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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   4031 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 17, 2023

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I’ve been thinking about the concept of the Trinity in Christian thought. Is it just a boring piece of theoretical theology, divorced from the lived reality of the Christian? Is there anything to be gained from meditating on the concept? And I think there is something to be gained, as follows:

In every moment of a man’s life he knows that there is an ultimate judge of his conduct, which is the higher-order faculty of mind that sees the days and months in sum. This higher order faculty is not accessible when we’re in the slogs of work and chores and cares. It requires our whole cognition and usually appears in a designated hour where we consider our life with full attention, but also appears before we sleep. We can call this the Father. For most of our hours in this life we do not access the Father, but instead we do our best to serve him, and this takes the form of the Son. The Father knows with certainty the values of patience, hard work, sacrifice, love, right attention, and has a vivid picture of our desired life. The Son, on the other hand, must attend with whole cognition to the specific instantiations of living. The mind being limited, it can never be both Father and Son. The Father may say that the grain must be harvested quickly to obtain a bountiful harvest; the Son focuses wholly on sowing the field, simply obeying the Father’s command.

The Spirit, then, the trickier element of the Trinity, is this relationship of obedience or love between the Son and the Father, emanating from both the Father and the Son.

Modern theologians might have us believe that the highly theoretical understanding of the Trinity could not be such an immediate allegorization and dramatization of our inner life, but I think this is in error.

Is it just a boring piece of theoretical theology, divorced from the lived reality of the Christian?

Yes, that's my position as a former Christian (and Orthodoxy is much more Trinitarian than American Protestantism). The Bible is fundamentally inconsistent about the nature of Jesus and his relationship with Jehovah. Arianism was an equally theologically valid doctrine.

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