The Trinity

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Can someone help me out in more fully understanding the Trinity

The roles of God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Maybe quotes from the Church fathers or something like that.

This could make for some good debate and information
 
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SwordofLight:
Can someone help me out in more fully understanding the Trinity

The roles of God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Maybe quotes from the Church fathers or something like that.

This could make for some good debate and information
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Are you looking for quotations from the Fathers as evidence that they believed in it - or as evidence of what they believed about it ?​

Or, are you looking for ideas which might help to show that talking about the Trinity “makes sense”?

I think it helps to start from “God is Love”, and to think of the Father loving the Son with an infinite Love, this Infinite Love being the Holy Spirit Who is the “bond” of communion between Father & Son.

Of course, no created idea or concept in our minds can possibly be adequate as a description of the Blessed Trinity - so we have to use a large cluster of ideas, so that where one is misleading, others will correct it. Even so, God’s “inner life” - which is what the Trinity is: the interior Life of God - is still far too great to be caught within our tiny minds 🙂 Idols are not - which is what distinguishes them from God ##
 
Frank Sheed’s work on theology has some good excerpts on the Trinity.

One thing I noticed is that many evangelicals have a really bad concept of the trinity. I guess that could be attributed to the buddy Jesus mentality. That is not to say this covers all protestnatism as Calvinist and Lutherans have a solid grasp on this doctrine well they should they borrowed the whole thing unchanged from the catholic church.
But evangelicals have dropped the apostolic creeds from their official a teachings, don’t teach a sovereignity of God famous of Augustine and Calvin so you have a inbalanced Jesus who is more human and less divine. He was fully both as catholics know but evangelicals have lost a some of that. Although none would deny the trinity in discussion they easily get lost in the conversation.
 
One picture is worth a thousand words.

Here’s the icon of the Holy Trinity.

h-t.org/images/HolyTrinityIcona.jpg

Jesus is the Person of the Holy Trinity who is in the red garment, in the center, pointing to the chalice with His Blood in it.

The Person of the Father is on Jesus’ right side… in this icon, He’s in the gold garment.

The Person of the Holy Spirit is in the green garment.

This icon of the Holy Trinity was originally “written” by a Russian iconographer named Rublev. You can do a search on Google about it.

Here’s a site that goes into detail about this particular icon… and how it portrays the Holy Trinity.

business.virgin.net/sound.houses/rublev/rublev.htm

"The Colours

Rublev gives each person of the Trinity a different clothing. On the right, the Holy Spirit has a garment of the clear blue of the sky, wrapped over with a robe of a fragile green. So the Spirit of creation moves in sky and water, breathes in heaven and earth. All living things owe their freshness to his touch.

The Son has the deepest colours. A thick heavy garment of the reddish-brown of earth and a cloak of the blue of heaven. In his person he unites heaven and earth, the two natures are present in him, and over his right shoulder (the Government shall be upon his shoulder) there is a band of gold shot through the earthly garment, as his divinity suffuses and transfigures his earthly being.

The Father seems to wear all the colours in a kind of fabric that changes with the light, that seems transparent, that cannot be described or confined in words. And this is how it should be. No-one has seen the Father, but the vision of him fills the universe."
 
Best source I ever had on the Trinity was Augustine’s “On the Holy Trinity”

newadvent.org/fathers/1301.htm

Keep your aspirin handy, though, and be sure to re-visit your grammer school sentence diagrams, for such great statements as: “But the mind can also love something besides itself, with that love with which it loves itself.” (Book IX, Chapter 4)
 
Try these:
There are three persons in the Godhead; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost [a]; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory. ** **

[a]. Matt. 3:16-17; 28:19; II Cor. 13:14; I Pet. 1:2

**. Ps. 45:6; John 1:1; 17:5; Acts 5:3-4; Rom. 9:5; Col. 2:9; Jude 24-25 .

(My question is Scripture says God the Father & Jesus Christ are in heaven…Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father…The Holy Spirit was sent as a comforter, so He is on the earth. Yet they are one. Can anyone say that Jesus and the Father are on the earth too?)**
 
Just out of curiosity – SwordofLight = An Claidh Soluis?
 
Here is a 12 part lecture series on the Trinity by Fr. Kenneth Baker, SJ.

home.comcast.net/~icuweb/icu025.htm

I admit that some of the terms in describing the Trinity are hard for me to grasp as well because they are philosophical; words like essence, subsist, nature are hard to grasp.

