you are one intelligent little monkey with glasses, u/d.
Need help on the trinity and John 1:1
by toladest 42 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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Satanus
YOU HAVE TO GET YOUR OWN REVELATION FROM GOD.
Yup, god told me herself.
S
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dorayakii
I also don't subcribe to any religion and I don't believe that the bible is the word of God, but this is my interpretation of who John thought Jesus was:
The Word was an extention of God. The understandable aspect of an unknowable Deity. God used him to communicate directly with humans. So in effect he was with God and he was "God / a god / godly / devine" at the same time, in the same sence as my "words" are with me (in the sence that they are not literally me) and are me (in the sence that they are inseperable from me). My voice can't exist without me, but i am NOT my voice.
In effect he was the Holy Spirit which was roving to and fro over the surface of the waters at creation. He used his arm to create the earth. My arm is part of me but my arm is NOT me.
"The Word" is linked with Jesus in John 1, so in effect Jesus was viewed as a projection of God's "Word" or ability to communicate with mankind. His returning to sit at God's right hand represents the ceasing of that aspect of direct human-to-human communication and God's communication with man again coming directly from "the Word" instead of its projection.
The word "Trinity" is quite inaccurate to describe John's view. It had nothing to do with 3 persons in 1. Rather is was to do with different aspects of God. His view of God was that he is so far removed from the physical that you cannot sence or communicate with him directly, so you need these different projections of Holy Spirit (and the ultimate projection into the living, breathing human Jesus) in order to link him to the physical world.
The concept is understandable when you think that I am NOT my body, i am NOT even my brain, but for my mind to be able to communicate with others it needs these "interfaces". The "mind" is very difficult to pin down for philosophers.
Again this is just my opinion on John's theology and i don't agree with it because, like the whole Bible, it is founded in unreasonable speculation and blind faith in things which are far removed from my own daily experience.
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AlanF
Like some others on this thread, I'm not a Christian and have no personal investment in the Trinity doctrine. I've studied the concept carefully though, and have come to the conclusion that there was an evolution of the concept of the nature of Jesus. The earliest Gospels contain hardly a trace of an idea that Jesus and the Father were part of a Godhead, but this concept seems much more developed in the Gospel of John, although it's still not directly stated. Over many more years, non-canonical Christian writers drifted more and more towards various forms of the Trinity.
As for John 1:1, most trinitarians simply have no idea what they're talking about. An excellent book, Jesus as God (Murray Harris, early 1990s), goes into gruesome detail on John 1:1 and a few other key texts that trinitarians find critical to their belief. Harris shows that theos in John 1:1c has a qualitative aspect, so that the base Greek "kai theos en ho logos" is literally "and god was the word", with "god" having the meaning of not God himself, but the nature of God, whatever that was. Harris offers several alternatives that more closely match the Greek meaning, such as "what God was, the Word was" or "the Word had the same nature as God".
I don't find these ideas particularly satisfactory, though, because they really beg the question of what John had in mind by saying something like "the word had the nature of god." What exactly is the nature of "god"? Did John have in mind the nature of the God of the Jews, Yahweh, in the sense of his nature as The Supreme Creator and Ruler of the Universe? Or did he have in mind the generic meaning of "god", which certainly includes the pagan gods, the devil and even powerful humans in everyday koine Greek use?
Let me illustrate this with an example. Suppose there's a group of intelligent monkeys. A human finds them and enslaves them. This man is the only human the monkeys have ever encountered, but they know that other humans exist. The man sets himself up as an all-powerful ruler over them, and becomes, in effect, their God. The monkeys come to call the man The Human. The Human also tells them his name is George. Now, suppose another man named Jack comes along and interacts with the monkeys for awhile, and then leaves. Here's my point: if a monkey writes "human is Jack", could one tell only from the writing that he meant that Jack is a member of the category called "human", or did he mean that Jack is a member of the category (with only one member, who is named George) called "The Human"? The answer is that you simply can't tell.
It's the same thing with John 1:1c. Murray Harris argues (poorly, in my opinion, and in line with other scholarly trinitarian thinking) that John's use of theos must have been restricted to mean God, and only God. But in normal Greek usage, theos was an extremely broad category with millions of individual members, just as human is a broad category with billions of individual members. To simply declare what John meant, based only on textual considerations, is to make an unfounded claim.
Just as one can properly write, "human was Jack", one can also properly write, "god was the word". One can also properly write, with exactly the same meanings, "Jack was a human" and "the word was a god". So in this sense, the New World Translation is correct in its rendering of John 1:1c. And reference to the KIT doesn't do naysayers any good here.
The point is that one cannot properly use the Greek text of John 1:1 to argue for or against the trinity. The text is neutral in this regard, and most careful scholars, when pinned down on this, will agree, just as Murray Harris -- an ardent trinitarian -- tacitly admits in his book (he argues that the NWT rendering of John 1:1c is wrong on grounds other than textual considerations, but I think his arguments are weak). In fact, Harris explains clearly why the standard rendering, "the Word was God" is flat-out wrong, because that phrasing implicitly equates God and the Word -- which is a heresy according to most modern Christians. That's why he argues for other renderings which are more precise in giving the original Greek meaning. However, as a trinitarian scholar with an audience he has to play to, or lose them, he can't admit that the NWT rendering is allowable.
