Holy, holy, holy!
Merciful and mighty
God in three persons
Blessed Trinity
Oh God in three persons
Blessed Trinity!
Indeed, I dare say all spiritual awakenings begin with worship. Sometimes moving from the head to the heart, sometimes with eyes newly beholding the glory of God, sometimes with ears hearing the rushing sound of heaven.
We also love because he first loved us.
I am not interested in opening any doors to pseudo-Christian groups who might want to add anything to Christianity which is not in the Bible. But I am an opponent of the tendency to go from this honest motivation to overestimating how much Christians and Christianity understand God in His entirety.
I am a Trinitarian and I have explained the reasons why I like Trinitarian doctrine. But this idea that God is triune or three is definitely NOT one of them.
point taken, however, i didnât think that was what i was intending to convey.
i agree with this. Given your world view, you would be thinking about Gods response to Job and his friends about thisâŚits pretty clear that God has made that exact point. But having said this, whilst God may not be describable in human terms, his will and wishes for us are very very simple. Christ clearly modelled and described those things to us and the follow up from the writings of the apostles point to the fact that humans complicated morality, not God (ie they, the pharasees, made the law a burden and that was never its intention.)
EDITâŚif its ok i would like to acknowledge at this point that i accept the obvious difficulty you guys see in my world view (ie that it has tendencies towards legalistic implementations). I can honestly tell you guys that SDAâs are not a legalistic denomination despite the label. I think the label stuck because we spend the vast majority of our time defending the 4th commandmentâŚit seems to consume so much of the discussion with SDAâs that others think that sums up our theology, however, this isnât actually the case. SDAâs strongly believe that we are saved entirely by faith in the grace of God.
In terms of the statements SDAâs have made about wayward members not being savedâŚhave any of you listened to fundamentalist baptists lately? They preach hell and destruction from sunrise to sunset so i think that this âlabelâ i get is more a result of the terrible habits of early conservatives rather than a logical common sense approach to scripture.
i would just like to respond to this MitchelâŚabsolutely fantastic stuff and i really like what you have written there. I think when i sit in church (which is rarely) and listen to ministers preaching, they bore us with the same old same oldâŚmy eyes always light up when something so true is presented in a manner that really hits one between the eyes. I would love to hear a minister get up and preach the trinity like what you have done in this wonderfully enlightening and concise post. Thank you.
i have a true story along these linesâŚ
When i was quite young (grade 3 or 4 primary school i think it was), an Electrolux vacume cleaner sales rep came knocking on our door to demonstrate a new vacume cleaner to mum and dad. Being the child i was, this bright shiny and wonderfully modern looking appliance looked and sounded so much better than the old crappy one that we hadâŚwhen he came to the end of his sales pitch and my parents were deciding on whether or not to make a purchase, their no1 child piped up and said âmummy please buy it, i will do all the vacuuming whenever it has to be done if you doâ
Of course the novelty of the new vacume cleaner must have worn off rather quickly because i cannot actually remember having ever vacuumed that entire house even after they brought the thing 
LOL
My experience as a parent is that you can get this response simply by saying they are good at something. âYou are really good at cleaning the kitchenâ somehow becomes âwe are going to make you clean the kitchen all the time now.â Sigh⌠parenting can be such a minefield⌠phewâŚ
For what itâs worth I didnât have any edge toward you in particular in saying that. It is a general complaint with Christianity that it cheapens the sacred by casting it as something certain and explicit.
Which leads to the conclusion that if you do a poor job, then you wonât be asked to do it again.
Many of the early Christian schisms dealt with the correct understanding of the relationship between Jesus and God.
While the Trinity may not be in the Bible, history seems to indicate that it is a central part of Christian theology.
For my part, I have always liked the shamrock as a metaphor for the Trinity. Itâs an oldie, but a goodie.
Indeed, it is the essence of the very first agreement in the ecumenical council (Nicaea 325 AD) on the defining belief of Christianity! And while this derived from a dispute with the Arians this is NOT a schism in Christianity since that dispute defined Christianity as a religion.
On the other hand, the word âChristianâ predates this and is found in the Bible ( Acts 11:26, Acts 26:28, and 1 Peter 4:16) as a derogatory term for the followers of Christ, which is a typical way in which the names for the followers of a religion originates.
My definition by the creed of Nicea 325 AD is just to define the word âChristianityâ as a religion distinguished from other religions by the most concrete measure according to stated beliefs. Definitions according to âfollower of Christâ or some essential goodness fails to do this, and is too offensive to other religions which claim to follow Jesus like Islam and to other people who see no reason to associate the goodness of people with Christianity.
Despite my Irish ancestry, I do not like it. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not three parts of God. As a metaphor it fails horrendously to explain the doctrine of the Trinity. At best the shamrock can only serve as a visual representation like a logo for the Trinity.
