Far too often, Christians—including some who should know better—claim that:
Christianity is simple; just follow Christ’s teaching of loving your neighbor and doing good for him.
Baloney.
For reference, this is the link to the creed, Profession of Faith, used in the Catholic Mass on Sundays and other Holy Days: Profession of Faith used in American Roman Catholic Mass.
Let’s start at the very beginning:
I believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.
But then in the later stanzas of the Profession of Faith, we learn that God is Father. And Son. And a mysterious Person labeled as the “Holy Spirit” seems to also be God.
And God is one, even One, except when He is three, or Three.
What to make of this? We could certainly note that: Alas, the World isn’t So Simple and ask how the actions of a Creator of a world not so simple could be understood in simple ways, indeed ways which are naive to the point of mindlessness. Did the Almighty complicate the environments and the very being of human beings in order to deliberately obscure all the true simplicity? Maybe Christians are quite confused because it all seemed so simple to those who were taught highly summarized and seemingly simple versions of an appropriately rich and complex understanding of a rich and complex Creation. See Enriching Our Moral World: Simple Is Digested Complexity for a discussion of what is quite true and quite well summarized in the title of that essay.
The world seemed so simple for centuries as Christians lived in a Western Civilization which was Christian, imperfectly and incompletely Christian, but also substantially so.
While cautious about tricky matters of pure theology, that is, analysis of revealed knowledge of God in His transcendence, I made some suggestions in my recently released and freely downloadable book, The Shape of Reality:
God is a divine manifold, in a manner of speaking. The light of revelation as best understood by human wisdom of the age shines upon God, also in a manner of speaking, and can project an image of Father. Let the wise man move a bit to catch the divine light of revelation from a different angle and the image is that of Son. Move a bit more and the image of the Holy Spirit appears.
Those who have read my latest book, The Shape of Reality, will have at least a feel for my preliminary development of a way of dealing with the reality of complex entities made of individuals which each retain their real existence. I concentrate on the reality of human communities. Those who haven’t read the book but know some modern geometry (especially differential geometry) and topology might understand what I’m saying or, at least, trying to say. The `manifold’ in the above quotation refers to topological concepts under which a complex surface can have `small’ regions which have the topology or full geometry of a simple Euclidean plane; each of those regions exist as such while the global entity also exists, separately in a distorted way of speaking. In human terms, the individual exists and continues to exist though he is part of a variety of communities which themselves truly exist and aren’t just nominal ways of speaking of mere gatherings of individuals. Nor is it true that those individuals are merely parts of a Borg-like collective. (Warning, each of the three Persons of God is the entirety of God in a way beyond the sense of each member of the Body of Christ being the entirety of that Body. This is the primary reason for caution in extending this way of thinking into the theological realm.)
In other words, we now have the capability of thinking rationally and intelligently about the Trinitarian God of Christian belief. This doesn’t mean this way of thinking about God in His transcendence is a perfect statement of the truth or the completeness of the truth. It only means it is a start on talking in rational and intelligent ways of the Trinitarian God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit.
Though I’ve been concentrating in recent writings on what might be labeled structural aspects of being, by way of geometry and topology, the real issue is relationships. A simple reading of the previous sentence is quite wrong—modern geometry and topology, largely by way of algebraic tools and concepts, is consistent with the trend in modern science and mathematics toward the realization of the primacy of relationships over stuff (or structures). There are major fields of geometry, such as symplectic geometry, where there aren’t any well-defined shapes; in symplectic geometry, area is a constant but there is no well-defined measurement of distance or angles, no firm shape.
The best way to make sense of created being is to follow both St John the Evangelist and the quantum theorists and evolutionary theorists in positing primacy of relationships over stuff, where stuff covers abstract forms of created being as well as concrete, thing-like forms. Relationships are ontologically prior to stuff and forms and structures and relationships create and shape all of those, sometimes forming complex entities. Something similar can be used to think through the Trinitarian God of Jesus Christ. After all, God is the Creator of all that is not Him and all that is not Him must, to some extent, reflect Him in being manifestations of some of His thoughts. God is unified, not in the sense of some frozen crystal, but in the sense that His mind and heart and hands, His thoughts and feelings and actions, are one.
God who is pure being and thus pure relationships in my metaphysical explorations can be seen to some—probably significant—extent even in thing-like being.
I’ve written in this essay about this particular issue, being able to speak rationally of the Trinitarian God of Jesus Christ, as a case study of sorts. This short and informal study was intended merely to present the most fundamental belief of Christians as one which can be handled in a rational way recognizing modern knowledge of God’s Creation, modern knowledge of both concrete and abstract created being, but we have to be willing to think in ways which are far from simple. Over time, these beliefs, which reflect modern knowledge of created being, will become the bedrock of Christian understandings of our world and all of created being which is not limited to this world. At that time, these beliefs will be part of a `simple’ understanding of reality—digested complexity as I discussed in the already referenced essay: Enriching Our Moral World: Simple Is Digested Complexity.
It takes a lot of hard intellectual labor to see the world in simple terms, and the simple terms we Westerners inherited from Christian thinkers of past centuries are no longer plausible when we consider that modern knowledge of both concrete and abstract being. Either Western Christianity will retreat to a high-walled intellectual ghetto of superstitious beliefs and practices or else it will start passing through a generations-long period of digesting the complexity of the world to produce a seemingly simple understanding.