Posts by aqwsed12345

57

How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

by Sea Breeze in

simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

that's how they sold it.

the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

aqwsed12345

@Vanderhoven7

No one is incorporated into Christ by a doctrinal checklist; the decisive question is whether the soul dies in sanctifying grace, which can be possessed only through union—at least implicit—with the visible Church that is Christ’s Mystical Body. When a Protestant is validly baptized in the Trinitarian formula, the indelible character of that sacrament grafts him onto the Church in re, not merely in voto. From that moment every supernatural act of faith, hope, and charity he makes is nourished by juices that rise through Catholic roots, because the one saving economy established by God admits of no rival streams of grace. The Council of Trent therefore acknowledged the validity of baptism conferred even by heretics, and Vatican II, echoing Pius XII, speaks of “many elements of sanctification and truth” that subsist in the ecclesial communities separated from Rome; through these the Holy Spirit “impels towards Catholic unity.”

Yet the same Fathers also insisted that these communities suffer grave wounds: the absence of sacramental priesthood and Eucharist, the eclipse of Marian dogma, the loss of the ordinary means of reconciliation, a diminished sense of the communion of saints. These privations are not neutral; they are objective defects in the substance of revealed religion and, if knowingly embraced, constitute formal heresy or schism, which severs supernatural life. The distinction is crucial. Most Protestants are heirs, not architects, of separation; they reject our claims not out of contumacy but from inherited convictions and cultural formation. In Thomistic terms they are “material” rather than “formal” dissenters; whatever error clings to their intellect is often accompanied by an upright will sincerely seeking God. Where invincible ignorance excuses, grace can heal: the theological virtues elicited by baptism dispose them, at the hour of death, to the further light by which Christ may manifest the full deposit of faith and invite explicit assent. Should they accept, they die within the Church, though history had kept them outside her canonical boundaries.

This mercy, however, is no charter for complacency. Because God has willed that the ordinary means of perseverance are the sacraments and doctrine entrusted to Peter, a Protestant knowingly refusing those remedies, or a Catholic abandoning them, imperils salvation. Likewise the Catholic may not adopt a false irenicism as though Marian dogmas or the sacrifice of the Mass were expendable ornaments. They are part of the “whole Christ,” without whom the seed of baptism struggles to reach full stature. Hence the Church both acknowledges what is already Catholic in our separated brethren—real though incomplete communion—and at the same time pleads for their return, knowing that the plenitude of truth and the ordinary assurance of final perseverance are found only where Peter’s faith cannot fail.

We readily admit that it often costs a person considerable effort to discover the essential difference between false or erroneous religions and the true one. Upbringing, environment, and prejudices absorbed without critical reflection can make orientation very difficult. Yet it is objectively impossible that God should have rendered the true religion so unrecognizable, giving it no marks by which it can be known and distinguished from error. In fact, whoever pursues the matter seriously and studies the Catholic religion and the other religions without bias will, with almost infallible certainty, arrive at the recognition of the one true Church.

The mere fact that we worship one God does not mean it is irrelevant how we worship Him or what we regard as His revelation and command. Jews and Muslims, too, worship the one God, yet it surely makes a difference whether one is a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian. Likewise, it is not indifferent whether, as a Christian, I serve and adore God within the framework of the Catholic religion—which possesses the fullness of faith and rests on the divine will—or within systems that in greater or lesser matters conflict with God’s ordinances.

At the same time, we do not claim that everyone outside the Catholic Church is automatically lost and only Catholics can be saved. One question is whether a religion is in itself true and exclusively correct; quite another is whether individuals who are objectively in error may nonetheless be free of personal fault and therefore not morally culpable for their mistake. A person who clings to an erroneous religion not out of negligence, contempt, or obstinacy, but because he is the victim of honest misjudgment, commits no sin on that account and need not be damned for it. Nevertheless, it is everyone’s most sacred duty to seek the truth, God’s revelation and will—hence the true religion—according to the best of one’s ability, and, once found, to embrace it in spite of every obstacle. If someone remains in error through no fault of his own, he does not sin; but if he recognizes the truth and refuses to follow it, he commits a grave sin and may be lost because of it.

