My, it seems rather difficult to keep someone’s teachings properly if you do not know what they are.
Not necessarily; the fact that in my viewpoint of the world the Holy Spirit does not exist does not mean I assume all who claim to have experienced it are insane. That’s dangerously close to Lewis’ flawed “lord, liar or lunatic” argument. Jesus was also apparently quite capable of speaking metaphorically at times, even though some people attempt to take every single things he says literally (except, of course, when it does not suit them to do so). One of the creationist arguments is that Jesus mentioned Adam, so of course there must have been a real “first man” named Adam who lived in a real Garden of Eden and the whole talking snake and such were literal. Jesus himself said so, so evolution must be wrong. Or…perhaps Jesus was speaking metaphorically.
Hm, if Jesus is not God, then God must not care about humans? That must be quite a shock to the Jews, Muslims, pagans, etc., etc. Before God sent Jesus, should everyone have assumed God did not care about them?
What does Jesus’ divinity have to do with being able to tell false prophets from true?
Well, if the apostles passed it down from generation to generation, there must still be a group of people who have this apostolic sucession who know what his teachings are. So one merely needs to learn it from them.
And if this is not the case, then you are right: we can never know how to understand his teachings. Thus if his teachings are just incomprehensible – well, then what is the difference between that and lunacy?
But what does he care with? Taoists don’t believe Tao gives a darn one way or the other, nor does it have anything to give a darn with, or even anything to not give a darn with. If he does have something to care with, then it must be completely inseparable from him, but separate from him never the less because God does not change, and yet caring it an action, and all action is change.
And to what does that caring he has apply to? If God cares, yet doesn’t care for anyone, then God effectively does not care. Yet, God wouldn’t care about someone who despises him – that person is separate from God of his own choosing and God can not reach them. Thus God can only care for one who loves him above all things and because of God’s love this person is not separate from him.
Thus these three persons are united in perpetuum as One.
You are right – this is circular reasoning. Oh well.
Yeah, but without the Holy Spirit, you can’t know which are the right actions to do. Or are you proposing that you just follow various people’s teachings for a certain length of time and see if the Holy Spirit visits you?
::shrug:: If it doesn’t prevent you from adequately functioning in normal society, I would not consider it lunacy. Hell, many Christians teach incomprehsible doctrine–we went over this in this very thread!–yet it is not considered by them to be lunacy. You can be a bit too sweeping with your rhetorical questions, dude.
But…the Holy Spirit cares, right? Therefore the Holy Spirit is an action. Therefore the Holy Spirit is not God. And since the three cannot exist if one is missing, I guess God doesn’t exist.
Keep in mind, that many/most Christians, and as far as I can tell, all single-God religions do not agree with your premise that God cannot love without the Holy Spirit. The single-God religions do not think it necessary to have three separate persons to accomplish love, lover and beloved, and I can certainly see why they think that; it is not necessary for myself to be three separate persons to be/do those things myself.
But perhaps reason alone can take you far enough to where empathy can take over from there. Like a rock upon which a church is built, to coin a phrase.
But from the outside, you see a closed system among the three. It is both active and unchanging. It is internally active, but the net extenal change does not occur.
(Sorry, Gaudere, but the Catholics are still the majority)
Perhaps they simply have not thought it through and found the inner mysteries? There are plenty of pagan Gods that are just Titan-like beings floating in space somewhere, and those who don’t believe in a God that is Love so I suppose you are correct. Sure this seems a little hackneyed, but you put ancient Greeks and ancient Jews and the teachings of a certain wild-eyed mystic together in the same room for a few days amd I think they’d come up with this same belief completely independantly. IMHO!
jab1 earlier posed the question as to whether Jesus could be God if he prayed to himself (I’m paraphrasing).
One of the things that bible study has taught me thru-out the years is that the book will provide answers for those looking for them. Whether they’re there or not, the truth is in the mind of the reader. Countless times the bible has been used as a justification of something now viewed as inherently evil… slavery for instance.
And the people who love to show their “knowledge” by reciting biblical passages from memory tend to take things out of context, if necessary, to prove their point.
But the bottom line is that there were no investigative reporters writing all the things said by Jesus or the disciples at the time they were living. And God did not hand down the Bible in the King James Version as literal truth. It may have been inspired writing or even “God-assisted” writing, but the narratives were molded to convey the message of the person speaking, not to accurately record an historic event.
