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Congratulations!

This is an early LDS poem that was printed in John Lyon's 1853 poetry collection The Harp of Zion; I recently posted it to my blog and figured someone here might enjoy it too. :) How happy the Saints who are faithful and true, Who have kept their first love, and on earth do renew The cov'nants they've made in the regions above, And still prove their faith by their labours of love. They'll rejoice evermore in the Kingdom of God, And have for reward, an eternal abode! Rejoice all ye dead who the Truth have not heard; In the spirit you'll learn all the power of His word, And the vast prison-house shall be opened for you, When you've paid the last mite for your sins justly due. In the mansions of peace, for the righteous prepared, You'll live in the joys of eternal reward! Be vigilant then, all ye faithful, to earn What the dead are so anxiously waiting to learn, Your trials, and patience, and sufferings, and loss, Shall be gain in the end, if you bear off the cross, And those who are saved, shall extol God, the giver, And shine like the stars, in His kingdom for ever.

Interesting, thank you very much. :) I think I'd find the public religious debates to be fairly interesting. Are Latter-day Saints fairly active participants in those? For a while now I've been sort of wondering what the situation of the LDS Church is like in the Philippines, what with an extremely predominant Roman Catholic society on the one hand and competing groups like the Iglesia ni Cristo on the other.

Welcome to the board, Marlon! It's nice to make your acquaintance here. Out of curiosity, if you don't mind me asking, what's it like being a Latter-day Saint in the Philippines, given the prevailing religious culture there?

I'm not LDS, so take my advice with a grain of salt, but I'd like to echo what beefche and a few of the others here said. It's best to honor your parents' wishes and wait until you're legally an adult to be baptized into the LDS Church. That's a true sign of maturity, and it may also help to smooth things out with your family both now and in the future by showing them that you're respectful of them and their wishes while making your decisions responsibly. There's no reason you can't remain quite active in the LDS Church in the meantime. Additionally, I'd also recommend following their additional counsel to study a wide variety of religions. Investigating other options is always a plus and will likewise show that you intend to take this area of your life very seriously. Plus, if you do choose to join the LDS Church after several years of study, then the broad religious knowledge and experience you gain between now and then could be a great asset if you go on a mission. Don't look at this as an obstacle; look at it as a God-given opportunity to demonstrate your commitment and to devote yourself to even more study and prayer so that God can use you even more powerfully for his purposes later on.

