Who Is Jesus?

That is the current understanding, but it is not the historic understanding. The historic trinity was founded upon the truth of the monarchy of the Father....the Father alone is the fount of godhead. He is the source and originator of the Son, who is eternally begotten from Him.

Christ is not begotten, as far as our understanding of the word begotten is concerned. If "historic" definitions are wrong then then need to be discarded. Much of the early church fathers espoused heresy. To say that Christ was begotten from all eternity is to imply that Christ is a created being--a heresy. The three persons of the Godhead are equal--not one of them being greater than the other. Your notion of the Father being the fount of the Godhead is nowhere to be found in Scripture. All three were present at creation. All three were involved in creation--not one being any greater than the other.
DHK

 

You area actually rejecting the historic doctrine of the trinity. Yet you still say that you believe the trinity.

You have in common with the oneness people that your doctrines both originated centuries after the early church. The historic teaching of the trinity, which you deny, was taught at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, and by the early church fathers and the apostles before that. The heresy which denies the eternal generation of the Son whle maintaining 'One God in three persons' originated at Geneva in the sixteenth century.

You say that 'much [sic] of the early church fathers espoused heresy.' - What heresies were they? These people knew the apostles.

I suppose it would be a waste of time to remind you that 'the head of Christ is God,' and that Christ said 'my Father is greater than I.'

It is all over the scriptures, both Old and New Testament. On the contrary, Jesus is nowhere to be found as a self existing being in the scriptures. His life is from the Father, not himself. He was brought forth from everlasting. To deny this, in truth, is to make the name 'Son' meaningless. It is to deny that Jesus is the Son of God. It is to deny that he is the Word, since the Word originates from and reveals and expresses the Father.

What you actually teach is three self existing persons who are God. This is both polytheism and Sabellianism.

Dean

[ July 22, 2004, 02:56 PM: Message edited by: dean198 ]

 

In reality, Biblical Christianity teaches that there is only one God. This truth is affirmed again and again in the Bible [Deuteronomy 6:4; Isaiah 45:5; 1 Corinthians 8:4; 1 Timothy 2:5]. The Bible teaches that God is an infinite being Who has no comparison or likeness [Isaiah 40:18,25]. He is an infinite being, Who can only be known by the revelation which He gives of Himself. In John 1:1,2, this infinite God reveals that He unites in the substance of His being a second infinite, eternal Almighty Person, one Whose eternal name is “the Word” [John 1:1; Revelation 19:13]. Being one in substance with God, He also is God. But He is not a second God. In the substance of His being the one true God unites two Infinite, Eternal Almighty Persons. These Persons are co-equal and co-eternal. Both are God, but being of one substance, there is only one God. This is a mystery [Colossians 2:2], which finite persons cannot fully understand . To fully understand it one would also have to be infinite.

This second Person, God-the-Word, Whom the infinite God unites with Himself in the substance of His being, is also most definitely an infinite Person. Because He is infinite, He can be known only by revelation. No man fully knows Him. He is known in the reality of His Person only by God Jehovah [Matthew 11:27]. The Christian Scriptures were given by God to give revelation about this second Person Who is also called God. Those who reject the testimony which God Jehovah has given by the third Person Who is united in the substance of God, God-the-Holy-Spirit, are guilty of blasphemously calling God a liar [1 John 5:10]. Those who teach something about Him which the Christian Scriptures do no teach are, in reality, blasphemously claiming to have greater knowledge than the infinite God.