Paul’s version of things won out over competing versions of early Chrisitian congregations and he never met Jesus.
So, in the final view, each person has to take religion and its foibles and truths in a way that best works for him/her. As for me, “it’s a mystery” still works as an explanation of the Trinity.
Wow. Maybe someday if I become a theist I will learn how to argue that a thing is both A and not-A at the same time. Your God-as-three-persons seems to be several imperfect parts creating a perfect whole…you have the “changing” Spirit, which cannot be perfect or God, and then the Perfect God, that cannot care. A God made up of three not-quite-wholly-God parts is a workable solution, but does not seem to be the traditional Christian one.
I am sure you will correct me if I am wrong, but your “God cannot love without the Holy Spirit” bit does not seem quite, uh, orthodox. Can you find that in the catechism for me?
What, you mean without the need for a Divinity to tell them of it? “Love, Lover, Loved” is a perfectly tidy little triangle, but positing this out to three separate persons seems a bit of a stretch to me. I suspect if the western culture had not been so focussed on threes and had preferred twos instead, we’d have a dual deity, and you would be earnestly attempting to explain to me why lover and beloved had to be separate persons in one God. And I would be insisting, again, that a single person is perfectly capapble of both loving and being loved, and the lover/beloved duality was no support of a two-personed God. IMHO!
Regarding the H20 analogy, perhaps Heaven is at the precise temperature and pressure for Him to be at triple point and thusly being the Divine equivalent of vapor, liquid, and ice, while at the same time being indivisible.
jmullaney Thanks for re-reading and thinking about my posts; that’s all I was asking for, “a little respect”.
Oh, believe me, I understand that questioning the literal or metaphorical truth of Jesus’ words now, after 2000 years, is dangerous to the faith. However, I agree with Gaudere; even if the early apostles misunderstood, that doesn’t make Jesus a “lunatic”. It doesn’t mean that Jesus wasn’t divine; it just might mean that the apostles misunderstood what he was saying about the nature of that divinity.
I also see your point about the Holy Spirit: if it visited the apostles and inspired them, presumably their inspirations led them to the truth – or as much of it as the human mind can comprehend. What has been passed down to us from them is therefore trustworthy. However, I’m not sure that’s an effective argument against what I posited: I don’t think one can demonstrate the “correctness” of the Trinitarian doctrine by saying the Holy Spirit helped the apostles arrive at it. Even if that is what actually happened, it sounds somewhat like using a word to define itself. I shall have to ponder this point further…
Anyway, here’s someone whose point of view helps explain my own:
The Gospels were written by men – with divine inspiration (“God-assisted” as sbscout put it), but we really can’t know to what extent each gospel represents the “correct” view of Jesus and the divine, nor to what extent each represents the evangelist’s divinely-influenced but still-personal interpretation. So we have to be careful not to read too much into any one part of those writings.
Look at the present day: how many evangelists seem to be “filled with the Holy Spirit” and yet sometimes have radically different things to say? I don’t think that some are “wrong” and some are “right”, although I do think some on the fringes are lunatics; rather, I think that each person’s message is some combination of divine inspiration (if the Holy Spirit truly has touched him/her) and their own personal views. As a result, we have to be very careful about taking what each evangelist (present & past) says as the whole, literal truth unless we can effectively parse his/her words into divine and personal inspirations.
To reiterate: I don’t think that the concept of the Trinity is “absurd”. It seems to fit what evidence we have if imperfectly, and it’s a better explanation than nothing, or the alternatives (liar or lunatic). But I guess I would hesitate to develop such in-depth and exhaustive arguments to “explain” and debate the Trinity, as has been done in this thread, because the primary source material seems too meagre to support such elaborate constructions.
Thus, like sbscout, I am content to accept the Trinity as a “mystery” which somehow reflects a truth beyond our means to fully comprehend – due to the limits of the human mind, the limits of the evidence to help us understand it, or both.
Having said which, I still find this debate itself interesting.
Again, jmullaney, thanks for taking the time to respond thoughtfully.
