I dont understand the charts - so Im taking it slow....
Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.
by BoogerMan 62 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Sea Breeze
Are you implying that the "parts" of God are merely "referred" to as persons?
@MMMustard
No. God is a singular essence - Spirit. Jesus is a man with three parts.
Man has a tri-partite essence - soul-body-spirit. Each of those parts is a person. This is the way the bible consistently speaks of each of them - with personhood. Jesus is a man with three parts. This is what qualifies him as a man.... just like you or me. However, since he inherited the very essence of God (Spirit) as the only-begotten, then is is fully both.Like I pointed out in my previous post: When the spirit of Samuel was summoned by Saul, Samuel identifies his spirit as "me", even though his body was long gone. “Samuel said to Saul, ‘Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?’” (1 Samuel 28:15).
Samuel could claim to be one and the same with his spirit.... just has Jesus has rightly claimed this. -
aqwsed12345
@MeanMrMustard
When a Thomist speaks of the “unified reality” that grounds the human capacities for thought, love, freedom, and bodily life, he is pointing to the substantial form of the living human being: the rational or intellective soul. In classical hylomorphism every material substance is a composite of matter (the principle of indeterminacy, the stuff that can receive different shapes) and form (the principle of determination, that which makes the stuff to be this particular kind of thing and equips it for its characteristic operations). In plants and animals the form is already called “soul,” because it is that by which the organism is alive at all; in man the soul is further specified as rational, since it founds powers that rise above the merely organic—universal intellection and free choice.
DNA, neurons, hormonal cascades, and all the biochemical marvels we chart with microscopes belong to the material side of the composite. They are the structures and dispositions that the soul employs as instruments, the way a musician uses strings or pipes. Remove the soul, and the molecular patterns may linger for a while, but the coordinating principle is gone and the organism soon dissolves into a heap of tissues. Conversely, without that molecular scaffolding the soul cannot express its life outwardly: even the highest intellect needs a healthy cortex and sensory data to reason about justice or geometry. Form and matter, therefore, interpenetrate without confusion: the soul is not a ghost floating in a machine, nor is it reducible to genetic code. It is the immanent cause that makes the bodily matter to be a this living, human body—one substance, not two loosely coupled agents.
So the “something there” is not an unknown x that we posit only to cover our ignorance; it is the formal cause whose existence we infer from evident effects. Whenever we see a genuinely human act—abstract thought, free consent, moral resolve—we know that a principle proportionate to such acts must be inside the agent, because nothing can give what it does not possess. The rational soul is grasped, then, not under a microscope but by a metaphysical judgment: these acts exceed the explanatory reach of chemistry alone, therefore the living subject includes an immaterial formative principle. Aristotle and Thomas would call that conclusion science, in the strict sense of a reasoned insight into causes.
Admittedly we do not “locate” the soul the way we trace a chromosome, because the soul is not a parcel of matter; it is the very act by which matter is organized into a living, human whole. But we are not left with a pious shrug either. We can describe the soul’s powers, distinguish its immaterial operations from its organic ones, analyze its relation to the body, and even show (by philosophical argument) that such a form is incorruptible once separated from matter. In short, the Thomist claim is not that we know nothing of the ground of human nature, but that what we know is formal and metaphysical, not another layer of empirically detectable stuff. The soul is precisely that formal act which, together with matter, makes a human being to be—not merely to seem—a rational animal.
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Rattigan350
Here is a trinity puzzler.
People object to Jesus being called Michael the archangel because that would make Jesus an angel and not God.
But yet they say that Jesus is the 'angel of the Lord' mentioned in Genesis and other places in the OT. If Jesus is Jehovah's angel, then he is not Jehovah.
So, is he an angel or not?
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aqwsed12345
@Rattigan350
The dilemma dissolves once we notice the Bible uses the word “angel” in two very different ways. In most passages it denotes a created, finite spirit-servant of God. But occasionally Scripture applies the same Hebrew and Greek terms (מַלְאָךְ ; ἄγγελος) to God himself when he temporarily appears as a “messenger.” In those theophanies the word describes a role, not an ontological category. The “angel of the LORD” in Genesis, Exodus and Judges speaks as Yahweh, bears his Name, receives divine worship and forgives sin. He is consistently identified as God, yet distinguished from God the Father; Christians therefore recognize him as the Son—Jehovah in self-manifestation, not a creature.
