Depending on whom you ask, the concept of the Trinity is either the absolute worst offense that can exist in the sight of God, or it’s God’s all-important self-revelation upon which all existence and life and salvation depend.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about it, to say the least – among Christians, especially, no less – and that confusion adds a lot of fuel to the historically persistent controversy around it.

So, here’s my own humble attempt at resolving some of the confusion.

Monotheists who aren’t Christian (i.e., Jews and Muslims) see the doctrine of the Trinity as a denial of monotheism, the belief that there is only one God. The premise of this piece is that it not only is not a denial of monotheism, but it’s a necessary logical outworking of monotheism. In other words, if monotheism is true, then God must be a Trinity; if God is not a Trinity, then the “God” in view by monotheists isn’t really God at all.

Before I get into that, some background information is in order. If you’re already up to speed on the basics, though, feel free to skip ahead to the section with the subheading “In His Image.”

And if you want a really quick, to-the-point, argument- and background-free explanation of why I think the Trinity is necessary to monotheism, without me “showing my work,” so to speak, skip down to the section with the heading, “God, the Word of God and the Sevenfold Spirit” (but if you do skip ahead and then find my argument inadequate or unpersuasive, I ask you to consider that I “showed my work” in the previous section for a reason, and you have formed your conclusion on the basis of incomplete information).

The Doctrine

The term “Trinity” is shorthand for the Christian doctrine that God is Three-in-One: three distinct Persons who are singular in Being – “the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.” Each Person of the Trinity is distinct from the Others and is equally and fully “God,” yet there is only one God, not a triumvirate of separate “Gods.”

And, according to Trinitarian theology, the Second Person of the Godhead, God the Son, or the Son of God, became human in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth and died for the sins of the world, rose again from the dead and then ascended back to his place at “the right hand of the Father” so that humanity could dwell representatively within the Godhead and, in turn, the Third Person, the Holy Spirit, could descend to dwell within humanity.

This arrangement is the essence of the Christian concept of salvation, hence the all-important, non-negotiable importance of Trinitarian doctrine to Christian orthodoxy. Much more on that later, though.

Historical Objections to the Trinity

As touched upon in the introduction, the other two monotheistic religions have something of a problem with this.

Muslims regard it as shirk – idolatry – which they hold to be the gravest offense anyone could commit before Allah, like ever. According to the Qur’an, Allah is super pissed off about this, hence the repeated emphasis on the “Oneness” of God throughout its pages.

“They have certainly disbelieved who say, ‘Allah is the third of three.’ And there is no god except one God. And if they do not desist from what they are saying, there will surely afflict the disbelievers among them a painful punishment,” reads Surah 5:73 of the Qur’an.

“And they say, ‘The Most Merciful has taken a son.’ You have done an atrocious thing. Would that the heavens be rent thereat and the earth split open and the mountains fall into the sea that they attribute to the Most Merciful a son. And it is not appropriate for the Most Merciful that He should take a son. There is no one in the heavens and earth but that he comes to the Most Merciful as a servant.” (Surah 19:88-93)

So Muslims see the doctrine of the Trinity as an outrage and an unpardonable blasphemy against Allah, hence the characteristic Islamic disdain for western religion and culture.

Although, it’s worth noting that the “Trinity” at which they take such umbrage isn’t exactly the Trinity of historic Christian theology. Based on Surah 5:116 of the Qur’an, Muhammed appeared to have been laboring under the impression that the Trinity consists of the three persons of Allah, Mary and Jesus, as a sort of “family of God”:

“And (beware the Day) when Allah will say, ‘O Jesus, Son of Mary, did you say to the people, “Take me and my mother as deities besides Allah ?”’ He will say, ‘Exalted are You! It was not for me to say that to which I have no right. If I had said it, You would have known it. You know what is within myself, and I do not know what is within Yourself. Indeed, it is You who is Knower of the unseen.’”

As in, rather than “tri-unity” as an internal and eternal characteristic of the Godhead, as historic Christian doctrine holds, it is instead the adding-on of external, created beings to the Godhead, which would be heretical and idolatrous by the Christian and Islamic understandings of monotheism alike.

