I'm not protesting Rome; Trinity ? Does Yah'shua believe in the "trinity"? Yah'shua said our Elohim is YHvH and He is ONE. He also said "the father and I are one". "If you have seen me you have seen the father". Are the terms Father and Son metaphors ?
I do not consider myself a "Protestant".
shalom b'SHEM Yah'shua HaMashiach
I think Rome is lost in man's traditions.
It's incredible what some people who claim to be Trinitarian Christians will overlook just to ally themselves with a person who opposes Catholicism. It says A LOT about their actual faith.
All;
I’m much more comfortable with the traditional Trinitarian constructions on spiritual realities . . . the terms, metaphors etc.
because I believe the Father, The Son and Holy Spirit are evident throughout the Old Testament and the New Testament.
HOWEVER,
WHO can claim precise, exhaustive, comprehensive, full fledged knowledge and understanding of GOD in such matters and terms?
Some visitations to Heaven report ‘viewing’
The Son merging with and flowing out of—as a light flowing out of light—The Son from The Father.
Certainly Christ DID SAY that in seeing Him we saw The Father.
HOW can we comprehensively know, in this realm, what He meant by that?
And HOLY SPIRIT IS CERTAINLY EVERYWHERE.
And God’s Word, Living Word holds the fabric of reality together.
What do we finite ones know about such things?
Where is the need to tear one another’s hearts out over such issues?
I am more than a little curious,
Uri’el-2012; & Roamer_1;
What do you do with the huge issue of whether
JESUS THE CHRIST CAME IN THE FLESH?
I think not exactly metaphors. I think analogies.
All our language is informed by created things processed through created organs of sense and mulled over by created minds. There can be no language or "concept" adequate to uncreated Reality.
It does NOT follow though that no analogy is better or worse than any other.
Look, what do we say when talking about operations of the mind? "I get it." "I see" "I hear you." "I have a good grasp of this." Even "I understand." All these are concrete images, though 'understand' is now limited in use to intellectual operations.
But, in my experience FWIW, there's a wonderful thing that happens. I start by saying something like, "God is kind of like a father," but after a while I realize that I am the analogy, the construct, the "figure". God is what a human father only seems to be. I end with, "in my carnal fatherhood, I am kind of, a little, like God."
However, there are meaningful parts of the Trinitarian language. I know that you all think we're head-tripping pagans and all, but we Scholastics (or, in my case, would-be Scholastics)think any position other than monotheism is incoherent, in the strict sense. So we think there is one God -- "has to be."
Now when we say that the Son is the "only begotten of the Father" and "eternally begotten of the Father before all worlds," we are saying, first, that the Son is the same kind of thing that the Father is. Like begets like, and creates unlike.
What makes the mystery is that "the kind of thing that the Father is," is the kind where there can only be one of them.
So while I am the same kind of thing that you two are (only WAY better looking), I am a separate "instantiation" of the "humanity." But that's okay because there's no essential problem with there being more than one human. But if the Son and the Holy Spirit are the same kind of thing that the Father is, then, urp, well, in some sense they must be "one with" or identical to the Father. But in another sense, there must be SOME kind of difference, because the Son obeys the Father, and when the Son leaves the Spirit is sent (and for other and better reasons -- most of which are over my head.)
So all the language about one "substance" but three "persons" (or one "ousia" and three "hypostases" is to provide a vocabulary which allows us to say, "In the most fundamental sense 'they' are one, but in a subordinate but nonetheless real sense 'that one' is truly three."