Interpretation the Trinity is polytheistic

[mikewhitney]

What was assumed in the first century was that Jesus was God. And there was no mechanism to understand the “deity of Christ” in relation to the deity of the father in the first century. This didn't become an issue until later.

No reason except that God the Father, the Son of God and the Holy Spirit are claimed to be ‘one god’ but simultaneously three distinct persons – each fully God. This a logical contradiction.

What you are working with is a political compromise arrived at as a result of political maneuvering in the fourth century between the two dominant Christology’s. It could have just as easily gone the other way (i.e. Arianism - where the Son is subordinate to the Father). This Christology was very widespread throughout much of the Eastern and Western Roman empires at the time, even after it was denounced as a heresy by the Council of Nicaea.

Three strikes. You're out.
Jesus kept on speaking of himself as the Son of God. He was about to be stoned for saying this. The Father-Son relationship is obvious in the Godhead. I'm not sure where you find controversy here.

The three as fully God of course is a bit confusing. This is what made the discussion important. You are just bringing up an element of the discussion, not a continuing point of confusion. We only know what God is like based on His revelation of Himself. God is what He is. We are not the ones to define His essence. For there to be a contradiction, you would have to know the whole metaphysical realm of God. I'm not sure how you will attain that knowledge --- or even attain any knowledge of God's realm apart from revelation through scripture.

This was not a political compromise. The meeting was called by Constantine but we have no indication that he forced the choice. Arianism faded away awhile after that because it did not sufficiently match the scriptural concepts. Additionally, we have had 1700 years to reconsider the results -- and we still find the Trinitarian concept as valid. You have to have some miraculous knowledge to counter what is known about the Trinity. If there is a better conception of the Godhead than has been presented so far, I could envision people accepting that.

Arianism was not just of the Son, as subordinate to the Father. Arianism was apparently about Christ Jesus being a creature of the Father rather than the Son existing eternally with the Father. The advice that I give to JWs who visit me is that they need to present a good argument against the Trinity if they think their perception of God is somehow better. It is not reasonable for them to just claim Christ is a creature rather than Deity, i.e. Arianism.

If you wish to prove something contrary to the Trinitarian understanding of the Godhead, you have to find a convincing weakness. (I know... it is a pretty heady undertaking.) This cannot be a supposed weakness built from your opinion about the metaphysical realm of God. You have to find a weakness in the scriptures or find a more acceptable conception of God when reconciling the various verses about the Father, the Son and the Spirit.

If you are trying to prove Christianity is wrong based on the Trinity doctrine, the weakness of your approach is that evaluate the Godhead within the extent of the metaphysical context that you can scrounge up. If you have no basis for verifying the accuracy of your metaphysical concepts, how can you even try to build any argument about the Trinity?

[37818]

Well which is it, was Jesus god, or was he just with god? Could he go off on his own to inhabit a human body while the Father is elsewhere?

JimL, you have a hearing problem: It is not which is it? The Word was both with the God and was God. John 1:1-2, ". . . the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . ." It is what the text says.

[siam]

JimL, you have a hearing problem: It is not which is it? The Word was both with the God and was God. John 1:1-2, ". . . the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . ." It is what the text says.

The text actually says----

1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was with God in the beginning. 3 Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.

All things = God? Is the universe God?...are the plants and animals God? Are all human beings God?

Just as Jesus was created with the "word" so too were all things......

[Tassman]

Jesus kept on speaking of himself as the Son of God. The Father-Son relationship is obvious in the Godhead. I'm not sure where you find controversy here.

Yes, it was assumed in the first century that Jesus was God. But there was no attempt to understand the deity of Jesus in relation to the deity of the father. This only became an issue in the later centuries when competing arguments arose as to how Jesus could be God in a monotheistic religion.

The three as fully God of course is a bit confusing. This is what made the discussion important.

It’s more than “a bit confusing”. God the Father and God the Son and God the Holy Spirit being ‘one god’ but simultaneously three distinct persons – each fully God – is contradictory.

We only know what God is like based on His revelation of Himself.

The problem was to decide which “revelation through scripture” was the right one – that of Arius or that of Athanasius.