In further revelation of Himself, the infinite God reveals that there is a third Person united in the substance of God. This third person is called the Holy Spirit [Matthew 28:19], or the Spirit of truth [John 14:17]. We know that He is one in substance with God because He is called the eternal Spirit [Hebrews 9:14]. Only God is eternal, and since there is only one God, He also must be one in substance with the other persons Who are also called God. So important is this third Person Who is one in substance with God, that blasphemy against Him will never be forgiven [Matthew 12:31,32]. Even denying that He is one in substance with the other two Persons Who are named God may be blasphemy against Him. Further, since He is the One Who moved the writers of the Bible, including the Gospels [John 14:26] to record what they wrote [Acts 28:25; 2 Peter 1:21], rejection and denial of these may also be blasphemy against Him [Hebrews 10:29]. Those who deny the truth of the Christian scriptures should beware lest they blaspheme the Holy Spirit, Who, through these Scriptures offers them grace, the undeserved favor of God through Christ’s death as a substitute in their place [1 Peter 3:18]. Rejection of the message of Christ’s death for sinners is rejection of the message declared by God, the Holy Spirit, in the Christian Scriptures. Rejection of it will bring awful consequences and condemnation [Hebrews 10:26-31].

Wrong. I teach what the Bible teaches, entirely apart from what historians and church fathers teach. Origen, for example, was a heretic--the father of Arianism--just one of many examples.
DHK

 

Origen heavily influenced the Athanasian position, actually. Particularly in the concepts of the eternal separate hypostases. At Nicaea, many of the leaders there were suspicious of Athanasius' position because of that (It still seemed to divide the divine unity). This is why it was hard for his theology to stick, at first (and why the Arians were able to gain the upper hand a few times).

Dean had a point is speaking of "semi-Sabellianism". The two doctrines share in common a perfect symmetry regarding the Three, one referring to them as "Persons", and the other "manifestations". In both positions, it seems "God" winds up being actually a fourth entity, that is represented in the equal three. But it is true, that in the Pre-Nicene period, Orthdoxy held what has been labeled "Economic Trinitarianism": "'God the Father', connoted not the first Person of [a] Holy Trinity, but the one Godhead considered as author of whatever exists." Early Christian Doctrines, by J.N.D Kelly, (Harper & Row, 1960 p.100)
The Word and Spirit, even though always existing IN the Father, were not revealed as separate entities from the Father until they were manifested for the purpose of redemption and sanctification —the 'economy' (dispensation). "Unless these points are firmly grasped, and their significance appreciated, a completely distorted view of the Apologists' theology is liable to result" (ibid.). The generation ("begettal") of Sonship was held to be at the Incarnation, and among some, the Creation.

The term 'Person' "...was still reserved for Them as manifested in the order of revelation; only later did it come to be applied to the Word and Spirit as imminent in God's eternal being".

So in the pre-Nicene period, the 'Triad' was represented "...by the imagery, not of three coequal Persons (this was the analogy to be employed by the post-Nicene fathers), but of a single Personage, the Father, who is the Godhead itself, with His mind or rationality, and His wisdom. The motive for this approach, common to all Christian thinkers of this period, was their intense concern for the fundamental tenet of monotheism, but its unavoidable corollary was a certain obscuring of the position of the Son and Spirit as 'Persons' (to use the jargon of later theology) prior to their generation or emission" (ECD, p.107,8, emphasis added). Both Hippolytus and Tertullian "...had the conception of God existing in unique solitariness from all eternity, yet having immanent in and indivisibly one with himself, on the analogy of the mental functions in a man, His reason or Word —Logos endiathetos" (p.111). To Tertullian, the Word or Reason of God, which was like a second in addition to Himself, was like the 'rationality' by which a man cogitates and plans, which is a 'second' in [man's] self (Adv. Prax.5).

Even though the early fathers were influenced by heresy in many areas, still, they were closer to the NT times. Doctrines were taught by the Bible, then disappeared, and then magically restored by the Nicene era/Athanasian church. The church was getting further and further from the Bible as time went on, adding philosophy, which the Bible would then often be seen through.

