Analogies are not (necessarily) heresy

Wrote this aaaages ago - finally got round to finishing and posting.

From time to time, people claim that this analogy or that analogy of the Trinity gives the wrong idea of God, or is even heretical. I'm sure that's sometimes true. But sometimes I think it's just that the people criticising it are trying to make an analogy do more than it's meant to.

For example, take the triangle. People say it's a bad way to explain the Trinity because each member of the Trinity is fully God, whereas each side of a triangle is not a triangle. But, I don't think it's bad, just - like all analogies - incomplete. It would only be a bad analogy if you were saying that a triangle says everything that's to be said about how the Trinity relates - and that's not how analogies work.

Craft we made, based on these instructions.

 

I have used the triangle analogy in Sunday school. I'm teaching people who may not yet even know that Jesus is God. So all the analogy is meant to say is that:

• The trinity is a thing.
• There is one God, made of three people, (who are all God).
• They are the Father, the Son (Jesus) and the Holy Spirit.

It's true in what it intends to teach - it's not the last word on the subject.

Actually, it's the same with the analogies of Jesus which are used in the Bible. He is variously described as our father, future husband, brother, master, shepherd, a lamb, a vine, a gate, bread, water, light... If you took any of those to extremes you could easily make a heresy. And some of them are mutually contradictory.

 

But the point is that Jesus - who is far more than we could ever understand - is a little bit like all those things (and the context usually makes it clear in what way).

Here's a quote:

We have to think about Christ using ideas and images, but if we put our trust in these symbols, rather than in the One they symbolize, we will be making a big mistake. [...] By using more than one image for God, we remind ourselves that any image we use is only temporary; it must be corrected and relieved by other images. These images serve our minds; they do not save our souls. A fork is not food.

~Michael Ward, The Narnia Code