God is what He is. We are not the ones to define His essence. For there to be a contradiction, you would have to know the whole metaphysical realm of God.

One doesn't "have to know the whole metaphysical realm of God". A knowledge of formal logic is all that's required to understand logical contradictions.

This was not a political compromise. The meeting was called by Constantine but we have no indication that he forced the choice.

It was totally a “political compromise”. There was not just one meeting under Constantine. There were endless meetings under Constantine, Constantine II, Constantius II and Constans. The politics ebbed and flowed between them with numerous variations of creeds decided, enforced and discarded depending upon whether Arius or Athanasius was in the political ascendant. Ultimately it was the 381 Council of Constantinople under the emperor Theodosius that brought the Eastern Church back to Nicene Christianity – primarily to unify the entire empire as much as for theological reasons.

Arianism faded away awhile after that because it did not sufficiently match the scriptural concepts.

The Trinity Doctrine was finally adopted as a result of political pressure not persuasive scriptural argument. Even then Arian Christianity lasted well into the 7th Century as a dominant force in many areas.

Additionally, we have had 1700 years to reconsider the results -- and we still find the Trinitarian concept as valid.

The very notion of a multi-person godhead is the problem. This is why it’s deemed in 'church-speak' to be a “mystery”, which is more polite than acknowledging that it contradicts itself.

[siam]

"...and the Word was God"
Word = God/God the father....?....

So the "Trinity" could also be understood as "Word", Jesus, and Holy spirit?
...though, according to John 32
"32 Then John gave this testimony: “I saw the Spirit come down from heaven as a dove and remain on him."
the Holy spirit incarnates into a dove--therefore Holy spirit = Dove

that means the Trinity = Word, Jesus, Dove.
the "Word" is God, and incarnates into Jesus and Dove.

[siam]

at some point in Christian history, the third person of the Trinity was "Holy Ghost"?

What was this concept about and what happened to it?

[Hypatia_Alexandria]

at some point in Christian history, the third person of the Trinity was "Holy Ghost"?

What was this concept about and what happened to it?

It needs to be understood that Christianity in its first two and a half centuries was completely fluid. It comprised a number of competing Christian groups that advocated a variety of theologies. Of course all these various theologies were contested and/or condemned by different Christians who held to other theological persuasions. However, it still remains a fact that in those two and a half centuries there was a plethora of different beliefs and a variety Christian scripture circulating.

The whole issue of the Son’s relationship to the Father and a Triune deity arose from the development of the religion in its early centuries. It was the innate discrepancies displayed in John's gospel, the writings of Paul, and other New Testament authors that resulted in the theological controversies and dissensions regarding the relationship of the Son to the Father.

The concept of a Triune homoousion deity remains the fundamental problem within Christianity, namely, the attempt to reconcile the monotheism of Judaism with its ineffable and invisible deity, and the Hellenised concepts of anthropomorphic deities.

For subordinationists who saw Jesus as a divinity but one subordinate to God the Father, the concept of a Trinity presented no problems. Various pre Nicene Church Fathers had been subordinationists of various hues and furthermore the subordinationists had a wealth of biblical texts from both the Septuagint and their own Christian writings that appeared to support their view. Arius had written that "their individual realities do not mix with each other and they possess glories of different levels" and that while each had his own function, the Father is "infinitely more splendid in his glories and is distinct from the Son because He has no beginning".

The pre-Nicene traditional formulations of Christ as logos therefore perceived him as something less than the Godhead and as there was no precedent for an incarnated logos, the Gospel depictions of Jesus could be taken as they were. However, the Nicene Creed that incorporated Jesus fully into the Godhead created a new Christological controversy. Once that formulation was put forward, which contended that Jesus had always been fully God and had existed eternally alongside God the Father and that the Son and the Father shared the same substance [homoousios] and that Jesus had always been part of the Godhead, even during his sojourn on earth, it served to raise new questions as to how Jesus could also be human at the same time, and more to the point, just exactly how human was he?

The tendency for speculation produced an entire plethora of different solutions. Hence there were various theories ranging from the Adoptionists, through to Doceticism, stopping off along the way at the views of bishop Apollinarius who postulated that Jesus had a human body but his soul and mind remained divine; and those of bishop Theodore who argued that Jesus had been conceived twice, once in a divine form, and once in a human form, the so-called Two Sons formula.

