PaulSacramento wrote:1stjohn0666 wrote:Good point @ PaulSacramento. I understand God to be easy to understand rather than confusing as per "he is not the author of confusion" Corinthians somewhere... Anyway, The "oneness doctrine" teaches that Jesus IS the Father because when reading John 1:1 at the end is "and the word was God" or in other words "and the son was God (the Father) It is a daunting task to teach the "trinity" to have some sort of understanding from it come to light. I have never understood it. I think the early church fathers didn't understand themselves, thus the counsels. My wife is trinitarian, and I don't get her explanation either. One more thing, why does "spell check" say that trinitarian is not the correct spelling
Don't think I am trying to change your faith or anything like that. I am just a simple man with a set of beliefs that differ with "mainstream" Christianity.
I am not a huge fan of the trinity doctrine because I have seen the confusion it can cause ( because of the wording) BUT I agree that Father, Son and HS are all GOD ( share the same divine nature and are a perfect union of spirit).
I think that issue is not so much understanding it, but explaining it !
The analogy used by some of the mythical beast Cerebrus is a good one: One being with 3 personalities.
The problem is that it gives us the mental image of a pagan myth AND a 3 headed monster and instead of focusing on the BEING, we focus on the image.
Humans are Triune in nature- Mind, body and spirit.
God being a relational being is to me, what makes the Trinity doctrine correct ( if ill-worded) and this is why:
If God was ONE ( the father only) then it seems that he was "incomplete" since he couldn't be relational ( He has no one to relate to) and He would only knwo "self-love" ( since He had no one to love till He created Jesus) and all that would make Him inferior to a being that knows "selfless love" and that means that He can't be God.
I know I sound like a broken record, but the problem with explaining it is simply that people don't have the requisite philosophical training. Once you have that, it's actually pretty easy to explain and even easier to grasp. Keep in mind that the full doctrine of the Trinity was worked out over about four hundred years. Some, of course, will use that as proof that the the Trinity is extra biblical, but they just don't understand when they say that what the doctrine teaches. All the Trinity
as a doctrine is, is an attempt at coherently understanding the biblical data. We have the following facts we have to deal with:
1. There is one God
2. The Father is God
3. The Son is God
4. The Holy Spirit is God
There are a lot of other facts to consider, too, but those are the big ones. All the NT writers understood those facts. They did not, of course, understand the
doctrine of the Trinity
as an explanation of those facts. That would be anachronistic, since the formal explanation did not yet exist (nor would we expect it too--they didn't have too much time for theological reflection on such issues. They were busy trying to found the Church and fight of the Judaizers on one hand and the Pagans on the other!). The problem when people reject the Trinity is almost always not their rejection of the Trinity
qua its explanation of those facts; rather, it is their rejection of one or more of those facts
themselves.
Understood as the above, do you see why it is a bit silly to say that the explanation is hard to explain? Of course it is hard to explain if you don't understand the terms in which it is understood. I'm sure Ross could rather easily explain the math that stands behind the Big Bang. I, however, could not understand that explanation, precisely because I don't understand the math (where as others on this board, such as 1/137, probably could; at least, they could much easier than I could). But suppose I complained that it was just too hard to understand and therefore said I rejected the whole thing. Would that say anything was wrong with the theory itself? No, of course not. It would say something is wrong with
me.
So, again, once you have the requisite training, the theory is actually pretty easy. Once you accept the fact that God's essence is identical to His existence, then terms like "infinite" and "good" make easy sense. Simplicity necessary follows, which requires us to accept pure monotheism. All this reasoning leads us to posit that God is the First Cause of all things (not temporally, but logically), meaning that all perfections exist in God, including Personhood, meaning God is a personal God. Persons have intellects and wills, and we know that the intellect is an inward procession as is the will, but the procession is identical with the being from which it proceeds. Thus all three processions are Persons, which means that there three Persons in the one Divine Substance (using the term "substance" here very loosely, as strictly speaking, God is not a substance at all, since He, being pure existence, transcends genus). This is not to say that each Person has their own intellect and will, otherwise we would have an infinite regress of Persons; moreover, the intellect and will are processions of the substance, not of the Person. As there is only one substance, there are only the two processions, which are identical with the Substance itself. That is to say, all three Persons have the identical intellect and will. Thus, the Father is the Principle, the Son is the procession of the intellect, and the Spirit is the procession of the will, a schema you will find fits exceptionally well with both the OT and NT language about God.
All of this, of course, is highly simplified, and like all simplifications, there are technical nuances that have been erased. But my point here is not to explain the Trinity per se, but rather to point out that if you are familiar with the philosophical tradition out of which the Trinity was developed, it isn't all that hard to understand. And if you are conversant with that tradition, it doesn't make much sense to ask someone to explain the Trinity, since the Trinity is itself the explanation of the biblical data!
If you want a deeper explanation of this, I would recommend all of the First Part of Aquinas'
Summa Theologica.
