Trinity (Part Two)

So there has been a bit of discussion around my posts about the trinity starting with my Statement of Faith. I haven't been posting as much as I could because I have been rapped up in researching this topic. First I think that it is important to understand some definition in all this the main belief that I disagree with is called Unitarianism which is the belief that God the Father is God, Jesus the son is a man, and the Holy Spirit (From what I can understand) is an expression of God or a interpretation of God (More or less). The Trinitarian point of view would appose this saying that God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit are both three individual persons and yet one God (e.g. three in one).

The next thing is to simply clear something up, in my first post on this I said that the trinity was a well established belief by the time of Christ. I did miss speak a little on this statement, using the word trinity here is a little out of context on my part, the belief in the trinity would not have been fully understood until Jesus came but the understanding of the basics of the trinity would have been understood since Abraham (Gen 14:17-24).

Moving on from that my primary references for what I am saying (and this goes for my whole blog not just these past few posts):

• Wikipedia
• Basic Theology: Charles C. Ryrie-Moody Press
• Richards Complete Bible Dictionary: Lawrence O. Richards-World Bible Publishers, Inc
• Many Early Church Extra-biblical (Meaning out side of the Bible) Letters, mostly ranging from 50 AD to 150AD which include Justin Martyr and Apology of Aristides. Doing a quick Google on them will yield many results.
• Notes and Classes that I have taken. Unfortunately, at this time, there is no way for you to get this training with out spending several thousands of dollars (or in my case having my parents spend several thousands of dollars)
  
• The Bible (Primarily NASB). You don't need all of these commentaries to come up with the same conclusions, just carefully and faithfully examining the scriptures for what it says (exegesis) instead of reading your own ideas into it (eisegesis). In this endeavor, though, one book that I do suggest is Grasping God's Word: J. Scott Duvall, J. Danial Hays-Zondervan.
  

As far as making a statement from silence regarding the need for a formal doctrine of trinity. I will restate what I said before, there was no need to have a formal doctrine of the trinity until the forth century, under the rule of Constantine because it was a relatively small group of people that thought differently, from the start of the church leaders and people believed in the trinity and it wasn't until Constantine that the small group became louder to the point that that had to sit down and work on the doctrine. This is not uncommon for any movement or belief, from Democracy to Platonism, in fact one of the great things about Christianity and Judaism is that we can actually read about the building of much of what we believe over several thousands of years in the Old and New Testaments. So you could say that this is an argument made from silence, but anyone who would say that has clearly not read any early church letters otherwise they would know that they are actually very vocal on the subject.

On the passage in 1 Corinthians 8:4,6 and on why Paul did or did not say something I can't answer that and no one can. I can however assume that since Paul founded the Church at Corinth he would have taught them the beliefs that he held which would include the trinity (2 Cor 13:14), because off that perhaps Paul didn't feel the need to teach what they already know. None of this is a sound argument because teaching and believing based on what isn't supported in the Bible is a great example of eisegesis (reading your own interpretation into the Bible), so for that reason any argument, for either side of this, should be disregarded in favor of what is in the Bible, which again goes back to this verse is not at all speaking about the trinity.

Referring to the word lords, 1 Pet 3.6, Matt 27.63, John 12.21 are used as verses to denote that the word here in Greek doesn't mean Lord as in God but lord as in anyone above you, saying that they are the same word. This is true, the same word is used in all four passages (the forth being 1 Cor 8:6) but that doesn't mean that it means the same thing, if you aren't confused by this statement you should be this is why the statement is made "it is all Greek to me". Now this is going to be a little hard because I understand that not everyone can read Greek (I have a hard time with it myself) and even if you can not everyone has an untranslated Bible laying around, so a great site to go to is Greek Bible you can go there and look up the verses for yourself and see what I am about to say. Now it is true that the words used in all four verses are the same word but they have different endings. What this means is that the word is changed slightly, in 1 Pet 3.6, Matt 27.63, John 12.21 the word used for lord is kurion but is 1 Cor 8:6 the word used for Lord is kurioV, this is a small change but a critical one it means the word goes from being translates with a lower case l to being translated with an upper case L. It is for that reason that we can say that Lord in 1 Cor 8:6 denotes God not just an elevated man.

