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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