/christian/ - Christian Discussion and Fellowship

>>690780

> I simply cannot imagine God taking human form and talking to us, I believe this is so far below his greatness that even mentioning it makes me uncomfortable.

Then you have a problem with the Old Testament, as well? Genesis 32:22-32

>As I continued reading about the trinity I also found that it was first introduced in 100~ AD

Wrong, John 1:1 for one.

>In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

>>690782

>Then you have a problem with the Old Testament, as well? Genesis 32:22-32

No, I understood that as mental.

>In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

I understood that as the God's Law, or Will.

>>690780

> I simply cannot imagine God taking human form and talking to us, I believe this is so far below his greatness that even mentioning it makes me uncomfortable.

Because God has perfect humility and you are a selfish little worm.

"For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways."

"And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross."

>I expect most of you here to disagree with me, so I'd like you to explain to me why you do believe Jesus is God in the flesh.

Because God can subsume any form he pleases. If he was purely transcendent then even his word/voice/speech could not communicate with any created being (angel or human). If his Word can enter creation and his Word is an infinite/eternal attribute of his then He is entering creation.

For God to be personal and relatable and not just an abstract/transcendent force he has to enter into creation.

The bible is clear that Jesus is the first and the last, the one before creation whom all things were made through, the one who possesses everything the Father possesses, the Lord of the Sabbath, the judge of mankind, the savior of mankind, the forgiver of sins, the one who prepares the rooms of heaven for us, the Word of God – the Word who was WITH God and WAS God — The Word that became Flesh and dwelt among us etc….the perfect imprint of the nature of God, etc.

>>690784

>I understood that as the God's Law, or Will.

Is God's Will God or some other being? Because that Will (actually Word/Logos) took on human flesh and dwelt among us.

>>690786

It's neither, to me it's simply the way in which God operates.

>Because that Will (actually Word/Logos) took on human flesh and dwelt among us.

I agree with this, as I do believe Jesus Christ was perfect.

>>690785

>If his Word can enter creation and his Word is an infinite/eternal attribute of his then He is entering creation.

I see his Word as being creation itself, esp. as Jesus often speaks in parables.

Could you tell me where you found you quotes, as I'd like to re-read the entire section where they came from.

>>690793

>I see his Word as being creation itself

it doesn't matter how you see things, but what revelation teaches us.

the Word is eternal and so precedes and transcends creation: "“Your word, Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens." Psalm 119:89-91

and "the Word was God". John 1

God's word is eternal and abides in heaven, God's word is also God.

>I agree with this, as I do believe Jesus Christ was perfect.

okay, but only God is perfect. So he has to be God.

TBH Arius makes more sense than many oneness people I know. Nevertheless God's Spirit, The Holy Spirit (aka the "Comforter") is sent by Jesus' authority.

Also revelation 5 a capital L Lamb is taking the book from the right hand of God.

>Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:

Phillipians 2:6

>8 But unto the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: a sceptre of righteousness is the sceptre of thy kingdom.

Hebrews 1

Look I know catholics are kind of retarded but don't go full potato because of their shame because even a broken clock is right twice a day. The Athanasian creed is the strongest barrier to Godhead-related heresies.

>>690793

>It's neither, to me it's simply the way in which God operates.

Indeed, the Word would normally be understood to be God's operative power that governs the world, and the Spirit would normally be understood to be God's life-giving breath that sustains the world.

But the revelation of the New Testament tells us that these are actually persons.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the direct consequence of this.

>>690780

The trinity is a recursive dialectic that describes Absoluteness (Godhead), Universality (Spirit), and Relativity (Creation/Man). The incompatibility you percieve is remedial if you understand the nonduality of God. There is Only God, Nothing else. God Being the only Being creates itself, of itself, for itself, by forgetting part of itself. Cheers.

>>690899

Disgusted with your own inability, unwillingness, or cognitive dissonance. Suit yourself there then with me, but I Am, that I Am.

>>690901

Nah, I'll trust the Bible over you. You can go now.

>>690897

Not bad, Anon. Not that it'll please the brainlets.

>>690897

Absolutely wrong

God is only One. But God knows Himself since eternity. When you know a thing, you have a image of the thing in your mind. God generates (not "creates")a Perfect Image of God: The Son of God, God since eternity. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, being also God since eternity. 3 Holy Persons, One Holy God.

Also the Triune aspect of God can be concluded without difficulty from His creation: the triangle is the fundamental geometrical form. The material world is "written" in a code with 3 as base. Space has 3 dimensions, matter has 3 states, time has 3 tenses. God Is Triune

>>690897

>Wait a sec are you trying to impose eastern metaphysics on me again.jpg

Here's a couple of useful things on the trinity I've saved from anons in other threads over the years, I don't know how useful/crazy/heretical they are:

The act of speaking requires that the speech is first willed internally, the speech given the form of a word externally, and the speech given breath in order to produce a sound in the first place.

