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Like the red copper pan. The advertisment shows you can drop an egg in the pan and cook it and it easily slides out. If you really cook the egg, it sticks to the great nonstick pan. Arminianism is like that . Man advertise if they can, they ought. Free will don't exist nor the truly non stick pan. It really takes butter or oil or grace to keep it from sticking. The ad looks good just to get your money. Man free will fad looks good to get your money.Please elaborate more.
Thank you for explaining further.Like the red copper pan. The advertisment shows you can drop an egg in the pan and cook it and it easily slides out. If you really cook the egg, it sticks to the great nonstick pan. Arminianism is like that . Man advertise if they can, they ought. Free will don't exist nor the truly non stick pan. It really takes butter or oil or grace to keep it from sticking. The ad looks good just to get your money. Man free will fad looks good to get your money.
The fact is I'm one of many that are here rebuking you only proves you really are clueless about the Triune God.It's obvious from the logical fallacies that you don't understand debate. Poisoning the well, elephant hurling, and ad hominems don't help your argument in the least. You've yet to show anything that proves your doctrine. You tried with Isaiah 9 but as the Septuagint shows that is not what the passage actually says. If you'd like to present another passage we can address it too!
Actually I added nothing but what any intelligent person knows that scripture is in fact all about.That's interesting. If you go back and look at the passage again, you'll notice that I didn't add any words to the passage. You added words to your passage.
What I've shown is that Jesus and the apostles quoted from the Septuagint and not the Masoretic text.
There were three separate persons in God present as the scripture states. You do comprehend the number three don't you?Of course they were.
What are we told about creation of the first man in Genesis? Chapter two verse seven?
God breathed into the Adam and he became a living soul. God is a spirit, the breath of God, the Bible itself is said to be God breathed. Created through the spirit of God come unto those to whom he would deliver his divine thoughts, words.
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.
This is my beloved son. Son of man! Born of woman, begat upon her by God and his Holy Spirit. The Dove, remembering symbolism in ancient Hebrew as that portraying the message of purity, love, tenderness, peace, hope.
"The spirit like a dove descending upon him." Mark 1:10.
Matthew 3:16 As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.
Luke 3:22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."
God is a spirit -John 4:24 - not a dove. Jesus was the son of man and the son of God. Was he two people? Or was he one?
Let me ask you this. How many Gospels are there?
BTW you never answered my question......are you a mormon, unitarian or something on those lines?That's interesting. If you go back and look at the passage again, you'll notice that I didn't add any words to the passage. You added words to your passage.
What I've shown is that Jesus and the apostles quoted from the Septuagint and not the Masoretic text.
What you've shown here is that you had a conversation with yourself and nothing that you mentioned did I ever say anything about. The fact is this conversation originates by you and through you and the argument is on you. Perhaps you can show me where I bought any of the nonsense you're arguing about? I have one last question for you why is it ok for you to continually to make unfounded "interpretations" and when confronted you turn around and accuse others of doing the exact thing you're doing?That's interesting. If you go back and look at the passage again, you'll notice that I didn't add any words to the passage. You added words to your passage.
What I've shown is that Jesus and the apostles quoted from the Septuagint and not the Masoretic text.
Trinity isn't required to be saved, you're right just Romans 10 will do the trick.
The problem with not understanding the trinity by faith is that you'll get your Christianity confused to some degree, whether minor or major.
As a believer in the trinity, it is hard to believe in. This is normal when you get into true doctrine. Difficulty to believe something is actually a good sign you are believing correctly what scripture says. If you feel like other ideas pull you one direction or another strongly, then that's really the flesh and the devil which opposes God's word, rather than promote / uphold it.
I can defend the trinity intellectually and from scripture, but I wont guarantee another person will understand what I am saying. So I largely don't bother unless someone who believes in the trinity wants additional study on it. Just recently, I learned an additional concept which I had never realized before, and I'm still meditating on it.
Why is there a baptism in the name of Jesus Christ, and a baptism in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? But you have to answer it from scripture, not from doctrine.I may have learned why, but I want to meditate on it a good while longer to be sure.
But certainly, there is the trinity and the trinity is God, and they are 1, just as it outlines in Genesis 1, where it lists all 3 components of God.
And this should not be alien to us, for we are Body, Soul and Spirit just as it says in Thessalonians. Therefore, us being made in God's image are comprised of 3 parts. God then too, must have 3 parts for us to be made in his image. Wonderfully, he does have 3 parts, Spirit, Soul, and Body just like us Christians do! Christ is his body, and his body is married to the church, making us 1 flesh. His spirit is the Holy Spirit, and his will and emotions are the Father.
