Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

the son of god must DEFEAT sin. sin seperated him from his brother/father .
when one takes away the son from the trinity one understands that the two persons remain.
when the father and spirit were watching the sons defeat through their omniscience , were they defeated?
god is watching his lesser created part get defeated, but at the same time god (2persons) isnt defeated?
would it make sense that the defeated god is seperated from ANOTHER DEFEATED god?

death defeated god, then god defeated it. the father and spirit always had death in a defeated position.

how much of god got defeated by death?

jesus died because the organs which helped him to live were slowly failing. god the father and spirit wasnt 1 in flesh with jc . the father ,who is bodiless, didnt make failing organs for himself. so he along with his cousin/brother (h ghost) watched his sons organs fail.

The Trinity is one understanding of god.

Perhaps this understanding of the divine may be more palatable to your taste:

God made itself human to experience humanity and better understand what went wrong in the Garden of Eden and this willingness to understand man/woman is an initiative of extraordinary beauty.

The outcome of his experience is this assessment: god forgive them for they don't know what they do, and the outcome of his experience also included an executive decree issued on the cross to the heathen thief: when you die [tonight] you will be in paradise with me for now, at last, I understand what god has created


Man is made in the image of god and now god understands, after Christ, that this relation is symmetric; god is made in the image of man and hence man will never know what he is doing. Only the Holy Spirit is shared between man and god and only this spirit is the bond between them: the spirit that creates laws, beauty, and knowledge of the world around them...

The holy trinity says god, mankind and the Holy Spirit are one: the incomprehensible, the hope, and their common language. On day the trinity will collapse into one, only god will exist with man being alive within it.

The best view in my opinion, the one I subscribe to is the participatory atonement, or "Solidarity." One can see that in the works of various theologians going back tot he Origen. Modern theologians include, Jurgen Moltmann, Matthew Lamb, D.E.H Whiteley.

He's saying that Jesus' death was a statement of solidarity, God is expressing his solidarity with humanity by becoming human and dying at the lowest level of society, a victim of human sin and political oppression. The political aspect wasn't brought out much in the NT becuase they didn't think in political terms, even though the Messiah's role was conceived of politically as a liberator.

So God is not being defeated, he's participating with humanity in it's most dramatic consequence so that he can identify with us and with our needs. Then because we place ourselves into that death and establish solidarity with him he establishes it with us and we share in the power of his resurrection and his future. this is expressed clearly by Paul in Romans.

theterminator wrote:the son of god must DEFEAT sin. sin seperated him from his brother/father .
when one takes away the son from the trinity one understands that the two persons remain.
when the father and spirit were watching the sons defeat through their omniscience , were they defeated?
god is watching his lesser created part get defeated, but at the same time god (2persons) isnt defeated?
would it make sense that the defeated god is seperated from ANOTHER DEFEATED god?

death defeated god, then god defeated it. the father and spirit always had death in a defeated position.

how much of god got defeated by death?

jesus died because the organs which helped him to live were slowly failing. god the father and spirit wasnt 1 in flesh with jc . the father ,who is bodiless, didnt make failing organs for himself. so he along with his cousin/brother (h ghost) watched his sons organs fail.

For me (a lifelong Christian), the Trinity is a very early conflation of Jewish and Orthodox Christian theology. I'm not buyin' it.

I usually reject anything in Christendom that isn't directly from the Old Testament (since that's the scripture Jesus and the Apostles relied on).

Having said that, it's also a harmless belief. The people who believe in the trinity don't deserve the grief from those who don't, and the belief itself doesn't warrant all the debate time spent over it.

the creeds were established as means of defining Christian identity. the Creeds set the Trinity in place as a doctrine. So historically being a Trinitarian comes to be synonymous with being a Christian.

Metacrock wrote:the creeds were established as means of defining Christian identity. the Creeds set the Trinity in place as a doctrine. So historically being a Trinitarian comes to be synonymous with being a Christian.

The reason this explanation is weak is because Jesus, not creeds, established Christian identity.

Being born again = Christian identity, and there are no doctrines that can ever supersede this personal event.

The Trinity is one big embarrassing cop-out IMO. From my experience, when you ask the average self-professing "Christian" in the street how the Trinity works, they will tell you a view of it that would have been regarded as heretical in the days that it was being formulated (and probably still is according to the official positions of the major Christian denominations). Most Christians I've found will give you a PART+PART+PART=WHOLE analogy, which is not how it's supposed to work. i.e Most Christians don't understand it. And even the ones that do acknowledge that it's a "mystery" that isn't supposed to make sense. In my opinion the Trinity was simply a cop-out to appease competing views. Christians desparately wanted to uphold the prestige of declaring "monotheism", while at the same time they desparately wanted to say that Jesus was God... the problem being that in the Gospels, Jesus and "The Father" are clearlly two separate characters. Solution? Let's just say that 3=1 and pretend no one noticed!

toejam wrote:The Trinity is one big embarrassing cop-out IMO. From my experience, when you ask the average self-professing "Christian" in the street how the Trinity works, they will tell you a view of it that would have been regarded as heretical in the days that it was being formulated (and probably still is according to the official positions of the major Christian denominations). Most Christians I've found will give you a PART+PART+PART=WHOLE analogy, which is not how it's supposed to work. i.e Most Christians don't understand it. And even the ones that do acknowledge that it's a "mystery" that isn't supposed to make sense. In my opinion the Trinity was simply a cop-out to appease competing views. Christians desparately wanted to uphold the prestige of declaring "monotheism", while at the same time they desparately wanted to say that Jesus was God... the problem being that in the Gospels, Jesus and "The Father" are clearlly two separate characters. Solution? Let's just say that 3=1 and pretend no one noticed!

You're overstating.

The Trinity is nothing more than an expression of the interaction between the three parts, and it's mostly abstract and dynamic in nature.

I personally reject the trinity, but I see non-believers doing ridiculous backflips over logic like yours to try to defeat what is essentially a non-issue, like this is something you should really be spending your time with.

I especially like it when you pretend that you can speak for Trinitarians in one sentence, for ancient Christians in the next sentence, and create a mythical battle between them. Then you pretend you somehow "get it" and they don't (though you've never stopped the average Christian on the street to find out). Then you misquote the gospels (Jesus said in John "I and the Father are one", some chapters after John himself states "the Word was God" and "the Word became flesh").

Before you hurt yourself, try a different point of view (that of Jesus himself). "Oneness", as defined by Jesus, can be understood from one perspective the way Adam and Eve became "one flesh". He obviously didn't refer to a material oneness, where they became Siamese twins. He was referring to a spiritual and emotional bonding, and he exemplified this bond between us and God in the parable of the wedding feast (where we are the bride and he or God is the bridegroom).

So you have a view of God like the Mormons do? That is, three gods in perfect unity?

Andrew wrote:So you have a view of God like the Mormons do? That is, three gods in perfect unity?

Putting words into my mouth is dishonest.

What you should have done is simply ask me what I believe.

(It's offensive to me when someone claiming to be a Christian expresses any form of bigotry, so I'll assume you did not mean this comment as derogatory against Mormons.)