Personally, I like the banana.Three parts of the same substance, making a whole banana.
There is a lot of stigma attached to Trinitarian analogies and accusations abound about one heresy or another. Peraonally I just consider how i am viewed@
As son
A husband
A market trader
They are all , all of me, but they only appear in the right environment. I am always a son, butâŚ
The only problem being i could reel off several more âidentitiesâ God only has the three, that we know of.
The point is not which analogy you choose or latch onto but to assert that there is still only one God. Calling it a mystery was probably the worse idea ever to come from Christendom.
I think many people just accept it for what it is and donât fret the small stuff. We canât fathom God so why try?
Richard
i use the only example i know when trying to explain the trinity:
A Family.
I appreciate the complaint that the Holy Spirit doesnt seem to be biblically respresented as female, and Jesus was obviously a male child (leaving females outside in the cold apparently), however, surely we can accept that given the patriarchal system back in the early days of religion and culture, the tendency towards representing only males shouldnt be suprising. For me, this tends to show that the Bible is timeless. It has the capacity to find relevance in any time and culture whether patriarchal or otherwise.
Woman Wisdom in Proverbs is one example I can think of. Tremper Longman has an introduction to the book I liked. In it he explains how chapters 1-9 form the story of a young man being called to by Woman Wisdom and Lady Folly. Both woman desire an intimate relationship, but itâs impossible to be intimate with both of them.
⌠oh and thereâs also the Caananite prostitute
That fits with the translation of the Greek ĎÎŻĎĎÎšĎ (PISS-tiss) as âallegianceâ, which combines the oft-ignored rendition as âfaithfulnessâ back with the more common âtrustâ. Incidentally that solves the âfaith versus worksâ issue: if we are saved by allegiance, then faith and works are hand in hand. You may not be able to choose what you believe, but yes, you can choose where to put your allegiance. And no matter who or what you give your allegiance to, there will be doubt.
Iâve always considered that bit to be shallow, a simplistic way of avoiding having to think.
My guess is He needed people to choose allegiance freely. Some will say that it was inevitable that humans would try to go our own way; I donât feel like thatâs really important because itâs a âwhat if?â question and those are rarely productive of anything. The fact is that every one of us has in fact chosen to carve our own path, or some to let others carve a path for them, and thatâs the situation we have to face. The other critical fact is that even though we all decided to be our own masters God still wanted us all in His family, and He acted down through history to make that possible.
Iâd say that thatâs part of allegiance. We have been given a gracious Lord by a gracious Father and have been called by a gracious Spirit, and allegiance means trust â not that He will make everything comfy for us but that we will arrive at the right destination.
It describes enough of His attributes, all that is necessary and maybe a bit more. I feel that if we were given all of His attributes our brains would overload and fry â which is why I look forward to a new brain!
And find Michael Heiserâs talks on the subject; he shows how second-Temple Jews understood a YHWH in heaven and a YHWH who walked on earth as a man, yet regarded them as one YHWH even so, and if you find the right talk he goes into how they were starting to see the Spirit of YHWH as distinct from the other two yet also YHWH and still just one YHWH. Jewish scholars declared all that a heresy when it became clear just how easy it made a transition to Christianity, but it was there and real. So as Heiser concludes, the Trinity is there in the Old Testament.
Second-Temple Jews certainly saw two âpowersâ in heaven, a YHWH who was always in the heavens and a YHWH who walked on earth as a man â and since both of those act like persons, those Jews were essentially binitarian. Itâs hard if not impossible to read the scriptures and not see that the Father is YHWH and is a Person and that the Son is YHWH and is a person, and the Spirit is also plainly YHWH.
What else would you call it? Itâs something we conclude from the scriptures yet canât explain.
That chops God into three parts worse than the shamrock does.
I like but donât really grasp an illustration given by a physics professor: the Trinity is like an electron; an electron has mass, charge, and spin, and if you take away any one of those youâve taken away the whole electron.
i use the analogy of family because God from the first days of creation set in place the fundamentals of family and the bible spends a significant number of its pages talking about Marriage, Son of God, Father in Heaven, this is my son in whom i am well pleased, etc. The beauty of the family unit as an illustration of God is that whilst there are individuals within a family, the nonsinful family would remain completely harmonious and like mindedâŚwe see little snippets of that in the phrase âblood is thicker than waterâ.
There is no analogy that fits.
Yeah ⌠I think I agree with the observation that any analogy that would purport to nail down trinitarian understandings will automatically be a heresy (or at least whenever such things are deemed to be the last word on it). But that doesnât mean itâs without usefulness or value.
Speaking of which âŚ
Alright, Phil - help me out. Thereâs the peel. And then the fruit itself. Whatâs the third? (or is it the little âhandleâ? â Ah - I think I see that.)
âLet your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.â -Colossians 4:6
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