the Trinity: one + one + one = one?

Last month contained the day in the church year called Trinity Sunday. My pastor included these statements in his sermon that day:

First, what is the teaching of the Trinity? There is one God in three persons. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, but there are not three gods but one God. We worship the Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity. Who can understand this? One + one + one = one. This is incomprehensible. God has not given us minds to comprehend this; only hearts to believe it and mouths to confess it. (Pastor Byran Wolfmueller)

I really like my pastor and learn a lot from him, but I don't like the way he characterized this. One + one + one is not incomprehensible because our minds are lacking. It is incomprehensible because it is logically impossible. Not even God can understand something that is logically impossible.

Comprehension means to take in the meaning, nature, or importance of something -- to grasp it. If something is incomprehensible, its meaning, nature, or importance are not knowable. So one has to wonder, if the content of the teaching of the Trinity is incomprehensible, does the "teaching" really teach us anything? Incomprehensible words, by definition, bring us no closer to understanding the nature of something than we had prior to hearing them.

If someone told me that, all things being equal, three objects weighed one pound each, but together also only weighed one pound, he would be telling me something inconsistent with logic and the concept of weight. While one can say that to believe such a thing would require "faith," I would question whether such faith was really a belief in something, or merely a rejection of logic and mathematics. If I had to do something that required an accurate perception of the weight characteristics of these objects, I would have to ignore at least one of three things: (1) I would have to ignore the knowledge that their quantity was three and that they each weighed one pound, or (2) I would have to ignore the knowledge that in total they weighed one pound, or (3) I would have to ignore mathematics. If I ignored none of these, and claimed "faith" in all of them, I would be no closer to grasping the nature of the objects than I was before, because these pieces of knowledge are inconsistent. Such "faith" would be merely an exercise in justifying belief in things absurd. (And once you open that Pandora's Box, the distinction between knowledge and ignorance evaporates.)

The doctrine of the Trinity uses the concept of quantity, and uses numbers as a means of qualifying quantity. If the numbers used violate the most rudimentary concepts of mathematics, then they must not be numbers as we understand numbers. And if someone talks to me about such numbers, they might as well refer to them using nonsense words, because I don't have any idea what they are. Using numeric terminology will only send me down the (apparently wrong) path of trying to integrate them into what I already know about numbers.

Now lest you think I'm arguing against the doctrine of the Trinity, I'm not. I'm merely arguing against this type of characterization of it.

I read a thought provoking book by RC Sproul a while back called Not a Chance. It contains the following passage on the topic of the Trinity which I found quite helpful:

Christianity rests on two profoundly important and profoundly difficult paradoxes that remain mysteries: the Trinity and the Incarnation. Classically, the Trinity was defined in these terms:

God is one in essence
and
three in person.

I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard or seen this formulation described as a "contradiction." Why is it called a contradiction? We are accustomed to thinking in terms of "One person equals one essence." This equation may be a convenient one, but it's not a rationally necessary one. The Trinity is indeed unusual and mysterious, but it is not inherently or analytically irrational.

If the formulation for the Trinity asserted that God is one in essence and three in essence or that he is three in person and one in person, we would be engaging in the nonsense of contradiction. Something cannot be one in A and three in A at the same time and in the same relationship. That's a contradiction.

The classical formulation of the Trinity is that God is one in one thing (one in A, essence) and three in a different thing (three in B, persona). The Church Fathers were careful not to formulate the nature of God in contradictory terms. . .

The formula is not meant to say that essence and person are the same things. Essence refers to the being of God, while person is used here as subsistence within being. Essence is primary and persona is secondary. Essence is the similarity, while persona is the dissimilarity in the nature of God. He is unified in one essence, but diversified in three persona.