Trinity Definition and Justification

[Flyonthewall]

Interesting, Fly. I'll have to admit that I'm not as familiar as I'd like to be with the LDS conception of the human person, whether it's tripartite (body, soul, spirit) or bipartite (body and spirit or soul), and all that. From what you said, LDS seem to lean more to the latter.

This is how I understand it, other LDS may take a slightly different angle on it. But I would say that it would be more of a bipartite.

As far as the analogy I proposed earlier, would it make more sense if I riffed on your last sentence, asking if you would consider your spirit "1/3 of me", or the body "1/3 of me," or the soul "1/3 of me"? Or are they all equally, fully me, because they are all an intrinsic, necessary part of what it means to be "me"?

I guess saying my soul is the completed me, and my spirit and physical body are two pieces of me, that when combined, complete me, would be accurate. My mortal body is a temporary housing, and my resurrected physical body will be permanent, but in keeping with your analogy, my soul is 1, my spirit would be 1/2 and my body would be 1/2, whether or not they are equally 1/2 is something I haven't really thought about.

To put this into a Trinitarian analogy, the Father is not a Father without a Son, and vice versa.

This makes sense...kind of like there cannot be a left without a right, or an up, without a down.

Both are permanently necessary and an intrinsic part of what it means to be "God".

I follow you on this, but don't agree that there must be a Father and Son for there to be a God...if I'm really following you.

Likewise, I would assume that you would not be a human being in any real sense without a spirit to animate a body, or for a body to house a spirit. Am I understanding you correctly here?

I agree that I would not be a human being without my spirit to animate my body, but this goes back to being two pieces of a whole, which I don't think is what you are trying to say.

I am trying to think of something similar with the same characteristics as the Trinity, but in our physical world, or even in science fiction or fantasy, that would help me out, but everything so far, has come down to being pieces of a whole, or elements of a group.

[rhinomelon]

I am trying to think of something similar with the same characteristics as the Trinity, but in our physical world, or even in science fiction or fantasy, that would help me out, but everything so far, has come down to being pieces of a whole, or elements of a group.

That's one of the tricky parts about thinking about the Trinity. There's nothing in the created, material, finite order of things that can serve as a full analogy to an uncreated, eternal, infinite, spiritual Being. It's like God's own question in scripture, "To what would you compare Me?" coming 'round to haunt us...

That disconnect between God's existence and ours means that we will never understand His existence fully, at least in this life (and probably in the next, but I don't have an opinion about that). We can understand things up to a point, even understand concepts like "eternity" and "spiritual existence" intellectually, but we just don't have anything to visualize this with. We human beings rely a great deal on visualizing things to understand them, and we cannot visualize anything without reference to things we can already see and touch; anything we can really visualize is a combination of things we see in reality. With God, such visualizations will always fall short. The intellect, apart from the imagination, can go further, but it still peters out in the face of eternity.

For a simple example of imagination and intellect, we have mathematicians and scientists who have calculated that reality has up to eleven (or maybe sixteen!) dimensions, while we experience only four. Nobody can visualize eleven dimensions, but we can demonstrate intellectually that they probably exist.

The definition of the Trinity I use is the classic, traditional, historical definition as taught in the Athanasian Creed, which is also the only valid one as far as I am concerned.

Do you realize that the Athanasian Creed is not even an ecumenical creed? I.e. it was not the product of a council, and therefore is not held as authoritative in mainstream Christianity? The Eastern church never used it, and it is rarely used in the Western church. Kind of an odd definition to defend as "the only valid one". This might be another reason why your arguments against the Trinity don't even attack the Trinity as it is believed by mainstream Christianity in general. And you still haven't given any reason why my earlier definition contradicts the Athanasian Creed.

It speaks for itself. I don't need to do anything to it.

And yet you did do something to it when you quoted it first. You didn't let it speak for itself; you snipped a little bit off of it, then gave your own summary (which explicitly contradicted the creed itself, but whatever):

Trinity = Three Persons in one Person = Three Gods in one God!

This is a definition that we agree is illogical and untrue; it is also NOT the Trinity as it is believed in mainstream Christianity.

Anyway, it's one thing to throw up a creed and say, "That's my definition". It's quite another to demonstrate that you understand that creed and are basically familiar with the concepts and terms therein. You have not done that.

