I'm probably going to make you all cringe a
little bit here, and some of you more than a little. By the way, I hope you
don't mind if I butt in. Excuse me, excuse me, coming through.
The problems, it seems to me, that we get in to
in these "Trinity" discussions arise not because of the threeness idea of
the Trinity but because of the oneness idea we have about "God." Don't get
me wrong here and blow me off before I even get started. I'm not suggesting
that God is not One: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!" I
think the problem comes in via the way we think of the word "one" as
compared to the Hebrew idea of one-ness. If when we are thinking about the
One God, we are thinking in terms of something like one mark on a piece of
paper, we have missed the idea of oneness which comes out of the Hebrew
mindset. When Moses wrote, "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is
one!" the word he uses here is the same word that he used when he
wrote, "For this cause a man shall leave his father and his mother, and
shall cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh." The word
"One" in a Hebrew mind is relational language; it is the language
of the coming together of a subject and an object. It means unity before
it means singularity. The singularity of God comes out of the
unity of the Trinity; in other words, the one - ness of God is the unity of
the Father-Son-Holy Spirit relationship. The three are one by way of
relationship. That relationship is so tight, so bounded, so bonded, so
substantive, that to try to distinguish the Father apart from the Son
and Spirit in terms of God-stuff, is impossible. The Father can only be
talked about in relationship to the Son. The Son the same in relationship
to the Father, and on and on. There is singularity --one God-- because
there is unity --Father-Son-and-Spirit-- first. Hence the one and the
three are not ideas competing for supremacy in our thinking. The one speaks
to the unity of the three.
Hope that wasn't too convoluted.
Bill Taylor
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