|
of Jesus |
|
What are your thought on the Trinity?
Ever since I was I child, I recalled hearing about the Trinity and I've been trying to understand the concept. Jesus spoke of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit. He also said that He and the Father are one. It was explained to me as God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are the same and form one God head. From reading the Gospels, it appears to me that they are separate, but the Son and The Holy Spirit do the will of the Father who is the one true God. What are your thoughts on this subject?
MY ANSWER
Responding here to your inquiry concerning the Trinity. What are my thoughts?
Your conclusion makes a very good and accurate statement. The Son and the Holy Spirit do the will of the Father who is the one true God. But we can say something more.
One can read the Apostles Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Creed of Chalcedon, the Athanasian Creed . . . all the ancient creeds, and become very confused about God. The composers of the creeds, that serve as a base for Trinitarian Doctrine, bequeathed to Christendom down to our time a bundle that, while containing some legitimate descriptive terminology, is nevertheless nonsense in its efforts to define God. Yet the creeds have been, apart from the scriptures, the essential bedrock of the teaching of the Church through the centuries. The Trinity was and is an attempt to explain the unexplainable. One may as well ask a kindergartner to explain the Theory of Relativity!
As you can infer by now, I do not subscribe to the creedal Trinity. I believe in the Multiplicity.
All that we can rely upon is the revelations of scripture; principally the gospels where Jesus acted and taught, some knowledge of science and world history, and the intuitive leanings of our hearts and minds as the Holy Spirit enlightens us from within. Jesus is the only personal revelator that we have on whom we can rely. The Holy Spirit brings the Logos, which consists of the utterances of Jesus, to life within us.
There are indeed three distinct persons in the teaching of Jesus. There is the Creator who is further identified as the Father in heaven. There is the Son, Jesus of Nazareth, whom the Father sent into the world to enlighten it. There is also the Holy Spirit, whom Jesus sent into the world after he returned to the Father, and who reminds us, enlightens us, and further teaches us concerning the Word of Truth that Jesus delivered. I think of the Holy Spirit as being a personal, divine tutor of the children of God in the world, and therefore to me and to you, preparing us to assume our places hereafter in the heavenly kingdom, when we also depart the world to go to the Father, as did Jesus.
We cannot comprehend them because of our mental and spiritual limitations, and we can only speak of them as they relate to the world that includes us. Thus, the Father is creator of the world, the Son is the light of the world, and the Holy Spirit is the light keeper and sustainer of the world.
The foolishness starts when men attempt to define the essential nature of these three personal divine entities. We cannot do it, and it is exceeding folly to attempt to do so. Yet human egotism is such that there are always those who think they have been fully enlightened so as to instruct the rest of mankind about the physics and chemistry of the divine substance.
The problem of understanding the relation of these three persons is at least two fold, and both relate to the essential nature of human beings and our understanding thereof in a paradoxical way.
First, we fail to recognize our natural limitations by seeking to believe more than we can know about God. This is what I have just described.
Second, we fail to recognize our supernatural essence by making ourselves much less than we are. This causes us to vastly exaggerate the differences between the human and the divine.
Therefore, the churchmen misunderstand all things divine because, first of all, they do not understand themselves.
Genesis states that man was made in the image (likeness) of God. Jesus validated this in his response to the tax question (pay taxes to Caesar) by his reference to the image of Caesar on the coin. He taught them to pay Caesar his tax, then he also taught that men should render to God what bears his image, that is . . . man.
I take this to mean that human beings are essentially divine from the beginning. Yet all men, while essentially divine, yet lack something for completion of the divine nature. That lack is filled when, as Jesus stated, one is begotten from above. When we take the divine Word, or Logos into our hearts, it is as Jesus said:
It is the human heart that receives the Word, keeps the Word, and finds its completion in the Word. Here how Jesus explained this in the Parable of the Sower:John.14
[23] Jesus answered him, If a man loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.
Luke.8
[8] And some fell into good soil and grew, and yielded a hundredfold. As he said this, he called out, He who has ears to hear, let him hear.This honest and good heart is in its essence the rich soil of divinity. It requires only that it be sowed with the seed of God, (the seed (sperma) is the Word - see the Parable of the Weeds), to complete its divinity. Thus, when one of us receives the Word (that Jesus heard from the Father and uttered in the world), that one becomes, in essence, fully divine -- a child of the Father and a brother (or sister) to Jesus. It is as Jesus said:
[15] And as for that in the good soil, they are those who, hearing the word, hold it fast in an honest and good heart, and bring forth fruit with patience.
Matt.12
[50] For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.From start to finish, it is a family affair -- yes, it is all about family. We are brothers, Jesus is our elder brother, God is our Father, and the Holy Spirit is our divine tutor while we remain in the world. And we are all essentially divine though it is an incomplete divinity having no life of its own until it finds completion by being begotten from above of the Spirit through the Word. But to qualify as children of God, we humans must also partake of the divine essence.
If you can believe this, then you are in a position to understand the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as well as any human. It is the same as the unity between you and me. We know this because Jesus said it:
Do you see, then, that the unity that binds brothers and sisters in the world to each other and to Jesus is exactly the same as that that binds Jesus, the Holy Spirit and the Father:John.17
[20] I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word,
[21] that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
[22] The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one,
[23] I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me.
they may be one even as we are one, . . ..Furthermore, note v. 22:
The glory which thou hast given me I have given to them, . . ..The glory is the divine essence of which I have been speaking. Therefore, we are one even as Jesus and the Father and the Holy Spirit are one, and we are all one in the one glory that is the glory of the Father and the Son..
Do you see how simple this becomes if only one listens to the Voice of Jesus?
We can go on from this point to expound on the cause of the problem as residing in the failure of the churchmen to understand their own human nature. Not comprehending their own natures, there is nothing valid that they can say or believe about God. So, to know God you must first know yourself by accepting your own essential divine nature.
The human and the divine are not two distinctly different categories. The human is a sub category of the divine.
We have to do, not with a Trinity of divine beings, but with a Multiplicity of divine beings.
I think the early churchmen, following Paul and probably others as well, let themselves be pressed into the trinitarian mode by the pressures of the polytheistic culture in which they found themselves. They determined to distinguish themselves from the polytheists by asserting their monotheism following the Jewish doctrine of the one Creator - God. But they had these two other divine persons, the Son and the Holy Spirit that they plainly could not deny, so they resorted to the Trinitarian doctrine in an effort to validate their monotheism in the face of polytheistic pressures. In the process they created this "Godhead" (not a word from Jesus) a far - off and remote deity before whom to be human was to be almost nothing.
But this did not excuse them, then or now, from failing to listen to Jesus. Their problem was not too many divine beings (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit). It was too few. Their attempted solution was to compress the three into one, whereas the Truth explodes the Three into a Multiplicity.
You will find more on this in this paper. Thank you for asking for my views on this vital subject. Bottom line? Every begotten from above person is a child of the Father in heaven and is divine. We are a Multiplicity!
Brother Ed