We acknowledge that other denominations, too, have devout and God-fearing members, and even martyrs; for it is one thing to ask whether the creed they profess is true and legitimate, and quite another to judge how fully they, as individuals, conform in conscience to the law they recognize as right. Subjectively, even a pagan can be God-fearing, noble, heroic, even martyr-spirited; that does not follow that pagan doctrines are therefore true. Moreover, Christians who stand in error do not err in every article, but only in certain teachings. In most of the fundamental questions the Eastern Orthodox hold the full truth: the existence of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation and Redemption, judgment and eternal life, the necessary co-operation of grace and free will, the sacraments. The Eastern Orthodox go to confession, receive Communion and confirmation as we do; they honor the Blessed Virgin, celebrate a valid Mass, possess validly ordained bishops and priests, and so on. Even broken fragments of the true religion radiate such vital power that, under their influence, many upright and well-intentioned souls among its adherents bring forth heroic manifestations of holiness and piety. Likewise, among Protestants there lives much of the ancient Catholic truth and much heartfelt devotion; many deeds pleasing to God are done. Yet all this does not cancel the fact that their doctrines are erroneous in certain essential matters—above all in denying ecclesial unity.

Is it therefore possible that someone who follows an erroneous faith may nevertheless be saved, even become a saint and a martyr? Yes, it is possible. We must suppose that even among non-Christians many obtain grace if in spirit they have sought the path of truth and have remained within some non-Christian religion only through inculpable error. The working of grace embraces a wider circle than the Church’s visible boundaries. By Christ’s appointment the Church is the ordinary guardian for obtaining and increasing divine grace and holds its special and abundant means; but this does not mean that the stream of grace never trickles beyond her banks. The two theses are not mutually exclusive: that the Catholic Church is Christ’s true Church, and yet that in extraordinary ways those outside her visible fold can be saved—through that very Church to which they belonged, albeit unconsciously, in spirit.

You might ask whether it then makes no difference to which denomination one belongs. That conclusion would be false. It matters greatly. If a person recognizes the true Church and yet refuses to follow her, he commits a grave sin against the Holy Spirit and, unless he repents and repairs it, cannot be saved at all. Membership of the Church is Christ’s most stringent command and an objective condition for salvation. “If he refuses to hear the Church,” says Jesus (Mt 18:17), “let him be to you as a heathen and a tax-collector.” This means: whoever, in spite of the lawful preaching of the Church’s ministers, does not believe will be condemned (Mk 16:16). Non-membership is guiltless only when it results from invincible and honest error—that is, when someone neither knows nor suspects that he ought to join the Catholic Church. This is the sense of the ancient Christian expression “no salvation outside the Church.”

Many say the notion of “the one saving Church” is extreme intolerance; yet, as shown, it is not. Were this principle intolerant, then Christ Himself would have committed the first and greatest intolerance when He declared that whoever will not receive the teaching of His disciples and believe it “will be condemned.” There, on Christ’s own lips, is the first formulation of the one saving Church. Is it intolerant if we say, “we have only one homeland”? If a country can be but one, why should not the Lord Jesus’ realm, the Church, be even more indivisibly one?

Our Lord instituted only one lawful and unified Church; therefore every “church” or denomination that stands opposed to this one lawful Church and separates itself from her is in error and illegitimate. This is not lack of tolerance, but consistency and fidelity to Christ’s ordinance. Of course, tolerance remains a Christian virtue, and the Catholic Church is tolerant. Yet tolerance is of two kinds. There is doctrinal or theoretical “tolerance,” which, for the sake of peace, would sacrifice divine revelation itself: that the Church rejects. And there is civil or practical tolerance, which seeks to live in peace and charity with neighbors who are in error, without approving their error or placing it on a level with the truth. The Catholic Church knows no doctrinal tolerance—she would see that as treason against Christ—but she does practice civil tolerance, often to a degree surpassing others.

You may ask whether, then, every Protestant must be considered a wrong-doer because he still clings to Luther’s and Calvin’s doctrines. If someone, knowing all this, willfully clings to ecclesiastical rebellion, he indeed cannot be acquitted of grave guilt and complicity in sin. Most present-day Protestants, however, do not know these facts and perhaps cannot easily understand them, because from childhood they have been taught and made to believe that Luther’s and Calvin’s revolt was not only lawful but divinely ordained. The chief strength of Protestantism lies in its skillful and unceasing propaganda, by which it continually re-inculcates its ideas into its adherents; only a few realize that the whole mental framework in which they were trained is erroneous. Yet whoever does realize it generally draws nearer to the Catholic Church; in countries like in the UK or in the USA tens of thousands return every year, including ministers. Religious division today is maintained chiefly by ignorance on one side and passion on the other, not by calm consideration, solid reasoning, or sound evidence.

