Jimmy Akin gives some advice on how to begin explaining the Trinity to young children, first by analogy and then by observing the personhood of beings in nature.
Transcript:
Host: Carrie in Moose Lake, Minnesota listening on 88.1 FM. Carrie, you are on with Jimmy Akin, what’s your question?
Caller: Hi, good evening and happy Lent! Thank you. My question is in regard to teaching elementary students about the Holy Trinity in a manner that they can easily understand, or more easily understand, because the God in three persons is kind of, I mean… It’s a hard concept.
Jimmy: So are you asking how I would explain it to such children?
Caller: Yes, thank you.
Jimmy: Well obviously, one can use various analogies that have been proposed for the Trinity. You know, there’s that diagram of the triangle with the word “God” at the center and “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” at each end, at each vertex, and then they’re connected with “Is” or “Is not” to explain how all three persons are God but they’re not the same person as each other. That diagram can be helpful. It doesn’t fully explain the Trinity, but it can be a help.
On a simpler level, you know–this is probably an apocryphal story, but at least according to legend, St. Patrick used a three-lobed shamrock to explain the Trinity to Irish tribes people, and that’s something that conceivably could help with very small children. The trouble with these analogies, and especially the shamrock analogy, is that there are limits to every natural analogy to the Trinity, because there’s nothing like the Trinity in nature. We don’t encounter anything like the Trinity in nature.
And so all of these analogies, if you press them too far, generate problems. In the case of the shamrock example, well shamrocks have three lobes, and thus they have three parts; but the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not parts of God. Each person is God. And so you end up, if you if you rely too much on the shamrock example, you’re gonna end up conveying the idea that God has parts, and that’s not true.
So I would–if you decide to use an analogy like that, I would be very careful to say to the children that this is an analogy, you know, we can kind of compare these two things, but they’re not the same. And so don’t think that God has parts like the shamrock has parts.
In terms of if they’re old enough to be able to process what I’m about to say, what I would do is I’d say, look, the teaching is that God is one being in three persons. And so what’s a being? Well, as the name suggests, it “be’s.” It’s anything that “be’s;” anything that exists is a being. And so there are all different kinds of beings; there are rocks and trees and flowers and people and angels and God. All of those exist, all of those are beings.
But you notice not all of them are persons. So for example, the rocks and the trees and the flowers, those aren’t persons. They’re zero people. Whereas you and I, as human beings, or an angel like Saint Michael, we are persons. Each one of us is a being that’s one person. So I’m one person, you’re one person, St. Michael is one person. And that shows us something very interesting, because if you have some beings that are zero persons, and some beings that are one person, then there’s no reason why you can’t have some beings that are more than one person, and that’s what God is. God is one being who is three persons.
That’s different than what we see here in nature around us, because God is infinitely above us, so we would expect God to be different than what we on an everyday basis. It’s understandable that this would be a difficult concept to grasp, and it’s subtle and it’s very different than what we’re used to encountering, but that’s because God is infinitely above us, and he’s infinitely wonderful, and we would expect there to be unexpected things like this about God.
And so that’s how I’d explain it if they’re able to take that in at their age. If you’d like to read a little more about that check out my book “A Daily Defense” where I go into this, and I also talk about the Biblical basis for the Trinity and the different verses of the Bible that help us put that teaching together and prove it.