When God speaks the world into existence,

The Father wills it.

The Son is The Word. (John 1:1)

The Holy Spirit is the breath. (Look up the roots of the word "spirit" in Latin and Greek) [and Hebrew, I would like to add]

—

1) There's God, and God creates through the Word (which is also the Verb). The Word must be uncreated then, because God creating the Word through the Word doesn’t makes sense. Therefore, the Word of God is always with God. Through his Word, God knows Himself. In other words, God have a image of God in His mind. Since God is infinite, His image is infinite. God loves Himself with infinite love, and always had. Thats the Holy Spirit. Infinity knowing Infinity and loving Infinity. Eternal knowing the Eternal and loving this Eternal. And yet, there cant be "three infinites" or "three eternals". There can be only one. Therefore, God is One and Trine.

2) Existence can't be existence if theres only "one thing". The number "1" wouldn’t be a number if there were no number "2". Therefore, infinity (all the numbers) always existed. Theres the "1", and theres the "2". The "3" proceeds naturally, since it's "1+2". 1, 2 and 3 are different things, right? Therefore, they are all "1" as well: [1=1], [2=1+1], [3=1+1+1]. The minimum amount of "numbers" that can make something concrete is "3". The triangle is the fundamental form. Therefore, God is One and Trine.

>>692281

For God, who is infinitely perfect being, existence of others beings than Himself is not necessary, but simultaneously He possess Love in infinitely perfect degree and, if so, this Love cannot be egoism.

Conclusion of this is that God exist in at least Two Persons.

Each of those Persons is able to do infinitely perfect giving of Love to other Person with fullness of Itself, and other person is fully able to receive this giving.

Because in result of full giving no Person cease to exists (because it would deny Love of giving-Person towards reviving-Person), it is necessary that Third Person exists, that is (because of nature of this act) subject of mutual giving of Two Other Persons.

Existence of more Persons is not necessary, and because God is infinitely perfect, there is nothing unnecessary in him.

Moreover each of persons is eternal due the very nature of God. The First Person is principle of Second One, whom He generates. Therefore First Person is Father to Second One, who is His only-begotten Son. Moreover, Third Person proceeds from the Father as the first principle and, by the eternal gift of this to the Son, from the communion of both the Father and the Son. Therefore from a Single Principle through a Single Spiration Third Person is both Spirit of Father and Spirit of Son. His name is Holy Spirit.

>>691282

>matter has 3 states

>solid, liquid, gas what about plasma

>>692286

And Bose-Einstein condensates?

Most triples in nature do not provide good examples of how the Trinity works, and should be avoided.

>>692281

>The triangle is the fundamental form. Therefore, God is One and Trine.

>>691282

>the triangle is the fundamental geometrical form […] God Is Triune

Guess you're the anon who wrote the bit I just saved and reposted

>>692288

Yeah fair, there was also the sun's heat and light analogy I was going over in one of the old threads but they all seem to reach their breaking point as coherent illustrations fairly early on

im also relatively new to christianity and also have trouble understanding the trinity. Why does jesus cry out to God when hes being crucified if he is God?

>>692303

He's speaking to God the Father, a separate person.

>>692304

Yes, but I thought according to the trinity jesus is God the father made flesh?

>>692305

He is not the farther made flesh, no, as >>692304 says the father is a separate person. He is the Son made flesh, or the Word made flesh.

Also I'm chiming in here to explain that the cry Jesus made was the first line of a Psalm (praise song/poetry from King David's time in the old testament), which Jesus referenced (in part) in order to draw attention to the people around how he was fulfilling the prophecy of the Psalm, which spoke of his heart being like wax (an anatomically accurate description of the state his heart would have been in following the stress and suffering his body had been and was going through), his feet and hands being peirced, casting a lot for his clothes, etc)

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+22&version=ESV

>>690780

Trinity is the exact reason why I left Christianity. The more I tried to understand it , the more I got convinced it doesn't exist and here I'm a non religious man . I think Christians are stuck in justifying an imaginative thing that's not real and it looks they can't until now . They keep giving examples like sun and heat and things like that and at the end you are just like what the hell is that ?!

If you're interested , here are some verses from Islamic scripture describing Jesus , I think they're like what you said tho I don't like Islam and disagree with them somehow but you may get interested https://carm.org/what-does-islam-and-quran-say-about-jesus

>>692316

I don't understand the trinity well myself (no one does fully but am sure some do more than others) but I do give weight to the argument that due to it being of God, the inifinite, our finite minds by their nature cannot comprehend the fullness of God and his nature - so phrased in a more silly way - in a sense, it makes sense that it [the trinity] doesn't make sense.

