The Meaning of One and Three

It occurs to me that the doctrine of the Trinity is a stumbling block because it messes with our mathematical system of accounting for things in the world. But God is not a creature to be counted as such, so why do we expect that our conventions still apply?

If God is both One and Three, it is only because He cannot be accounted for by standard mathematics. In mathematics, One is not Three, and that's that. However, if One and Three are words that can have different meanings other than their mathematical meanings, then the doctrine of the Trinity is still possible.

This is one reason why I'm not such a mathematical Platonist these days. When it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, I find myself constrained by reason to reject such a doctrine if, in fact, the system of mathematics I use every day is reality.

Yet the doctrine of the Trinity sums up a manifest experience of God, witnessed not only in scripture but in life. God was in Jesus, and Jesus was in God, and Jesus was God. No one has ever seen God or ever will, but if you've seen Jesus, you've seen God. This paradox is not a matter of abstract philosophical principles but of experience.

If I think of mathematics as a tool for describing reality, or even better, a system that helps me manage reality, then there really is nothing wrong with this paradoxical doctrine. God being both Three and One doesn't contradict real experience; in fact, it corresponds most exquisitely with real experience. But clearly God cannot be described (or managed) by the intellectual tools of (traditional) mathematics.