So, the answer is twofold. Protestant Trinitarians who, through no grave fault of their own, remain outside visible unity can indeed be saved, but never by a salvation proper to Protestantism. If they reach heaven, it is because the merits of Christ and the mediation of His Catholic Church have secretly nourished them and, in their last conscious moment, found no obstinate resistance. Those who would knowingly repudiate the Church once they have recognized her as the divine ark place themselves under the condemnation Saint John describes. Charity therefore obliges Catholics to evangelize, and prudence forbids us to narrow God’s mercy into channels of our own devising while it equally forbids us to widen the gate by denying the objective claims of the one fold and one Shepherd.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

@slimboyfat

A careful reading of the second-century apologists shows that their occasional description of the Logos as ἄγγελος is neither an assertion that Christ belongs ontologically to the angelic order nor a precursor of the modern Watchtower claim that Jesus is Michael. The difficulty arises from a semantic shift that separates the ancient Greek noun ἄγγελος, whose primary sense is “messenger,” from the English loan-word “angel,” which in ordinary parlance designates a created spirit of fixed rank. When the Church Fathers wished to speak of a created angel, they normally supplied an adjective such as “one of the angels” or “one of the ministers,” whereas in Christological contexts they explained why the Word may properly be called ἄγγελος, namely because he is the primordial envoy who makes the Father known. To transpose that functional title into an ontological claim is to wrench their language out of its literary and theological setting.

Justin’s First Apology VI is the passage frequently marshalled in favour of an Arian reading. The Greek, however, is syntactically ambiguous and the critical editions acknowledge competing construals. A straightforward translation, retaining the order of the words, is possible: “We worship and adore the Father … and the Son who came forth from him and taught us these things, and the host of the other good angels who follow him and are made like him, and the prophetic Spirit.” Even if that rendering is adopted, Justin is not assimilating the Son to the created order; the Son heads the clause, receives divine worship together with the Father, and is specified as the one whom the angelic host follows and resembles. The phrase “other good angels” therefore presupposes a categorical difference between leader and followers, not an identity of nature. Moreover, the same author insists only a few chapters later (XIII) that Christians worship the Son καὶ δεύτερον τάξιν, that is, in second rank, a formulation he repeats in XVI and LXI. The triadic pattern—Father, Son, Spirit—here receives explicit liturgical application, while the angels remain absent; hence scholars from Grabe through Schaff have judged that the mention of angels in VI, if taken with the verb “taught,” explains to the emperor that Christ instructs not only human beings but the angelic ministers as well. Either way, worship is restricted to the three hypostases of the Godhead.

Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho LV–LVI removes the residual ambiguity by defining his vocabulary. The Logos is “called ἄγγελος because he announces to men whatever the Maker of all things wills to declare.” The causal clause—διὰ τὸ ἀγγέλλειν—makes the point unmistakable: the title derives from the activity of revelation; it is not an index of created status. In the same breath Justin affirms that this Messenger “was God even before the creation of the world,” appeared in the theophanies to Abraham and Moses, and is now incarnate in Jesus Christ. One cannot coherently read “even God” (καὶ Θεός) as a predicate of a creature whilst maintaining fidelity to Justin’s insistence that Christians render him λατρεία, the worship owed exclusively to the one true God. To juxtapose “we worship the Father, the Son and the prophetic Spirit” with “we are not atheists” is to declare that denying the full divinity of the Son would collapse Christian monotheism.

The same semantic logic governs Clement of Alexandria. When he calls the Logos ἄγγελος (Paed. I.7) he has already laid down the hermeneutical key in Chapter 3: the Lord “ministers all good to us both as God and as man.” The word ἄγγελος serves him as a metaphor for the revelatory economy of the Old Covenant; it is forced into alien service only when modern readers isolate a single sentence and forget the ontological claims that frame it. Trinitarian theology therefore urges caution against one-liner proof-texting in patristic literature as well. Terms are plastic, context is decisive, and an author’s controlling analogy—fire from fire, light from light, rational word from rational mind—must govern the interpretation of any ontologically subordinate image.

Nor does the Arian appeal to “other good angels” reckon with the apologists’ doctrine of creation. Justin distinguishes between the Logos, “begotten before all creatures,” and the angelic race, “created” (ποίημα, κτίσμα). A being begotten of the Father’s own substance cannot simultaneously belong to the order of creatures without collapsing the apologists’ most basic metaphysical contrast, a contrast they borrowed from Scripture itself: in principio the uncreated Word is with God and is God; through him all things that came to be were made (John 1:1-3). Hebrews attributes that creative agency to the Son precisely to demonstrate his transcendence over angels, who worship him and whose very winds and flames he fashions (Heb 1:5-14). To merge Christ into the angelic host would unravel the epistle’s argument and confound the Church’s baptismal confession, already discernible in Justin’s era.

