Number study.

God knows himself as he is, unlimitedly, including what is hidden from us. We experience him always within limits and partially. We use names because lexical strings can be used easily to invoke something far greater or even indescribably great (the map is not the territory). This means that the unity of God as he experiences himself is mediated to us by a diversity of names and of simultaneous experiences.

Trinitarian creeds express a definitional core for this unity and diversity, and should be upheld fully; yet, because often charged with contradiction or incompleteness, they can be and are supplemented with unofficial helpful explanations. They are not insufficient, but we can amplify them by resorting to additional Scriptural background. When we seek this resolution we find that God uses numbers in many more ways than Trinitarians.

1> "The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deut. 6:4). Most have no problem with "Yahweh is our God is Yahweh is Unity". But he is no monad or concrete block; he displays diversity, and most unitarians recognize this backhandedly. We focus on diversity thoroughly, but must begin by affirming all is core unity.

2> "In your Law it is written that the testimony of two people is true. I am the one who bears witness about myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness about me" (John 8:17-18). Before we talk threeness we must admit the Lord uses the concept "two" about himself and not directly "three". The Son is himself the "One" (the Unity) in the same way the Father is Unity; but he is "not alone" because he does what the Father does. So here Scripture assigns names to the one (Yahweh) that are given the concept two (Unity and Father). Ancient of Days interacts with Son of Man, without always mentioning the Spirit that flows between them. However, logically, a duo always implies a relationship, and that relationship can be counted as a third; thus this picture gravitates back to trinitarianism without fully recognizing it.

Each number has special meaning that is both implicit and traditional; all creations of God reflect his nature. Expressions of twoness include male-female, right-left, heaven-earth, human-divine, but all show a complementary unity that reflects the unity of Father and Son.

3> "Every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses" (Matt. 18:16). As anti-Trinitarians note, God never uses the words "person", "trinity", or "three" with respect to himself, unless the indirect association of this verse with John 8 is admitted. There are many triads, starting with Matthew 28:19 (Father, Son, Spirit) and always answerable to that formulation, but the word "three" is missing. The conclusions are of course sound that Father is God, Son is God, Spirit is God, and these are distinct; but we do best to talk about God the way Scripture talks about him when our secondary formulations are challenged for insufficiency.

An important point in these Scriptures, and Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, is the "fuzzy math". "Two or three", like "six or seven", is an idiom for an inexactly counted number. Sometimes God wants an inexact metaphor so we recognize math is not complete either. As we go on, more reasons for fuzziness appear.

Here patterns include body-soul-spirit, past-present-future, length-breadth-height, sky-land-sea, father-mother-child, thesis-antithesis-synthesis: among some pairs there is a tertium quid that comes naturally. We observe philosophically that the mind naturally turns pairs to triads but does not so easily turn triads to quartets; why? I can only say it makes sense because the increased relationship of a fourth to all three priors (e.g. tetrahedron) is not so easily envisioned as pairing off all four more distantly (e.g. square). A Catholic illustration places the four words Father, Son, Spirit, God in a tetrahedron rather than a square, because the joins to the word "God" are intended to emphasize the relationship of "is", while the joins among the three vertices are intended to emphasize the relationship of "is not". While this is accurate in itself and reinforces the creeds and Scriptures, it invites the question of why "God" is not a fourth in the Trinity. The answer is that "God" is a title that is typically presented in unity, or (as "Elohim") in indefinite diversity, and is not often presented as only one in a plural transaction. When that does happen (as in the creedal "God of God, Very God of Very God"), all in the transaction share one Deity.

But God does associate himself with larger numbers as well; and it's possible to see his diversity in these ways as well, without losing anything else we have gleaned from Scripture or creed.

4> "A stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it were gleaming metal. And from the midst of it came the likeness of four living creatures" (Ezekiel 1:4-5). The greatest description of the appearance of the enthroned, joined with several other testimonies, gives him four constant attendants that constantly exude fourness, even as they chant the threefold "Holy" (Is. 6).

