Posted on 06/14/2006 8:05:55 AM PDT by NYer
We believe in the Blessed Trinity because we believe in Jesus, Who revealed the Trinity. God had prepared the Jews not only to welcome the Messiah, but to recognize through revelation what philosophers like Aristotle achieved through reason: that there is a God and there can only be one God.
Moses said to the Jews, “Acknowledge today and take to heart that the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other but to believe in God Who is the only God.” When the Messiah finally came, He revealed a huge mystery that went far beyond what the Jews were expecting: that the one God in Whom they believe is not solitary, but a unity, a communion of three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and that the Messiah is the Son.
He told them explicitly that the Father and He are one (Jn 10:30). He told them that He and the Father would send the Holy Spirit (Jn 14:26, Jn 15:26). And when He sent them out to baptize in the name of God, He didn’t give them instructions to baptize in the “names” of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit — as if they were three different gods — but in the “name,” for they are fundamentally a union of three persons. This is what the term Trinity means. It was devised by the early Church apologist Tertullian around the year 200 from the Latin words “unitas” and “trinus,” literally “unity” and “three.” It signifies that there is a unity of three persons in one God.
Since the beginning of the Church, theologians have spent their lives trying to penetrate this mystery and explain it to others. St. Patrick used the image of a three-leaf clover. St. Augustine used the image of the mind, with memory, reason and will. More recent minds have used the image of H20, which can exist as ice, water, or steam. But none of these analogies — though interesting and somewhat helpful — do justice to the reality of the mystery of how three persons can exist in the one God.
When St. Augustine was in the middle of his voluminous and classic study of the Blessed Trinity, he took a walk along the beach in northern Africa to try to clear his head and pray. He saw a young girl repeatedly filling a scallop shell with sea water and emptying it into a hole she had dug in the sand. “What are you doing?” Augustine tenderly asked. “I'm trying to empty the sea into this hole,” the child replied. “How do you think that with a little shell,” Augustine retorted, “you can possibly empty this immense ocean into a tiny hole?” The little girl countered, “And how do you, with your small head, think you can comprehend the immensity of God?” As soon as the girl said this, she disappeared, convincing Augustine that she had been an angel sent to teach him an important lesson: No matter how gifted God had made him, he would never be able to comprehend fully the mystery of the Trinity.
This, of course, does not mean we cannot understand anything. If we want to get to the heart of the mystery of the Trinity, we can turn to the most theological of the Apostles, who meditated deeply on all that Jesus had revealed and, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said simply and synthetically, “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16). For God to be love, He has to love someone. None of us can love in a vacuum; there must always be an object of our love. Who is the object of God’s love? It cannot be man, or the created world, or the universe, because all of these existed in time and God is eternal and therefore existed before time.
It’s also impossible to say that God merely loved Himself in a solitary way, because this would not really be love but a form of egotism and narcissism. For God to be love, there needed to be an eternal relationship of love, with one who loves, one who is loved, and the love that unites them. This is what exists in the Blessed Trinity: The Father loved His image, the Son, so much that their mutual and eternal love “spirated” or “generated” the Holy Spirit. They exist in a communion of love. The three persons of the Blessed Trinity are united in absolutely everything except, as the early Church councils said, their “relations of origin,” what it means to be Father, what it means to be Son of the Father, and what it means to proceed from the Father and the Son.
These theological insights about the blessed Trinity may seem theoretical, but they become highly practical when we reflect on the fact that we have been made in the image and likeness of God and called to communion with God. To be in the image and likeness of God means to be created in the image and likeness of a communion of persons in love. Our belief in the Trinity — the central teaching of the Catholic faith — has given the Church the deepest understanding available to human beings of the nature of man, the meaning of human life, and what it means to love.
Religion Forum.
Weren't you around then, or am I thinking of someone else?
oh ok duh... Ya I was here. I was so new to the computer back then that I used my real name "Steven" for two years before I got a real "nick". lol.
Xzins...you I and Steven all have signup dates of early 1998...were you always Xzins?
goin on doug?
Now I'm confused...goin on what?
Yep, Xzins has been around that entire time.
I had a 2nd name for a bit, but one of the mods smacked me upside the head and made it disappear.
Contemplate this: In just 2 years we'll have been posting here for 10 years. Blows my mind.
Ya sure doesn't seem that long. Alot has changed since the good ol' days. I was looking over some very old NES theads a few weeks ago. Dang I've changed. :-)
10 years.
Amazing.
And JR's software, even at that time, is better than what the competition uses today.
It's almost conversation-like. The word "virtual" really does apply to what he's put together.
I've tried before to look up and figure out what my very first post was. Once I got back to fall of 1998, but I don't remember how I did it, probably after an intense google search. I've changed quite a bit too since the beginning.
True, it's truly remarkable. What's the best about it in my opinion is the ability to share real time experiences with thousands of people. Thinking of 9/11 specifically, the whitewater saga and the 2000 elections.
Me, I think you're misunderstanding both the nature and purpose of sacrifice.
No, I'm saying that our obedience to God's commands should not be predicated on the perceived pragmaticism of doing so, but based on our faith that He knows better than we what is good for us.
