Evidence · Case 04 · The Trinity
The “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies” sketch, Lutheran Satire
One exhibit from the free evidence repository at apologetics.pro.
Sources
Lutheran Satire, “St. Patrick’s Bad Analogies” (2013).
Transcript naming each heresy:
Objections & responses
- A YouTube comedy sketch isn’t evidence for anything. Doesn’t citing it undermine the site’s claim to rigor?
The sketch is labeled here as a popular source and a memory aid, not a source of authority, and that is the right way to hold it. The actual evidence for this claim is the historical condemnations in the next two exhibits; the sketch simply maps the familiar analogies onto those condemnations accurately and memorably. If you would rather skip it, the argument loses nothing but a mnemonic.
- The sketch’s mapping is too neat. The sun analogy isn’t really Arian, since Arius said the Son was created and the sun’s light isn’t created by the sun in any similar sense.
The mapping is rough, and partialism in particular is a modern label rather than a historical heresy name. It is more accurate to say the analogies tend toward the named errors than that they commit them. The sun analogy leans Arian because it makes the Son an emanation dependent on and lesser than its source; whether that is exactly Arius or merely subordinationist is a fair quibble that does not affect the point, which is that every physical analogy makes the persons either parts, phases, or unequal.