Posted on 05/23/2005 2:49:43 AM PDT by Salvation
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| Does the Trinity Matter? |
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| 05/23/05 |
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Many are ready to give a polite nod of some sort to Jesus of Nazareth. Most honor Him as a great moral teacher. Many even confess Him as Savior. But the Incarnation of the Eternal God? Second person of the Holy Trinity? |
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If that is all you ever got of the New Testament, that would be enough. "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us...."
2 Cor 13:11-13
Brothers and sisters, rejoice.
Mend your ways, encourage one another,
agree with one another, live in peace,
and the God of love and peace will be with you.
Greet one another with a holy kiss.
All the holy ones greet you.
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
and the love of God
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.
God can’t be one and three at the same time.
1 John 5:7 -- "For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one."
Love is always "in practice," and it is always, at the very root, I - love - you. There you have your image of Trinitarian love: I and love and you. Except that the love is kaleidoscopic: it goes round and round from one to the other reciprocally, full of glory, full of bliss.
Or, to put it another way: God is love, for all eternity; but God could not be "love" if God were just one Person: He could only be an egotist, so to speak. But the fact that God, who is One Being, is a community of Persons --- you could meditate on that forever. It is so beautiful.
Salvation thought Jesus Christ, however, IS limited to Christianity...
"There is no under name given to men under heaven by which me must be saved."
As salvation was not the subject I limited myself to the concept of the Trinity.
Very true on the egotist part.
Do you ever hear Christ, the Father or the Holy Spirit glorifying themselves?
No, they glorify each other. The Trinity is an "unselfish" model of total giving for us to imitate in all our relationships. (Very similar to that of a husband and wife.)
I found this piece interesting because he detected connections between failure to accept the Trinity and various social/political conditions.
However, the knowledge of the Triune God changes everything: the perception of the positive value of Creation and multiplicity, of the sexual duality and its significance, of marriage and fatherhood, the perception of communion as the specific human vocation, the meaning of existence and personhood. It even radically changes the meaning and value of economic life and the polis. And if we do not notice this it is, frankly, because our minds have ceased to be Christian.
The god that Feuerbach and Marx criticized, the god that Nietzsche killed, was that god of the philosophers, that invented god, created by a Reason that was made judge of all things. This Reason refers to itself as enlightened, but in reality it is too blind to recognize the Mystery of which all reality is composed. It is true, that god cannot save the world. That god is false. It is not the Living God, but a meager human invention, ultimately at the service of a social and political system, at the service of the State. Today this system is dying, along with its gods. And those sectors of the Church (unfortunately very broad ones) that have given their minds over to it have become sterile and are dying along with it.
Thank you!
Beyond that the Hindus double the size of the Trinity by reflecting it in Male and Female forms. Then they triple it by reflecting it through this plane, Heaven, and Hell (or the Demon Realm).
It gets tripled yet again by projecting it through time (past, now, future). There are undoubtedly other reflectings, doublings and triplings of which I have only the dimmest understanding.
So, if you asked a Hindu if he or she thought the Trinity to be important, he or she would probably say "yes" and invite you to discuss something else since it is so terribly complex.
The Christian Trinity is much simpler.
A logical question ~ are men "saved" through Jesus name after the Second-Coming, or is that limited only to the First-Coming?
Check it out in the original Sumerian first. It was (and still is) the practice in English for royals of all kind to speak of themselves as "we" and "our".
The Christian Trinity is much simpler.
No, the Father eternally begets the Son and the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father -- simultaneously. That is what the Church taught since the 4th century, and that's what the Church teaches to this day.
BTW, that icon of Trinity is contrary to Scripture. God the Father cannot be portrayed.
Now, how is it I can discuss God in this thread yet be unable to represent God?
'tis a mystery, forsooth!?
Such is the fate of artists! LOl!
