What do you mean by "Trinity"?

[BobRyan]

This thread is not intended for anyone who rejects the Trinity because people that reject the trinity might give a different definition for it - one that even Trinitarians reject - so that does not address the question.

I believe "One God in three Persons" as the "blessed Trinity", eternal, infinite all powerful all knowing -- all three persons. Yet all included in the "ONE God" concept, infinitely complex topic - so not trying to reduce it to a nutshell.

How about your belief in the Trinity? How do you define what Trinity is?

 

[Greg J.]

It's a fact that we have one God: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is typical Western-style thinking to want to understand concepts so we can understand actual applications/examples/situations of them. In this case, you are trying to understand principles from which it makes sense that there is one God and three persons are God. An example analogy: you could learn the principles involved in fuel-powered engine design and then design an engine. You would be using deductive reasoning to go from principles to an application.

But when faced with matters that are too complicated for us to understand directly, we study examples. In my analogy, someone would provide you with a number of engines with different qualities, then through studying them, you might come to formulate theories as to potential principles that are true for all engines (and then you would test your theories). The formulation of principles this way is the result of inductive reasoning.

The only way I am aware of to grow in one's understanding of how one God can be three persons (through human effort) is to examine the evidence available of what it means that we have one God and examine the evidence of what it means that we have the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This may be difficult; I get the feeling that this would require a scholarly mentality to examining the evidence.

Personally I would avoid trying to learn too much from other people and what they have written, because it is well known there is no widely satisfying explanation. Set your heart on learning what God himself has said, and asking him for help at each step. He'd love this! If you spent some years on this, I honestly expect God would show you things about it that are more valuable than the theories written up by humans. (Make sure sin is not hindering your relationship with God.)

 

[farout]

This thread is not intended for anyone who rejects the Trinity because people that reject the trinity might give a different definition for it - one that even Trinitarians reject - so that does not address the question.

I believe "One God in three Persons" as the "blessed Trinity", eternal, infinite all powerful all knowing -- all three persons. Yet all included in the "ONE God" concept, infinitely complex topic - so not trying to reduce it to a nutshell.

How about your belief in the Trinity? How do you define what Trinity is?

It is humanly impossible to fully understand how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one but three. Call God a Trinity, but there is no explanation that really explains God. We are finite, God is infinite. No human mind can really explan this. As we walk by faith so we accept God as described in Scripture.

 

[Hoghead1]

It is humanly impossible to fully understand how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one but three. Call God a Trinity, but there is no explanation that really explains God. We are finite, God is infinite. No human mind can really explan this. As we walk by faith so we accept God as described in Scripture.

No, that is not true. The Trinity is confusing and paradoxical, simply due simply to the muddled thinking of the fathers.

 

[Hoghead1]

It's a fact that we have one God: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is typical Western-style thinking to want to understand concepts so we can understand actual applications/examples/situations of them. In this case, you are trying to understand principles from which it makes sense that there is one God and three persons are God. An example analogy: you could learn the principles involved in fuel-powered engine design and then design an engine. You would be using deductive reasoning to go from principles to an application.

But when faced with matters that are too complicated for us to understand directly, we study examples. In my analogy, someone would provide you with a number of engines with different qualities, then through studying them, you might come to formulate theories as to potential principles that are true for all engines (and then you would test your theories). The formulation of principles this way is the result of inductive reasoning.

The only way I am aware of to grow in one's understanding of how one God can be three persons (through human effort) is to examine the evidence available of what it means that we have one God and examine the evidence of what it means that we have the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This may be difficult; I get the feeling that this would require a scholarly mentality to examining the evidence.

Personally I would avoid trying to learn too much from other people and what they have written, because it is well known there is no widely satisfying explanation. Set your heart on learning what God himself has said, and asking him for help at each step. He'd love this! If you spent some years on this, I honestly expect God would show you things about it that are more valuable than the theories written up by humans. (Make sure sin is not hindering your relationship with God.)

The Trinity is largely an extra-biblical teaching, though implied in Scripture. The Trinitarian formulas are all man-made things and therefore subject to critical study. Most of the problems with the Trinity are due to muddled thinking on the part of the fathers, not the great mystery of God. If you really want to learn abut the Trinity, you need to very carefully study the Trinitarian formulations of the fathers.

 

[yeshuasavedme]

YHWH is the Spirit uncreated, Who is Life/Breath, and in YHWH there are three persons. All three are YHWH Spirit, and they are three separate Persons.

Adam is the spirit of the Adam kind, made male and female but one spirit, and in Adam there are billions and billions of persons who are all Adam spirit, but created.

 

[Hoghead1]

YHWH is the Spirit uncreated, Who is Life/Breath, and in YHWH there are three persons. All three are YHWH Spirit, and they are three separate Persons.

Adam is the spirit of the Adam kind, made male and female but one spirit, and in Adam there are billions and billions of persons who are all Adam spirit, but created.

