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Hello, Bill, and welcome to the site! Sillyman is an awesome name.

Welcome! :) We look forward to getting to know you better here.

Jace, thank you for sharing that. Not being LDS and not ever having been a missionary, I don't have much personal experience to draw on here to help; but when President John Taylor (then an Apostle) returned to the Utah Territory from the work he was doing in France and Germany, he had very little positive to say about the quality of his experiences there. Instead, he denounced pretty much everyone he came across as a barbarian compared to the wonderful, honorable civilization of Latter-day Saints in Utah. From the sounds of things, he had an absolutely miserable time, and he wasn't afraid to say so in front of everyone; he felt no need to present it as a time of joyous spiritual advancement. But there is one positive thing he did say about the mission, and it had to do with the journey to serve God: "Some people talk about doing great things; but it is not a great thing to travel a little, or to preach a little. I hear some of our Elders saying, sometimes, that they are going to do great things - to be rulers in the kingdom of God, Kings and Priests to the Most High, and are again to exalt thousands of others to thrones, principalities, and powers, in the eternal worlds; but we cannot get them out of their nests, to travel a few miles here. If they cannot do this, how will they ever learn to go from world to world?" (Journal of Discourses 1:19-20) Being a bit of an outsider myself, I'm not in much of a position to offer advice, but the way I see it, there's nothing wrong with having an unpleasurable and seemingly unprofitable mission experience. (And I'm very sorry to hear that yours was largely served under a mission president whose focus was apparently more on quantitative 'results' than on genuine spiritual growth and service to God.) Despite the modern stigma of admitting it, many of God's servants have had terrible trials, hardships, and miseries in the course of the undertaking. I think what matters more - in addition to what MarginOfError said - is to see it as an experience of growth that prepares you for the greater tasks of glory that God has in store for you in days to come. Even if from a worldly standpoint, or a perspective of personal enjoyment, it seems like a great waste of time and money.... there's no telling just how God will use that experience of service to him to reward you with greater callings and honors yet to come - since, whatever we see and feel about our lives through our present dimness of vision, in heavenly retrospect we have the promise that we'll see how "God works all things together for good to those who love him, who are called according to his purpose".

Welcome, Pooh!

