Is There Not An Apparent Problem To The Doctrine Of The Trinity?

[Storm Rider]

Yes, Tacenda brought out the analogy of fire, which is my favorite. A flame lit from another flame is of the same substance, and if/when the flames are brought together again, it is one fire.

 

1 flame + 1 flame + 1 flame = 1 flame

 

Oh snap! Of course, being an analogy it has its problems, but it is still my favorite. And used by Justin Martyr to boot!

 

But is the gift of life from a parent to a child also the gift of the same substance?  I always felt the need for monotheism was too exaggerated to monolithic if it denies that God could not have a son.  At the end of the day, I have always considered myself a monotheist and yet fully believing in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

[Tacenda]

Yes, Tacenda brought out the analogy of fire, which is my favorite. A flame lit from another flame is of the same substance, and if/when the flames are brought together again, it is one fire.

 

1 flame + 1 flame + 1 flame = 1 flame

 

Oh snap! Of course, being an analogy it has its problems, but it is still my favorite. And used by Justin Martyr to boot!

It's the most loving analogy to me.  So many trip up when they think that God would sacrifice his son like he did.  What better thought than of God coming down and doing it himself.  I love it.  Never believed this until now.  Helps me keep my belief up for as long as possible, that God exists.  Helps families stay together, where the Mormon God will separate.  I'm sorry, but this is a glorious thought to me.  Helps me so much.  Especially since, I think my dad became Atheist toward the end of his life.  That means my parents would be separate.  And actually my mom would be separate from all her family but one.  How is that families forever?  How is it that we becoming Gods will be the best way?  I just don't see it.  There are plenty of children on each planet run by the one and only God of our Universe.  He created them, each and every one.  He didn't need us to become Gods to help him.  IMO.    

[Storm Rider]

It's the most loving analogy to me.  So many trip up when they think that God would sacrifice his son like he did.  What better thought than of God coming down and doing it himself.  I love it.  Never believed this until now.  Helps me keep my belief up for as long as possible, that God exists.  Helps families stay together, where the Mormon God will separate.  I'm sorry, but this is a glorious thought to me.  Helps me so much.  Especially since, I think my dad became Atheist toward the end of his life.  That means my parents would be separate.  And actually my mom would be separate from all her family but one.  How is that families forever?  How is it that we becoming Gods will be the best way?  I just don't see it.  There are plenty of children on each planet run by the one and only God of our Universe.  He created them, each and every one.  He didn't need us to become Gods to help him.  IMO.    

 

So what do you do with scriptures that say that Jesus' followers are gods or that we will be joint heirs with Christ?  I think that your understanding of Exaltation, Theosis, Deification demands not looking at scripture and only looking at the typical anti-Mormon criticism. Even in Catholicism we are called gods.  

 

Why on earth would you think God "needs" our help?  When you describe God according to what you think the LDS Church teaches I see nothing in common with the God I know.  

[Calm]

It's the most loving analogy to me. So many trip up when they think that God would sacrifice his son like he did. What better thought than of God coming down and doing it himself. I love it. Never believed this until now. Helps me keep my belief up for as long as possible, that God exists. Helps families stay together, where the Mormon God will separate. I'm sorry, but this is a glorious thought to me. Helps me so much. Especially since, I think my dad became Atheist toward the end of his life. That means my parents would be separate. And actually my mom would be separate from all her family but one. How is that families forever? How is it that we becoming Gods will be the best way? I just don't see it. There are plenty of children on each planet run by the one and only God of our Universe. He created them, each and every one. He didn't need us to become Gods to help him. IMO.

You act like LDS teach all that matters is this life. Will your dad persist in his atheistic beliefs if he sees God and is taught by angels in the next life? Will the rest of the family? If God himself comes to you after your death and says this is the way I created for my family to be together forever, will you tell him he is wrong, that it really separates families for us to become like him and that your way of remaining not only his child, but in addition remaining childish (which mortals all are in comparison to God as Paul states) is better? Edited May 16, 2014 by calmoriah

[Tacenda]

So what do you do with scriptures that say that Jesus' followers are gods or that we will be joint heirs with Christ?  I think that your understanding of Exaltation, Theosis, Deification demands not looking at scripture and only looking at the typical anti-Mormon criticism. Even in Catholicism we are called gods.  

 

Why on earth would you think God "needs" our help?  When you describe God according to what you think the LDS Church teaches I see nothing in common with the God I know.  

