More Musings on the Nature of the Trinity
For more detail about one God as a higher-ordering being resolving the paradox of the Trinity please see my previous post on the nature of the Trinity.
I had written earlier about how man is made in God's image so that what we have in a body (and mind), soul (emotions and basic desires) and a spirit (a life force which animates and connects the two, and values connection to the Divine) are mere shadows of God's version of these features, so that with Him each of these things is a complete personality, separate in will but united in Nature. In fact the root word for "image" where it says in Genesis Chapter 1 that man was made in God's "image" is the word for "shadow".
Man is a "flattened" version of the original. You might imagine us as two-dimensional representations of what was three dimensional. The features you see on the image won't be as complete, won't have all of the same texture and capabilities, as the 3D original. The soul of Man is a flattened (and now unfortunately marred by sin) image of who God the Father is. Our body and LOGOS, the reasoning principle of the mind is a flattened image (again marred by sin) of God the Son, who can be in absolute service to the Father because His emotions and intentions are all Holy (since ours are not, our reason is often at war with our intentions and emotions). Our desire to connect with others, especially the perfect fellowship of the Divine, on the deepest levels, is a flattened image of God the Spirit. It is opposed by our Flesh, which wants to turn the focus away from such fellowship and subordinate it to other appetites. Since God has no Sin Nature, He has no counterpart to our Flesh. All of His appetites are subordinated, or I should say in perfect agreement with, those of the Spirit- the desire for perfect fellowship is pre-eminent.
Muslims sometimes say that Christians worship three Gods. This is of course not true. Our dispute with them is not over the number of Gods, but the nature of God. He is a higher-order being than we are. We are mere shadows or images of what He truly is, and the parts of the image must necessarily have less depth and texture as their corresponding parts on an original expressed in more dimensions. Note this does not apply when an image is made of an image. That is, when the Bible says someone had a son "in their image" the loss of texture and dimension argument does not apply because you are making an image of an image (no dimensionality is lost) whereas when God made man that was creating an image of an original (dimensionality was lost).
I had written earlier about how man is made in God's image so that what we have in a body (and mind), soul (emotions and basic desires) and a spirit (a life force which animates and connects the two, and values connection to the Divine) are mere shadows of God's version of these features, so that with Him each of these things is a complete personality, separate in will but united in Nature. In fact the root word for "image" where it says in Genesis Chapter 1 that man was made in God's "image" is the word for "shadow".
Man is a "flattened" version of the original. You might imagine us as two-dimensional representations of what was three dimensional. The features you see on the image won't be as complete, won't have all of the same texture and capabilities, as the 3D original. The soul of Man is a flattened (and now unfortunately marred by sin) image of who God the Father is. Our body and LOGOS, the reasoning principle of the mind is a flattened image (again marred by sin) of God the Son, who can be in absolute service to the Father because His emotions and intentions are all Holy (since ours are not, our reason is often at war with our intentions and emotions). Our desire to connect with others, especially the perfect fellowship of the Divine, on the deepest levels, is a flattened image of God the Spirit. It is opposed by our Flesh, which wants to turn the focus away from such fellowship and subordinate it to other appetites. Since God has no Sin Nature, He has no counterpart to our Flesh. All of His appetites are subordinated, or I should say in perfect agreement with, those of the Spirit- the desire for perfect fellowship is pre-eminent.
Muslims sometimes say that Christians worship three Gods. This is of course not true. Our dispute with them is not over the number of Gods, but the nature of God. He is a higher-order being than we are. We are mere shadows or images of what He truly is, and the parts of the image must necessarily have less depth and texture as their corresponding parts on an original expressed in more dimensions. Note this does not apply when an image is made of an image. That is, when the Bible says someone had a son "in their image" the loss of texture and dimension argument does not apply because you are making an image of an image (no dimensionality is lost) whereas when God made man that was creating an image of an original (dimensionality was lost).
posted by Mark Moore (Moderator) at Saturday, November 22, 2014
2 Comments:
Taking this hypothesis further: The three Persons of the Trinity are all complete personalities. That is, all have Soul, Mind (LOGOS), and Spirit. They can each perform these functions for Themselves and for each other member of the Trinity, so united is Their nature. This is somewhat analogous to, for one example, a nucleus with a proton and a neutron, with the ID of which is which changing depending on which the electron merges with at that instant.
Much like quantum events, there is no way to define Who has what role for Whom until something happens to break symmetry- such as the Incarnation, at which point one Person of God becomes the Son, which then resolves which of the Other two is Father and the Spirit.
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