The modern identification of Jesus with Michael the archangel therefore mistakes both biblical exegesis and patristic semantics. Michael is explicitly “one of the chief princes” (Dan 10:13), a creature who, in Jude 9, does not dare to pronounce judgment in his own name. The pre-existent Christ, by contrast, receives titles, functions and honors reserved for Yahweh alone: he forgives sins, commands worship, and bears the incommunicable Name. The Church Fathers who call him ἄγγελος do so to underline this paradox of divine condescension: the eternal Word stoops to become the envoy, yet without surrendering his equality with the Sender. If that trope is flattened into the claim that Christ is merely a higher member of the angelic species, the Gospel’s central mystery—the Word became flesh—loses both its metaphysical depth and its soteriological power.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

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.

FYI: Did the Trinity Come from Paganism?

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

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.

57

How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

by Sea Breeze in

simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

that's how they sold it.

the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

aqwsed12345

@Vanderhoven7

The Catholic Church has never offered anyone a route to heaven that “bypasses” the Cross or excuses him from the obedience of faith; she simply distinguishes between a culpable refusal of revealed truth and the misfortune of never having heard that truth in an intelligible way. When Saint John says that “he who believes not the Son shall not see life” he is speaking, as the context of both Jn 3 and 1 Jn 5 makes plain, about those to whom the Son has actually been proposed and who therefore stand before the drama of acceptance or rejection. Thomas, commenting on the same verses, adds that unbelief becomes mortal when it is “pertinacious”—that is, when it resists the truth once known to be such. The soldier on Hadrian’s Wall and the Bedouin child are not, before any act of their own, in that situation.

Yet neither are they saved by a second, “natural” covenant. If they are saved it is solely because the one sacrifice of Calvary and the one bridal gift of the Church are made present to them by an anticipatory grace that elicits an implicit, seminal act of the very faith you name: faith in a God who is Father, in a mercy that forgives sin, and in a life that conquers death. The Holy Spirit can plant that seed because, as Pius XII teaches in Mystici Corporis, Christ’s merits overflow the visible enclosure of the sacramental economy and can touch those who “by an unconscious desire” are already ordered to the Church. At the instant that seed is accepted it ceases to be merely implicit, for grace is not a vague benevolence but a supernatural light; it contains within itself, virtually, the whole Creed. Should life last, Providence ordinarily leads such a soul toward the explicit confession of Jesus as Lord; should death intervene, Christ, who “enlightens every man” (Jn 1:9), can unveil Himself in the final moment so that the obedience of faith may be perfected or, if spurned, finally judged.

This is no modern novelty. Saint Justin could call the righteous pagan “a Christian unawares”; Saint Thomas could say that a man who follows the light given him “would receive further illumination, even by an angel, sooner than God would fail in what is necessary for salvation”; Pius IX and the Fathers of Vatican II repeat the same doctrine. None of them weaken the necessity of Christ or His Church; they simply refuse to bind the Almighty to the accidents of geography or history when He wishes “all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” That refusal is not sophistry; it is theologia crucis, for it confesses that the Blood outpoured on Golgotha is puissant enough to reach even those whose tongues have never formed the sacred Name, provided they do not wilfully shut their hearts against the invitation written on creation and conscience.

Therefore the Church evangelises with urgency—for explicit faith, baptism, and full communion are the ordinary road—and yet she dares to hope for the unevangelised, not because she trusts fallen nature, but because she trusts the pierced Heart of her Spouse.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

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.

57

How Did Watchtower Sell the "Jonadab" Concept ?

by Sea Breeze in

simply put; gullible people were told if they chose life on earth instead of heaven, they wouldn't have to die.

that's how they sold it.

the watchtower lied to people in the 1920 booklet and convention series titled "millions now living will never die!

aqwsed12345

@Vanderhoven7

The Lord’s warning in John 8:24 is absolute: no one enters life while remaining in culpable unbelief of the One whom the Father has sent. That text has governed Catholic soteriology from the Fathers through Trent: faith in Christ, enlivened by grace and perfected in charity, is the gateway to justification. Where you and I must look more closely is the distinction—taught by Augustine, refined by Aquinas, and reaffirmed by Pius IX—that the act of faith can be either explicit or, under certain conditions, implicit. Saint Thomas puts it succinctly: “Before the coming of Christ it was enough to believe explicitly in the Redeemer as promised; after His coming it is necessary to believe explicitly in Him as accomplished—unless a person be so situated that he cannot hear the Gospel, in which case a readiness of will to believe whatever God should reveal is accounted unto righteousness”.