Each of these attempted resolutions only served to raise ever more issues. If Jesus was fully man when he suffered was he still man when he performed his miracles? Or was he then acting in his divine capacity? Furthermore, what sort of humanity did he take? Was he Man, prior to the Fall? Man as he is now, lost to sin? Or Man as he would be when redeemed? If he was created as a perfect man as some ECFs suggested, then how was Luke 2:52 to be explained? Luke tells us, Jesus increased in stature and wisdom, that verse implied that, at some point Jesus was a less developed human being. Yet if he was created as perfect man how was this possible?

Prior to his incarnation it was assumed that he was not a man in any way but what happened after his resurrection? Did he revert to just being God? Or did he retain some of his humanity and if so, how much?
As to the Holy Spirit, the views held among some today were not arrived at until the late 300s and even then they were not completely accepted by all ecclesiastics. The Nicene Creed had asserted "I believe in the Holy Spirit" but nothing had been said of the Spirit having any divine status or being related to either Father or Son in any way.

It was St Basil of Caesarea [c.329/330-379 CE] and his fellow Cappadocians who incorporated the Holy Spirit as part of the Godhead but with its own distinct personality [hypostasis]. The earliest treatise that presents the Spirit as a distinct personality is that by Athanasius dating from 350 CE. The three are, it was argued, equal in status but differ in their origins. God always was, the Son was “begotten” from God the Father, and the Spirit “proceeded” in some way from the Father. It is known that Basil had studied the Neoplatonist Plotinus and thus Greek philosophical terms, in themselves complex, were adapted and adopted to produce a solution that allowed the Nicene formula to be reasserted and the Holy Spirit integrated into the Trinity without reverting to Sabellianism [i.e.the belief that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three different aspects of God, as opposed to the Trinitarian view of three distinct persons within the Godhead]. The doctrine of the Trinity stood between the Jewish conception of a monotheistic God, in whose worship Jesus and the Holy Spirit had no place, and Greek polytheism that had no difficulty in accepting Jesus and the Spirit as lesser divinities.

One can understand why the concept of the Trinity was so difficult for many to accept. There is comparatively little in scripture that can be used to support the idea in its final form. The terminology of Father and Son used in the Synoptic Gospels, in fact, suggests a Jesus who saw himself as genuinely distinct from his “Father.” This terminology could hardly be disregarded, and it needed some clever linguistic analysis by the Cappadocians to suggest that Father and Son could be equal and of the same substance as each other. It had, of course, to be accepted that Mary had carried the infant Jesus without providing any “substance” of her own. Although there was some scriptural backing for the concept of the Holy Spirit, it is not portrayed as enjoying a relationship with God the Father as powerful as that experienced by Jesus [as would have to be the case if the Spirit were to be accepted as an equal part of the Godhead]. Basil had to fall back on “the unwritten tradition of the fathers” [whatever that was], as well as “reason” to make his case.

One particular challenge was that the only use in scripture of the term hypostasis in a context in which the Father was related to the Son refers to the Son as “a perfect copy of his [God the Father’s] hypostasis” [(Hebrews 1:3], that verse thereby denying the distinction between them which the Cappadocians had so painstakingly formulated.

Then there was the issue of the eternal existence of the Son. The Nicenes had to deny that God could have “created” Jesus as his Son. Yet the only aspect of Jesus which gave him a distinct hypostasis from God the Father was the fact that he had been begotten as Son. Even if the terminology of “begetting” could be used instead of that of “creating,” “begetting” still involved some kind of action that had to be fitted in without undermining the “eternal” status of the one begotten. As another Cappadocian, Gregory of Nyssa admitted, the concept of time could not be allowed to enter the process at all. So what did “begetting ” mean in this context if there could not be a time when Jesus was not begotten?

[Aside: If at this point your head is spinning just imagine all this being thrashed out in the highly inflected language of Greek with all its subtleties, shades of meaning, and nuance!]