Thanks for the welcome back, Skippy! Your question actually inspired me to add a new segment to the FAQ ('Welcome and Introduction') page at my blog, so I hope you won't mind me answering your question in part by quoting from what I've said there: But why do you study these things, if you aren't a Latter-day Saint? There are a lot of answers I could give to this question. Part of it is that I simply enjoy reading about religion and thinking about theology. On those grounds alone, I find Latter-day Saint beliefs to be interesting. I also value knowledge for its own sake. Consequently, I find it thrilling to learn about things that interest me even in the slightest. I also find religious history interesting, and studying Latter-day Saint history from a variety of angles is enriching both personally and intellectually. Furthermore, I enjoy the stimulation I receive when I read works of LDS philosophy, theology, and even apologetics - just as I enjoy similar works from LDS critics. I should note that LDS issues do not in particular occupy the majority of my time or the bulk of my reading. Other groups - e.g., Jehovah's Witnesses - have been the object of similar focus for me in the past, and other groups may become objects of fascination for me in the future. Even at present, I probably read more general historical theology, philosophy, and biblical studies than I do Mormon studies in particular. Still, I enjoy having particular focus areas to enjoy studying, and for me Mormonism happens to be one of them currently. In addition, as mentioned above, my girlfriend is LDS, and we love to have invigorating discussions about religion - hers, mine, and otherwise. (In fact, we're currently working through a chronologically ordered sequence of historical pro- and anti-LDS writings, whether treatises, pamphlets, books, autobiographies, novels, or otherwise. It's a fascinating project that I think will be profitable to both of us, especially insofar as it gives a sense of the history of both Latter-day Saints and their critics.) Because I care about her, I have especial reason to care about what she believes and the faith tradition of which she is a member. Some (though not all) of my interest in the ideas, the history, and the praxis of that tradition derives from my personal bond to someone who is integrally connected to those ideas, that history, and that praxis. And she has said that my devotion to study and my interest in dialogue has taught her and inspired her - and I'm glad to keep up anything I happen to be doing that benefits her. So even without the aforementioned reasons, this alone would be a good reason to continue learning and researching. Beyond that, Evangelicals all-too-commonly have a poor understanding of what Latter-day Saints believe, combined at times with hostility. What we need is for Evangelical leaders and clergy to be able to accurately and sympathetically understand LDS beliefs and to lead the way in speaking the truth in evident love - and for those Evangelicals with a clear awareness of their own beliefs and an ability to articulate them to help to clear up popular LDS misunderstandings as well, and to do so in the same spirit of love. As Carl Mosser and Paul Owen recommended in their classic castigation of Evangelical reactions to Mormonism, "evangelical academians need to make Mormonism, or some aspects of it, an area of professional interest". In my situation - as an aspiring Evangelical academic with an interest in and personal connection to Mormonism - how can I in good conscience refuse to answer their call? And finally, beyond that, I also keep researching, studying, dialoguing, etc., because I am aware and open to the possibility that I may be persuaded thereby to give greater credence to LDS positions on various theological issues - and it is possible, therefore, that if distinctive Latter-day Saint beliefs are true and are persuasively argued in their literature, then my research will lead me to accept those truths (on which, see below). Does that help to answer your question? I'm also aware that not everything ever published in any LDS literature anywhere has the status of official, binding LDS doctrine (even given the notorious internal controversies over the boundaries of such a corpus of teachings). Nevertheless, that which appears in the sources may be a useful indicator of what was in practice taught in the past, even when it may or may not match up with what is in practice taught today. And, at the very minimum, it will be an important opportunity for insight into the individual LDS theologies of particular influential LDS writers from the past, which I think is something valuable that needs appreciation in its own right.

Welcome, Lisa!

After an all-too-extended absence due to computer issues and (more importantly) keeping up with classes, I'm finally back! :) So this seems like a good opportunity to reintroduce myself and what I've been up to lately. I'm an Evangelical Christian from the eastern USA, working towards a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) degree at present; I'm about one year in now. I've been to various degrees interested in LDS thought and history since I was in high school, which was when I received my first copy of the Book of Mormon and read it. I now run a blog devoted to LDS-Evangelical dialogue, though these days I'm mostly finding interesting old quotes - mainly from old LDS literature - to post until I have more time to devote to it. (Those interested in learning a bit more about me can probably get some insights from the 'Welcome and Introduction' page I have there, I suppose.) I'm also dating a wonderful active LDS woman, and she and I have plenty of invigorating discussions. We both love reading, too. While I was away from here, I read some good LDS-related books like Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Joseph Smith's Quorum of the Anointed, 1842-1845: A Documentary History, and The Nauvoo Endowment Companies, 1845-1846: A Documentary History. Also, my girlfriend and I have agreed to embark on a special reading project together. I've gathered a collection of freely available historical pro- and anti-LDS literature in PDF format and organized it chronologically, so we've been working through that. So far we've finished Alexander Campbell's 1832 Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon, and I've finished Eber D. Howe's infamous 1834 Mormonism Unvailed, which she's still working through. In the meantime, I've started Parley P. Pratt's 1837 A Voice of Warning and Instruction to All People, Containing a Declaration of the Faith and Doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, Commonly Called Mormons. I doubt I'll start making my way through it in earnest until maybe next week, so as to give my girlfriend some time to catch up and me some time to keep up on my classes. Mostly I'm just looking forward to the end of the semester so that I'll at last have time to get some real reading done!