I hear you are saying that the Trinity represents three separate, unique personalities. That strikes me as tritheism, three gods. Where is the oneness of God in your model of the Trinity?

 

[Greg J.]

There is overwhelming evidence in Scripture that God is One and is in three Persons. The confusions and conflicts arise because people are trying to understand how that could be true to a satisfying degree, but their failure doesn't make it any less true. Personally, I do not find that the idea that God is One and is in three Persons contradictory.

I don't have the goal of understanding what other humans think about God (especially on an issue they couldn't resolve). My goal is not to understand what humans have understood, it is to know God better. I have God's Word and the help of the Holy Spirit for that.

Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one Teacher, the Christ. (Matthew 23:10, 1984 NIV)

But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. ... (John 16:13a, 1984 NIV)

What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ (Philippians 3:8, 1984 NIV)

The intellectualization of God and his Word is a very sad result of the rejection of God and the accompanying unbelief. But it is the only path available to those that do not believe in God and everything he said.

 

[Erose]

It's a fact that we have one God: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is typical Western-style thinking to want to understand concepts so we can understand actual applications/examples/situations of them.

I think it should be noted that all the Ecumenical Counsels that dealt with the Trinity were in the East, not West.

 

[Hoghead1]

There is overwhelming evidence in Scripture that God is One and is in three Persons. The confusions and conflicts arise because people are trying to understand how that could be true to a satisfying degree, but their failure doesn't make it any less true. Personally, I do not find that the idea that God is One and is in three Persons contradictory.

I don't have the goal of understanding what other humans think about God (especially on an issue they couldn't resolve). My goal is not to understand what humans have understood, it is to know God better. I have God's Word and the help of the Holy Spirit for that.

Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one Teacher, the Christ. (Matthew 23:10, 1984 NIV)

But when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all truth. ... (John 16:13a, 1984 NIV)

What is more, I consider everything a loss compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them rubbish, that I may gain Christ (Philippians 3:8, 1984 NIV)

The intellectualization of God and his Word is a very sad result of the rejection of God and the accompanying unbelief. But it is the only path available to those that do not believe in God and everything he said.

In order to survive, however, the church needed to acquire an intellectual life; otherwise, it's just a headless religion for simple fools, and the smart ones are well advised to avoid it.
The Trinity is a problem for many due to muddled thinking on the part of the fathers. One God in three persons often collapses into the social theory of the Trinity, whereby each member is a separate, unique personality. If so, how is this anything other than tritheism?

 

[hedrick]

I see the Trinity as based on the fact that Jesus shows us God. If we take our idea of God from them, it’s bound to affect how we think of God. The NT reflects some idea of a preexistence for Jesus, but makes it clear that this isn’t separate from God. (There are several recent books looking at ideas of preexistence in the NT.)

If Jesus shows us God, then God can’t be a completely Other character, who sends commands to us from on high. Jesus’ experience of obedient love must reflect something about God. Hence we see that God is inherently both Father and Son. (At least in the West, the Spirit is seen as coming from their relationship.)

However the NT speaks of this all in an allusive way, more poetry than prose. Dogma fascinates me. I’ve read a lot about the history of both the Trinity and the Incarnation. Councils such as Nicea did need to deal with misunderstandings such as the Arians. And the Nicene Creed isn’t all that metaphysical anyway: you can defend its central Christological statements as basically just a paraphrase of John 1. But I’m less enthusiastic of the tendency of Christianity theology to translate poetry into prose, and turn the understanding of God into a metaphysical puzzle. So for myself, three persons in one nature isn’t the way I prefer to understand it. I’d prefer to use Biblical language.

 

[Hoghead1]

I see the Trinity as based on the fact that Jesus shows us God. If we take our idea of God from them, it’s bound to affect how we think of God. The NT reflects some idea of a preexistence for Jesus, but makes it clear that this isn’t separate from God. (There are several recent books looking at ideas of preexistence in the NT.)

If Jesus shows us God, then God can’t be a completely Other character, who sends commands to us from on high. Jesus’ experience of obedient love must reflect something about God. Hence we see that God is inherently both Father and Son. (At least in the West, the Spirit is seen as coming from their relationship.)

However the NT speaks of this all in an allusive way, more poetry than prose. Dogma fascinates me. I’ve read a lot about the history of both the Trinity and the Incarnation. Councils such as Nicea did need to deal with misunderstandings such as the Arians. And the Nicene Creed isn’t all that metaphysical anyway: you can defend its central Christological statements as basically just a paraphrase of John 1. But I’m less enthusiastic of the tendency of Christianity theology to translate poetry into prose, and turn the understanding of God into a metaphysical puzzle. So for myself, three persons in one nature isn’t the way I prefer to understand it. I’d prefer to use Biblical language.

The problem is that the Bible is not a book in systematic theology or metaphysics, tells us very little about how God is built. It implies a Trinity, but dose not work it out in any real detail. To do that, you need metaphysics and so the early fathers looked to Hellenic substance metaphysics. The Nicene Creed is metaphysical in that it uses the term "substance," which comes from Hellenic metaphysics, not Scripture.

