jr. September 18th, 2007
Check out The Fuerst Shall Be Last. This guy has some fantastic insights on Trinitarian theology.
It’s an excellent starting point for some discussion. And, I think, a cogent argument for the supremacy of Love over sovereignty as God’s defining attribute.
Brad Andrews December 14th, 2006
I was finding it too hard to keep my comments brief, so I will turn this into a entry. And it’s also a “Christmasy” post, since I would like to delve into the incarnation, the conception of Jesus, and the impeccability of Christ.
The early church considered the Incarnation to be one of the most important truths of our faith. Because of this, they formulated what has come to be called the Chalcedonean Creed, a statement which sets forth very what we are to believe and what we are not to believe about the Incarnation.
This creed was the fruit of a large council that took place from October 8 to November 1, 451, in the city of Chalcedon and “has been taken as the standard, orthodox definition of the biblical teaching on the person of Christ since that day by” all the major branches of Christianity.[1] There are five main truths the creed of Chalcedon summarized the biblical teaching on the Incarnation.
1. Jesus has two natures — He is God and man.
2. Each nature is full and complete — He is fully God and fully man.
3. Each nature remains distinct.
4. Christ is only one Person.
5. Things that are true of only one nature are nonetheless true of the Person of Christ.
The first truth we need to understand is that Jesus is one Person who has two natures a divine nature and a human nature. In other words, Jesus is both God and man. We will look at each nature.
Jesus is God
The Bible teaches that Jesus is not merely someone who is a lot like God, or someone who has a very close walk with God. Rather, Jesus is the Most High God Himself. Titus 2:13 says that as Christians we are “looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus.”
Jesus is man
It should be obvious that if Jesus is God, then He has always been God. There was a never a time when He became God, because God is eternal. But Jesus has not always been man.
But what exactly do we mean when we say that God the Son became man? We definitely do not mean that He turned into a man, in the sense that He stopped being God and started being man. Jesus did not give up any of His divinity in the Incarnation. Rather, as one early theologian put it, “Remaining what He was, He became what He was not.” Christ “was not now God minus some elements of His deity, but God plus all that He had made His own by taking manhood to Himself.”[2]
So what happened at the conception of Jesus?
In Mt.1:20, the angel tells Joseph “that which is conceived of the Holy Ghost.” The egg was generated to life as God the Son entered the egg under the superintending ministry of the Holy Spirit. No one has ever or ever will be conceived in this way. This is why Jesus is the counter-example!
The Bible is explicit that the Holy Spirit was the divine agent who caused Jesus conception in the womb of Mary. Jesus became a biological miracle with no fertilization. As this happened, the Holy Spirit protected his sinlessness as God the Son entered the womb and gave life to the egg of Mary.
So what’s the point of Jesus being tempted?
So the new question probably is: How could He truly be able to ’sympathize with our weaknesses’ (Hebrews 4:15)? If He could not sin, what was the point of the temptation?
The Bible clearly says that Jesus did not sin. The question is whether Jesus could have sinned. Those who hold to impeccability believe that Jesus could not have sinned. Those who hold to peccability believe that Jesus could have sinned, but did not.
Which view is correct? The clear teaching of Scripture is that Jesus was impeccable - Jesus could not have sinned. If He could have sinned, He would still be able to sin today because He retains the same essence He did while living on earth. To believe that Jesus could sin is to believe that God could sin.
Again, although Jesus is fully human, He was not born with the same sinful nature that we are born with. He certainly was tempted in the same way we are, in that temptations were put before Him by Satan, yet remained sinless because God is incapable of sinning. It is against His very nature (Matthew 4:1; Hebrews 2:18, 4:15; James 1:13). Sin is by definition a trespass of the Law. God created the Law, and the Law is by nature what God would or would not do; therefore, sin is anything that God would not do by His very nature.
Those who hold to peccability believe that if Jesus could not have sinned, He could not have truly experienced temptation, and therefore could not truly empathize with our struggles and temptations against sin. We have to remember that one does not have to experience something in order to understand it.
Though this sounds simplistic, God knows everything about everything. While God has never had the desire to sin and has definitely never sinned ” God knows and understands what sin is. God knows and understands what it is like to be tempted. Jesus can empathize with our temptations because He knows”not because He has “experienced” all the same things we have.
Closing responses to Henry Micheal’s comments
I am using Jesus here as a counter-example, an exception that disproves the rule.
Jesus was the counterexample that disproves the rule. Do you agree or disagree?
