In the comments to the last post, dmm writes:

You say in passing that in the Garden God had made a "trinity" of Adam, Eve, and God.
I wonder if the trinity that the Trinity made was Adam, Eve, and the marriage. Sometimes my marriage seems to be a being separate from my wife and me, with its own personality and demands.
Perhaps also, each child they beget produces another trinity of father, mother, and child. Then when the child marries, he/she leaves that trinity and forms his/her own trinity.

You've raised some interesting questions, which I will try to summarize with a metaquestion: How does one recognize a Trinity?

I just read a book by James Jordan on 6-day creation, and noted that he spent an entire chapter finding trinities in the creation account: dividing days into threes, activities into threes, locations into threes, etc. It seems that once one has a knack for counting to three, nothing ever comes by ones and twos anymore. (No Jordan never got to Noah's Ark.)

Well, I confess to having succumbed to the disease on more than one occasion, not the least because I tire of antagonistic dualities, and chafe under the Aristotle's law of the excluded middle. But here are some guidelines that should help guide our prospecting in this trinity mining business:

 a) all parties must be alike in nature.
 So man, woman, marriage fails the test because one is not like the other two.

 b) Trinities must communicate
 So man, dog and truck are not a trinity, because one doesn't communicate.

 c) Abstract nouns cannot be included
 So once again, man, woman and marriage fails because one is an abstract noun.

Why the rules? Because God defines what a Trinity looks like, and the Triune God does not descend into modalities, into role-playing or into abstractions. Rather, the Triune God communicates constantly, as in the prayers of Jesus, it reflects individuality, the Son being separated from the Father, it reflects persons, not ideas or concepts or other such Gnostic nonsense.

So yes, Man, woman, child is also a trinity implied by Genesis, but not the one occurring at the Fall. The communicating part is a bit of a stretch, though, making this less trinitarian than man, woman, God.

Finally, one should eschew abstract nouns as a general rule, sort of like English profs telling aspiring writers to avoid the verb "to be" in favor of active, transitive verbs. This is not just because abstract nouns lack punch, but also because they mislead.

My favorite example is the discussion my wife had with me about characteristics she disliked which were "bad for our marriage". What about her? Were they bad for her? And in a similar vein, many preachers talk about behavior that is "bad for faith". What about Christ? Are they bad for him? The more layers of abstract nouns between people, the less Trinitarian, and the more "religious" and ideological becomes the relationship. Consider Islamic radicals that are violently killing even other Muslims in the name of "jihad" against faithlessness. Real people are being hurt for the sake of ideology. (It isn't restricted to Islam, there was plenty going on in Christendom in the 16th century wars of religion, the Inquisition, etc.)

As I see it, the problem is one of replacing a person with an idea of a person, of replacing Christ with the idea of Christ, of replacing the communion with God with the idea of communion with God. Faith should never be used as a noun, but as a participle, as a verb behaving as a noun. One of our Sunday school classes is called "Faith Builders", but try that with a participle, "believing Builders", "talking builders", "trusting builders", and you see the foolishness of using abstract nouns.  In contrast, Gnosticism absolutely frolics in abstract nouns.

dmm writes:

The reality of abstracts
You make some great points. I think you are right that we often hide behind the abstract.
But abstract things are still real, even though they aren't concrete. Take friendship, for example. It is possible to take actions that damage (or limit) a friendship even though they don't damage either person in the friendship. Simply going to different colleges ends most highschool friendships. Taking a different job, or changing churches, or moving far away often ends friendships. Or, perhaps, these actions put the friendship into "suspended animation." Or maybe just change the nature of the friendship. The point is, the abstract thing has a real existence and nature, which can be affected by other things (both concrete and abstract).
So, getting back to marriage, I think it is possible to harm one's marriage by an action which does not directly harm one's spouse. In fact, the spouse might even like it! For example, a wife might stop talking to her husband about her feelings. Instead, she confides in her (female) friend. Both spouses might actually be happier with this situation. Yet this is bad for the marriage. (I mean if this becomes the norm.) In a way, the marriage is a 3rd party in the relationship of the husband and the wife. They aren't allowed to live merely as friends sharing a house, even if they both agree on it, because that cuts out the interests of the 3rd party.
Moderns get around this by saying that the marriage is simply an abstract legal construct. It isn't real. It simply disappears if both parties agree. But Christianity says that God creates the marriage, and that the marriage can only cease when one spouse dies.

Sorry for going philosophical on you, but what does "real existence" mean? If a tree falls in a forest, and no one hears it, does it make a noise? If by "exist", you mean that we can use our 5 senses to discover it, then neither marriage nor friendship "exist". But then, neither does our 401(K). For that matter, credit cards may exist, but not credit.

I will stop writing philosophical non-sequiturs and cut to the chase. Abstract nouns serve a useful purpose, just as credit cards do, they represent a rather complex set of social constructs, they are shorthand for things that really do exist. If I gamble on the futures market and lose, I may actually face a delivery of pork bellies on my doorstep.

"Friendship" is shorthand for a number of obligations you and another person hold upon each other, like futures trading. Should a friend show up on your doorstep, you can't send him down to the homeless shelter. The "friendship" documents and dictates all this complex social behavior. Likewise "marriage" captures a bookshelf full of expectations and legal requirements that few grooms would have the stomach to read through much less assent to before the ceremony. Nevertheless, the laws and obligations depend upon the existence of the two people involved, not the other way around. They no more have a separate existence from communicating persons than a rumor or a meme.

 Whereas an abstract noun, say, electronegativity, is a wonderful way to organize disparate scientific facts into one convenient number, no one is mistaking a chlorine bomb explosion in Ramadi for an attack of electronegativity. Nevertheless, an over-reliance on derived scientific constructs, on shorthand representations of nature cause scientists to miss some of the more amazing events that happen not to fit the summary.  Cliff Notes can never replace Shakespeare, secondary sources can never replace primary sources, shorthand should never be confused with longhand, conjectures must not be confused with data, or we would all be doing PoMo science.

So one can use the shorthand, one can talk about "marriage" instead of "my obligations and emotional attachment to the mother of my children", but it is nonsense to say that an action is "good for my wife but bad for my marriage", as if the shorthand is something distinct from the longhand. I am reminded of the joke about why Japan copied the German military but the American medical system in WWI. This is because the German surgeon, while stripping off his latex gloves, would say "The operation was a success, but the patient died." When a marriage takes precedence over a spouse, all the personality, all the life, all the soul has been drained out of a person and replaced with an ideology. Ideologies are neat, ideologies are clean, ideologies are predictable, and ideologies are idolatry.

In contrast, real people don't behave nearly as neatly as idols. They forget, they fight, they forgive, and they mature. This is why we have the Trinity, three persons distinct yet eternally communicating, three but one. No shorthand, no images, no idols can come between them. They are abstraction-proof examples of our own relationship to God and spouse.  In the words of St John, who dedicated his lifework to this threat, ending his 1st epistle to the churches with this simple command:

"Little children, guard yourselves from idols."