I would like to be able to be more learned on it though because it's always the thing Muslim's get hung up on in debates and if you're not well versed and careful they can make it seem like it's a contradiction (which it's not, it's simply a mystery).

>>690780

> I simply cannot imagine God taking human form and talking to us, I believe this is so far below his greatness that even mentioning it makes me uncomfortable.

Let me ask you something: if you were a parent (or if you are) and you love your child, how far would you go to save your child? What humiliation and pain would you be willing to take onto yourself to save it? If God is full of love for humanity, why would it be beneath Him to become human, live among humans and die for our salvation? Do you think of God as some petty skyking? Just because God became human it does not mean that he stopped being God.

Embed related is unironically the most helpful video about the trinity for lay people that I've seen.

If you want an analogy that does work,

https://historyofphilosophy.net/augustine-brittain

is a pretty good overview of Augustine's "On The Trinity" that explains the human mind analogy.

>>692303

He was actually quoting scripture

>>692316

Stfu and leave our board. Islam is retarded.

>John 1

>The word was with God and the Word was God

>And the word became flesh and dwelt among us

>john 58-59

>“Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I am.” 59 So they picked up stones to throw at him, but Jesus hid himself and went out of the temple.

Literally said he was older than abraham called himself Yahweh (I am). That's why they tried to stone him

OP here.

>>692604

>If God is full of love for humanity, why would it be beneath Him to become human, live among humans and die for our salvation?

Because God is omnipotent, if he wills humanity to be saved, he could just say: "be saved" and it would be as he commanded.

>Just because God became human it does not mean that he stopped being God.

This does not make sense to me.

How can an infinity being assume the position of a finite being?

>>692612

This was p. good. But if it cannot be comprehended by human reason (the trinity), wouldn't it be fine if I simply worship the Godhead, as Jesus did?

I'd rather worship something I truly believe in (God), instead of something I am told to believe in(the trinity), as I believe this would weaken my faith.

>>692288

The condisants are close to unity. I believe in ethereal space, but string theory can be further expanded to include a case for a zero-dimensional point based universe which can contain infinite dimensions.

>>692316

why you don't like Islam?

>>692316

>here's a book written over 600 years after Jesus walked the earth. It's totally accurate and superior to everything written by people who knew Jesus.

>>690784

>No, I understood that as mental.

What? She Jacob wrestled with the mental of God? And was surprised that he saw God mental face to face and was spared?

>I understood that as the God's Law, or Will.

God's was with God and it is God? And the law took on flesh? Are you not seeing the mental gymnastics here?

>>695259

>>695258

>>695279

Thanks for taking the time to write all this, makes a lot of sense.

>>695314

No, I meant it was happening inside of him. He himself wrestled with the law of God, and the Law overtook him, and he was named Israel.

>God's was with God and it is God? And the law took on flesh? Are you not seeing the mental gymnastics here?

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

I simply see this as an explanation of how the inner working of God were with God from the beginning.

>Are you not seeing the mental gymnastics here?

No

>>695370

>"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

>I simply see this as an explanation of how the inner working of God were with God from the beginning.

"and the was made flesh and dwelt among us"

The inner workings of God can become a man, but it's outside God's power, or somehow beneath him but not his inner workings? What would if mean for one's inner workings to take on flesh?

>>695387

>What would if mean for one's inner workings to take on flesh

It mean that a man completely obeys God's Law and Teachings.

>>690782

>John

written ~100AD.

>>692296

Yes we must remember that these are all just imperfect analogies

The trinity can be a confusing concept and it's one of the ones where there's actually some utility in looking outside Christianity into other spiritual philosophic texts to see why the trinity concept shows up in multiple places…

Hindus have a trinitarian godhead (see: Bhagavad Gita) as do the Jewish Kabbalists (see: The Zohar) and a lot of gnostic writings and Hermetic systems really spend time unpacking the trinity idea.

It's something like this…

God Most High, the unchangeable pre-existent pre-eminent One, must contain the Knower, the Known and the Knowledge itself.

The Kabbalists describe this as The Crown (Keter) which is God the Father, then Wisdom (Chokmah) which is The Son, then Understanding (Binah) which is the Holy Spirit.

You could think of these roughly as being The Sum Total (God as One not doing anything), his Active principle (Him doing stuff) and his Passive principle (the part on which He acts).

This is *very* knotty stuff to get around and frankly most Christians don't understand it even a little bit because it's very high conceptual philosophy… so the short version is don't worry about it too much.

Here's what you need to know…

God the Father is the pre-existent creator of All things… the self-aware, self-generating, All-knowing, etc. etc.

God the Son as the manifest Christ on Earth is a fun one that requires some explanation.

It would take pages to explain why there must necessarily be Darkness along with Light and Evil along with Goodness… but the short version version is that it's logically impossible to create a dynamic universe without it because without diminishing God's Light there could be no separation from his Unity.