Ok, lets review the facts:
On Chalcedon, I am a Chalcedonian but I have come to believe the Oriental Orthodox who reject it are fully Orthodox. Usually its easier to explain the Trinity to an unbeliever using Chalcedonian terminology, but I believe Chalcedonian and Miaphysite theology is fully compatible and has been since the Fifth Ecumenical Council (I have to thank my colleague Wgw for persuading me of this, although I disagree with him that the schism is non-existant due to it being uncanonical).
- You claimed the New Testament does not contain the word "substance" or other Trinitarian terminology. It does; it also features prosopon. These are the two most important terms in Triadology and the only creedal terms; hypostasis and the East Syriac equivalent qnume are important for theological study, but they are not in the creeds or in the Bible, and are not required to understand the Trinity.
- Your argument about the Trinitarians has the effect of implying that they are all Nestorians; it was Nestorius who was obsessed with a Hellenic separation of the divine and human, and it was St. Cyril who insisted they be brought together.
If you read the Theopaschite arguments of the Oriental Orthodox fathers, I think you will find something that will clarify your understanding of this position. Read Severus of Antioch in particular, or the modern summary Orthodox Christology by Fr. Peter Farrington, available on iBooks.
Then, you can see how the Chalcedonians came around to embrace a Theopaschite view by reading the text of St. Justinian's hymn Ho Monogenes, which follows the Second Antiphon in the Orthodox divine liturgy:
Only-begotten Son and immortal Word of God, who for our salvation didst will to be incarnate of the holy Theotokos and Ever-virgin Mary, who without change didst become man and wast crucified, O Christ our God, trampling down death by death, who art One of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit: save us.This little hymn is one of the best and clearest expressions of Orthodox Christology, amd refutes entirely I believe your argument that the Fathers were driven mainly by "classical theism." What you call "classical Theism," which is really just Hellenic proto-Gnostic henotheisrkc or monotheistic philosophy, would not permit God to, without change, become man and be crucified.
Of course they were.
What are we told about creation of the first man in Genesis? Chapter two verse seven?
God breathed into the Adam and he became a living soul. God is a spirit, the breath of God, the Bible itself is said to be God breathed. Created through the spirit of God come unto those to whom he would deliver his divine thoughts, words.
In the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God.
This is my beloved son. Son of man! Born of woman, begat upon her by God and his Holy Spirit. The Dove, remembering symbolism in ancient Hebrew as that portraying the message of purity, love, tenderness, peace, hope.
"The spirit like a dove descending upon him." Mark 1:10.
Matthew 3:16 As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.
Luke 3:22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased."
God is a spirit -John 4:24 - not a dove. Jesus was the son of man and the son of God. Was he two people? Or was he one?
Let me ask you this. How many Gospels are there?
It is atrongly suggestive to the point where modern dynamic equivalence based translations like the NIV would take a similiar liberty with the text.
The Comma Johanneum simply makes the implicit reference explicit.
So you would leave out the vital Gospel message of the Adultery pericope, and have our Lord not say "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone?"
Here is what I would say to that: the Comma Johanneum can be viewed as divinely inspired because the Trinity is a true doctrine of the Apostles, and an unknown pious scribe added it as a gloss to the Latin manuscripts of the Vetus Latina in order to make the Trinitarian reference more explicit, probably around the time of Paul of Samosata, the decadent bishop of Antioch, who was the first to really attack the Trinity, a few decades before Arius.
You have to understand how divine inspiration works. The Church, as a whole, is protected by God fro, the gates of Hell (Matthew 16:18), and the Church wrote the New Testament, and later edited it. At firat, the Church did not even have a New Testament; the Gospel was delivered orally, which is why the Pauline epistles, the oldest part of the New Testament, refer to it in the singular. Then, so that this oral history would not be lost, Apostles Matthew and John, and the scribes Luke and Mark, who had previously travelled with Ss. Paul and Peter (and the Cenacle was in St. Mark's house) wrote down from memory their experiences and what they had heard from their fellow Apostles, lest the oral history not be altered. Some other people also wrote pious expressioms of their understanding of the faith, like the Shepherd of Hermas.
I believe there were many more of these accounts than we presently have, but most are lost; several of them I believe were acquired by Gnostics and mutilated to suit the Gnostic heresy, for example, the Gospel of Thomas, which reads like a Synoptoc but has clear Gnostic interpolations, or the Odes of Solomon (one Patristic figure says the Gospel lf Thomas was written by Thomas the wicked disciple of Mani; I used to think he was talking about the sayings gospel recovered at Nag Hammadi. but I realized he was referring to the very perverse Infancy Gospel of Thomas.