MJH, some nice posts. I do have some questions about what precisely Jesus meant in some of his discussions, and I agree that metaphor may well have been misread as more literal than intended. (Lot of that going around lately! ;))
My post on the propriety or impropriety of comments was not directed at you, and I’m sorry it was taken that way. It was simply observing that: (1) one may form an opinion on the validity of a subject with some historical thinking having gone on about it, such as this one, and legitimately post them; (2) the historical thinking is, quite simply, historical – To say that the Earth is flat is wrong; to say that the Flat Earth Society believes it is, is right – and hence, if someone posts an accurate statement of what the historical thought was on that topic, that is a statement of fact. Such a statement may be incorrect fact, and subject to disagreement on that score, and certainly anyone is free to disagree with the historical thought itself, but I saw posters arguing against posters like Joel who were simply reciting their understanding of the concept as it had been historically held; (3) I saw No Compulsion’s post as founded on a misconception of what Christians have actually been saying through the years about Jesus’s putative divinity, and clarified the situation by an analogy taken from Islam, which respects Mohammed but worships Allah alone. In addressing all three of these issues, I apparently tarred you with a brush that was simply intended to draw the appropriate lines.
To illustrate, here’s some hypothetical posts from a thread on catastrophic pseudo-science: Poster 1: Velikovsky said that the events recorded in Exodus were caused by a close fly-by of the planet Venus, which he claimed was covered with ice. Poster 2: How can you believe such a palpable absurdity? Poster 3: Velikovsky’s theories fly in the face of everything we know about planetary motion, and would require rewriting most of the major laws of physics. Poster 1: That’s not my idea; I’m just quoting what Velikovsky said. Poster 4: Venus being covered with ice was not Velikovsky; it was Horbiger.
Of the lot of these, the only one with a problem is Poster 2, who is mistaking Poster 1’s statement of Velikovsky’s theory for Poster 1’s theory. Poster 3 is disagreeing with the theory, and Poster 4 is pointing out that Poster 1 mixed up two different goofballs’ theories in his first post.
Better? I do regret that it appeared to be accusatory towards you, MJH. It was not intended.
True, true. And keeping in mind those that have the spirit do not need worldly teachers anymore. (not that I have it). You can know them by their fruit, but if you don’t have the spirit to begin with, I don’t know how you are even supposed to discern that. On the other hand, if everyone knows God and some merely willfully turns away from him, you can’t change their hearts. Insert appropriate four letter word here.
I agree, and I am not sure why I’m bothering. It is not as if I could say something and Gaudere would suddenly understand; and meanwhile my explanation is getting more muddled.
And, no, Gaudere, the catchecism doesn’t say that is so many words, but it is still akin to the verb proceeding from the noun yet they are still separate. But I give up. It is an eternally complete action which at the same time does not change.
It is ultimately a mystery, and beyond reason. Kicking a few thoughts around is only killing time and you never know if you might still key in to someone and they might, by grace, understand. If the holy spirit is the light by which this can be seen, no one can give this gift except God.
Polycarp No problem, misunderstandings happen. But yesterday, because of the mix-up, I left wondering, "What on earth did I do? Particularly since I do keep in mind the kind of guidelines you illustrate in your last post. It’s alright now, thank you.
And as I myself wrote previously: “I don’t think one can demonstrate the “correctness” of the Trinitarian doctrine by saying the Holy Spirit helped the apostles arrive at it. Even if that is what actually happened, it sounds somewhat like using a word to define itself.”
In other words, you need credit to get credit.
This discussion reminds me of an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A famous Bajoran poet emerges from the Bajoran wormhole, centuries after he entered it. (Apparently the wormhole aliens, whom the Bajorans regard as their “Prophets” or gods, kept him with them for quite some time.) This poet is hailed by the Bajorans as their prophesied Emissary – a person whose contact with the Prophets will help guide the Bajorans. However, until this poet re-appeared, the Bajorans had believed Benjamin Cisco, Captain of the space station and a Terran, was the Emissary. Yet the Bajorans adapted to their new Emissary almost without regard for the inherent contradiction in the switch, as illustrated by this converation between the character Odo and Kira Narees, a Bajoran officer on the station. (Not verbatim, but close I hope.)
Odo: Do you believe this man [the poet] is the Emissary?
Kira: Yes.
Odo: But before you also believed Captain Cisco was the Emissary?