This continues further into the conceptual space of choice… there is NO FREE WILL without the capacity for Evil… it is genuinely as simple as that. If we couldn't choose to be shitcunts then we don't have Free Will and that's that.

OK so Evil exists… how then does God justify his creation to his creatures?

There's an idea in medical science that you can't just test wild unapproved medicines on people but you can self-inject. i.e. it's alright to do it to yourself… that's ethically sound.

So God justifies his creation by manifesting himself in the form of his Son… who necessarily must be perfect in his humanity as well as perfect in his divinity, because otherwise it's a shit example.

What I mean by that is that Jesus/Jesus was completely human… if he wasn't then he would be too far abstracted from us to be a perfect example or sacrifice.

God manifests as the embodiment of his own Wisdom and imparts said Wisdom to his creatures. He also gives us the example of self-sacrifice for the good of the creation.

Basically, we're justified through Christ's sacrifice because he came down and suffered as extremely as possible and very visibly. This is by design because if he'd "gotten off lightly" then those who suffered more would not be justified in their suffering.

You have to consider too that this example needed to be something that could be understood by ALL people regardless of their culture or intelligence… that's why it needed to be acted out. Actions speak louder than Words… and even though Christ/Jesus is the Word… it's his Actions that were our salvation.

So when unpacking this stuff there's a lot of really complicated reasons for it all happening, which would necessarily follow from the fact that God has perfect supreme intelligence… but there needs to be an "interpretation for everybody" so it was done in such a way that even the dumb-dumbs would be able to understand it.

There's a stack more to it than this but it's like… several books worth of stuff.

TL;DR - God manifested Himself as his Son… who had Free Will and could choose temptation… who struggled against the flesh in the same way we did… who went through all the same shit we did… he was completely human and not abstracted from us… he did this to demonstrate his Wisdom and justify the Evil and suffering in this world through basically always doing the right thing. He suffered in the extreme to prove that God is not indifferent to the extremes of suffering that this world is capable of producing.

God is with us. He is with you now. He sees through your eyes and he shares in your trials and tribulations.

>>690897

^^

This guy gets it.

Gotta be so careful with how you phrase this to people though because you get accused of being a Deist or a Gnostic or a Pantheist by dummies…

You are exactly right though.

>>691282

Matter has more than 3 states. There are, however, 3 energetic worlds in which the 4 fundamental particles operate and we know that in the lowest that said matter has 4 states (plasma as someone pointed out)

The Son is not simply a mirror of the Self-Knowledge of God as you suggest, that's genuinely preposterous because otherwise Christ can't be perfectly human.

Further your Holy Spirit just kinda shows up without explanation or definition.

I notice a LOT of Christians are very fuzzy when it comes to defining the Holy Spirit and how it's part of the pre-existent triune godhead.

I mean you're basically just saying "The Son proceeds from the Father and the Holy Spirit proceeds from that and that's all God from Eternity. The End."

Can you not see how that literally explains nothing… you're just describing what you believe is without any why.

>>692316

I'm the opposite. Only baptized this year after some 20 years as a non-believing horseman style athiest/agnostic.

The Trinitarian Godhead is true it's just a really difficult concept which is why, in some respects, it's better to ignore it. It's not actually instantiated in the scripture anyway (old Greek NTs do not mention trinity AT ALL)… it's just implied through inference.

Islam is crazy wrong about Christianity and the Koran is so ridiculously inconsistent with what it says about Jesus I wouldn't put any stock in that interpretation at all.

One simple example is Pharaoh calling for Moses' crucifixion… just a casual several thousand years before crucifixion was invented.

If you acknowledge the existence of Jesus then you have to declare him a madman or a liar for going around saying the things he's purported to have said… that's if you don't believe them.

Jesus demoted to the status of prophet genuinely makes no sense… and if God doesn't change and his Law is pre-existent then why is Islam COMPLETELY at odds with Jewish and Christian ethics.

It is so contradictory it would make your headspin but you actually have to read it and see everything in context to see what a complete mess it is.

>>699404

>>699398

>>699405

Interesttng posts

>>699401

>Gotta be so careful with how you phrase this to people though because you get accused of being a Deist or a Gnostic or a Pantheist by dummies…

Well then call me a dummy but I'd love to hear more on this (i.e. how it's not any of those things), because >>690897 's

>God Being the only Being creates itself, of itself, for itself, by forgetting part of itself,

specifically sounds very much like the Hindu's conception of reality (hence >>692273) of Brahman dreaming or putting on a play or drama or game of hide and seek with itself for..well I'm not sure of the reason, honestly..fun? It's own pleasure? (Thought it was a non-personal being/force so not sure how it could experience fun or pleasure..)

Muslim.