Here is an excerpt from that discussion (all personal information and references edited)
You asked for a definition of the Trinity, and that is fair. It is:
Within the one Being that is God, there exists eternally, three coequal and coeternal persons, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Now to move further to the Incarnation, we believe that Jesus has took on an additional nature, that of man.
You said, "I am familiar with the statements which preclude his being God by virtue of the relationship he has with God. With the plain statements that he is man."
That is a classic non sequiter, and that is the basic flaw in your thinking.
I don't deny Christ's human nature, and any plain statement to His humanity are just that... speaking of His human nature. Within the doctrine of the Trinity those don't preclude His being deity. You are assuming what you need to prove. You have decided that if He is a man, than He cannot also be Deity. However, Scripture clearly teaches both (which if we do continue in conversation, I will show you some of them). To deny His deity requires even more explaining away than the clear near time references in Scripture.
I said, "..and some [meaning texts that testify to His deity] that are very plain once we get into the idiom and culture of the time, which is why I often say that the case for preterism is very like the case for Trinitarianism... one has to ask the question, plain to whom? To us, or to the original audience?
And you said, "To us, of course. After all, we're the ones who need to know Christ. Getting into fuzzy thinking under the pretense of understanding the mind of the original audience would be, well, fuzzy."
…..that is so wrong it is hard to know where to begin. First, you again assume something you need to prove. You cannot just state that something is "fuzzy thinking" making it wrong by definition, you must demonstrate that, and that would be an impossible task. Ironically, you are practicing cognitive dissidence here, since you are becoming convinced of preterism, the backbone of which teaches that the apocolyptic texts were clear to the first century audience, and that's how we need to understand these passages, not in terms of Cobra helicopters and nuclear bombs.
Times and cultures change. Idioms change, languages change. If you ever read a copy of the original King James Bible, though it was in "English" you wouldn't be able to read it. Jesus and Paul and the other inspired words recorded in the Bible were written in THAT culture, first to THAT audience... Our culture and even ways of thinking are different today. No socialologist and anthropologist doubts that. If the Bible were written to our culture and way of thinking, it would not have been fully understandable to the original audience, and since they would not have the benefit of resources explaining our culture and way of thinking etc, since we did not exist yet, they would be clueless. We have the rest of the Bible and extra-Biblical literature from that time to help us understand the culture of the day. The Bible did not drop out of the sky in the 21st century, and we cannot interpret it that way.
You say we are the ones who need to know Christ, true, but so were the original audience who were to begin the initial spread throughout the whole world. God has given us ample material and background in just the Old Testament alone and through the many gifted scholars that He has provided to the Church that we are without excuse for not seeking diligently to find out within context (which includes the historical social context) what was being communicated.
My best friend was complaining to me about the idiom of the stars falling and the moon and sun not giving their light in
Matthew 24, and asking how in the world could God expect us to understand that today as meaning the judgment upon a nation? Well first I explained that the OT very clearly uses these symbols. She then said but how would just the average person know to connect these two things... and I replied that God was faithful and would provide the education to those who sought it, and did she ever consider that this may be a reason why she and I were even having that conversation. Possibly God was using me to give her the information.
You cannot consistently hold to preterism and then insist that the words of the Bible must be interpreted according to a "modern" understanding. I don't think you can be consistently anything and really believe that.
The problem if find in discussions with people over disputed topics is that their theology is not a coherent whole. For example, they use one tactic to defeat an argument on subject matter, not realizing (or not caring) that if their proposition is true, it would disprove their theology on another matter. For example, I am a young-earth creationist. Young earth creationists look at Genesis one and see that God very clearly is communicating 6 24-hour days not that long ago. That is what the Biblical text clearly says. However, these same young earth creationists are also futurists. Ironically they don't realize that the very same arguments they use to promote the clear understanding of the time statement in
Genesis 1, if taken consistently through the Bible, would destroy their futurism. They believe two contradictory ideas at the same time, and don't even seem to be aware of it.
Now on point to our conversation, if you really believe that we don't need to understand the Bible within the culture in which it was written, you will never be able to defend your faith and the Bible against charges of internal inconsistency and contradiction. Most claims of such are really just a misunderstanding of the culture and distinctly Jewish way of thinking and clear up once these factors are considered.