Welcome!

Welcome, Goldielocks!

Welcome, Aino!

Hello and welcome, Nikki. :)

Welcome to the site!

Welcome to the forum, Sharon. :)

Welcome to the forum, Shawn!

Welcome, Lonewolfx!

Welcome, Judas! (Now there is a sentence I never thought I'd be able to say... :-P)

Hello, Drew! Nice to meet you.

Here I would once again disagree, but also suggest that perhaps you've only considered two options: one in will, and one body. I would submit to you that there are other ways of understanding the oneness in John 17 besides those two. I'll briefly recapitulate what I was getting at in a previous post. Jewish literature of the time is full of affirmations that something ought to appropriately be one for the reason that God is one. If there is only one universal God, they said, then the faith upheld should be one, his temple should be one, his chosen people should be one. Schism and disharmony, in other words, were being condemned as practical denials of the oneness of God. That, I think, is what lies behind Jesus' discourse on oneness. The Father and the Son are one God, not two. Therefore, they share in the intimate interpersonal relationship appropriate to constituting the oneness of God. Now, if the Father and the Son are one God, then - so the familiar argument does - their people ought to be one people. And to be one people means not to foster schism and disharmony, but rather to strive after a uniting communion with one another, cultivating interpersonal relationships that reflect the impassioned love found within God's own tripersonal self. The oneness of God implies that the Father and the Son are united in will, and the oneness of God's people would imply that they, too, seek unity in will; but neither is wholly reducible to that. I would disagree here as well. Contrary to Joseph Smith's famous exposition of Genesis 1, there is no polytheism in it. It says that in the beginning, God created heaven and earth. The word elohim is technically plural, but it is likely an intensive plural, as was common in Hebrew. This is especially clear since it is paired with a singular form of the verb in this passage. Intensive plurals and other such constructions are used frequently in the Old Testament. For instance, behemoth in Job is the intensive plural of behema, "beast". With all due respect to Joseph Smith, this is simply one area in which I and many other non-LDS Christians simply cannot agree with his position. Only if one assumes that "spirit" is a type of body (or, that statements of the simple form "X is [a] spirit" carry no implications as to whether or not that spirit is embodied) is John 4:24 seemingly compatible with the LDS teaching on divine embodiment. At any rate, in our judgment, it won't work in this case, since the logic of the passage pushes us toward the mainstream Christian view. Here's how I would read it. In John 4:24, Jesus is explaining why one of the major disputes between Samaritans and Judaeans is becoming irrelevant under the New Covenant. That dispute was, which is the proper 'one temple' for the God of Israel, the one in Jerusalem on the Temple Mount or the one in Samaria on Mt. Gerizim. Under the New Covenant, however, there is no unique geographical place that takes a spiritual priority. It is the people of God as a community who constitute a living temple, not bound to one place; it is the believer who him- or herself is a temple to God. Geography becomes irrelevant to piety. Why does Jesus remark about God being spirit? Because God, as spirit, is fully omnipresent and, as such, is present everywhere among his people. Spirit is immaterial and incorporeal, and hence is not limited to one or the other geographical locale. God as spirit is able to be present among his people wherever they are; the mark of a true worshipper of God is not where they are on a map but where their worship stands in honoring God. If they worship in spirit and in truth - in other words, as Christians faithfully honoring God and living as people driven by the Holy Spirit - then it does not matter whether they worship in Jerusalem, in Samaria, or anywhere else on the face of the earth, because he is present among them no matter where they are. I