Help me understand what the Trinity is for?

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19 Amen, amen, I say unto you: the Son cannot do any thing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doth, these the Son also doth in like manner.
20 For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things which himself doth; and greater works than these will he shew him, that you may wonder.
21 For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and giveth life: so the Son also giveth life to whom he will.
22 For neither doth the Father judge any man: but hath given all judgment to the Son.

What I’m failing to grasp here, is the point of the Son. To my poor understanding, these verses make him sound like a clone of the Father [by which I mean, he does nothing new]. Well, for what purpose? To what aim? If the Father is all powerful, why does he have the Son, who doesn’t do anything that the Father doesn’t do anyways? Except the last verse, which again, to my lack of understanding causes confusion with verse 19 (if the Father does not judge, and the Son does only what the Father does, how does the Son judge…?)

I’m very lost.
 
SighGuy said:
19 Amen, amen, I say unto you: the Son cannot do any thing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doth, these the Son also doth in like manner.
20 For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things which himself doth; and greater works than these will he shew him, that you may wonder.
21 For as the Father raiseth up the dead, and giveth life: so the Son also giveth life to whom he will.
22 For neither doth the Father judge any man: but hath given all judgment to the Son.

What I’m failing to grasp here, is the point of the Son. To my poor understanding, these verses make him sound like a clone of the Father. Well, for what purpose? To what aim? If the Father is all powerful, why does he have the Son, who doesn’t do anything that the Father doesn’t do anyways? Except the last verse, which again, to my lack of understanding causes confusion with verse 19 (if the Father does not judge, and the Son does only what the Father does, how does the Son judge…?)

I’m very lost.
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Are you asking what is the purpose of a man coming to Earth who is fully divine and in complete unity with the Father doing exactly as He does and yet submitting Himself as a man?

The purpose was for our salvation, to keep things simple. Only a man could die for the sins of man, yet only God could complete the act. It would have been too hard for an Angel or a regular Prophet.
 
Well, not quite. What I don’t understand is, if the Son does nothing different than the Father, why is the Son necessary? Why does not the Father simply come to Earth as man and die for our sins?

I’m not rebelling, of course, against the Christian faith-- I’m just trying to understand it.

For example, let’s say you are a great dancer. You want to go to teach people how to dance because they dance poorly. Why don’t you just do it yourself? Why is it necessary for you to have someone who proceeds from you that does nothing new or distinct from you, to go and teach them to dance? What purpose do they, the one proceeding from you, serve that you can’t serve?
 
SighGuy said:
Well, not quite. What I don’t understand is, if the Son does nothing different than the Father, why is the Son necessary? Why does not the Father simply come to Earth as man and die for our sins?

I’m not rebelling, of course, against the Christian faith-- I’m just trying to understand it.

For example, let’s say you are a great dancer. You want to go to teach people how to dance because they dance poorly. Why don’t you just do it yourself? Why is it necessary for you to have someone who proceeds from you that does nothing new or distinct from you, to go and teach them to dance? What purpose do they, the one proceeding from you, serve that you can’t serve?
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Ah, I see. The distinction between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is simply the nature of God that He has revealed to us. You must not forget that God is One God, God is not three. So God did in fact join us and do it Himself, although He took on the form of a man working in complete unity.
 
I would encourage you to get the book Theology for Beginners by Frank Sheed.

The Trinity is. I AM WHO AM.
 
It is not a matter of ‘what is the Trinity for.’ The Trinity is the way in which God exists. The Trinity exists necessarily–because it is God’s nature to exist as Trinity, just as it is your nature to exist as a human being. I recommend the above book by Frank Sheed as well–Theology for Beginners, along with his book Theology and Sanity.
 
I haven’t read Sheed’s book, but I have read the five-volume about the development of Christian Doctrine by Yaroslav Pelikan.

He was raised Lutheran but joined the Orthodox Church before he died. So, that is his point of view.

In those volumes, he writes extensively how the doctrine of the Trinity was developed and what the opposition to the doctrine was.

The doctrine was not based alone on the scripture that was quoted in the original post in this thread.

It is one of Pelikan’s unspoken assumptions and certainly an explicit teaching of the Catholic Church to take into account all of scripture, as needed, on this or many such questions.

The doctrine of the Trinity is not succinctly expressed in scripture, but is based on many points of scripture and logic. The doctrines, especially this one, were developed in the early centuries of the Church, to combat errors and heresies.

The explicit doctrine of the Trinity is what is thought to account for all the teaching of scripture about God. Certainly there are many points of view about that. Unitarians, in contrast, believed that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were simply different names for God, not a trinity of persons, as the doctrine holds.

Marcion held that the mean and vengeful God of the Old Testament was altogether a different God, than was Jesus. To Marcion, Jesus was “a” God. Thus, there were two Gods.

Marion’s influence was very widespread and long-lived. It took centuries to try to dispel that heresy. As a result, to this day, usually every Sunday Mass we are reciting “I believe in one God” – the formula of the Nicene Creed, to keep people from drifting into or resurrecting the error of Marcion.

Just last night in my Bible study class, a lady was saying that she didn’t believe that God was vengeful, like it says that God punished David by putting four of his sons to death. I hesitated and resisted the temptation to confront her about her Marcion heresy.
 
Development of doctrine, like development in physics theory, is not an attempt to construct something new, but an attempt to better understand reality. The bible is not a book of theology. It is a book of revelation.
 
Thank you for the help in clarifying this. I will be happy to delve into Theology for Beginners and the other works recommended (fitting as I am a beginner, back to the faith for only one year since I left in young adolescence).
 
For me, when I ponder the statement “God IS love” (1 John 4:8, I begin to comprehend a little how there must be more than one person in the Godhead in order for that to be true. To BE love, within the very essence of the Godhead, requires loving interaction/expression to BE there; it requires more than one Person.
From there one can go on to meditate on what the fullness of love between persons would be like. The words of John 5:22 will no longer seem so strange.

(Some things are very difficult to express, so I apologize if it doesn’t make sense to you.)
 
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