 

[hedrick]

Hoghead1 is right that the Church had to adopt an intellectual stance. There was a strong feeling in the Greco-Roman culture that Jewish modes of thought were too unsophisticated to pay attention to. Thus I can understand exactly where the Apologists and folks like Origen were coming from.

The problem is that God chose precisely that Jewish culture as the primary vehicle to reveal himself, both in the OT and the NT. And modern thought doesn’t see Jewish modes of thought as being as primitive as the Greeks did.

I can’t help thinking that the Church would have been better off telling Arius that he was taking NT passages too literally, and failing to understand the kind of literature it was. Instead, the heretics seem to have pulled the Church into their way of thinking. Of course the Church was smart enough not to adopt their answers. I'm convinced that the Church gave the best answers it could given the questions it chose to answer. But sometimes the questions you ask and the way you ask them matter more than the answers you give. In the process of addressing objections from Greek culture, the Church to a reasonable extent gave up the culture in which God revealed himself, getting embroiled in controversies that I think may have been based on unwise ways of speaking about God.

 

[civilwarbuff]

"substance," which comes from Hellenic metaphysics, not Scripture.

Someone pointed out that "substance" occurs 99 times in the Bible on another thread.....I will see if I can find it. However, any search on an online bible should yield similar results.....

 

[civilwarbuff]

Intellectualization of God never leads to a good place. Intellect supplants belief and I don't recall seeing God calling us to "intellect"......rather we are called to believe......

 

[Hoghead1]

Hoghead1 is right that the Church had to adopt an intellectual stance. There was a strong feeling in the Greco-Roman culture that Jewish modes of thought were too unsophisticated to pay attention to. Thus I can understand exactly where the Apologists and folks like Origen were coming from.

The problem is that God chose precisely that Jewish culture as the primary vehicle to reveal himself, both in the OT and the NT. And modern thought doesn’t see Jewish modes of thought as being as primitive as the Greeks did.

I can’t help thinking that the Church would have been better off telling Arius that he was taking NT passages too literally, and failing to understand the kind of literature it was. Instead, the heretics seem to have pulled the Church into their way of thinking. Of course the Church was smart enough not to adopt their answers. I'm convinced that the Church gave the best answers it could given the questions it chose to answer. But sometimes the questions you ask and the way you ask them matter more than the answers you give. In the process of addressing objections from Greek culture, the Church to a reasonable extent gave up the culture in which God revealed himself, getting embroiled in controversies that I think may have been based on unwise ways of speaking about God.

The Arians went on a Hellenic standard of perfection, which sanctified and enshrined the immune and the immutable. Consequently, they argued Christ could not be God, as Christ changed, suffered, etc. God, to Arius and his followers, could not change or suffer. Ironically, the Trinitarians also held with such a dualistic model of God. The whole question is whether the divine that rules in heaven is identical with teh divine that makes its presence felt on earth. This was a very tough issue, as both sides had a very dualistic model of God as the complete and total antithesis of creation, as wholly immutable, simple, immaterial, void of body, parts, passions, compassion. As such god and the material order are like oil and water, they don't mix. Hence, it was very difficult of everyone to see how God could be present in Christ. In fact, they had so much trouble understanding how God could be present in Christ that they could not get around to considering a more ubiquitous presence, the Holy Spirit, God present throughout ourselves and our world. Hence, the Holy Spirit was the least-elaborated member of the Trinity. The original Nicean Creed only mentioned the Spirit. The section we have now didn't come into usage until about 500 AD.

 

[hedrick]

I think we largely agree, though I think mainstream theology, at least in the West, managed to avoid tritheism. At least if you think of things in their terms. I think Augustine's vision of the Trinity manages to have a distinction without tritheism.

 

[Hoghead1]

Someone pointed out that "substance" occurs 99 times in the Bible on another thread.....I will see if I can find it. However, any search on an online bible should yield similar results.....

"Substance" is a concept from Hellenic philosophy, specifically Aristotle. You will not find an equivalent term in Scripture.

 

[Hoghead1]

Intellectualization of God never leads to a good place. Intellect supplants belief and I don't recall seeing God calling us to "intellect"......rather we are called to believe......

Quite the contrary. In order to survive and grow, the church had to acquire a strong philosophical, intellectual dimension. Otherwise, it would have collapsed into a thoughtless faith for simple minds. Unfortunately, many Christians did become very anti-intellectual, and this resulted in bigotry, intolerance, undue fear, superstition, tyranny, you name it.

 

[hedrick]

While i agree about substance, I think you can regard "of one substance with the Father" as a paraphrase of John 1's "with Gid and was God." At Nicea, one substance was a political compromise, which worked because it could be understood different ways, but would not be accepted by overt Arians. Thus I think we can accept it without being committed to any particular metaphysical path. To me it means that the Logos really is God, and not a created thing, as the Arians seem to have said. I think John would have agreed with that.