I said that God didn't need our help, when did I say He needed our help?  Maybe I'm misunderstanding you.  Or you're right He doesn't need our help in the first place.  And I always thought that we are gods with the little "g".  That's different, especially when we think of Greek mythology and those gods.  And we can become joint heirs with Christ, I think that for sure.  I'm still figuring it all out, it's hard to change thinking when one believes one way for so long.  I need to add also, that my mom visiting us on different planets doesn't do it for me either.    

[mfbukowski]

But is the gift of life from a parent to a child also the gift of the same substance?  I always felt the need for monotheism was too exaggerated to monolithic if it denies that God could not have a son.  At the end of the day, I have always considered myself a monotheist and yet fully believing in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. 

Of course.

 

Substance can be anything you want it to be.  It could be an oily substance or a firey substance or a furry substance or a wet substance or....  pick an adjective.

 

It is a very useful word that doesn't mean much on its own.

 

Yes, Tacenda brought out the analogy of fire, which is my favorite. A flame lit from another flame is of the same substance, and if/when the flames are brought together again, it is one fire.

 

1 flame + 1 flame + 1 flame = 1 flame

 

Oh snap! Of course, being an analogy it has its problems, but it is still my favorite. And used by Justin Martyr to boot!

That's why you can put whale oil in your gas tank!  All similar things are consubstantial!  And one can turn lead into gold simply by changing it's accidents, because gold and lead have the same substance!!   Ain't life grand!?!?

[saemo]

It's the most loving analogy to me.  So many trip up when they think that God would sacrifice his son like he did.  What better thought than of God coming down and doing it himself.  I love it.  Never believed this until now.  Helps me keep my belief up for as long as possible, that God exists.

 

The same for me, after I "discovered" the Christian teaching about God, I converted from atheism.

 

 

 

Helps families stay together, where the Mormon God will separate.  I'm sorry, but this is a glorious thought to me.  Helps me so much.  Especially since, I think my dad became Atheist toward the end of his life.  That means my parents would be separate.  And actually my mom would be separate from all her family but one.  How is that families forever?  How is it that we becoming Gods will be the best way?  I just don't see it.  There are plenty of children on each planet run by the one and only God of our Universe.  He created them, each and every one.  He didn't need us to become Gods to help him.  IMO.    

 

I am the unbeliever who will be separated from my family, according to Mormon belief. It is emotionally painful for me to think on how my mom thinks this about me. 

Edited May 16, 2014 by saemo

[saemo]

Of course.

 

Substance can be anything you want it to be.  It could be an oily substance or a firey substance or a furry substance or a wet substance or....  pick an adjective.

 

It is a very useful word that doesn't mean much on its own.

 

That's why you can put whale oil in your gas tank!  All similar things are consubstantial!  And one can turn lead into gold simply by changing it's accidents, because gold and lead have the same substance!!   Ain't life grand!?!?

 

and?

[saemo]

You act like LDS teach all that matters is this life. Will your dad persist in his atheistic beliefs if he sees God and is taught by angels in the next life? Will the rest of the family? If God himself comes to you after your death and says this is the way I created for my family to be together forever, will you tell him he is wrong, that it really separates families for us to become like him and that your way of remaining not only his child, but in addition remaining childish (which mortals all are in comparison to God as Paul states) is better?

As a once-atheist, now Catholic…if in the next life God said, "guess what, everything in your life didn't matter, here is what you should accept"…I'd think this God to be the biggest jerk that ever existed and would tell him so.

[mfbukowski]

Louis DeBroglie, one of the founders of quantum physics and the Nobel prize winner in 1929, famously said: the mechanism [quantum physics] demands a mysticism!

I know you guys like old stuff just because it is old, but 1929? 

 

Here's a newer statement- AND a great article- a good short read that addresses this directly

 

http://www.peterbyrne.info/documents/sad0711Byrn3p.pdf

[mfbukowski]

As a once-atheist, now Catholic…if in the next life God said, "guess what, everything in your life didn't matter, here is what you should accept"…I'd think this God to be the biggest jerk that ever existed and would tell him so.

I'd laugh and thank him for the second chance.

[cdowis]

I have never heard a physicist say "It's a mystery!"  

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

Richard P. Feynman

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/richard_p_feynman.html#m2AvsP0PHIHmPjQw.99

[saemo]

Even in Catholicism we are called gods.  

 

Not in the same way that Mormons believe. We share in the divinity of Christ, we don't become gods, as Mormons believe.

 

 

[mfbukowski]

and?

And nothing, obviously.  Whoosh.

[Calm]

I am the unbeliever who will be separated from my family, according to Mormon belief. It is emotionally painful for me to think on how my mom thinks this about me.

