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Notes -
An intriguing new theological heresy came to me as I was preparing to sleep.
I'm a Trinitarian Christian and a geek, so I can't help getting nerd-sniped by discussions of the Trinity's internal "economy". My Triessentialism philosophy started from praying that God would resolve the apparent logical contradiction of the Trinity, and seeing an answer which has satisfied me for over twenty years. I've listened to the Trinities podcast (which turned out to be run by a blatant unitarian) and discussions of different formulations of understanding God's Trinitarian nature.
Now, I'm a fan of the Lutheran Satire channel's videos because of the hilarious and interesting ways they puncture heresies. Their most famous video, St. Patrick's Bad Analogies, source of the "That's modalism, Patrick!" meme, is a must-watch on or around St. Patrick's Day.
So this is the thought which came to me at bedtime and put a wide grin on my face. What if each Person of the Trinity is the only One Who exists, truly God before all and above all, but each in a different one of the three overlapping realms of the Physical, Logical, and Emotional? What if none of the Persons of the Trinity has ever met the others, but would have had to infer their existence through their effects on humans were He not omniscient?
It would make a fun and fascinating cosmological foundation for a fictional work of high fantasy, but here in our universe it's an obvious heresy, and I don't believe it.
Fun. I was thinking recently that so much “religious experience” makes sense even when only including the emotional, and ignoring altogether physical facts and logic and memory. If you are praying in awe at God, then God can just be a placeholder, and provided the experience of “awe” occurs in relation to your life, it is a very beneficial experience to cultivate. Same with humility (a beneficial and adaptive state), petitions (salience of your desires), sustained worship (the training of our attention), thanks (the training of appreciation for things we ought to be appreciate of), apology (salience of wrongs), favor (confidence). We could be tempted to call a person who cultivates these feelings religious, even if it occurs entirely within one’s emotional activity and with no actual belief in God. And then, if there’s some scholarly theist who believes all the right things but lacks this emotional dimension, we would be tempted to call them totally lacking in God. It’s a fun thought: God as Divine Placeholder. God existing in periphery but lost as soon as we focus, like an object in the dark that can only be seen when we aren’t directly seeing it.
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