The Trinity

[moobu2]

This is the doctrine of the trinity, one of the most important belief systems in Christianity.

God is a trinity of persons - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Father is not the same person as the Son; the Son is not the same person as the Holy Spirit; and the Holy Spirit is not the same person as Father. They are not three gods and not three beings. They are three distinct persons; yet, they are all the one God. Each has a will, can speak, can love, etc., and these are demonstrations of personhood. They are in absolute perfect harmony consisting of one substance. They are coeternal, coequal, and copowerful. If any one of the three were removed, there would be no God.

Now isn't that strange? wow. Of coarse the concept was borrowed from other cultures and became orthodox a few hundred years after Jesus allegedly lived and died. The ancient world was rife with Tripartite Gods, they were everywhere in every region, Gods, Goddesses, giants and mythical animals with 3 heads, so, I wondered what the chances were of all the Tripartite deities just being myth (made up by ancient superstitious peoples) then all of a sudden, one Tripartite God came along that actually existed? oh never mind, thats insane idnit?

[kstewart33]

1. I never understood the Trinity.

Logically it does not make sense, and appears to be entirely man-made which makes it highly suspect.

Just another reason why, for me, organized religion does not work.

[Warpy]

2. None of it makes any sense to a logical mind

which is why it must be compartmentalized away in an untouchable area labeled "faith" to be accepted, at all.

[moobu2]

3. I think it was a very old idea

used in Christianity to reconcile the worship of several Gods, while claiming to be monotheists worshiping the one Jewish God of the Old Testament. Kind of schizophrenic to me. I think the Trinity concept has something to do with very old sun worship ideas.

[originalpckelly]

6. Dissociative identity disorder, not schizophrenic.

Schizophrenia and having multiple personalities are not one and the same. Schizo info may be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_personality_disorder

I wish people would stop doing that. We all make mistakes, though, so no worries. :P

[moobu2]

7. I guess I was talking more about the bizarre delusional hallucinatory

aspect of schizophrenia really. But then there is that multiple personalty disorder thing going too, so either way its insane to believe such silly none sense I guess.

[immoderate]

22. Consider that schizophrenia denotes a "schism."

It's a break with reality.

--imm

[DeadEyeDyck]

11. If there is only "One"

then man-made, God-made are one and the same. The trininity are simply 3 manifestations of the One.

[dimbear]

4. As above, so below and vice versa. All those trinities are images

of the royal family, namely the king and consort plus the crown prince or heir apparent.

If you have a look at the records of ancient Canaan, you will discover that Yahweh himself was once the younger part of a royal family, His parents at that earlier time being Ba'al and Astarte. (Or Ashtoreth, etc. many spellings available.)

It wouldn't surprise me much if another cycle were to roll past. :)

[Igel]

5. Never made sense to me.

A good friend was visiting from out of town once and my wife, an atheist, was asking us about religion. He's Catholic, I was a loyal church-goer once. The trinity was mentioned, she asked, and I said that my church didn't have any trinity as part of a doctrine, it was utterly non-trinitarian.

My Catholic friend had to pick up his jaw, pause, and then said he didn't think there were any Xian churches that weren't trinitarian. You could see he wasn't seriously considering a dash for the door--in a living room with an atheist and a non-trinitarian, he must have been in mortal danger. He stayed.

I'm church hunting. Non-trinitarian is a requirement.

[dimbear]

14. It makes sense if you look at it practically.

Why do cars from around 1960 have tail fins? Because one brand started having them, so the others did too. Although.........they serve no purpose whatever.

If you ask the average American in the street what religion prevailed in Rome before the advent of Christianity, you will of course be answered by 'duh.' But maybe one in ten might say paganism. We here, being in the know, would give the correct answer 'Mithraism' as the most prevalent religion. A strong contender would be the adoration of Isis, with the associated trinity of Isis, Osiris, and Horus. Isis was part of a trinity, Isis had many followers, ergo....Christianity would have one too. A religion must compete or die, because evolution is acting upon it, just as it acts on any complex self-replicating system.

I won't beat a dead horse by citing all the things Christianity lifted from Mithraism.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. Can you back up "Mithraism prevailed over paganism in Rome before Christianity"?

