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mackbrislawn
Guest
The meaning of words…people can use the same words but mean something quite different. However, since there is only one true God, and Jesus is divine and a god, He must not be a true god. He must be false.Mackbrislawn,
Please know that I do believe in the divinity or deity of Christ. I just do not believe he is the Almighty God or part of a three in one God. I appreciate your honest observation that early Christians didn’t think of the Trinity as many do today. QEOS has a wider meaning than the Western world view of “god.”
The thing for me is my God has no God. The moment you begin to worship someone other than yourself you cannot be that God… At every stage of Jesus’ life he has someone who is God to him. Nowhere are we told in Scripture that Jesus is the same identity as God himself. He is not that Supreme individual or Being.
Now, Trinitarians do not consider God as having parts; the persons are not parts, even though they can be conceptually separated.
I do not follow the reasoning that if you worship someone other than yourself you cannot be that God. The persons are all God to one another and worship one another, and so it is indeed true, Jesus at all times has had someone who is God to him.
Trinitarians will not agree that nowhere in Scripture are we told that Jesus is the same identity as God himself. They see it all over. Of course it is because they know how to do it; since they have the advantage of the tradition from the apostles, they know how to properly interpret and understand scripture. They are not untaught, as Peter says at 2Peter 3:16.
That is the importance of oral tradition, it provides the paradigm, or pattern, in which to read scripture. Peter explicitly states that without it, you are untaught, and liable to misunderstand scripture, to your own destruction.
Everyone will have some sort of oral tradition or paradigm in which they understand scripture. Catholics believe their paradigm comes from the earliest Christians, but they consider others to have a tradition that begins with some human person, such as John Calvin, Charles T. Russell, or Ellen G. White, et al. These are “man-made traditions.”
Yes, it is indeed true, I’m sure that the earliest Christians did not think of the Trinity the same way as Christians did later. They probably didn’t think about it at all, they merely accepted without wondering. By the same token, I’m sure the earliest Christians didn’t make the distinction between the heavenly calling and the earthly calling either. They knew nothing about it. And the very earliest ones didn’t know anything about the 144,000 as well, because the book of Revelation wasn’t written yet. They didn’t have it to read!
So, deeper understandings develop as time goes on, but the basic understanding cannot change.