As the Catholic Catechism says,
“251 In order to articulate the dogma of the Trinity, the Church had to develop her own terminology with the help of certain notions of philosophical origin: “substance”, “person” or “hypostasis”, “relation” and so on. In doing this, she did not submit the faith to human wisdom, but gave a new and unprecedented meaning to these terms, which from then on would be used to signify an ineffable mystery, “infinitely beyond all that we can humanly understand”.
Yet that same Catechism says,
“The faith of all Christians rests on the Trinity.”
So we have here a dogma hat is described with words of a new and unprecedented meaning developed from certain notions of a philosophical origin that is now and forever beyond all that we can humanly understand. Moreover Christian faith is to rest upon this dogma!
That sounds like credulity since Paul defines faith as confidence that there is a reality, an underlying substance with evidence to support what is not beheld.
“God/Man”??? I thought you didn't teach Christ was a part God, part man.
“end of man’???.....where does that expression come from?
One of my thematic complaints, you may have noticed if there was anything in my rants worth noticing, is the non-Catholic non-Orthodox somewhat contemptuous view of reason (as it seems to me, at least.) I think one of the reasons Justin Martyr and Augustine loom large in our legend is that they were both "philosophers" before they converted and they both experienced their relationship with Christ not as ending their philosophical occupation but as "Baptizing" it.
Reason, we think, rightly used leads inevitably to the conclusion that there is a God, and only one of Him. But without revelation (which implies grace) reason won't be able to know Him, though it can lead to some imperfect knowledge about Him.
I think the Philosophers around the Mediterranean did remarkably well in some ways, while they remained disastrously wrong in others. And in Asia, I think Buddhism, most of whose schools reject anything like a personal God who bestows grace, also achieved wonderful things. I think it is especially remarkable that the Mahayana school developed that idea that compassion - what I call "suffering love" is a virtue above "enlightenment."
BUT there is a transformation required when you have the revelation that God is personal (or "Meta-personal"), that He stands outside creation as a sculptor stands outside his statue, AND that, while ontologically utterly distinct from creation, yet he manages to enter it fully by what Paul describes as a kind of emptying. (At least that's how we Trinitarians think of it.)
[Pause for breath, coffee, etc.]
In talking about such a Being, from the very beginning almost all our language has to be changed. I may "cause" wrinkles in the sheets and weird dents in my pillow, but the sheets and pillow and the very stuff they are made of, down to the sub-atomic particles were not caused by MOI! I am, at best, a kind of parasitic cause. and that kind of cause is all we know by experience.
Yet it is not meaningless to say that God "causes" Creation and everything in it. And so on with words like "Father", "Love", "Justice", "Happiness", and (I maintain) even "one." Everything we say about God has a "sorta kinda" implied. And not only that, but, while I think I know about fatherhood from being one and observing many, I discover over time that MY fatherhood is the "sorta kinda" fatherhood, while His is the REAL one, of which mine is a pale imitation.
So with the terms of philosophy in your quote, and their "unprecedented" character.
As to the faith of Christians resting on the Trinity: Please note that the faith of Christians does not rest on each individual Christian being able to give a halfway coherent account of the Trinity. It is lousy Trinitarian theology to say that God is like a shamrock or a three-trunked tree. But if the person saying it thinks "The Father is God, so the Son, and so the Holy Spirit; yet there is [incomprehensibly] one God," we think she will not go too far astray, at least not on account of the thinking.
Of course, is she wants to start teaching, or carried the metaphor too far, THEN there may be problems.
So "modalism" while wrong, is certainly pardonable in someone who says, "There is one God, who made me for Himself and who directs me toward himself, who saved me and is with me, who is so subtly united with me that my very desire to know God, to obey Him, to pray to Him is His and not mine." To that I would say "Close enough, especially if you remember to heed and to thank Him."
To me it's an "of COURSE!" that our faith would rest on something incomprehensible. I'll need help seeing how that could be a problem. Merely to SEE God, before the Incarnation, was usually lethal. To comprehend him? Get outta TOWN! My brain would explode if I comprehended His toenail (if He had one.)(Which, come to think of it, we maintain He did.) Incomprehensibility of the reality of God is par for the course.
What we hope for in the Trinitarian and Christological Dogmata is a kind of "method of discourse" to keep us from saying or thinking things about Him which will be grossly wrong. In our opinion, FWIW and for example, it would be grossly wrong to say, "God so loved the world that He told some inferior to go die to save it," or "Jesus was only pretending to be a man."
These dogmata are like clues (in the sense of guide strings) which we carry with us into the mystery and which help us return with a something to say which will not totally mess up ourselves or our hearers.
Enough of that. Moving along ...
I hope my response to the credulity remark can be inferred from the above. If not, let me know.
God/Man
My objection as to the word "part". This is a fine example of the problem of talking about mysteries. We don't know as much about what's right to say as we do about what's wrong to say. We would say, admitting at the outset that we can't understand it, that Jesus is FULLY God and FULLY man. The natures are not mixed, not even like sugar and water in a simple syrup. He is entirely each.
And we say that because (again -- this is always implied,I, at any rate am not qualified for or even desirous of laying down the law here -- IMHO) in our view if one takes as a premise the idea of "part" one ends up with a disastrous conclusion.
“end of man’???.....where does that expression come from?
Like I know?
;-)
All I mean is 'what man is "for"', 'why we were made'.
I mean the basic questions: "Who is he?" "Why is he here?" "Where did he come from?" "How did he get here?" "What does he want?" "How many angels can swim in the head of a beer?"
(No. Wait. not the last one.)
"The end of man", I guess, is the classification of the answers to the "'Why' questions."
You wanna impress the chicks? Go around saying "the 'heneka hou'" which means "the 'that for the sake of which'". Good luck with that.
Why did God make us -- as far as we're concerned?" Answer: For eternal happiness in knowing and loving Him ever better for ever and ever. That kind of thing.
Wow! That was long winded! If you read it, I hope it was somehow useful. May God bless you today and always.