The Trinity.
That the Trinity is an unfathomable mystery is a point of faith in many people's beliefs yet I don’t see where the Bible teaches that the Trinity or the Godhead is inherently beyond understanding. The Bible gives many clues that led to the various formal statements of the doctrine that we call creeds but to date, there have been few attempts express the Trinity in a way that were comprehensible and still aligned with orthodox Christian doctrine.
This document is not an analogy to help anyone understand the Trinity better but is an assertion of How Jesus can be both the Son of God and God Himself. I am hoping that someone will either Biblically refute what is said here or help refine the presentation of it as a fuller answer to understanding the mystery of the Trinity.
The various Christian creeds that touch on the Trinity include carefully crafted descriptions of the relationships within the Godhead, but the hard to comprehend aspects are generally relegated to mystery. The question of how three persons can be one is not addressed in the creeds but rather the creeds merely contain eloquent assertions that the Three, are indeed, One, The creeds all leave it at that and no real explanation is offered. Many Christians resort to one analogy or another as a means to comprehend and express the relationships within the Godhead, yet no analogy can be truly analogous; the Godhead is unique.
All efforts to articulate the Triune Godhead that I have seen tend to focus on inconsequentials like the many shared qualities of the Members of the Godhead in an attempt to assert the oneness of the individual Members with each other. I feel this tendency is a logical flaw in all the creeds that employ it. The nature of the Trinity is subtle but also rather simple. I apologize that I couldn't come up with a way to express it more compactly; please bear with me as you read what follows. .
Identity is not the same as identical and vice versa:
You will acknowledge that God in His Omnipotence has the power to create a perfect copy of me, a color Xerox of me if you will. Such a copy might be so perfect that the copy would be convinced that he actually WAS me. My family couldn't tell the difference either because my copy would share every single attribute I possessed.; but he wouldn't truly BE me and I would rightly object to being killed to make room for him . Conversely, if my own attributes ever changed for some reason like due to having a stroke, and even if I forgot the faces of my own children, wouldn't I still be me? I am a being and each being that exists has its own unique identity. That identity is independent of whatever attributes are present or absent. This argument demonstrates the flaw of describing shared attributes in order to assert that the Father, Son and Holy Ghost are unified in the Godhead. I intend to show that the most salient fact is that They share a single identity.
God is outside of time:
"In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.". Genesis 1:1
This verse describes the creation of the Earth, the cosmos, and the creation of the place we commonly call Heaven. When God created everything, He also created time and space. God therefore exists beyond the created realms of time and space. Glimpses we get into the third Heaven in Revelation, reveal that there is some sort of physical dimensionality there too but one cannot reach Heaven by physically traveling to it from Earth. In a sense, the realm that we call Heaven is sort of like a parallel universe. One wrinkle in that comparison is that the time in Heaven is apparently locked to the time here on Earth. Verses that describe reactions in Heaven to events on Earth indicate that the time is synchronized between Heaven and Earth.
Our existence here on Earth is spacial and temporal. The scriptures strongly imply that existence in Heaven is spacial and temporal too. Even though the Lord's Prayer includes the line "Our Father, Who art in Heaven...", the created realm that is Heaven, doesn't fully contain God. The Psalmist said that God has to bow down to even LOOK at Heaven. When Solomon was dedicating the Temple, he said to God "even the Heaven of Heavens cannot contain You.". This is all because God is beyond time and space.
However, in the incarnation, Jesus WAS contained by time and space while He was here on the Earth; He wasn't omnipresent even though He saw Andrew from afar. And even though all power and authority was given to Jesus; He wasn't omnipotent. When Jesus said that only the Father knew the time of His coming, Jesus implied that He wasn't omniscient either. Detailed knowledge of the future apparently was the domain only of the Father who is beyond time.
What does God's only Begotten Son mean?
