What are your views on understanding The Trinity?

Vince Massi said:
The Bible does teach that God is Three Persons in One. Scripture also teaches that this is a great mystery. The Trinity is a partially successful explanation of this great mystery, but the Trinity is not correct in every point.
Click to expand...
If it's an unknowable mystery, how can you know "it's not correct in every point"? Not that there is a single set of Trinity doctrines with exact specifics that are agreed upon by every Christian. The how and why of it can be debated but the fact that it is taught in the Bible cannot.
 
Vince Massi said:
The Bible does teach that God is Three Persons in One. Scripture also teaches that this is a great mystery. The Trinity is a partially successful explanation of this great mystery, but the Trinity is not correct in every point.
Click to expand...
You misunderstand the word "mystery." As a theological term, it means something that was previously kept hidden but is now revealed; it must be known by revelation. It doesn't mean something that can't be known or understood.
 
Ekklesian, I believe that your questions are unanswerable, but I'll try to help.
A lot of this Catholic theology is a blend of Christianity, paganism, and philosophy. Theologians who couldn't even grasp the Gospel wrote much of the theology on the nature of God.
Now, we are taught that Jesus had two natures, one human and one Divine. I took Systematic Theology at HAC, where the textbook presented arguments (both for and against) the doctrines that Jesus had one, two, or three natures. Unfortunately, the textbook convinced me that all three positions are wrong. Even more important, I realized that God didn't care enough to explain it, so why should I worry about it?
 
Vince Massi said:
Even more important, I realized that God didn't care enough to explain it, so why should I worry about it?
Click to expand...
Because the Name, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, is revealed to us, and those who know Christ, hunger to know Him better.

Not saying you can wrap your mind around it, but saying God didn't care for us to know Him as Father, Son and Holy Ghost is erroneous at best. It sounds like you may subscribe to a form of Modalism: that God is really one person acting in different roles.
 
"... those who know Christ, hunger to know Him better."

I do. That's why I don't waste time with theological philosophy.

Anyway, decades ago, I felt that Jesus had three natures (human, Divine, and "Jesus"). In Systematic Theology class, I was fascinated by all the accusations against people who believed this--not a single one of the accusations applied to me. However, the book did convince me that Jesus did not have three natures.
 
Vince Massi said:
I realized that God didn't care enough to explain it, so why should I worry about it?
Click to expand...

Jesus is a man: "the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5).
Jesus is God: "To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ, who is God over all, blessed forever" (Romans 9:5).

So God did explain it, thus maybe you should worry about it.

If "one, two, or three natures" are all wrong, how many natures does Jesus have? None? That's just stupid. More than three? (More than two, really.) Is he also an animal? a carrot? a super-intelligent shade of the colour blue? Apart from human or divine, what additional nature does he have, and how do you know this, since it is not given by revelation?
 
Jim Vineyard was having a staff meeting, and a very Godly guy got all upset because the rest of us didn't care about how many natures Jesus had. He started lecturing us on how Jesus had two natures (God and man). I asked him if Jesus wanted to sin., because that was what He really wanted to do.
Horrified, the staffer exclaimed "No!," and I explained "If Jesus didn't want to sin, He didn't have a human nature." The poor guy sputtered longer than anyone else I've ever heard.
 
Vince Massi said:
Jim Vineyard was having a staff meeting, and a very Godly guy got all upset because the rest of us didn't care about how many natures Jesus had. He started lecturing us on how Jesus had two natures (God and man). I asked him if Jesus wanted to sin., because that was what He really wanted to do.
Horrified, the staffer exclaimed "No!," and I explained "If Jesus didn't want to sin, He didn't have a human nature." The poor guy sputtered longer than anyone else I've ever heard.
Click to expand...
He didn't have a corrupt 'human nature,' you mean.
 
To deny that Christ had a human nature is to deny that he was human.

Massi is a Christological heretic. He's just doing his very best to avoid admitting it.
 
Several years ago, Marty Braemer was a big writer on the FFF. A successful HAC grad, he had built a medium-sized IFB church in New York. His church included a successful Christian school. A devout Ruckmanite, he got into several fights on the FFF, and he kept coming back for more.