I don't want to get into anything way, way over my head philosophically (and I often think we ought not dare to speak of the inner life of the Trinity at all without dropping to our knees and confessing, "Alas, I am a man of unclean lips") but could anybody explain to me --- sorta briefly ---what is the difference between the Second Person of the Trinity being "begotten" and the Third Person "processing"?
I never grasped the "eternally begotten" part because "begetting" means to make a female pregnant, and of course there's no female in the Trinity. So, since it doesn't mean THAT, I really don't know why that word was chosen; or how it is distinct from "proceeding."
Please excuse. Once again, I feel abashed to be even speaking of the Trinity. But as Psalm 119 says,
"The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding unto the simple...The righteousness of thy testimonies is everlasting: give me understanding, and I shall live."
All of the things in the Nicene Creed are there for a reason. They dealt with heresies of their day.
"Begotten not made,"
Not made through femail-male, but begotten by the Holy Spirit.
processing is a form of proceeding -- Christ told the apostles before the Ascension that he was sending the Holy Spirit (didn't use those exact words) to be with them always. If fact, he said, "I will be with you always." Again denoting and emphasizing the timelessness of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We try to put them in boxes, but we just can't.
Your Welcome look at my other replies to that statememt.
Anything to refute What is.
Oops.
female-male
The Sumerians "invented" writing.
There are more than a couple of Scriptural references to the "Spirit", and more than one name is applied. Whole religions have been constructed out of this.
”You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”Acts 1: 8
Where did he read these stories and in what writing style were they written?
BTW, long after Moses they seem to have been down to one copy of the Torah. The prophet tells us that it had to be reassembled as best they could. We have no idea what was lost or moved around.
The tradition is that Moses was a Hebrew, by birth, but an Egyptian through adoption.
Moses was given the first five books of the old Testament as an inspiriation By Father God Himself.It did not come from ancient writings or anything he read as far as I believe, or understand.
I also believe that Scripture is inerrant and therefore if it says in Genisis "Let us make man in our image" then Father God was talking to someone and it wasn't man.
Yes Moses was adopted Egyptian but he was raised by his birth Mother a Hebrew, and if you study the Exodus you find that he practiced Hebrew Traditions and Worship.
I beheld till thrones were placed, and the ancient of days sat: his garment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like clean wool: his throne like flames of fire: the wheels of it like a burning fire. (Dan. 7:9)
The West always allowed such images, and the East did too:
This is incorrect, Salvation. The Creed says that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, not of the Holy Spirit.
God the Holy Spirit does not beget God the Son eternally according to the divine order.
However, Jesus Christ the incarnated God-man, is indeed begotten in time by the power of God the Holy Spirit in the natural order.
I find it odd that someone who professes Eastern Orthodoxy would make such a blunder.
Eastern Orthodox believers have portrayed the Father iconographically for centuries upon centuries.
From Him, certainly, from whom the Son had his Divine nature, for He is God of God, He has also, that from Him too proceeds the Holy Spirit; and hence the Holy Spirit has from the Father Himself, that He should proceed from the Son also, as He proceeds from the Father. Here, too, in some way may this also be understood, so far as it can be understood by such as we are, why the Holy Spirit is not said to be born, but rather to proceed; since if He, too, was called a Son, He would certainly be called the Son of both, which is most absurd ... For so thou wilt see how the birth of the Word of God differs from the procession of the Gift of God, on account of which the only-begotten Son did not say that the Holy Spirit is begotten of the Father, otherwise He would be His brother, but that He proceeds from Him. Whence, since the Spirit of both is a kind of consubstantial communion of Father and Son, He is not called, far be it from us to say so, the Son of both. (St. Augustine, On the Holy Trinity, XV, chapter 27)
If you doubt that and think that God handed down all the words verbatim, note that Moses included his own personal experiences in his writings.
Although it is not inconceivable that God "inspired" Moses to write down his own personal history, word for word, how about Moses simply using the brain God had so amply provided him with to do the job.
Remember, Moses was a man chosen as a prophet. He was not a robot.
In some quarters the term "Biblical Inerrency" means "true to the sources".