Michael, by contrast, is explicitly introduced as “one of the chief princes” and “your prince” (Dan 10:13, 21), language that places him among the created heavenly host. He never wears the divine Name, is never worshiped, never forgives sin, and in Jude 9 declines even to pronounce judgment in his own authority. Revelation 12 shows him leading fellow angels—something Scripture never does with the Angel of the LORD, who commands angels because he is their Creator (cf. Heb 1:6–7). Michael’s entire portrait is creaturely; the Angel of the LORD’s portrait is divine.
When the New Testament depicts the incarnate Son it never calls him a “created angel.” Hebrews 1 deliberately contrasts the unique Son with “all the angels,” proving his superiority precisely because he is God’s eternal radiance and heir. Calling Jesus “Michael” would flatten that contrast and force us to read the chapter against its grain.
Thus there is no contradiction. “Angel of the LORD” is a divine self-revelation; “archangel Michael” is a mighty but created servant. Jesus can be the first and cannot be the second. Different senses of the same word do not make him both a creature and the Creator; they simply remind us that “angel” sometimes labels function, other times nature, and context decides which.
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Touchofgrey
Trinity mythology has been around before christianity even thought of the idea .
Sumerian,Hinduism, ancient Egypt and Greek and Roman mythology.
The trinity belief is based on that a miracle worker called jesus existed and was killed and raised from the dead, there is no independently verified evidence that such a person ever existed, there was possibly a apocalyptic preacher who was killed by the Romans and the mythology of the jesus story started from that .
So the Christian concept of a trinity is like all the other trinity's beliefs which are based on myths.
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slimboyfat
When is an angel not an angel? When you need to prop up the trinity doctrine, that’s when!
Clement of Alexandria was clear that Jesus was an angel who became a human.
Formerly the older people had an old covenant, and the law disciplined the people with fear, and the Word was an angel; but to the fresh and new people has also been given a new covenant, and the Word has appeared, and fear is turned to love, and that mystic angel is born — Jesus. The Paedegogus 1.7
This view that Jesus was an angel in heaven before his birth was common in early Christianity until it was declared heretical in the 4th century.
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no-zombie
While whole Trinity thing is a totally pagan concept, by simply reading Genesis 1:27, 5:3 and 9:6 (that says that man was made in God's image), the simple form of God is made plain by the inverse of those verses.
How hard can it be.
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aqwsed12345
The Arian allegation that Trinitarian theology relies on a verbal sleight-of-hand—treating Christ as an angel when convenient and not an angel when inconvenient—fundamentally misrepresents both the biblical text and the theological tradition it accuses of inconsistency. At the heart of this misunderstanding lies the Greek term angelos (and its Hebrew counterpart mal'akh), which translates to “messenger.” In both linguistic and scriptural contexts, this word denotes a function rather than a fixed ontological category. The Bible employs it flexibly, applying it to created spiritual beings like Michael, who serve as God’s emissaries in the heavenly court, and to the eternal Son, who, before His incarnation, manifests as God’s visible envoy in Old Testament theophanies. Far from being an equivocation, this dual usage reflects a coherent distinction that Trinitarian theology upholds and that early Christian thinkers, including Clement of Alexandria, carefully preserve.
Clement’s discussion in The Instructor (Paedagogus), Book I, Chapter 7, offers a key example of this distinction in action. Surveying the history of divine revelation, he describes how the Logos, the eternal Word, guided Israel under the old covenant through a pedagogy of fear. In this role, Clement notes, the Word “was an angel”—not in the sense of being a created being, but as God’s messenger delivering divine instruction to His people. With the arrival of the new covenant, this same Logos “has appeared” in the flesh as Jesus, shifting the divine approach from fear to love. This statement does not imply that the Logos is a creature; rather, it highlights a functional role in God’s self-revelation, first veiled in theophanic encounters and later fully disclosed in the incarnation. Clement reinforces this interpretation just two chapters earlier in Book I, Chapter 3, where he writes that the Lord “ministers all good to us both as God and as man; as God forgiving sins and as man training us not to sin.” This attribution of divine prerogatives—forgiving sins, a power reserved for God alone in Jewish theology, and receiving worship—directly contradicts the Arian notion of a subordinate, created Logos. Clement’s theology aligns with the Trinitarian affirmation of the Son’s full deity, not the Arian reduction of Christ to a mere creature. By situating the “angel” reference within the context of divine theophanies, Clement aligns with the mainstream Christian tradition, which identifies the “Angel of the LORD” as the pre-incarnate Christ, not a creature like Michael. The Arian attempt to isolate the “angel” metaphor from Clement’s broader theological framework distorts his intent and misrepresents the early Christian consensus.
