The Holy Trinity (UPDATED)
OK, i read this, seth, before my poli sci class. I ran to class and couldn't get my brain away from this post...so i forfeited my notes and started writing down thoughts instead.
I believe that you really can't wrap your head around the idea of the Trinity. The trinity as best as i understand it, is "almost" the essence of God made into living onipitant seperate beings: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are all seperately thinking and existing beings but they are all one in the same. Confusing, i know. I had a sixth grade teacher explain it to me in really simplistic terms years and years ago: to you seth, I am a mucisian but to my dad I am his daughter, and at the same time I am my friend, Corey's, psycologist. I am three different people yet i am the same person. I have different identities for different roles.
This does not explain the fact that the Son, the Spirit and the Father are three very different beings. I believe that the Trinity itself is a concept that we, humans, created inorder to bring some form of order to God, for our own sanity. God himself is complex enough, let alone "three" of Him. Jesus never labled his relationship with the Father as a Duelity/Duet. I believe He stated that they are one in the same. The full Spirit did not decend upon the world/people until after the resurection: 50 days after the resurection and 10 days after the ascention...during the Pentecost, thus signifying that God's presence is available to anyone who asks. His presence.In order to somewhat scratch the surface of the Trinity, one needs to explore the nature of the three parts. God as the Son, God as the Father, and especially God as the Spirit. And then realize how they interact with eachother. Almost like a Venn Diagram. Which attributes are shared and which attributes are exclusive to the different parts of the Trinity.
I spoke of the Spirit the most because that is the part of the Trinity I believe that we interact with the most. The Spirit is the pure essence of God, which was created by faith for faith...a child-like faith. If that is the case, then wouldn't the core idea of the Trinity have to be largely based on faith?
I don't know. I know that I am personally satsified with the concept of taking the Trinity and the concept of it by faith.
Feedback, rebuttals?
-Reijn
This is an exerpt of a book i read by Rob Bell, Velvet Elvis. What do you think?
This doctrine is central to historic, orthodox Christian faith. While there is only one God, God is somehow present everywhere. People began to call this presence, this power of God, his ‘Spirit'. So there is God, the then there is God's Spirit. And then Jesus comes among us and has this oneness with God that has people saying things like God has visited us in the flesh (John 1:14). So God is one, but God has also revealed himself to us as Spirit and then as Jesus. One and yet three. This three-in-oneness understanding of God emerged in several hundred years after Jesus' resurrection. People began to call this concept the Trinity. The word trinity is not found anywhere in the Bible. Jesus didn't use the word, and the writers of the rest of the Bible didn't use the word.
But over time this belief, this understanding, this doctrine, has become central to how followers of Jesus have understood who God is. It is a spring, and people jumped for thousands of years without it(this fact, of course, doesn't make the doctrine any less true. It's been true all along; people just ‘recently' discovered it.) It was added later. We can take it out and examine it. Discuss it, probe it, question it. It flexes, and it stretches.2 It has brought a littler, deeper, richer understanding to the mysterious being who is God. . . .Our words are not absolutes. Only God is absolute... The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God. We are dealing with somebody we made up.3
Interesting point hu? *nods*
-Reijn
posted by Reijn of the Elfin Muse | 12:50 PM
2 Comments:
I think that sums it up pretty well. It's a confusing concept, one that we, as you noted, dumped on ourselves. Western culture feels most comfortable when important things are grouped in three's (three princesses, three antagonists, etc). The Celts grouped their gods in trinities, and the number 3 has often been seen as a sacred number. I think too, that we feel more comfortable thinking of God as having three parts, for lack of a better word, because then he doesn't seem as terrible, as powerful. Instead of having one force with all this power, that power is now seemingly divided into three beings.
Make sense? I just wrote a research paper so I'm not sure if it does...
I think He is laughing now.
The way the concept of a Trinity evolved is really fascinating.
The Nicene creed declared "Oh, yes, Oh yes-- God and Jesus are made of the same stuff. Yes."
But that's in part because Big Emperor Constantine was sitting at the end of the table looking down his nose at the priests, holy men, etc. who were defining what Christianity was.
But a lot of really intelligent people that spent their lives thinking about the Trinity thought different things-- that Jesus was made from a different substance than God and the Holy Spirit, or that the Holy Spirit was the odd man out, or that Jesus had two different sides, two different substances.
And "Orthodox" Christians got all bitchy and killed everyone else, and then not much strong opposition was left.
Soo much of Christianity's development has to do with politics. I don't know. A lot of people early on argued that by splitting God into three pieces one was almost crossing the line into polytheism... I have no clue what to think.
Sometimes I think that I'm not a Christian anymore.
Okay, often I think that.
Why must this whole faith thing be soo complex? That's the problem with Christianity: it is very very complex, with so many f-ing shades of emphasis I get a headache trying to figure out which is right. Maybe everything is right. Or maybe nothing is right.
My head hurts and I'm off topic. I'm going to go hire a cockroach assassin. I'll come back to this later.
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