Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
laziness, impatience, and hubris
 
PerlMonks  

Re^4: Wall quotes Wall (3==1)

by Athanasius (Archbishop)
on May 15, 2021 at 07:27 UTC ( [id://11132621]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re^3: Wall quotes Wall (3==1)
in thread Wall quotes Wall

Hi LanX (and apologies for the late reply),

(3==1)

The formula for the Trinity is: three Persons (Greek hypostases, “individual realities”, Latin personae) in one [Divine] Nature (Greek ousia, “being, essence”, Latin substantia, “substance”). I do understand that the names “God the Father,” “God the Son,” and “God the Holy Spirit” make it sound as if there are three Gods; but that’s just an unfortunate feature of the terminology, not of the underlying doctrine. The name “God the Father” means God, in the Person of the Father; “God the Son” means God (the same God) in the Person of the Son, and so on. (The doctrine is known as the Trinity, meaning Three, but a more accurate name would be Tri-Unity, meaning Three-in-One.)

Now to your question...

So, please decide which person you are talking about...

As a general rule, attributes of personality, when applied to God, apply not to the Persons of the Trinity individually, but to God in His nature/essence. Hence, when John says God is love (1 John 4:16), this implies that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all equally love. The distinction you are trying to draw between Father and Son is not possible in Trinitarian theology. To see that this is so, consider the opening of the Book of Hebrews:

The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being (Hebrews 1:3, NIV)

The Son could not be the Father’s exact representation if they had different personalities!

-----

I suspect that, lying behind your question (and if not yours, then certainly behind some of the things said in other parts of this thread), is the idea that the Father is the God of the Old Testament, the Son of the Gospels, and the Holy Spirit of the book of Acts and beyond. This is an ancient view, originating in the 3rd century, and has since been named Modalistic Monarchianism (or Sabellianism). But despite some similarities of terminology, it is not Trinitarian. In the Trinitarian view, the three Persons act together, not successively: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. ... and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. ... Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness...” (Genesis 1:1,2,26, NIV).

-----

By the way, your reference to the deification of Jesus of Nazareth is misleading in a Trinitarian context. In classical Greco-Roman religion, a hero such as Heracles/Hercules could be deified, meaning the man became a god. The Christian understanding of the Incarnation is the opposite: God becomes man.

Hope that helps,

Athanasius <°(((><contra mundum Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://11132621]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others wandering the Monastery: (None)
    As of 2024-04-25 01:41 GMT
    Sections?
    Information?
    Find Nodes?
    Leftovers?
      Voting Booth?

      No recent polls found