Now obviously some people may still be young in the faith and may not fully grasp who Jesus is. Of course, this may be a good reason why the Bible teaches "that not many of you should be teachers." While trolling through the Blogosphere, I came across an excellent Post, I Love the Trinity, by John Samson at Reformation Theology. Here is the post:
I love the Trinity!
I love the Trinity. That's because I love God, and God is a Trinity.
Very few people have a firm grasp of the concept of the Trinity. It is important therefore to determine what we as Christians mean by the term. The doctrine of the Trinity, stated simply is that there is one eternal being of God, and this one being of God is shared by three co-equal, co-eternal persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. God is therefore one in essense and three in personality.
It is necessary here to distinguish between the terms "being" and "person." It would be a contradiction, obviously, to say that there are three beings within one being, or three persons within one person. There is no contradiction though because that is not what is being said at all. There is one eternal, infinite being of God, shared fully and completely by three persons, Father, Son and Spirit. One what and three who's.
All the major cults today (Including the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), etc.) contend that Christians have simply made up the concept of the Trinity, saying that the term is not even found in the Bible. Though it is true that the actual term cannot be found in Scripture, I would have to say, "so what?" for even the word "Bible" is not found in the Bible! The term "Bible" comes from the word biblos meaning "book," and therefore means "the Book." The Bible is not just "a" book but "the" book, because it is the very Word of Almighty God, and therefore the most important book anyone can ever read; for it is the only one that is inspired by God. (2 Tim. 3:16).
We believe in the Trinity because it is taught in the Bible. How so? While the actual term is not found in the Scripture, the doctrine certainly is.
On the basis of Scripture itself, Christians throughout the centuries have professed belief in the Holy Trinity, affirming the fact that our one God is eternally existent in three Persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are co-equal, co-existent and co-eternal. This is because the following three things are very clearly taught in Scripture:
(1) There is only one God, who is eternal and immutable (unchanging). (Deut. 6:4; Isa. 43:10; Mal. 3:6; Mark 12:29; John 17:3; 1 Tim. 2:5; Jam. 2:19)
(2) There are three eternal Persons - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These Persons are never identified with one another - that is, they are carefully differentiated as distinct Persons. The Father is not the Son, nor the Son the Holy Spirit, and nor is the Holy Spirit the Father. (Matt: 3:13-17; 28:19; Luke 10:22; John 1:1, 2; 3:16, 17; 15:26; 16:7; 17:1-26; 2 Cor. 13:14)
(3) The Father, the Son, and the Spirit, are identified as being full Deity - that is, the Bible teaches the Deity of the Father, the Deity of Christ and the Deity of the Holy Spirit. (Isa. 9:6; John 17:3; John 1:1, 18; 8:58; 20:28; Phil. 2:5-11; Col. 2:9; Titus 2:13; Heb 1:8; 2 Pet. 1:1; Acts 5:3, 4; 2 Cor. 3:17, 18)
When someone denies any of these three statements, severe error is the result. Dr. James White states, "if one denies that there are Three Persons, it results in the "Oneness" teaching of the United Pentecostal Church and others. If one denies Full Equality, one is left with Three Persons and One God, resulting in "subordinationism" as seen in Jehovah's Witnesses, the Way International, etc. (though to be perfectly accurate the Witnesses (JW"s) deny all three of the sides in some way - they deny Full Equality (i.e., they believe that Jesus is Michael the Archangel), they deny the Three Persons (the Holy Spirit is an impersonal, active "force" like electricity) and One God (they say Jesus is "a god" - a lesser divinity than Yahweh). And, if one denies One God, one is left with polytheism, the belief in many gods, as seen clearly in the Mormon Church, perhaps the most polytheistic religion I have encountered."
"God eternally exists as three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and each person is fully God, and there is one God." (Dr. Wayne Grudem)
"To all three belong the same eternity, the same unchangeableness, the same majesty, the same power. In the Father is unity, in the Son equality, in the Holy Spirit the harmony of unity and equality; and these three attributes are all one because of the Father, all equal because of the Son, and all harmonious because of the Holy Spirit" (Augustine, On Christian Doctrine: Preface/Book 1 Chapter 5).
3 comments:
The reason most lay Christians don't understand the concept of the Trinity, as pontificated by the Nicene Creed, is because it is such incomprehensible nonsense!
The Trinity was invented by the political councils of the newly-minted state church to respond to Jewish charges of polytheism and to satisfy the demands of Platonic philosophy.
Nowhere does scripture refer to the three persons of the Godhead as "one substance."
"And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: And lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." (Matthew 3:16). Here are three separate beings in three separate locations -- impossibly "one substance," unless you think it was all done with smoke and mirrors to deceive!
Was it smoke and mirrors again at the transfiguration of Jesus? Jesus stood before Peter James and John, his face shining like the sun, and a voice spoke out of the bright cloud above them, "This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him." (Matthew 17:1-5. How can Jesus possibly be his own father!
The only godly substance taught in scriptures, and that repeatedly, is the very real substance of flesh and bones of the resurrected body of the Lord Jesus Christ. There were more than 500 witnesses to this reality! (1 Corinthians 15:6)
Jesus even commanded his disciples to feel his resurrected body, "for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have. (Luke 24:39).
Jesus ascended to heaven in that very same physical body, and as the apostles wondered about that, two angels testified, "This same Jesus, which is taken up from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven." (Acts 1:11.) This same Jesus! In like manner! Yes, indeed, in his glorified, resurrected, physical body of flesh and bone! He did not hide his body under a rock and ascend as some incomprehensible blob of pseudoplasm.