Because for instance,

Clauss, M., The Roman cult of Mithras, p. 24: "The cult of Mithras never became one of those supported by the state with public funds, and was never admitted to the official list of festivals celebrated by the state and army - at any rate as far as the latter is known to us from the Feriale Duranum, the religious calendar of the units at Dura-Europos in Coele Syria;" "the same is true of all the other mystery cults too." He adds that at the individual level, various individuals did hold roles both in the state religions and the priesthood of Mithras.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraic_mysteries#cite_note-45

Mithras was one god, not worshipped exclusively. Really, it's part of the 'paganism' you suggest it surpassed.

[dimbear]

16. As I do so often, I appeal to the writings of Ernest Renan.

One of my favorites, who expressed his conviction that Mithraism would have become the chief religion of the West except for the advent of Christianity. After all, the Roman Emperors had begun to adhere to it--before the day of Constantine. That we went down the path of Christianity has to be ascribed to the fortunes of war.

By paganism, of course I mean classical paganism, i.e. the cult of Jove et al.

What are the evidences on the ground, so to speak? The ubiquity of the archaeological remains, the mithraea, the headstones inscribed to Mithras, and the intensity of the Christian reaction to Mithraism.

I concede there are no attendance records, after all Mithraism was a mystery religion. Far less are there written records, but that is due to the extreme enthusiam of the Christians to efface them.

There is also an amusing bit of etymological evidence. Warriors honor their strongest enemies, as you will see at a glance looking at a map of the United States. The names of Indian Chiefs we remember are those of the fiercest opponents. Thus it is a very high compliment to the valor and strength of the opponents that Christian bishops wear Mithras hats. Not so common in English nowadays, you usually see that same word translated to miter or mitre.

It's like the Amazonian headhunters or the Plains Indians with their scalp belts.

[muriel_volestrangler]

17. "would have become..except for" isn't the same as "was", though

Yes, Mithraism was a mystery religion; but it was mingled with the other modes of god worship that the Roman Empire continued, and which were still the official ones.

As for the etymological evidence: yes, it's thought 'mitre' and 'Mithras' both come from an Indo-European root meaning 'to bind', which became 'mitra/mithra' 'friend, companion' in Sanskrit and Avestan, and 'Mithras'. But 'mitra' is used in the Greek Septuagint to describe a bound headdress worn by a priest, and that (being BCE) predates Mithraism anywhere in the Mediterranean, and Christianity too. It's a coincidence that worship of Mithras, with a similar name to the headdress, was then brought to the area. (All from the Oxford English Dictionary)

[dimbear]

18. I see that after a mere 18 centuries, opinions remain divided.

I'm not possessed of an OED these days. My Webster's agrees with me, but of course that's a bit feeble compared to the big guy.

There are various forces at work. There are the obvious borrowings from Mithraism on one side, and the concerted efforts of the Church to deny them. People of good will even today can argue either side, but we can dispassionately agree that Christianity smashed Mithraism, and then Christian high officials wore something called by various names including 'Mithras cap.' That's just history. Perhaps the original problem was that there was no fancy headgear at all in the gospels. No precedent in the Christian Ur legend. Competitive pressures required some fancy headwear, as so voila!

Students of the era (fourth-fifth century) are gravely hampered by scarcity of sources. Sources are scarce because the Christian emperors took care to burn them. Even as effaced from history as it now is, I believe Mithraism deserves its due; a second place medal.

And of course a lot of info has been added since Ernest Renan went on to greener pastures. Archaelogy has made many finds concerning Mithraism, including clear evidence of the violent nature of its overthrow.

There is even some fascinating evidence that Mithraism survives to some extent in the rituals of Freemasonry. But that's another story.

[muriel_volestrangler]

8. There's a fair amount of evidence that Greek philosophy, especially Platonism, was instrumental

in the emergence of Christian Trinitarian doctrine. This happened through such people as Philo, who mixed Jewish and Greek ideas around the time of Christ:

Philo of Alexandria (c.20 BCE—40 CE)

Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenized Jew also called Judaeus Philo, is a figure that spans two cultures, the Greek and the Hebrew. When Hebrew mythical thought met Greek philosophical thought in the first century B.C.E. it was only natural that someone would try to develop speculative and philosophical justification for Judaism in terms of Greek philosophy. Thus Philo produced a synthesis of both traditions developing concepts for future Hellenistic interpretation of messianic Hebrew thought, especially by Clement of Alexandria, Christian Apologists like Athenagoras, Theophilus, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and by Origen. He may have influenced Paul, his contemporary, and perhaps the authors of the Gospel of John (C. H. Dodd) and the Epistle to the Hebrews (R. Williamson and H. W. Attridge). In the process, he laid the foundations for the development of Christianity in the West and in the East, as we know it today. Philo’s primary importance is in the development of the philosophical and theological foundations of Christianity.
...
Though Philo’s model of creation comes from Plato’s Timaeus, the direct agent of creation is not God himself (described in Plato as Demiurge, Maker, Artificer), but the Logos. Philo believes that the Logos is “the man of God” (Conf. 41) or the shadow of God that was used as an instrument and a pattern of all creation (LA 3.96). The Logos converted unqualified, unshaped preexistent matter, which Philo describes as “destitute of arrangement, of quality, of animation, of distinctive character and full of disorder and confusion,” (Op. 22) into four primordial elements:

For it is out of that essence that God created everything, without indeed touching it himself, for it was not lawful for the all-wise and all-blessed God to touch materials which were all misshapen and confused, but he created them by the agency of his incorporeal powers, of which the proper name is Ideas, which he so exerted that every genus received its proper form (LA 1.329).

http://www.iep.utm.edu/philo/

Notice the similarity to the beginning of John's gospel, written a few decades later, which equates Jesus with 'The Word' - Logos, and who is claimed as being an essential participant in Creation, with 'God' working through him.

The New Testament doesn't normally place the 'Holy Spirit' as part of any trinity (no word like 'trinity' ever appears, and the closest to the concept is the ending of Matthew, and the last verse of 2 Corinthians: "May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all". However, it's notoriously easy for a copyist to tack on their own ending to their source, and so it's quite possible these post-date the rest of their books. In the Martyrdom of Polycarp (happened around 155AD, written some time later) we see the grouping of the Holy Spirit with 'Father' and 'Son' - in the middle of passages.

The promotion of the Holy Spirit to the new concept of a Trinity happens more than a century after the New Testament was written, when Christianity had spread around the Mediterranean. It was Tertullian who both first used 'Trinity' (in Latin) and talked about 'three persons, one substance', around the start of the third century AD. But before this, Middle Platonism had developed ideas of a triad god in the writing of Numenius and Albinus, both 2nd century AD. Also at the start of the third century, we have Origen of Alexandria, who takes this idea of a triad from Middle Platonism and explicitly uses it for the Christian Trinity.

Greek philosophy and theology, of course, was influenced by other religions and cultures over the centuries. But the idea of an 'ultimate' originating Person, and a mediating 'Word' or 'Mind' and then a 'World Soul' or 'Spirit' that are also Persons that should be regarded as a triad, that the Christian trinity expresses, is most closely similar to the (non-Christian) Greek ideas of Platonism that were around about 50 years before Christian theologians suggested them.

[AlecBGreen]

10. very interesting food for thought

Thanks for sharing this. Im getting ready to hop in the shower and run some errands but I will explore this later when I have more time. :hi:

[AlecBGreen]

9. "one of the most important belief systems in Christianity"

I disagree. While it IS an important concept, I think theological issues like this are less important than the actions our faith calls us to perform. "Love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, soul and mind" and "Love thy neighbor as thyself" would be, to me, the most important. As Paul says, "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love."

That said, I DO believe God is three-in-one. I think this is a prime example of the duality vs. nonduality conundrum. God IS three seperate entities (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) yet simultaneously one. Just because it is illogical doesnt make it difficult for me to accept. Studying the freakiness of physics and the nature of the Universe has led me to accept that something can be completely illogical and counterintuitive yet still "true."

[GliderGuider]

12. Christianity's version of a koan?

In Zen Buddhism a koan is proposition designed to defeat the rational mind and open the door to an intuitive understanding. Not a concept much in favour in the rational West. Still, an embracing of conundrum and paradox can be be quite liberating.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

13. ...

[Nihil]

20. Not so much "The Trinity" as "*THE* Trinity".

:toast:

[bemildred]

19. Well, I admit, it seems a bit dogmatic. nt

[FamousBlueRaincoat]

21. it's pretty interesting

It's one of the huge things that really made me stop being a Christian - I could not come to terms with the trinity in the context of monotheism. If Christians would come out and be polytheists, it would make things run smoother. They worship a god-head. It's not that big of a deal - other religions, say Hinduism, have a god-head. But they don't pretend to be monotheist.

There was such a thing as non-trinitarian Christianity before Constantine. It still exists, but not in any meaningful way. Unitarians, Quakers, and some more minor sects.