There is an implicit error of Process Theology in your statement. God does not change His mind; when the Old Testament uses language like this, it is metaphorical and in the context of allegory. God is immutable and in all respects perfect.
The Holy Scriptures are divinely inspired because the holy prophets and apostles who composed them had direct access either through private revelation or direct experience (especially in the case of the Apostles) of God. So, the early Church started with just the Old Testament. Then the Apostles wrote the genuine inspired canon. Unfortunately, much of this was lost or corrupted by Gnostics during the Roman persecutions, although as early as St. Irenaeus, even before St. Irenaeus, we find some mention of our current canonical scripture.
When the Church finally came to be at peace during the reign of Constantinople, the process began of figuring out which books were genuine articles, written by the Apostles, and which ones were not. The main test of canonicity among the fourth century fathers was whether or not the Apostles actually wrote the book, not whether or not it was divinely inspired. The Church of Alexandria supplied fifty codices to Rome while St. Alexander of Alexandria was Patriarch, on the request of the Roman archbishop. Meanwhile, St. Constantine asked Eusebius of Caesarea, who publically admired the Emperor and died leaving unfinished a comprehensive biography of the liberator of Christians, to produce another fifty or so Bibles for use in the churches of New Rome, Constantinople, which he was building. Eusebius wrote in a letter a list of books he thought were canonical, but this list was not ultimately accepted.
A new translation of the New Testament into Syriac was made, the Peshitta, to replace the Diatessaron, the Gospel harmomy which had been dominant in the Syriac speaking churches of the Prient, but which the Fathers mistrusted owing to its authorship by Tatian, a known Gnostic heresiarch. This initially contained only those works which were most uncontroversial; all of the disputed books were omitted (they were later added to the West Syriac Peshitto, but not to the East Syriac version). St. Jerome expressed his own opinions.
Ultimately it was St. Athanasius who settled the matter, as you well know, in his 39th Paschal Encyclical. His determination as to which books in the New Testament were authentic and apostolic and which ones were not became universally accepted, and was the basis for the Decretum Gelasianum of 493, which defined permanently the canonical New Testament as far as the Church of Rome was concerned, and prohibited the use of any other books. This canon was not universally binding, but was a local canon specific to the Roman Church, but in general all churches recognize the Athanasian canon (the Ethiopians append to their Old Testament the Didascalia, one of two ancient first century manuals of church discipline, along with the Didache, the Armenians include 3 Corinthians, but do not read it liturgically).
So that is what happened. The Church wrote the New Testsment; specifically the Apostles who established the current church as the successor to the dying religion of Second Temple Judaism, which due to the destruction of the Temple became extinct during the course of its compostion. Then, after a proliferation of Gnostic psuedepigrapha and forgeries, the Church edited the Bible to determine what was divinely inspired. There are disagreements between the Apostolic churches and indeed the Protestants, particularly on the Old Testament, and these mirror similiar arguments from the fourth century. But ultimately, each local Church had to decide for itself what New Testament books were to be accepted, and the Athanasian Canon was definitive.
Now, the primary test for canonicity was apostolic authenticity; 1 Clement and the Shepherd of Hermas were excluded not because it was thought they were not divinely inspired, but because it was known their authors were not Apostles.
However, when it came to the actual Bibles that wound up being written and later printed, and used liturgically in each Church, this was a decision that had to be made. All of the Apostolic churches wound up accepting the validity of the Comma Johanneum even if they left it out of their text. Likewise, they all accepted the validity of the Adultery Pericope, and Mark 16:9-20.
It is the Church which legitimized Scripture, not vice versa; Scripture was written by and for the Church. However, because of the binding force of tradition (2 Thessalonians 2:15), once the Church came to a general agreement on what was canonical. and also, what the contents of each book should contain (specifically, all of the Apostolic churches, even the Coptic Church and the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria, agreed on the Byzantine Text Type or the Majority Text, and rejected the so-called Alexandrian text type or Minority Text), the matter became closed.
And while it was the early Church which gave Scripture its legitimacy, since the matter of what is Scripture is settled, Scripture now also grants the Church legitmacy, because Scripture is now a part of Holy Tradition; the Church has established a reliable, canonical Bible, with extreme difficulty, and this Bible, now that it exists, in turn authenticates the Church.
