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From: fsks@unc.UUCP (Frank Silbermann)
Newsgroups: net.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Trinity: the fine line
Message-ID: <97@unc.unc.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 5-Aug-85 18:11:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: unc.97
Posted: Mon Aug  5 18:11:15 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 6-Aug-85 12:47:28 EDT
References: <603@usl.UUCP> <3015@topaz.ARPA>
Reply-To: fsks@unc.UUCP (Frank Silbermann)
Organization: CS Dept, U. of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill
Lines: 86
Summary: 

Dwayne K. Lanclos writes:
>>Of course the Holy Spirit is the same thing as God!  That's what the
>>concept of the Trinity means:  one God demonstrating three different aspects.
>>Down through history, the experience of God has been that which gives life
>>and meaning to our existence (the Father), as realized in human history
>>(the Son), and as the spirit dwelling within each of us (the Holy Spirit).
>>The Trinity is the formulation used to express this experience in language:
>>three persons in one God.

In article <3015@topaz.ARPA> hedrick@topaz.UUCP (Hedrick) writes:
>I agree with the main point of your response.  The idea of the Trinity
>does not threaten the unity of God, as "Lady Godiva" seemed to feel it
>did.  However your particular wording suggests the classical heresy of
>Modalism.

Who declared Modalism to be a heresy?  When did this happen?

>Modalists believed (or are represented to have believed --
>it's sometimes hard to tell what those on the losing side actually
>believed) that Father, Son, and Spirit represent the ways God shows
>himself to us, but do not represent any actual distinction within God
>himself.  Classical Trinitarian thought believes that Father, Son,
>and Spirit represent different modes of being* within God himself.
>There is not enough distinction to give us three Gods.
>But there is enough to allow for personal relationship to exist
>within God before he ever created any human beings to love.

How much more distinction is required to give us three gods?
That is, suppose some ancient Roman told you that his religion
is monotheistic -- that Jupiter, Juno, Mercury, Vulcan, Diana,
Mars, Dionysis, etc all were different aspects of the one true god.
How would you confront him?  Obviously, you believe his religion
is a false one, but would this be a monotheistic falsehood or
a polytheistic one? If you admit that his religion might be
monotheistic (independent of its lack of general truth content)
then the term monotheism no longer has any useful meaning.

>The Trinity is a difficult doctrine, because it requires us to walk a
>very fine line.  On the one side, it is easy to talk as if we believed
>in three separate Gods.  The examples often given in Sunday School
>don't help this.  It is very typical to talk about three waterglasses
>and then talk about how it is all one water even though it is three
>glasses.  Or about three people and how they share one humanity.  I
>have never figured out how one can possibly get orthodox doctrine out
>of these illustrations.  The mere fact that there are three things
>sitting there is enough to defeat the purpose of the illustration, at
>least for us in the West.  As soon as we count them: one, two, three,
>we are out of the realm of orthodox Trinitarian thought.  For the
>Trinity has nothing to do with the number three.  There is nothing in
>God that you can count.  It is fairly clear that if theological
>tradition had gone differently we could have a duinity or quadrinity,
>and the same basic understanding would be expressed.  (The
>illustrations that I criticize originated among people with somewhat
>different philosophical assumptions from ours.  As far as I can tell,
>they must have meant something very different to them than they mean
>to us.)

Then why is the doctrine of the trinity so important to Christianity?

>On the other side, we want to make sure that we are saying something
>about God himself, and not just about the way he interacts with us.
>As I see it, the primary purpose of the doctrine is to emphasize the
>fact that Love is part of God's nature.  When he asks us to love him
>and each other, he is letting us into something that he has had all
>along.  This means that for us God is no longer a mathematical point,
>with no observable properties other than the demands he makes on us.
>We actually know something about God in himself: that he has within
>himself that which loves, that which accepts love in obedience, and
>all of the interplay between these two.

Of course this side of God's nature was already much in evidence
in the Old Testament books of the prophets (e.g. the story of Jonah).

>Differing understandings of the Trinity have traditionally had effects
>on what one believes about Jesus.  Normally heretical understandings
>of the Trinity (or lack of the doctine entirely) has been combined
>with what I would consider substandard understandings about Christ.
>Typically God is made too abstract to really involve himself in human
>history, so Jesus comes out as something less than a real incarnation
>of God.

This understanding explains why the Jewish and Moslem beliefs about Jesus
are not really "rejections" of Jesus, but rather disagreements over what
is actually there to be accepted.

	Frank Silbermann