don't think anyone has ever maintained that the doctrine of the Trinity is correct simply because most people believe it. However, it must be granted that, if one view has been seen and overwhelmingly recognized by the people of God throughout the ages, that can't be ignored as a consideration in its favor. That doesn't mean that the views of dissenters are irrelevant, but it does mean that they ought to have a decent case. For my own part, I do think that certain LDS teachings are unbiblical in certain ways. Mainly, that I don't think that some of them can be defended adequately from the Bible if the Bible is being read in a way informed by literary and sociohistorical context, as is appropriate. Not all interpretations are equal. Now, I would of course expect Latter-day Saints to try to show, drawing responsibly on the literary and sociohistorical context, how those distinctive teachings are able to be derived from the Bible. And I of course have no problem with that effort; my position is simply that it is unsuccessful (though I'm quite willing to be shown wrong there). I for my part have never found the fundamentals of Trinitarian theology to be all that imposing or difficult to understand. I don't know that many Trinitarians have ever contended that nothing about it can be understood. What we have said is this: if we cannot fully get our minds around certain facets of the created order, then if God's ways are truly infinitely higher than ours, we ought not pretend that we can fully get our minds around him, as though we could domesticate God, trap him in a cage, dissect him with our instruments, and eventually close our notebooks and say, "Well, that was fun. We've finally got that whole God thing figured out now." We can't. We're faced with a God who is truly infinite, whom we know only partially and frequently through limited analogies drawn from created nature. It stands to reason that this situation calls for appropriate intellectual humility. In this case, it is often appropriate for most to accept the teachings while admitting that our handle on the mechanics of it is limited. That doesn't mean that no effort is being put into trying to wrestle with the meanings of the terms, or analogies that might help, or the implications of this or that. Indeed, mainstream Trinitarian thought has a robust history of 'speculative' theology that grapples with those very things. Numerous debates about various details of Trinitarian theology still persist, sometimes by more practically minded theologians, sometimes by analytic philosophers of religion. Ultimately, there is no perfect created analogy that captures every facet of who and what God is. If there were, he wouldn't be God. Nevertheless, there are limited analogies that each help with certain aspects of it, but which also each fail to capture others and can be misleading if taken too absolutely. It's for that reason that I dislike trying to find analogies. One decent one is the image of a light bulb lit from everlasting to everlasting. The bulb itself (or the coil in it, or what-have-you) continually shines light and radiates heat, both eternally; and yet if either were absent, it would not be a lightbulb (in the fullest sense of the word). Just so, the Father begets/generates the Son and spirates the Spirit eternally and is inseparable from both. And as the light and heat are, with the bulb, one lit lightbulb rather than three, so the Son and the Spirit are, with the Father, one God rather than three. Another pointer comes from C. S. Lewis. To a two-dimensional figure, the notion of a cube would sound utterly absurd. One figure... with six squares? What nonsense! But just as, despite the protests of a two-dimensional critic, a cube transcends the two-dimensional limits on how many squares may be in a figure, so does God transcend our created limits on how many persons may be in God. Those are two that I've found less limited than many of the other popular ones, though still hardly an avenue to complete understanding. God may indeed be known from nature, but not everything about God may be known through a created analogy. I find no natural thing that is omnipotent, or that is self-existent, or