hedrick@topaz.ARPA (Chuck Hedrick) (03/23/85)
In <136@spar.UUCP>, Michael Ellis asks > I'd also be interested in knowing what Biblical references, if any, > support the ideas below: > > * Trinity The Trinity seems to have started as sort of a part of Christology. In principle, one could image that Christians would have said simply that God came down in Christ. But Christians seem to have seen things in a slightly more complex fashion. E.g. John (at the beginning of Chap 1) says that God's Word became flesh. Not just God -- God's Word. And both Paul (Col 1:15-20) and Hebrews (chap. 1) seem to see an eternal Son who became incarnated as Jesus. A number of Christians in the first and second centuries saw this Word or Eternal Son as a second creature, inferior to the real God. Most often these people could not accept the idea that God would allow himself to suffer, so they wanted Christ to be the incarnation of a lower being. (Many of the same people also could not believe that God would stoop to create matter, and so there was also the concept of a lower creator god. Indeed in one neo-Platonic system 9 levels of increasingly corrupted beings were needed before we got to one sufficiently misguided that he would create the world.) One of the first decisions on Christian doctrine was that the Son was not some lower God, but was actually God himself. This was the start of the doctine of the Trinity. We could imagine that things might have gone a different way. It might have been said that there was no Eternal Son -- God himself just became incarnate. But apparently Christians felt that God's incarnation reflected something that was always true about God, and therefore that the Son was always there. As far as I know, the people who denied the concept of the Eternal Son all believed that Jesus was something less than a full incarnation of God. In the early decades, the Son was described primarily in terms of "Logos" (translated as Word, but having lots of overtones beyond that, e.g. wisdom and creative power). It was said that even before the world existed, who could imagine that God could have been without his Wisdom? I tend to follow Augustine. He says that the Son is necessary in order for God to love. There must be within God not only that which loves, but that which accepts his love. And love is not just something that God came up during human history. He was always love. This discussion obviously went beyond what is explicitly in the Bible. But the concept of the Word or Eternal Son is clearly there, as is the idea that God is love. If you accept that, then your choices are - the Son as a second God, equal to the Father. This is a clear violation of the basic principles of monotheism. (I hope I don't have to cite scripture references here, but try Deut. 6:4) - the Son as a subsidiary creature. In the final analysis, this makes a mockery of Christianity, because it means that in Jesus we don't see God himself, and by his death we aren't reconciled to the real God. - the Son as an mode of being of the one God. The third alternative won, as one might guess it would. The Holy Spirit seems to have entered in sort of an offhand way. There was much less controversy about it. Both the Old Testament and the New Testament mention the Holy Spirit as God's presence with his people. (A couple of randomly chosen references: Acts 9:31 and most of Rom. chap. 8.) Once theologians started sharpening their ideas of the exact relationship between the Son and the Father, it was quite natural to include the Spirit. In discussions of this sort it is common to cite various places in the NT where there are trinitarian formulae. A typical one is 2 Cor 12:13: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all." Such passages alone would not have led to the full complexities of the Trinity as they developed over the next centuries. However they do show an early tendency in that direction. In my personal view, the doctrine of the Trinity is important because it makes God something more than a mathematical point. It tells us that as part of his eternal structure, there is the relationship of love. Indeed according to Augustine, the three persons are separate only to the extent necessary to allow for a personal relationship within God. One of the most basic Christian ideas is grace: That when God calls us to be obedient servants, he himself supplies the obedient love that we need in order to respond. It is important to me that this is not just something that he wants us as creatures to show, but that obedient love (the love of the Son for the Father) is part of God himself. (Indeed that is why he can give it to us.)