(Based on Surah 3:33-47, Muhammed also seemed to be laboring under the notion that Mary the mother of Jesus was the same Mary/Miriam mentioned in the Torah, who was the sister of Moses and Aaron and the daughter of Amram and Jochebed, who lived about 1,500 years earlier. But, that’s a discussion for another time. Suffice to say, the Qur’an’s author is a dubious authority on God and on biblical persons and events.)

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Jews also hold the Trinity to be a denial of monotheism, but they’re not laboring under such a blatant misrepresentation of it like we see in Islam. Jews tend to think the doctrine of the Trinity is just a failed attempt by post-apostolic theologians to justify, within a monotheistic framework, the New Testament and its teachings about the deity of Christ. “Failed attempt” because they see it as a fundamental denial of the Shema, “Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one.” (Deuteronomy 6:4), as well as a denial of the commandment, “You shall have no other gods before/besides Me.”

“If God is One, He can’t be three,” they insist, so the Trinity adds “gods” beside Him, thereby violating the commandment.

Except, the Hebrew word used for “one” is “echad,” which indicates “a united oneness,” as opposed to “yachid,” which indicates “a solitary oneness.”

An example of a “united oneness” would be in Genesis 2:24, where it reads about Adam and Eve that “the two became one (‘echad’) flesh.”

And there’s plenty more within the Hebrew Scriptures that – while not necessarily proving the doctrine of the Trinity in so many words – nonetheless speak to an internal plurality within the Godhead, rendering Jewish objections to the Trinity moot.

There are the “Us”-passages in Genesis (1:26; 3:22), and the specific mention of the “Spirit of God” in Genesis 1:2 as apparently distinct from “God” in the primary sense. And, there are numerous instances in which the Angel of YHWH/the Lord is referred to by God in the third-Person, and the Angel speaks of God in the third-Person, and then the Angel is afforded all of the worship and authority of God Himself (Exodus 23:20-22; Joshua 5:13-15; Zechariah 3, etc.).

So, while the unity of God is certainly insisted upon in the Hebrew Scriptures, there’s also plainly a plurality within that unity, so “unity” doesn’t necessarily mean a strict singularity.

In fact, before the advent of Christianity, the notion of “Two Powers in Heaven” was, if not universally accepted orthodoxy within Judaism, at least was not regarded as heretical, due to passages like these. The Jews’ reasons for rejecting the Trinity are not actually theological or scriptural, as some might claim, but tribal and cultural, owing to their rejection of Christianity.

As in, contrary to popular misconception, they do not reject Christianity because they reject doctrines like the Trinity. It’s the other way around. They reject the Trinity because they reject Christianity. They reject today much of what their pre-Christian ancestors took for granted within Judaism, because of its Christian associations. Just consider their position on the Septuagint today, compared to 2,000 years ago, as just one emblematic example.

A History of Heresies

There are quite a few popular attempts at explanations of the Trinity among Christians, some of which are more helpful than others at conveying the concept.

There’s the Water/States of Matter Analogy: Just as water can be liquid, solid or gas, but remains the same substance, so is God the three Persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, while remaining the same Being, according to this analogy.

Except, this is really just another form of the heresy known as “Modalism,” which is erroneous because it denies the separate Personhood of each member of the Trinity. As in, Father, Son and Holy Spirit are actually the same Person, but fulfilling a different role – wearing a different hat, so to speak – according to Modalism. It posits that “the Son” is just Who God is when He’s not being the Father or the Holy Spirit, which doesn’t fit with the Scriptures, since they depict the Father, Son and Spirit relating and referring to one another as distinct Persons (John 17; Romans 8:16 and 34).

Then there’s the Egg Analogy: an egg comprises the three components of a yolk, the white and the shell. This is an expression of yet another heresy – that of Partialism. None of the components of the egg can rightly be understood to be the egg in its fullness, as each Person of the Trinity is fully “God” (Colossians 2:9, 10).

The illustration attributed to St. Patrick – the shamrock, or three-leaf clover, is another version of the same heresy.

