Theological Small Talk

Here's a bit of correspondance about the Trinity and the Nature of Christ I thought I'd share. I get a lot of questions from folks in the congregation and sometimes the answers are worth putting out there for others to chew on as well.

Here's part of the letter:

The Trinity (and more importantly the nature of Christ) is probably one of the hardest ideas to grasp in all of Christianity. Who is Jesus? Simple answers are usually simplistic and sometimes heretical. Why? Because you have to match what Jesus said about himself and what Jesus said was complicated.

Jesus said he was God, not "a" god or "like" God, but the everlasting God. He said that he and the father are one and if you've seen him you've seen the Father. He said referred to himself as the "I Am" of the Old Testament.

Jesus also distinguished himself from the Father and the Holy Spirit and repeatedly demonstrated that he was fully human.

See what I mean by complicated? And it's not new or limited to Jehovah's Witnesses. The Earliest theological debates in the Church go back to efforts to explain simply who Jesus was. Do you make him all God and not human - wrong. Do you make him all human and not fully God - wrong. Every simple answer fails to match what is taught (but never spelled out for us) in the New Testament.

The official answer from the church to this dilemma is that Jesus is 100% human and 100% God. That doesn't add up, true, but miracles don't usually "add up" in a way that we can understand. Nevertheless, it's easy to understand why Jesus must be both fully God and fully man. Mankind owes a debt to God and only a human can pay that debt. But the debt is infinite, so only God can pay it. The only solution? The payer must miraculously have both natures - God and Human. This is the Incarnation.

As for the Trinity. There is but one God - all of the Bible, front to back, testifies to this. But God is perfect in and of himself. He's not even alone. He has community, love, submission, and all aspects of pure relationship as part of who he is naturally. So although is God has one nature (God), he has three persons (Father, Son, Holy Spirit). Most metaphors used to explain this break down because there are are not three different manifestations of God or three different hats that he wears. There are three simultaneous, eternally existing, interacting persons who are of one nature and make up one entity.

As difficult as this is, it matches the evidence and testimony of scripture perfectly.

Other explanations have purposely mistranslated and misinterpreted the Bible to justify their simpler explanations - as the JW's do to John chapter 1. Any first year Greek student is taught how to catch these schemes.

Orthodoxy has rested upon this difficult but scripturally accurate and theologically sound understanding for 2000 years against every kind of assault and argument.