drew@anucsd.anu.oz.au (Drew Corrigan) (11/23/90)
gross@dg-rtp.dg.com (Gene Gross) writes: >Steve Peterson listed several passages of Scripture to show his doctrine >concerning the Deity of Jesus Christ. I have chosen to deal with two of >those passages. One in some depth. I have been reading the responses to the passages and questions originally raised by Steve Peterson. With due respect, I do not feel his question(s) about Jesus praying to, and worshipping God the Father, as his (Jesus') God have been answered. What exactly did Jesus mean when he spoke of the Father as *his* God? This question in particular does not appear to have been answered. I have another question. How do Trinitarians see the Godhead as functioning? That is, do you see the persons in the Godhead as capable of making individual decisions but agreeing to act in concert? Do the members of the Godhead have their own distinct personalities and reasoning capacities and wills? The reason I ask, is that the way I read the NT, there appears to be a clear chain of authority within the Godhead. God the Father is in charge and Jesus Christ is the "executor" of the Father's will. The Father told Jesus what message to say when he came to earth as a man. The time of Jesus' return is (will be) a decision of the Father. Jesus is described as God the Father's "Christ" - ie the Messiah sent by the Father. I am not disagreeing with Jesus being a part of the Godhead, and him enjoying a level of existence of equal to the Father, but the NT picture clearly seems to portray a difference in ultimate authority and decision making. Replys to these two questions (why Jesus calls the Father his God, and how the Godhead functions) are welcomed. Drew Corrigan (drew@anucsd.anu.oz.au) [I'm going to try to give an orthodox response. In fact I have some qualms about whether the philosophical categories used in the orthodox formulations are the right ones to answer some of your questions, but I'd rather do more speculative theology in my own name rather than as moderator. (1) on prayer to his Father. The orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation (which is probably more relevant to this question than the Trinity) says that God took to himself a human life in such a way that the human life was His life. However it retained its original character as human. There was a normal human mind, human will, etc. This is basic to the "two-nature" doctrine of the Incarnation. Christ has two natures, which did not merge to form single "compromise" nature having some properties of humanity and some of divinity. Rather than being a demigod, Christ is fully God and fully human, and has all the properties of each, uncompromised. Since his human nature is normal, without any extra parts or supernatural capabilities, in his human life he had no way to communicate with his Father other than the way the rest of us do: prayer. Since the human form of the Son reflects exactly the nature of the divine form, we may say that this worship and prayer reflects on a human level the relationship of dependence and obedience existing in eternity between the Father and Son in the Trinity. (2) on the functioning of the Godhead. The doctrinal standards allow a certain degree of freedom in how the Trinity is thought of. The Western church, going back to Augustine and before him the Alexandrians, tended to start with God as one, and to emphasize his unity. The Antiochene tradition tended to start with the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as three persons. It seems clear that in Augustine, God has a single will. I was unable to find that stated clearly for Antiochene theology. I believe some of those who agreed to the Nicene compromise would have held that there were three wills that were completely in agreement. However later discussion slightly tightened up the concepts, and outlawed certain of the Antiochene views (including some that I think they ought not to have). The Cappadocian Fathers, who represent what I think is the final form of the Antiochene tradition, said that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit acted with a single action. Action was initiated by the will of the Father, and was completed through the Son and Spirit. I did not find a precise statement that there was only one will, and indeed the repeated reference to the will of the Father tends to suggest that they may not have thought the other Persons had their own wills. I generally use Augustine's thoughts on the Trinity as the basis for my theology. However there is a problem with saying that the Trinity has a single will. As indicated above, I think that the submission of Jesus to his Father's will reflects the relationship between the Father and Son in eternity, with the Son being obedient to the Father. Since obedience implies submission of one's will to another's, it's hard to see how this can have any meaning unless there is at least some distinction in will among the Persons of the Trinity. However for various reasons I'm reluctant to say simply that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have separate wills, since this would seem to violate the basic understanding that the Trinity acts with a single action. I'm pushed into the somewhat wierd position of saying that the Trinity has a single will that exists in three modes. The issue of personality is difficult because the classicial discussions were done in philosophical terms that are simply different from ours. I don't think personality in the modern sense was one of the terms they thought of. I think it's fairly clear that Christ's human nature has a human personality. I'm not at all sure what to say about personality for the Trinity. My reflex is to say that as the Trinity acts with one action, it has a single personality. But I have a feeling that someone with a more Antiochene view would see three personalities. At any rate, I don't think there is an official orthodox answer to this question. On your comment about Jesus having a difference in ultimate authority and decision making, I believe you are right. The three persons of the Trinity have different roles. Otherwise there would be no distinction between them. The Son is obedient to the Father. --clh]
