Posted on 11/09/2006 8:44:45 AM PST by policyforever867
The Holy Trinity
God is the originator of Truth. (Who else?) He is also the originator of the Church, which He founded to teach the Truth ("whoever hears you, hears me") Luke 10:15-17
I would suggest for those with budding faith to find the Gospel and read, and absorb. Jesus did not directly speak of the Trinity, but did tell us to baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19) in the Great Commission. It is indeed a mystery, something which might be beyond our understanding until we are all called home. But Nicene Creed explains what we DO know about the whole thing.
Jesus and His Word are the cornerstone of the Church, and what He says in the Gospel is enough to bring us to God. And communion with the Body of Christ is not just a help, but essential to growth in the faith. The brothers and sisters in a church can guide you and support you in ways that you might not realize.
Oops. That should have been addressed to policyforever867...
Source, please, or is this a vanity?
Trinity Sunday (and the Trinity season)
HaSheeloosh HaKadosh: The Holy Trinity
Astronomers tell us the universe is expanding. But if the universe is everything how can it be expanding and what is it expanding into? Although they can measure it in scientific terms, they can't explain it. I suppose we just have to take it on faith that what they say is true.
Not really. Doppler effect pretty much convinces me about the universe expanding. 3 is 1 and 1 is 3 hasn't been explained to my satisfaction yet. BTW, because the universe is expanding doesn't necessarily mean its everything. That's your spin.
Some say paradox, some say mystery. Apparently they're not on the same page yet. :-)
My glib approach is that nothing we say about God is true, but some things are even further from the mark than others. Also, God being the only one of his kind and a priori different from everything and relationship which language deals with, all the things we same a bout him should be preceeding by "sorta like".
For example. God isn't even "one" the same way other things are one. When we attribute "oneness" to God, we Tgrinitarians find ourselve simmediately in trouble and have to say, well He's Three, also, But He's not three the way other triads (for example, the tri-lateral commission, Sahdrach, Meshach, AND Abednego, Tinkers, Evers Chance)are three and He's not one the way any thing we ever thoguht of as one is. (remember the campaign slogan, "Nixon's the One" - to which I always wnated to say, "He IS? You sure coulda fooled me!") He's just "sorta like".
And if I then say that something else is a better "sorta like" I end up in REAL trouble.
That's how I do it, anyway.
To support the idea of a three-in-one Godhead you must use terms not found in the Bible, rely on false scripture based on twisted interpretations that contradict extremely clear scripture and create a convoluted theory that no one really understands....forcing its adherents to declare it a mystery.
Your entire post was a mystery. In any language that God has given us one means one and three means three.
That's true. But keep in mind that "mystery" doesn't mean it can't be understood at all. It means it can't "all" be understood. Like your love for your child. You can explain it in part, but there are parts that go beyond your conscious grasp.
And trying to understand more and more, is a good thing, worth your effort. Psalm 119:34 --- Give me understanding, that I may keep your law and obey it with all my heart.
Oh, but I never said that. I said it can't be fully grasped by created intellect. Why would you think an infinite and transcendant God would be otherwise?
I gave you a reference where it's explained, explained clearly, and explained so that any literate person can understand it.
That's a good thing, right?
In any language that God has given us one means one and three means three.I don't think this conversation can be carried on to anyone's benefit using an adversarial approach. I'm not saying you're doing that. I'm preemptively excusing myself from the conversation if it gets anything but easy going and meditative.
If you will reread my post, you will see, I think, that I didn't say anything about any language that God has given us, or, for that matter, any language we have managed to come up with one our own, with or without God's help. What I am trying to say is something like this. God is more unlike anything else than He is like anything else. I would suggest, that the most basic predication, namely: that something "is, is made about God in a way defferent from the way it is made about anything else. God "sorta like" is.
Yes, one means one. But "one" is attributed to, ah, wine bottles, in a way different from the way it is attributed to God. For one thing, THIS wine bottle is one, but one among many. If monotheism is true, then God is one, but not one among many.
