Sunday 10 January 2016

Clarification of my view on the Trinity

I stated in my initial post on this blog that I see the Trinity as more a case of one God in three 'presences' than three Persons: the 'only true God' (the Father, as described by Jesus) is present in the Son, by the Spirit.
The fact that both the Son and the Spirit share all the divine attributes of the Father (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, infinite love or omnibenevolence etc.), however, means that it is not inappropriate to refer to them also by the title 'God'. I think the reason that the doctrine of the Trinity requires us to say that although all three Persons are God, yet there is only one God, is that if we were to say that there were three gods, that would imply that there were three 'independent' sources of supreme power, three seperate sets of divine attributes, etc.
By saying that although there are three who are God, there is only one God, we are constantly reminded that there is only one supreme 'power source', only one source of infinite love and knowledge etc. - that of the Father Almighty, maker of Heaven and Earth, as the Nicene Creed puts it. The Son, rather than being God in an unqualified sense like the Father, is 'true God from true God', to borrow another phrase from the creed (italics mine). Likewise with the Spirit. While the Father is uncaused, the Son (God's 'Word' or Wisdom, which became incarnate as Jesus Christ) is eternally generated and the Spirit eternally 'spirated' by the Father. As such, the Father is eternally the source of the divinity of the Son and the Spirit.
When we try to view the doctrine of the Trinity as a logical or mathematical idea it inevitably leads to incoherence if not outright cognitive dissonance. It is, rather, a religious concept expressed in symbolic language. Translated into straightforward, 'face value' terminology, I believe that what it is trying to express is the idea that while there is one supreme God, there are two other Gods who share all of the divine attributes of the supreme God because they derive them from Him.

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