Scripture is being modified today, illicitly. Some very recent dynamic equivalence translations like the latest New International Version have, in the interests of political correctness, taken spectacular liberties with the text. The Jehovahs Witnesses published a Bible in which John 1:1 was modified to suit their dogma. And Hal Lessig and a group of postmodern and emergent theologians, many of whom had previously been involved in the Jesus Seminar under Robert Funk, produced A New New Testament, which combines a liberal, postmodern, dynamic equivalence translation of the canonical New Testament with a liberal, postmodern, dynamic equivalence translation of an assortment Gnostic scriptures, which is hillarious, because while on the one hand they distorted the canonical New Testament making it less Orthodox, on the other, they distorted the Gnostic texts making them less Gnostic and in some cases causing them to read as being more Orthodox and less bizarre (especially in the case of The Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Apocryphon of John).
It should be stressed that several dynamic equivalence Bibles take liberties with the text which exceed by a massive degree the gloss provided by the Comma Johanneum. The Living Bible, for example. If I were to quixotically set out to compose an Orthodox Bible based on Dynamic Equivalence (which I do not believe would be very Orthodox), I could among other things translate "I and the father are one" as "I am of one substance with the Father," and my change would be far less radical than those made in many recent Bible editions.
So, in answer to your question, scripture can be modifed today. However, you asked "Maybe." So, may scripture be legitimately modified today? No, because the canon is closed and the question of what texts to use was settled in the first millenium. All of the apostolic churches, the Orthodox, the Roman Catholics and the Assyrians agreed on the Athanasian Canon, a more or less comparable Old Testament canon based on the contents of the Septuagint, and the use of the Byzantine text type. These scriptural texts were then written into the lectionaries of the churches. Because the canon is settled, one could not add a new book or delete an existing book, or add or delete verses, with amy legitimacy, because Scripture as it exists is a matter of Holy Tradition. One of the last books to be agreed as canonical was Revelations, but it contains a warning against adding or removing anything from "this book," which may be read as applying only to it, but which perhaps piety should compel us to regard all of sacred scripture with.
I myself will therefore not accept as canonical any book not included in the canon of at least one Apostolic Church, and in the case where only one included it (1 Enoch in the Ethiopian Church, for instance), I read it with extreme caution.
This does not mean that new devotional or religious literature cannot be written and regarded as divinely inspired. I believe the Epistles of Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp, and most of the Patristic corpus, is divinely inspired; I believe the Sayings of the Desert Fathers is divinely inspired, and I believe the Philokalia is divinely inspired. I also believe the ancient hymns and liturgies of the Church are divinely inspired, but subject to change. These works however are subordinate to Scripture, but they all collectively form a part of one united, divinely inspired Holy Tradition, at the center of which is the Gospel as narrated by the four evangelists, surrounded by the other books of the Holy Bible, which is truly an ikon of the Word of God (when we venerate ikons of Orthodox saints who were Church Fathers, we kiss the Bibles they are depicted as carrying).
The only possible exception I can think of, which is really hypothetical: If one became stranded followimg some global cataclysm on a remote island with a small community of people and had no Bible, I guess in that case it would be permissible to try and write down a summary of the Bible from memory.
Missed that word "like" a dove did you?God is a spirit and not a dove? BRILLIANT and I'm glad we can agree on some things. But the Spirit OF God in the genitive is God's spirit. He owns and operates IT, sir.
Ok, lets review the facts:
On Chalcedon, I am a Chalcedonian but I have come to believe the Oriental Orthodox who reject it are fully Orthodox. Usually its easier to explain the Trinity to an unbeliever using Chalcedonian terminology, but I believe Chalcedonian and Miaphysite theology is fully compatible and has been since the Fifth Ecumenical Council (I have to thank my colleague Wgw for persuading me of this, although I disagree with him that the schism is non-existant due to it being uncanonical).
- You claimed the New Testament does not contain the word "substance" or other Trinitarian terminology. It does; it also features prosopon. These are the two most important terms in Triadology and the only creedal terms; hypostasis and the East Syriac equivalent qnume are important for theological study, but they are not in the creeds or in the Bible, and are not required to understand the Trinity.
- Your argument about the Trinitarians has the effect of implying that they are all Nestorians; it was Nestorius who was obsessed with a Hellenic separation of the divine and human, and it was St. Cyril who insisted they be brought together.
If you read the Theopaschite arguments of the Oriental Orthodox fathers, I think you will find something that will clarify your understanding of this position. Read Severus of Antioch in particular, or the modern summary Orthodox Christology by Fr. Peter Farrington, available on iBooks.