Moving to the Holy Spirit, it has been argued that if you see the Holy Spirit as a person you could argue that power as well has person-hood, this isn't true for two main reasons first power isn't spoken of as having a anything that would with person-hood (e.g will, love, reactions), second power is attributed to the Holy Spirit (Rom 15:13,17-19, Acts 1:8). The Holy Spirit on the other hand is shown to have a will (1 Cor 12:11), love (Rom 5:5), intelligence (1 Cor 12:8), these all show the person-hood of the Holy Spirit. It was also brought up that words like God the Son and God the Holy Spirit aren't found in the Bible, this is a true statement you can search the whole Bible and never find either phrase, you also won't find Trinity, Unitarian,Trinitarian, Calvinism, Arminianism , Apologetics, Canon, and many other words that we use in Christianity. But for the sake of understanding just so anyone knows anytime I reference God the Father I am speaking of God or YHWH, God the Son is Jesus, and God the Holy Spirit is of course the Holy Spirit.

Now on to the video The Human Jesus, which is a two hour long video that can be found on Google video. As Craig said in the comments on the first Trinity post to ask people to watch a two hour long video is a lot to ask, which would be one of my critiques of the video itself (I really don't think that many videos that are that long are going to that affective at conveying a point). That being said I have watched it and found it, like most of the arguments for Unitarianism, an example of looking at the context of Bible verses. My first problem with the video is that it really doesn't reference anything, it speaks about history and makes no mention of any text by which they came about this information, we are just suppose to assume that these people in the video naturally know that mind set of the first century church well enough to come up with this belief. My second problem with the video is it takes several passages out of context and one example of this is when the video looks at John 1:1 (This is about forty two minutes in to the video). John 1:1 says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." (NASB). Now in the video the argument is made that no where in the verse is this talking about Christ, they then go into how "Word" here is the word logoV (Logos) and how this is literally the word of God. This a far interpretation of this verse, no where in here does it talk about Christ or anything like that, however Trinitarians don't simply use verse one here, if we pull out here and (As I have been saying through out these posts) look at the CONTEXT of the verse we see a different story come out and a different interpretation is to follow that.

John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. 4 In Him was life, and the life was the Light of men. 5 The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. 6 There came a man sent from God, whose name was John. 7 He came as a witness, to testify about the Light, so that all might believe through him. 8 He was not the Light, but he came to testify about the Light. 9 There was the true Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man. 10 He was in the world, and the world was made through Him, and the world did not know Him. 11 He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him. 12 But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name, 13 who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. 14 And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. 15 John *testified about Him and cried out, saying, “This was He of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me.’” 16 For of His fullness we have all received, and grace upon grace. 17 For the Law was given through Moses; grace and truth were realized through Jesus Christ.

Now here we see a logical progression in thought in regards to Jesus. We start with the "Word", now this "Word" was with God from the beginning showing that it is separate from God and at the same time it is God. This is a both and statement that is made in verse one. Moving then to verse two "Word" becomes "He" and in verse three and four "He" is now the "Light". In verse six through eight we see John the Baptist come into the picture, verse eight also shows us that this "Light" is not simply a man. Verse ten reiterates that it is through "He"/"Light"/"Word" that the world came into being, then in fourteen that this "He/Light/Word" became flesh and dwelt among us full of grace and truth. In verse fifteen we are told that this is the person in which John the Baptist was preaching about saying that He comes after but existed before, and last in verse seventeen this comes to fruition when it finally comes out that this "He/Light/Word" that the author has been talking about is Jesus Christ.

As C.S. Lewis said all of this forces us to one of three conclusions, one Jesus was liar who knew He was not God but still claimed to be, two He was lunatic who thought He was God, but was wrong, or three That He was indeed God.