Correct me if I am wrong, Jesus is God. Not a part of God, but is God. Not a god, but God. Not God part of the time, but all the time. Not a mode of God, but is God. The Father is also God. Not a part of God, but is God. Not a god, but God. Not God part of the time, but all the time. Not a mode of God, but is God. But Jesus is not the Father.
How does this sense?
Is it any different from:
A is C
B is C
B is not A
Do you Christians reject the idea that identity is transitive? Do they reject all of logic?
For a historical perspective, the original Greek word for the three “persons” of the Trinity can be either translated as “person”, as it is now, or as “role”. So one can describe the Trinity as being, roughly, God the Creator, God the Redeemer, and God the Inspirer. The same Entity fills all three roles, but the roles are nonetheless distinct.
If the trinity is understood as involving three roles held by one entity, then yes, he was praying to himself. But that’s not as strange as it may sound. One person can fulfill two roles in a single company, and I can imagine cases where the person might be required, in one role, to write reports that are to be received by the person holding the other role–so he ends up writing the report to himself. It’s not for the purpose of informing himself of anything, but for recordkeeping purposes he may still need to actually write the report.
If Jesus is praying to himself, it’s not for record keeping purposes I suppose. But still, who knows what formal requirements there are that he needs to fulfill in his role as Son, regardless of the fact that he himself also happens to fill the role of Father.
It’s fully intended to be an exception. That the Doctrine of the Trinity does cannot be grasped or have any perfect analogy is not an accident - it’s meant to be that way.
One way one could think of it is that Jesus is fully God for the people the Father wanted Jesus to reach, and was given the full power of God for those people. As the body and blood of Jesus was shed and distributed to all that will partake, Jesus reaches all people in living within the people who partake of Him. As such Jesus does have the full power of God in everyone.
When one surrenders a aspect of his life to Jesus, it is Jesus who gets to live in and control that aspect of that person’s life, so it is Jesus. So Jesus will do all that the Father intends, so Jesus and the Father are one.
The Holy Spirit is the guiding spirit that Jesus follows, as such the Holy Spirit instructs Jesus as to the will of the Father, as such the Holy Spirit and the Father are one.
Jesus in person and also in the believer is fully man (also fully God), and therefor subject to human error. But the Father looks at the heart, so even if Jesus, living in the believer, truly believes he is following the Holy Spirit, but makes a mistake, the Father will move heaven and earth if needed to make that for the good (Rom 8).
According to the psalmist all humans are God, and Jesus backed this up when he was accused of blasphemy because he called God his father,he reminded the Pharisees that their fathers also called God their father. He didn’t seem to think of himself as any more God than any of the people living at the time.
If Jesus was all God and all human, then humans would also have to be God or he would have been half God and Half Man.
It is a matter of belief.
The word God has had many different interpretations over the years. The Pharohs and many others were thought of as Gods.
I’m not sure where you’re getting the “B is not A” part. Here’s my understanding of how it’s supposed to work. Whether you consider it to be coherent is entirely up to you.
A = G
B = G
C = G
A = B = C
Where A, B, and C each stands for a member of the Trinity and G stands for God.
If I were to put a sock puppet on my hand, it Mr. Socky, would be me. I could talk to it, it could ‘talk’ to me. We are one and the same, yet we can chat.
Yeah. You don’t talk to yourself, or consider several options, or have times when you’d say “stop the world, I’m getting off” but you realize that wouldn’t really be the best option, even if you really, really, really want to do it?
Yeah; thing is, I’m not omniscient. Why would a being that knows the future and arranged it “consider other options”? It already knows what will happen; there aren’t any other options; it already decided what will happen to the last detail before the universe existed. Everything that happens is just a ritual playing out of previously decided behaviors.
The Trinity is in the category of “mystery” for Christian theology…beyond human understanding. So yes, it is incoherent, quite literally.
And yes, most Christians would need to admit that logic is not the process through which a relationship with God or an understanding of theology is attained.
Yes. All attempts to explain it by analogy and/or logic, in this thread and elsewhere, necessarily fail on some point.
For example: Mr Socky may be me, but he’s not wholly me.
As far as I understand it, the doctrine of the Trinity is that there are three persons, each of whom is wholly God, but the same one God - so the three persons are not each a one third portion of God, neither are there three Gods, neither are the three persons just different facets, expressions or modes - they’re the whole deal, each.