The soldier on the Roman frontier, the Chinaman of the twelfth century, the Bedouin infant who dies in the cradle do not disprove Christ’s sentence; rather, the Holy Spirit, “who blows where He wills,” can interiorly move such souls at the moment of conscience to accept the light available to them and, if they persevere in that obedience, dispose them for the final illumination by which Christ makes Himself known. When that happens—whether in the last heartbeat of earthly life or in a secret inspiration long before—the soul no longer stands in the state described in John 8:24, because the very grace that binds it to Christ also infuses the theological virtue of faith. It is still Christ who saves and still faith in Christ that justifies; the difference lies only in the hour and manner in which the Name is embraced.

Nothing in that mystery diminishes the ordinary necessity of preaching. On the contrary, it confirms it: explicit faith, the sacraments, and a life of visible communion with the Church are the ordinary road God Himself established, and charity forbids us to leave our neighbour on the perilous margin of implicit desire. But neither does the Church presume to set limits to divine condescension. She repeats the Apostle’s question—“How shall they believe Him of whom they have not heard?”—and therefore sends missionaries; yet she also trusts that the Shepherd who died for every man can reach the lamb caught in thorns beyond the edge of the pasture. To deny that possibility would not exalt John 8:24; it would circumscribe the Cross. The tradition holds both truths together: outside the Church there is no salvation, and yet—precisely because every grace flows from the wounded Heart of Christ—no man who is truly docile to grace is outside the Church in the final reckoning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fate_of_the_unlearned#Roman_Catholic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincible_and_invincible_ignorance

84

Zechariah 12:10 Corruption in the NWT

by Sea Breeze in

here's a question for those who still support watchtower on this forum.

why did watchtower leave out the word "me" in zech.

zechariah 12:10 reads like this: .

aqwsed12345

@Earnest

The point at issue is not whether the Fourth Evangelist — whose gospel you rightly cite in 𝔓66 — quotes a line that contains the relative pronoun ὃν. He does. Nor is it disputed that the kaige–Theodotionic strand already renders Zech 12:10 with εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν. The question is what that ὃν presupposes in its Hebrew source and what the New World Translation does with the Hebrew so as to avoid the consequence John draws.

Hebrew Vorlage.
The Masoretic consonants are not in doubt: וְהִבִּ֣יטוּ אֵלַ֔י אֵ֥ת אֲשֶׁר־דָּקָ֖רוּ, “they shall look unto me ’ēt whom they pierced.” The first-person object pronoun is the grammatical antecedent of the relative. No extant Hebrew manuscript earlier than the middle ages reads ’êlāyw (“unto him”) here. The third-person shift is a Greek phenomenon confined to revisions that wished to remove the anthropopathic force of God’s being pierced. Textual criticism therefore starts from a first-person Hebrew clause.
Kaige–Theodotion technique.
The revisers responsible for 8 ḤevXII gr took the difficult Hebrew at face value: they kept the first-person speaker but supplied a relative pronoun that Greek requires, giving εἰς ἐμὲ ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν. That wording later re-emerges in Codex L. John, when he cites the verse, streamlines only one verb (ἐπιβλέψονται → ὄψονται) but leaves the ἐμὲ / ὃν syntax intact. He is not introducing a new, theologically convenient reading; he is picking up the Jewish revision that already matched the Hebrew more closely than the older LXX.
What John does with it.
By applying the “ὃν” clause to the crucified Jesus (19:34–37) John tacitly identifies Jesus with the first-person speaker of the oracle, YHWH. That is why the citation is preceded by the emphatic witness formula of v. 35 and repeated in apocalyptic form in Rev 1:7. The Fourth Evangelist’s claim is not merely that Zechariah predicted a piercing, but that Israel’s God, now in flesh, is the one pierced.
What the NWT does instead.
The New World Translation alters the Hebrew itself: “they will look to the one whom they pierced.” By changing ’êlayʾ (“to me”) to a third-person object and relegating the first-person to a separate clause (“They will look to me and they will lament over him…”), the translators eliminate the identification between speaker and pierced one. That adjustment is not the same as John’s Greek wording, because John presupposes that ὃν refers back to the first-person speaker; the NWT blocks that link in advance. The alteration is not textual-critical (no such Hebrew reading exists) but theological, dictated by a christology that cannot admit the pierced one to be YHWH.
The charge of “corruption.”
A translation departs from the autograph when it substitutes an unattested reading in order to serve a doctrinal constraint. That is what happens in the NWT’s handling of Zech 12:10. John’s citation does not license such a move: he cites a Greek line that still implies the divine antecedent — exactly the implication the NWT strives to remove. Therefore one may affirm both propositions at once: John faithfully reproduces the kaige Greek of Zechariah, and the NWT nevertheless corrupts the Hebrew to avoid John’s theological conclusion.
On the manuscript base you list.
𝔓66 is a witness to John, not to Zechariah; it tells us nothing about the prophetic text beyond confirming that John used ὄψονται εἰς ὃν ἐξεκέντησαν. The sole pre-Christian Greek evidence for Zech 12:10 itself is 8 ḤevXII gr, whose reading, though fragmentary, aligns with the first-person Hebrew. That is the very reading the NWT sets aside.

