Re: See edit. What about 'verse 5' needs more specifics?***

Fordtunate Son

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Re: Fordtunate, have you tackled John 17:1-3 before?

Mar 29, 2024, 12:21 PM

Whoof. The Trinity.

It sounds like that's the root of your question. I'd consider John 17:1-3 on the lesser end of the confusion regarding the Trinity. There are lots and lots of other examples that are equally, if not more, confusing.

It definitely requires a different mode of thinking to get one's head around. But the concept, at its core, is not restricted to religion. It's more fundamental than that. The core of the idea is "how can one thing be many, or many be one, or/and both?"

It helps me to try and think about that concept in other arenas. For instance, in science, the very same confusion arises around the particle-wave duality of light. Light is simply both. Just like the Father and the Son, in Christianity, are both.

Light is a wave, AND a particle. And how one perceives and understands light depends on the experiment one runs. The old adage is "you will find what you are looking for." If you want to find a particle, that's what you will find. If you want to find a wave, that's what you will find. Where that all ends up at is that one realizes that the observer is just as important as the observed. The two cannot be separated in whatever definition one ends up using. Without getting too far down that rabbit hole, check out some Youtube videos on Young's Experiment, or the Two-Slit experiment. It'll change the way you see reality.

Another similar example to the Trinity, from the subatomic world, would be Shrodinger's Cat. The cat is simply dead, and alive, and every other quantum fluctuation in between, until an observer opens the lid and forces it to be one or another. The religious version of that would be, Father, Son, Holy Ghost are the same, until we speak of one, and that 'Trinity' collapses into one at that point.

Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle is the same idea. An electron is a 'smear' of ALL probable locations until the observer, us, forces it to be one singular point. But WE are the ones doing the forcing. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are ALL one, until they are not, and become singular.

A simpler, day-to-day example of that concept is flipping a coin. Is a coin, while it is in the air, heads or tails? It's both. It only becomes one or the other when it hits the ground.

And a fifth example is more definitional. How can black be white? Well, they can't, but they both fall under the definitional umbrella of "color." So, if God is black and Jesus is white, when Jesus says "the Father and I are one", that's like saying we are both color. We are individual color, at the same time we both fall under the same larger category of 'color.'

The Trinity can lead to a tangled mess unless one works to see it in one of those 4 or 5 ways. For instance, if God and Jesus are the same, you have God giving birth to himself, via Mary. And, you have God being crucified, as Jesus, on the cross.

And that list goes on and on. That's why the distinction of separation, but of the same substance, is important to sort all that out. Another crude way of looking at it would be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are all a part of the Family. God is not Jesus, and Jesus is not God, but they are both Family. The theological term for that 'family' is the "God Head."

This was a huge, huge, point of contention between the major churches for about three centuries. The guys down in Alexandria did not see it the way Rome and Antioch saw it. Oddly, at the time all these debates were going on, Jerusalem was a very minor player. The Christian population had moved west by that point.

The crux of the matter was Jesus's use of the terms Father and Son. And the debate (among many) came down to "are the Father and the Son equal, or not?" The Alexandria guys said "Look, no son is equal to his father."

Their argument went like this: "We have lots of examples of Jesus deferring to, asking of, and acknowledging that his father is greater than he is. There is no case where God defers to Jesus. God never, ever says "My son is greater than I." So God is clearly greater than Jesus. That means they are not equal. And furthermore, what father was ever created at the same time as, or existed outside of time in eternity as, a son? The very terms themselves, Father and Son, imply both a difference in age and stature. They cannot be equal."

It's a heck of an argument. And like I said, it took a long time to sus out. In science, the joke is that you never change anyone's mind once it is set, and so progress is made, "death by death." Lol. I suspect that's what happened here. Rome finally prevailed over Alexandria, probably because enough people just died and the argument eventually went away.

You can literally see the fight when you read the Apostles Creed. The language they used is very, very specific, and it was selected to pointedly counter alternate views at the time. It's not just a casual recounting of events, its saying "It was THIS way, and NOT the way you are saying."

Eventually I'll get to all that good stuff, but there's been so much other good stuff it just has to wait its turn.

Here's the classic Trinity graph, showing all components as 'equal.' I'm sure there are some Alexandrian Christians rolling over in their graves and still saying "But Jesus said "My Father is GREATER than I!"

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It's a good question and got me thinking, and that usually leads to another 1500-word diatribe, so here we go...

I often ask myself, "How did Jesus see himself?" Not Paul, or Irenaeus, or anybody else, how did Jesus see himself. When he looked in the mirror, who did Jesus see? And John 17:1-3 ties right into that.

When I read 17, it comes with the implicit feel of servitude. Jesus is looking up to God. He's on a mission from God (just like Jake and Elwood). And he sees himself as a messenger, in the classic Jewish sense. He is doing his dad's bidding. He has some news to share.

God isn't spreading this message, and God and Jesus aren't spreading it together as co-equals. God has set the task, and Jesus is charged with the implementation of that task. That is a Father-Son, Boss-worker relationship, in my mind.

So the transformation of Jesus, who calls himself the Son, and not the Brother, of God, is an interesting one itself. I was speaking the other day in a post about the elevation of Jesus from a humble carpenter to the High Priest of the World with a seat by God, in the Book of Hebrews.

And even there, note that it's not two co-rulers side by side, it's Jesus at the right-hand of God. The classic "right hand man" who is the first in line under the boss.

So how, and why, the perception became of 'equal' is a story to be uncovered in itself.

From Jesus's own words, I think if you sat down over a beer and said "What's this all about?" I think Jesus would say "Well, I'm the Son of God." And one could reply, "That's not really in the Jewish tradition, But Ok. You said it, so let's go with it."

I mean, the Jews fought with God for over 1200 years to have only one, and not multiple Gods like Baal, Moloch, Asherah, etc.

And they WANTED more, but he insisted on one, and killed a lot of them for not going with the 'One' thing.

For a while, God was accepting of other Gods existing and being worshipped by others. Over time, only he should be worshipped. And over more time still, only he was real. So how do you figure you fit in as a Co-God, of equal stature as your Father?"

In the Greek tradition, Zeus had sons like Apollo, but they never thought they were equal to their dad. So are you, Jesus, proposing that you are equal to your Father when you say you are his Son?"

I'm not sure what he would say.

And if the conversation went on and one asked, "Well why are you here?" We know what Mark, Matt, Luke, and John would say, because they wrote it down. But I'd like for you to tell me, in your own words."

I think at a minimum, Jesus would say "I'm here to tell my fellow Jews the end of the World is upon us. And believing this message, that I'm giving you, is how you get to that Kingdom." And beyond that, I'm not sure what else he would say. Others have said plenty. But what would the man in the mirror say?

Anyhow, coming back around to John 17, I do think that Jesus thought he was the Son of God. He died for it, and to me, that shows the ultimate faith in one's convictions. But I'm not convinced HIS view of what that meant was what others, over time, have come to believe what all it meant.

Fordtunate, have you tackled John 17:1-3 before?

Re: Fordtunate, have you tackled John 17:1-3 before?

Re: Fordtunate, have you tackled John 17:1-3 before?

See edit. What about 'verse 5' needs more specifics?***