So, someone might say, well God is one among all the things that are. I would say back, that God "is" in a manner different from the other things that "are" because His "being" lets them "be", since they exist at His will and are only because He is.
Creatures "are" in a dependent way. God "is" as the source of Being. Creatures "are" for a while. God always "is" (by definition). A dog who eats a powerful explosive, is only "one dog" for a while, then he is many pieces of dog, while the dog is only a memory.
Is a car "one" or is it a mess of parts, and does the word we use just means something like "a bunch of parts which together sometimes move humans around, and other times make money for mechanics, or, as parts, make money for junkyard owners." So one and many is sometime hard for even dogs and cars.
But God, they say, and it seems smart, has no parts. He is "one" through and through.
But, while God has no Father, sometimes Jesus, who is God, addresses Himself to "The Father". If they're one, why Jesus address anything to the Father. It would be like an itch telling itself it itched. If they're not one, either Jesus is not God, or God has a father who is not God. Or, maybe, just maybe, when we say, "Shema Yisroel, Adoshem Elohenu, Adoshem ehad," maybe "ehad" isn't exactly as simple as we thought it was, no matter what language we speak, and especially when attributed to the LORD our God.
As I said, "Sorta like" one. "Sorta like" three.
But yeah, ontology is a mystery, pretty much. I'll cop to that.
Yes. But in the language of metaphysics, person and nature are not the same thing. Person is an identity. "George W. Bush" is a person. That's his identity, his "who". His what is a nature. It's the collection of qualities and capabilities that are proper to the class to which he belongs, that of human beings.
God is three persons with one divine nature. You know about things that have nature without person; a rock has a rock nature but there is no "rock person", so a rock exhibits a zero-to-one relationship of person to nature. You, yourself, have a human nature, and are a human person; that's a one-to-one relationship of person to nature.
God has a three-to-one relationship of person to nature. This is without precedent in the created world, which has only one-to-one (humans and angels) and zero-to-one (inanimate objections, animals) relationships of person-to-nature. But it is not illogical, or even paradoxical.
why can't you explain it to me?
See post 35, but that's a (very partial) summary of something that's much longer. See Sheed's book.
Sometimes it is simply part of a number, like "eleven" (echad + 'asar, one plus ten), in , for example Genesis 32:22. Sometimes it is as well translated by an indefinite article (a[n]): "a new cart" (1 Sam. 6:7); "a juniper tree" (1 Kings 19:4,5); "a book" (Jer. 51:60).
Perhaps most importantly, echad clearly has the meaning of single, alone, ONLY one, or JUST one, the ideal of a limit of one (Num. 10:4; Josh. 17:14; Esth. 4:11; Isa. 51:2). In Deuteronomy 17:6, for example, it really isn't precise English to translate echad merely as "one". For if the "one" witness referred to is the second of the third witness, then that one witness is enough to convict the hypothetical person of murder. The meaning is that a person must not be put to death of the evidence of only one witness (which is the way the NRSV translates it). Echad means "one" and ONLY one.
I don't see how it relates to the problem I'm rasing about predications about God.
If you look in the tanak you will find that God's nose got hot on more than one occasion. Between you and me, I don't think God really has a nose. (Not counting the Incarnation, I mean) They must be making a predication analogically. In fact it's an analogy piled on an analogy, like Pelian on Ossa - and still unable to reach as high as the Olympus of non-analogical attributions about El Shaddai. It's "sorta like" his nose got hot.
YEAH, I get that there's a jump from noses to number. But I tried to say "one" isn't such an easy idea even when used about dogs and cars. It gets totally out of control when applied to the LORD. (Trying to approximate RSV usage when referring to the Holy Name here, out of respect, not to say terror.)
Now listen class: if ANYONE, I repeat, ANYONE, starts singing "One is the Loneliest Number" heads will ROLL! DO I make myself CLEAR?
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