Hey all,
As the title says. I’m having a hard time understanding the Christian beleif of Jesus and God.
They seem to be worshipped like separately? But Christianity is Montheistic.
It’s so confusing.
Does anyone have any good resources (I’m not opposed to like Sunday school teachings for kids) that can explain this to me in a way it makes sense?
My hand and I are the same being, but when I go to the doctor, sometimes I’ll have them look at my hand, sometimes at me as a whole.
So im not a Christian but the theology of it is fascinating to me. You are getting arguments from a trinitarian viewpoint. Not all Christians are Trinitarian.
Here is the article on unitarism on Wikipedia which is a good starting point if you want to learn more about it. Most domoinations are tritarian but not all of them.
Certainly there are unitarian Christians. But all of the unitarian Christians I have ever had substantive personal interactions with appear to be unitarian in response to a fundamental misunderstanding of the trinitarian doctrine of God. And right in the beginning of that article you linked, it says Jesus is “not equal to God himself,” as one of the defining characteristics of Christian unitarianism. But even trinitarian doctrine is not about saying that Jesus is “equal to God himself”—that is, trinitarian doctrine is not that “Jesus is God,” but that “the Trinity is God.”
Folks are certainly free to believe whatever they wish, but unitarianism in Christianity as a response to trinitarianism has always struck me as a response to a poor understanding of trinitarianism, rather than as a response to trinitarianism itself. The unity of Godhead remains key to trinitarianism. Katherine Sondregger, in her Systematic Theology: Volume 1, The Doctrine of God, for example, begins by focusing at great length on the unity of God—but she remains trinitarian.
“god” and jesus are the same being. but also jesus is “gods” son. and was sent to earth to be executed to forgive humanity sin. which “god” created.
yeah.
I’ve never understood why this was hard to understand.
The distinctly Christian doctrine of God is that the Trinity is God. That does not mean that each of the three “persons”—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—is God (in the sense that each can be separated into a separate entity that is God); it does not even really mean that all of them are God (in the sense that God is the addition of the three together). Rather, what it means is that a distinctly Christian way to understand God is as a relationship. An early idea of this is expressed, for example, in the prayer of Jesus in John 17 for oneness between God, himself, and his followers, that all shall be “in” each other. To be clear, however, the Trinity is a doctrine that was only developed after all of the writings in the New Testament. There are lots of ways that people have read the Trinity back into scripture, but the idea was developed only later.
The relational aspect of the Trinity is also expressed, for example, in the idea that Christians pray not to Jesus but through Jesus—that is, that prayer is participation in the divine, through the human person of the Trinity. So it is not—should not be, in my view—that Jesus is worshipped separately from God, because the idea is that Jesus is not separate from God. One way to think about it is that the relation of the Trinity is experienced in the relationship we may all experience, between the divine that is the ground of being (Father), the humanity that is our being (Son), and the connection between all humans and the divine (Holy Spirit). And to worship is to participate intentionally in that totality of relationship. That is, to worship is to experience “grace,” which can also be defined as partaking in the divine nature. Or, from a different perspective, you could say that to worship is to practice rootedness in the true reality of our being, which is as the human experience of the divine in relationship.
Or, as I have heard it said, the Trinity represents the Lover (Father), the Beloved (Son), and Love Itself (Holy Spirit). So when we say with I John 4 that “God is love,” that is what we mean.
Also, the doctrine of the Trinity is not a simple one, but one that has a long history, and many expositors. And there are different theologians who put different emphases on different aspects of it. There are also lots of Christians that talk about it without really understanding it, and in ways that are not really faithful to the complexity of it. You could study it, or contemplate it, for a lifetime—but most of us won’t.
I find it difficult to consider the Trinity knowing it is something introduced 2 to 3 centuries after Jesus’s death. This means accepting it is equivalent to deviate from Jesus’s teachings since he never taught that to the diciples.
I usually see John 17:3 cited to affirm that in the Bible Jesus denies his divinity :
Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
Christianity is a long tradition with many developments in many times places to ensure that the tradition remains relevant. Cutting off that tradition, or pretending that we can some how refuse to “deviate from Jesus’s teachings,” even though we live in a completely different context than Jesus did, is both a denial of reality and a recipe to make the tradition irrelevant. If the Trinity is no longer relevant, then the thing to do is to make arguments based on where we are, the context we’re in, for a development to something else. Purporting to leapfrog back in time as though the intervening two millennia didn’t happen isn’t going to work.
While I agree that our context changes, I don’t see why it would have an impact on God’s very nature.
We can’t see God, so only Himself can tell us about His nature. And who does God talk to? Who does God reveal things to ? To select people He sent to the rest, prophets and messengers.
That’s why some people coming together to vote in multiple occasions (ie. the different councils) how they want God to be is far from divine revelation especially when it contradicts Jesus.
The nature of God does not change. But doctrines of God have changed constantly throughout history. We can see them change in scripture itself—from bodied to disembodied; from visible to invisible; from poly- and henotheistic to monotheistic; from geographically local to cosmically universal, and so on. They may do that because they are only doctrines, which are linguistically and culturally rooted. This is how our Jewish friends and our Muslim friends can understand God differently, even though God is, in Godself, only ever God.
And another problem with purporting to limit oneself to just the teachings of Jesus is that we have nothing Jesus wrote (if he wrote anything, and he probably did not), and Jesus did not have anything of our New Testament, all of which was written in a series of decades long after his time in Judea. That means Jesus cannot possibly have had the same doctrine of scripture that we might have (for example, he could not have affirmed the canon of the New Testament), and so saying that we should be limited to the words of Jesus in our scripture is really no different than affirming the Christian, trinitarian doctrine of God—both of those things post-date Jesus.
And doctrines are not just people getting together and voting. They are imagined, and argued, and circulated, and engaged, and argued some more, all out in the wilds of the church universal, until gradually they become part of the substance of the conversation comprising the tradition. That some of those processes of conversation and argumentation might be ecumenical councils is only a small fraction of the life of doctrine.
