Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!julius.cs.uiuc.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: ibrahim@syacus.acus.oz (Ibrahim Sifri) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Trinity Message-ID: Date: 29 Oct 90 06:57:37 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Australian Centre for Unisys Software, Sydney Lines: 63 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu People often say they believe in the Trinity, yet they differ in their understanding of it. I would like to start a conversation with the following questions: 1) What, exactly, is the Trinity? 2) Does the Bible teach it? 3) Is Jesus Christ the Almighty God and part of the Trinity? I am hoping to have some logical answers to start a productive conversation that is not a waste of time. For this to happen, you must back your answers from the BIBLE. Ibrahim Sifri. [Trinitarian thought is a way of talking about God that attempts to do justice to both the separate existence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and to the fact that there is only one God. There have actually been several different approaches to the Trinity, with rather different emphases. The relevant doctrinal standards allow for this diversity. They simply set boundaries marking off areas that are known to result in problems. This whole business is Biblical if you agree that the Bible describes the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as distinct, but that it commits us to worship only one God. I believe there are people who think they reject the Trinity as un-Biblical, but who are actually Trinitarian. The Trinity became inevitable as soon as the Church chose to read passages like John 1, Col. 1, and parts of Hebrews as describing a Son who had an eternal existence alongside the Father. I suppose one could regard passages such as Col. 1:15ff and John 1:1ff as metaphorical. But the moment you take them as saying that there was actually a Son existing from eternity alongside the Father, you are committed to either the Trinity, or some positions that have been pretty clearly rejected by the Church (the Son as a separate God, or the Son as an entity that is not truly God). The Trinity simply says that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct, but that they are only one God. How this can be, and what it all means is not properly speaking specified by the doctrinal standards, and different theologians have given different explanations. Your third question involves more than just the Trinity. The relationship between Jesus Christ and God is properly speaking the subject of the doctrine of the Incarnation. The Incarnation says that the Son -- the eternal person of the Trinity -- took to himself a human existence in such a way that there was a human being that can be said to be the "human face of God". However God and humanity remain separate things. Jesus, as a man, was not eternal, invisible, omnipotent, etc. He was mortal, just like the rest of us. Again, the doctrine does not explain how the two were united. However it says that God took to himself this human life in such a way that we encounter God directly through Jesus. I think it is OK to summarize this by saying that Jesus is God, though it may tend to be misleading. If you aren't careful, you can end up thinking that Jesus was a superman, or something altogether beyond human. That is not what the Church means to say. Jesus was an ordinary human being. The Incarnation says that God can manifest himself though a human being. It also safeguards the distinctness of God and humanity, ruling out concepts such as a demigod, halfway between God and human. As to the Biblical background for this, it is basically passages such as Col 1:19, which indicate that God was really present in Christ, and that Christ's sacrifice was actually God's action, acting in Christ. The Incarnation is inevitable if you accept both that God was really present in Christ, but that Christ remained human. --clh]