AlanF
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upside/down
As is more and more always the case AlanF... I tend to agree.
u/d (of the Paduan class)
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the_classicist
1) From my readings of Hellenistic Greek, the article is not really necessary when referring to God (there are specific grammar rules, I don't know them yet). I've found most examples of this to be in the genitive case; so if you were to translate it a la NWT, you would say that Jesus Christ is the Son of *a* God. Theos, indeed, signifies a divine being. Yet in the Christian context we see Theos being used in reference only to a monotheistic God, or Theoi to false gods. What used to be referred to in the Hebrew as the "sons of Gods" or "gods," other divine beings, are replaced by such words as aggelos to signify such things, and we are also introduced to other forms of heavenly beings such as "powers and principalities."
2) Taken extra-biblically. We can see that orthodox/Pauline Christianity (the ones who claimed succession from the Apostles) viewed Christ as God, sometimes more implicity than explicitly.
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zen nudist
no trinity no non-trinity (^_^)
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Terry
Logos had meaning among the Greeks.
Putting it simply into English as "word" gives no indication at all what Logos meant to the Greek speaking world at large.
The Greeks were addicted to reason, intelligence and generally figuring out how things worked. The great philosophers worked out how the Universe is put together just by using their mind. The ancient Greeks had a very modern concept of the world and figured out the diameter of the earth, the fact it was round, cause and effect, etc. etc.
If you had to put one word to the above process and say it in Greek it would be LOGOS.
You might say LOGOS was the Greek way of looking at how reasonable everything worked from a chain of causes and effects. Were it not reasonable; they would not be able to figure it out because it would make no sense (logos).
So, here is MY translastion of John 1:1
"As far back as you can go (In the beginning) there was cause and effect and it was reasonable (was the Logos) because it worked itself from purity of existence into matter. Matter reflected the same perfect realization of that order. (And the Logos was with God and the Logos was god)."
This is pure pagan belief in an orderly universe driven by a reasonable and intelligent form. Plato, the mystic, actually believed there was a better reality (the Forms) than the one you and I live in. He liked to think we are just shadows of the REAL reality. Aristotle (the rationalist) pooh-poohed that notion and thought there is only one (UNI-verse) existing reality and it works because it continues to exist.
So, John 1:1 is not a revolutionary presentation of who God is or who Jesus is at all. It is a rhetorical way of presenting how wonderfully Jesus reflected the orderly and intelligent aspect of the pure existence of the Forms. You might say, in a nutshell, "Jesus is as good as a perfect thing can be".
Isn't that a whole lot less mystical and doctrinaire?
Terry
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greendawn
LT i am not sure what concept you mean when you say
"Wouldn't it rather indicate that the Word was the Almighty unitarian God (singular)?
Apparently it's not the Trinity but something else, the Father and the son are in fact just one person? -
M.J.
Logos.
( Greek “word,” “reason,” or “plan”)
plural logoi in Greek philosophy and theology, the divine reason implicit in the cosmos, ordering it and giving it form and meaning. Though the concept defined by the term logos is found in Greek, Indian, Egyptian, and Persian philosophical and theological systems, it became particularly significant in Christian writings and doctrines to describe or define the role of Jesus Christ as the principle of God active in the creation and the continuous structuring of the cosmos and in revealing the divine plan of salvation to man. It thus underlies the basic Christian doctrine of the preexistence of Jesus.
The idea of the logos in Greek thought harks back at least to the 6th-century- BC philosopher Heracleitus , who discerned in the cosmic process a logos analogous to the reasoning power in man. Later, the Stoics, philosophers who followed the teachings of the thinker Zeno of Citium (4th–3rd century BC ), defined the logos as an active rational and spiritual principle that permeated all reality. They called the logos providence, nature, god, and the soul of the universe, which is composed of many seminal logoi that are contained in the universal logos . Philo of Alexandria, a 1st-century- AD Jewish philosopher, taught that the logos was the intermediary between God and the cosmos, being both the agent of creation and the agent through which the human mind can apprehend and comprehend God. According to Philo and the Middle Platonists, philosophers who interpreted in religious terms the teachings of the 4th-century- BC Greek master philosopher Plato, the logos was both immanent in the world and at the same time the transcendent divine mind.
In the first chapter of The Gospel According to John, Jesus Christ is identified as “the Word” (Greek logos ) incarnated, or made flesh. This identification of Jesus with the logos is based on Old Testament concepts of revelation, such as occurs in the frequently used phrase “the Word of the Lord”—which connoted ideas of God's activity and power—and the Jewish view that Wisdom is the divine agent that draws man to God and is identified with the word of God. The author of The Gospel According to John used this philosophical expression, which easily would be recognizable to readers in the Hellenistic (Greek cultural) world, to emphasize the redemptive character of the person of Christ, whom the author describes as “the way, and the truth, and the life.” Just as the Jews had viewed the Torah (the Law) as preexistent with God, so also the author of John viewed Jesus, but Jesus came to be regarded as the personified source of life and illumination of mankind. The Evangelist interprets the logos as inseparable from the person of Jesus and does not simply imply that the logos is the revelation that Jesus proclaims.
The identification of Jesus with the logos , which is implied in various places in the New Testament but stated specifically in the Fourth Gospel, was further developed in the early church but more on the basis of Greek philosophical ideas than on Old Testament motifs. This development was dictated by attempts made by early Christian theologians and apologists to express the Christian faith in terms that would be intelligible to the Hellenistic world and to impress their hearers with the view that Christianity was superior to, or heir to, all that was best in pagan philosophy. Thus, in their apologies and polemical works, the early Christian Fathers stated that Christ as the preexistent logos (1) reveals the Father to mankind and is the subject of the Old Testament manifestations of God; (2) is the divine reason in which the whole human race shares, so that the 6th-century- BC philosopher and others who lived with reason were Christians before Christ; and (3) is the divine will and word by which the worlds were framed.
" logos ." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2005. Encyclopædia Britannica Premium Service
30 June 2005 <http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=9048773>.