Then there’s the Sun Analogy: God the Father is like the Sun, God the Son is like the rays of light that emanate from the Sun, and the Holy Spirit is like the heat created on Earth from the Sun. This is the Arian heresy, which had it that the Son is a created being only similar to God the Father in substance, but not identical (homoiousion instead of homoousion, which is what the Council of Nicaea boiled down to), and not “God” in the full sense.

These have been condemned by various church councils, but some Christians would argue that they’re still useful, at the very least, as “elevator pitches” – quick, concise explanations you could make during the span of an elevator ride, just to get your foot in the door and get someone at least open to the possibility that God could be a Trinity.

I don’t know that I accept that. If they’re heretical versions of the Trinity, it isn’t actually the Trinity you’re getting them to entertain as a possibility, so I don’t know that they’re truly constructive to that end, except maybe to trick someone into considering it, which I don’t think is an advisable tactic.

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A possible exception, though – and my own personal favorite quick illustration of the Trinity – is the Cube Analogy used by C.S. Lewis.

Imagine trying to describe a cube to beings who exist in only two dimensions. They’re familiar with flat shapes like squares and circles and triangles, but since they’ve never experienced reality beyond their two-dimensional frame of reference, they cannot conceive of cubes, spheres, cylinders or pyramids. Try to explain what a cube is, and they’ll only be able to imagine it in terms of six separate squares grouped together somehow, but not as a single, indivisible object.

Likewise, that’s sort of what explaining the tri-unity of the single God is like to beings who live only in three-dimensional time and space, in which every being is only a solitary person.

Now, the Cube Analogy suffers for being another variation on Partialism … if we take it as an illustration of the Trinity, that is. But, I think it’s less an illustration of the Trinity than it is an illustration of the limits of our perception as three-dimensional beings. According to String Theory, there are possibly 10 or 11 spatial dimensions to the universe, while we perceive of only three, and possibly more than the single temporal dimension we experience. And God, by definition, created the universe, so He exists beyond all of the spatial and temporal dimensions that constitute the space-time continuum itself, to say nothing of His transcendence of the limited corner of space-time of which we can perceive.

So, if we can see that two-dimensional beings’ inability to conceive of a cube doesn’t render the concept of a cube impossible or logically nonsensical, so our inability to conceive of three Persons who are one in Being doesn’t render the Trinity impossible.

So, that’s the elevator pitch I prefer, because the heretical aspects of the illustration aren’t the relevant aspects.

That’s just to get my foot in the door, though.

My ultimate goal isn’t just to convey that the Trinity is possible, but that it’s a necessary logical consequence of monotheism itself.

In His Image

In my view, the most compelling piece of evidence for the Trinity is human consciousness.

Or, I should say, the nature of Consciousness itself is our clue, of which human consciousness is our only firsthand example. According to Scripture, though, God modeled human consciousness after His own: “God created mankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them…” (Genesis 1:27)

Whatever else that means (and it means a great deal), self-awareness is included in our being made in the image of God.

Being “made in the image of God” is what it means to be human and distinct from the animals, according to the book of Genesis.

According to evolutionary anthropologists, the defining characteristic that makes us human is our capacity for abstract, symbolic thought and communication, i.e., language. Anthropologists tell us that anatomically modern humans first appeared about 200,000 years ago, but it wasn’t until about 40-50,000 years ago that we became fully human – “behavioral modernity” is the term for it. The transition from bestial Anatomically Modern Humans to fully evolved Behaviorally Modern Humans happened through what they call the “Great Leap Forward,” by which humans suddenly (relatively speaking) developed the ability for complex language – Man could think in terms of abstract symbols and communicate those symbols through the use of sound.

Ancient Jewish mystics picked up on this long before the advent of modern anthropology, though, just by reading and contemplating the Bible.

“Abracadabra” is an Aramaic phrase believed by some to have been coined by ancient Kabbalists. According to its folk etymology, it means, “As I speak, I create,” and it’s meant to convey the relationship seen in the book of Genesis between speech and creation, as first shown in God’s act of speaking the universe into existence, and second, in His image-bearer’s act in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:19-20): Adam participated in God’s work of creation by naming the animals. He didn’t create ex nihilo as God did, but by naming the animals, he brought another dimension of order to creation – he created the first system of taxonomy, just as we create institutions, art, paradigms of thought and systems of law and science and classification — often, through story and narrative– through our speech and language today. Things like the economy, governments, religions, ideologies, societies and social classes are real things, but they exist entirely as constructs of language and communication – they exist only because we speak them into existence. Our speech is the underlying basis for our ability to build civilizations and technology, which sets us apart as fundamentally different from the animal world.

