Posted on 08/11/2016 9:06:49 PM PDT by UnChained
Beyond creeds.
All attempts to articulate the Triune Godhead that I have seen focus on inconsequentials. The nature of the Trinity is rather simple but I can't come up with a way to express it compactly so please bear with me.
You will acknowledge that God in His Omnipotence has the power to create a perfect copy of me, a color Xerox of me if you will. Such a copy might be so perfect that the copy would be convinced that he actually WAS me. My family couldn't tell the difference either because he would share every single attribute I possessed.; but he wouldn't truly BE me and I would rightly object to being killed to make room for him . Conversely, if my own attributes ever changed for some reason like due to having a stroke, and I even forgot the faces of my own children, wouldn't I still be me? I am a being and each being that exists has its own unique identity that is actually independent of whatever attributes are present or absent.
"In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.". Genesis 1:1
This verse describes the creation of the the Earth, the cosmos, and the creation of the place we commonly call Heaven. When God created everything, He also created time and space. God therefore exists beyond time and space. Glimpses we get into the third Heaven in Revelation, reveal that there is some sort of dimensionality there but one cannot reach Heaven by physically traveling to it from Earth. In a sense, the realm that we call Heaven is sort of like a parallel universe. One wrinkle in that comparison is that the time in Heaven is apparently locked to the time here on Earth. Verses that describe reactions in Heaven to events on Earth indicate that the time is synchronized between Heaven and Earth.
I said all that to highlight that our existence here on Earth is spacial and temporal. The scriptures strongly imply that existence in Heaven is spacial and temporal too. Even though the Lord's Prayer includes the line "Our Father, Who art in Heaven...", the created realm that is Heaven, doesn't fully contain God. The Psalmist says that God has to bow down to even LOOK at Heaven. When Solomon was dedicating the Temple, he said to God "even the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain You.". This is all because God is beyond time and space.
However, in the incarnation, Jesus WAS contained by time and space here on the Earth; He wasn't omnipresent even though He saw Andrew from afar. And even though all power and authority was given to Jesus; He wasn't omnipotent. When Jesus said that only the Father knew the time of His coming, Jesus implied that He wasn't omniscient either. Detailed knowledge of the future apparently was the domain only of the Father who is beyond time.
We serve a living God, but what do we mean when we we say that God is alive? Isn't it that like us, God is a Being? Doesn’t even His Name "I AM" assert God's livingness as a being? We humans are alive as sentient beings. We are each a “Self Awareness” which is something alive that is superimposed upon our biological lives. This most important component of our "livingness" is this intangible thing that is looking out of our eyes. Indeed, that is how we humans were made by God "after His own Likeness." God is a living being and so are we. Another word used to denote our being is "soul". It is our soul that we hope will live again in the resurrection. But if God reassembles you again after you are fed through a wood chipper, will the resurrected you be the REAL you or merely a color Xerox of you?
Christians believe that God has the power to truly raise them from the dead. We therefore believe God has the power to manipulate individual souls, moving them through time and space, housing them and rehousing them as needed; Indeed, He demonstrated that power by placing His own Being, His "I AM", into a human body in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago and then subsequently dieing and rising again.
It is meaningless to talk about the dual natures of Christ when the important fact is that Jesus was/is the same being as the Father. Also whatever attributes were present or absent in the incarnation is of secondary relevance to the fact that Jesus was and is, the same I AM as the Father. God didn't create a new being for Jesus’ body like He did when He breathed life into Adam. In the incarnation of Jesus, God installed His own Being, His very Life into the Human body that was Jesus’. Just as when I begot my son by contributing my LIVING sperm that became a vital part of the LIVING cell that grew into my living son; so God begot Jesus by putting His own life, His very BEING into His Son’s body. Jesus and the Father aren't two persons. They are the SAME person if the word person means anything at all. Talk of the "same substance" or of "essences" doesn't convey the awesome reality of Jesus' oneness with the Father.
The questions that may still confound the reader are "If Jesus is the same Being / I AM / Person as the Father,
How can Jesus and the Father exist at the SAME time?" ( like at the baptism of Jesus )
How can Jesus be subordinate to the Father?"
How could Jesus pray to the Father and talk about Him in the third person?"
The answer to question number one is the key to it all.
IT ISN'T THE SAME TIME!!!"
The Father is the Great " I AM " who dwells OUTSIDE of time and space. In the incarnation, Jesus was the I AM of God dwelling WITHIN time and Space. There is no paradox or simultaneity conflict between the two realms. All of God’s attributes couldn’t fit in Jesus’ human body though, The Father / Son relationship is a result of the inevitable Greater to Lesser / Begetter to Begotten nature of the relationship. In brief, Jesus is the "I AM" of God within time and space, the Father is the "I AM" Who dwells beyond time and space. If the reader can get a handle on this, all of the scriptures that touch on this topic will fall into place.
Even Jesus' existence in Heaven was/is temporal. Whether you contend that Jesus had a beginning with the start of time in Heaven, or you say that Jesus existed from eternity past before the Creation, doesn't really change what makes Jesus one with the Father. Focusing on whether attributes are shared or not doesn't affect the awesome fact that our God so contrived reality that He could give up His life for us. Jesus wasn't some hapless third party that God punished on our behalf; Jesus was God Himself in the flesh!!