For example, how long was Jesus in the tomb. Most Christians believe that the Bible is pretty clear that Jesus was crucified on Friday and rose on Sunday. But He said that He would be in the tomb three days and three nights? There is no way that you can get three literal days and three literal nights without doing severe violence to the text. Holding explains:
This is actually an instance in which we need to understand Jewish idiom, which understood "a day and a night"; to include even the smallest part of a day and night. AJewish source from after the time of the New Testament puts it this way: "A day and a night are an Onah ['a portion of time'] and the portion of an Onah is as the whole of it"; [J.Talmud, Shabbath 9.3 and b.Talmud, Pesahim4a] Other examples of this kind of usage can be found throughout the Bible (
Gen. 42:16, 1Kings 20:29, Esth. 4:16, Matt. 27:63). Jesus was in the tomb for only a small part of Friday and Sunday, but that counts according to Jewish idiom for the entire "day and night" for each of those days.
If you have ever used that explanation yourself, then you cannot possibly say that is "clear" to us moderns, but was something unique to that culture and that day. The examples could be multiplied a thousand-fold.
Holding further says in answering sceptics who cry foul when the Bible is explained in terms of its cultural context: “Let’s put it plainly: The Semites were here before we were, and the message was first imputed to THEM. It was critical for them, as the initial recipients, to get the message clearly,and our own arrogant presumption did not require God to wait several hundred years for Western civilization to pop up so that His message could be imputed in more clear terms. We have only ourselves to blame if we find the message of the Bible unclear. It is we who made our language less colorful and less idiomatic than Hebrew. It is we who choose to look down on other cultures and pronounce them inferior, rather than trying to understand them.
The Bible often uses anthropomorphiclanguage to describe God, and such language is read figuratively. Why not hyper-literally as our modern understanding would have?
Now on to whether this is a salvational issue. With all due respect, I don't think you have thought about this too deeply or logically, and it requires that we get into the philosphy of language. I used this same argument with others, and I don't think you really stepped back and tried to understand the point.
Words by themselves mean nothing. The only reason this sentence means something to you is because that we, as a people, have agreed that in English that certain letters form certain words which have certain meanings. If I were to make a statement such as the following:
The moon is made up entirely of carbonite rock......
I would mean something very definite about the composition of the moon. But let's just say that you read that and although you read the same words, and agreed with me, yes the moon is made up entirely of carbonite rock, but you poured the meaning "green cheese" into "carbonite rock" we would not be speaking of the same thing. In fact the "moon" that I believed existed would not be the same "moon" that you believed existed. My moon is really made up entirely of carbonite rock. Your moon is made entirely of green cheese, because to you, carbonite rock means green cheese. By no stretch of the imagination can our positions be reconciled, and although we apparently "agree" since we use the same "words," it is actually the meaning that we pour into the words, not the words themselves which are determinative. You cannot possibly disagree with this.
It is no different with the Bible, and when we come to
Romans 10:9-10.
,,,,that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
You claim that since both Unitarians and Trinitarians confess "Jesus" that both are saved. That is simply and sheerly illogical and just like the green cheese example above. A Jesus that is fully man and fully Deity is completely different from a Jesus that is soley man. The two cannot be reconciled, and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered the same Being. Sure we both use the word "Jesus," but the word itself has no magic, it is the meaning that we pour into that Word, and the meaning that Paul intended us to pour into that Word. You (and me) just cannot arbitrarily confess "Jesus" and expect to be saved, if your Jesus (or my Jesus) is not the Jesus of the Bible.
I used the example of a lawn maintenance man Jesus Gonzalez. Yep, his name is Jesus, but if he is who I believed God raised from the dead, and who I placed my religious faith in, I am lost. You may feel the example is ridiculous. It is actually very appropriate because the distance between Deity and "just a man" is infinite..... and if you can see the denigration by reducing an only human Jesus to a lawn maintenance man, then maybe you can possibly imagine the denigration of reducing the God who made you into being just solely a man.
This holds true for the other doctrines mentioned in
Romans 10:9-10 as well. The Word "God" is mentioned there as well, but if you pour a different meaning into that word, such as the pagan god Zeus, you also have no salvation. You are an idolator even if you believe that your idols really did raise Jesus from the dead.
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A Belief in the Divinity of Christ is Essential for Salvation
Amen! And well put!