In short, the question is not whether John wrote “ὃν.” Of course he did. The question is whether the underlying Hebrew said “me,” thereby making the pierced one YHWH, and whether a modern version may legitimately replace that with “the one” to preserve a sub-divine christology. On the combined testimony of the Masoretic consonants, the kaige–Theodotionic revision, and John’s own theological use, the answer is clear: the Hebrew says “me,” John presumes it, and the NWT alters it.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

@MeanMrMustard

Your instinct to test the vocabulary against concrete specimens is the right one—Thomas would have applauded it—because in his view metaphysics must start ab esse in re, from realities that can be named and handled, and only then ascend to the heights. So let us keep our feet on the ground with dogs and poems, and only at the end lift our eyes again to the mystery of God and of the Incarnate Word.

When I said “nature” is the set of essential properties while “essence” is the underlying reality that grounds those properties, I was not offering a mere re-labelling exercise. Think of a living oak. We can draw up a botanist’s checklist—lignified tissue, photosynthesis, acorn reproduction—and that description is certainly true of the oak. Yet the description is not what makes the tree be a tree. Behind the checklist lies a formative principle that actually organizes matter into roots, trunk, leaves, and powers of growth. Aristotle called that principle the form, and when form organizes matter into a complete, self-subsisting whole we call the result a substance. The Thomistic tradition reserves the word essence for that formative principle considered precisely as the source of intelligibility—that by which the oak is an oak. Nature, in turn, names the ordered set of capacities that flow from that essence: absorbing water, synthesizing sugars, pushing out new rings each spring. Essence is therefore not a conceptual filing cabinet but a real, interior cause; nature is that cause in act.

Nature isn’t just a tally of traits; it’s the dynamic principle that governs how a thing operates, flowing from its essence. Essence, meanwhile, isn’t merely the sum of those traits either—it’s the metaphysical core, the “whatness” that makes a thing intelligible as itself, distinct from everything else. Think of essence as the internal blueprint, and nature as how that blueprint plays out in reality. They’re not redundant; they’re two sides of a coin, with essence being the “what it is” and nature the “how it acts because of what it is.” A thing’s operations reveal its nature, which is grounded in its essence.

The same distinction holds for us. A newborn, an adult philosopher, and a comatose accident-victim all share the same essence, rational animality. In a newborn the intellect and will are only radically present—as the rose is present in the living root—but they need not be on public display for the essence to be whole and operative. If the powers were absent even radically, the child would not be a human being in the first place. Hence neither a severe cognitive disability nor the sleeper’s inactivity nor prenatal immaturity robs the subject of humanity. What matters is the intrinsic principle that grounds the capacity, not the momentary performance statistics.

You’re right that “two legs” doesn’t define humanity; a legless person is no less human. Thomism would say that’s because legs are accidental, not essential. The essence of a human is “rational animal”—a composite of animality (life, sensation, motion) and rationality (intellect and will). This isn’t a category in the nominalist sense, where we just slap a label on a set of traits we observe. It’s a metaphysical reality: what makes a human human is this inherent capacity for reason, even if it’s not always exercised. A mentally handicapped person or a fetus doesn’t lose humanity because the essence—rational animality—remains intact as their defining principle, even if accidents like injury or development impede its full expression. “Actualizing” a nature doesn’t mean ticking off a checklist of displayed traits; it’s the living out of those essential capacities, whether fully realized or latent. A fetus has the intrinsic potential for reason, which is what counts, not its current performance.

Now for dogs and cats. A dog’s accidents—number of legs, color of fur—can vary wildly without touching its dog-essence. If you amputate a leg, you impair the animal but do not transmogrify it into a cat. Why? Because the essence, the formative core, remains. That is why Aristotle speaks of “that which acts, acts according to what it is”: the canine essence elicits barking rather than meowing, pack instincts rather than solitary ambush, even when the creature’s accidental equipment is damaged. So yes, dogs have a nature: call it “caninity.” It’s the essence that makes a dog a dog—sentient, corporeal, with a specific mode of animal life distinct from, say, a cat’s “felinity.” Both are mammals, sure, but their essences differ in form: a dog’s nature inclines it to pack behavior and certain sensory aptitudes, while a cat’s leans toward solitary hunting and agility. A three-legged dog doesn’t cease to be a dog because its essence isn’t tied to leg count but to that deeper form—its “dogness”—which persists despite accidental variations like color or size. The distinction isn’t just taxonomic; it’s real, rooted in their being, not our naming conventions.

