Why water, an egg and a cloverleaf are insufficient

1. Intelligibility is not depictability

A sentence is intelligible when its concepts and assertion can be recognized. It need not be reproducible as a small model on a table. “God creates everything without himself being created” has definite content although no creature supplies a complete analogy to the uncreated Creator. Isaiah 40,18 makes precisely this limit the subject of its question about an adequate image of God.

2. The usual images change doctrinal content

With water's states, the same material is now one thing, now another. In Jesus' baptism, by contrast, we encounter Son, Spirit and the Father's voice together. With the cloverleaf, each leaf is part of the plant. The Son, however, does not possess merely a share in deity. Three humans share a kind but exist as three separate human beings. This, too, fails to capture the one undivided deity.

These errors arise when a limited similarity is elevated into a complete explanation. One may illustrate a number of three through an image. One may not derive the kind of divine being from it.

3. The better explanation works with statements

John 1,1 connects three characterizations: The Logos already was in the beginning, was with God and was God. John 17,24 speaks of the Father's love for the Son before the world's creation. Eternity, deity and personal relationship are thus positively asserted. This is more substantive than an object easily imagined but misrepresenting precisely these relationships.

Correspondingly, Thomas distinguishes between proving a truth and subsequently illustrating it. Similarities can help reflection once revelation's content is established; they do not support this content through their own power.^[1]

4. The image is measured against the text

The right question is therefore not: “Which object is exactly like God?” It is: “Which scriptural statement does this comparison help us understand, and where does the similarity end?” The answer may also be that a particular image creates more confusion than insight.

We need not shrink God into the limits of created things to speak meaningfully about him. His revelation gives us true concepts; it promises no scale model of his being.