A Rational Explanation of the Trinity

[LittleLes]

[quote name='Jake Huether' date='Sep 7 2005, 01:25 PM']Again...

The Love of the Holy Spirit for the Father and the Son is simply WHAT God is... God... Infinite perfection.

The Love between the Father and the Son - proceeding from both, is WHO the Holy Spirit is.

I don't think you are reading what we are saying.  You are simply re-stating your own thoughts without learning a thing.

At this point, I must shake the dust from my sandals.

God bless and good luck in your search for Truth.
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RESPONSE:

I fully agree. I'm reading what you are saying but find the arguments to be without consistency or substance. So lets move on.

[son_of_angels]

A quick reply from a non-theologian,

It is a position of faith, though a position not reliant on itself but on reality, that God exists, and reason shows him plainly to exist, for he has shown himself "in sundry ways and divers manners" together with the verse "the heavens show forth the glory of God."

I then can, without the faculty of revelation, conceive positively that God must be the source of all, and that all exists to serve and adore him.

However, the mystery of the Trinity is explained rationally only in the person of Christ, and therefore cannot be explained without divine intervention and grace. Any attempt to do otherwise is an overextention of intellect into will, and therefore an occasion to sin.

Edited September 7, 2005 by son_of_angels

[Guest JeffCR07]

[quote name='LittleLes' date='Sep 6 2005, 10:01 PM']RESPONSE:

The flaw in your argument is the "exact terms which would FULLY
express the nature of God."  But one doesn't have to fully express the nature of God to  understand any number of aspects of his existence or to have evidence of contradictions in some claims made about him.
For example, it is argued that the Son is the Father's perfect conception of his own self. Since existence is among the Father's perfections, his self-conception must also exist. Thus the Son is "begotten" by intellectual generation.

And the Holy Spirit "proceeds" from the perfect love that exists between the Father and the Son. But this love too must share the perfection of real existence.

However, according to the Nicene Creed, the Holy Spirit "proceeds from BOTH the Father and the Son." But then there must be perfect love between the Father and the Holy Spirit which too must share the perfection of real existence. Hence the need to invent a fourth person of the Trinity. And so forth.
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Again, you either don't understand the argument, or refuse to acknowledge it and instead attack a straw-man.

Also, since you supposedly place so much stock in historical accuracy, it would probably be good to know that the Nicene Creed does not contain the filioque, but rather, the filioque was added to the Nicene Creed in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church.

Now, back to the actual issue:

We can say, for example, that God exists. However, by virtue of the fact that He is God, His Existence is something fundamentally transcendent and, as such, cannot be fully expressed via human language. The most we can say is that "He Exists" though this really doesn't fully express His Existence as such.

Precisely the fact that we are attempting to express a divine truth via human language means that whatever expression is used, it will ultimately be inadequate.

Similarly, if we say that "God is Three Persons" our human language fails to convey all of the actual reality of who God is. Then again, when we say "God is One" here again our human language is ultimately inadequate. There is not an actual contradiction in God, but only a semantical contradiction that arises because our language is flawed.

Lets use an example:

Imagine, just for the sake of argument, a wholly and totally unnamed color, somewhere between blue and red. There is no word for this color. We gather and look at it, and, because we have no word for it, we see the red in it, and say "it is red." Then, later, we return to look at it, see the blue in it, and say "it is blue."

Now this second time, we explicitly say that we are not contradiction the previous assertion that "it is red" and at the same time, that first statement does not preclude the second statement, that "it is blue."

These two statements would seem to be in contradiction to someone who did not understand that both statements are failing to convey ALL of the nature of the color in question. But when we understand that no word exists for the color, we see that both assertions are correct and right to use, because it is understood by those asserting that the words do not convey the entirety of the color, but only aspects of it.

With God, human language always fails, and therefore there will always appear to be contradictions to those who refuse to see the inadequacies of human language.

In Christ,

Jeff

[Paladin D]

Littleles, reason [b]alone[/b] does not make one a Catholic, it also requires faith too. Faith and reason work together, and aid each other in understanding.

[White Knight]

Paladin is right, through Logic we can only explain the basics of the Trinity, to understand the fullness of the Holy Blessed Trinity is something else intireally and has no contradiction, just condiction.