Kira: Yes.
Odo: How can they both be the Emissary?
Kira: If you have faith, no explanations are necessary. If you don’t have faith, no explanation will suffice.
…
As I see it, that’s about where you’ve arrived on this thread. That’s not to disparage people with or without faith; but it does mean that the two groups end up talking about two different things, in a sense.
As long as no one is confused between something being unreasonable when it is merely beyond reason, because I think with reason alone someone can arrive at many of the conclusions which can put them on the path of faith and let them enter into life. We don’t want to confuse Christianity with those cults that wish to deaden minds and enslave their followers.
From Torah, we learn that the Oneness of G-d was originally “one of many”, not a monotheistic view at all. The first translation of “before” there is not entirely accurate. It is more accurate as ‘before/beside’, meaning ‘in the same place of worship’. This was to prevent the use of family gods or regional gods in the Holy of Holies or the Temple (after it was built, of course).
This translation has meaning when you realize you can’t have other gods before G-d if there aren’t any. The fact that G-d would tell us not to have others means that there are others to have, wrong though it would be for Israel to select them. For Israel, in fact, there are no other gods, because G-d has proclaimed his lordship over his chosen people, and their acceptance is demanded. This is called henotheism, and is the description of early Judaism.
To further muddy translations we have this fact: the word selected here for gods merely means divine beings. G-d is later called the G-d of gods, and this is a right description for him. There are other heavenly beings, but only one G-d for Israel. Shema Israel.
Now to get to the BIG one…
From NO Compulsion in Islam, we read:
Not at this point. Ishmael and his mother had been sent away, and thus, under the Law, were no longer part of the family of Avraham. At the point of the sacrifice there was only one son to Avraham, and that was Issac. Since Paul (a possible writer of Hebrews) was a student of the Law, he would have known this and made the distinction.
But what of John 1:18 that says “No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only (begotten), who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” Seems rather clear from that verse. Mind you, I’m arguing from a text to prove the text, which is bad debate style, but I’ve not got many choices here. grin
Incomplete reference. Exodus 4:22 begins, “Say this to Pharoah:” Thus G-d wanted the message delivered to Pharoah, and selected words meaningful to the Egyptian leader. The symbolism there is intentional, as it has meaning inside the traditions of Egypt, specifically relating to the subsequent slaughter of the firstborn of the whole of Egypt (tenth plague). It was not said to the people of Israel, who were very clear in other stories that being firstborn wasn’t always the best or chosen (Jacob/Esau, Cain/Abel, Joseph/His Brothers, Ishmael/Issac).
Ephraim means the Northern Kingdom of Israel, specifically, which had been required to worship at northern shrines instead of in Jerusalem of the Southern Kingdom. It was, in fact, the North that was taken into slavery first, as the more distant of the followers. Further evidence of the distiction of Ephraim and Israel is found in Hosea 11, for those interested in reading more. This may be one of those indications that being firstborn is the lesser position, as Israel was chosen for the Temple, and remained a kingdom longer (though eventually fell to the same fate).
In the tradition of the Kings of the land where Ephraim and Israel were founded, a King took on his subject not only by using the terms “servant” and “lord” (traditional feudalism) but also by saying “son” and “father”. In this case the translation is better “on this day I have become your Father”, which indicates the adoptive role. I must admit the English doesn’t do it justice, which turns out to be the source of most current Christian debate.
Not a valid game, because you’re swapping words between Hebrew and Greek settings that don’t have the exact meaning you imply. As a result the underlying meaning of the phrases can be harmed. Sorry, but you’ll have to stick within the same language group (Hebrew:Semitic, Greek:Indo-European) at least.
As the rest of your issues are based on this sentence, let me read you a different translation: “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” (Autos de en hupochoreon en tais eremois kai proseuchomenos.)
Says nothing about doing it to his God.
What translation are you using?
The traditional position of worshipful prayer in Judaism (palal) is standing. Such a strong gesture, that of prostrating, is not common at all. Instead, this is the act of a postulant, as you indicate; one who is petitioning (or questioning/entreating, from which we get the word prayer) the keeper of the Plan to consider changing it. But, in doing so, this Jesus was accepting that the Plan was the whole reason for being here, not other objectives that seemed meaningful on the way. It wasn’t that this Jesus couldn’t make the cup pass, but that the doing so had to be in accord with the Plan. This is further solidified in the statement “yet but not as I will, but as you will.” He was saying “I can change it, but there is a reason we are doing it this other way, so I’ll not act until we are in concert about our position.”
