Has God always been Triune?

Fish14 said:

Has he always been God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit? Is it possible that God, before the world, created Jesus (a new Person) and then Jesus created the world?

Please read these verses:

• Hebrews 13:8 - Does this forever extend to the past? You can say we live in Heaven forever, but that doesn't necessary mean we have always been there.
  
• John 8:58 - That doesn't tell that Jesus has always existed.
• John 1:1-4 - Is this the same beginning than in Genesis 1:1? If so, Jesus could still have been created to create the world.

Don't misunderstand me. Jesus is God, and there is one God in three Persons.

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The position you describe is that of Arius and the Arians. That Jesus was the first and highest creation. When it was first proposed in the 300's AD the plain old people of Alexandria Egypt would have none of it and would not attend the churches where Arian beliefs were preached, preferring to go out into the desert where the monks were, who knew that the Son of God was eternally God himself. They said that was the truth that they received from their grandparents and parents, who received that from their grandparents. Arius sounded all Scripture Alone but his teaching was the new teaching and rejected by the plain folks as just not right. They had a sense of the faith which protected them from fancy was in accord with what the later council of Nicea came up with in systematic theological talk to say what they believed all along.

"I begin this chapter by asking you to get a certain picture clear in your minds. Imagine two books lying on a table one on top of the other. Obviously the bottom book is keeping the other one up-supporting it. It is because of the underneath book that the top one is resting, say, two inches from the surface of the table instead of touching the table. Let us call the underneath book A and the top one B. The position of A is causing the position of B. That is clear? Now let us imagine - it could not really happen, of course, but it will do for an illustration -let us imagine that both books have been in that position for ever and ever. In that case B's position would always have been resulting from A's position. But all the same, A's position would not have existed before B's position. In other words the result does not come after the cause. Of course, results usually do: you eat the cucumber first and have the indigestion afterwards. But it is not so with all causes and results. You will see in a moment why I think this important.

I said a few pages back that God is a Being which contains three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube contains six squares while remaining one body. But as soon as I begin trying to explain how these Persons are connected I have to use words which make it sound as if one of them was there before the others. The First Person is called the Father and the Second the Son. We say that the First begets or produces the second; we call it begetting, not making, because what He produces is of the same kind as Himself. In that way the word Father is the only word to use. But unfortunately it suggests that He is there first-just as a human father exists before his son. But that is not so. There is no before and after about it. And that is why I think it important to make clear how one thing can be the source, or cause, or origin, of another without being there before it. The Son exists because the Father exists: but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son.

Perhaps the best way to think of it is this. I asked you just now to imagine those two books, and probably most of you did. That is, you made an act of imagination and as a result you had a mental picture. Quite obviously your act of imagining was the cause and the mental picture the result. But that does not mean that you first did the imagining and then got the picture. The moment you did it, the picture was there. Your will was keeping the picture before you all the time. Yet that act of will and the picture began at exactly the same moment and ended at the same moment. If there were a Being who had always existed and had always been imagining one thing, his act would always have been producing a mental picture; but the picture would be just as eternal as the act.

In the same way we must think of the Son always, so to speak, streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father-what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it. But have you noticed what is happening? All these pictures of light or heat are making it sound as if the Father and Son were two things instead of two Persons. So that after all, the New Testament picture of a Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it. That is what always happens when you go away from the words of the Bible. It is quite right to go away from them for a moment in order to make some special point clear. But you must always go back. Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him. He knows that Father and Son is more like the relation between the First and Second Persons than anything else we can think of. Much the most important thing to know is that it is a relation of love. The Father delights in His Son; the Son looks up to His Father." - CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

Fish14 said:

Has he always been God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit? Is it possible that God, before the world, created Jesus (a new Person) and then Jesus created the world?

Please read these verses:

• Hebrews 13:8 - Does this forever extend to the past? You can say we live in Heaven forever, but that doesn't necessary mean we have always been there.
  
• John 8:58 - That doesn't tell that Jesus has always existed.
• John 1:1-4 - Is this the same beginning than in Genesis 1:1? If so, Jesus could still have been created to create the world.

Don't misunderstand me. Jesus is God, and there is one God in three Persons.

Click to expand...

What you've stated impacts several levels with what the early Church noted when it came to Jewish believers (in the first century beforethe councils) had battles as it concerns the concept of the Divine Council - and the reality of the Two Powers in Heaven idea that helped many Jews come to faith in Christ and developa Christological Monotheism since they could understand that the rabbis always taught that God had a lesser power to Him (regent) who was God as well and they co-ruled. Many are not aware of the relationships between rabbinic Judaism, Merkabah mysticism, and early Christianity - as it was the case that "Two powers in heaven" was a very early category of heresy and one of the basic categories by which the rabbis perceived the new phenomenon of Christianity...yet they did not understand the reality of what Christianity advocated on the role of the Messiah nor did they know the history of what the rabbis before them had already said in agreement with the Messiah being Divine.

• God, Jesus, and Judaism: An Old Testament Bridge to Faith | LogosTalk
  
  
• Old Testament Godhead Language - The Divine - The Divine Council ...
  

One Jewish scholar who did an amazing job on the issue is Daniel Boyarin, who wrote Two Powers in Heaven; Or the Making of Heresy as well as the book entitled Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (as well as The Gospel of the Memra: Jewish Binitarianism and the Prologue to John and the work "The Jewish Gospels" where he noted at multiple points where the concept of the Messiah was always rooted in Jewish thought and echoed by what the rabbis said....and for Jews, the two powers are one and a person does not worship one without the other and even Second Temple literature is replete with forms of bitheism, including the philonic logos and the Ezekiel traditions of an Angel of God in the image of a man appearing on the throne. ).


Additionally, Dr. Michael Heisner (of LOGOS Bible Software) did an excellent job covering the issue in his presentation entitled The Naked Bible » Two Powers in Heaven ....more here in The Divine Council and Jewish Binitarianism - YouTube or the following:

Fish14 said:

Has he always been God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit? Is it possible that God, before the world, created Jesus (a new Person) and then Jesus created the world?

Please read these verses:

• Hebrews 13:8 - Does this forever extend to the past? You can say we live in Heaven forever, but that doesn't necessary mean we have always been there.
  
• John 8:58 - That doesn't tell that Jesus has always existed.
• John 1:1-4 - Is this the same beginning than in Genesis 1:1? If so, Jesus could still have been created to create the world.

Don't misunderstand me. Jesus is God, and there is one God in three Persons.

Click to expand...

To your question about God, BEFORE the World, CREATED Jesus and then Jesus CREATED the World answer is NO, UNLESS
JESUS CREATED HIMSELF AND HE MUST EXIST IN ORDER TO CREATE HIMSELF FIRST WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE.
Here is my PROOF:
John 1:3 Context
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2The same was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

WITHOUT JESUS WAS ANYTHING MADE, THAT WAS MADE.

God is Love.
God does not change.
Love cannot exist without the one loving, and the one being loved, thus for God to be Love, God must have always been more than one person.

Lord Kyrios said:

To your question about God, BEFORE the World, CREATED Jesus and then Jesus CREATED the World answer is NO, UNLESS
JESUS CREATED HIMSELF AND HE MUST EXIST IN ORDER TO CREATE HIMSELF FIRST WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE.
Here is my PROOF:
John 1:3 Context
1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2The same was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. 4In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

WITHOUT JESUS WAS ANYTHING MADE, THAT WAS MADE.

Click to expand...

You can't get any further into the past than the beginning, can ya?