Is there anything in Christian Theology about the possibility of the Father’s or Holy Spirit’s ability to become incarnate in the same say the Word became incarnate?
Hmmm… “Christian belief” covers a very large area of theoretical speculation, so no single good answer is going to work here. But let’s essay the following:
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Yes, of course He can; He’s God, after all; He can do whatever He wants.
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But He wouldn’t; the Incarnation was a particular and special instance of God the Son becoming Man in order to redeem Man from his own sinful nature, a special instance of divine humility which would not be repeated. (By comparison, it’s possible that some one human being, in intellectual love with Drosophila melanogaster, might choose to become a fruit fly and die as one, in order to learn what being one is like from the inside. But it’s not going to be a common pursuit of humans, Jeff Goldblum to the contrary.)
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Latter-day Saints theology is something completely different from anyone else whatsoever on this subject, and I’ll defer to our Mormon members on explaining that. (Most people either totally discount the Doctrine of Eternal Progression, or give it a “this stupid heresy” take, and I’d prefer to avoid doing either.)
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The heresy of Montanism held that its founder, Montanus, either was himself the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, or was the vehicle through which the Holy Spirit spoke, reinterpreting the sending of the Paraclete as referencing a human person, Montanus, who was to be identified in some special way with the Holy Spirit.
So the simplest answer is: Orthodox Christianity would hold “in theory, yes; in practice, no” – and variants have, well, interesting divergent beliefs.
Is there an Orthodox Christian answer as to why it was the Word that was chosen become incarnate and not the Father or Holy Spirit?
IIUIC, Orthodox (rather, Traditional) Christianity holds that each person of the Trinity is of the same essence, is the same being, as the other two persons. We LDS hold that the Godhead is composed of three distinct entities: God the Father, Jesus the Christ, and the Holy Ghost.
I meant chosen by God.
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We LDS hold that the Godhead is composed of three distinct entities: God the Father, Jesus the Christ, and the Holy Ghost.[/qoute]
Can the other entities of the Godhead become incarnate? Is there teaching on why the Jesus (and not the Father or Holy Spirit) was chosen to become incarnate in LDS teaching? And hijacking my own thread, can the entities of the Godhead disagree and fight each other in some fashion?
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The theology is that God the Father has a body, thus he is already carnate; obviously also that Jesus has a body; and that the Holy Ghost has a body only of spirit. As to their disagreeing, no. We are taught that the members of the Godhead are one in purpose.
For an Orthodox (big “O”) Christian answer, there is this from Athanasius’ On the Incarnation:
It is the Word (or, rather, Logos, of which “Word” is a rather misleading rendering) in whose image and likeness humans were created – we are rational, volitional creatures. Therefore, it was most fitting for the Word to become incarnate and restore us to our original nature.
Mary conceived of the Holy Spirit so it would be the Spirit that fathered Jesus, not the Father. But in some beliefs the Father, Son, and Spirit are the same so in that sense they all would be incarnations.
Monavis
It’s not a separate part. The three parts of the Trinity are only One.
Yeah, if it was easy we wouldn’t call it a “mistery”.
With that teeny detail out of the way,
The Word is called El Verbo in Spanish - I don’t read Greek but I’m told the Greek word also has the double meaning: Verbo means both word and action. In the sense of “word” it’s linked with magical thought: words have/are power, to know someone’s/something’s real name gives you death and life power over them, when a mage says “fireball” a fireball appears. But if you think of the “Word” as Action… well, Action is what the whole Incarnation is about, isn’t it?
The Nicene creed describes the Son as ‘eternally begotten of the Father/God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God/
begotten not made, one in Being with the Father’
-meaning (I think) that the parent/offspring relationship is the state in which the Godhead has always existed; this being the case, the physical incarnation of the Son on our planet was sort of an inevitable expression of the eternal nature of the Godhead.
Mystery. Mistery (also spelled mystery is an archaic word for a trade.
Doesn’t look right. Let’s try it this way.
Mystery. Mistery (also spelled mystery) is an archaic word for a trade.
Interestingly, Joseph Smith’s theology changed over the course of the foundation of the LDS church. It seems that he started out with a fairly orthodox view of the Trinity and then only settled into the three separate entities at a later stage.
This evolution in theology required making changes in the Book of Mormon in order to match with the later doctrine, and is thought to be one of the reasons that Joseph Smith’s “First Vision,” his initial encounter with the heavens, radically changed over time as well.
Besides serving as another example of your dislike of a particular denomination, TokyoPlayer, what does that posting have to do with anything?
Thanks for mentioning this; I found it actually quite profound - “In the beginning was the Word” does seem rather weak in English, because the ‘Word’ could be anything - like ‘banana’ or ‘pencil’.
“In the beginning was the Verb”, even if it isn’t a strictly acurate English translation (which isn’t possible anyway), conveys much more of the sense of purpose and action that, reading in context, the passage seems to be trying to put across.
How is that The Father can know things that the other parts of the Trinity don’t if they are One?
It’s a mystery. :eek:
OK, that might not seem a particularly satisfying answer, but your question is the same as asking how there can be three distinct persons if they are one being.
Well gosh Monty. Another question to me without addressing the points I’ve brought up. Good idea. If you can’t win with logic then attack the person. :rolleyes:
Shall we spell this out really, really, really slowly again for you? We’re having a discussion about the Trinity, including question of the LDS beliefs, and you bring up the *current * LDS beliefs vis-a-vis Orthodox and I mention how said beliefs have evolved from Orthodox Christian views. Really, do we need to go through this every time?
For people who are interested, (and to piss off people who aren’t interested) there is an in depth article on Joseph Smith’s Changing Doctrine of Deity.
This is shown in some of the changes required in the Book of Mormon.
For the second phase in Joseph Smith’s progression, we go back to the essay
Joseph Smith then progresses to the current LDS theology, which is that there are a multitude of Gods, and that we (well, not me, but others) can become gods ourselves. In a famous talk, called the King Follet Discourse, Smith outlines how God was once a human, like us, and had his own God, before he became our God. Lately, the LDS church has back peddled from that, with the current prophet telling Larry King that they don’t know that much about it.
I think this fits in here somewhere: who are these:
Genesis 6:2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.
And, I haven’t gotten thus far in the bible yet, but I hear that somewhere in there God has a meeting with the other Gods and banishes them. What?
Save your rolleyes for your own jerkish attitude, TokyoPlayer. Recently, in just about any thread in which the LDS are even tangentially mentioned, you jump in with a bunch of crap that has absolutely nothing to do with anything other than your private gripe against the LDS. It is you who are attacking the person, so to speak; in this case, the “person” being the church.
No, we don’t. The real question is why you think that whenever anyone mentions the particular current teaching of that particular church, you feel the need to rehash old stuff.
The only relevant comment in there is your admission that you’re doing this “to piss off people.”
And none of that has jack to do with the issue at hand. Well, other than, once again, showing that you just have to trot stuff out to gripe about a particular denomination.
I’ll ask you again, instead of trashing all these other threads, why don’t you get off your butt and just make a consolodated Pit thread about your gripes?