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Yes. And as I said, it was rejected.Hi ToBeLoved, I believe Hedrick may be referring to Docetism, a first century heresy that St. John wrote against in his 1st & 2nd Epistles (i.e. 1 John 4:1-3). Basically, the belief was that Jesus was purely Divine and that, while we may have experienced Him here in some manner, it was never as a human being (He only "appeared" to be human according to this particular heresy).
I hope that helps.
(Hedrick, if I have misrepresented what you meant, I apologize, and if so, please correct me.)
Thanks!
--David
Hello everyone. I was raised in a Christian community and family. I believe in God. I love the message Jesus give us. I just fall short on my belief in the trinity and divinity. I'm a husband and a father. My children love Jesus and God I've never expressed my personal views torwards them.
And I haven't been comfortable talking about it except with one other person who I work with most of the time in the oilfield. He also comes from a Christian background and shared a very similar view as me.
I look at all of us as sons and daughters of god. As I get older and think of it more. I feel like I'm becoming more of a deist I think.
Thank you everyone for taking the time to reply.
As for why I struggle with these. I wasn't consistently in the church growing up. Maybe saying I was raised in a "Christian Family" wasn't the best description. We all believed in God and I just knew some of the more basic things. We went to church every once and a while. I know it sounds bad but I didn't never even realize the trinity / divinity aspect of Jesus until I was older.
So as the years went by I guess I have more or less formed my own view. Instead of what I should have learned if I was consistently in the church early on.
My view was God sent Jesus to give us his word and love. And to be his sacrifice for us. But I honestly never even considered Jesus as being God. I've always looked at us all being the sons and daughters of God.
When I prayed as a kid. I always prayed to God. And I would give thanks to Jesus.
And as I got older and more curious about more things in life. And really started to learn the teachings of Christianity it was just a shock to me.
That's why I decided to look for a forum on Christianity. And try to read other people's views as well.
My work keeps me gone working in the field a majority of the time. So most of the learning I can do is reading. So I thought this would be a good place to try to be more social about religion and views.
Didn't mean to upset anyone or imply Jesus as to be a lunatic or anything close to that. If it came off that way.
Thank yall
Thank you AvgJoe.
Please do not become a deist because satan has been given reign over this world for the time being and looking to to this world for answers will give you the wrong ones. Think about the trinity like this The Father, the WORD, and the Holy Spirit. GOD the Father is the creator of everything, He spoke everything into existence that's why everything he says has to be true, if he was able to lie then nothing could exist. He breathed his spirit which is life into Adam and also life/his spirit came down unto Mary and she became pregnant. GOD's spirit which was GOD was jesus, his words were true, he could not lie because we was GOD. He had to be born of man to be able to sin and reject it to be a sacrifice but he had to be GOD to be able to reject sin. He could not be born under sin and held by it that's why he needed to be born of a virgin untouched by man and not conceived in the natural way. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with GOD and the word Was GOD. Jesus is the word, born by the Holy spirit/GOD. The trinity is correct but it has been taught really in an incomplete way. I really hope this might help a little. GOD bless.Hello everyone. I was raised in a Christian community and family. I believe in God. I love the message Jesus give us. I just fall short on my belief in the trinity and divinity. I'm a husband and a father. My children love Jesus and God I've never expressed my personal views torwards them.
And I haven't been comfortable talking about it except with one other person who I work with most of the time in the oilfield. He also comes from a Christian background and shared a very similar view as me.
I look at all of us as sons and daughters of god. As I get older and think of it more. I feel like I'm becoming more of a deist I think.
People "struggle" with the doctrine of God because they approach it as though human reasoning will provide answers. The fact of the matter is that the Bible speaks of the "Mystery of God" and the "Mystery of Godliness". Perhaps your biggest obstacle is simply a lack of familiarity with the Bible itself, and Bible Truth concerning the doctrines of God and Christ.Hello everyone. I was raised in a Christian community and family. I believe in God. I love the message Jesus give us. I just fall short on my belief in the trinity and divinity. I'm a husband and a father. My children love Jesus and God I've never expressed my personal views towards them.