We’re getting into ‘rules’ again, which to me imposes a system of logic and reasoning that doesn’t allow exceptions. Jesus was the exception to this rule.
While we are not iherently damned to hell coming from our good and wise creator, as a result of the Fall and the resulting cultures we have a natural tendency to sin - a lot
Two things:
1) We were damned to hell from moment Adam committed the first [original] sin in our human timeline. I make this distinction about the human timeline because this was no surprise to God as He sits outside of time.
We have to remember this was not God’s plan. He created Adam and Eve to live in perfect communion with Him. But because he created human beings and not robots, He gave them the ability to choose right over wrong and they chose wrong.
What is beautiful about this is that even though God knew these things were going to happen [Adam's sin, damnation, etc.], He had a plan in place to come into a point into human history to remedy the situation. This is while the Bible says, “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” Christ made a way for our salvation by satisfying God’s wrath towards sin through His incarnation and subsequent sacrifice on the cross.
2) The fall did more than just give us a natural tendency to sin-we inherit a sinful nature-or total depravity. The word ‘tendency’ presupposes we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in our own power and not sin. That is what the Pharisees thought they could do by following the law. I think I remember Puritanbob saying that is your only other option if you don’t believe in total depravity. I agree with him. And the truth is, no one can follow the law perfectly. And since we can’t, we need to be absolved our responsibility to do so by someone who can fulfill it. That someone was Christ. He did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it [Matthew 5:17]
Either way, you have to deal with the question of how a fully human (and fully God) Jesus was not sinful, but the rest of humanity (save for Adam and Eve for a bit) were/are/will be. So, while there might be a work-around under the system - it just needs to be stated
In a sense, we have to accept that if God wants to work outside of a ’system,’ He can. In the conception and incarnation, we have an example of this. I hope I have tried to make an ‘official’ statement here in this post.
1. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (InterVarsity and Zondervan Publishing, 1994), p. 556.
2. J.I. Packer, Knowing God (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1993 edition), p. 53.
Honzo October 19th, 2006
I have a question for the bloggers here that is very peculiar to me. In Joshua 5:13-15, we meet the famous “Commander of the army of the LORD.” Knowing that in Revelation that angels do not accept worship, is this possibly a pre-incarnate Christophany?
Also look at Melchizedek in Hebrews 7 and in Genesis 14:17-24. Do you think that this man was a pre-incarnate Christophany?
Honzo October 9th, 2006
I just want to throw out some ideas.
What is Wisdom in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Testament? Is it the Holy Spirit? Since the words for spirit and wisdom are feminine in Hebrew, should we assume that the Holy Spirit is the feminine side of God?
This question has more to do with biblical book selection. Assuming that one finds a book that is theologically similar to the other books in the bible and yet was excluded from the cannon because it cast women in more favorable light, can we include it in the cannon now? How do we know for sure that there was no human bias in the selection process?
Anyway, have fun.
Honzo September 21st, 2006
Augustine wrote On the Trinity around 419 C.E.. This was after the Church had established the doctrine of the Trinity and now people were trying to defend the doctrine against heretical formulations. Besides the common charge of tri-theism, the greatest challenge came from the formulation of the trinity as presented by Arius. This Arianism, not to be confused with the Indian and Nazi idea of Aryanism, was very concerned with the authority of the Father. Arius promoted this so far as to make the Son lesser than the Father in their essential natures. After all the Son was begotten; since He was begotten, He must have been created. As something created, there was a time before He was created. Augustine sought to dispel these claims and to show how each member of the trinity have the same essential natures and how the Trinity was a necessary configuration of God. He did this in an interesting manner.
Augustine starts out book eight On the Trinity by stating some simple postulates of the Trinity:
It is at first odd that two parts of the trinity are not greater than the remaining part. To put it in mathematical terms Augustine maintains the following:
How can this be the case? While I don”t think he explicitly says this, but if we take p to equal ∞, or infinity then I think it can work:
Each aspect of God is infinite. But wait, if they are each infinite, then would they not be equal to each other? Yes. That is were Augustine demonstrates the idea that each member of the trinity shares the same nature.