A poem stands in striking contrast. Ink and paper have no inherent tendency to rhyme, to scan in pentameter, or to conjure images of moonlit seas. Those features arrive only when a mind imposes them from without. A poem therefore possesses no self-subsisting nature the way a dog does; its “whatness” is accidental, borrowed, unable to act or grow of itself. A poem isn’t a substance like a dog or a human—it’s an artifact, a product of human craft. Its “essence” isn’t intrinsic but extrinsic, imposed by the poet’s intellect onto matter (words, rhythm). Its nature is its formal principle as a poem—what makes it a poem rather than prose or gibberish—but it’s not a substantial nature. It’s an accidental form, dependent on a mind to shape it, unlike the intrinsic essence of a living thing that drives its operations from within. A poem’s “whatness” is real, but it’s tethered to human intention, not self-subsistent being. The Thomist places such items in the category of artifacts, where the form is extrinsic and perishes the moment the organizing intelligence or the supporting material is withdrawn.

Those creaturely examples also expose the contingency of everything around us. An oak, a dog, a man—all are composites in which “what it is” and “that it is” remain distinct. I might never have existed; I could cease to exist tomorrow. This composition of essence (potency) and existence (act) cries out for a first reality in which the two are no longer separable, otherwise nothing contingent would ever be. God, says Aquinas, is precisely ipsum esse subsistens—Being itself, not merely a being. In Him, essence and existence are numerically one; He is sheer actuality, with no unrealized capacities, no admixture of limit or defect. That is what “pure act” (actus purus) seeks to capture. When we predicate power, knowledge, or goodness of God we are not stacking independent properties like stickers on a suitcase; we are naming distinct aspects of a single, limitless act of being.

For us, “what we are” (essence) and “that we are” (existence) are separate; I’m a human, but I might not have existed. In God, they’re identical: His essence is to exist, pure actuality with no potentiality or limitation. His nature and essence align as one eternal act of being, not a set of traits we compile but the ground of all reality. Concrete example? Think of God as the “why” behind everything existing—He’s not a thing among things but the source that doesn’t need a source, unlike dogs, humans, or poems.

Your worry about “essence” being just a set of attributes misses this: in Thomism, it’s not a descriptive bucket but a principle of intelligibility. For humans, it’s not about listing “rational” and “animal” like ingredients; it’s the unified reality that grounds those capacities. For God, it’s not attributes like omnipotence tacked on—it’s His sheer is-ness that entails them. This isn’t vague; it’s the bedrock of a system where language tracks reality, not just our perceptions. Christology leans on this: “fully God” means the Son shares that divine essence completely; “fully human” means He assumes our essence completely, uniting both in one person without blurring them. It’s not sloganeering—it’s metaphysics with teeth, meant to hold up under scrutiny like yours.

So all this bears directly on the Incarnation. When the eternal Word assumed a human nature, He did not tack divine attributes onto a Galilean rabbi, nor did He dilute His Godhead into some tertium quid. Rather, the one divine Hypostasis took to Himself—united to His person—a complete human essence: body, soul, intellect, will. Everything that makes God God and everything that makes man man is present, intact, in the single subject who speaks from the manger, from the mount, and from the cross. “Without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” Chalcedon insists, precisely because only such an unconfused union secures real divinity and real humanity and therefore real redemption.

If you press me for an “example” of actus purus, I can only warn that every finite analogy will limp. Yet an echo can help: picture white light cascading through a prism. The colors—red to violet—are distinct participations; the white is indivisibly all wavelengths at once. Each color expresses something truly present in the source, yet the source transcends any single hue. Likewise, creatures manifest limited reflections of being; God is unbounded Esse itself, containing every perfection formally, not fragmentarily.

Thus, the Thomist map: essence is the intrinsic formative principle, nature the ordered dynamism that flows from it; accidents hover at the surface, mutable and secondary. Dogs and cats manifest their essences by what they do; a poem receives its ephemeral “form” from outside; a human embryo is already human because the rational essence is present implicitly; God alone simply is. On that scaffolding the confession “fully God, fully man” stands firm, not as rhetoric but as metaphysical precision wedded to revealed fact.

66

Time of the end - a TRINITY puzzler.

by BoogerMan in

(matthew 24:36) “concerning that day and hour nobody knows, neither the angels of the heavens nor the son, but only the father.".

(jesus seems to have forgotten to include the holy spirit not knowing either).

