Posted on 05/24/2016 6:49:46 AM PDT by Salvation
Many of you know that I write the Question and Answer column for Our Sunday Visitor. Given the celebration of Trinity Sunday this past Sunday, I thought I might reproduce here on the blog a question/answer regarding the Trinity. It is a fairly common question; perhaps you have it, too. Remember that my answers in the column are required to be brief.
We read in a recent Sunday Gospel (May 1, 2016) that Jesus says that the Father is greater than He (Jn 14:28). Since we are all taught that each Divine Person of the Blessed Trinity fully possesses the nature of God, equally to be adored and glorified, what did Jesus mean by such a statement?” – Dick Smith, Carrolton, TX.
Theologically, Jesus means that the Father is the eternal source in the Trinity. All three persons of the Trinity are co-eternal, co-equal, and equally divine. But the Father is the Principium Deitatis (the Source in the Deity).
Hence, Jesus proceeds from the Father from all eternity. He is eternally begotten of the Father. In effect, Jesus is saying, “I delight that the Father is the eternal principle or source of my being, even though I have no origin in time.”
Devotionally, Jesus is saying that He always does what pleases His Father. Jesus loves His Father; He’s crazy about Him. He is always talking about Him and pointing to Him. By calling the Father greater, He says (in effect), “I look to my Father for everything. I do what I see Him doing (Jn 5:19) and what I know pleases Him (Jn 5:30). His will and mine are one. What I will to do proceeds from Him. I do what I know accords with His will.”
So although the members of the Trinity are all equal in dignity, there are processions in the Trinity, such that the Father is the source, the Son eternally proceeds from Him (Jn 8:42), and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principal (Jn 15:26).
St Thomas speaks poetically of the Trinity as follows:
Genitori, Genitoque … Procedenti ab utroque … compar sit laudautio
(To the One Who Begets, and to the Begotton One, and to the One who proceeds from them both, be equal praise.)
The Athanasian Creed says the following regarding these processions:
The Father is made by none, neither created nor begotten.
The Son is of the Father alone, neither made nor created, but begotten.
The Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son, not made, nor created, nor begotten, but he proceeds from them.
So although equal, processions do have an order. The Father is “greater” (as source), but is equal in dignity to Son and Holy Spirit.
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Because humility and modesty are virtues, and the source of all virtue is...?
“Christ and God The Father are not the same being.”
Plus, Satan would have never tempted God, knowing that tempting God is not possible.
Any doctrine that was established by capital punishment/murder, and the continued threat of such was NOT established from/by Jesus Christ.
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So you do not believe that Jesus Christ was crucified, dead and buried, and that the Father raised Him from the dead?
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I guess I thought we were talking about the doctrine of The Trinity, but you have made a very good argument against the Nicean doctrine of The Trinity by your post, in that God raised Christ from the dead. If they were the same wouldn’t Christ have raised Himself from the dead? God was greater than Christ so God raised Him from the dead. and on another note, if Christ was only spirit as some claim why would He need to be raised from the dead? We already know that before He was raised He was preaching to the souls in prison before His Resurrection. He is not spirit but flesh, perfected flesh.
The Trinity is different states or forms of the same spiritual entity of greater than 3 dimensions that is able to evolve by a dialectical process into the different states or forms that look and act differnet when it enters our 3 dimensional space.
I also can see that the Bible is clear about the hierarchy of authority of the trinity (See Jesus with the Centurion)
Water - One Matter
Gas - One State
Liquid - One State
Solid - One State
All 3 still Water(H2O)
God
The Father - One Title
The Son - One Title
The Holy Spirit - One Title
All 3 still God(Jesus)
Phil 2 9-11
9 Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:
10 That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;
11 And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Some words from “Isaiah”
43:10 Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.
43:11 I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no saviour.
Even God denies the existence of a “saviour”.
Gas - One State
Liquid - One State
Solid - One State
All 3 still Water(H2O)
God
The Father - One Title
The Son - One Title
The Holy Spirit - One Title
All 3 still God(Jesus)
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Nice try.
Water, steam (vapor), ice. That's good except when water becomes steam it is no longer water it is steam. When water or steam become ice it is no longer water but ice.
When Christ was being baptized by John, the voice of God was heard from Heaven saying “This is My Son in whom I am well pleased”. The voice did not say “This is Me”. The Holy Spirit was also seen descending in the form of a dove. So the Water, steam and ice were all in different places at the same time, it wasn't the same water in all three places.