Augustine then uses a argument from grammar to prove that God must have a triparte nature. He examines Love. In order to have love, there must be a lover, a loved, and the action of love. Since God is the very embodiment of love, and he loved himself, he must have the three natures. In order to be love, God must at the same time be the object, the subject and the verb. Restated:
1. God is the highest love
2. Love has three parts
3. ∴ God must have three parts
Augustine repeats this basic line of reasoning for the ideas of Word and Knowledge. Since each part of the equation is dependent on the other parts of the equation, no combination is greater than the remaining part and vice versa. Likewise, the distinctions between the parts are imbued in the very nature of Love, Word, Knowledge and God. In order for their to be the word (Jesus), there must be the speaking of the word (the Spirit) and the Speaker (the father). There is no before and after here. There is no speaker until there is the speaking and their is no word until the speech and or the speaker. In this sense, we can consider the word to be begotten from the speaker and at the same time co-eternal with it. This is how Augustine by-passed Arius” charge that the son was created and therefore was lesser than the father.
Why is all of this such a big deal? Why does one have to have a correct view of God and therefore the Trinity? Augustine thought that in order to love something, one must know it. How can I love my wife if I do not know who she is? Likewise, if one does not know what God is really like, then one”s love is misplaced. Augustine says in chapter 4 of book eight, “But indisputably we must take care, lest the mind believing that which it does not see, feign to itself something which is not, and hope for and love that which is false.” In other words, if your view of God does not match the reality of God, you do not really love God and your faith is a false faith!
All of this begs the question of how one can know God. In looking around, I cannot see Him, much less observe his trinitarian nature. Augustine says we can. He draws off of the idea of imago dei, the idea that humans are made in the image of God. This, coupled with his Neoplatonism, led him to think that with the turning inward of the intellect, one could grasp the reality of God. We have a mind and we know our own mind. In order to do this, there must be a mind, the knowledge of the mind and the mind that the mind knows. This parallels God. It is this way that we can realize that as we have three parts, God also has three parts. We are a lower image of God”s true image. Augustine is quoted as saying, “As far as we know God, we are like God.” This process brings about mystical overtones. With enough introspection and prayer, one can get glimpses into the reality of God. These flashes are fleeting, however and soon we are brought back to the material world.
Cross Posted at the Unsound Argument and Hundiejo.com.
Honzo August 6th, 2006
I came across this today and want to see what you all thought about it. This is a statement on the Trinity my Marcus Borg, from The Meaning of Jesus, Two Visions:
… the popular notions of the Trinity commonly imagine God as a committee of three somewhat separate divine beings. But in both Greek and Latin, the word translated “person” means a mask, such as that worn by an actor in the theater - not as a means of concealment, but as a way of playing different roles. Applying this to the notion of God, the one God in known in three primary ways: as the God of Israel, as the Word and Wisdom of God in Jesus, and as the abiding Spirit.
While I would differ on the primary meaning of Jesus, and that he alludes to pantheism a few pages back, (that is another post) I really like this way of visualizing the concept of the Trinity. What do you all think? And if I may, please include along with your reasons the above is incorrect, the view that you think is better.
Honzo May 23rd, 2006
I came across a very interesting article on Physics Web[1] the other day. It was entitled Subtle are Einstein’s Thoughts[2] and it was on the personal religion of Einstein. Yes, that was a pun and read on to find out why.
There are many quotes on religion from Einstein. Here is a sampling[3] :
Perhaps the best quote of his that really captures his views on God and religion are
A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist[4].
and
Common to all these types [religion of fear and religion of morality] is the anthropomorphic character of their conception of God. In general, only individuals of exceptional endowments, and exceptionally high-minded communities, rise to any considerable extent above this level. But there is a third stage of religious experience which belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form: I shall call it cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to elucidate this feeling to anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic conception of God corresponding to it. [5]
The article from Physics Web makes it clear that Einstein disavowed in the strongest terms the idea that there is a personal god. It also gives a short history of his religious development:
This idea of the ‘merely personal’ was an existence dominated by wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings. Instead of the personal god, Einstein maintained a ‘cosmic religion’ that was rooted in the awe in the ability to understand the universe. He said that there were hints of it in the Old Testament, Islam, and Buddhism. The rationalization of God in its purest form, one rooted in Rational Science. It is suggested that Einstein thought a personal god was too small a deity to respect. He describes the cosmic religion in his essay ‘The World as I See It”[6]
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery ‘ even if mixed with fear ‘ that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man’ I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence ‘ as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.
Religion absent of the idea of a personal god is very reminiscent of Pantheism[7] This has lead many to brand Einstein as a follower of the ‘God of Spinoza’. However, he was asked once if he did in fact believe in such a pantheistic god. He said that he was not an atheist and did not know if he could define himself as a pantheist. The main difference was that while Pantheists maintained that nature was God and not created, Einstein thought the two were separate as nature was created and God was not.
