As I see it, Parker’s explanation of how Mormons see their ‘trinity’ is that the father, son and holy spirit are three
separate people in ‘one god’. But, they’re only considered to be a ‘trinity’ because they’re ‘one in purpose’, so actually, they’re still just three separate ‘entities’ that agree on stuff. They also happen to somehow be physically related, through some past ‘sealed eternal marriage’ between the father and his ‘goddess wife’, on some other distant planet. If all of that is true, then, by that definition in combination with what the Gospels tell us, then
all of us should already be ‘gods’, just like Jesus, because by being in the Body of Christ (His True Church) we are
all ‘at one’ with Him, even while we’re still in this life. Aren’t we?
Tony888;8167992:
I like this simple comparison
Catholics believe there are three seperate persons unitied in one being (united in one purpose)
LDS beleive there are three seperate beings united in one purpose
Both sides are left with Father, Son and Holy Spirit acting in the same way
They are related in that God created them. If you want to use a DNA analogy, your Trinity persons would share the exact same dna
Introducing deification and Theosis vs Exaltation is too complicated to address. I will remind you that the RCC teaches “The Word became man so that man might become God” Why do mock the LDS for believing this Christian teaching?
Tony, the RCC Trinity only has One Member that would have any DNA, at all, and that would be Jesus. He is the only One that
ever existed, at any point in time, with human flesh and bones. Spiritual Beings do
not have DNA because they do not have
physical bodies.
To a Catholic, “One in
Being” =
One God.
The LDS concept of ‘exaltation’ has absolutely
nothing in common with the RCC view of sanctification, in the least bit. We don’t count the days until we become gods, then leave the Holy Trinity behind to start our own family of people that would worship* us*. We count the days until we can spend all eternity
with the Holy Trinity in perfect love, joy and happiness, as adopted members of the eternal Family of God. We
never contemplate being God’s equal, in
any way. That was the lie that the serpent told Eve, that they (Adam & Eve) would become ‘as gods’ if they ate the fruit. Instead, they got thrown out of Paradise to suffer and die on the earth, along with their children, until the time that a Savior would come to redeem them.
There’s a huge difference between the Holy Trinity, seen as ‘three separate beings united in one purpose’ as viewed by LDS, and the RCC believing that there are three separate Persons, united in One God. There is no real similarity in those two concepts in the least. The LDS look at the Trinity as one would look at the Three Musketeers (who I happen to love, and I’m only using them as an acceptable example of three different people that were ‘united in one purpose’, for comparative purposes). Would you agree that they would be a simple but fair example of the LDS concept of the Trinity?
Now, compare that to the Catholic teaching, where we also have those
same three ‘beings’, but for us, they are all
inseparable parts of the
same God.
One God.
Not three gods. I’ve been giving a lot of prayerful thought to trying to come up with a way to describe the way Catholics see the Holy Trinity that would explain it in very simple terms, that even a child could understand. I think I may have found one.
This may seem pretty silly, but I think it makes it much easier to understand how the Holy Trinity exists as One God. Have you ever really looked at a peach? No doubt you have, but I doubt that you have ever thought about it the way I was thinking about it. At the center of the peach is a stone. It’s really just a big seed. All around that stone, is the sweet golden flesh. That’s the part that we all love to eat. Outside of the flesh, is the skin that wraps around and completely surrounds both the flesh and the peach stone. I was contemplating how that simple, lowly peach, can represent the Trinity of God so perfectly!
To my mind, the stone would represent the Father. He’s the center of the Trinity, and through His power,
all of creation comes into existence out of
nothing but God, Himself. I can easily picture the flesh of the peach as representing Jesus. He emanates from and completely surrounds the Father, with His Eternal Love. He is inseparable from Him. Nothing in all of creation can
ever separate Them from each other. The flesh of that peach also reminds me of the human flesh that Jesus willingly took upon Himself when He humbled Himself, to become like one of us. It’s also that same sweet flesh that He left as His gift to us, that we consume whenever we partake of the Holy Eucharist. Last, but by no means least, we have the skin of the peach. The skin surrounds
both the flesh
and the stone of the peach (the Father
and the Son). I saw that skin as representing the Holy Spirit, that binds the Son and the Father together by His Eternal Love for both of Them, that also emanates from Them to Him in return. Even the color of the peach’s skin reflects the colors of fire, so that it also perfectly represents the fire of God’s Love in the Holy Spirit.
The peach is one, single, lowly fruit. It’s not three different fruits, it’s just one, but it’s made up of three
completely different parts. Each section alone, can’t really be called ‘a peach’. They have to stay together as a whole to be called that. If any of those parts was ever separated from the others, then they could no longer be called ‘a whole peach’. The Trinity is One.
Sorry about the Battlestar Galactica remarks, but a Mormon really did tell me that.