The roles were set; The Father is the architect, the Son is the craftsman, and the Spirit is the active functionary of the creator. Three identifiable roles, acting in concert as one entity.
And you didn’t realize that the Invisible God was Pink before reading this, did you! grin
Of course not, and that’s why I’ve been careful not to suggest that the discussion itself has been absurd or meaningless or pointless. It has been an interesting mental exercise and has clearly called for a great deal of educated, well-reasoned discourse. Very likely those participating will remain on their respective sides of the fences, but if a person chooses a path that changes his/her mind/faith as a result of the reasoned discussion, there is no harm in that.
A far cry from the fundamentalist Christian who befriended my Jewish roommate in college. He [my roommate] was curious about Christianity from an intellectual point of view; he was open-minded enough to discuss issues of faith without feeling threatened. She [the Christian] had a rather different agenda. After one session of reading Hebrews together, he returned to our room and I asked, “How did it go?” He paused, then asked me: “Do you think I’m going to Hell because I’m Jewish? That’s what she told me.” I shook my head, “No, but I’m Catholic; so according to her I’ll be right there alongside you!”
Some Christians seem to think that if a person has not been visited by the Holy Spirit (“struck by lightning”, so to speak, like St Paul), then a hammerblow to the head should do just as nicely.
There are a couple of Biblical passages that I think help explain the Christian viewpoint of the Trinity. I’ll quote them here, and I encourage everyone with access to a Bible to look them up and confirm in their own mind that I’m not taking anything out of context. First of all, John 1:1-3 says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being.” The Word here refers to Jesus, and vers 14 goes on to say, “And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Additionaly, Philippians 2:5-6 says, “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men.” The Apostle Paul also closes the book of Second Corinthians with, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” (13:14) I think that this passage shows some of the unique purposes of each of the three parts of the Trinity, Jesus as a source of grace, God of love, and the Holy Spirit of fellowship.
Fleegajoob’s post just led to a delicious irony: here we have a thread where David B., Gaudere, Phil, JAB, and others who hate the Scripture-shootind drive by would have to admit that a Bible quote is a breath of fresh air.
Zev, I commented earlier that no analogy will fully do the job, because the concept is one without good parallels in the non-divine plane. But let me try three metaphors in troika, asking you to consider the focal points of each and discount their failings, and then take them together:
As a man, you as a Jew understand yourself to be composed of body, mind, and spirit. Which one of them is “you”? Clearly, all are. Bodily fatigue or emotional stress will cloud your mind; a determination to complete a task will supersede both for the nonce. The essential “you” partakes of all three characters.
Again, you function in different roles to different people. You are your boss’s employee; assuming you to be married with children, you are your wife’s husband and your children’s father. You are your parents’ child. Granted that all are roles, you carry them on, sometimes simultaneously, without compromising the essential persona that they are roles for.
It is fairly easy to conceive of three people united to complete a task of great importance to them, with unity of will and purpose. Each plays a different function in the completion of the task, but they are in a way one in fulfilling their different purposes to finish the task, the single goal of each and of them as a group.
The only truly meaningful statement about the Trinity that does not raise more questions than it answers (though it does raise some profound ones) is the discourse on him/them by one of them/him (as we Christians think) found in John, chapters 12-15. It is well worth one’s time to read, bearing in mind the idea that the doctrine of the Trinity is not an abstract philosophical foofaraw but the product of the earnest desire of believing people to understand how the Creator God whom Jesus calls Abba, Jesus himself, and the Holy Spirit can be separate persons and yet one God.
“Love, Lover, Loved” is a perfectly tidy little triangle, but positing this out to three separate persons seems a bit of a stretch to me. I suspect if the western culture had not been so focussed on threes and had preferred twos instead, we’d have a dual deity, and you would be earnestly attempting to explain to me why lover and beloved had to be separate persons in one God. And I would be insisting, again, that a single person is perfectly capapble of both loving and being loved, and the lover/beloved duality was no support of a two-personed God. IMHO!