Even if Moses used some of his personal experience Why couldn't have Father God inspired Moses in what to write about those experiences?
God not only inspired Moses to write his Hisotry but the History of the Hebrew people. Including the Genesis account.
To say that anypart of Scripture is untrue is to disquallify all of Scripture.
My understanding of inerrancy is without error so again I say if it says in Genisis one " Let us make man in our image" Father God the creator of all wasn't talking to animales or man he was talking to someone. That being Holy Spirit and Christ the Son all the same person.
Moses told the story as if he'd lived the life. God told him to free His people. Moses set about doing that. One would imagine he could use all the help he could get, even ancient Sumerian stories conveniently located in Egyptian archives where they'd been left behind by the Sumerians who assisted the Egyptians in developing their hieroglyphic system.
There's really nothing wrong with compiling the stories of the prophets in one book.
As far as making a mistake is concerned, after the Egyptians destroyed Solomon's Temple, and they were down to one Torah, which had to be reassembled, there may have been some mistakes. They are not insurmountable. After all, we are at least as educable as our ancestors!
May 22, 2005 Trinity Sunday
Reading I (Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9) Reading II (2 Corinthians 13:11-13)
Gospel (St. John 3:16-18)
If we were simply to look objectively at what it means to be Christian, there are quite a number of things that we can point to as being critical to our faith. However, the central tenet of our faith is the belief in the Most Holy Trinity; everything else revolves around that single point. It is something which, on one level, we tend to take for granted, and, on another level, most of us probably rarely even think about it. It is something that is so critical that without it we could not even call ourselves Christian.
For instance, you can think about the Jehovah’s Witnesses who run around banging on your doors, and also the Mormons who do the same thing. They call themselves Christian, but they are not. They do not believe in the Trinity. And because they do not believe in the Trinity, neither do they even believe in the same Jesus. They talk about Jesus, but they do not believe the same thing about Him. The Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that Jesus is Saint Michael the Archangel, and the Mormons think that Jesus is just one of us, that He is not God but He is just a human being like the rest of us. They talk about Him as being a “nice guy” but that is all they can really say. They will claim He is the savior of this world, but that is because the Mormons claim that each one of us will be a savior of our own world, so we are no different than He is and He is no different than we are. This is just the world that God gave Him to save; we will all have our own.
So we see that to deny the Trinity is to deny everything that we believe about the Person of Jesus Christ. This is why it is so critical in the Gospel reading today that Saint John tells us that God sent His Son into the world not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him, and that everyone who believes in the Name of the only Son of God has eternal life and anyone who does not believe has condemnation because they did not believe in the Name of the only Son of God. It is not just believing generically in the Name of Jesus, but it is believing in the very Person of Jesus Christ. To believe in the essence of Christ is to believe that He is God and that He is one with His heavenly Father, Who revealed His Name to Moses upon the mountain as He passed by.
Of course, it is translated in the reading that we just heard as “Lord” but that is not what it says in Scripture. What it says in Scripture is “Yahweh” – I AM, the One Who is eternal. So if we believe that Jesus Christ is one with His heavenly Father, then He also is eternal. He has no beginning and He has no end. In His humanness, there is a beginning but there will be no end, just like our souls have a beginning but they will have no end. But His Person as God has no beginning and has no end. God is eternal, and eternity means no beginning and no end. Our souls are immortal. They have a beginning, they were created at a specific time, and they will have no end. Our souls cannot die, so they will continue to live in one of two places for eternity; and as is made clear, that is going to depend upon our belief in Jesus Christ.
Not the kind of belief that so many Christians would say, “As long as you believe in Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior you are going to heaven.” That is not what it means. It means to believe in the very Person of Jesus Christ, to believe in Who He is. If we believe in Who He is as the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, God Who lives and reigns forever, then that means we have to believe in every single thing that He has taught and everything that He is. It is no longer merely an objective belief that we can look at a series of propositions to ask, “Do I believe that or do I not?” But it is about entering into a relationship with a Person. The only way to enter into a depth of a relationship with the Person of Jesus Christ is through the Holy Spirit because no one can even say “Jesus is Lord” except through the Holy Spirit. So we see how the entire thing works together.
