I'd like to add a note about a philosophical teaching called divine simplicity. Briefly stated in simple form, that view holds that God cannot be composed or complex because the fact of complexity implies a prior cause in order to get that complex effect. Consider the implied question "Who made God like that?", and the implication that if there is a straight answer to that question as asked, then God would not be God. Without going into the full argument here, I'd like to say that the Venn diagram -- or better said, the earlier creed on which it's based -- can clarify one thing about that: if only the Father is self-existing, and the Father is the ultimate origin of Son and Spirit*, then God made Himself like that. Of all the follow-up questions that come from the idea of God as Trinity, the one I find most useful in increasing our understanding of God is "Why?" If we start with the view that God's will has a purpose within God's own wisdom and nature, and if we consider that the Son and Spirit came about by the Father's will, then "Why?" is a legitimate question. And the answer, the best I can discern so far from Christian Scripture, is to reach out to us: to be God with us and God in us.
* For those who hold the view that the Spirit proceeds from the Father, the Father alone is the necessary prerequisite for the Spirit. For those who hold the view that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, still the Father is the ultimate origin of the Spirit, as the Father is the sole origin of the Son.
6 comments:
Interesting, and helpful.
Hi Martin
Thank you for the encouragement.
Take care & God bless
Anne / WF
Anne,
Sorry, but I don't think this is quite right. The term "self-existent" in theology is opposed to "created", and applies to the single divine nature which is common to the Father, the Son and Holy Spirit. Otherwise, Jesus would not have been able to apply the name "I AM" to himself, or to say that the Father has given him to have "life in himself".
Traditionally, the unique attribute of the Father is usually stated as being that he is "unbegotten" or "from none", not merely that he is self-existent.
If we imagine the Father by himself deciding whether to produce the Son and Holy Spirit, that would reduce the other two members of the Trinity to the status of created beings, as Arius taught. But since (as the Creed says) the Holy Trinity is coeternal, the Father has no existence prior to begetting the Son and breathing the Spirit. Instead, this act is the very life of the Father, because God is love by his very nature.
I understand that it seems paradoxical to say that a Person can be "from" another Person without existing prior to that Person, but this seems required by our other beliefs about the Trinity.
And your suggestion that God decided to be a Trinity in order to be in the best form to save human beings is definitely not in the Creed, nor is it at all compatible with standard Christian teaching. Since God's nature is necessary and unchangable (James 1:17), it cannot depend on whether or not he creates contingent human beings. That is why the Creed is so careful to state that the Incarnation happened "not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh; but by assumption of the Manhood into God", in order to avoid asserting that God's nature suffered change when he came as Man to suffer for us.
Hi Aaron
Sorry I'm late to the comment; I didn't see it right away. There are some misunderstandings that I'd like to clear up but I'll do it in a more organized fashion and not just on-the-fly. I'll follow up once I've got it organized.
Take care & God bless
Anne / WF
Good post, although I agree with Aron. We are fledglings trying to fly across the ocean when it comes to approaching the trinity, but every effort can produce some degree of new understanding. Your diagram is helpful!
I’m actually writing to ask a question... I stumbled on your post in preparing for my sermon on Deuteronomy 6.5 this week. I googled “with all your soul trinity” and your post popped up.
Here’s what I’m pondering this past several weeks as I’ve been studying... it seems there is something of a Trinity of our own being in the Shema... heart, soul, strength. The Hebrew words are levav, nephesh, and me’od, and carry much broader meaning than just heart, soul, strength.
However, I’ve been preparing to preach that the Shema (more properly verse 5 - known as the “v’ahavta”) is about loving God with all of your being. And your levav, your nephesh, and your me’od are simply three ways to describe the same substance.
And the word substance got me to thinking about Trinity. And how each of us is a sort of trinity. And how the imago dei is part of us. And I wondered, “is the Father like the heart (levav), the innermost, central part of our being? And is the Spirit like the soul (nephesh), the uttermost part of our being? And then, of course, is the Son like the strength ( Me’od means more than strength, “muchness, wealth, abundance”)?
I’m still researching, but wanted to bounce that idea off you. What do you think?
I definitely didn't see your comment in time for the sermon you were preparing to preach! I've heard that comparisons to human characteristics were part of the early discussion in the ancient church. Two quick thoughts on that: 1) Looking at the different aspects of our human nature is interesting and useful in its own right; 2) I haven't heard anyone from the classical Trinitarian camp argue that anything in human nature is separable in quite the way as Word of God and the Spirit of God. ... For an angle to understanding humanity it might be productive; as an angle to understanding God it's probably even necessary; as an analogy for the Trinity it will somewhere fall short. (Don't they all?)
Take care & God bless
WF
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