that is all-wise, or that is from everlasting to everlasting. Still, there may be limited traces of God's tripersonality in nature - but as at best very pale reflections. Agreed. :) Agreed here as well. Technically, the affirmation of "one essence" is quite compatible, in some sense, with the LDS view of the Godhead. It's the major other differences that make a big difference. The biggest one, I think, is that in non-LDS Christian thought, there is a very strong sense that there is a great ontological difference between ourselves and God, and hence that we aren't all the same fundamental kind of thing. I think one roadblock to dialogue here is that, well, many other Christians just have no idea what is being meant when the word "literal" is used in this way. I would say that I, too, believe that God is the Father of our spirits. He is the creator of our spirits. But I don't think, "Ah, well, that's a metaphorical use of the word 'father' as opposed to a literal one." I would say that it's a different use of the word 'father' than when we speak of our earthly fathers being 'fathers', but I don't use a 'literal'/'metaphorical' spectrum for it. Likewise, apart from the Word becoming flesh, Trinitarians historically have believed that the Son is begotten by the Father. We believe that the Son timelessly derives his existence from the Father as a matter of metaphysical necessity, and all this within the essence of God. I don't take that as a less 'literal' use of the language of begetting than any carnal use. For this reason, I don't think the LDS emphasis on their beliefs being 'literal' is all that productive without further exposition of the exact content of what's being affirmed. Similarly, we have questions on what exactly it means for Jesus' body to be "sired" by the Father. What I would say the mainstream Christian belief has been is this: God, by his power, created a human body in Mary's womb, a complete human nature to which the Word could in his divine nature be joined in the hypostatic union. The creation of this body was a joint-act of all three members of the Godhead. God's unique fatherhood of Christ stems from before the incarnation, not from the act of incarnation itself. Amen! I see no (few?) substantial problems in your words there. I believe that Christ is Lord and God - though, I would qualify, not a Lord and God other than the Father - and that he created heaven and earth, the sea and all that in them is. I believe that Christ was chosen before creation to be the redeemer of mankind, and that he shows us the way to be in communion with the Father as we were meant to be, and that he enabled this by making atonement for our sins and rising again so that we might share in his triumph. The day will come when Christ will judge us - and I would add that all those who have faith now, provided they hold true to the faith, have an assurance of a verdict in their favor on that day. And then all Christians will be made joint-heirs with Christ, and will be glorified and will reign with him over the whole of creation. For my part, if I may interject, I would say that angels are spirits created by God before we were created (not sure what you mean about them being "a part or parcel of the same creation as we are", though, but I would add that they are not of the same kind/species as humans or as God). They have a number of tasks, such as glorifying God and serving him and ministering to the human faithful as well. Some of those angels rebelled, and so will receive a negative verdict in the final judgment. It may also be that individual virtuous angels will have their angelic careers submitted to us for review in the future, but that's wholly speculation. For those angels who rebelled before and so will be given a negative verdict at that judgment to come, their fate will be to be cast into outer darkness, forever cut off from God, and so to gradually and perpetually diminish in glory and in faculties. Those are my thoughts on some of the issues that have been raised in this thread, at least. It's been busy since I last posted! (Sorry to have to split it into two posts, but I suppose I was responding to quite a few posts after all!)