The doctrine of the Trinity also contradicts the testimony of the martyr Stephen after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus. "But he, being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God." (Acts 7:54-56).
Finally, consider carefully and soberly the great intercessory prayer of Jesus to his Father, shortly before he was to work out the infinite atonement for our sins:
John 17:20-26:
20 Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word;"
[Jesus now prays for all who would believe on the words of the apostles.]
21 That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me.
[Jesus asks the Father that all who believe in him will be one with him in exactly the same sense that he is one with the Father!]
22 And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one:
[Jesus has given his glory (to be fulfilled in the resurrection) to his followers, so that they may be perfectly one with himself and the Father. As "one substance," one incomprehensible blog of pseudo-plasm? Never! But with individual, glorified, resurrected bodies of flesh and bone, with the same glory that the Father gave Jesus. Do the geometry. Giving requires one individual, the giver, A, and a separate recipient, B. How could Jesus receive his glory except from his Father?]
23 I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.
[Jesus is talking here about the unifying power of love -- the power that unifies him with the Father and his followers with himself and the Father.]
24 Father, I will that they also, whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am; that they may behold my glory, which thou hast given me: for thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.
[Jesus specifies the place where this glory shall be given to his followers -- in heaven. The Father, one being, loved the Son, a separate being, from the beginning.]
25 O righteous Father, the world hath not known thee: but I have known thee, and these have known that thou hast sent me.
[Do the geometry. Person A, in one location, sends Person B to another location. The very concept of "sent" requires to persons, two locations. Impossibly one substance!]
26 And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.
[Here we see the eventual perfect unity of the Father, the Son, and all whom the Son has redeemed, together in one place, heaven, enjoying eternal glorified, distinct physical bodies of flesh and bone united perfectly in love, but never muddled together in some impossible and incomprehensible union of substance.]
Finally, in his wonderful sermon on the resurrection, Paul testified that those who follow Christ will be resurrected just as he was, to inherit a physical body having a glory like the sun. (1 Corinthians 15) John testified that when Christ comes again, and the Saints are resurrected, "we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2)
This very Biblical doctrine of theosis, that our Heavenly Father, like any parent, has provided for his children to become like him, was believed and taught in the primitive Church and is still taught, in modified form, in Easter Orthodoxy, but it is only taught in its purity in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is the pure restoration of primitive Christianity. This doctrine is not the "polytheism," that you allege, for we shall always worship the Father in the name of the Son and be subject to them. Rather it fulfills the intercessory prayer of Jesus, that his followers become one with him and the Father.
All this raises the necessary question, "when the Nicene Council killed the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ in order to invent the Trinity, where did they stash his body?"
In the spring of 1820 a 14-year old boy, Joseph Smith Jr, was troubled by the religious contention between the Protestant churches in his neighborhood. Reading the counsel of James, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him," (James 1:5), he went into a grove of trees to ask God which of all the churches he should join.
"After I had retired to the place where I had previously designed to go, having looked around me, and finding myself alone, I kneeled down and began to offer up the desires of my heart to God. I had scarcely done so, when immediately I was seized upon by some power which entirely overcame me, and had such an astonishing influence over me as to bind my tongue so that I could not speak. Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed to sudden destruction.
"But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair and abandon myself to destruction—not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before felt in any being—just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
"It no sooner appeared than I found myself delivered from the enemy which held me bound. When the light rested upon me I saw two Personages, whose brightness and glory defy all description, standing above me in the air. One of them spake unto me, calling me by name and said, pointing to the other—This is My Beloved Son. Hear Him!
"My object in going to inquire of the Lord was to know which of all the sects was right, that I might know which to join. No sooner, therefore, did I get possession of myself, so as to be able to speak, than I asked the Personages who stood above me in the light, which of all the sects was right (for at this time it had never entered into my heart that all were wrong)—and which I should join.
"I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.”
(Joseph Smith History 1:15-19)
I testify that God the Father and his Only Begotten Son Jesus Christ are exactly that to which the apostles, the martyr Stephen, and the martyr Joseph Smith testified -- glorious, distinct beings with physical bodies of flesh and bone. The Holy Ghost is also a distinct personage, having a body of spirit. No wonder that the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ told Joseph that those creeds were an "abomination in his sight!"
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Tracy,
Thanks for your comment. You obviously spent a lot of time writing it. There are, however, so many errors that it would require basically a "do-over" to even begin to interact with such thinking.
This statement seems to give me a summary of your view, and I will interact with that.
"All this raises the necessary question, "when the Nicene Council killed the resurrected Lord Jesus Christ in order to invent the Trinity, where did they stash his body?""
First of all, Nicea didn't kill the Resurrection belief. All throughout your post seems to miss this obvious truth. If you have even bothered to read the Nicene Creed it talks about the resurrection!
For you to think Christians deny the bodily resurrection is just plain amazing.
2) By your numerous statements, you clearly have no idea what the doctrine of the Trinity is. May I suggest you read primary sources that give a knowledgeable understanding of the Trinity before you begin to set fire to the many straw-men you have erected?
3) You have confused the doctrine of the incarnation with the Trinity itself. Jesus was not talking to Himself when He prayed.
In all of your post, you assume the Mormon understanding of who and what God is, then read it into Christian theology and come away with scarecrows burning in the fields.
If you would like to discuss this in a rational manner, please let me know.
God Bless
BTW: "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him," (James 1:5), he went into a grove of trees to ask God which of all the churches he should join."
Traci I have done this, and as it turns out God very very very clearly told me Mormonism is wrong and that Reformed Baptists are the true churches.
:-)
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