 

Being closer to New Testament times does not necessarily mean being closer to the truth. The origin of the heresy of baptisml regeneration was close to New Testament times. Arianism and gnosticism both were in the era of New Testament times. The First Epistle of John was written to combat the heresy of gnosticism. Many times do the Apostles, and even Christ Himself, warn their own contemporaries that there are many "false prophets" and "false teachers," among you; John even referring to some as "antichrists." Heresy is not new.
Being closer to the time of Christ does not guarantee that a person has the truth.
DHK

 

I would have thought the opposite - that they were unhappy with Athanasius' position because it seemed to Sabellian. I would be interested to know where you got that.

I have never seen where they put it at the Incarnation....do you have any examples? I think Tertullian only, as far as I can tell, put the begetting at creation.

Disappeared? They remained throughout the church until after the Nicene period, when the three Cappadocians and Augustine influenced theology for the worse.

Regards

Dean

 

When the apostles speak of God, they virtually always speak of the Father. Perhaps a few times they speak of Christ, and that is usually qualified in some way. NEVER of the 'three persons.' and NEVER of 'three persons' come to mention it.

GOD (The Father) so loved the world that he GAVE HIS SON. Etc ad infinitum. 'For us' says Paul, 'there is one God.' Who? 'the Father.' Is that it? 'and one Lord, Jesus Christ.'

Simple. So simple, that a child could understand, so profound that the wisest of minds continue to stumble at it. 'Son' speaks of derivation. Again, common sense would tell you that, but man's wisdom and theology can convince otherwise.

The Father has made himself known in His Son. The three are not equally manifested as three persons.

Those verses say nothing of the sort. It says that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with the God (which refers, once again, to the Father alone), and that the word Himself was fully divine, or deity, as the best scholars concur. Why wouldn't he be fully divine? He is begotten from the fully divine Father by eternal generation, hence the Son. He is not fully divine of Himself. His life is from the Father. Just as the Father has eternal life IN HIMSELF, so he has GIVEN IT TO THE SON TO HAVE LIFE IN HIMSELF.

No, it is man made language which does not exist in scripture, and which was unheard of for about four or five hundred years after the faith was once delivered to the saints. The apostle Paul commands that we 'hold fast the form or pattern of sound words,' yet most of evangelicalism ignores this and set up there own pattern of words based upon their philosophical system of theology. But Paul taught, not in words of man's wisdom, but in words which the Holy Spirit teaches, and which have been once delivered to the saints, without need of addition or substraction. If what you believe cannot be expressed in that pattern, then there is something wrong with what you believe.

KJVO Ruckmanites and others sometimes make the mistake of calling Origen an arian - he was not. This is a common misbelief. He was later called a heretic by the church, but not for his belief on the trinity, which did not differ from any of the other fathers, both Greek and Latin, up to the time of the Council of Nicaea.

Dean

 

2Cor. 11:3 "But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ."

What is the simplicity that is in Christ? There is but one God, the Father. God manifest in the flesh. God is the LORD and the LORD is God. The LORD is The everlasting Father, our Redeemer and Saviour. The Lord is the Spirit. There is one body, one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, AND IN YOU ALL! Praise the name of the LORD God. The name of Jesus.

 

Paul the apostle:

'But for us there is ONE GOD, the Father, AND one Lord, Jesus Christ.'

Dean

 

dean198,

The Father is the one God(1Cor. 8:6) and the Father is the one LORD(Isaiah 63:16). The LORD our God is one LORD(Deut. 6:4). Thomas called Jesus Lord and God because he recognized Him for who he truly is(Jn. 20:28). True worshippers do worship the Father in spirit and in truth because He is the one LORD God. It seems to me you believe the word "and" means more than one being, person or entity has to exist.

 

OK, first of all, I have to correct a big typo in the last post: it should be "Doctrines were NOT taught by the Bible, then disappeared, and then magically restored by the Nicene era/Athanasian church".

