Comments on The Everpresent Wordsnatcher: More trinity

All this trinity stuff is freaking me out, as it s...

2006-04-23T22:51:00.000-04:00

All this trinity stuff is freaking me out, as it seems to be following me everywhere.

http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/middlebrow/

I'd link to a particular discussion, except for some reason my brain can't remember how. Go figure.

Fred Sanders (the blogger in question) is one of the profs at Biola whose focus is, apparently, the trinity. Some interesting stuff (mixed in with his kids' artwork).

Eric, I'm really intrigued by the deity/higher dei...

2006-04-23T07:26:00.000-04:00

Eric, I'm really intrigued by the deity/higher deity paradigm you set up. It makes a lot of sense to non-philosophy-trained me.

And as a side note, If I might add to Eric's response to Puritan belief...

None of this discussion would even be happening if Jeff and most, if not all, of the rest of us hadn't already had Jesus as the cornerstone of our faith. If we didn't believe in Christ, there would be little point in believing or worrying about the Trinity. The discussion certainly wouldn't be going in this direction. Jeff's post wasn't an attack on the Trinity, only an exploration in very philosophical form of how we might think about the Trinity. It's something I doubt we can ever fully understand, but certainly its not a doctrine of hear no evil/see no evil/speak no evil, as you implied in your post.

I'm well aware of that, but 14:7 simply doesn't am...

2006-04-22T16:09:00.000-04:00

I'm well aware of that, but 14:7 simply doesn't amount to the claim "Jesus = Father." All it says is that knowing Jesus necessarily entails knowing and seeing the Father.

Eric - Even the pharisees believe the words of scr...

2006-04-22T07:42:00.000-04:00

Eric - Even the pharisees believe the words of scripture and like all trinitarians they too falter when it comes to who Jesus is.

If Jesus is not the only cornerstone of your faith, then you can not believe Him when He says:-

If ye had known me ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him" (John 14)

If you are busy looking at formula's then you aren't looking at Jesus & will never know Him.

That seems slightly unfair, Puritan. For one thin...

2006-04-21T05:19:00.000-04:00

That seems slightly unfair, Puritan. For one thing, nobody's suggesting that we don't believe the words of Scripture. What Jeff is questioning is what the formula means. Given that Jesus and the Father have different roles, different activities, and even different knowledge, it is plain that if Jesus were to say "I, the Son, am the Father" he would mean something different than the ordinary sense of those words. We could affirm the words of Christ, but wouldn't we still want to find out in what sense he meant them (especially since that sense would seem to be unusual)?

But I don't think that Jesus ever did say that he was the Father. I think your elipsis left out something important. In verse 24 he says, "I am he," and his disciples ask, "Who?" In verses 25-26 Jesus answers, "Just what I have been saying to you from the beginning. I have many things to say and to judge concerning you, but he who sent me is true, and I speak to the world those things which I heard from him." And then verse 27 says "They did not understand that he spoke to them of the Father." On its face, this passage seems to me to be saying that Jesus has been sent by the Father with words that he heard from the Father. This is far from a claim that Jesus is the Father.

I think it is important to simply believe Jesus on...

2006-04-21T03:11:00.000-04:00

I think it is important to simply believe Jesus on His word concerning the God and Father of Heaven:

"I Am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him" (John 14)

There is a doctrine that is essential to salvation:

Jesus speaking:
"for if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins"

... "They understood not that he spake to them concerning the Father" (John 8)

My thought is something along the lines of 2 and 3...

2006-04-20T14:15:00.000-04:00

My thought is something along the lines of 2 and 3, I think. Here is how it seems to me:

The difficulty, I think, is the use of the word "divine." When we say "divine" in the context of T1', we mean something like "shares in the essence of godhood." Now Christians like to throw around claims like "there is only one God." But in a discussion like this I think that is sort of misleading. By the standards of most men at most times, we think there are three gods. If you could somehow separate the three persons of the Godhead, each would qualify as an independent deity to pretty much anybody other than a Trinitarian Christian. If you will, you could put it this way: Jesus may be a better deity than Athena, and obviously they're very different people, but they're the same on the same conceptual level of organization.

I state it this way on purpose to suggest the following point: the Godhead is on a level of organization above that of traditional deity. This seems intuitive to me because if it the Godhead were an entity on the level of the traditional deity, its constituent persons would be some kind of sub-deities, which I don't think is true. On the hierarchy of organization, I think Jesus belongs at least at the level of Athena, if not above - certainly not below (where we might put angels and would certainly put humans).

So when Christians say "there is only one God" we don't mean that there is exactly one "divine" entity. We mean that there are three "divine" entities and one "superdivine" entity.

So why do we say "there is only one God?" Partially I think that's because we don't really have a good word for this kind of superdivine entity. We do not think that Godhead:Jesus is analogous to Cronos:Zeus. Cronos and Zeus are the same sort of entity ("gods"); the Godhead and Jesus are not. But how should we label the Godhead other than "god?" There is no other convenient term (except for Godhead, which we made up).

But the bigger reason we say "there is only one God [the Godhead]" is, I think, because people have this intuition that a god is something you can properly worship. Christians, coming from the theological background of Hebrew-Jewish monotheism, are married to the proposition that you can only properly worship one "god." By the time our theologians showed up on the scene, it was long since established that the reason you can only properly worship one "god" is because our "god" (let's call him Theo, to continue your terminology) is superior to all those other gods like Baal, Ashtoreth, Asshur, Ahura Mazda, and the like. Now the Christians come along and take this Hebrew work, which states that Theo is superior to all the other gods out there and they say this: Theo is superior to all other gods not just because he is more powerful (the way in which Zeus is superior to all other Olympians) but because he is on a higher level of organization altogether. Theo, we say, is an independent entity who comprises three entities that in any other religion would be called gods. And then we say that this newly identified class of entity is the only class that truly deserves the appellation "god." We could put it like this: Jesus is divine, but he is not a god. Athena is divine, but she is not a god. And since Theo is the only entity in his class, we say "Theo is God, there is no other." This connects in a very pleasing way with the work of earlier Hebrew-Jewish authorities who went so far as to say that entities like Baal, Asshur, and Ahura Mazda were not gods at all.

We have now solved a pressing problem in early Christian theology: how is someone who grew up worshiping an entity named Theo and who demands to be this person's only god also to worship Jesus? Isn't that having two gods? Not at all, we proclaim: you have had only one god all along; it just turns out that he's somewhat more complex than you thought. Abraham, in other words, did not worship the Father. Abraham worshiped Theo. And because the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not "gods" in the sense of entities you can properly worship and of which you must worship only one, we can say that we "worship" Jesus and yet only worship one god.

So I suggest that T3', if it can be used the way you propose using it, is false. We declare as a matter of defining terms, however, that it does not follow there are three gods. So now we have T1', which stands as you wrote it, and T3, which is making a claim about a different class of entity altogether. P4 has now also became false. This falsifies steps 2, 4, and 5 in your final argument.

I got the idea/point of Peter's article from this ...

2006-04-19T18:26:00.000-04:00

I got the idea/point of Peter's article from this cool guy named Andrew Bailey who helped me understand/respond to your post.

Becky