Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: drew@anucsd.anu.oz.au (Drew Corrigan) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: How does the Godhead function? Message-ID: Date: 29 Nov 90 09:58:59 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Lines: 141 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu Thanks to our moderator for his reply. I suppose the next questions are: ** 1. Is Jesus viewed as having been the Son of God, from eternity, or did he become the Son when he was incarnated? What I am interested in exploring is how Trinitarians view the relationship between the members of the Godhead before Jesus' coming to earth as a man. How is that relationship described and how is it considered to function. I think there may be certain logical difficulties in asserting that One was eternally the son of the Other. ** 2. Why is God "unable to sin"? I have heard that the standard position says that God cannot sin because he is not "free" to sin, or that his will is fixed in such a manner as he is unable to sin. My own position is that God does not/cannot sin because he wills not to sin, but rather wills to love. ** 3. Is Jesus considered to have been "morally unchangable" as a man? That is, unable to sin because he had no choice in the matter? My own view is that Jesus as a man was capable of sin, but through exercis- ing his will and relying on God the Father, was able to set his will not to sin. Thus he "overcame" the weaknesses of human flesh. Any replies to these questions would be appreciated. Drew Corrigan. (drew@anucsd.anu.oz.au) -- Drew Corrigan. Department of Computer Science, Australian National University [1. I'm worried that your question may suggest a misunderstanding. If what you mean by Jesus is Christ's human existence, that didn't exist before he was conceived by Mary. However this was simply the human existence of the Son. The Son's "native" existence is as one of the Trinity. The Trinity is the way God is, and always has been. The Son in that form was the Son from eternity. "There was not when he was not". It's best -- at least when dealing with Western theology -- not to think of the Son as a separate entity at all. He is simply one "mode of existence" of God. We think of God as having love intrinsic to himself. But love is a relationship. In order to have a relationship, you've got to have more than one thing to be related. The Son is one "end" of the relationship of love that has always existed within God. But he is not a separate entity in the sense that if you could see and count God you'd see three of something. That's why I use the term "mode of existence" to characterize the Persons. God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that doesn't mean there are three Gods. As one of the Eastern theologians says, when you count God you don't count "one, two, three", but "one, one, one". Even the incarnation doesn't increase the number of Gods (nor does it add a demi-god or quasi-god). Jesus is the human existence of the one God. (Technically I should clarify that it is specifically the Son that was incarnated.) Since he is a real human existence, there is a human will, personality, etc., which by being human could only communicate with God through prayer. This makes it very tempting to say that there are two things there: God and a human being. But I think the best way to understand orthodox theology is that there is only one "entity", and this entity has two existences: an existence as a human and an existence as God. (Entity and existence is more commonly translated person and nature.) So to answer your question, the Son is the Son from eternity, but his human existence started at a specific point in time. (I'm going to comment on this a bit more below. I have some problems saying that God the Son and Jesus are the same entity, although I do want to say that Jesus was the Son's human existence.) Many people have a hard time relating these technical discussions to the portait of Jesus in the NT. But it's clear that what started the Church down this line was statements in John, Colossians, and Hebrews talking about Jesus as having a preexistence. The obvious way to interpret this is as I believe the JW's do: that the Son is a separate quasi-divine entity that existed "in the heavens" and then came down to earth and lived as Jesus. The problem is with things like "I and the Father are one", though I think the real issue was that the Church came to think of the crucifixion as an act of God's self-sacrifice. Thus the Church concluded that having the Son as a preexistent creature separate from God was a bad idea. They chose to regard the Son's preexistence as a mode of existence of God himself. I have some problems with the philsophical terminology that was used in those discussions. I think this is a result of trying to express something that is probably not completely intelligible by humans, using a philosophy in which only "substance", "essence", etc., are first-class objects. Function and relationship were not. I think Jesus was the eternal Son's human existence, but only because God chose to identify himself with Jesus. I'm not entirely sure what it means to say that a human being and the eternal Son are the same entity. (Indeed some theologians fudged, using a doctrine called "anhypostasia", which in effect says that the Son's human existence was "man", but not "a man". Thus there is only one entity because ultimately the human being had no "entitiness". This view -- which I see as a subtle way of denying Jesus' full humanity -- indicates to me that there's a problem in the way the identity between the Son and Jesus was formulated philosophically.) I have no problem with saying that the eternal Son identifies himself with the man Jesus, so that Jesus' acts are God's, and Jesus reveals God. (I use the analogy of a character in a novel that represents the author -- though in fact I think we want to go further and say it is as if the author actually entered his own novel.) But I'm not sure I can attach any meaning to the concept that Jesus and the eternal Son are the same entity. I hope however that my concept of the Son identifying himself with Jesus is trying to say the same thing. ---- Technical details: Note by the way that when it is said that the Son is eternally begotten by the Father, this is seen as an ongoing thing, not a thing that happened once in time. When a child is begotten, this is a thing that happens once in time. Before it happened, the child didn't exist. If that's what we meant, it's not clear what it would mean to say that the Son was begotten in eternity. However far back in eternity it happened, if being begotten is an act, there would be a before. But for the Son, being begotten is not an act, it's a continuing mode of existence. It might be worth quoting from Chalcedon (451), which is the defining document for the Incarnation: "He is of the same reality as God as far as his deity is concerned and of the same reality as we are ourselves as far as his human-ness is concerned; thus like us in all respects, sin only excepted. Before time began he was begotten of the Father, in respect of his deity, and now in these "last days," for us and on our behalf of our salvation, this selfsame one was born of Mary the virgin, who is God-bearer in respect of his human-ness." The term "mode" has a bad association, because of the heresy known as "modalism". However modalism said that the persons simply represented ways God related to the world, but did not represent any distinction intrinsic to God. Thus the new terminology that some are using for the Trinity -- Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer -- is heretical, because it characterizes God by three different ways he related to the world and us. I am using the term "mode of existence" to refer to different ways in which God exists and relates to himself, so I am talking about a distinction intrinsic to God. --clh]