Take care, everyone

[rhinomelon]

One more point regarding zerinus' deification argument, then I think I'll be done. The reason that zerinus gave for arguing that the early church fathers and the modern LDS church were teaching the same thing about deification is that they used the same words. I pointed out that similar words, or even the same words, can change meaning over time (especially between two very different cultures 2000 years apart). This did not faze zerinus at all.

So here's the problem with zerinus' argument as he's defended it thus far. If using similar terminology and vocabulary is all one needs to say that the early Christians taught deification in the same way LDS do, then why is all the similar terminology and vocabulary from the pre-Christian philosophical sources ignored? They used the same terminology (as I've already posted, and can be read in zerinus' primary source, "The Deification of the Christian According to the Greek Fathers" by Jules Gross)! If the Greek philosophers used the same words, then do they teach deification like the LDS do? Is it the same concept? Why use the "vocabulary" issue to create a link with the early church and not the pre-Christian Greeks, if they all use the same vocabulary?

If zerinus wants to count the Greeks out based on some other doctrinal issue ("The obviously didn't mean the same thing," etc.) then he has to demonstrate that the ECF do not have similar doctrinal differences, because simple similarities in vocabulary are simply not enough.

I've posted multiple examples of how the ECF differ markedly from the LDS position. The ball is in zerinus' court now, and outside documentation is a must here. No more citing blogs and personal opinions as if that should be enough.

Take care, everyone

[zerinus]

Do you realize that the Athanasian Creed is not even an ecumenical creed? I.e. it was not the product of a council, and therefore is not held as authoritative in mainstream Christianity? The Eastern church never used it, and it is rarely used in the Western church. Kind of an odd definition to defend as "the only valid one". This might be another reason why your arguments against the Trinity don't even attack the Trinity as it is believed by mainstream Christianity in general.

The Athanasian Creed was considered on par with the Ecumenical creeds during the Middle Ages, and for a long time after the Protestant Reformation among the Protestants. Its use has declined recently because many Christians find its direct language about the Trinity and damnation of unbelievers to be embarrassing; but for the greatest part of the history of Christianity that has not been the case. On the contrary, it has always been regarded as expressing sound orthodox Christian doctrine on Trinity. It is still used, and considered orthodox, but not used very frequently. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, it was â??attributed to Athanasius as a sign of its intense orthodoxy of Trinitarian beliefâ?. That still holds true today. According to the Britannica article on Christianity, the Athanasian Creed is â??the final dogmatic formulation of the Trinitarian doctrineâ?. So you canâ??t just toss the Athanasian Creed because it doesnâ??t let you recast Trinitarianism in your own image today. The Athanasian Creed was not recognized by the Eastern Orthodox Church because of the Filioque issue, not because they disagree with the Trinitarian formulation of it. The following brief history outlines the liturgical usage of the Athanasian Creed today:

Liturgically, this Creed was recited at the Sunday Office of Prime in the Western Church; it is not used in the Eastern Church. Today the Athanasian Creed is rarely used even in the Western Church.

In Reformed circles, it is included (for example) in the Christian Reformed Churches of Australiaâ??s Book of Forms (publ. 1991). That said, it is rarely recited in public worship.

In the successive Books of Common Prayer of the reformed Church of England from 1549 to 1662, its recitation was provided for on 19 occasions each year, a practice which continued until the nineteenth century, when vigorous controversy regarding its statement about â??eternal damnationâ?? saw its use gradually decline. It remains one of the three Creeds approved in the Thirty-Nine Articles, and is printed in several current Anglican prayer books (eg A Prayer Book for Australia (1995)). As with Roman Catholic practice, its use is now generally only on Trinity Sunday or its octave.

In Roman Catholic churches, it was traditionally said at Prime on Sundays after Epiphany and Pentecost, except when a Double feast or day within an octave occurred, and on Trinity Sunday. In the 1960 reforms, it was reduced to once a year on Trinity Sunday. It has been effectively dropped from the Catholic liturgy since Vatican II, although it is retained in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It is however maintained in the Forma Extraordinaria, per the decree Summorum Pontificum.

In Lutheranism, the Athanasian Creed is â?? along with the Apostlesâ?? and Nicene Creeds â?? one of the three ecumenical creeds placed at the beginning of the 1580 Book of Concord, the historic collection of authoritative doctrinal statements (confessions) of the Lutheran church. It is still used in the liturgy on Trinity Sunday.

