Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, blind guide

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_ClarkGoble
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Re: Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, blind guide

Post by _ClarkGoble »

by the way - relevant to the discussion the SEP has an excellent entry on the trinity which showcases both it's connection to platonic thinking but also the different ideas of what the trinity actually constitutes.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trin ... story.html

Once again just to be clear the idea of three persons in an unity isn't the trinity. There's lots of confusion over what the trinity actually is. What most Mormons think the trinity is actually is the heresy of modalism. So when Mormons are attacking it typically they're attacking a strawman. But then to be fair if you talk to lots of lay Christians what they describe as the trinity is also either modalism or tritheism. So it depends upon what is under question: the sophisticated doctrine or the actual understanding of the doctrine.
_Mittens
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Re: Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, blind guide

Post by _Mittens »

ClarkGoble wrote:by the way - relevant to the discussion the SEP has an excellent entry on the trinity which showcases both it's connection to platonic thinking but also the different ideas of what the trinity actually constitutes.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trin ... story.html

Once again just to be clear the idea of three persons in an unity isn't the trinity. There's lots of confusion over what the trinity actually is. What most Mormons think the trinity is actually is the heresy of modalism. So when Mormons are attacking it typically they're attacking a strawman. But then to be fair if you talk to lots of lay Christians what they describe as the trinity is also either modalism or tritheism. So it depends upon what is under question: the sophisticated doctrine or the actual understanding of the doctrine.



first used by Theophilus (A.D. 168 A.D. - 183 A.D.), or from the Lat. trinitas, first used by Tertullian (A.D. 220 A.D.), to express this doctrine. The propositions involved in the doctrine are these: 1. That God is one, and that there is but one God (Deut 6:4; 1 Kings 8:60; Isa 44:6; Mark 12:29,32; John 10:30). 2. That the Father is a distinct divine Person (hypostasis, subsistentia, persona, suppositum intellectuale), distinct from the Son and the Holy Spirit. 3. That Jesus Christ was truly God, and yet was a Person distinct from the Father and the Holy Spirit. 4. That the Holy Spirit is also a distinct divine Person.

(from Easton's Bible Dictionary, PC Study Bible formatted electronic database Copyright © 2003, 2006 Biblesoft, Inc. All rights reserved.)


Homoousios -God- Godhead- Substance- Essence- Being –Nature [ all Synonyms ]

One being. Three persons. In other words, one "what" and three "who"s. There is one being, God. There are three persons: God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The distinction is between being and person. One being, three persons. One what, three who's.

Substantia
There were two major Latin words involved. The first is substantia, and Greek Homoousios Although the word was idiomatically to mean “goods” or “property” and in a legal sense to denote “ that to which two or more parties could share legal claim,” there never was never much doubt as to what the Church Fathers intended when using substantia was simply the being of God. Thus to say , with the Latin orthodox theologians, that Father,Son, and Spirit were consubstantialis was to say that they shared the same basic “thing” or “what” that they were: namely, they were God.
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_Physics Guy
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Re: Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, blind guide

Post by _Physics Guy »

ClarkGoble wrote:by the way - relevant to the discussion the SEP has an excellent entry on the trinity which showcases both it's connection to platonic thinking but also the different ideas of what the trinity actually constitutes.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/trin ... story.html

Thanks very much for the link. It's been a long time since I'd read up on any of this, and I don't think I'd ever read a history of trinitarianism specifically before—just general church history stuff. My impression now is that the articulation of the doctrine was even worse than I had imagined. Most of the thinking was done in really primitive times.

I'm not aware of much modern re-thinking of the Trinity, either, though. The Mind of the Maker, by mystery writer and Dante translator Dorothy L. Sayers, is the only original explanation that I think I've seen.

The idea that's been in the back of my own mind for a while now is that the distinction among the Persons of the Trinity is pretty much the same as the distinction between background, pattern, and detail. I consider that I myself, as a human person, am a pattern realized in a medium of biological details that are not me, within a larger world that is also not me. Full reality is a continuous whole, however, extending over all scales from sub-nuclear to beyond galactic.

What counts as subliminal detail on one scale becomes the pattern as one zooms in closer. Zoom in closer still, and that pattern becomes background for yet smaller patterns. Zoom out instead, on the other hand, and what was fixed background becomes a changeable pattern. Zoom out more, and that pattern shrinks into subliminal detail. Pascal's two infinities are even more infinite than Pascal could have known.

The God who makes and controls this doubly infinite reality cannot be restricted, as I am, to a narrow range of scales. God is always present in all three of background, pattern, and detail (which is why I don't think this theory counts as a modalism). The distinction is relative, not absolute (so it's not a tritheism, either), but it is unavoidable—at least to restricted human minds.

This notion of the Trinity has seemed compelling to me because of my work, which focuses on multi-scaled systems. It also fits with my materialist model of consciousness. Perhaps I should look more seriously at modern Trinitarian theology, and see how many of these themes are already recognized. I hadn't really appreciated how completely absent they are in the ancient stuff.
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