Broaching the Trinity: Three Persons?
- Thread starter Thomas
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OK.
Er, I don't think it does? All living organisms have genomes – viruses, bacteria, flora, fauna, animals. The Bible is saying something about human nature. It has a lot more to say about the soul that is more than the genome.
Same with a virus, but that's not a person. Nor will the DNA tell you about the character of the person, just that it is a particular human being.
Er ... OK ... But that's not what Trinity is. The Trinity is Three Persons, not One Person.
Again, that's not the Trinity.
And Levi has a soul and spirit, and his son inside him, so now a few more persons ...
But God is not a creature and does not possess a genome. Nor, as a matter of fact, does God possess a soul. God is a spirit, Different thing.
Not according to the Bible. He sits at the right hand. He will come again, so does he 'de-merge' ... I think not. God is not a body as human bodies, or indeed any bodies, are bodies.
Nope. God is not anything-based.
Clearly, there are not.
There is the Logos/Word (1) with God (2), and the Logos/Word (1) was God (2). No third individual entity mentioned. Case disproved.
Base12
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Are you sure about that?
John 6:63
"It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life."
The Word of God always contains the Holy Spirit by default. Thus, any time the Logos is mentioned, the Spirit is there.
Base12
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You literally just sad God is a Spirit...
Whatever man. I am not going to waste time with you.
S'what the Bible says ...
"... but an hour comes, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for indeed the Father looks for those worshipping him so; God is spirit, and it is necessary that those worshipping worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:23-24).
By 'spirit' is meant that God is not in material things, not in times, nor in places. Same as "God is love" (1 John 4:8) is not talking about the kind of love I have for chocolate or a good peaty whisky.
The problem I have with that, is that it did not exist before Orthodox Christianity.
The oneness of God is the first commandment .. faith all rests on that foundation.
..as you would also agree.
..so if the trinity was so important for faith, then why were the Jews not made aware of it?
TheLightWithin
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Right, they describe themselves that way.
But to me it's like me and my two colleagues telling someone we are the same counselor or something.
One counselor three persons.
There's really no clarity to it.
I take ideas seriously, and I strive to make sense of them seriously.
This complication of monotheism is for me-- trying to shove the idea into my head is like trying to shove a piece of furniture into a room where it won't fit and the corners keep running into the doorframe or something.
I get that trinitarians call themselves monotheist, I'm just not sure how it's truly different from tritheism.
TheLightWithin
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That's exactly my confusion.
Ah ... and I wish shedding light was as simple as that.
But alas, it's not, and before making any poor attempt to do so, perhaps it's worth considering what Christianity means by the term 'mystery'.
What follows is largely redacted from a much longer article by the theologian Denys Turner on a different topic altogether:
The French Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel once said that one should never confuse a mystery with a problem.
St Thomas Aquinas, author of the Five Ways, offers five logical and rational arguments for the idea of a philosophical deity – for God as a concept, rather than for the God as revealed in Scripture.
In his magisterial Summa he says something else altogether. That as we progress towards an understanding of the Divine, we eventually and inevitably reach the limit of human reason. We have not 'the mind of God' – we can barely explain ourselves – and worse than that, our neighbour, even our closest loved ones, will always be to some degree hidden from our knowledge.
To pass beyond reason's horizon is, in broad terms, to enter into the mystery. The Eleusinian Mysteries predate the Christian by a thousand years. The Orphic Mysteries by a good few hundred.
St Thomas goes on to say that not only reason must fail of the knowledge of God’s nature but that faith does too, yet somehow faith supplies some 'knowledge' of God that to reason is denied. Faith does not dispel the transcendence, the darkness, the ineffability of God, on the contrary, in faith one enters more deeply into that darkness; not escaping it, not dispelling it, but intensifying it.
Every human person is a mystery, even to themselves; deep one might delve into one's own nature, or the nature of another, but one never reaches the end.
Why then should we suppose God not by a mystery, and the mystery of mysteries?
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If it is through faith alone that we know the Trinity. That 'mystery' is revealed to those whose prayerful contemplation of Scripture leads them to it. By reason the philosophers arrived at the proposition that God is One, but then that left them with another mystery – that of the Many.
Platonism reached its climax in the idea of Monad and Henad, that in the One, everything exists is a simple and undifferentiated unity.
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The doctrine of the Trinity is not a bit of additional information about God, additional, that is, to what we can know of God by reason. Faith doesn’t add something else to our rationally acquired knowledge of God. It deepens it.
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A problem asks for a solution, a solution that resolves the problem; and if you are bright enough, or conduct enough research, or consult those who know, you will find the solution to it, like the solution to a quadratic equation: once solved, the problem is laid to rest.
But mysteries do not yield to investigation, argument, proof, or categorisation. Mysteries can never be solved. They cannot be gotten to go away. Indeed, the deeper you enter into a mystery, the deeper the mystery gets. The gap between where you are with it and where the mystery lies never decreases, it only ever increases; nor can you think your way out of a mystery, for to do so is to reduce the mystery to the standing of a problem.
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But if you cannot think your way out of a mystery you can pray your way into one. Indeed, prayer is the only way there is into a mystery. Before a true mystery, the mind can only give way. You can’t crack it, you can only surrender to it, and the mind boggles – you bow before it and you say, humbly, “Amen.”
Strangely, in finding your way into a mystery you come to know it in a manner that no solution to a problem ever achieves. You know a mystery and you love it, as you know and love a friend, you want to live with it. Problems, by contrast, are a nuisance until they are dissolved.