How did sin start? Through an act of disobedience against a command that seemed to have no pragmatic benefit--and one involved in choosing what to eat at that. The fruit was good in appearance, good for food, and desirable for making one wise, yet God said not to eat it. There was no pragmatic benefit to either Man or God, yet God said not to eat it. And yet on the basis of that moment of "slipping" and eating what God had said not to, six thousand years of depravity and violence were born.
Now, is one's salvation predicated on kosher? Of course not. I can, and have often, made the case from the Torah that kosher is optional for Gentiles--and I think that was done as a mercy, since there are many parts of the world where they are dependant on non-kosher animals for survival. Nevertheless, it is good to keep kosher if you can, not for any pragmatic purpose (though I do believe that a kosher diet has its health benefits), but simply because one wants to obey God. Not for reward, not on the basis of one's on wisdom of what is good or not, but out of love and trusting God to know what's best.
I'll repeat: I do not seek to be Torah observant in order to be saved, but because I am saved, and I want to be like my Savior in every way. That includes eating only what He would eat.
Throughout scripture God has always established different dietary laws. While in the garden, they only ate from "any tree in the garden" (Gen 3:1). After the flood God told Noah that, "Every moving thing that is alive shall be food for you; I give all to you, as I gave the green plant." (Gen 9:3).
Most people that I have read believe the dietary laws set up by God in Leviticus was to act as a method of perserving the people from tainted food. God later restored the commandement of Genesis 9:3 in Acts.
1Co 8:8 But food will not commend us to God; we are neither the worse if we do not eat, nor the better if we do eat.
Two sets of rules for two sets of people???? If memory serves me correctly those Gentiles who come to God in faith are grafted in with the Jewish believers. There is only one set of rules for everyone.
I recognize that traditional Christianity has reasoned that this verse means that God somehow changed the dietary laws, but that's not how Peter, the receipient of the vision, saw it. What God cleansed was gentiles who had God's spirit. He was telling Peter that gentiles who have God's spirit are NOT unclean jsut because they are not "Jewish".
This is Peter's interpretation:
Act 10:28 And he said unto them, Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath showed me that I should not call any man common or unclean.
That is what God showed Peter, nothing more. Acts 10 is exculsively about how the first gentiles were given the spirit of God. There is nothing in that chapter or the next to indicate that Peter or anyone else understood it in any other way. There is no controversy.
Excellent example. Just because we can't always see the benefit of obeying God doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It's called "faith".
If you believe that, then you should keep the Torah zealously as the Jerusalem believers and Apostles did (Acts 21:20ff), for as Yeshua said,
Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.In any case, there have always been commands that were optional, commands which were only manditory for certain sets of people, and commands which were relaxed out of mercy for Gentiles. For example:
--Mat. 5:17-19
- God gives the rules for a "peace offering" in Lev. 3, in which a person could offer a sacrifice of thanks and worship for something God had done for him. This offering was purely voluntary on behalf of the individual (though in certain circumstances one might be offered for the nation).So yes, there are occassions when God provides that not all rules apply to all people at all times, or in His grace lets a minor rule slide, so to speak.- The High Priest was not permitted to make himself ritually impure for any reason and was never to drink, since he was always "on duty" as it were. These restrictions only applied to the common Israelite if they were under the oath of the Nazir.
- There was an especially harsh punishment for prostitution if the woman were the daughter of any priest (Lev. 21:9), nor could a priest take any woman who was not a virgin for a wife, not even a widow (v. 14). Other Israelites were not under the same stricture.
- If an animal died on its own, an Israelite could not eat it, but he could sell the meat to a Gentile living in the land (Deu. 14:21) who was allowed to eat it. This verse, combined with the fact that in Gen. 9 God gave Noah every living thing for meat, is the reason I do not consider kosher manditory for a Gentile believer.
- When Naaman was healed of leprosy, he asked the prophet for a special dispensation that he could continue his duties to his king, even though that meant kneeling with him in the temple of another god. Elisha, speaking for God, permitted the mercy.
- While the Apostles and the Jerusalem believers kept Torah rigidly and zealously, and even offered sacrifices in the Temple, they did not impose all of the Torah on the Gentile believers as a prerequisite to salvation or acceptance into the Community. Instead, recognizing that salvation was by faith, not works, they gave the new Gentile converts a handful of rules designed to separate them from the pagan temples, and gave them room to grow in the Spirit from there.
We are asked to present our bodies as a living sacrifice wholly acceptable to God. Keeping Kosher is a sacrifice, especially if you've had a bacon cheeseburger in the past. Setting aside a day for worship and reflection is a sacrifice. Tithing is a sacrifice. Fasting is a sacrifice. You are giving up something for the glory of God.
In that sense I respect anyone who does it solely for the glory of God. If any man says that such sacrifices are necessary for salvation, then I will be on them like white on rice, as there is only one sacrifice that secured our salvation and we didn't have anything to do with that one.
So self sacrifice for discipline, sanctification and purification is something we should all admire when we see it. It is something we should strive to emulate. I have chosen a path that permits me to have bacon cheeseburgers. Buggman, however, has chosen a path that limits his July 4, barbeque to plain hamburgers, beef short ribs and Hebrew National hot dogs. If he invited me over for a Barbeque, I could live with that. I could make that sacrifice for the Glory of God.
Ping to 499. Sorry.
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