joe@uunet.uu.net (Joe Saladino) (11/26/90)
drew@anucsd.anu.oz.au (Drew Corrigan) writes: :I have another question. How do Trinitarians see the Godhead as functioning? ... :The reason I ask, is that the way I read the NT, there appears to be a clear :chain of authority within the Godhead. God the Father is in charge and :Jesus Christ is the "executor" of the Father's will. The Father told Jesus :what message to say when he came to earth as a man. The time of Jesus' :return is (will be) a decision of the Father. Jesus is described as God the :Father's "Christ" - ie the Messiah sent by the Father. The issue here is that Jesus came to earth to live as a man. He was to live as man should have lived had he not sinned. To satisfy the justice of God Jesus had to rely on His father in the same way we must. Had He used His divine power to bail Himself out, would have made His life on earth an interesting experience but would not have satisfied God's requirement for 100% righteousness from man as a man. -- Regards... __ ___ __ |__) |_ ) |__| |\/| {joe@bram.UUCP} Joe Saladino @ |__) | \ | | | | Corporation {verdix!bram!joe} -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- verdix_____________ Home (503) 626-9991 tektronix___percy__\___bram Office (503) 626-2772 reed_______________/ FAX (503) 626-5766 [I would object to the concept -- which your comments might suggest -- that Jesus had superhuman power but abstained from using it. The problem is that this makes him appear to be a superhuman entity playing at being human. As I understand it, in the Incarnation, the Son took on a real human existence, with all the finiteness and limitations implied by that, and in this context, he did not have any special powers. Whatever miracles he did were done by his Father at his request. This may in fact be what you are saying. Because Christ is a single Person with two natures, it is appropriate to speak of him as both human and God, and your comments may be meant to be taken in the context of Christ as God. But some Christians have had reservations about whether Jesus was *really* human, so I thought it was worth pointing out the danger. --clh]
chl@cs.man.ac.uk (Charles Lindsey) (11/29/90)
In <Nov.25.21.17.34.1990.26071@athos.rutgers.edu> Our Moderator (replying to Joe Saladino) writes: >[I would object to the concept -- which your comments might suggest -- >that Jesus had superhuman power but abstained from using it. But surely Jesus had these powers, and spent 40 days wrestling with the problem of whether he should use them. He concluded (as if had to if all that has followed is to make sense) that he should not, i.e. that he should do no more than any human could in principle have done. [My reading was that the miracles Jesus was tempted to do would have been done by the power of God working through him, not by any intrinsic power. The concept that Jesus did not have the normal human limitations is a heresy, called Docetism -- the doctrine that Christ was not human, but merely seemed to be. I'm reluctant to make final judgements, as the line between orthodoxy and Docetism is one on which there is some legitimate room for disagreement. But I believe your comment is -- at least by the criteria of mainstream Catholic and Protestant theology -- heretical. Note that the doctrine of the Incarnation says that Christ had two natures, human and divine. Of course with respect to his divine nature, he had the full power of God, since he was God. But I think you were talking about Jesus' human existence, and thus were positing superhuman powers for his human nature. Perhaps someone from a more conservative tradition would also care to comment. --clh]
drew@anucsd.anu.oz.au (Drew Corrigan) (11/29/90)
Thanks to our moderator for his reply. I suppose the next questions are:
** 1. Is Jesus viewed as having been the Son of God, from eternity, or did
he become the Son when he was incarnated?
What I am interested in exploring is how Trinitarians view the relationship
between the members of the Godhead before Jesus' coming to earth as a man.
How is that relationship described and how is it considered to function.
I think there may be certain logical difficulties in asserting that One
was eternally the son of the Other.
** 2. Why is God "unable to sin"?
I have heard that the standard position says that God cannot sin because
he is not "free" to sin, or that his will is fixed in such a manner as he
is unable to sin.
My own position is that God does not/cannot sin because he wills not to
sin, but rather wills to love.
** 3. Is Jesus considered to have been "morally unchangable" as a man? That
is, unable to sin because he had no choice in the matter?
My own view is that Jesus as a man was capable of sin, but through exercis-
ing his will and relying on God the Father, was able to set his will not to
sin. Thus he "overcame" the weaknesses of human flesh.
Any replies to these questions would be appreciated.
Drew Corrigan. (drew@anucsd.anu.oz.au)
--
Drew Corrigan.
Department of Computer Science, Australian National University
[1. I'm worried that your question may suggest a misunderstanding.