There are only two other religions in the world who believe in only one God, that is the Jewish people and the Muslims. But, again, even though they believe in one God, both reject the concept of the Trinity. The Jewish people believe in God Who revealed Himself in the Old Testament. But the idea that God revealed Himself as one was to be able to show the pagans, who were worshipping all of their false gods, all of their little idols, that it was wrong and there is only one God. There are certainly indications in the Old Testament about the Trinity, but what was made clear in the Old Testament was the oneness of God. In the New Testament, the fullness of the revelation of God is in the Person of Christ and in the sending of the Holy Spirit.
So what we have to look at is this belief in the Trinity. So central, in fact, is this belief to who we are, that already in the Mass (not just today’s Mass because of the Trinity, but every single Sunday) we have expressed our belief in the Trinity on five occasions. We began with the Sign of the Cross. In the greeting, we repeated exactly what we heard in the second reading from Saint Paul when he wrote to the Corinthians: The grace and peace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. That was the second point at which we pronounced our faith in the Trinity. Then in the Kyrie, three times we prayed: Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy in honor of the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. And then in the Gloria, once again we prayed to our Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Then at the end of the Collect, or the opening prayer, we asked through Our Lord Jesus Christ that the Holy Spirit would pray to the Father. So we see that just in the first couple of moments of Mass we expressed this belief in the Trinity five times. All of our prayers are made in the Trinity. It is critical to who we are and who we understand ourselves to be.
If the Trinity is not a reality then our faith in Jesus Christ is blasphemy. If God is not a Trinity of Persons then everything we believe about the Eucharist is completely false, because if God is not a Trinity then Jesus is not God. If God is not a Trinity then the Holy Spirit could not have overshadowed Our Lady for the conception of Jesus Christ, He could not come down upon the bread and wine to change them into the very Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, and He could not be given to each one of us to lead us into all truth. We begin to see that this point is so central that without it every single thing we can say about our faith is false. It is so central that without our belief in the Trinity everything else completely falls apart.
So it is something that we really need not merely to take for granted, but to enter into. The Trinity is one of the mysteries that is known as an “absolute mystery,” which means it is something we will never be able to understand fully. It could not have been known without specific revelation from God, and once it is revealed there are some things that we can say and understand about it but we will never be able to grasp it completely – even in the next life. Part of what is going to make heaven so wonderful is that there is always more, because God is infinite and our minds are merely finite. Consequently, the finite cannot comprehend the infinite. So there will always be more for all eternity. And since God is love, it is more love. Our hearts are going to be completely filled with the fullness of God, and there is always more. It never, ever will end. And what is it that we are going to be caught up into? The very love of God, Who is One in Three Persons.
Now we might say, “That sounds illogical. How can three be one?” Well, first of all, by the very nature of God. God is love. You cannot be in love with yourself; that is narcissism. So if God is one (and it is made very clear in the Old Testament that there is only one God), He cannot be alone because that completely contradicts the definition of love. Love requires a relationship; therefore, there must be at least two. But love by its very nature transcends the love of just two, as any husband and wife know. It is not enough just to be there and look at one another for the rest of your life. Love becomes life-giving; love transcends the two and becomes life-giving for others. Once again, just by its very nature, love cannot remain with two but it must go beyond that. For love to be complete, it requires at least three. It could have been more than that, but in the Trinity it is three. So the Three, loving one another perfectly, and the Three all being God, and God being perfect and the Supreme Being, that means there is nothing in one that is lacking in the other. Therefore, the Three are identical and they are One. The only difference between the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit is their relationship with one another; otherwise, all Three share the same Divine Substance. That would be as if somehow there were three of you but only one soul. Logically, we cannot grasp it, but that does not mean it is illogical, nor does it mean it is not true.
