What is the Trinity?
So I had my religions class today and we started our discussion on Christianity. More specifically, we started talking about the never-complicated subject of the Trinity--WHOA! When I was reading our book, "Christian Theology" I was confused at some points and I've grown up in the church and have somewhat of a grasp of what the trinity is and how it functions.
It did help me see, however, how other religions do not believe Jesus is not God. Until now, I never understood how people couldn't believe this-- "of course Jesus is God!" When looking at it that Jesus was a man so how can he be God really got me thinking. It's a pretty heavy subject and I am not about to try to explain it here.
The biggest and most interesting discussion we had in class today was the fact that the Bible only mentions the trinity (but not called the trinity in the Bible) as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in two verses in the whole Bible! The discussion arose, inevitably, that what if the idea of the trinity was just a man-made idea and we got it totally wrong? That we misunderstood what it meant by the Father/Son/Holy Spirit relationship? No one had a very good answer. They either answered "just because" or "I don't know."
So I started thinking to myself, what would that do to our theology? Our beliefs? I had a discussion with one of my pastors recently about this very subject (about theology changing, not the trinity). We both read the book Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell which I've talked about before, and in it he talks about how people put too much emphasis on the theology of Christianity and miss the big picture. He proposed the idea of (this is definitely a paraphrase) what would it do your faith if you knew that the word used for virgin regarding Mary not only meant someone who hadn't had sex, but also a woman who had had sex only once? And what if it could be proven (by some super-duper sci-fi gizmo) that she was the later definition of virgin? What would that do to your faith? Would it discredit the Bible? Is our faith solely based on theology instead of the message of the Bible? This is just what was going through my mind today during class and I thought I'd share it with everyone. What are everyone's thoughts? Ideas? Insights?
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2 comments:
Fun things. The interesting thing is that while the bible does only refer to the Godhead, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit in a few parts, there are also other parts, mainly in the old testament that refer to more than one part of God as a whole. My favorite is that in the creation poem, God refers to itself as "we." A definate plural. However, this is way before the concept of trinity came about.
I also dig, the boiling down faith to its most simple denominator. For example there are situations in nature where a mamal has a-sexually reproduced. Science has never recorded this in humans, but just a few months ago, an animal a-sexually reporduced that science never noticed.
so what would it do to your faith if that was proven about Mary... or another human has this happen?
I know that I don't have all the answers and I am not placing my faith in shakey and esoteric side issues, but I choose to be humble and state what i believe, and realize that I am falible and may not get it all right, but hey that is what grace is for.
Our Western culture likes boxes. Boxes for presents, boxes for our fast food meals, boxes for moving, and boxes for our theology.
It seems as though we need an answer to everything, whereas God, IMHO, seems to like mysteries.
It's not that He smiles at us stumbling around in the dark, but that, in mystery, He encourages us into a position of awe and wonder and worship.
We don't have to understand, but enjoy.
I think some of the best answers in class were, "I don't know." Because no one really does. We only pretend.
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