I think one thing that can be a big problem for some is clearing up a lot of common misconceptions about the Trinity - misconceptions that can be held by professing Trinitarians as well as by non-Trinitarians, unfortunately. Needless to say, I disagree. I dealt with this one in particular in an earlier post, where I pointed out two different approaches, both of which are both possible in light of the text itself and both of which are also entirely compatible with Trinitarian thought - and both of which have been around for over 1400 years. I think I can see one misconception arising here. Trinitarians believe that the oneness of the Trinity is a oneness in nature/essence/deity, and so the Father and the Son were every bit as one before the Son took on human flesh in the incarnation as they were afterwards. But Trinitarians also believe that, apart from that one act of incarnation, none of the persons of the Trinity are naturally embodied, or naturally physical/material/corporeal in any way. So from that it should be clear that when we talk about the Father and the Son being 'one', we do not mean that the Father and the Son are one physical object. Rather, we mean that the Father and the Son are one God, which entails being one in purpose and love as well as being one in essence. But the real question is, "One what?" Yes, Trinitarians do believe that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are one God. And for what it's worth, I try not to punt to mystery as a way of avoiding the hard work of thinking about it. I do think that it's something that we cannot fully resolve, in the sense of being able to eventually see it as something containable and beneath us. I think it's more along the manner of the way the nature of light is for us currently: we can see that light exhibits wave-like properties, and we can see that light exhibits particle-like properties, and we can see that nothing in our experience has wholly prepared us to put those images together, and for that reason if we're asked, "Well how can that be?", we may not have much of an answer other that to say that to an extent it's beyond us. We can't domesticate light - and, just as with the creation, so much more with the Creator. But, we can apprehend it well enough to probe at the mystery. For my part, I'm trying to get away from using the phrase "one in being". The reason is that, these days, the English word "being" is extremely ambiguous. What is "being"? That's one of the perennial philosophical questions. The phrase "one in being, three in person" was intended to be the English equivalent of "una substantia, tres personae", but I think that for the sake of ease, we ought to switch to the locution "one in essence, three in person" as an accurate reflection of the Trinitarian thought of the Greek and Latin Fathers. And when it comes to the Father and Son being one God, or being one in essence... well, why shouldn't one send the other? Why shouldn't one be in some sense greater than the other (if, indeed, that statement would be true of them apart from the incarnation)? I'd like to take a chance to answer this, since I - like prisonchaplain - do not believe that there was a wholesale falling away of the church. The first reason that I'm not Roman Catholic is that if I weren't Protestant, I'd be Eastern Orthodox instead. In terms of representing faithfully the character of the church in the patristic period, I think the Orthodox communions do a better job than the Roman Catholic communion does at present. It's all too easy in the West to get this mental image of the Roman Catholic Church as 'original' and forget about the Eastern Orthodox. At any rate, keep in mind that the 'branch' view of ecclesiology is one that comes natural to Latter-day Saints and Roman Catholics but maybe not so much to Evangelicals such as myself. For my part, when I ask myself, "What is the church?", the answer is that it is the body of Christ. Any Christian is, by virtue of that fact, a part of the church in some sense, even if perhaps - due to schism, heresy, or sin - they are not full participants in its communion and in holding to its one faith and its spiritual unity. So the question then is, where do I belong? I belong in a local congregation where the word of God is taught faithfully and which strives for communion and fellowship with all Christians everywhere and with all Christians who seek to hold to the faith we've received from the apostles. If a member of some other church holding to, for example, the Nicene faith were to come seeking communion and fellowship at my congregation, we certainly wouldn't disbar them from that table-fellowship with us. We seek no schism; we seek unity of fellowship. From this perspective, it is when other Christian groups - for example, Roman Catholics or Eastern Orthodox - would refuse to enter into that fellowship with us that it is they rather than ourselves who are acting as schismatics. (And as far as 'authority', one must remember that Evangelicals seldom think in those terms. But when it comes to priesthood, I as an Evangelical adhere largely to Martin Luther's exposition of the 