If what you mean by Jesus is Christ's human existence, that didn't
exist before he was conceived by Mary. However this was simply the
human existence of the Son. The Son's "native" existence is as one of
the Trinity. The Trinity is the way God is, and always has been. The
Son in that form was the Son from eternity. "There was not when he
was not". It's best -- at least when dealing with Western theology --
not to think of the Son as a separate entity at all. He is simply one
"mode of existence" of God. We think of God as having love intrinsic
to himself. But love is a relationship. In order to have a
relationship, you've got to have more than one thing to be related.
The Son is one "end" of the relationship of love that has always
existed within God. But he is not a separate entity in the sense that
if you could see and count God you'd see three of something. That's
why I use the term "mode of existence" to characterize the Persons.
God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that doesn't mean
there are three Gods. As one of the Eastern theologians says, when
you count God you don't count "one, two, three", but "one, one, one".
Even the incarnation doesn't increase the number of Gods (nor does it
add a demi-god or quasi-god). Jesus is the human existence of the one
God. (Technically I should clarify that it is specifically the Son
that was incarnated.) Since he is a real human existence, there is a
human will, personality, etc., which by being human could only
communicate with God through prayer. This makes it very tempting to
say that there are two things there: God and a human being. But I
think the best way to understand orthodox theology is that there is
only one "entity", and this entity has two existences: an existence as
a human and an existence as God. (Entity and existence is more
commonly translated person and nature.) So to answer your question,
the Son is the Son from eternity, but his human existence started at a
specific point in time. (I'm going to comment on this a bit more
below. I have some problems saying that God the Son and Jesus are
the same entity, although I do want to say that Jesus was the Son's
human existence.)
Many people have a hard time relating these technical discussions to
the portait of Jesus in the NT. But it's clear that what started the
Church down this line was statements in John, Colossians, and Hebrews
talking about Jesus as having a preexistence. The obvious way to
interpret this is as I believe the JW's do: that the Son is a separate
quasi-divine entity that existed "in the heavens" and then came down
to earth and lived as Jesus. The problem is with things like "I and
the Father are one", though I think the real issue was that the Church
came to think of the crucifixion as an act of God's self-sacrifice.
Thus the Church concluded that having the Son as a preexistent
creature separate from God was a bad idea. They chose to regard the
Son's preexistence as a mode of existence of God himself.
I have some problems with the philsophical terminology that was used
in those discussions. I think this is a result of trying to express
something that is probably not completely intelligible by humans,
using a philosophy in which only "substance", "essence", etc., are
first-class objects. Function and relationship were not. I think
Jesus was the eternal Son's human existence, but only because God
chose to identify himself with Jesus. I'm not entirely sure what it
means to say that a human being and the eternal Son are the same
entity. (Indeed some theologians fudged, using a doctrine called
"anhypostasia", which in effect says that the Son's human existence
was "man", but not "a man". Thus there is only one entity because
ultimately the human being had no "entitiness". This view -- which I
see as a subtle way of denying Jesus' full humanity -- indicates to me
that there's a problem in the way the identity between the Son and
Jesus was formulated philosophically.) I have no problem with saying
that the eternal Son identifies himself with the man Jesus, so that
Jesus' acts are God's, and Jesus reveals God. (I use the analogy of a
character in a novel that represents the author -- though in fact I
think we want to go further and say it is as if the author actually
entered his own novel.) But I'm not sure I can attach any meaning to
the concept that Jesus and the eternal Son are the same entity. I
hope however that my concept of the Son identifying himself with Jesus
is trying to say the same thing.
----
Technical details:
Note by the way that when it is said that the Son is eternally
begotten by the Father, this is seen as an ongoing thing, not a thing
that happened once in time. When a child is begotten, this is a thing
that happens once in time. Before it happened, the child didn't
exist. If that's what we meant, it's not clear what it would mean to
say that the Son was begotten in eternity. However far back in
eternity it happened, if being begotten is an act, there would be a
before. But for the Son, being begotten is not an act, it's a
continuing mode of existence.
It might be worth quoting from Chalcedon (451), which is the defining
document for the Incarnation: "He is of the same reality as God as far
as his deity is concerned and of the same reality as we are ourselves
as far as his human-ness is concerned; thus like us in all respects,
sin only excepted. Before time began he was begotten of the Father,
in respect of his deity, and now in these "last days," for us and on
our behalf of our salvation, this selfsame one was born of Mary the
virgin, who is God-bearer in respect of his human-ness."
The term "mode" has a bad association, because of the heresy known as
"modalism". However modalism said that the persons simply represented
ways God related to the world, but did not represent any distinction
intrinsic to God. Thus the new terminology that some are using for
the Trinity -- Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer -- is heretical,
because it characterizes God by three different ways he related to the
world and us. I am using the term "mode of existence" to refer to
different ways in which God exists and relates to himself, so I am
talking about a distinction intrinsic to God.
