I was wandering through Wikipedia yesterday when I ran across A Canticle for Leibowitz and then its “midquel” Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman. In the latter, the RCC has reformulated YHWH as Open Sky, and the Trinity as three avatars including the story’s second namesake. I don’t know whether the term was applied by Miller or a Wikipedian, but that doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. I’ve been meditating on the doctrine of the Trinity for a few days now, and this word helped me to express my thoughts to myself and further develop them.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term “avatar,” it means an incarnation or, as more generally used above, a representation of one’s nature. Modern examples of avatars include main characters in a story which represent aspects of the story’s author, and a sock-puppet show which can contain up to two (or three, including the head) avatars of each puppeteer. But any popular instance of either example would be imperfect; if all the main characters are essentially the same, there’s no room for a story – right?
I had better tie the title into my point before anyone gets bored. Why would YHWH manifest as avatars? He is the relational God, which implies that He has emotional and psychological “needs,” or motivations. So because of His need to relate to someone else, He has forever been acting as three distinct persons with the same nature but different offices, or responsibilities. But the perspective used by these persons when they consider their relationship is unique; Jesus consistently refers to His Father as distinct from Himself (see particularly John 8:18). So each person has not only a different office but a different identity.
Now, that last point may not seem so unique at first; a character in a story or a puppet in a show calls itself “I.” The uniqueness is in the sincerity of the designation; authors and puppeteers know theirs to be false, but YHWH believes His. God is not simply putting on a show for us, because such a show would indicate that we were to follow His lead. But the only reason for Him to direct us in such a way would be that we might become more like Him. And that requires that the show is a shadow of something deeper, something essential to the divine nature.
This is not schizophrenia because YHWH not only “hears voices” but also produces the same. So the Father is knowingly pretending to be two avatars – additional, separate, interacting persons, but each of these persons is realer than any of us and as real as the Father Himself, who perfectly projects His own nature onto the other two. And I lifted this concept of comparative realness out of C. S. Lewis’ Great Divorce, which compares righteousness to a person’s mass and, by extension, either volume or density. In Heaven, which is much larger in every way than the Grey Town (Hell), visitors from the Grey Town have such low density as to essentially be ghosts (less real than the Bright People), unable to accomplish anything.
This is also distinct from dissociative identity disorder because:
- such a person is not consciously aware of their own masquerade;
- each avatar, or personality, expresses an incomplete piece of a person’s psyche; and
- no two personalities are ever active at the same time.
Scripture necessarily contradicts all of these points regarding YHWH.
Finally, I want to explain how I arrived back at the conventional term of “person” for each aspect of the Trinity. I actually wanted to avoid its use because it gives the impression of three independent gods who happen to agree, and that was where “avatar” came in. But then I realized that each avatar must be identical in nature, and the Puppeteer must also be identical to them. For otherwise He would be misrepresenting His own perfect nature, but now I had four identically perfect beings. So I assigned the Father as Puppeteer and reduced the avatars to two. Then I had to promote the avatars to persons because they are necessarily just as real as the Father.
So I think the sock-puppeteer analogy is the more accurate of the two regarding the relationship in the Trinity. But as YHWH relates to humanity, He is the protagonist in an epic romance – the Bible. And within that romance, He is the Puppeteer.
Posted by Jesdisciple 