'priesthood of all believers', which I see as being faithful to the New Testament's teaching about priesthood in the New Covenant. But that seems like an issue for an entirely different time, so I won't go into more detail here.) Is there a particular element of John 17 that interests you here? (Please also see my remarks on John 17:22 in an earlier post.) The assumption here that "being" (if by that one means "essence"/"nature") and "person" are synonymous is simply one Trinitarians would reject. The sense of the word "being" in which an orthodox Trinitarian affirms that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are "one being" is not a sense of the word "being" in which it is synonymous with "person". Mainstream Christians also do not accept that the Father has a "spirit body". We instead believe that to be "spirit" in the sense in which God is spirit is precisely to be immaterial and incorporeal. Hence, there is no answer from this perspective to that first question, as the question is predicated on an inapplicable assumption. Regarding the issue of being created in his image, Evangelicals affirm that we are created in his image but have a radically different notion of what that phrase means. For me, at least, to be created in his image means to be created as a representative of his power and authority in the earthly dominion, just as ancient Near Eastern kings set up representations of themselves throughout their kingdom and just as their gods were represented by images on earth as well. (Noteworthy is that those images did not always need to have a close resemblance to the king or god; what was needed was that it be a fitting emblem of the authority and presence of that king or god.) Hence, to be created in the image of God does not - for us - carry any implications about the similarity of physical appearance. This helps us make sense for the post-Flood command against murder, which outlaws it on the grounds that we are made in God's image. This command is a bit obscure if we take that as meaning, "Don't kill each other because you look a lot like God does", but seems to make better sense if we take it as meaning, "Don't kill each other because every human is designed to be a living emblem of God's authority and presence on the earth, and every human needs to be treated with the dignity appropriate to that calling; hence, shedding one another's blood in an unlawful manner is an affront to God's own authority and presence, akin to the assassination of an ambassador of heaven." However, in order to be a fitting representative of God on earth, we did need to be endowed with certain characteristics, among which are reason, self-awareness, and free agency. Your next question is a bit obscure and seems related to your fourth question. I'll answer as best as I can by giving a more general exposition, while admitting upfront that I'm not totally sure what it is that you mean. God, by default, is not a body. He therefore does not occupy space. Heaven and earth cannot contain him; he is, in his spaceless immensity, grander and vaster than the whole of the cosmos. Nor should he be thought of as an aether that fills the whole of space; that would be closer than picturing him as limited to one position in space, but still would be incorrect. God does have intimate access to every point in space and thus can be said to be present at every point, but this should likely not be taken to mean that he is spatially located at every point in space. God is the container, not the contained. (This raises a number of questions about what it means to say that any person is located somewhere, but we won't get into those philosophical quandaries here.) Thus, it can't be said that there is some particular place where his consciousness resides to the exclusion of other places, for the simple reason that God, as such, is the creator of space and so does not wholly reside in space. However, it may be said that he is present at certain places in certain additional ways. For instance, the Father is present in heaven, which may be taken in a variety of compatible ways. It may be, for instance, that those in heaven (whatever it means to be 'in heaven', precisely - that, too, is a tricky issue) have intimate access to the Father, such that he is more present there with us than one body is present to another. It may also be that the Father perpetually manifests himself in a theophany in heaven, thus expressing himself spatially there. Those are quite compatible, I think. Those are just a few ideas I'm tossing out. Ultimately, though, what I would say is that God cannot be entirely contained in space, and that God is not wholly absent anywhere in terms of his most basic mode of presence, whatever precisely that means. As for your fifth question, I can't really give an answer since I don't know what you mean when you use the word "being", or for that matter what you mean when you use the word "thought", and thus I have no grounds on which to guess what you think are the major distinguishing differences between the two, or why an incorporeal deity might be more comparable to the former than to the latter.

