Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday, a day set aside in the Western Church calendar to consider the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity.

Any pastor or preacher committed to tackling the topic is trembling, or at least he should be.

As one of my theology professors once noted, it's basically impossible to explain the Trinity

without at some point sliding into heresy. But we have to talk about it because it's at the

top of the defining traits of Orthodox Christianity, perhaps more than any other doctrine.

In fact, the Trinitarian

understanding of God sets Christianity apart from other monotheistic faiths. It's a difficult

doctrine to understand, even more difficult to explain, especially to non-believers. As the great

Augustine of Hippo confessed, and I quote, Which of us understands the Almighty Trinity?

And yet which speaks not of it, if indeed it be it.

Rare is that soul, which, while it speaks of it, knows what it speaks of.

End quote.

Well, one way to talk about the Trinity is to clarify all that the Trinity is not.

And to that end, the YouTube channel Lutheran satire has produced

the very funny and helpful video, St. Patrick's Bad Analogies. You got to check it out. It's a way

to own the struggle rather than treat what God has revealed to us about himself as irrelevant.

Even British theologian N.T. Wright has described his struggle with

understanding the Trinity and why the ancient Celtic church was so fascinated by it.

Though the Celts do like things in threes, more importantly these early Christians

recognized that the Trinity wasn't an optional doctrine for the Christian faith.

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