You Can’t See Your Own Head

Speech is also the underlying basis for self-awareness.

It’s our ability to create by way of abstract symbolic thought that enables us to communicate with others, as well as to communicate and create internally. Just by virtue of being conscious, we create a symbolic concept of the self, and we see the self as a subject in the world, as well as a subject within our own mind. As in, we’re not just aware of the world around us – the sights and sounds and sensations reported to our brain by our sense organs; we’re aware of ourselves as subjects within the world.

Hopefully I won’t scandalize too many Christians (or other monotheists) by this, but the relevance of consciousness to the doctrine of the Trinity first occurred to me a few years ago while I was reading the Hindu Upanishads, a central topic of which is the internal makeup of the human psyche and what Consciousness actually is. The applications to monotheism don’t depend on acceptance of any Hindu-specific belief, though. It just so happens that it was Hindu mystics who were among the first to contemplate the interior dimensions of human consciousness a few millennia ago (or, at least, the first to preserve those contemplations for posterity), and our acknowledgment of the truth of those observations doesn’t depend on acceptance of the overarching belief system.

The Hindu mystics who wrote the Upanishads recognized that our concept of the self is not identical with the actual self, though, and much of their contemplation was devoted to probing the mysteries raised by the disparity.

The Self, or Atman, to put it in Hindu terms, is the Thinker/Speaker. But the thoughts and words that originate with the Thinker are not the Thinker him/herself. So, while the Self is capable of thinking and speaking of the Self, the thoughts the Self has about the Self are not the actual Self, but the Ego, or Jiva, to again put it in Hindu terms

At issue is the ability of the Self to actually think about the Self in true and accurate terms.

“You can’t see your own head,” as summed up by Dr. Ed Wood, my Intro. to World Religion professor in college.

As in, the Self can no more directly perceive the Self than you can see your own head. You can see a reflection of your head in a mirror, or a photograph, but you can’t actually see your own head any more than you can turn your eye back in on itself to look at your own eye. Likewise, the Self can only make inferences about the Self, based on reflection – how the external world relates to the Self as another object in the world, and that’s how the Self becomes a subject in its own world.

This raises questions about what the Ego/Jiva actually represents. Does it truly represent the Self? Because if you try to speak about the Self in any concrete terms, what can you really say about your Self that’s actually about your Self?

And by “Self,” I mean your actual Self.

Your “actual Self” isn’t the physical material of your body. The “Ship of Theseus” paradox shows that you can’t reduce the Self to your body, since none of the cells that constitute your physical form today existed a matter of years ago, and all the cells you have in this moment will be dust in a matter of years while you live on in your body. Yet, your Self existed then, now and will years from now when the constituent parts of your body are entirely replaced with new cells and new materials. So, you can’t point to the body or even your brain and say, “That is the Self.”

And, you can’t point to the pattern in which those cells are arranged and say “That is the Self,” because identical twins have the same genetic pattern, but are distinct Selves.

And anything else you could say about the Self isn’t really about the Self, either. You could talk about where you’ve been, what you’ve done, whom you’ve met and interacted with, work you’ve accomplished, experiences you’ve had, but none of that information is actually about the internal Self – only the external experiences of the Self. All it does is skirt the outer limits of the Self, creating an outline of negative space in which the Self invisibly resides, but we still haven’t said anything about the Self.

And, even if the Self were capable of perceiving of the Self, in order for the Ego to be a true representation of the Self, the Self would have to recreate itself in thought, like a computer simulating a complete model of its own hardware and programming. For that model to be an accurate and complete representation rather than just a comparatively crude, abbreviated symbol of the computer, it would have to include all of that computer’s functionality, which would exceed its computational capacity – a thermodynamic impossibility.

