Festival of Snow-related Bad Theology

Since we had to cancel the  Global Warming event we were quite excited at Young Keith's suggestion of a "Festival of Snow-related Theology". His idea was that everyone in the community should have to stand up and give us an insight into humanity and its relationship to the Divine, using a snow or ice-related illustration.

What he didn't tell us was that he had a crack team of snowballers, ready to strike if anyone toppled over into whimsy or bad theology. Which, let's be honest, was always going to be likely.

Goffrey was first. He explained how he always saw the nature of God in terms of the threefold nature of water - that the Father is the steady, regular pattern of ice; Jesus the living water; the Spirit is like steam, which bloweth where it will as it comes out of a kettle. I think Goffrey is quite lucky. In the old days he would've been burnt at the stake for modalism like that - not just covered in snow.

I took a fair number of snowballs myself for my response to Goffrey. Iexplained that a more reasonable analogy to the Trinity can be made in terms of the triple point of water. Turns out when explaining a mystery, one shouldn't use an illustration nobody can comprehend. Even if you use a phase diagram. The last words I heard before things all got a bit confused was "what state is this then, O Wise One?"

Hnaef was up next. He explained how he also used ice-related illustrations for the trinity. So there are six sides to every snowflake, recognising the sixfold nature of the water atom (I let this go - it probably wasn't worth arguing with). And then there are two natures of Christ - human and divine. And two times three is... well, thankfully he was cut off at that point by a hail of snow and had to take cover before he got into any more trouble.

Charlii stood up and said  what did snowflakes and fingerprints have in common? To which Young Keith's uncle, the police officer, replied that they can both give away the identity of a criminal - footprints in the snow being a means of following the miscreants back from the scene of crime. No, replied Charlii - they're both unique. Your fingerprints are yours and nobody else's and no two snowflakes are ever the same - so we are all special and unique. To which Burton, reasonably I thought, asked how did she know this and how could she prove it? Which scientist, asked Burton, had ever measured and categorised every snowflake that ever fell or will ever fall? Charlii stuttered a bit as she wondered whether these two "facts" were really true after all. Which was fateful. We had to dig her out the snow with a spade. Still, she's still a vast improvement over our last trainee druid, who was tarred and feathered after that talk on the Christian roots of Margaret Thatcher's politics.

Mansfield Woodhouse butted in at this point. He has always been one of the more moral of the Woodhouse family - especially compared with his mother, who sits at home day after day having successive fits of the vapours and failing to make matches for her sons. Should we not, said Mansfield, rather see morality as an icy landscape - where if we take a step from the straight and narrow we may stray onto a slippery slope and shoot off downhill to disaster?

I'm afraid by this stage I was cold, grumpy and fed up with theology. So I switched on the sprinkler system in the Moot House. Everybody's a lot closer to the nature of frozen water now, although their theology's no better than it was. Still, I feel we've all learnt something.