So what I was saying, is that while being closer to the NT times does not guarantee it is not a heresy, still, when you see concepts (with associated terms, interpretations, etc) developing over the centuries (especially in an area where the Bible is more inferential, then clear), then an earlier expression is more likely to be closer to the truth. Baptism regeration may have begun in early centuries, but we can clearly see that it was not taught in the NT,and that it started later. One is either a baptismal regenerationist, or he is not. One is either a gnostic, or he is not. With the Trinity, many terms and ways of expressing it were added (including things such as symmetry and words like "person"), and this did develop, and the earlier formulations were closer to the NT (because less terminology and philosophy had been added), though it no less represented "orthodoxy". So the fourth century expression should not be upheld so exclusively, and in ignorance of the earlier simpler expression. There was heresy back then, but at the same time, there was a bit more of a biblical simplicity.

Arianism? That developed centuries later.
Actually, formulas like this and the others sprang out of the same biblical revelation, developed together, and diverged as different points, such as the oneness or threeness of God or the humanity or deity of the Son were emphasized by different people or schools of thought. The challenge was to put all these truths together in some way, and it was hard to do that without overemphasizing certain points and thus neglecting others. Still, there was through all of that an "orthodox" position, but even this changed, being perfected at Nicaea, and polished at Chalcedon. The new terms chosen safeguarded against the heretical views, but the resulting symmetry of it often confused people.

Basically, as I said, it shared in common with Sabellianism the symmetry. Even right before the Nicene Council, the Bishop of Rome himself, Dionysius, "was clearly shocked at the Origen-inspired doctrine of the three hypostases", as suggested by Dionysius of Alexandria, "which seemed to him to undermine the divine monarchy", and he implied they were "virtual tritheists, splitting the indivisible oneness of the Deity into 'three powers, three absolutely separate hypostases, three divinities'" (Early Christian Doctrines, p. 134. This book, by the way, is the source of a lot of my information. It is very good, and an orthodox resource, even cited by CRI and others!)
So we see, the objection raised by many, was that it overly divided, not melded too close together, the Three. This was the opposite direction from Sabellianism, though the symmetry was similar. The problem between the two positions, IMO, was shifting between terms such as "person" and "manifestation", and projecting them onto the same completely symmetrical model.

Hyppolytus was one. Some of Tertullian's statements seem to point to the Incarnation as well. Of course, later leaders saw associating the begettal with His birth or the Creation as being misunderstood as Him being "created" at a point in time (hence Arianism), so they moved the "begettal" back to "past eternity". Problem is, this would the raise the questions of what exactly "begettal" was (apparentely obscuring the meaning of the term), and why it was different from the "procession" of the Spirit. So more philosophy was added in time to try to explain that.
(Another point I forgotto mention is that even the creeds acknowledged that the Father "Was 'OF' non; neither begotten...". In the common symmetrical expression we hear today, you would think there would be a "Father OF God", just as there is a Son of God and Spirit of God.)

With Augustine, you have no problem with me. But the Cappadocian fathers were actually critical of Augustine's doctrine for being overexplained.

Karen Armstrong's A History of God, p.116-8, shows the PURPOSE of the nice symmetrical (i.e.—3 coeternal coequals) formula was basically to make it more of a mystery just for the sake of mystery! To the Greek church, it was something by which one experiences God through contemplation. (This is where the symmetry of it was useful). It "only made sense as a mystical or spiritual experience: It had to be lived, not thought, because God went far beyond human concepts. It was not a logical or intellectual formulation but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason". After all, the Trinity is dogma. We usually think of dogma as those statements, that must be believed INTELLECTUALLY, no matter how ridiculous it seems. But that's actually kerygma! Dogma is truth "that is only grasped intuitively and as a result of religious experience. Logically, it made no sense at all. It reminds us that we must not hope to understand Him". It wasn't meant to be taken literally or to make sense or be explained. But that is precisely what the Western church tried to do (even attempting to represent it through pictures) —only to have the larger society jettison the whole idea in the Age of Reason. Where the East, following the Cappadocian Fathers, started from the threeness, thinking of each hypostasis as the whole (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration, 40:41), the West, following Augustine, started from the divine unity (the mysterious "substance") and then was left trying to figure out how the Three hypostases fit in. THIS is precisely the root of the problem in the West. Looking through history, we see that the West is where all of the later problems with it arose, with dissenters like Servetus, the Socinians, the Unitarians, and now the "kingdom of the cults". The East never experienced all of this dissent over the doctrine. And the Eastern fathers, while regarding Augustine as a great father, were still mistrustful of his Trinitarian theology. It too, like Arianism, was seen as making God seem too rational and anthropomorphic.