Then, when you add on the Judeo-Christian element of sin and its attending shame, the Self would recoil in horror at its own shortcomings and excesses – its “nakedness” (Genesis 3:7), and the Ego it would create would be an inflated, idealized version of itself shaped by wishful thinking and insecurity.

So, as a necessary corollary to the fact of our consciousness, humans are self-aware, but only just, because our Ego-self is only an indirect caricature and distorted echo of our true Self, inflated by imagined virtues and glossed-over faults.

Which brings us to the subject at hand.

God, the Word of God and the Sevenfold Spirit

According to monotheism, there is an infinite and eternal Supreme Consciousness who is omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly holy who created the universe and all life within it: He knows all, is infinitely powerful and is without moral defect and is the Source of our own existence, life and consciousness.

All monotheists – Jews, Christians and Muslims alike – agree on that definition.

And, God is at least as conscious and Self-aware as we are.

I don’t think any Jew or Muslim anywhere would try to argue that God lacks the faculty of self-awareness that defines our own existence as humans. I would expect they would insist upon that point as zealously as anyone – God is alive and conscious and Personal, and to say otherwise would be blasphemy, within both Judaism and Islam.

So if God is Self-aware, as we are, that means He has/is a Self, and He also has an “Ego” – an awareness of Himself as a Self.

And if God is all-knowing, then His omniscience would extend even to Himself. And if God is all-powerful, then His omnipotence would include the ability to perfectly perceive and to think comprehensively and accurately of Himself.

Which means – with none of the aforementioned limitations attending man’s self-awareness – God’s “Ego” would be a perfect and complete representation of God’s Self, lacking no attribute that God Himself possesses: His omniscience, omnipotence, holiness, His infinity and eternity. God’s “Ego” would not be a crude, abstract symbolic representation of God’s Self, as is a human ego, but an absolutely perfect representation of all that God is.

In other words, God’s “Ego” would be God in His own right. Yet, He would be distinct from God, as the Ego is distinct from the Self.

He would not be a creation of God – a creation is external and unnecessary to God, while self-awareness is a necessary fact of God’s existence. For God, to exist is to be self-aware, so – while God’s Self-awareness is contingent on God, He is not a creation of God, but is necessary and eternal to God’s own existence. Rather than God’s creation, He is God’s Son, who is like the Father in every regard, but has His existence from the Father.

Just as man’s ego is conjoined to our faculty of language and speech, so is God’s Self-awareness to His. His Self-perception, then, would be better described, not as His “Ego,” but as His Word. And just as man creates by his speech, so is the Word of God the Agent through Whom God creates.

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Because the Word of God lacks no attribute of the Father, the Word is also Self-aware – He has an “Ego,” a Self-image, just as the Father has a Self-image in the Word.

The Self-image of the Word, however, includes – not just His understanding of Himself but His understanding of Himself in relation to the Father, as well as the Father’s understanding of Himself in relation to the Word.

The Self-image of the Word is the Embodiment in Consciousness of the mutual relationship between the Father and the Word. He is the Living Spirit of the fellowship between the Father and the Word, and He also is God in His own right, lacking no attribute of the Father and the Son.

And, of course, being an absolutely perfect and complete representation of everything that God the Father and God the Word are, the Third Person of the Godhead is also Self-aware, and aware of Himself as a Person in relation to the Father and the Son.

You can see where this is going, right?

The Third Person’s Self-awareness is also Self-aware and lacking nothing that is God, Who is also Self-Aware and lacking nothing, Who is also Self-aware and lacking nothing, etc.

There is an infinite progressive proliferation of Divine Persons proceeding from the First and Second Persons of the Godhead. The Father and Son are like two mirrors of Consciousness facing each Other, creating (well, “creating”) an endless repetition of reflections of each Other, and of each Other in relation to the Other. Except, because God is omniscient, omnipotent and infinite, nothing is diminished as the reflections repeat, because these are not, as in the analogy, mere light waves reflecting off a surface and diminishing in energy and focus with each iteration, but God’s Own Mind in His awareness of Himself. Light waves are finite quanta of energy that diminish and diffuse, making each successive reflection a lesser copy of the previous reflection. But, the Supreme Consciousness that is God is infinite and all-powerful. So, every single “reflection” is God in His own right. The two “mirrors” are God the Father and God the Son, and the infinite progression of Divine “reflections” are the Holy Spirit. Except, lacking nothing that is God, the “reflections” are also “mirrors” in their own right.

