Monday, April 25, 2016

Understanding the Trinity using Object Oriented Design



God is an existential reality who is to be understood, savored and worshiped. The Bible makes it clear that the supreme revelation of God is in the Lord Jesus Christ (Hebrews 1:1-3). People have sought to understand and express realities about God through timeless mediums of prose, poetry, music, paintings, sculptures, signs..etc. These expression mediums, though limited, can help express insights into aspects about God. One of the most interesting yet complex realities about God is His self-identification as being triune. The orthodox understanding of the Trinity is:

One God as three distinct co-substantial, co-eternal persons.

While the definition is fairly straight-forward, it is an immensely difficult thing to comprehend because our mind searches for analogies, examples and illustrations that are hard to find. Some illustrations are unhelpful and most spill over into the modalist heresy.

Object oriented design is a conceptual means of modeling abstracts, realisms and expressing programmatic constructs. It is widely used in designing and implementing software systems. Could object oriented concepts offer insights into understanding the doctrine of Trinity?

Here's an attempt:

public Class God { /* attributes described in the Bible */ }
      
 /* The three statements below are triggered by self- realization, outside of time and  executed concurrently */

TheFather = new God();
TheSon = new God();
TheHolySpirit = new God();

Note: It is not too difficult to model self-realization, time-independency and concurrency 


The pseudo-code captures:

(1) The distinctness of the three persons in the Trinity. When one processes the pseudo-code above, it is impossible to mis-speak one person being the same as the other.
(2) The attributes and substance of all three persons is the same.
(3) The possibility for three persons to perform different (Son praying to the Father) and same (Creation: Genesis 1, John 1:1-3) acts.
(4) The feasibility of an open system where the doctrine of the Trinity is not implausible.

Other consideration(s):

1) Is John 3:16 a reason to consider TheSon as a subclass of TheFather (still triggered by self-realization, outside of time)?
2) Representing Hypostatic Union within this illustration matrix would be an interesting study.


No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for your interest. Please feel free to post a comment.