Then again, if the Spirit proceeded from the Father only, did that not assume some pre-eminence of the Father that the Son did not share with him? If so, could they then still be alleged to be equal parts of the Godhead? In due course this problem was to lead Augustine to suggest that the Holy Spirit must process from both Father and Son, the so-called double procession, although this idea never travelled to the east.

[see Freeman, C. The Closing of the Western Mind; The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason]

[Tassman]

Then again, if the Spirit proceeded from the Father only, did that not assume some pre-eminence of the Father that the Son did not share with him? If so, could they then still be alleged to be equal parts of the Godhead? In due course this problem was to lead Augustine to suggest that the Holy Spirit must process from both Father and Son, the so-called double procession, although this idea never traveled to the east.

Ah yes, the dreaded “Filioque clause”, one of the major causes of the schism between the Eastern and Western churches. The Western church proclaims that the Holy Spirit must process from both the Father and the Son (i.e. the “double procession” of the Holy spirit), whereas the Eastern Church proclaims that the Holy Spirit processes from the Father - leaving the way open to an Arian-style subordination of the Son to the Father. In short, a continuation of the same Trinitarian Christology problem that has bedeviled Christian theology ever since the Filioque clause was added to the original Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, and which has been the subject of great controversy between Eastern and Western Christianity ever since.

[siam]

[...If at this point your head is spinning just imagine all this being thrashed out in the highly inflected language of Greek with all its subtleties, shades of meaning, and nuance!]

Maybe...its not the Trinity concept that is the problem for the Greeks but the "One God" concept? Why are these people trying so desperately to smash a polytheistic concept onto a monothesitic framework? What makes it necessary?
Why was Marcion rejected?

[JimL]

[...If at this point your head is spinning just imagine all this being thrashed out in the highly inflected language of Greek with all its subtleties, shades of meaning, and nuance!]

Maybe...its not the Trinity concept that is the problem for the Greeks but the "One God" concept? Why are these people trying so desperately to smash a polytheistic concept onto a monothesitic framework? What makes it necessary?
Why was Marcion rejected?

They had to find a way to make of Jesus a god, so gods word, his creative function, became his son. The Holy Spirit on the other hand, being a 3rd person, I don't get at all. Was the holy spirit gods second begotten son, if not why not?

[Christian3]

at some point in Christian history, the third person of the Trinity was "Holy Ghost"?

What was this concept about and what happened to it?

You will find your answer here:

https://www.gotquestions.org/Holy-Spirit-Ghost.html

[37818]

They had to find a way to make of Jesus a god, so gods word, his creative function, became his son. The Holy Spirit on the other hand, being a 3rd person, I don't get at all. Was the holy spirit gods second begotten son, if not why not?

JimL, One God, John 4:24. Christians know God, by whom Christians have eternal life, John 17:3. 1 John 5:12. John 14:6. Romans 8:9, 16.
1 John 5:9-11.

[mikewhitney]

They had to find a way to make of Jesus a god, so gods word, his creative function, became his son. The Holy Spirit on the other hand, being a 3rd person, I don't get at all. Was the holy spirit gods second begotten son, if not why not?

You have pointed out the weak point of the conspiracy theories. It is the mention of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity that messes up the conspiracy theory about people making up the idea of Jesus' Deity. Like mentioned elsewhere, the addition of the Holy Spirit would not be done by people wanting Jesus to make up an imaginary elevated deity status. The only option is to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior.

[Esther]

Right, so what you believe is that the 3 persons making up the 1 god are not necessarily a unified and indivisable whole, but 1 of the persons, the son, can seperate from the supposedly indivisable triperson god and do his own thing here on earth separate and apart from the other 2 persons?

Yes Jim. They are 3 distinct and separate members. Jesus was on earth praying to his father in heaven for example.

[JimL]

You have pointed out the weak point of the conspiracy theories. It is the mention of the Holy Spirit in the Trinity that messes up the conspiracy theory about people making up the idea of Jesus' Deity. Like mentioned elsewhere, the addition of the Holy Spirit would not be done by people wanting Jesus to make up an imaginary elevated deity status. The only option is to acknowledge Jesus as Lord and Savior.

So if jesus is the only begotten son of god, what is the 3rd person of the trinity, the only begotten daughter maybe, or what?