Man loves God with heart, soul, and might (Deut. 6:5, Mark 12:30), corresponding to heart-soul-body; but this is sometimes shortened to two, heart-soul, and Luke thought it necessary to translate "soul" with two words meaning soul and mind (Luke 10:27), making man fourfold with heart, soul, strength, and mind. I don't think this teaches man has four discrete levels, but I do think that the soul level has observable subdivisions. Similarly, I don't think the four living beings are God himself, but I do not know that I can simply prove the contrary directly from Scripture. I note that the translation "creatures" is incorrect, because in both Hebrew and Greek the word means "living ones", "lives", and I note these beings are frequently referred to. As righteous sentient expressions they always speak for God rightly and are inseparable from him. The easiest fast conclusion is that they are like his robe or his throne, completely possessed by his will, but separable in the mind from the form that the person of the Ancient of Days takes. We would be wise to follow Ezekiel, who saw a vision that drove others mad, and multiply words for caution's sake, saying, "Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD." Glory has likeness, and likeness has its own appearance, all for the sake of revealing one God showing himself and communicating within himself.

There is enough material on fours in Scripture that all relate to these living ones that it could occupy an entire book, from the four Rivers of Eden to the four Horsemen of Apocalypse. Details are left for now as an exercise.

7> "Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness" (Rev. 1:4-5). Skipping over the more distant relationships of five and six, we come to this very explicit passage very often ignored. Some solid testimonies to it still appear, such as the original lyrics to Be Thou My Vision. We are not going the way of the false teaching "There's nine of them!" by calculating God as being 3x3 or 1+7+1, but we are going to explicate a passage that needs it in order to prevent others from doing so. This is still God expressing himself in the nominal triad of I Am, Spirit(s), and Jesus, but now, instead of focusing on the unity of the Father or the God-Man dual nature of the Son, we are given a heptad of Spirits. Isn't there one Spirit?

Yes, there is, like there is still one wind when seven hurricanes appear, and there are still "seven Seas" when we call them all "the Sea". Because the Spirit manifests as an uncountable (wind, water, fire), we can sometimes count occurrences of Him, as we will see below. What John saw was a heavenly menorah of seven branches that was the pattern for Moses's construction (and also for the seven lampstands of Revelation 1, a separate vision), and he intuited that the seven flames he saw were the one Spirit, but that he was to describe them as the seven Spirits (flames) to allow us to make that connection. The point for now is that the Christian God of the Scriptures and creeds does not deign to call himself directly three, but does repeat that his Spirit can be called seven. But like the ten fingers of Jesus, what we see always operates in unity.

Seven may be associated with perfection because of its unique place among the primes as a just-comprehensible but ever-ineffable collection of units. Its association with God throughout Scripture is well-known and needs no advertisement. I will emphasize one heptad that includes the Trinity yet shows God's greater diversity without admitting new "Persons" thereto. It is the seven unities of Eph. 4:4-6: Body, Spirit, Hope, Lord, Faith, Baptism, Father-God.

10> "He wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments" (Exodus 34:28). The one time God speaks from heaven to all men he gives (literally) "ten words", which can be pictured as the one Word dividing himself up into ten expressions. Being the count of fingers or toes (important in Daniel's and John's prophecies of the end), "ten" is often inexact in Scriptural colloquialism. It was used just as we use "dozen" roughly today, and in fact "ten or twelve" is often a range of fuzziness and a good paraphrase of Scriptures that mention e.g. "ten days", "ten times".