God is not a singular, solitary Spirit, but a unified infinity of Spirit(s).

We might be inclined to reject this idea as too absurd to entertain, because it seems counter-intuitive. It runs opposite to everything we know by observation about the universe, as it is governed by such restrictions as the laws of conservation and entropy and the like.

The laws of the universe apply only to the universe and all within it, though. God, by definition, transcends the universe, and so is not subject to its laws. They are subject to Him. The very notion of creatio ex nihilo, which is so basic and essential to monotheism itself, also runs contrary to those very laws. How much more should we expect God Himself to as well?

And, is this not exactly what monotheism and the scriptures of every monotheistic religion teach, if only by implication? Is not God, by definition, infinite? And what does it mean – that “God is infinite” – if not what I have described?

This is consistent with the book of Revelation, which speaks of “the Seven Spirits of God,” or “the Sevenfold Spirit of God.” (Revelation 1:4; 3:1; 4:5; 5:6)

Clearly, from those verses, the Holy Spirit is not a singular, solitary spirit, but a plurality of Spirit(s).

And, any student of ancient Hebrew culture can tell you that when the number seven is used, it doesn’t always literally mean “seven” – one less than eight and one more than six. The number seven in Judaism is a divine symbol, hence the seven-branched menorah which symbolizes this monotheistic religion, as well as all the other groupings of seven throughout the Torah and the rest of the Old Testament, like the seven days of creation, the seven weeks between Passover and Pentecost, Yom Kippur in the seventh month of the year, the Jubilee year occurring after seven sabbatical years, etc.

The number seven speaks of perfection and completion, but it can also mean “without measure,” like when God warned of avenging Cain “seven times over” (Genesis 4:15), and then Lamech exaggerated it to “seventy-seven” times over (v. 24). Or when God warned of punishing Israel’s sins “seven times over” (Leviticus 26:18, 21, 24, 28), and when He said Israel’s enemies would “flee in seven directions” (Deuteronomy 28:25). You see this idiom repeated in the New Testament, when Peter asked Jesus how often he should forgive, and Jesus told him, not merely seven times, but 77 times (Matthew 18:21, 22). Clearly, he didn’t mean to cut off forgiveness on that 78^th offense, but that there was no limit. And, that was to reiterate that “forgive seven times” didn’t mean the eighth time was the last straw, but that there was no last straw.

Likewise, the seven letters to the seven churches (Revelation 1:18-3:22) weren’t intended just for those specific seven churches situated in Asia Minor, but were intended for the Church as a whole, for all of history and in all places, of which those particular seven were representative.

In the same way, the phrase “Sevenfold Spirit of God” is representative of the plurality of God’s Spirit in all of His completeness and limitlessness, Who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who are all coequally God.

So, if monotheism is true, then God is, primarily, a Trinity, but the Trinity is, in actuality, an Infinity (or a “Trinfinity”?).

The Word Made Flesh

It’s important to note that this isn’t just a theological abstraction– a philosophical exercise done for merely academic purposes, or to win arguments with Muslims and Jews. The doctrine of the Trinity has profound, life-changing application for every single human being.

While it is important for Christians to be able to answer Muslims and Jews when they object to the Trinity, it’s even more important that we understand the Trinity ourselves and grasp its centrality to our salvation and to our understanding of ourselves as Christians, and as members of the human race.

Christianity has it that the Word of God, the Second Person of the Godhead, entered into history in human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

The prologue of the Gospel of John explains:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind…

“The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God – children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:1-4; 11-14)

Let’s consider what that means – that this man, Jesus of Nazareth, is the eternal Word of God incarnate in human form.

It’s often taught that, as the Word made flesh, Jesus represents God before humanity (Hebrews 1:1-3), and as “high priest in the order of Melchizadek,” he represents humanity before God (Hebrews 5-9).