This perspective is not unique to Clement but echoes across the pre-Nicene Christian tradition. Ignatius of Antioch, writing around 110 AD, repeatedly calls Christ “our God” in his Letter to the Ephesians (Chapter 7), describing Him as “God existing in flesh,” both “made and not made.” Justin Martyr, around 150 AD, in his Dialogue with Trypho (Chapter 56), identifies the “Angel of the LORD” in Old Testament appearances as the pre-incarnate Logos, distinct from created angels, and inherently divine. Irenaeus of Lyons, writing around 180 AD in Against Heresies (Book IV, Chapter 20), asserts that the Son is “eternally with the Father,” co-equal and uncreated. These early voices form a theocentric and incarnational consensus, not an angelocentric one, demonstrating that the divinity of the Son was a foundational belief long before Arius challenged it. When Arius, in the early 4th century, proposed that the Son was a created being, subordinate to the Father, he introduced a novelty that diverged from this established tradition. The fierce resistance to Arianism, culminating in the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, arose not from mere politics but from a theological necessity: if the Son is not fully God, the worship offered to Him in Christian liturgy becomes idolatrous, and His mediation of salvation—reconciling humanity to God—lacks divine efficacy.
The biblical texts undergirding this tradition draw a clear line between the Son and created angels, further dismantling the Arian claim. The “Angel of the LORD” in Old Testament narratives, such as Genesis 16:7-13, Exodus 3:2-6, and Judges 13:18-22, consistently acts with divine authority. In Exodus 3, this figure appears in the burning bush, declares “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,” and prompts Moses to hide his face in reverent fear of God. In Judges 13, the “Angel” reveals a name too wonderful to comprehend and accepts worship, actions forbidden to created beings under penalty of blasphemy. By contrast, Michael, the archangel, is portrayed in Daniel 10:13 as “one of the chief princes,” a finite being among others of his kind. In Jude 9, Michael defers judgment to God, saying “The Lord rebuke you,” and in Revelation 12:7, he leads a host of angels in battle but never receives worship or claims divinity. The Epistle to the Hebrews, particularly in Chapter 1, cements this distinction by placing the Son on the side of the Creator—“the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being”—while relegating all angels to the role of “ministering spirits” who worship Him. To conflate Jesus with Michael, as some Arian interpretations might suggest, obliterates this canonical boundary and undermines the text’s explicit emphasis on the Son’s supremacy over all creation.
Thus, the Arian question—“When is an angel not an angel?”—finds a straightforward answer in Trinitarian theology without resorting to verbal trickery. When angelos refers to a created entity like Michael, it describes a finite, spiritual creature fulfilling a messenger’s role. When it applies to the eternal Logos, as in the “Angel of the LORD,” it designates the uncreated Son temporarily acting as God’s envoy, without any compromise to His divine nature. This is not a manipulation of terms but a recognition of the semantic flexibility inherent in the biblical language itself. Clement, the Scriptures, and the early Christian tradition unanimously affirm the Son’s divinity, viewing Him as worthy of worship and co-equal with the Father. The Trinitarian position honors this witness, maintaining that the Son is adored as God because He is, eternally and unchangeably, of the same divine essence as the Father. Far from a sleight-of-hand, this doctrine reflects a consistent and historically grounded interpretation of both Scripture and the faith delivered by the early Church.
The claim that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is a late borrowing from earlier pagan triads rests on superficial resemblances and ignores the radically different conceptual worlds in which those systems operate. Sumerian, Egyptian, Greco-Roman and Hindu religions certainly speak of groups of three deities, but in every case the three are discrete gods who merely cooperate or form a celestial family, not one indivisible being who eternally subsists in three co-equal, co-eternal persons sharing a single undivided essence. In Egyptian theology Osiris, Isis and Horus remain ontologically separate; in classical Hinduism Brahmā, Viṣṇu and Śiva are three hypostases of an impersonal Brahman that itself is expressed through countless other manifestations. By contrast, Christian Trinitarianism is a development internal to Second-Temple Jewish monotheism: it preserves the uncompromising confession that “the LORD is one” (Dt 6:4) while recognizing that the one God is eternally Father, Son and Spirit. The decisive difference is metaphysical—Trinitarianism is concerned with the unity-of-being problem inside strict monotheism; pagan triads never attempt to solve that problem because they are not monotheistic in the first place.
