Trinity Sunday

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Re: Trinity Sunday

May 28, 2024, 11:10 AM

It's a response to multiple expressions of God in the OT and NT. Basically, "How can one explain how different people have understood and explained God over 2000 years?

That question ultimately led to about 300 years of different churches thinking different things, and a lot of folks getting excommunicated over it. The Trinity tried to reconcile that.

In a nutshell, the interpretation that was decided on by the church "powers that be" has a distinction between WHAT God is, and WHO God is. Another way of putting it would be "God's substance vs. God's appearance.

A rough analogy would be water. Water IS H2O, but it can APPEAR as water, ice, or steam. One substance, three forms.

But it's way more complicated than that. For instance, Jesus clearly says "the Father is greater than I" -John 14:28. But he also says "I and the Father are one." - John 10:30. How can both be true?

The concept of the Trinity tries to explain that. But some of those excommunicated guys way back when said "No son can be equal to their father because their father came before them." The Trinity doesn't say that though. It says The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are three equal parts of a whole.

That example just scratches the surface of the implications. If the Trinity has existed since creation, that means Jesus is as "old" as God, despite being his son. And that means that Jesus existed from the time Abram left Ur, and actually gave the Jews the Law, through Moses, that he would later sacrifice himself to end.

It also means that God himself, as a part of the Trinity, was on the cross and a part of him died. Like I said, a lot of implications if one follows it all through.

That particular idea that Father/Son/HolyGhost existed since creation is called High Christology. Another view, and the one that I was taught, is called Low Christology. In Low, Jesus was born a man, from a miraculous birth, and became divine either at his baptism or his D&R. That view means that only a man died, but when he was resurrected he became divine. It has the implication that a part of God didn't die on the cross, but also means that the Trinity couldn't have existed since creation, because Jesus didn't exist until Mary bore him.

So either way one goes, it answers some questions and opens others. But it's an attempt, at least, to answer every way God, Jesus, and the HS are spoken of in the Bible.

The Jews and Muslims keep it very simple. God is God, and only God, period. Jesus was a man, and the Holy Spirit is either and angel, or a messenger of God.

At some point I'll go through all the variations of Christology that didn't make it. They all have very valid interpretations that lasted centuries in some cases, they just didn't make the final cut. How can one explain that which cannot be explained, ya know?

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Yes, that's certainly how I would read those verses.

The "Word" is a very Greek idea, and it's one of the reasons people think that whoever wrote John was educated in, or at least familiar with, Greek ideas and philosophy. As opposed to purely Hebrew philosophy.

The root of Word is the idea of the 'Logos', which means word, but also means rationality, wisdom, and ordering ability. So it's a more powerful and inclusive word than just speaking. It means the ability to create and structure, essentially.

That ties into the idea in many ancient religions of creating order from chaos, in a variety of ways. In Sumerian creation, for instance, order (and thus creation) was established by slaying the monster Tiamat, who embodied chaos.

There idea of the power of the spoken word is pretty old, but not really Hebrew. In the Genesis 1 version of creation, God speaks the universe into existence, "And God Said..." etc.

That's in contrast to the parallel creation story beginning in Gen 2:4, where God creates, builds, and makes things with his hands, even molding man and breathing life into man.

Two completely different "feels" to creation. One version is almost manual labor and craftsmanship, and the other is sweeping rhetoric and the power of speech.

There's lots of blended concepts like that running all through the Bible, between the OT and NT.

Mark, written in maybe 50-60ish AD, reads Jesus as much more of a simple man, while John, written 90-100, has a much more regal and divine feel to it all. Different people, in different times, in different places, and potentially different audiences, writing differently.

Remember there were two early crowds in Christianity who were being converted; Jews, who were already looking for a Messiah (albeit a different kind of Messiah), and Gentiles (primarily Greeks), who had no concept of what a messiah even was, or why you would need one.

So both these people had to be addressed in terms and ways they understood.

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