As a personal note, while I am a Christian, I very much respect his thoughts on religion. The awe that captured him draws me to science and religion at the same time. The awe found in understanding what we are not a part of - moves my heart. I do disagree with the idea of a non-personal God. However, I do agree with that we should not anthropomorphize God. It may be that our tendency to do that is rooted in his non-human nature. We have a disadvantage because we lack words that truly describe God in an accurate way. This may be, as the Physics Web article suggests, why Einstein himself used personal words to describe his god, such as ‘malicious’ and ‘rational’. We simply lack the language to easily describe such a being without using ourselves a frame of reference.
Linknotes:
This was cross-posted at the Unsound Agument
Travis Gilmore January 3rd, 2006
To help clarify the issue of the Trinity, we should examine past heresies to know what God and his divine character is NOT. The two we shall examine is moldalism and tritheism.
Modalism denies the distinction of persons within the Godhead, claiming that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are just ways in which God expresses himself. Tritheism, the other extreme of the theological spectrum, falsely declares that there are three beings who together make up God.
Now the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are defined as three persons of one essence. The term person does not mean a distinction in essence, but a different subsistence in the Godhead. There is a real or true difference between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but it is not an essential difference.
To truly understand the doctrine of the Trinity, it must first be known that we has humans cannot fully grasp of the character of God. So through his divine Word, the Trinity has been presented as a paradox, but NOT a contradiction. It is not a full explanation of God, but it is a boundary in which we should not traverse. So the Trinity defines the limits of our finite reflection.
As for the proof in the Scripture, let us consider the Word to refute all objections that the Trinity is not Biblical.
‘16As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. 17And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”
Here we see all persons of the Trinity in full glory. Christ, in perfect obedience of his Father, was baptized to begin his ministry, and the Holy Spirit was given to the Son. Each person was distinct in that they had a distinct verb associated with them. The Father spoke (intransitive) and was pleased (linking verb), the Son went up (intransitive) and saw (transitive), and the Holy Sprit descended (intransitive) and lit (transitive).
‘19Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.’
Christ gave this final commandment to His disciples, and this shows us the deity of each of these persons of the Trinity. To baptize someone ‘in the name of’ something gives that specific object as sense of worship and praise. When we pray, we pray ‘in the name of Jesus,’ for He is the Mediator between us and the Father. To pray ‘in the name of Buddha’ or ‘in the name of Chuck Norris’ would be a sin giving false worship, for it is not reverence to the Son. We baptize in the name of ALL persons of the Trinity, because each and all deserve our worship and our lives.
‘14May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.’
In his farewell of the second epistle to the Corinthians, Paul gives another glimpse into the Trinity. His blessing is that in which all persons of the Trinity bestow a virtue to the believers of Corinth: grace, love, and fellowship. A poetic and beautiful image purveys in this send-off which leaves us in terrific awe of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
1Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, To God’s elect, strangers in the world, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia and Bithynia, 2who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and sprinkling by his blood”
Finally, Peter gives us incredible insight into the nature and truinity of God. It is the Father that has chose us by grace, the Spirit that sanctifies us our entire natural life, and only because of the obedience and atoning work of Jesus the Son could this all be possible. Praise and glory be to all persons of the Trinity.
Honzo December 20th, 2005
The subject of the trinity is a difficult one, even for those that endorse it. It is hard to wrap one’s head around any paradox, especially on that involves things that are Gods being one God, something that we have no empirical evidence for.
The paradox is this:
It would seem that there is no possible way for the Father, the Son, and the Spirit to be one and yet distinct from one another. Yet, Christianity maintains it is so. This is our paradox. Another way of putting it, in a more snide form, is to ask, “Did God talk to himself when Jesus prayed to the Father? Was He schizoid? (or for the sake of argument, have dissociative identity disorder?” While at first this might be offensive to Trinitarians, it is a problem that must be solved, even if the answer is yes.
It is because of this difficulty that Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims, and Jews have a primie facie complaint against Christianity. To the Muslim and to the Jew, the idea that God can be compartmentalized is one of the greatest insults one can heave at Allah or Jehovah. Major tenets of each faith maintain that God is unified. This idea is referred to as Tawhīd in Islam.
Thus is the Christian problem of the Trinity; the Christian answer to this problem will be addressed in a later post.
References:
1. Deuteronomy 4:35 (English Standard Version)
2. John 17:1-3 (English Standard Version)
3. John 1:1-20 (English Standard Version)
4. Acts 5:1-5 (English Standard Version)
5. Matthew 28:19 (English Standard Version)
6. Luke 3:21-22 (English Standard Version)
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