And that’s why those who are still learning should not get upset if someone says one’s particular expression is that of a heresy, because we need to know what the heresies are. It’s essential when studying the Trinity.
Dear Portos, You know it took me an awful long time to understand how Jesus who I saw dead on the Cross related to God in heaven whom I prayed to. I looked at the Crucifix and didn’t get it though I wanted to understand so bad… It was someone who was a non-Catholic who explained it to me in terms that I could understand and I had been Catholic all my life. He went through it step by step about the sacrifice of animals and the one sacrifice for all of us that ended animal sacrifices and so was God sacrificing Himself for all mankind…Who can do this but God?? I knew that Jesus was God because I believed that and I don’t know why, well I do now because of the Holy Spirit. I knew that we ate and drank the Precious Body and Blood of Jesus but I never got the connection either, until I was moved by the Holy Spirit… Jesus and God the Father and the Holy Spirit are One… God became man and died for us and we can enter into that mystery and when we are it is the mystery of the Whole of the Trinity, not just Jesus, or the Father or the Holy Spirit. I don’t want to be treated less than I am as I feel I was today. I’m simple and don’t know all the ins and outs but I’m a real Catholic with real feelings and I believe I have something to share and I apologize if I didn’t share it correctly… God bless.
Apologies are not needed. We all fell into some kind of error when we were learning these things and we still probably do. Even priests hesitate to go to deeply when catechizing about the Trinity because, in their own words, “I shouldn’t say too much lest I fall into heresy.”
Yup, was going to pull out the classic line that if i could explain the Trinity to you, then i would be God and you could worship me, line.
Well that made me laugh probably because I’m an Irish Catholic from Chicago.
:irish3: God bless…Yes, that and first of all, a humble submission to what the Church teaches, because she has already gotten it right. Then understanding will follow faith.:irish3:
Well that made me laugh probably because I’m an Irish Catholic from Chicago.
:irish3: I believe we all need to take this to God in prayer for understanding of the Trinity…
And it took time and many heresies in history to bring get all precise in formulation
Sounds simple but it isn’t always simply explained. I could read a thousand posts explaining the Holy Trinity and it could be quite mind boggling and hard to grasp because most of them go on in detail having lost the reader halfway through… Knowing that God is Jesus helps me… Does that mean God the Father is separate from Jesus? Absolutely not… God the Father and God the Son are One in the Spirit of God… Three persons The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in One Triune God…And it took time and many heresies in history to bring get all precise in formulation
Then there is the legend told of St. Augustine - that he was trying to understand the Trinity as he walked along a beach…and he meet a child using a shell to carry water from the ocean to a hole in the sand. Augustine asked him what he was trying to do - and he replied he was trying to put the whole ocean in the hole. Augustine then explained to him he could not do this…
Thank you all for the great responses, however I just have a few more curiosities.
I think it is hard to understand the trinity as a human on Earth, but I’d say, there is a reason they are “God the Father” and “God the Son”. Yes, they are part of the same whole, but they are separate entities and there is a reason one is “father” and one is “son”. I also think if Jesus had come to Earth claiming “I am God”, he would have been poorly received by the Jews.
I would assume this is the Father speaking of Jesus, the messiah. [Just a quick thought, but I just considered this a ‘formal’ annointing of messianic kingship similar to Samuel’s annointing of David. But maybe I err?]
Well, this is why there was much debate over Jesus’ personhood and the relationship within him of the human nature and the divine nature. Dyophytism, monophytism, miaphytism, Nestorianism… It’s the stuff of schisms. But this does not deny Jesus’ divinity or that he is not the same as the Father, which are supported by other scriptural texts and tradition. We see that Jesus is also fully human and obedient and not the same person as the Father. But what does it mean to also then say that the Word was with God and was God and that the Word becake flesh, in addition to your quotes? Or to say that even though he was equal to God, he humbled himself to the form of a slave? These are being put together, Jesus’ humanity and the high Christology we find in Matthew, Johannine and Pauline theology.
He was praying to his Father in Heaven, the origin of his being, and as part of humanity.
The Son is equal in nature. He is only ‘inferior’ in relationship to the Father. The orthodox position takes the scriptural claims (implicit and explicit) of Jesus’ divinity and Godhood and reconciles that with him being different from and obedient to the Father and his humanity. It is the best explanation, even if it boggles the mind. Deviation from orthodoxy is an attempt to lower the mystery of God to fleshly over rationalization.
Best wishes.
So it is wrong for us to say that God has emotions. When we speak of God having emotions, we must be clear that this is only an analogy to the feelings that human beings experience, and like all analogies, this falls short of describing the Almighty. God is perfectly simple and immutable. He does not experience changing emotions or feelings.
The Divine Nature of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit is immutable and cannot change or suffer. Yet the person of the Son suffered in the flesh on the cross. Elsewhere Aquinas says: "As is said in a sermon of the Council of Ephesus [P. iii, cap. 10, “Christ’s death being, as it were, God’s death”–namely, by union in Person–“destroyed death”; since He who suffered “was both God and man. For God’s Nature was not wounded, nor did It undergo any change by those sufferings.”
All three persons are equal in authority, power and glory. No orthodox Christian calls any Divine Person superior or inferior to another. The “monarchy of the Father” means nothing more than that the Father eternally begets the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.
I stated from the start that I was wary of the term inferior due to its possible implications, though I later fell into using it. However, while subordinationism is heresy, relational subordinationism is not. Perhaps it is not stressed by all (particularly in the west), but it is not inconsistent with orthodoxy. Your quote from Saint Thomas is specifically regarding an objection to the Son being equal to the Father in power/nature, and I agree with Thomas, who agrees that the Father “shows” and the Son “hears” as from an eternal begetting, that the Son is equal in power and nature to the Father. He specifically is refuting the idea that the Father’s “commanding” does makes the Father greater in power than the Son, which is consistent with what I’ve said: It does not make Him greater in power.
Actually Jesus was Praying to Our Father in Heaven, not in secret, because Jesus shows us what we should do… Everything that Jesus did was part of His teaching us what we should do and Jesus confirms that when He send out His disciples to teach everything that He taught them. But that doesn’t mean God the Father wasn’t with or in Jesus fully aware of what His Son Jesus was going through…