The further assertion that the doctrine stands or falls with the historicity of Jesus, whose existence is said to be unverified, collapses against the consensus of contemporary critical scholarship. Seven undisputed Pauline letters, written within twenty-five years of Jesus’ death, presuppose his public ministry, crucifixion under Pilate and post-mortem appearances (1 Cor 15:3-8). These texts are independent of the later Gospels and are cited by scholars of every ideological stripe as primary data. Outside the New Testament, Tacitus (Annals 15.44) and the most widely accepted stratum of Josephus (Ant. 18.63-64) confirm the execution of “Christus” under Pilate and the continuance of his movement in the first century. The question is therefore not whether Jesus existed—virtually no credentialed historian denies this—but what explanatory framework best accounts for the rise of a community that worships him as “Lord” while remaining convinced that they have not abandoned Jewish monotheism. The earliest Christian answer is already visible in the high Christology of Paul (Phil 2:5-11; 1 Cor 8:6), in the Fourth Gospel’s Logos theology (John 1:1-18) and in the Spirit-Christ-Father benediction that closes the earliest preserved sermon-letter, 2 Corinthians 13:14. These texts pre-date the fourth-century councils by centuries and show that the raw materials of Trinitarian belief arise organically within the first generation of Christianity.
Pagan derivation theories also falter on the decisive role played by Scripture in the fourth-century debates. At Nicaea (AD 325) the term homoousios—“of the same substance”—was adopted precisely because the party defending Christ’s full deity, led by Athanasius, found that every attempt to express the New Testament’s teaching solely in biblical phrases was being reinterpreted by Arius to deny the Son’s co-eternity. The Nicene bishops therefore chose a non-biblical adjective to safeguard the manifest witness of the biblical text. Athanasius defended the term’s use by arguing from Scripture, not by appealing to any pagan precedent. Far from importing foreign mythology, the council used philosophical language as a fence to protect the narrative and doxological claims already embedded in the apostolic writings.
The suggestion that Genesis 1:27, 5:3 and 9:6 dictate a unitarian concept of God misunderstands the analogical logic of the imago Dei. Humankind is said to be made “in” or “according to” God’s image; analogical likeness does not imply identical ontology. To reason backwards from human singular personhood to divine singular personhood would invalidate biblical data that present a complex unity in God, such as the Old Testament “Word,” “Wisdom” and “Spirit” motifs, and the New Testament’s integrated worship of Father, Son and Spirit. Moreover, the image language functions in these texts to ground human dignity and accountability, not to supply a metaphysical definition of divine identity.
Finally, the charge that the resurrection is mythical overlooks the cumulative historical argument for the empty tomb, post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples’ belief. The unity of these three phenomena is most convincingly explained if Jesus was in fact raised; alternative hypotheses—hallucination, legend, deliberate fraud—fail to account for the transformation of skeptical individuals such as James and Paul or for the remarkable early consensus that resurrection, not mere immortality, had occurred in the midst of history. Granted the resurrection, the exaltation of Christ to the sphere of divine identity follows, as shown by the earliest Christian worship practices documented in pagan sources such as Pliny’s letter to Trajan (c. AD 112), where believers “sing hymns to Christ as to a god.”
Trinitarian theology therefore cannot be dismissed as a late pagan accretion. It represents the church’s sustained exegetical reflection on the revelation of God in Christ and the Spirit, under the pressure of maintaining Jewish monotheism while honoring the divine prerogatives ascribed to Jesus. The intellectual vocabulary of the councils was drawn from contemporary philosophical resources, but the content it expressed was hammered out in continuous dialogue with the biblical texts and against the resistance of rival proposals that could not do justice to the apostolic witness. The result is not mythology but a coherent account of God that arises from, and remains accountable to, the historical and textual foundations of the Christian faith.
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slimboyfat
You claim that early Christian authors who called Jesus an angel didn’t mean he was really an angel but actually almighty God. What a remarkable linguistic trick. But where did the writers themselves ever say that?
Justin Martyr talked about the Son and “the other good angels”, clearly making Jesus an angel, and distinct and subordinate to God. Did he not mean what he wrote either?
Hence are we called atheists. And we confess that we are atheists, so far as gods of this sort are concerned, but not with respect to the most true God, the Father of righteousness and temperance and the other virtues, who is free from all impurity. But both Him, and the Son (who came forth from Him and taught us these things, and the host of the other good angels who follow and are made like to Him), and the prophetic Spirit, we worship and adore, knowing them in reason and truth, and declaring without grudging to every one who wishes to learn, as we have been taught. First Apology 6