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Earliest but not... most correct?
Broaching the Trinity: Three Persons?
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Gee.You mean why can we not just love one another?
Well, yup, given that's one of the commandments in the religion, yes, please.
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No, I mean life and death in the sense that so-called "heretics" were persecuted and sometimes killed. Not just in the early days but later on, Michael Servetus, whom I think was unitarian or something.
You could say the persecuted heretics are the ones who died for what they believed in, and they shouldn't have had do.
NO excuse for the executions.
Yes, they should have tolerated "heresy" and never should have killed anybody for it.
I'm not going to try and defend Christendom in the Middle ages – we hardly clothed ourselves in glory. Look at the story of Servetus, for instance, and we see a catalogue of spite. He fled the Catholics, only to be condemned by the Reformation Calvinists. It seems that everyone piled in to condemn him...
Well quite, but that's today ... the past was a different place.
Well, who's correct?
It's unfair to judge the 2nd century for not believing in a doctrine that wasn't defined until the 4th.
The key point for me was their belief was in a triune, in that it was in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
How those three are defined is still an ongoing process ... not that contemporary views are different, I'd rather say they're deeper.
David Bentley Hart has triggered a whole theological/metaphysical insight into the Baptism of Christ (Matthew 3, Mark 1, Luke 3, John 1) and the parallel between Incarnation and Creation ... I think that's new, although it might well be ancient, and I just simply missed it.
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what's the quote or saying -- the past is a different country, they do things differently there.
I think it's from a novel called The Go Between A quote from The Go-Between
The Go-Between - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
That observation is real enough, but to me at least, calls into question the idea of an enduring moral order.
An idea many religions rest upon, unless I misunderstand.
Yes ... thanks for this, and I tracked down where Hartley got the essence of it from, a lecture by David Cecil in 1949:what's the quote or saying -- the past is a different country, they do things differently there.
I think it's from a novel called The Go Between A quote from The Go-Between
The Go-Between - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
"Past periods are like foreign countries; regions inhabited by men of like passions to our own, but with different customs and codes of behaviour. If we do not know these we shall misunderstand their actions and misapprehend their motives."
(from David Cecil, "The Fine Art of Reading and other Literary Studies")
Quite.
Well the Golden Rule is universally acknowledged, but rarely followed.
Religion is a social institution, cultures another, governments another ... and any of them can go off the rails, as we are currently only too aware.
Everybody is a heretic. There's really no avoiding it. Trinitarians are big-time heretics! The doctrine goes right against the very words of Jesus.
Oh .. and I thought that it was just me.
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Naaah... I started a whole thread on itOh .. and I thought that it was just me.
So, the Trinity seems to be important as far as the Christ is concerned. What I am struggling with, is the idea of this Trinity, and the son in particular, being eternal.
There was a one-off event, or so I am told, a little over two thousand years ago. Was the son eternally dormant prior to this?
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Those are good questions.
I also don't see why trinitarian and not binitarian. Why the holy spirit is considered a distinct personality and not a power, ruach, as it were.
Or why the Oneness Pentecostals aren't correct. They think all references to God are all Jesus.
Faithfulservant
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Scripture clearly defines the Holy Spirit as a He and acts separately from the Father and the Son. He has His own emotions He is worshipped and referred to as God by the apostles has a will of His own can be sinned against.
No.
The one-off event, commonly called the Incarnation, is the union of the divine and the human.
The divine element of that union is eternal and active.
Sorry Thomas, I am really puzzled now.
When was this union, I ask as presumably "the human" is not eternal. Was there a 'before the union state'? Or is it considered to have always been.
Any assistance truly appreciated.
When was this union, I ask as presumably "the human" is not eternal. Was there a 'before the union state'? Or is it considered to have always been.
Any assistance truly appreciated.
No. God is always and eternally, God.
The 'union' is the Incarnation, the birth of Jesus Christ, who was both 'true God and true man'
The existence of the Triune God is outside of time and space. The idea of the Incarnation is an 'irruption' into history.
Hope that helps ...
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Although this video is long, I thought I would post it both here and in the thread about Philosophy and NeoPlatonism.
This particular video is the host (Dan McClellan) responding to someone else's video by providing more information.
I personally found the intricacy of his exploration of the trinity, or the development of the idea over time, to be one of the more powerful and useful ones I have heard to date. Some of the patristic thinking he describes makes it almost comprehensible. I for one appreciate it.
This particular video is the host (Dan McClellan) responding to someone else's video by providing more information.
I personally found the intricacy of his exploration of the trinity, or the development of the idea over time, to be one of the more powerful and useful ones I have heard to date. Some of the patristic thinking he describes makes it almost comprehensible. I for one appreciate it.
It is a difficult subject, because one can't 'get one's head around it.'
With Hinduism there is the concept of Avatara
"The manifest embodiment is sometimes referred to as an incarnation. The translation of avatar as "incarnation" has been questioned by Christian theologians, who state that an incarnation is in flesh and imperfect, while avatar is mythical and perfect. The theological concept of Christ as an incarnation, as found in Christology, presents the Christian concept of incarnation.
"The term avatar in Hinduism refers to act of various gods taking form to perform a particular task which in most of the times is bringing dharma back. The concept of avatar is widely accepted all over the India."
While there are technical distinctions between the two – incarnation and avatara – I think that itself is to do with the nature of the form adopted and the message or teaching transmitted.
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I think what is rather hard about it is it really does not seem altogether logically coherent.
And there is so much we don't know about God, or cannot, the same way we could know about a living creature on earth.
We can gather factual data about living animals or people. We don't have access to the same kind of information about God.