As I stated earlier, I am not a defender of the trinity–I do not believe such a thing exists–but this statement blithely disregards a whole boatload of Christian thought on these subjects in general and the trinity in particular. Choosing not to believe it is one thing–it certainly requires one to accept premises based on revelation (I’m thinking of the usual Bible verses–Matthew 28:19, John 10:30, the benediction in 2nd Corinthians, the three visitors in Genesis)–but IMO gonzomax is making a gross caricature.
It is the equivalent of pointing and laughing at “silly quantum physicists” who have to “weasel out” of the “trap” that a photon can be two different things at once. Many QED fields are explained by “virtual” particles, which by definition cannot be observed–isn’t this just a rationalization to preserve your precious theory in the face of overwhelming common sense?
Let me be clear: These objections to quantum physics are ridiculous, and can only be seriously entertained by someone who hasn’t taken the time to understand the subject. My point is simply that great minds have applied themselves to this problem and have come up with some plausible interpretations, and many of these will explain the trinity in a coherent way. Again, that doesn’t mean the trinity is a real thing, but since when has that stopped people on this board from reasoning about entirely hypothetical subjects? I don’t see half as much ridicule (but twice as much actual reasoning) regarding the various powers of Superman, but when it’s a religious topic we quickly turn from “fighting ignorance” to “point and laugh”. Why is that?
God talking to himself isn’t really the issue (though praying to oneself is a little weird) so much as the clear implication that these are different pesrons with different wills.
This is a funny comic, but it’s not really analogous since theology has no scientific or empirical underpinnings, but only starts with asumptions.
I don’t think the problems with the Trinity (or some other theological problems like the POE) are anything new, or that people haven’t tried for millenia to resolve them, but I do know that none of them have ever been successful.
I completely get that it then makes them difficult to reconcile as one being (which is the whole point), but why would three distinct people not have three different wills?
CEO, CFO, CTO are all part of GoNoGoCo. CTO can call the CEO, but that doesn’t change the fact that all 3 are part of the trinity that makes GoNoGoCo, correct?
Of course three distinct people would have three different wills; no one on either side of the debate seems to have a problem with that part. It’s only the “difficulty” in reconciling three distinct people with three different wills one being – which folks one one side say is a mystery that doesn’t make sense and is illogical while folks on the other side say, er, no, there’s nothing mysterious about that; it doesn’t make sense because it’s incoherent.
I see nothing to disagree with here. On one side, you’ve got people who fully expect the thing to violate the rules to which every other known thing is subject.
-They’re both actually making the same statement (it is incoherent), it’s just that believers consider that a feature, not a flaw.
Oh, there are plenty of incoherencies in the Torah as well as in the New Testament. For example, how is it that God created day and night on the first day, but didn’t create the sun until the fourth day?
Trinities were common in pre-Christian pagan traditions, and Christianity was lousy with pagan influence (and declining Jewish influence) by the time of the Nicean Council. The Christian Trinity was an attempt to save Christianity from pagan polytheism as much as anything else.
As Measure for Measure said, Nicea was also partially an attempt by Constantine to make the Church fathers agree on a unified theology, but it wasn’t entirely successful. They came up with an official creed, but they only did so by shutting out the Araianists.
The Holy Spirit, specifically, got into it because of Matthew’s “Commission” in Mt. 28:19 to baptize “in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”
Well, (a) that doesn’t apply to the particular claims referenced in the quoted passage there, but also (b) we could explain that away by figuring God created some other light before creating the sun. That’d be weird, but it’s a different kind of weird than explicitly claiming that God created the sun on the first day and didn’t create the sun until the fourth day.
Still, forget the Torah for a moment. The point isn’t whether this or that other religion happens to involve an incoherence; the point is that we could whip up a religion that involves no such incoherence. We could postulate a God who brings some people back from the dead, or a God who brings no people back from the dead, with no conceptual trouble; we can’t, though, likewise postulate a God who brings some people back from the dead and brings no people back from the dead – which is incoherent in a way that religious claims (a) don’t need to be, but (b) sometimes are.
And also the “Other Comforter” referenced in John 14.
I find it extremely difficult to understand why persons not motivated at the need to scoff at beliefs they do not share find the basic principle of Trinitarian theology so absurd and ‘incoherent.’
Without the Scholastic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic philosophical language added, it simplifies to:
There is one God.
This God is the same God who inspired the Law and Prophets, the one worshiped by Jews.
This God is somehow so infused in the man Jesus of Nazareth that it is an accurate statement that ‘to know Jesus is to know God.’
In his human capacity, Jesus exemplified how to know and love this God, addressing Him by the affectionate term for Father.
So from one frame of reference Jesus is equivalent to God and from another, He is one subservient to God, modeling His life after God’s will.
Scores of people throughout history have testified to the life-changing experience of having the Spirit of this God at work within them, renewing and transforming them.
This is in accord with Jesus’s promise of the Spirit and with the experience of the earliest Christians, as recorded in Acts and the Epistles.
So there is in some way three distinct ways in which God is manifest to man, corresponding to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – and yet there is but one God.
The Greeks found it useful to say there was a single ousia manifest in three hypostases, which in Latin was rendered one substantia and three personae, the latter usage being Englished as one substance and three persons. But this is metaphysical conceptualization, doctrine or dogma rather than core belief. One believes in the Dogma of the Trinity in the same sense as one believes in Keynesian economics or the symbology of James Joyce’s novels; one believes in the God it describes in the sense one believes in one’s spouse or closest friend as a person in whom one can put full trust.
The facile F=G, S=G, HS=G, but F!=S!=HS, hence contradictory argument is at fault for the same reason that “cats are animals, dogs are animals, but dogs are not cats, therefore the whole thing is absurd” falls to pieces. As the great philosopher W.J. Clinton was wont to say, “It all depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.”