But here we have the ten words enumerated that are God's expression of himself (see our sidebar); five about "the LORD your God", and five about man, namely what "you shall not". Tens have several unappreciated tie-ins. God first expressed himself in a Creation account including the phrase "God said" ten times: he created Light, Space, Land, Plants, Lights, Swarms, Beasts, Man, Dominion, Gifts. This corresponds to M-theory in physics, in which the best mathematical description of the universe has ten dimensions (one time, three space, and six spatial but basically inaccessible due to size). Interestingly, just as some isomorphic versions of the theory use 11 dimensions for math purposes even though the 11th is unpopulated, so too does Genesis 1 contain an 11th instruction differently introduced, God's blessing on the animals. In creating the mouth, the Lord made it capable of ten to twelve different vowels (all languages are conformable to this structure): Hebrew uses nine vowel symbols but they have ten or eleven sounds depending on system. (I like to count the basic phonetic alphabet as 12 vowels and 30 consonants, but again due to fuzziness this can all be counted under tens.)

In 384 AD, Jerome passed on a tradition (Letter 25, to Marcella) that the Lord has ten basic Hebrew names. An accurate Latin transcription is: El, Eloim, Eloe, Sabaoth, Elion, Eser-Ieje, Adonai, Ia, Jod-He-Vav-He, Saddai. My modern transliteration would be: El, Elohim, Elohe, Zevaoth, Elyon, Ehyeh, Adonai, Yah, Yahweh, Shaddai; these can be translated: Deity, Godhead, God, Power, Greatest, Existent, Lord, Self, Self-Existent, Sufficient. This tradition is widely reported and the list varies; I've also seen Chai (Life), Daath (Judgment), Gibbor (Strength), and Melekh (King) as base names added to this tradition. One reliable source is Hebrew4Christians by John Parsons, who groups nine of these together and lists other names. Another tradition comes from Pseudo-Dionysius (6th century), who finds ten types of angels in Scripture: Seraph, Cherub, Throne, Dominion, Virtue, Power, Principality, Archangel, Angel, Guardian (the last two may be joined, leaving nine). In each of these cases, as with those of other numbers, believers are seeking to categorize God's revelation in new systematic ways, and to recognize God's rulership through various names, whether they refer to his direct revelation of himself or his general revelation through creatures. We take caution never to idolize a system or a referent, but always to seek the one God who reveals himself in the systems.

13> "[1] The LORD, [2] the LORD, [3] a God [4] merciful [5] and gracious, [6] slow to anger, [7] and abounding in steadfast love [8] and faithfulness, [9] keeping steadfast love for thousands, [10] forgiving iniquity [11] and transgression [12] and sin, [13] but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation" (Ex. 34:6-7). Like the Ten Words, the 13 Names were given on Mount Sinai. The count is traditional and follows Hebrew rules, even if counterintuitive to us. Each is a characteristic of God that interacts with the others, even the two occurrences of the same name Yahweh, and the extended description of his justice. We shouldn't neglect that Moses wrote this as the sublime revelation of God's name, and that later analysis is intended to stimulate our thought, not to analyze God to death, or to substitute some tight attribute set and worship our or another's understanding of it instead.

72> "[19] Then the angel of God who was going before the host of Israel moved and went behind them, and the pillar of cloud moved from before them and stood behind them, [20] coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel. And there was the cloud and the darkness. And it lit up the night without one coming near the other all night. [21] Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided" (Ex. 14:19-21). While mentioning diverse names of God, it's important to properly understand this passage's relationship too. As a student of wordplay I can explain that scribes noticed this climactic demonstration of the Angel of the Lord's power as being written in three verses of exactly 72 letters each, taken as forming a rectangular crossword. The 72 three-letter strings formed were taken as secret names (a few are real Hebrew words, but any Hebrew triliteral can be given meaning). This requires caution because it invents new words and risks missing the forest for the trees (existing revelation); but if we name the true God afresh with designations that reflect his own names and uphold revealed truth, that is not sin in itself.

120> "The company of persons was in all about 120 .... Divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one" (Acts 1:15, 2:3). Finally the One Spirit accommodates 120 or any number of believers. It is my hope that worshipping him, the Unity in all Diversity, can be heightened by recognizing the Scriptures, creeds, and traditions in their fullness.