First quick comment: Arius was not a bishop. When the controversy broke out, he was only a presbyter (elder) who was having a theological dispute with the Alexandrian bishop Alexander. Arius was deposed from his position, despite having desired to become the bishop of Alexandria himself. When Alexander died, he was succeeded in the bishopric by Athanasius, not Arius. (I suddenly feel the urge to begin to chant the troparion to Athanasius: "O holy father Athanasius, like a pillar of orthodoxy you refuted the heretical nonsense of Arius......", heh.) As prisonchaplain points out, Vanhin is right to say that Jesus is not the Father, but incorrect to seemingly assume that this is what the doctrine of the Trinity says. Trinitarians - well, ones who actually know what that means, anyway - do not believe that Jesus is the Father. Trinitarians believe that there is one and only one God, the God of Israel, and that any claim that there are other gods aside from that God is false. Trinitarians also believe that this God's identity is broader than just one person; this God's identity also includes God's eternal Word and God's eternal Spirit, who with him are one God. This allows God, in God's very self, to be eternal community and eternal, self-sufficient Love. But the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three distinct persons; the Father is not the Son or the Spirit, the Son is not the Father or the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father or the Son. The first Synod of Toledo, held in the year 400, affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity by talking about "one true God, Father and Son and Holy Spirit", but went on to add that "the Son is not the Father", and later added: "If anyone says and believes that God the Son is the same person as the Father or the Paraclete, let him be anathema." Later - 151 years later, to be precise - Justinian mentioned in an edict that God is "one according to the principle of essence or Godhead, but three according to the properties or hypostases or prosopa", the latter two Greek words indicating something roughly the same as 'distinct persons'. A later edict by Heraclius in 638 specifically stressed that Christians who believe in the Trinity do not "eliminate the distinction of persons". In 675, the eleventh Synod of Toledo declared of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit that "the three are one, that is, in nature, not in person". The thirteenth-century Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas, in Summa contra Gentiles 4.5.5, stressed that "God the Father is not himself the Son, but the Son is other than he, and the Father is other than the Son". Later on, a seventeenth-century metropolitan of Kiev, Peter Mogila, confessed that in the Trinity there are "three distinct persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost". This is the mainstream Christian faith that has been affirmed by Christians for well over 1500 years, and is upheld by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestants, even though unfortunately so little emphasis is placed on accurately teaching it in Protestant denominations that even many clergy are unnecessarily confused. As for some of the Bible verses that have been bandied around, let's all please remember that over the past 1700 years and more, Christian theologians, philosophers, biblical commentators, and preachers have not mysteriously forgotten that certain parts of the Bible exist. It just isn't the case that there are no Trinitarian approaches to certain passages; even if the average lay Christian in, say, a Protestant church has no idea what to do with a certain verse, that doesn't mean that a wealth of answers won't be found in the works of patristic and medieval thinkers, to say nothing of modern biblical scholarship and theology. When it comes to Luke 18:19, for instance, modern commentators equipped with an understanding of how first-century Mediterranean cultures worked can see that people commonly deflected accurate compliments as a way of averting envy in certain situations, especially because a compliment could be used to mount a challenge. Hence, biblical scholar Bruce J. Malina notes that: "While claims to worth needed public acknowledgement in the world of Jesus, words of praise could kill. Hence we would expect people to be wary of compliments and other public expressions of a person's superior worth. Thus Jesus simply avoids envy by refusing the compliment 'Good Teacher.' He properly responds, 'Why do you call me 'good'? No one is good but God alone' (Mark 10:18)" (Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology, 3rd ed. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 126). And prisonchaplain's insights also help us to understand why the Gospel author might have presented him as deflecting it in the way that he did. With regard to John 14:28, one standard approach to this verse since at least the Arian controversy has been to note that orthodox Christians believe that Christ after the incarnation has two natures, divine and human. Christ is fully and truly God, but he is also fully and truly human, and while certain things are said about him as God, others are said about him as human. And while as God he might well be fully equal to the Father, as human he would appropriately confess the Father as greater and worship the Father as God. For one notable fifth-century use of this approach, Leo the Great's Tome remarks that "it does not belong to the same nature to say 'I and the Father are one,' and to say 'The Father is greater than I.' For although there is in the Lord Jesus Christ a single person who is of God and of man, the insults shared by both have their source in one thing, and the glory that is shared in another. For it is from us that he gets a humanity which is less than the Father; it is from the Father that he gets a divinity which is equal to the Father". Still, even if we don't understand it by making reference to the two natures, there's nothing incompatible with the doctrine of the Trinity in saying that, in some sense, the Father is 'greater' than the Son. Perhaps the two are equal in essence, but still the Father is 'greater' than the Son in being unbegotten rather than begotten. Thus, in the year 343, a synod meeting in Sardica commented on this verse that "no one ever denies that the Father is greater than the Son, not because of another substance, not because of difference, but because the very name itself of the Father is greater than that of the Son". Also, a final quick note on John 17:22. In many samples of Jewish literature of that period, there was an emphasis on the fittingness of one X corresponding to the one God - so, one temple, one Israel, one harmony of faith, etc. See the similar echoes in Ephesians 4:4-6. As modern biblical scholar Richard Bauckham points out, this may provide some very relevant background for understanding John 17. It is because of the intimate interpersonal unity within the one God - as exemplified by the intimate union of the Father and the Son - that it would be highly improper for the people of that one God to fail to stand united. The only proper response of God's people to the oneness of God is to manifest the corresponding oneness of God's chosen people. (A response, alas, that has so often been neglected on the part of God's people.)

Welcome!

Welcome to the site, Daybreak! :)

The Merovingian Dynasty still rules the Western world from the shadows..... And welcome!

Welcome! Ditto to what Dr T said.

Welcome, Casper. Also non-LDS.

Welcome, Mikey!

Welcome to the forum. :)

Greetings, dscherck!

Hello, Jacobi! Welcome to the site.

*waves* Hi MoreCoffee! I'm an American and an Evangelical Christian. Pleased to meet you.

Howdy, Ketch! Alas, this site is not Sparta... yet.

Hello and welcome, Katie! Glad to have you here. I'm not LDS, but when I was younger I had the same problem in my church; I just never could connect with most of the folks around my age (in large part because they formed large cliques and didn't really associate me), so I eventually left the church youth group, though I stayed active in the church itself. Ultimately I just had to cultivate connections with folks my own age outside of my church and with some older folks within my church.

Hi Minnie! Welcome to the forum.

Welcome to the site!

Love it! I gave your work a plug on my blog, by the way. I don't have many readers yet so far as I know, but hopefully you'll gain some fans among the folks I've got. :)

Howdy and welcome! I minored in the subject rather than majored in it, but I'm a bit of a math nerd too.

Welcome to the forum, Michael! I'm 1.28 people as partial compensation for Dr T. :)

Welcome! Glad to have you here.

Welcome to the forum, SearchingMySoul! I'm also a non-LDS Christian.

Hello, samc! Welcome to the forum.