Only if you received a full witness from God and rejected it. If not, you will still have a chance to learn and accept the full gospel in the next life and the Atonement will allow for any divisions to be healed.

Given the way you have presented your interpretation of LDS belief, I find it hard to believe you have had that witness yet. Perhaps your mother knows you better, but perhaps your mother's understanding is wrong as well. And given the LDS teaching about "wayward children" of faithful parents, she shouldn't be in despair about an eternal separation anyway.

This doesn't mean that everything we have done and learn in this life has no meaning anymore than the fact we learn greater truths in university that sometimes even contradicts what we earlier learned negates our earlier schooling. Knowledge and experience build on each other, even the experience gained through misunderstandings and mistakes.

Edited May 16, 2014 by calmoriah

[cdowis]

Yes, Tacenda brought out the analogy of fire, which is my favorite. A flame lit from another flame is of the same substance, and if/when the flames are brought together again, it is one fire.

 

1 flame + 1 flame + 1 flame = 1 flame

 

Oh snap! Of course, being an analogy it has its problems, but it is still my favorite. And used by Justin Martyr to boot!

 

Of course the analogy breaks down in light of what the Bible tells us.

 

For example, Christ told us in John 17:19-23, are we all to become a "flame" (homoousia) since Christ said that we would be ONE with the Father in the same way that the Father and the Son are one.

[mfbukowski]

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man's struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

Richard P. Feynman

Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/richard_p_feynman.html#m2AvsP0PHIHmPjQw.99

Yeah I get it but that's not the point.

 

They keep trying to get an answer.  Others just throw up their hands and say "It's a mystery!" and fold their tents and go home.

 

Theology is pointless if it's all a mystery.  It's mental.....   well you get the idea.

 

Why bother if it can go nowhere?  Physics advances.  They create new models of reality.  Ratzinger is indeed also trying to do that, and is a closet critic of historical theology.

[MiserereNobis]

I know you guys like old stuff just because it is old, but 1929? 

 

Here's a newer statement- AND a great article- a good short read that addresses this directly

 

http://www.peterbyrne.info/documents/sad0711Byrn3p.pdf

 

I like that how you help me refute your statement with even better evidence than I gave.  Thanks!  It is an excellent article.  We just seem unequipped to fully understand reality (much less God!)

 

I'm looking forward to you and I sitting on our clouds in the next life talking through all this straw

[mfbukowski]

Because I am interested in a productive conversation, I will now ignore saemo on this thread and I suggest others do as well.

 

I apologize for getting stirred up by her insults.

[MiserereNobis]

Theology is pointless if it's all a mystery. 

 

 

 

It's not ALL a mystery.  It's a mystery at a certain point.  Up to that point we can try our best to figure it out and understand it.

 

Like in physics.  Yes, the mechanisms of reality seem to ultimately be a mystery, but we can still use equations to figure out lots of stuff.  We shouldn't just throw up our hands because there is a point which we seem to be unable to cross.

 

 

Physics advances.  They create new models of reality.  Ratzinger is indeed also trying to do that, and is a closet critic of historical theology.

 

I wonder if he'd think that about himself.  You should email him and ask him (and be sure to include your favorite Rorty video )

Edited May 16, 2014 by MiserereNobis

[mfbukowski]

I like that how you help me refute your statement with even better evidence than I gave.  Thanks!  It is an excellent article.  We just seem unequipped to fully understand reality (much less God!)

 

I'm looking forward to you and I sitting on our clouds in the next life talking through all this straw

I am looking forward to it as well, but it seems you also misunderstood my point as did cdowis.  Physics progresses, Thomism does not.  Theology can progress as long as it doesn't throw up its hands and say "It's a mystery!"

 

Just as in physics, it's all just models all the way down.  There IS nothing beyond "the philosophies of men mingled with scripture" when indeed scripture is physically written by human hands.  It all comes through humans one way or another.

 

THAT is where Wittgenstein, Rorty and Susskind all agree.  All we have is ways of speaking about models which work for a purpose- that's all any of it is.

[Calm]

Not in the same way that Mormons believe. We share in the divinity of Christ, we don't become gods, as Mormons believe.

]

LDS believe we become gods by becoming one with Christ and the Father through accepting and living "thy Will be done, not mine".

This seems to me to be in accord with Christ's teachings and life.

Edited May 16, 2014 by calmoriah

[MiserereNobis]

I am looking forward to it as well, but it seems you also misunderstood my point as did cdowis.  Physics progresses, Thomism does not.  Theology can progress as long as it doesn't throw up its hands and say "It's a mystery!"