So it is with the mystery of the Trinity. Thomas constructs a technical argument governing how to think about the mystery of the Trinity insofar as one can – but really what he offers is a way of thinking about the mystery without making those mistakes that can so easily lead to error.
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Generally speaking, as G. K. Chesterton said, it is the heretics who want to reduce the mysteries to problems, as, for example, Arianism does. It seeks to rationalise a position and so provide an easy and acceptable answer – it is much easier to suppose that Christ was just a man, and not God became a man.
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Orthodoxy preserves and transmits the mystery.
Doctrine undertakes the task of ‘clearing the space’, of answering those ‘problems’ that would obstruct our access to the deep mystery of God’s inner life as revealed to us in Christ.
Trying to 'get one's head' around the Trinity recalls an apocryphal tale attributed to (among others) St Augustine. While walking on the sea shore and struggling with formulating a concept of the Trinity, he came upon a young boy who was emptying a bucket of seawater into a hole he'd dug in the sand.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm emptying the ocean into this hole," the boy said.
"You'll never be able to do that," Augustine said.
"I've a better chance of doing it than you have of comprehending the mystery," the boy said ... and promptly disappeared.
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To paraphrase a comment made about trying to 'get into the mind' of St Thomas Aquinas:
“The main danger is that of supposing that the thing to do is get one's head around the Mystery of the Trinity, a task of compression that will be achieved only at your head’s peril. The only safe thing to do is to find a way of getting your mind into the Mystery, wherein yours has room to expand and grow, and explore the worlds it contains.”
― from Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait
"What are you doing?"
"I'm emptying the ocean into this hole," the boy said.
"You'll never be able to do that," Augustine said.
"I've a better chance of doing it than you have of comprehending the mystery," the boy said ... and promptly disappeared.
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To paraphrase a comment made about trying to 'get into the mind' of St Thomas Aquinas:
“The main danger is that of supposing that the thing to do is get one's head around the Mystery of the Trinity, a task of compression that will be achieved only at your head’s peril. The only safe thing to do is to find a way of getting your mind into the Mystery, wherein yours has room to expand and grow, and explore the worlds it contains.”
― from Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait
Faithfulservant
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Just because the word " trinity" isnt in the bible doesnt mean it wasnt understood. Jesus proclaimed the 3 when He told them to baptize in the name of the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit. But i dont want get into this again.. its like going round and round and we have done this far too many times.The problem I have with that, is that it did not exist before Orthodox Christianity.
The oneness of God is the first commandment .. faith all rests on that foundation.
..as you would also agree.
..so if the trinity was so important for faith, then why were the Jews not made aware of it?
1 John 5:7 For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.
One practice (or intention, or philosophy), three practitioners ... a weak analogy, but it's a start?
Three separate people, all with one and the same thing in mind.
As per the Turner quote. It's not about fitting it to our conceptions, it's about embracing it.
This is what we do ... we are faced with something new, and we find a way to fit it, to shape it, to what is familiar, to fit it into our preconception. To fit it to our world.
But that's entirely the point, and that is why 'Revelation' can never simply be words written on a page, because it goes beyond the words – it's not what it says, it's what it says implies, and that is where two mysteries of Christianity emerge from – the Incarnation and the Trinity.
Inherent in the rejection of mystery, in the treating it as a cop-out, is the desire to render God something subject to reason. God then becomes something we could have come up with under our own steam if we put our minds to it. In the end, it's an idol, a 'graven image', because we seek to fix something that, in reality, is unfixable because it's beyond forms.
This is what the doctrine does. On the one hand, three forms – The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit (although He is the most intangible of the three, 'the Anonymous One' as a tutor used to say of Him); on the other, God – formless, ineffable, numinous. The doctrine takes us from the forms into the formless.
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I'm reading Holgoland by Carlo Rovelli on the birth of Quantum Physics.
A young scientist, Werner Heisenberg, is given an intractable problem by his mentor, Nils Bohr. It's all to do with atoms and how they act. The theory is correct because all the observations back it up. The science explains what happens, but cannot explain why it happens ... and no-one can find a solution.
Until, one day, Heisenberg cracks it.
"At first, I was was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that I had gone beyond the surface of things and was beginning to see a strangely beautiful interior, and felt dizzy at the thought ... "
"It was around three o'clock in the morning when the final results of my calculations were before me. I felt profoundly shaken. I was so agitated that I could not sleep. I left the house and began walking slowly in the dark. I climbed on a rock overlooking the sea at the tip of the island, and waited for the sun to come up...» (page 9)
What's happened here? The young Werner Heisenberg has been tasked with solving a problem by Nils Bohr, a problem that neither Bohr nor anyone else can find a solution to.
"... it was around three o'clock in the morning when the result of my calculations lay before me. It was correct in all terms. Suddenly I no longer had any doubts about the consistency of the new ‘quantum’ mechanics that my calculation described.
At first, I was deeply alarmed. I had the feeling that I had gone beyond the surface of things and was beginning to see a strangely beautiful interior, and felt dizzy at the thought that now I had to investigate this wealth of mathematical structures that Nature had so generously spread out before me." (page 13).
Revelation is not arrived at by arranging the furniture in a room. It's not the furniture, a new room is required.
TheLightWithin
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Exactly. Runs right up against what I thought monotheism was supposed to be
(I know you were quoting the example about human people, the counselors, but if that's not on target, should a different word other than persons be used in contemporary times as it leads to misunderstanding?)
I don't think there's a better term.
The three are and act independently, hence ...