I wish you the best of luck in your career change, Glitch. My thought is, when God wants you, he’ll be in touch. All you need to do is not ignore his knocking on your door. (“Have you found God?” “I didn’t know he was lost.”)
To answer the questions asked me or implied by folks in the course of this thread:
I believe in God. Period. I put my full faith and trust in his goodness, grace, mercy, and lovingkindness. Who is this God? Apparently the Christian God.
It’s important to distinguish dogma from terminology in talking about him. Any discussion of the Trinity would have Gaudere poking holes in it you could sail the Titanic through. It’s an abstruse, near-paradoxical concept. I believe in the Holy Trinity. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be understood in the Aristotelian formulations that the church has traditionally used.
Start with one god. I and all Christians are as firm on this as the most Orthodox of Jews or the most fervent of Muslims. He reveals himself in three personae – and let’s use the Latin, not the English. A persona is the mask an actor in classical Greek theatre wears, and by extension the character he portrays. That actor may have several roles in the course of the play. God certainly does.
He reveals himself as creator and as tutelary deity of the Hebrews/Jews. He reveals himself as the Holy Spirit playing one-on-one with our own spirits. And he reveals himself in a historically unique way through the character of Jesus of Nazareth, itinerant rabbi.
One god. Three personae. BTW, the Trinity was never defined as three and no more…three is the number of personae he’s used in relating with humans. As with spatial dimensions, there may be others we have no knowledge of; three is what we have to work with.
As I’ve tried to explain by analogy with prayer, God rarely if ever expects anything of humans because he wants or needs it. He normally does it because it’s needful or important to our spiritual development. He does not need me praying for Edlyn and her kid – he’s perfectly well aware of what they need. But it’s important for me to be aware that they need my prayers – that they are fellow suffering humans. Same goes for peace in ____ (fill in the trouble spot of your choice). He’s got it under control, and is working out his plan there. It’s me who needs to be aware of its need for peace.
Likewise with the Atonement. Whatever Paul and John may have meant by the language they use, God didn’t need to have a human sacrifice, or even a divine sacrifice, to credit against the debit of human sin in his cosmic balance book. He doesn’t keep those kinds of records. He cares about you individually, as a father cares about his child, not as a banker cares about his loan accounts. But Jesus gave his life to bring God and man back together when what Lib. calls religion politicians were structuring his idea for guidance in living a balanced, healthy life into a set of careful rules about what kind of what you could eat when and how much effort of what kind you could make on his day of rest, and all the rest of that convoluted garbage, and the vast majority of humans were either ignoring God altogether or taking one minor element of his nature and turning it into a minor deity, repeating the process until they had a pantheon and then mythologizing them.
Jesus died to save me. I have no doubt of that. But I don’t see it as paying off an upset God – rather, he did it because I was too damned dense to pay attention until he did something that poignant and dramatic. And the same is true for all of us.
That is how I see it. YTMV.
