ZEV, you’re such a sweet guy. For my part, let me clarify: I’m only very very mildly hurt – hardly a scratch – to hear from someone that I respect that my beliefs are idolatrous. Precisely to the same degree, I imagine, that you would be. But I know you believe as you do in good faith (and through faith), and can do no other, and so it doesn’t really bother me much. I can’t ask you do anything other than be respectful of my beliefs, as you invariably are, so it’s all good. Like I said, I don’t really think we disagree. And I respect you enormously, and you have nothing whatsoever to apologize for.
As far as whether I believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – of course I do. I’m a garden-variety, middle-of-the-road American Protestant, and therefore a Trinitarian. That’s why (one of the reasons) that I’m a Christian and not a Jew.
Zev, any attempt to explicate the concept of the Trinity falls short of what we understand to be the truth about God, and I truly hesitate to say the slightest word on the subject. But I have two or three things to bring forward as regards this, and I hope that you’ll bear with me in discussing them. First is the Definition of the Union of the Divine and Human Natures in the Person of Christ, written by the bishops of the united Christian church(es) in 451 AD. This is the closest the totality of Trinititarian Christianity comes to saying definitively what the nature of God as seen in Jesus Christ is; anything other than this is a writing from times when the church was divided, or the respected but not official views of a great (or not so great) theologian. It’s laden with Greek philosophy and not at all amenable to classical Jewish thought, but it strikes me as something that may convey a part of what we do believe.
Second, in an attempt to convey to you as a Jewish man what the traditional teaching on the Deity of Christ is, may I commend to you the efforts of two Christian Jews to convey to other Jews their grasp of how Christ was the fulfillment of God’s promise: Peter’s Pentecost discourse in Acts 2 and 3, and the [url-“http://bible.crosswalk.com/OnlineStudyBible/bible.cgi?passage=heb+1&version=nrs&showtools=0”]Letter to the Hebrews. I hasten to add that this is not any attempt to convert so much as it is to convey a sense of the unity between Christianity and Judaism that has been the understanding of (most thoughtful) Christians since the beginning of our separate faith.
These are rather long, and I am not attempting to bring them into evidence here, merely offering them as a means where you can, perhaps and if you so choose, get a handle on how Christians can feel that their beliefs are the fulfillment of the promises in the Tanakh, and not a nigh-onto-polytheistic perversion of Judaism’s beliefs.
