When I posted my Theology of Care post, I mentioned that I had a “science-fiction view of the trinity that I may post about separately.” This post is the description of my science fiction, nuclear fusion containment field model of the trinity. I had this idea while I was in seminary, but when I graduated, it kind of took me as an obsession until I downloaded some open-source CAD software and drew it. I’ll try to describe what motivated me to think about it and all the ways this model ended up describing the relation between the Persons of the Trinity. As a bonus, I also get a certain kind of ecclesiology out of it, showing how the Trinity relates to us and binds us together in love. Remember, this is science fiction, and it’s only a metaphor.
The problem motivating the idea came from an issue we were discussion in my class on Systematic Theology. Part of the problem is the gendered language of the "Father." In class we said that the essential quality of the First Person of the Trinity is the begetting, not the gender. The First Person of the Trinity is "eternally begetting." It's not just one and done. God begets the Son and has always begotten the Son and is always begetting the Son and always will be begetting the Son. God also is always creating. These ideas lead to something like process theology, where the process is more important than the product. God's creative nature is to be valued more than God's having created all those years ago. This brings God into the present; God creates for us even today. At this point I've gotten far afield, following my short attention span, so back to the point . . .
The Begetter is eternally begetting, and the Begotten is eternally being begotten. The task we were exploring was whether there is some other analogy we could use for God (since all ideas we have about God are going to fall short in our human minds, we need not be bound to old one, especially when a problem like God's gender starts getting in the way). We explored an idea of a water source, an aquifer, that is eternally sourcing a spring. The Holy Spirit, then, is the water that flows out from the spring, watering plants and nourishing life all around the spring. So the Trinity would be described as the Source, the Wellspring, and the Flowing Waters, or something like that (I'm sure some of the ideas we discussed in class came from
Migliore, Daniel L. 1991. Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology. Grand Rapids: WBEerdmans.
but I haven't found the page numbers; I'll update this post when I do).
My physics brain then made me think of a magnetic field. The lines of the magnetic field "flow out from" the north pole of the magnet, and they "flow into" the south pole (a semantically strict physicist might object to the motion implied, the source and sink, but that's a quibble for my metaphor). The point is that the two are related by their essential nature. There cannot be a north pole without there being a south. If you break a magnetic piece of iron in half, there is still a north and a south in each of the pieces. The north pole is eternally begetting, and the south pole is eternally being begotten.
Satisfied with my new metaphor for the relation between the Begetter and the Begotten, I added the toroidal twist around the equator to represent the Holy Spirit. My mind leapt from science to science fiction. I thought this might be a nuclear fusion containment field, say on a starship like the Enterprise. The torus is the part that gives it the inward-pointing force to squeeze the atoms together in a fusion reaction. The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the vinculum caritas, the bond of love. Vinculum could also be "shackle," which I like because it connects with the toroidal shape in my magnetic field. The shackle of love sometimes refers to the thing that holds the Begetter and the Begotten, the Father and the Son, together inside the Trinity.
The thing that I noticed, though, is that this is a force that squeezes things together. So what is it squeezing together? A nuclear fusion reaction would be squeezing hydrogen nuclei, protons, together to become helium nuclei. So, I imagined a pool of hydrogen atoms at the bottom of my magnetic field passing up through the field from south to north (not because of physics, just how I imagined it), and along the way they get squeezed and fused together to become helium atoms at the top. I realized that's the church, the ecclesia. We come together as we pass through the field that is the triune God and we come out the other side bound together in love.
Descriptions of properties inside the trinity are referred to as "immanent" and descriptions of the properties and relations between God and not‑God are referred to as "economic" (from the root word of economy, which has to do with work, the effects of God on not‑God, or from the root word which means home, the household of God). I'm particularly pleased that the metaphor of the Holy Spirit as a torus in a science fiction nuclear fusion containment field is both immanent and economic. It turns the economic relationship inside out: instead of the Trinity being a thing that affects (works on) other things that are outside it, this metaphor makes the Trinity a thing (a field) that brings other things into itself, that other things pass through. God brings us into, iside of God's own self. We are inside God when the Bond of Love works on us. We are being loved by God at the same time the love of God is making us love one another. We are being bound to God at the same time we are being bound to each other in love. It's not two separate processes; it's all the same process.