That fact is much more wondrous than anything you gain by adhering to the words of some mouldy creed.
I feel this is the answer to 2/3 of the Trinity mystery. Most discussions of the Trinity only speak of the Father and the Son. I cannot even begin to ponder the nature of the Holy Spirit's relationship within the Godhead however.
Pretty good exegesis and I would have no problem with your conclusions. However I still like the example I give for the children because anyone can “get it”. The question on the Trinity is, “How can three persons be one?” Consider an Apple. Seed, flesh, peel. Three aspects, one thing. Seed contains the life force. Flesh is fruit of life. Peel is the protector of life. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Three aspects of one being, and as you said, outside of time.
What I was trying to overcome is the sterility of the ultra precise verbiage found in the creeds and that I feel also communicate error.
The Chalcedon Creed asserts that Jesus had both a God nature and a human nature with Jesus switching between the two modes. That is a pointless invention and just plain wrong. Jesus didn’t have two natures, He was just Himself.
The Nicean Creed says that Jesus and the Father were different persons but were both made out of the same “stuff”
In the interest of stating my post simply:
Jesus is the I AM of God within time. The Father is the Great I AM beyond time.
Still hard to understand I suppose, but a lot shorter.
I like how the explanation I’ve offered demolishes the Islamist’s argument that Christians are polytheist pagans. Also skeptics have sport ridiculing the notion that God provided a hapless whipping boy that He could vent His anger upon because God loved us SO much. That ridicule is answered well by the explanation above.
Regards...
The best description I ever heard of the holy trinity was said this way. Take a torch. It gives light and heat. Now divide the torch up the handle longitudinally into thirds. You now have 3 separate items that each give light and heat. Put them back together again and they are one torch. Each is a third of the whole and each is the same in substance and in function with the others. Separately the three perform the same as combined. At any time they can be separate or combined. But even when separated, they are still three parts of the same original torch, not 3 individual torches. They are one but can be 3 separately.
This analogy may not work for everyone but it worked for me. I thought it was brilliant in simplicity and in meaning.
Very interesting. I appreciate your investigation of both heaven and earth.
My response is to prefer the moldy and ancient creed from 300 A.D. “God from God. Light from Light.” Thus, it is helpful to investigate the “relations” within the Trinity.
I think your investigation of the Trinity is leading to the investigation of Christology: whether Jesus is the divine Second Person? Yes. Look at His words and His miracles. They match.
Being we are created in the image of God we are also a three-part being..
P.S.: Everything in this vanity is heretical.
I’ve read something similar before, it went on to relate that the Holy Ghost is Gods essence on earth while Jesus is now in heaven both temporally locked, while the Father is as you stipulate outside of time. It does folks what Jesus said that only the father knows the time.
I’ve always wanted to ask which Jacob wrestled with to earn his new name.
A far simpler depiction of the trinity is the h2o molecule. It exists in three states. Solid, Liquid and gas. Ice, water and vapour. The Sun the solid. The Holy Spirit the liquid and the Father the vapour.. Three states of the same molecule. This is not unique to H2O but this is the h2o planet and Christ came as a solid tangible expression of the Trinity. Christ himself said that God is spirit. nebulous like a vapour. The Holy Spirit is said to be poured out like water.
The Son the solid I should say.
Simplest thing I’ve heard is in the conclusion of one of Paul’s letters, 2 Cor 14:14.
“May the love of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you always.”
Basically, three aspects of love.
Alternatively, if you’re into configuration management, you can think of it as three views of a system.
13:14 that is.
“My God, My God, Why hast though Forsaken Me?” .... and later “It is done, into thy hands I commit my spirit”.
Here’s a novel Idea .... maybe Constantine, Alexander, Athanasius and Hosea got it wrong back in 325 AD!
And, at the “triple point” (at a certain temperature and pressure), the water exists in all three phases at the same time. Works for any material - just different temps and pressures.
The image that comes easily to me is the now-familiar view of earth from space, the blue dot against the vast black background. But in this case, the blue dot contains the entire universe, as well as the fourth dimension of time. The creator sees the beginning, the end, and everything in between, all existing simultaneously. This is omniscience.
Now suppose the creator wished to enter into the creation. The creation cannot contain the creator, but the creator can project a mental image of himself into the creation, much as we can project ourselves into a daydream (which is often the point of daydreaming) and emotionally experience something that we have ourselves created. This projection is the second person of the Trinity, fully one with the first and present from before the beginning and at every point across the four dimensional blue dot.
And finally, suppose that the creator wishes to instruct one or more of the sentient beings in his creation. He shares some of his thought with them. This "whisper" is the Holy Spirit.
The creation, including us, is a thought experiment in the mind of God. The Trinity is an elegant model of the view of the universe, as we understand it post-Einstein, from the creator's perspective. The extraordinary thing is that the early theologians worked their way to this model 1,900 years before science stumbled onto the idea of a space-time continuum, with time as merely another dimension linked organically with the spatial (and, we are now told, other) dimensions.
God exists in three distinct persons, not states. The example you suggested is classic “modalism” or “Sabellianism.” It’s one of the unorthodox teachings of T.D. Jakes and Oneness Pentecostals.
That.
LOL...I’m glad someone said it.
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