I know of no place in the Holy Bible where it talks about extra dimensions and going back and forth between them, we have absolutely NO evidence of your facts. If we can make things up then you can say whatever you want but don't expect others to believe what you say. Mind you, I have no problem with your believing whatever you want, but don't make silly arguments and expect me or anyone else to believe them.
Please don’t be so dense. I was responding to teppe’s post that appeared to deny the Crucifixion. I personally believe that many times when Jesus referred to the Father he was referring to the Ain Sof, the True and the Living God outside of the Creation.
Water is H2O
Two atoms of Hydrogen and one atom of Oxygen.
No matter what it’s state. Ice, Liquid, or Steam it is still water(H2O)
St. Augustine and the Seashell, by Dr. Marian Horvat
The great Doctor of the Church St. Augustine of Hippo spent over 30 years working on his treatise De Trinitate [about the Holy Trinity], endeavoring to conceive an intelligible explanation for the mystery of the Trinity.
St Augustine with the boy on the beach
Augustine meets a boy on the beach
He was walking by the seashore one day contemplating and trying to understand the mystery of the Holy Trinity when he saw a small boy running back and forth from the water to a spot on the seashore. The boy was using a sea shell to carry the water from the ocean and place it into a small hole in the sand.
The Bishop of Hippo approached him and asked, “My boy, what are doing?”
“I am trying to bring all the sea into this hole,” the boy replied with a sweet smile.
“But that is impossible, my dear child, the hole cannot contain all that water” said Augustine.
The boy paused in his work, stood up, looked into the eyes of the Saint, and replied, “It is no more impossible than what you are trying to do – comprehend the immensity of the mystery of the Holy Trinity with your small intelligence.”
The Saint was absorbed by such a keen response from that child, and turned his eyes from him for a short while. When he glanced down to ask him something else, the boy had vanished.
Some say that it was an Angel sent by God to teach Augustine a lesson on pride in learning. Others affirm it was the Christ Child Himself who appeared to the Saint to remind him of the limits of human understanding before the great mysteries of our Faith.
Through this story, the sea shell has become a symbol of St. Augustine and the study of theology.
The declaration of the Trinity from the Council of Nicea was not coerced by Constantine, it was made in opposition to Constantine. The emperor sided with the Arians, denying the divinity of Christ and treated Him as merely a created being. The Christian understanding of the Trinity stands completely opposite to the heretical Arian understanding and thus Emperor Constantine’s at the time of the council, though I do believe that he ultimately accepted the decision of the council. It was another couple of centuries until Arianism completely faded away and it still pops up from time to time.
Your history is wrong, thus the rest of your statement is baseless.
Great story.
great & comments
Horsefeathers. Made-up Mormon "history". The Trinity was the belief of the whole church from the beginning, long before Constantine. No "government edict" was required to make it so, and the idea that heresy was a crime against the state didn't come around until AD 1100 or so.
The Father is not Jesus. The Holy Spirit is not Jesus.
This is a hint from the Word but spiritual things do not lend themselves to carnal schematics.
John 3:13 No one has ascended to heaven but He who came down from heaven, that is, the Son of Man who is in heaven.[
Can your body and soul be in two different places at the same time???
So Augustine didn't know any more than the little kid, eh???
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You are very horribly mistaken. When Constantine made the theology of the Holy Trinity the law of the land to not sign on to it in writing meant that you would be excommunicated and possibly executed. Nearly 1/3rd of the Church leaders refused to sign on until the council in 385 which started enforcing the executions.
The whole idea of what we now call the Trinity came from The Church in Greece, it was nowhere else at first. The bishop of Alexandria, he was Greek, was a friend of Constantine, that bishop was a Trinitarian and ultimately convinced Constantine to enforce that one belief so that there would be a “universal or catholic” faith.
There were church leaders who went into hiding after the 385 council rather than be executed. It was not a happy time in The Church. Constantine for his part while alive did not think it so important as the Alexandrian Bishop to go after those who would not sign on and so let them continue in their leadership positions without signing on to Trinitariansm.
The Non-Trinitarians did not as a whole think Christ any less divine than God The Father, they only believed they were not the same person, that they could be three places at one time. They believed that Christ was subservient to God the Father and that The Holy Ghost was a person of spirit only that did the bidding of both The Father and The Son.
I have no idea what Mormon made up history has to do with any of this, this was many centuries before the world ever thought about Mormons.
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