165 Nonetheless, left to itself reason is utterly unable to see this Trinity.
How are we to understand its three parts? Are they three gods who are
one God in essence and name? Are they three distinct qualities of one
underlying material, meaning that they are just qualities or attributes of a
single God that have names? Or is there some other alternative?
The only good advice tells us to turn to the Lord God our Savior and
read the Word under his supervision (since he is the God of the Word).
Then we will be enlightened and see truths that even reason will
acknowledge.
If you do not turn to the Lord, even if you read the Word a thousand
times and see a divine trinity and a divine unity there, the only under-
standing you will get will be that there are three divine persons, each of
whom is individually God; and therefore there are three gods. The com-
mon sense of all in the whole world finds this conclusion repulsive, how-
ever. Therefore to avoid being abused, people have come up with a
strange compromise: although there are in fact three gods, the faith
insists that we not say three gods; instead we must say there is one God.
Furthermore, if we do not wish to undergo a barrage of verbal hostility,
our intellect has to be especially imprisoned in this regard and held in
chains under obedience to faith—from now on, according to the Chris-
tian leadership in the Christian church, this has to be the holy way.
[ 2 ] Such is the paralyzed offspring that was born as a result of not
reading the Word under the Lord’s supervision. Any of us who do not read
the Word under the Lord’s supervision read it under the supervision of
our own intelligence; but when it comes to objects in spiritual light, such
as all the essential teachings of the church, our intelligence is [as blind] as
an owl [in daylight]. In that case, when we read about the Trinity in the
Word and we get the impression that although there are three, still they
are one, it seems to us like a response from an oracle. Since we do not
understand it, we chew on it, because if we put it straight in front of our
eyes it would be a puzzle. The harder we worked to solve the puzzle, the
more we would entangle ourselves in darkness, until we began to set our
intellect aside as we thought about it, which is like setting our eyes aside in
the act of seeing.
To put it briefly, when we read the Word under the supervision of
our own intelligence (which we all do if we do not acknowledge that the
Lord is the God of heaven and earth, and turn to him and worship him
alone), we are like children playing a game of blindfolding their eyes and
trying to walk in a straight line. They believe they are walking straight,
singke
(singke)
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