 

That is a book I want to read. As I understand it, Athanasius championed 'homo-ousias', and this word was treated with great suspicioon by the majority (the so-called semi arians who are now understood to have been orthodox) who believed that the word was Sabellian. In fact it had been used by the modalist Paul of Samasota. To the Nicene bishops, the word suggested that there was no difference between the Father and the Son. That was why it was understood in the creed that the Son was of the Father by generation.

I need to check into that, and I will probably reply later. I believe that the teaching of the eternal generation goes back to even pre-Christian times: many of the Jews taught the eternal generation of the word or mamra, or wisdom of God.

Yes, I totally agree. I would add Calvinist theology to the mix too though.....one of the reasons the Remonstrants and Arminius protested the Reformed faith was their denial of the eternal generation of the Son, and their teaching that the Son is eternally self-existing. Also, it seems that some of the seventeenth century Anglicans got a good grasp of these things....such as Bishop Bull. There are two Anglican ministers in Australia right now fighting over whether we should understand trinitarianism in the Nicene way or the western post Augustine way. The latter appeals to the falsely so called 'Athanasian Creed' - which rejects just about everything Athanasius ever stood for! Ultimately the truth of Jesus as the Son is simple enough for the simplest of minds, and profound enough to stumble the greatest of minds. Like Peter, we must have the revelation from the Father. We can functionally understand these things without knowing the history! PTL!

What church do you go, if you don't mind me asking?

Regards
Dean

 

True, and the book extensively covers all of this. Many at the time favored homoeousios, which was "like" substance. Then others still held to an economistic view. As Armstrong had said: "When the bishops gathered at Nicaea on May 20, 325, to resolve the crisis, few would have shared Athanasius' view of Christ. Most held a position midway between Arius and Athanasius" (History of God, p.110).

Wasn't aware of him using it, but he wasn't modalist. He was actually the other type of monarchianism: "dynamism", which was the doctrine that the divine Word united itself with a purely human "Christ". (Basically the unitarian theology of the Way Intl. and Christadelphians today). However, modern modalism sometimes does cross over into dynamism when the Oneness people are pressed long enough to explain how Jesus spoke to the Father (they separate the two natures into practically two separe persons. I know this is not officially their position, but it has happened in practice).

Not "no difference", but rather the same "essence" or nature. (Also called "Substance")> But then I guess people could mistake this for "no difference", and thus the same as madalism. However, once again, the main objection of both the economists and homoeousians was that it pulled the three too far apart, not that it meshed them too close together.

"procession" would be the generic term that was understood, for both the Word and Spirit. "generation" was at one point understood as relating specifically to the coming of the Word as the Son, of whom it is exclusively used. Then it was made synonymous, but people still questioned what was the difference between one type of procession and another.

Non-Denominational. One of the NYC area "tabernacle" churches that are basically Independent AOG's (though I am not myself Pentecostal). I just studied the issue on my own when I first came into the faith.

 

Hi Eric, I will have to look again into the Council. These things are fascinating! I find that many Pentecostals functionally understand these things and avoid complicated theological language which obscures rather than enlightens.
God bless
Dean

 

The question isn't is Jesus God? The question is, Who is God? The bible clearly defines God as the Father. Therefore, since there is only one God, Jesus is God in flesh, as it is written.

 

John3v36,

See 1Cor. 8:6 and the opening 3 verses of almost all the books of the new testament. God=Father.

 

Yes, he is The everlasting Father. Agreed?