What’s wrong with the Trinity?
Is something wrong with the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? Is three enough?
There are 3 bases in baseball, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. But there is also Home Plate. There is no “home plate” in the Trinity.
Plato had three levels of society: rulers, military, and peasants. Doesn’t that about cover the topic?
Aristotle had an interesting way of thinking about triads. The virtues were in the middle between the two extremes. Justice, for example, was not getting too much, or too little, but just right.
What about the philosopher Hegel? He had thesis, antithesis, and syntheses. What a dynamic triad!
We have three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. That seems to work; except some would include the “fourth estate.” The press. And what about referendums, initiatives, and protests? What about lobbyists, think tanks, donors, or influencers? Does sticking to a triad model limit our vision?
Well, at least three is better than two. Who wants to live in a world of “either-or” right or wrong, saved or condemned, free or slave. Better to have some room for a middle ground, or maybe even a scale from one to 10. How bad is crossing the border without permission compared to robbing a bank?
Mybe we should not always think in twos, or in threes. Home base, after all, is just as important, if not more important, than any other base.
Speaking of home base. The Christian Triad of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, appears to leave out our home base: the Earth. The Trinity is about the one God in three forms, but none of the forms are about the living Earth: our human home. There are at least two reasons for this. First of all, the Christian God of the 2nd and 3rd century was separated from the fertility gods and goddesses of animistic religions. The worship of one God replaced the gods of hearth and home, and the gods of fertility.
The second reason is that all three slots of the triad were already filled. True, the Earth was God’s creation to be dominated by humans, but it was not part of the holy triad. I think you can see why the Christian church, for the most part, has not been a protector of the Earth.
In the Introductory Chapter to my book. A Climate of Justice, I shared the research of the anthropologist Georges Dumezil that demonstrated that triadic thinking belongs to Indo-European languages. I then proposed that we engage in quadradic thinking instead by including in our analysis the Earth, our Humanity, the Social, and the Civic. Religious language would belong to the social.
There is a sequence among the four. If you begin with the Earth. our home, then you look at our humanity, as living in the biosphere, with others in society, and for others in the civic realm. There are other frameworks, of course, it depends on where you begin. If you limit yourself to three things, that may cover the key bases, or it may not.