--clh]mib@geech.ai.mit.edu (Michael I Bushnell) (11/30/90)
In article <Nov.29.04.58.39.1990.16863@athos.rutgers.edu> OFM writes:
[
The term "mode" has a bad association, because of the heresy known as
"modalism". However modalism said that the persons simply represented
ways God related to the world, but did not represent any distinction
intrinsic to God. Thus the new terminology that some are using for
the Trinity -- Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer -- is heretical,
because it characterizes God by three different ways he related to the
world and us. I am using the term "mode of existence" to refer to
different ways in which God exists and relates to himself, so I am
talking about a distinction intrinsic to God.
--clh]
I've thought a lot about this new terminology, and I don't
particularly like it either. Do we have alternatives that don't
offend those in our midst who stress that neither Father nor the Son
are male or female? Jesus was surely male, but the eternal Logos
cannot be meaningfully said to be essentially male any more than it
can be said to have brown hair. Is there another terminology we can
use? The only that comes to mind is "Lover, Beloved, Love" which
captures it all quite nicely, I think. What do others think?
-mib
--
Michael I. Bushnell \ This above all; to thine own self be true
LIBERTE, EGALITE, FRATERNITE \ And it must follow, as the night the day,
mike@unmvax.cs.unm.edu /\ Thou canst not be false to any man.
CARPE DIEM / \ Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!eric@wdl47.wdl.fac.com (Eric Kuhnen) (12/04/90)
[100 lines of Trinity & The Son deleted] I believe that the doctrine of the Trinity exposes its own fallacies when explanations like the preceding are undertaken. (I'm not flaming the individual who wrote it; it was well-written within the context of the Trinity doctrine.) I believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, separate in form and body from God the Father. I believe that the oneness spoken of in such passages as John 17 allude to a oneness of purpose, thought, and action. This brings up an interesting point: what is religion for? To answer my own question, I think that religion is a vehicle for clarifying the nature and attributes of God the Father, Jesus Christ The Son, and the Holy Ghost. If a religion espouses beliefs that cloud the nature of God with confused and convoluted doctrine, then they are not serving the function for which they were intended. Comments? "Q" [Sure. But the question is what is meant by "clarifying". To paraphrase, a doctrine should be as complex as necessary, and no more so. In this case, as complex as is necessary to do justice to all of the evidence in Scripture. Almost all heresies have been simpler than the orthodox doctrines. The reason is that they emphasized one side of a situation where balance was needed. It's often more complex to do justice to all the considerations. --clh]
BINDNER@auvm.auvm.edu (12/04/90)
mib@geech.ai.mit.edu (Michael I Bushnell) asks? .Is there another terminology we can .use? The only that comes to mind is "Lover, Beloved, Love" which .captures it all quite nicely, I think. What do others think? . . -mib The way I understand it is Perfection, Truth (the Knowledge of Perfection), and Love (of Perfection and of Truth). All of these are Being, which is One. Instead of One you could also say Three Divided By Zero (which is undefined on this plane of existence, or separate by undivided). Michael Bindner
stevep@uunet.uu.net (Steve Peterson) (12/11/90)
In article <Nov.29.04.58.39.1990.16863@athos.rutgers.edu> Our moderator writes: >..............[discussion of God being revealed in differnt "modes" deleted] >Many people have a hard time relating these technical discussions to >the portait of Jesus in the NT. But it's clear that what started the >Church down this line was statements in John, Colossians, and Hebrews >talking about Jesus as having a preexistence. The obvious way to ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >interpret this is as I believe the JW's do: that the Son is a separate ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >quasi-divine entity that existed "in the heavens" and then came down >to earth and lived as Jesus. The problem is with things like "I and >the Father are one"........ Yes, I agree that this is the obvious way to understand this. There is no problem with Jesus' statement: "I and the Father are one". (John 10:30) When Jesus said this did he mean that they formed some sort of Trinity? Some Trinitarians say that he did. But at John 17:21, 22, Jesus prayed regarding his followers: "That they many all be one," and he added,"**That they may be one even as we are one**." He used the same Greek word (hen) for "one" in all these instances. Obviously, Jesus' desciples do not all become part of the Trinity. But they do come to share a oneness or purpose with the Father and the Son, the same sort of oneness that unites God and Jesus... "**That they may be one even as we are one**"........... Interesting..... Best regards..... Steve Peterson stevep@cadence.com or ........uunet!cadence!stevep