Hello and welcome, Erogin!

Welcome, CTR-man! I hope and pray that all will go well with your marriage.

Welcome, ldsf!

Hello and welcome!

That's definitely in the ballpark. :) For my part, I wouldn't use the word "contradiction", but definitely an apparent paradox or tension for sure. I think it captures some of the later approach and the questions that were being asked later on. [Note in retrospect: the rest of this post is rambling] In the New Testament period, it wasn't a worry because many Christians of that period were able to draw chiefly on the thought-categories of Second Temple Judaism, which already was able to accomodate multiple 'figures' within the identity of God: namely, certain of his attributes, such as his Word, Wisdom, Spirit, Torah, and Shekhinah. There was a sense of distinctness in some literature - or, at least, a depiction of distinctness within a unity of identity. Thus, the earliest Christians were able to talk about the divinity of Jesus within a staunchly monotheistic context in several ways. First, they could of course refer to him with the title 'God' or talking about him as having the fullness of deity dwelling in him, which they did. They could also cast Jesus in the role of one or more of those personified divine attributes by calling him 'Word' or 'Wisdom', or by using allusions to other texts of the time to depict him in that sort of role - and they did both there as well. And a third way they could go was to take certain motifs that marked off God's uniqueness and apply them to Jesus as well: things like a role in creation and a future role in judgment, or eternity, or a seat on the exalted throne of God, or giving him the name of God - and they did all of those as well. The effect made rather clear that Jesus was to be understood as included within God's eternal identity, but not in a way exclusive of the Father, whom the NT authors understood to be the God of Israel. They didn't need to do much with the Spirit, since the Spirit was already understood as included in God's identity, and all that was really necessary was to depict the Spirit as distinct by, say, using triadic formulas about Father, Son, and Spirit, or about God and Jesus and the Spirit - such as we have in Matthew 28:19, 2 Corinthians 13:14, and so forth (and see also Galatians 4:6). Later on, it came to pass that Christians were not so familiar with the cultural background of a lot of these affirmations, but still had some sort of grasp of the general gist. This left those Christians in a position of both trying to understand what they'd received and also to somehow match it with conceptual language borrowed from the intellectual culture of the time, using words such as ousia, hypostasis, physis, prosopon, and substantia and persona. It took a while to get things sorted out adequately. Some of the second-century apologists, for instance, were heavily influenced by Stoicism in their approach to the Logos, or Word. (Justin Martyr is one example of that.) One early struggle that the church had to endure was a fight against various Gnostics and Docetists who wanted to portray Jesus as a heavenly figure who had only appeared to be human, but who really had nothing to do with matter - or else who had entered into matter in order to free us from it through secret teachings for the elite. They drew heavily on Greek ideas to the exclusion of the church's Jewish heritage, often vilifying the Jewish god for having created matter and seeing the Father as a higher god who had sent Christ, one of the intermediate emanations or 'aeons', to free us from the prison of matter that the Jewish god, the 'demiurge' (sometimes named 'Yaldabaoth' in Gnostic literature), had trapped us in. The mainstream church, in contrast, stuck by its Jewish heritage in the Old Testament and rejected those teachings, continuing to associate the Father and the God of Israel who had created heaven and earth. One of the next movements that arose were movements that wanted to resolve the thorny questions of oneness and threeness in the Godhead by just collapsing the threeness down and saying that the one God had revealed himself in different guises or roles. Some of the known early representatives of that viewpoint were Praxeas, Noetus, and Sabellius. In contrast, the mainstream church firmly rejected it, especially since Praxeas' teaching implied that the Father had been crucified under Pontius Pilate, which the church recognized to be totally different from what it had always taught. Instead, the church maintained an emphasis on the fact that, although there was only one God who was revealed as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, still there were three distinct persons. Later on, the next major problem came with the rise of the Arian controversy, when an Alexandrian church elder began teaching a radical view - probably influenced partially by Neoplatonism - that the essence of God was to be unbegotten, and so since the Son was clearly begotten, they could not be of the same essence; consequently, the Son had to be the highest created being, but definitely lower than the unbegotten God. (It was later, as a result of this controversy, that the church was able to hammer out the precise difference between 'begotten' and 'made'.) But among other reasons, many Christians were outraged at what Arius was teaching because the church for hundreds of years had been worshipping Jesus as God. On the whole, you could say that this was a long quest for the right way to harmonize everything that the Bible says about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Bible is very clear - or at least virtually all Christians throughout the ages have thought so - that there is only one God, in the most fundamental sense of the word, and that any solution that allowed the statement "there are three true gods" to be true would be unacceptable. And yet when they reviewed the Bible, it seemed clear to them that it was presenting the Father as truly God, presenting the Son as truly God, and presenting the Spirit as truly God. The problem wouldn't likely have faced the Christians who were working in a Second Temple Jewish context, but it did face the church after it moved into a different cultural context wherein they had to use the language of Greek philosophy. Eventually they found a successful solution in terms of one ousia and three hypostases or prosopa, though in the course of doing so they had to radically reshape the way in which those words were understood. What helped was that it was recognized by them that something about the divine ousia was radically different from the human ousia, such that even three hypostases sharing the divine ousia would be one God. What they finally found had basically the same basic content, at root, as the New Testament teaching, but in new language and addressing certain new questions. The same process of contextualization has gone on elsewhere as well since then; for instance, some nineteenth-century theologians in India have done an interesting job using the language of Advaitavedanta (a major school of Indian philosophy) to present the doctrine of the Trinity in that very different context.