We can understand it by the very nature of what love means and therefore what it must be. We can see it in a variety of different ways throughout creation, the vestiges of God that are shown in so many ways that there are threes in so many things. But perhaps the clearest way to see it is to be able to look at any couple who is married. We see in the teachings of Jesus and of the Church that on the day you are married your souls are united and the two become one. How can two be one? It seems illogical, doesn’t it? Yet every married couple knows it is a reality. And every married couple knows that that love they have and the unity of persons has to be more than just themselves. Now you can ask yourself, “Just exactly how did the two become one?” You did not do that to yourselves. As much as you love one another, you cannot make yourselves into one; only God can do that. So in order for the two of you to become one, it required a third, and that third is God. Therefore, we see that marriage reflects the Trinity. There is a unity of persons and it is a union that is forged in love and that love is life-giving for new persons – just like the Trinity. The unity, obviously, of husband and wife is not quite the same as in the Trinity, because in the Trinity the Three are identical and Their love is perfect. That is not quite the way it works in a marriage. However, any older married couple will recognize, and any of us looking at an older married couple will recognize, that as that couple grows they become more identical. They start to look the same, they talk the same way, they act the same way, they think the same way. The oneness that is there from the beginning of their marriage is perfected and the two become more and more identical. Never, of course, in our humanity will we ever become completely perfectly identical, but we begin to see even in this human reality how there can be a unity of persons, how more than one can still be one, how a multiplicity of persons (Three, in this case of the Trinity) can be one God.
There are not three gods; there is one God. And that one God is Three Persons. And these Three Persons are all eternal. There is never a time that the Second or the Third Person of the Trinity did not exit. All Three have existed from all eternity, and all Three will exist for all eternity. The glory that is offered to each one of us is to enter into the love of the Trinity. We will not become part of the Trinity, but we will be brought into the very life and love of the Three Persons of the Trinity, and we will be caught up in perfect love for all eternity. That is what this is all about. Our very purpose for existence is love, and that is what God desires for each of us: to learn in this life how to love so that we will be prepared for what is to come in the next life.
So if we want to be able to love one another, if married couples want to be able to love one another more perfectly, if we want to love God and love neighbor as we have been commanded to do, then it begins by entering more deeply into the mystery that we celebrate today, to take this up in prayer and to begin even in this life to enter more deeply into the mystery of the Most Holy Trinity; and in that way to prepare yourself for eternity because that is what heaven will be: to be caught up into the love of the Trinity and to be filled to overflowing with the love of God and the love of neighbor. That is what we see in the Trinity: Three Persons loving one another perfectly, and in that perfection of love the Three are One. Each one of us, who is the overflow of the love of the Trinity, made in the image and likeness of God and sharing in the very life of God Himself, is called now to believe in the Name of the only Son of God and live that life of faith so that for eternity the fulfillment of the purpose of our creation will be ours where we will love and we will be loved, we will be caught up into this glorious mystery which will never end and which we will never even comprehend – hardly even a fraction of – for all eternity, and we will be filled to the fullness of the very love of God in the glory of the Three Persons Who are One.
* This text was transcribed from the audio recording with minimal editing.
Quoting from the Nicene Creed:
(Bow) "by the power of the Holy Spirit
he was born of the Virgin Mar, and became man,"
Guess I got the correct words in the wrong place.
"We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,"
So that would seem to make us both right.
some facts from the sermon about two other religions:
**There are only two other religions in the world who believe in only one God, that is the Jewish people and the Muslims. But, again, even though they believe in one God, both reject the concept of the Trinity.**
Read Revelation and see for yourself.... last book of Bible....
I and the Father are one.
And a helpmate shall come along...
The trinity is well-founded in Scripture.
Good post.
That's a great point to make.
What's even more interesting is that both Orthodox Jewish and traditional Islamic teaching allow for God to have "emanations" (10 in Judaism, from 19 to thousands in Islam depending on which school you follow) which blur the distinction between Creator and creation in a way which the Trinity does not.
Nice article.
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