We serve a living God, but what do we mean when we we say that God is alive? Isn't it that, like us, God is a Being? Doesn’t even His Name, "I AM" assert God's livingness as a being? We humans are also alive as sentient beings. We are each a “Self Awareness” which is something alive that is superimposed upon our physical, biological lives. This most important component of our "livingness" is this intangible thing that is looking out of our eyes. Indeed, that is how we humans were made by God "after His own Likeness." God is a living being and so are we. Another word used to denote our being is "soul". It is our soul that we hope will live again in the resurrection. But if God reassembles you again after you are fed through a wood chipper, will the resurrected you be the REAL you or merely a color Xerox of you
Christians believe that God has the power to truly raise them from the dead. We therefore have to believe that God has the power to manipulate individual souls, moving them through time and space, housing them and rehousing them as needed; Indeed, that belief was underscored when God demonstrated His power over individual souls by placing His own Being, His "I AM", into a human body in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago and then subsequently dieing and rising again.
It is meaningless to assert that Jesus had both a Human and a Divine nature in order to explain the divinity of Christ when the important fact is that the Person Jesus was and is the same I AM as the Father. Also whatever attributes like immortality, omnipotence or omniscience were present or absent in the incarnation is of secondary relevance to the fact that Jesus was and is, the same I AM as the Father. When God breathed life into Adam, He created a new being to inhabit Adam's body. In the incarnation of Jesus however, God installed His own Being, His very Life into the Human body that was Jesus’. Just as when I begot my son by contributing my LIVING sperm that became a part of the LIVING cell that grew into my living son; so God BEGOT Jesus by putting His own life, His very BEING into His Son’s body. Jesus and the Father aren't two persons. They are two different instances of the SAME person if the word person means anything at all. Pretty talk of the "same substance" or of “subsisting in the same essences" doesn't convey the awesome reality of Jesus' oneness with the Father. The talk of three persons in the creeds are actually in error I feel.
The answer to the Mystery:
The questions that may still confound the reader are, "If Jesus is the same Being / I AM / Person as the Father,
How can Jesus and the Father exist at the SAME time?" ( like at the baptism of Jesus )
How can Jesus be subordinate to the Father?"
How could Jesus pray to the Father and talk about Him in the third person?"
The answer to question number one is the key to it all.
IT ISN'T THE SAME TIME!!!"
The Father is the Great " I AM " who dwells OUTSIDE of time and space. In the incarnation, Jesus was the I AM of God dwelling WITHIN time and Space. There is no paradox or simultaneity conflict between these two realms. All of God’s attributes couldn’t fit in this Universe or fit in Jesus’ human body. The Father to Son relationship is a result of the inevitable Greater to Lesser / Begetter to Begotten nature of the relationship.
In brief, Jesus is the "I AM" of God within time and space, the Father is the same "I AM" Who dwells beyond time and space. If the reader can get a handle on this, I believe all of the scriptures that touch on this topic will fall into place for him.
Even Jesus' existence in Heaven was and is temporal. Whether you contend that Jesus had a beginning with the start of time in Heaven, or if you say that Jesus existed from eternity past before the Creation, doesn't really change what makes Jesus one with the Father. Focusing on whether attributes are shared or not doesn't affect the awesome fact that our God so contrived reality that He could give up His life for us. This understanding also informs us that Jesus wasn't some hapless third party that God determined would be punished on our behalf; Jesus was God Himself in the flesh!!
The fact that the God of the Universe loved you so much that He considered you worth the ultimate sacrifice is much more wondrous than anything you can gain by adhering to the words of some mouldy creed.
An interesting add-on to this understanding yields a rationale for why God will create a New Heaven and a New Earth. With pollution and urban blight, the desirability of a New Earth might be obvious; the need for a New Heaven however is not. What is wrong with the, no doubt, totally awesome Heaven that exists right now?
The rationale is buried within a point mentioned earlier; God cannot be contained by Heaven. Though Heaven may be God's Throne and the Earth His footstool, Heaven is still a created, temporal place, altogether too small for God. Yet in Revelation 21, right after the New Heaven and Earth are established, a momentous angelic announcement is heard.
"Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and He will dwell with them, and they shall be His people. God Himself will be with them and be their God."
Hear what's being said here:
"...God HIMSELF will be WITH them..."
These verses imply that God will be able to move into the New Heaven and make Himself at home there. Apparently, God’s intends to remake reality such that He can spend the rest of Eternity just as close to us as He can get us. Isn’t that cool?
I feel that this document contains 2/3rds of the answer to the Trinity mystery. Most discussions of the Trinity primarily speak of the Father and the Son so I've left it there also. The relationship of the Holy Spirit to the rest of the Godhead seems much more elusive for now.
