Misexplaining the Trinity: The Doctrine No One Could Make Sense Of

David Tynan O’Mahony, the Irish comedian and satirist better known by his stage name, “Dave Allen”, hilariously explained the perils of teaching theology to a child, particularly the concept of a Triune Godhead.  Allen built an entire career on this kind of material, provoking indignation across a four-decade run on British and Irish television by highlighting political hypocrisy and treating religious authority with open disdain.  His routine on trying to explain the Trinity to a child is not an isolated joke.  It sits squarely within a body of work that consistently found the doctrine, when stripped of ecclesiastical solemnity and explained in plain language to an actual child, considerably harder to defend than its defenders ever admitted.

Thomas Jefferson Made the Same Point Two Centuries Earlier, Without the Laugh Track

In his letter to James Smith, on the 8^th December 1822, Thomas Jefferson elaborated on his hatred for the Pauline Christian doctrine of the Trinity.  He said, “The hocus-pocus phantasm of a ‘God’ like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands and thousands of martyrs.”  He continued, “In fact, the Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea?  He who thinks he does, only deceives himself.  He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without a rudder, is the sport of every wind.  With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.”

Why the Comedian and the Founding Father Arrive at the Same Place

Allen worked in observational comedy, using a child’s plain-spoken confusion to expose an idea adults had simply stopped questioning out of habit.  Jefferson worked in Enlightenment rationalism, using formal logical argument to arrive at the identical destination.  Neither man was objecting to the existence of God, and neither was objecting to Christianity’s ethical content.  Both were objecting to a specific, later theological formulation, and both concluded that the doctrine survives largely because believers stop interrogating it at precisely the age a child would otherwise ask the obvious follow-up question.

This is not merely a comedian’s punchline or a deist’s grudge.  The doctrine of the Trinity, as formally defined, does not appear anywhere in that language in the earliest Christian texts.  It was hammered into its classical form at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, and further refined at the Council of Constantinople in 381 CE, specifically to settle the Arian controversy, in which the priest Arius had argued that the Son was created by, and therefore subordinate to, the Father.  The final Nicene formulation was not a spontaneous revelation.  It was the output of a political and theological negotiation, conducted centuries after the events it claims to describe, and enforced afterwards through exile and condemnation of dissenters, Arius among them.  A doctrine requiring an imperial council, two rounds of refinement, and the suppression of a competing view to reach its final shape is not self-evidently the “incomprehensible” mystery its defenders present it as.  It is a historically negotiated settlement, dressed retroactively in the language of mystery once the negotiation was finished.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

A child asking how one can simultaneously be three, and a Founding Father calling the same claim a phantasm born in the blood of martyrs, are making the same observation from opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum: complexity is not the same thing as depth, and unintelligibility dressed up as sacred mystery has a long, well-documented history of being exactly that, unintelligibility, and nothing more profound underneath it.