 

Just as in physics, it's all just models all the way down.  There IS nothing beyond "the philosophies of men mingled with scripture" when indeed scripture is physically written by human hands.  It all comes through humans one way or another.

 

THAT is where Wittgenstein, Rorty and Susskind all agree.  All we have is ways of speaking about models which work for a purpose- that's all any of it is.

 

Yeah, I guess I keep confusing you with a normal LDS thinker who probably wouldn't be caught dead saying that everything is philosophy of men mingled with scripture

 

That's why you are so much fun!

[cdowis]

 

 

 

Even in Catholicism we are called gods.  

 

Not in the same way that Mormons believe. We share in the divinity of Christ, we don't become gods, as Mormons believe.

 

 

 

 

Again, beside the scripture in John 17, we find Christ stating Revelations [21] To him that overcometh will I grant to sit with me in my throne, even as I also overcame, and am set down with my Father in his throne.

 

Paul tells us Romans 8 [17] And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.  This in context of Heb [2] Hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things, by whom also he made the worlds.

 

These teaching have been lost to the historic Christian church but were certainly understood by the apostles after to forty day ministry and teachings of Christ.  They have been restored in these latter days.

[mfbukowski]

This speaks for itself- and it seems a statement that people like to ignore

.... Ratzinger offers a similar image:

 

Every one of the main basic concepts in the doctrine of the Trinity was condemned at one time or another; they were all adopted only after the frustration of a condemnation; they are accepted only inasmuch as they are at the same time branded as unusable and admitted simply as poor stammering utterances - and no more. The concept of persona (or prosopon) was once condemned, as we have seen; the crucial word that in the fourth century became the standard of orthodoxy, homoousios (= of one substance with the Father), had been condemned in the third century; the concept of “proceeding” has a condemnation behind it - and so one could go on. One must say, I think, that these condemnations of the later formulas of faith form an intimate part of them: it is only through the negation, and the infinite indirectness implicit in it, that they are usable. The doctrine of the Trinity is only possible as a piece of baffled theology, so to speak

When one looks at the history of the dogma of the Trinity as it is reflected in a present-day manual of theology, it looks like a graveyard of heresies, whose emblems theology still carries around with it like the trophies from battles fought and won. But such a view does not represent a proper understanding of the matter, for all the attempted solutions that in the course of a long struggle were finally thrown out as dead ends and, hence, heresies are not just mere gravestones to the vanity of human endeavor, monuments that confirm how often thinking has come to grief and at which we can now look back in retrospective - and, in the last analysis, fruitless - curiosity. On the contrary, every heresy is at the same time the cipher for an abiding truth, a cipher we must now preserve with other simultaneously valid statements, separated from which it produces a false impression. In other words, all these statements are not so much gravestones as the bricks of a cathedral, which are, of course, only useful when they do not remain alone but are inserted into something bigger, just as even the positively accepted formulas are valid only if they are at the same time aware of their own inadequacy.

3 The history of the homoousios will suffice to illustrate the point; see the summary by A. Grillmeier, in LThK, 2nd ed., 5:467f.; and also the survey of the history of trinitarian dogma in A. Adam, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. i (Gütersloh, 1965), pp. 115 - 254 (p. 349, n. 13). On the subject of man’s stammering before God, cf. the beautiful story “Das Stammein” from the Chassidic stories in M. Buber, Werke, vol. 3 (Munich, 1963), p. 334.

Introduction to Christianity, p.171-173 (Ignatius Press 2004, emphasis added)

I am still trying to see how successive errors all add up to a great TRUTH, but I will be sure to let you know when I figure it out.

I also fail to see how this is NOT a criticism of "historical theology" but thinly veiled by that "bricks of a cathedral" departure from logic, which he felt, to me obviously, that he needed to insert to justify his criticism. At heart, he is a postmodernist.

Successive errors do not add up to truth, unless one is a postmodernist, who understands truth quite differently than Thomists. Truth for a postmodernist, is "the best we can do" to put together a vocabulary which works for a given purpose.

The trinity worked until culture advanced and realized that that model no longer worked. It is like science. Copernicus overturned everything- it was a new model. Was his model perfect? No. Was Newton's? No. Was Einstein's? No.

These above words are those of a postmodernist. I know how we think. These are not the words of a Thomist.

His strategy is identical to Blake Ostler who presents new ideas- not his ideas, but those current in the philosophical community- in a very persuasive manner using traditional LDS terminology. Ostler is very good at it- and so is Ratzinger in his sphere.

Edited May 16, 2014 by mfbukowski