What i have a hard time understanding is how the Trinity shares the same essence.

The Father generates the Son and they share the same essence, but yet I, as a created person, do not share the same essence as my biological Father, do I?
 
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Dan-Man916:
What i have a hard time understanding is how the Trinity shares the same essence.

The Father generates the Son and they share the same essence, but yet I, as a created person, do not share the same essence as my biological Father, do I?
Click to expand...
Yes, you do. There’s three ways to understand essence, and I forget what they are, but you and your father, and incidentally the rest of mankind, share an essence.

A bad example of the Trinity, but a good example of essence (or substance) as it was understood by the Church Fathers who were defining it is three gold statues made from the same pot of molten gold: even when the substance is separated (which with the Trinity is impossible, thus this is a bad example of the Trinity), there’s not three golds, the gold in one statue is not different from the gold in another, but one gold. (Those are gold statues, notice gold is singular, statues is plural.) (My reference, Augustine, On the Holy Trinity, Book VII Chapter 6… he even says it’s a bad example of the Trinity in there, but he’s a bit more wordy than me about it.)

Another way to understand essence is that it comes from the Latin word esse, which means, “to be.” So, essence is the being or “isness” (to coin a word) of something. He is a human, same as his father.

Another example, he is a Kennedy, just like his Father, and he is a Buchanan, just like his Mother. He has the rights that a Kennedy has and those that a Buchanan has. (At the Highland festival, he can wear either kilt, for example, or even one that has both tartans.) Likewise, Jesus is Divine, same as his Father, and is human, same as his mother. He has the power to live without sin, and forgive sin, as granted by his Divine nature, and to pay the debt for sin through death, as is fitting his human nature.

Don’t let the big words theologians use scare you. Ask them to define it. If they can’t, understand that they don’t understand the concept any better than you do, and are trying to scare you into thinking different so they won’t loose their job. Then go look it up, and if you’re a nice kind of person, explain it to them.
 
  1. God has a perfect idea of himself otherwise God is ignorant of himself.
  2. God is real, if God has perfect idea of himself it must include reality othewise if reality is omitted it would be imperfect.
    3.Therefore, in God there are two realities. that of God and his perfect idea of himself.
    God who generates his perfect idea of himself is Father… and the perfect idea of himself generated is the Son.
  3. Love is to give all good.
  4. God is all good.
  5. If God is to love he would give all good which is himself.hence God gives God.
    God that is given by God is the HolySpirit
That is the trinity… the Son is Gods perfect idea of himself…whereas HolySpirit is Gods love
 
trinity can be demonstrated in deductive reasoning

Father and Son
  1. There is one God who has a complete and perfect idea of himself otherwise He is ignorant of himself.
  2. God is real not imaginary, if God has a complete and perfect idea of himself it must include reality so that God’s complete and perfect idea of himself is in itself real, otherwise it would be incomplete and imperfect for omitting his reality.
  3. Therefore, in one God there are two realities, one reality is that of God and the other reality is that of His complete and perfect idea of himself.
    God who eternally generates his complete and perfect idea of himself is the Father since he is the origin.
    The complete and perfect idea of himself generated eternally from the mind of God since God always has idea of himself, is the Son.(jn 1:1)
    Both Father and Son are respectively real.
Holy Spirit.
  1. Love is to give all good.
  2. God is all good
  3. Therefore when God loves,God gives himself, he cannot give goodness less than himself, he must give all good who is himself, otherwise it is not love.
    .Since himself is God…hence God gives God.
God given by God in love is the Holy Spirit.

So, we have one God Father Son and the Holy Spirit.

Where am i not logical here? what number and why?
 
I would also like to think of the Blessed Trinity as three infinitely long lines, each perfectly parallel to one another, yet are so near each other that they appear as one single line.

Gerry 🙂
 
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Dan-Man916:
What i have a hard time understanding is how the Trinity shares the same essence.

The Father generates the Son and they share the same essence, but yet I, as a created person, do not share the same essence as my biological Father, do I?
Click to expand...
You possess human nature, and your father does so as well. In that sense you share something in common, humanity, yet you are not your father. In this sense it somehow, though imperfectly, approximates the nature of the Blessed Trinity.

Gerry 🙂
 
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