People "struggle" with the doctrine of God because they approach it as though human reasoning will provide answers. The fact of the matter is that the Bible speaks of the "Mystery of God" and the "Mystery of Godliness". Perhaps your biggest obstacle is simply a lack of familiarity with the Bible itself, and Bible Truth concerning the doctrines of God and Christ.
A Christian simply needs to believe (1) JESUS IS GOD, AS WELL AS THE GOD-MAN and (2) GOD IS ONE, BUT HAS ETERNALLY EXISTED AS THREE DIVINE PERSONS (the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost). This is simply a matter of believing, not analyzing God.
Deism is a departure from Bible Truth.
It is belief in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe. The term is used chiefly of an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis of reason but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind. The Cross of Christ completely refutes Deism.
You must not believe the Bible then, because it is very clear that Jesus is divine.I would argue that the orthodox concepts of Trinity and Incarnation are actually a protection of Jesus’ full humanity and the unity of God.
Christians from the beginning experienced Jesus as showing them God himself. There were debates in the early church with a group (Arians) who saw him not as God but as divine, i.e. as a separate eternal entity that was a lot like God but inferior. But the mainstream Church insisted that there’s only one God, so Jesus shows us him.
There was another view that saw Jesus as a kind of optical illusion, a way that God became visible, but not a real human. That was also rejected. The dominant view was that God appeared through a full human life, with a separate human will, taking real human actions.
So the final standard, Chalcedon, said that in the Incarnation we have two things, God and a human, and those can’t be confused. But they also can’t be separated, because this human isn’t just a guy that God decided to use, but was created specifically as God’s human vehicle.
The technical terminology that was used looks weird in modern terms, but I think you need to look at what they were trying to do. And they were trying to protect Jesus’ full humanity, but also the Christian experience that in Jesus they experience God himself.
Now the Trinity. Scripture (and Christian experience) shows us God in different ways. As the creator God, as the Holy Spirit, and as a Son. At first you might think that we’d just say “well, those are just ways we see God; he’s just one thing.” Why didn’t that happen?
There are some bad reasons, but I think the good reason is again that Christians experience Jesus as God’s own presence. But if God can show himself as a human, who furthermore dies, this says something about God. The Muslim God can’t experience death, and he can’t experience Jesus’ obedient love of his Father. But if Jesus really shows us God, then the Christian God does. So the God Jesus shows us is a God who has within his own experience the obedient love of the Son as well as the love of the Father. If God doesn’t have it, Jesus can’t show it.
This results in a bit of complexity in our idea of God, but it’s inherent in the basic Christian witness that in Jesus we see God. It says that Father, Son and Holy Spirit aren’t just different ways we see God, but that God is able to experience personal relationship *in himself,* before humans are even around. I have some issues with the traditional terminology used for this (though mostly these issues aren’t present in the Nicene Creed, which is CF’s official statement). But the basic intuition is that there’s some kind of personal relationship inherent in God, and therefore that he has more than one personal role in his experience. (Note that I’m using role to refer to something inherent in him. Otherwise the term looks like something called modalism, which says that the three persons aren’t inherent in God, but are just different ways he appears to us.)
I hope that is all clear. But the summary is that I think the Trinity and Incarnation are inevitable results of the Christian perception that in Jesus they meet God himself, but that we have to take seriously the fact that he’s really human.
I’m very wary of the common insistence that Jesus is “divine.” In pagan religions there were various people and even things that are divine. But in Christianity there’s only one God. I always worry that calling Jesus divine sounds like one of the pagan divine men. That we’re saying that Jesus was really superhuman. No, Jesus was not superhuman. Rather he was a normal, mortal human life that was God’s way of being present within human history.
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