The Trinity is a really stupid idea, right?
If you're a recovering Protestant, you may not have heard this voiced aloud at some point from someone who knows what it is, so let me be the one to do it for you. The Trinity is a really, really stupid idea.
I know that part of my own experience about the Bible growing up was treating a lot of assumed knowledge as true. There are all sorts of details people provide about the Bible, about things that that are tradition and, basically, fanfic. There are things the Bile says that almost nobody accepts as literal — the spies claims that the Promised Land was 'full of Giants,' you'll see so much effort meant to express that, hey, actually, no really, what they mean was like giants, liiiike giants. And when they talk about slavery, well you need to understand this other thing and —
We talk about Cathlics and their Pope and their Apocrypha, but Evangelicals have their own secondary texts, and their sources and explanations are based on fucking smoke. The Pope may be a terrible idea but at least he exists. Anyway, the Trinity. The Trinity lives in this space. The claims that the Trinity are in the Bible are based on some ... let's call them spicy negotiations.
One idea is that, for example, God uses 'us' and 'our' in Genesis. Which yeah, he does, because God in the book of Genesis is one god amongst many. He says that, and refers to other gods. But the modern Evangelical monotheist perspective chooses to ignore all the other gods' presence in the work, and claim instead that God's use of a communal plural refers to God having some special multi-dimensional persona. Another example is a point where Jesus, speaking poetically, claims to have been 'I and the father are one,' which you may interpret as a literalistic unity of two individuals (a bit odd), or maybe a firm and commanding way to assert that two people are in absolute agreement (so normal as to be boring). And that's kinda what they have. There's no point where Jesus says 'there's a thing called the trinity,' or 'I, the holy spirit, and God, exist together as one thing,' and instead everything that has to be made to explain the Trinity is layer upon layer of nothing.
If you already believe the Trinity exists, and you want to ignore the Bible's use of poetic language, and also want to change what some verses are actually about in a cross-referenced kind of linguistic connect-the-dots, you can make a case for it, but all the evidence is like that. It's 'oh, yes, this is obviously a metaphorical phrase, but what if it's not?' and 'oh this is talking about this king in this point of history, but what if it's not?' and so on and so forth.
You'll find that almost always, when told this, the typical response from Christian apologists isn't to try and make it make sense, but to instead disdain this criticism. It is a hipster sneer of a doctrine, where if you don't get it, well, it's just because you don't get it. It can't be that the idea of it is silly. It has to be that actually, it's a sensible idea regarded by serious people and it addresses a problem or meets a need in their religious perspective, and if you don't see how sensible it is, that's on you. And this sort of assumed deference is used to build government policy.
See, the Trinity is the idea that three things are the same thing and also their own distinct things that are not that same thing. It is a magic trick of a phrase and every metaphor for its application is a silly attempt to try and redefine 'is'. One of the strongest points to prove the Trinity was the argument, once upon a time, that it had to be true, and it had to be divine in origin, because nobody who was trying to make a compelling, provable, true case for anything would forward a position that was so obviously wrong.
And this is where we get the Miracle of the Brick.
St Nicholas is a guy from that period of history where it's pretty reasonable for us to say, yeah, this guy existed and he was a dude and the reports of his life were probably based on reasonably real things that reasonably happened. Like, yes the dude was probably at this place in this time, and no, the story of him teleporting to save a ship, probably didn't happen. The things that happened are probably the foundation of the stories of the things that didn't. Multiple miracles about one or more golden cups? Probably had a golden cup somewhere, and the stories are built out of that. St Nicholas is also seen to be somewhat one of the lineages of people who became Santa Claus, which means even Protestants talk about him a lot around Christmas. And being who they are, these days, there's a lot of focus on what a badass he was because he beat someone up for disrespecting the Bible.
This is from the Council of Nicea, in 325, so about three hundred years after the events the Bible is supposed to be about and about the time the Bible is being solidified into a single document. We know it's about the time it's being solidified because this is the incident, the event that solidifies it — the Council of Nicea. It's in this incident that a lot of people get to codify their personal fanfiction into the Bible and choices are made about what the Bible should include to make absolutely sure that eventually, they'll be able to justify it, and therefore, everything about what the Bible had in it would be nice and clearly laid down, with no ambiguities, mistakes, typos, or contradictions, right?
Right?
One of the areas where there was a lot of contentious argument was about the Trinity. See, there were these detractors of the idea, who pointed out that the idea is stupid. St Nicholas pretty much argued that of course it's stupid, that's how you know it has to be divine, nobody would come up with that if they were trying to fool you. I love this argument because it is such a stupid solution to a stupid problem.
Anyway, then an opponent got up and argued that hey, no, this idea sucks and is mid. Saint Nicholas, then, [redacted] this guy. And I say [redacted] because if you ask Kirk Cameron he righteously grabbed the guy and dragged him out of the room and threw him on the ground and beat him for his defiance of the lord's will. And if you follow the St Nicholas Centre (your one stop website for all your St Nicholas needs) they'll say he slapped him, while citing an article that described it as punching him. Whatever the issue is, Saint Nicky got a short wicky and the sitch got sticky.
Also in this situation, to argue that the Trinity totally made sense, Saint Nicholas picked up a brick, and showed it to the assembled group of biships. He argued the brick was composed of air, earth, and fire, just like how the Trinity is composed of all three things! The miraculous tradition then holds that this brick caught fire in his hand, and its light showed everyone how right and true he was! This, we are told, is the Miracle of the Brick!
Now, again, this is probably based on some historical events!
Which makes me wonder if the guy who already had punched someone out over arguing with him about the Trinity hefted a brick and waved it around the room and gave people a good reason to agree with him, and after the fact they all agreed it was a miracle because that didn't make them look like a big pile of idiots who suck.
Just a thought.
Sometimes I wonder if it's worth having these conversations about points of sticky doctrine like the Trinity. Sometimes I wonder if it's worth anyone's time to point out the way that this very serious subject is founded on extremely ridiculous arguments that are, themselves mostly just wishing very hard for a thing to be true. But I think one of the things I find the most interesting and helpful in this kind of examination is to demystify the things that are treated as true, assumed as true, and see just how much of these things are based on the Bible, and how many of them are just...
Y'know.
Someone threatening you into believing it.