Regarding the holy Trinity (page 2)

defd

I also do not believe in the Trinity. I do not see it in the bible.

D.

John Doe

If its pointless then we shouldnt read the bible at all

Ah ah ah, text book false dilemma.

Hellrider

Wow.......well a JW forum with non-JWs. I think thats pretty funny.

No. An ex-JW-forum with a couple of JWs (defd and scholar). There`s an ancient saying that the One who started this forum, grabbed the domain-name right in front of the JWs.

I heard the story of how the founder of JW prophecized Jesus' coming like twice and failed

Not twice. Try like a couple of dozens times.

Welcome to the board.

There are some verses in the Bible that appear to support the Trinity and some that appear to reject it but there certainly never was a clear formulation of the Trinity as we know it since the 4th century.

My take is that the Trinity is a very strained and unnatural concept and it was produced out of despair towards the accusation that worshipping Jesus (as decreed by the apostles) was an act of idolatry, a charge that Jews and Moslems still make against Christians. Making the Son the same as God resolved that problem but produced other unnatural, irrational, ideas in its wake eg why did God -in the form of the Son- have to suffer to learn discipline and be rewarded with a supreme name and power? Isn't it blasphemous to say that these didn't always belong to Him? The whole picture of divinity is thrown into confusion.

In my view God has the right to order the creation to worship someone that He created if He so wishes, and let the Jews and the Moslems yell out: foul.

Then words like the Father, the Son, the Firstborn, the beginning of God's creation, greater than I, will have their natural literal meaning as they were meant to, being directed to the mainly illiterate uneducated masses of those days. Were not these words meant to be taken at their face value? Or did they have some kind of deeply mystical and virtually incomprehensible meaning?

As the Trinitarians say "the Trinity is not something that can be rationally understood" not because it is so deeply mysterious but because it's downright absurd.

Narkissos

I for one don't find the Trinity doctrine absurd. I even appreciate its beauty (from an aesthetical / intellectual standpoint).

Yet, as Greendawn wrote, it is a 4th-century doctrine and you simply cannot squeeze 1st or 2nd century texts (such as those which were gathered in the NT) into it.

But I would add that no other consistent doctrine does a better job at that.

Why? Because the NT texts offer different views of "God," "Christ" and the "Spirit" and their relationship with each other; you cannot reconcile them without twisting them or leaving out essential parts of them.

Iow you have to choose between reading the texts and doctrinal synthesis.

Leolaia

::applause:: for Narkissos' comments, it's what I would have said in 10% of the space.

greendawn

Narkissos could it be that the NT was consistent in it's concept of the Father and Son and the trinitarians distorted the picture to fit their concepts.

Considering even their major argument based on John 1:1 (kai theos ito o logos), anyone that knows Greek properly, unequivocally translates it in English as "and Logos was a god", only if the verse read "kai o theos ito o logos",(which it does not) that would translate to "and logos was (the)God".

Narkissos

Thanks Leolaia... I can write your "abstracts" if you wish...

Greendawn, I don't think so. Let me try to show a central example of what I find irreconciliable:

To the Judeo-Christian material in Luke and especially in Matthew, Jesus is a man, a prophet, the final Moses, the son of David... he wasn't anywhere before his birth; he was adopted as "son of God" at baptism.

To Paul he is the heavenly Son of God, but he is also the Spirit in believers; to John he is the eternal logos, the Son of the Father, distinct from the Father of the Jews who is the Prince of this world. In both Paul and John, with some nuances, he is no more than apparently human, revealing the true nature of the elect. The Gospel of Mark reflects similar conceptions.

The Trinity and its companion software, the Chalcedonian doctrine of the two natures of Christ (which btw I find much less intellectually satisfying), is an attempt to make sense of both types of teachings, once their natural heirs (Judeo-Christians, Marcionites, Gnostics) had been dismissed as heretics. This was not the first attempt. In a sense the extant Gospels already try to combine different and incompatible notions... in different combinations of course.

Try to synthesise diversity and what you'll get is a diversity of syntheses.

greendawn

Narkissos, it doesn't mean that Matthew and John (or Paul) had contradictory ideas on the nature of Christ, they simply focused on different aspects of the same individual one focuses on his actions as a human, the others on his heavenly superior origins and position after the resurrection.

TD

Hi Greendawn,

I don't really get excited one way or the other about the trinity, (Although like Narkissos I do think the doctrine has a certain eloquence) so don't misunderstand: I'm not defending the trinity.

(kai theos ito o logos), anyone that knows Greek properly, unequivocally translates it in English as "and Logos was a god", only if the verse read "kai o theos ito o logos",(which it does not) that would translate to "and logos was (the)God".

Where is the word "ito" coming from? It appears to me that you are either reading or transliterating from a Modern Greek Translation of the NT. (Or possibly picking up the word "eeto" via A. W. Pink)

John 1:1c in the Koine/Hellenistic/1st-Century Greek New Testament reads: kai theos en ho logos

At any rate, why take such a harsh view? You're condemning a fair amount of ancient Greek scholars.

Regarding the holy Trinity

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