(***Since we've both established that neither of us are aiming here to convert each other, I'm going to take a step back and focus on friendly interfaith dialogue and understanding, rather than pointless bickering. Really we should have never gotten off that track, but alas we are petty sinners. You have my deep personal apology in that regard, I can be very sinfully petty and pointlessly argumentative, and have been so here the last couple of posts. I shall try (again) to resist that temptation and make this a more productive conversation. ***)
Thanks. No need to apologize. I'm not offended in the slightest. It's just a matter that I must argue in accordance with my faith, whether or not the aim is to convert someone (which it isn't; I don't have any illusions of being some great apologist or missionary; I really am just some guy). And because I must argue in accordance with my faith, I try to take the time to explain why I use this or that term and not another, why a certain analogy can only be taken so far, and so on. Especially as an Oriental Orthodox person, I see it as a duty to try to do so as clearly and exhaustively as I can in this format, since I know there are not many of us, and basically all the rest of Christianity disagrees with us in matters of Christology. (This is again why I would never appeal to some kind of majority rule, as I recognize that I am not in the majority. There are some 90 million or so Oriental Orthodox, in comparison to maybe 300 million Eastern Orthodox, 800 million Protestants, and 1.3
billion Catholics. The argument concerning the Creed is one of content, as always.)
As we've talked about previously, LDS do not acknowledge Tradition as authoritative. We do acknowledge the Bible as authoritative.
For my own clarification: in the LDS faith, the Bible is taken as something separate from tradition, then? What about the BOM, D&C, POGP? Are they considered likewise?
Hence whether or not something is in the Bible is very important to LDS. We do acknowledge the shared divinity of Christ and the Father. Their substance is simply not a subject in LDS beliefs.
I understand. Again, I recognize that LDS and Christians have different understandings of what 'substance' means, with the LDS taking it to mean physical matter (according to you and Peter1000 in the other thread, that is). This is not what we mean at all when we say that the Persons of the Holy Trinity are homoousios, because ousia does not have anything to do with physical matter. I must've written that 50 times to Peter1000 in the older thread, but maybe that was too long ago to be remembered clearly, or maybe it has been missed in all the times I've said the same thing here (i.e, the 'ousia' that they share is the divinity).
This discussion is not part of LDS theology. If you would perhaps like to use some other words, we could perhaps cross the translation gap, and I could better address your questions.
Well, no, actually. That's part of the issue, as I wrote in my reply to NYCGuy: when you stop using the words that are traditional to your faith to describe your theology, you end up with things that are less accurate and more prone to misunderstanding than they should be. So rather than say something less accurate than it should be, I would rather continue to use ousia, as that is what is traditional to my own Church and its faith. In fact, in Coptic, we did not translate this word at all -- it remains in our hymns as 'homoousios', as in the hymn "Khen efran", which simply says "In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the holy coequal Trinity [Coptic: ti-Trias ethowab en-
omoousios]: worthy, worthy, worthy (is) the Holy Virgin Mary; worthy, worthy, worthy (are) Thy servants, the Christians." (That's the entire thing.)
The problem is, of course, that Christians who are not of a Greek or Coptic background probably will not know what that means, since again, in Latin the same term (homoousios) got translated as consubstantial, which is not transparently/phonetically related to homoousios, so you'd have to know something of the Greek language to know how they relate to each other and why.
So while other words can be used, I'm afraid they don't make talking about this any easier. I think it is better -- given what we've hashed out regarding why the Mormon religion insists that they are of the same divinity and yet not homoousios (read: the Mormon equation of substance with physical matter), despite this being literally impossible in Christianity -- to probably restrict my English usage to
coessential rather than anything more broad, despite the possible range of meanings of 'ousia' in English. Because, again, in Christianity in particular, coessential and consubstantial mean the same thing, thus to use one is to affirm both. So if it will make my posts easier to read and understand, that's what I'll use. (NB: I'm in no sense dropping the defense of both, only seeking to limit the amount of time we'll have to spend talking about what it
doesn't mean, as well as the potential for confusion among LDS posters given the Mormon-specific meaning of 'substance', which is not what we are talking about.)
Clarifying here: I did not mean to imply that you were a modalist at all. I was simply listing traits about Christ .
I understand. I didn't mean to imply that you were accusing Christians of being modalists. I only wrote that to make clear that the people who would confuse the Persons are the various modalist groups who claim that all three Persons are but 'modes' of the same Person (e.g., the Sabellians of the past, or the Unitarians of today like Oneness Pentecostals). That's modalism. As homoousios has nothing to do with their individuation as Persons, this is not what it addresses.
Seeking clarification here--
You have thoroughly said here that the "substance" you are referring to in your doctrine is not just the physical 'stuff' (pardon my lack of better word choice) Could your doctrine be understood in terms where there is no physical comments at all? Just things like heart/mind/desire?
Have I not written that over and over? That ousia does not have anything to do with physical matter? I thought I had, but maybe I was not clear enough somehow. Anyway, yes, to say that the Persons of the Holy Trinity are homoousios is not at all a comment about physical matter. It has nothing to do with physical matter. It is an affirmation of their sharing of the divinity -- the divine essence, not some kind of divine physical matter (we don't have any such doctrine, though from what I know about Mormon cosmology and the rejection of creation ex nihilo, it seems that you guys do; this probably adds to our talking past each other).
Hopefully a purposely not-God example will make it clear what is meant and not meant, because the same thing that stops us from talking with absolute precision regarding God's essence also applies to talking about regular people's essences, too:
Say I want to talk about a random person, let's call him 'John'.
If I want to talk about John, what kinds of things can I say, and on what basis might I say them?
If John is my friend, I might say "John is kind", and if pressed for what exactly I mean, I'd probably list examples of John demonstrating the virtue of kindness: he volunteers at a soup kitchen; he helps old ladies across the street; he lent me $50 once, and still hasn't asked for it back despite the fact that this was five years ago (NB: John is a fictional person and I am not a mooch), etc.
In all of this, have I said anything about John's
essence -- that is to say,
who he is in himself? No. I can talk about how he acts in the world. I can show you these things as a demonstration of how kind John is, but I cannot look at another person, no matter how well I know them, and say "this is John's essence". It's not possible to put into words. John's essence is within him as himself and is unique to him by virtue of who he is, not to the exclusion of what he does, but not as the sum of it either.
So it is not a matter of the magnitude of ones unity or purity of action that might begin to speak of their
essence as being something unique to them, because while it is true that it is unique to them, it is also something that we can not define by such externalities, even though they're literally all that we can know by looking at the physical world and their actions within it. This is precisely why ousia does not have anything to do with physical matter. It is purely internal, because everyone's essence is something that they possess of themselves internally, and in that sense (and only that sense, to the exclusion of any talk about physical matter) is 'what they are made of'.
And it is in this way that we say that the Persons of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are homoousios: they share in the one divinity that is common to all of them by virtue of
who they are, and not because of a unity of action or thought or 'desire' (whatever this means in reference to God).