And, of course, I agree with all that (who am I to disagree?), but that’s not the extent of it.

As the Word of God, Jesus doesn’t merely represent God to humanity, but he represents God to Himself. Again, He is God the Father’s Self-image – His “Ego-Self.” As God the Father thinks of God the Father, God the Son is what He thinks.
God the Son took on human form in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

Having died for the sins of the world and being raised to life by the Spirit of God, after giving instructions to his disciples to “Go and make disciples of all nations” and thereby finalize and spread the Christian religion, Jesus ascended back to the “right hand of the Father” to resume his eternal place within the Godhead.

God is eternal. He created time and space and exists without beginning or end beyond space-time. The distant past when the universe began in the first moments of the Big Bang and the far future when (or “if”?) the universe ends are equally “present” to Him – as present to Him as this very moment. He sees it all at once, as if it’s all happening now, because to Him, it is. With Him “a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day.” (2 Peter 3:8; Psalm 90:4)

If Jesus ascended to “the right hand of the Father,” that means there never was a time when there wasn’t a human man born of a mortal human woman in 1^st-century Roman-occupied Judea with nail-scarred hands and feet residing within the Godhead.

And, if he is God the Father’s Self-image, that means God has always and eternally identified as a human being.

I am not saying, “God is a man.”

I am saying, “A man is God.”

As in, humanity is not a necessary, intrinsic property of the Divine Nature. Yet, humanity is a property God has taken upon Himself through the Incarnation and Ascension of the Son of God.

So, while humanity is not a necessary aspect of the Divine Nature, God’s Self-identification with humanity can certainly be seen in His creation of the universe.

And, as a layman who dabbles in popular scientific literature about physics and cosmology from time to time, I find it exhilarating to see even non-believing physicists flirt with this as they try to make sense of the apparent fine-tuning of the universe through the Anthropic Principle and its various iterations, such as the Participatory Anthropic Principle and the Final Anthropic Principle. It’s like they can almost see the face of God staring back at them as they probe the mysteries and origins of the universe, and they can see His intense concern for humanity spelled out in natural law.

But, I digress.

God personally identifies with humanity, because humanity is represented within the Godhead.

“And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus,” wrote Paul (Ephesians 2:6).

This has profound implications for the dignity and inherent value of every human being who has ever lived. God identifies with humanity, as a human being, and so He is intensely, personally jealous for every single one of us, not just because He made us, but because He is one of us.

*   *   *

Just as humanity was raised up to the Godhead in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, so also, God in turn descended to dwell within humanity in the Third Person of the Godhead – “the Sevenfold Spirit of God sent forth into all the earth.” (Revelation 5:6)

Every person who belongs to Jesus Christ has no less than God Himself dwelling within us: “For in Christ all the fullness of the Godhead lives in bodily form, and you have been given fullness in Christ,” wrote Paul (Colossians 2:9-10).

As in, we also participate in the Godhead.

That is not to say that we are members of the Godhead, but we participate, because we have the fullness of God Himself – the Third Person of the Godhead who embodies the fellowship between the Father and the Son – dwelling within us, renewing and transforming us into the likeness of the Son of God.

Of course, this isn’t immediately or always apparent to us – the Spirit of God dwells within the Self, and the Self cannot directly perceive of the Self. “You can’t see your own head,” after all. So, the human Ego-self doesn’t always represent the true reality of the Self, bad or Good.

But, if we trust in Christ and have committed ourselves to him, we participate in the Godhead and are thereby adopted as God’s own offspring.

“The Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by Him we cry, ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs – heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory,” wrote Paul (Romans 8:15-17).

And, this is the entire point of God the Son taking on human form: to transform fallen mortals into gods.

We’ve moved pretty far away from this understanding within popular western Christianity, but this was how the Church fathers understood the gospel in the early centuries of Christianity.

They didn’t teach merely “Jesus died so we could be forgiven our sins and not go to hell.”

Yes, he did, but it hardly ends there.

As several of the early Church fathers wrote, from Irenaeus in the 2^nd century to Athanasius in the 4^th, “The Word became man that men might become gods.”

Indeed, this was the entire purpose for which God created the universe.