One day, a student with a well-established reputation for ungodliness claimed to have seen Marty making out with a teacher. Despite Marty's threats to expel the student for lying, the deacons investigated. Various staff members reported seeing Marty and/or the teacher in unusual places at unusual times. Meanwhile, the student's answers to exactly where he had been at different exact times checked out, but the answers from Marty and the teacher did not. Eventually, the teacher confessed that they had been having a sexual affair for some time, and Marty was fired.

And then...
 
Vince Massi said:
Several years ago, Marty Braemer was a big writer on the FFF. A successful HAC grad, he had built a medium-sized IFB church in New York. His church included a successful Christian school. A devout Ruckmanite, he got into several fights on the FFF, and he kept coming back for more.

One day, a student with a well-established reputation for ungodliness claimed to have seen Marty making out with a teacher. Despite Marty's threats to expel the student for lying, the deacons investigated. Various staff members reported seeing Marty and/or the teacher in unusual places at unusual times. Meanwhile, the student's answers to exactly where he had been at different exact times checked out, but the answers from Marty and the teacher did not. Eventually, the teacher confessed that they had been having a sexual affair for some time, and Marty was fired.

And then...
Click to expand...
... along came Jones?
 
I was surprised when Marty--who had been fired after being caught in adultery, lying, and slander--received an outpouring of support on the FFF. Several days later, he announced that he was returning to the ministry, and I was surprised at the outpouring of rage he received, often from the same people.
But HAC taught us not to quit. When his other sins failed him, Marty turned to a new sin: pagan philosophy.
 
Vince Massi said:
I was surprised when Marty--who had been fired after being caught in adultery, lying, and slander--received an outpouring of support on the FFF. Several days later, he announced that he was returning to the ministry, and I was surprised at the outpouring of rage he received, often from the same people.
But HAC taught us not to quit. When his other sins failed him, Marty turned to a new sin: pagan philosophy.
Click to expand...
Describe the "support" and "rage"? You doth color your narrative a bit, methinks.
 
Ekklesian said:
Describe the "support" and "rage"? You doth color your narrative a bit, methinks.
Click to expand...
Vince is either being inaccurate or dishonest. Braemer had recently been exulting that another poster, whom he disliked, had left the ministry after confessing to an affair--only to be discovered in fairly short order to be guilty of the same thing. And he made the usual weak defenses of himself (David was an adulterer and didn't have to stop being king, blah blah). So he was quite soundly mocked all round as an adulterer and a hypocrite. He moved to another part of the country and worked his way back into ministry there; meanwhile he was poisoning his former congregation against his successor. He was a first-class cretin all round.

That said, unlike Vince, I don't think he denied that Jesus had a human nature.
 
"Describe the "support" and "rage"? You doth color your narrative a bit, methinks."
Marty had gotten into a lot of fights because of his strong Ruckmanism. But when he got fired, there was an outpouring of sympathy, support, encouragement, etc., even from people he had fought with. About ten days later, he came back with a cheery post assuring us that he was returning to the ministry. There followed a furious outpouring of condemnation.

The people who ripped into him explained that he was Scripturally unqualified for the ministry, and that he was adding to his sins by attempting to return.
 
Hey Christ-denier, if you weren't so obsessed with upping your post count by posting your stupid stories one sentence at a time, you'd already realize we got past that part.
 
Despite his adultery, lying, and slander, Marty was better than us, and he could prove it: he was knowledgeable about the nature (s?) of Christ.

Marty reprimanded us sternly for not understanding these things. And, because they are not taught in Scripture, we needed to go to Marty for enlightenment. We had failed the test--we had learned Scripture, but not pagan philosophy. And now we had to answer to Marty. Seriously.

No joke: About a year later, Marty was trying to run an internet talk show, and he used this same tactic in other areas. His site featured a portrait of Marty glaring at readers with an angry scowl, as he called them to account for not knowing things the Bible doesn't teach.
A few years ago, Marty got a church in a modernist denomination, and he abandoned us to our Bibles.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top