FLATLAND BY EDWIN A. ABBOTT (THE NATURE OF THE TRINITY)

This slender volume (less than 100 pages), published in 1884, was written by an English clergyman who had a fascination for mathematics. The subtitle of the book is “A Romance of Many Dimensions,” in which the word “Dimensions” has several meanings, the most literal of which is a study of the geometrical possibilities of one-, two-, and greater-dimensional realities.

The most interest in this book over the years has come from science-fiction and mathematically minded fans. The introduction to the Dover reprint by Banesh Hoffman, for example, calls it “a stirring adventure in pure mathematics...This is no trifling tale of science fiction. Its aim is to instruct, and it is written with subtle artistry.” And the publisher's note on the back of the front piece calls it “an unequaled presentation of geometrical concepts and...a barbed satire of the hierarchical world of the Victorians.”

It may well be all of those things stated above, but my personal opinion, and that of others, is that Abbott's artistry is actually much more subtle than the above quotes would indicate since it includes, and no doubt intended to include, a hefty dose of theology which has gone over the heads of many who comment on it. What this obscure clergyman has accomplished in his book is to give us one of the most powerful analogies for beginning to understand the mystery of the Trinity.

Paul Copan, in Dictionary of Christianity and Science, provides a very short history of attempts to comprehend the Trinity through the use of earthly analogies. Some cited in the past have been (a) the three states of water (unfortunately leading to the heresy called modalism) or (b) the three parts of an egg (another heresy called partialism).

One possible way to getting around modalism for the water analogy is to note that under certain conditions of temperature and pressure called the triple-point, water exists in all three states simultaneously. And I have sometimes tried to explain the belief in Jesus being both human and divine by invoking the example of light waves, which physicists say have the simultaneous properties of both matter and energy.

Copan additionally describes Begbie's analogy of God as a chord of music composed of three separate tones combined in “an integrated sound within the same space with distinctive, mutually enhancing notes.” Or we could consider Moreland and Craig's image of the mythological three-headed dog Cerberus in which there are “three distinct centers of awareness, each with the same canine nature.” As Copan concludes: "Whichever type of analogy is used , we have threeness and oneness without contradiction and with plausibility...There is both union as well as distinction within God. So it can be said that God is both community and unity, distinction though not separation."

Any of those images may be helpful to you in understanding the Trinity, but to me, the Flatland analogy comes perhaps the closest to explaining, at least in a dim way, the possibility of God as three-in-one. To do that explaining I will have to unfortunately jettison almost completely the ingenious plot of Abbott's book and stick only to a geometrical rendering.

Imagine a flat sheet of paper inhabited by two-dimensional beings such as triangles, squares, and a host of polygons. They can sense and interact with one another by bumping into them and moving along their respective sides to see how many angles they have. And in this imaginary world, the more sides one has, the higher in the social order one is. Another way of putting it is that the closer one approaches a circle, the more perfect one becomes.

Suddenly, into this well-ordered world comes a brand-new type of being. He has no angles at all and thus is a perfect circle. Reactions to this circle vary considerable, but at one point there is a concerted effort to get rid of him since he upsets the existing establishment. But that attempt fails when the circle suddenly shrinks smaller and smaller until it is just a dot, and then disappears entirely. There is much more to the plot than this brief outline, but it is all that is need for my immediate purposes.

To explain this phenomenon, we must put ourselves in the place of the Flatland creatures for a moment. They exist only in two dimensions and can only “see” in one dimension, length. However, by changing their perspective through moving around they are able to discern the two-dimensional nature of others around them. Analogously, we are three-dimensional creatures who can view in three dimensions only by moving around and/or taking advantage of our two eyes, which give us two slightly different views from the same location.

In Flatland, the key to the sudden appearance and disappearance of the circle into their narrow world is the fact that in three-dimensional reality the circle is in fact a sphere which can intersect the plane of Flatland at will, being first sensed as a mere point, then a circle which can grow at will in circumference or shrink back to a point and disappear altogether simply by moving up and down, but it is still a sphere the whole time. The only thing that changes is how much of the sphere is revealed to the Flatland creatures at any given time.

From this geometrical picture, we can now see that the whole story of Flatland is really that of God as a many-dimensional being coming to earth as a three-dimensional one, Jesus, and then ultimately ascending outside of our limited three-dimensional perception. And one can extend the analogy even further by noting that Jesus told his disciples that he needed to depart in order that the Spirit might come. That event could well be described as similar to when the sphere chooses to descend to Flatland and reside inside any of the polygons who live there. God in that way lives within a believer.

Note that in none of these various different permutations of the sphere does the sphere change its reality in the least; it remains a single sphere. The only variation is in how the Flatlanders are able to experience it.

And as a thought exercise to leave you with, consider that the fourth dimension (in which God exists) is time. With that in mind, such matters as God's omnipresence in space and time, His omniscience in being able to see future events, the difference between precognition and predestination, etc. all come into clearer perspective.