Then, you can see how the Chalcedonians came around to embrace a Theopaschite view by reading the text of St. Justinian's hymn Ho Monogenes, which follows the Second Antiphon in the Orthodox divine liturgy:
Only-begotten Son and immortal Word of God, who for our salvation didst will to be incarnate of the holy Theotokos and Ever-virgin Mary, who without change didst become man and wast crucified, O Christ our God, trampling down death by death, who art One of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit: save us.This little hymn is one of the best and clearest expressions of Orthodox Christology, amd refutes entirely I believe your argument that the Fathers were driven mainly by "classical theism." What you call "classical Theism," which is really just Hellenic proto-Gnostic henotheisrkc or monotheistic philosophy, would not permit God to, without change, become man and be crucified.
You are saying that God is a Mystery and most of us started there. Trinity RATHER made God not only more confusing but against what He said about Himself. Notice I did not say what THEY said about THEMSELVES.
What makes you say this is certain? The DEITY of Jesus is not certain. WHY is this not certain? Certainly Jesus SAID he was God correct? Now you know WHERE JisG goes off the deep end.
And an egg is shell yolk and white. And water is ice, liquid and vapor. And water is H two and Oh. Oh my oh me these analogies are a BALM to my soul. I could write a SONG about God being an EGG for instance. God MUST have 3 parts alrighty. Now just find THIS in scripture and maybe just maybe you have a CASE.
I was agreeing about the "dove" part. You missed that didn't you? I miss you too. Haven't beaned your bean for a few days.Missed that word "like" a dove did you?
Nobody stated the Holy Spirit was a dove so why bring it up?I was agreeing about the "dove" part. You missed that didn't you? I miss you too. Haven't beaned your bean for a few days.
You are seriously misquoting teh passage. IT reads, "In fact, there are three witnesses, the Spirit, the water, and the blood and they are in agreement." The passage says nothing as to whether they are Deity or not.There were three separate persons in God present as the scripture states. You do comprehend the number three don't you?
1 John 5:7 For there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit: and these three are one.
Could you explain the science behind how God raised Jesus from the dead?
Where the supernatural intersects the natural realm, and how God changed the atoms quantitatively in his body to bring him back to life? Or how God stopped the sun for that day in Joshua, the day like no other?
Personally, I can't.
This is the nature of the trinity. I can say "trinity" just like I can say, "Jesus was raised from the dead" and in either instance I'm discussing something I am woefully ignorant of but believe.
If you haven't come across this in all of scripture, you haven't paid attention.
Job 38 -
16 “Have you explored the springs from which the seas come?
Have you explored their depths?
17 Do you know where the gates of death are located?
Have you seen the gates of utter gloom?
18 Do you realize the extent of the earth?
Tell me about it if you know!
19 “Where does light come from,
and where does darkness go?
20 Can you take each to its home?
Do you know how to get there?
21 But of course you know all this!
For you were born before it was all created,
and you are so very experienced!
And if God does teach us one of the steps of raising Christ from the dead by revelation of wisdom, then what it does is just create more mystery of God to unlock, not less. When I learn from God, I learn more and more what I don't know, not checking off things to eventually know it all.
We should think of God's truth like a chart, each node having multiple rays off of it to another nodes, going on forever. Learning 1 truth, means there are several more to learn, and the more you learn, the more there is to know.
So I know quite a bit about the trinity, and in knowing this much I have a larger amount I fail to know.
What makes you say the resurrection of Christ is certain?
It's the same concept, learned by different revelation. We receive the revelation of the resurrection upon acceptance of salvation. Likewise is the revelation of God in 3 and 3 as one. I think even the word "trinity" fails to capture what it is, so I prefer not addressing it that way, but for simplicity sake it works. It's a word which poorly approximates something which can only be known through Christ by spiritual revelation, not intellectual.
And yet spiritual revelation works according to logic, and God's word believed in faith, so it is not ambiguous or ill-defined. It is concrete knowledge of God, sufficient to stand for eternity, move mountains, and build our lives upon and bear fruit of God.
Yet if a person has not learned it, I can't say this is a terrible thing like some. There are other revelations in scripture. I personally think there are many more important than understanding the trinity.
The difference is I pulled the analogy directly from scripture. I did not pull it from just the world at large. We would have no reason to apply the analogy unless scripture told us to.
Then God said, "Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness - Genesis 1:26
Then in Thessalonians, scripture defines what a man is, and what his likeness is.
May your whole spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. - 1 Thessalonians 5:23
If scripture says it, I generally believe it.
Thank you for explaining further.
Interesting point. Especially considering the scriptures that refer to God's predestination of all things for his glory. Predestination, preordained, his knowing us before the womb.
Something to think about.
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