C. S. Lewis on the Trinity

I expanded this post into a series of eight posts on the Trinity, starting here.



In part IV of Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis describes the doctrine of the Trinity:

“[T]he mysterious something which is behind all things must be more than a person…something superpersonal…The whole purpose for which we exist is to be taken into the life of God.”

Lewis uses the analogy of dimensions in space, describing how God’s “dimension” is at a higher level than ours; we cannot to fully comprehend the Trinity:

“As you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you don't leave behind the things you found on simpler levels; you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you couldn't imagine if you knew only the simpler levels…On the Divine level, you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being…Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube.”

When thinking about the Trinity, we should not think it is an impossible contradiction or bad math (1+1+1=1).    The idea is that there are three distinct persons, so tightly knit together that the three are united as one being.  "Being" is something different than "person."  We do not know exactly how, and these words are no more than imperfect analogies to our human experience.  All we can say is that the life of God is both more complicated and simpler than the human experience.  There is both unity and diversity in the being of God; God is "the One who lives as three."  And to a large extent, we must be content with not knowing how this works.  After all, we are talking about God; we cannot expect our minds to be capable of fully grasping the infinite.

In a later chapter Lewis describes the three persons of the Trinity in more detail. He says that although there was never a time when the Father existed and the Son did not, the Father is nevertheless the cause of the Son*, and that this is what is meant by “begotten Son” or the Son “proceeding” from the Father. The Son is “streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp…He is the self-expression of the Father.” As the author of Hebrews says, “The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Hebrews 1:3). Lewis goes on to say, “God is not a static thing – not even a person – but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama.” He then comes to the third person of the Trinity. “The union between the Father and Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is a Person.” Lewis goes on to describe how this can be, and he describes the different roles of each person in the Trinity in bringing us humans back into the life and love of God (how the Trinity brings about this history of the redemption of a fallen world and humanity). The Son, “streaming forth from the Father” enters the world and becomes a man; he is the Mediator, the bridge between us and the Father, and our way of knowing what the Father is like. The Holy Spirit is within us and acts through us. Like the Son, the Spirit reveals God to us, but in a different way. Understanding the Trinity also helps us to understand how “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Even before the creation of the world, there was love within the Trinity, and it is out of this life and love that creation came to be.

*I am not quite sure I agree with the idea of God the Father being the cause of God the Son. The idea of causality is, well, not as simple as it seems, I think. I think we should be careful when saying something is the cause of something else. It seems to me a strong word with which to describe this mysterious relationship between the persons in the Trinity.