If the church were saying that God is three Gods in one God, that would be a contradiction in logic. But the New Testament claim is that there are three Persons in one God. Think about this in mathematical terms. One can say that P + P + P = G (that is, three Persons constitute one God) and be completely logical. It is only if one were to claim that G + G + G = G (that three Gods are one God) that we should cry foul. However, the Church has always carefully maintained that all three Persons are fully divine because they share in one essential being. They are not three beings (three Gods) but one indivisible being (one God). This may be strange and mysterious, but there is nothing illogical about it. When people begin to think about God’s triune nature and say, “That doesn’t seem logical,” in reality it is not a contradiction in logic that they are sensing but something else. They are sensing the strangeness of the doctrine—there is something to this teaching about God that lacks analogy to anything else in human experience. It is unfamiliar to think of a being comprised of three Persons. While there may be nothing innately illogical about the idea, it is certainly unheard of in any other sphere of human experience and is thus strange to us. This is what we mean by saying that the so-called logical question is not really a logical question but an analogical question.


Ryken, Philip; LeFebvre, Michael (2011-04-05). Our Triune God: Living in the Love of the Three-in-One (pp. 40-41). Good News Publishers/Crossway Books. Kindle Edition.

Strangeness alone does not mean that something is illogical, much less that it is unreal. These two fields of modern physics, producing the doctrines of relativity and quantum mechanics, remind us that reality is full of strange phenomena. Such phenomena are difficult to come to grips with, not because they are untrue or illogical, but because they are unlike anything already familiar to us. Like astrophysics and quantum physics, theology takes us into realms of reality beyond normal, this-worldly matters. When we study the very nature of God’s being and make observations concerning the kind of being that he is, we should not be surprised at findings that are nothing like our experiences of other beings in the everyday encounters of our world. The discovery that God is triune is certainly one such finding. It is an anomaly, but it is not illogical. Nor is it to be dismissed as untrue because we cannot comprehend it. Rather, just as physicists examine the evidence of their fields to establish their doctrines about nature, the claim that God is triune has to be tested against what is revealed about him, and if the evidence sustains it, it must be accepted reverently. But unlike physics, which studies material phenomena, theologians study an immaterial God who cannot be examined through experiments with a telescope or a microscope. The only infallible evidence we possess for knowing God is his self-revelation in Scripture. It is, therefore, through the exegetical study of Scripture that the theologian must discern what is true about God, even if it stretches our mind beyond what we can fully comprehend.

Ryken, Philip; LeFebvre, Michael (2011-04-05). Our Triune God: Living in the Love of the Three-in-One (pp. 46-47). Good News Publishers/Crossway Books. Kindle Edition.


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