Trinity

I'm working on a sermon for Lord's Day 8 of the Heidelberg Catechism - which is on the Trinity. In my studies I ran across a good question from Randal Working's book, From Rebellion to Redemption, which by the way is an excellent resource for stirring the mind through the Catechism. His question was: What are some analogies you’ve heard of the Trinity? Are any of these satisfying? Do you see any limitations to them?


Here is my answer, I hope it's clear enough without writing a full essay, I'd like your thoughts:

Analogies: Tripartite human being. Egg. Water (vapor, liquid, ice). Social Trinity / Perichoresis / Family. Time.

Of these I still like the Tripartite human being the best, but only the way I myself first thought of it as a teenager – body to Christ, mind to Father, spirit to Holy Spirit. The Platonic tripartite human doesn’t really work well for me (spirit, emotions, intellect) - where's the body? The Bipartite human being seems to combine my ideas of mind and spirit into the concept soul (or do I have the terms "soul" and "spirit" switched around?), and it has some advantages, but also some disadvantages. What I primarily like about my body, mind, spirit analogy to God is that we are made in God’s image, so it’s not unlikely that there is a Trinitarian element to each of us. I feel this gives my analogy a biblical advantage somewhat. The analogy avoids tritheism because your mind, for example, contains in a very real sense the full essence of the whole you, even though it is not physical as the body, or spiritual as the spirit. Yet the mind is not devoid of those aspects because the mind works through the physical brain, and certainly expresses something of the spirit as well. Likewise when we see someone’s body we call it by that human’s name because it contains the whole human, and gives it's own expression to the mind and spirit. And the spirit of a human is not just related to the mind of the human, and we know this because the body also has powerful effects on our spirit (just think of what physical acts of sin do to our spirits!). So the analogy avoids tritheism because the human is not really three parts (despite the title “tripartite”), but it is one essential being in three aspects. But I don't really like the word "aspects" there, because it's not like human beings exist in three modes or something. So, the analogy also avoids modalism, because the human being is all three at the same time, and all the time. We would avoid subordinationism with the analogy if only we would give up our foolish ideas that the human body is subordinate to the mind and spirit (in reality we can point to just as many times when it seems the mind or spirit is subordinate to the body, as when we are very hungry and become tempermental). And we also avoid the error of blending everything together completely (can’t think of the name of this heresy right now), because the body, spirit, and mind of a human are clearly different from each other and have different primary functions even though they are all completely involved in the primary functions of the other two as well.

The analogy does finally break down though, because the human being is just one person, whereas God is three persons and one God. We have to be careful about that so as not to go so far with this analogy that we forget that Jesus is fully human with His own fully human soul (or should I say mind and spirit?). In other words, I don't want my trinitarian analogy to be taken so far that it messes with orthodox Christology.