A common visualisation of the first half of the Creed is the Shield of the Trinity.

Source

If the creed is considered doctrinally unreliable, its liturgical use by the main churches of today would not be warrantedâ??even though its use has significantly declined.

zerinus

[rhinomelon]

If the creed is considered doctrinally unreliable, its liturgical use by the main churches of today would not be warrantedâ??even though its use has significantly declined.

I have no problem with the doctrinal reliability of the Athanasian Creed, don't get me wrong. It's just odd to me that you would use that one as your sole definition, as opposed to those commonly accepted by mainstream Christianity as a whole. It's also odd to me that you base your entire definition on one creed, as opposed to a more considered definition based on the literally thousands of pages of writings from the early church regarding the Trinity. For instance, reading some of the writings of Athanasius would give a deeper understanding of all the issues that are only referenced obliquely in the creed. The creed is a summary of a great deal of thought and discussion, and in order to fully understand it one has to dig into the background material. It's like the difference between reading an abridged cliff-notes version of Moby ****, and reading the whole thing. You may get the basic points, but the full understanding of the story is impossible to get from the cliff notes alone. And a person who had only read the cliff-notes would hardly be in a position to discuss the story in any depth with someone who had read and studied the unabridged version.

But at its foundation, my problems with your assertions rest not with the creed you use, but with your apparent lack of understanding about what the creed means, and what it meant to the people who composed it. Your earlier summary, for example

Three Gods in One God!!

not only explicitly contradicts the Athanasian Creed

16. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.

you claim as your source, it also makes a very elementary error that is easily corrected by even a cursory examination of the documents related to the Trinity.

I would also point out that the words I used in my earlier definition (One God in three persons) are present in the Athanasian Creed:

3. And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;

4. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.

5. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit. [i.e. three--count 'em!--three persons]

So your assertion that I am using a modern invented definition of the Trinity is proven false by the very sources you quote as authoritative on the matter.

Now, I'm actually going out of town on Thursday for the weekend again, up to Boston this time, but before then I'm going to try to post some snippets from Alister McGrath's book "Understanding the Trinity". It's a short, excellent work that I think would benefit anybody, LDS or otherwise, trying to understand the doctrine of the Trinity. Nathan, maybe you should check your library, or maybe Amazon. I got my copy for about ten bucks, and it's been worth it!

Take care, everyone

[rhinomelon]

Oops! Double posted.

[nathansoz]

Nathan, maybe you should check your library, or maybe Amazon. I got my copy for about ten bucks, and it's been worth it!

I would check the library... but erm... fines are killing me

But Barns and Noble is close too

[rhinomelon]

I would check the library... but erm... fines are killing me

But Barns and Noble is close too

You should look at www.allbookstores.com . It compares prices at a bunch of different places, and I can tell you from experience that Barnes & Noble is usually not the best place to bookshop.

Anyhoo, more later. Take care, everyone

[William the Conqueror]

Thank you. I have a question for you now. Is the ONE God, the One and Only true God of the scriptures, YES

is He a "person" or not? He is Three Persons (as opposed to Personages)

Is He depicted in the scriptures as "person" (i.e. haveing a distinct personality) or not? He is depicted in scriptures as having Three Persons.

What is your answer to that? Read above. I hope this clears out the cobwebs. Enjoy!

zerinus

[rhinomelon]

I think zerinus is gone, William. Anyway, bumping for later (hopefully I'll be able to post something before I head out to Boston for the weekend).

[rhinomelon]

Back from Boston! And another book suggestion, for those really interested in theology and the like. "Theology and Sanity" by Francis Sheed is a great book. It was actually recommended to me by a Catholic poster here, and I finally got my own copy instead of the library one. Very interesting stuff. It can serve as a primer to basic mainstream Christian theological categories for interested LDS.

If zerinus wants to count the Greeks out based on some other doctrinal issue ("The obviously didn't mean the same thing," etc.) then he has to demonstrate that the ECF do not have similar doctrinal differences, because simple similarities in vocabulary are simply not enough.

I've posted multiple examples of how the ECF differ markedly from the LDS position. The ball is in zerinus' court now, and outside documentation is a must here. No more citing blogs and personal opinions as if that should be enough.

Bumping for zerinus. More later! Take care, everyone