(acts 1:7) "he said to them: “it does not belong to you to know the times or seasons that the father has placed in his own jurisdiction.".

aqwsed12345

@MeanMrMustard

You’re absolutely right that both sides often bring a flood of verses and that foundational assumptions shape how those verses are understood. But your reply—“to people just reading the Bible, that looks a lot like reading your meaning into the scriptures”—is exactly the crux of why method matters, and why “just reading the Bible” is never as neutral or self-evident as it seems.

You insist on brevity and “common definitions,” but these are never neutral or self-standing. As soon as we talk about “God,” “person,” “nature,” or even “Bible,” we are already interpreting. The very act of choosing which verses matter, how to relate the Old and New Testaments, how to weigh historical background, what to do with paradoxes or mystery—all of this is interpretation, whether we admit it or not.

The problem isn’t with “walls of text” but with the illusion that one can bypass centuries of reflection, debate, and suffering for the truth, and simply start fresh “just reading” as if no one ever did so before. The reason Christians “spit out scriptures” isn’t to overwhelm, but because the Christian revelation is organic, woven together over centuries, and the heart of the faith is not reducible to a slogan. Every heresy in Church history began with someone “just reading the Bible” and refusing to listen to the faith community that wrote, transmitted, and preserved it.

To your point: yes, there’s a danger of “reading your meaning” into the text. But there’s an equal danger—much greater, in fact—of pretending that “plain reading” is free from assumptions. Protestant, Catholic, Unitarian, or skeptic: every reader comes to the Bible with a context, a tradition, and a set of inherited questions. The Catholic view at least admits this openly and seeks to check interpretation against the living faith of the Church, guided by the Spirit, not the ever-shifting impressions of individuals or the fashions of the age.

If anything, the example from Matthew 24:36 actually confirms the point I am making: the “plain reading” approach only appears simple if one ignores the complexities of the text, its canonical context, and the theological claims Christianity has always made about Christ. Of course, someone who picks up a Bible and reads, “the Son does not know, only the Father,” may initially think this means Jesus is not God. But for nearly two millennia, the entire Christian tradition—across language, culture, and denomination—has been wrestling with how the Scriptures as a whole present Jesus: as both truly God and truly man, possessing a human intellect and will as well as a divine intellect and will. The point is not to “read in” our conclusions, but to interpret each passage in the light of the whole, refusing to allow one verse to negate the fullness of what the Gospels reveal.

To treat the verse in Matthew as if it were a gotcha—“aha, the Trinity is refuted!”—misses how doctrine develops. The Church’s response is not to ignore or explain away such passages, but to wrestle with their meaning: Christ, as man, could say He did not know, precisely because in His humanity He freely accepted the limitations of human knowledge, while in His divinity, nothing is hidden from Him. This isn’t an arbitrary harmonization, but a reflection of what the Church has always confessed: “true God and true man.” It is only shallow proof-texting that refuses to hold these truths together, that seeks the “plain meaning” at the cost of the mystery.

Your sarcasm about the Pope “overlooking” Matthew 24:36 makes my point for me. Of course the Church knows these verses—she has prayed, pondered, and preached them for centuries. If the truth were as simple as a single verse, there would never have been a controversy. But the very existence of centuries of debate, heresies, and councils testifies that Scripture is not self-interpreting, and that genuine understanding requires patience, humility, and reverence for the depth of God’s self-disclosure.

So, yes, let’s begin with definitions. But let’s not pretend that slogans or isolated texts settle the matter. What is required is not less thought, but more: a willingness to let the fullness of revelation question our assumptions, and to receive with humility the faith that was handed down—not as a quick fix, but as a living mystery to be entered into, not mastered. That is why the Catholic Church never “mic drops” with a verse, and why her interpretation, for all its apparent “walls of text,” has endured while so many shallow certainties have faded away.

You want conciseness? Here it is:
The doctrine of the Trinity cannot be built on “one-liners,” nor destroyed by them. It is not an invention of clever theologians, but the Church’s humble attempt to confess what is given in the totality of revelation—a mystery that is only distorted by shortcuts and proof-texting, whether for or against. The Catholic method—always open to reason, history, context, and tradition—recognizes that no one reads the Bible in a vacuum. Every community brings its “wiggling” and “squinting.” The question is not whether we interpret, but whose interpretation bears the mark of fidelity, depth, and fruit over centuries, not just the loudest meme or the shortest post.

The Trinity is not an escape from “just reading the Bible,” but the mature fruit of reading the whole of Scripture in the light of Christ, with the mind of the Church. If that requires a few more paragraphs—or centuries—so be it. Truth deserves the patience to be sought and received, not just asserted.