The Doctrine of the Trinity and Christianity

Conversation
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Isaiah 55:8-9 - “For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.

Psalm 103:11-18 - For as the heavens are high above the earth,
So great is His mercy toward those who fear Him;
12 As far as the east is from the west,
So far has He removed our transgressions from us.
13 As a father pities his children,
So the Lord pities those who fear Him.
14 For He [a]knows our frame;
He remembers that we are dust.

15 As for man, his days are like grass;
As a flower of the field, so he flourishes.
16 For the wind passes over it, and it is [b]gone,
And its place remembers it no more.
17 But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting
On those who fear Him,
And His righteousness to children’s children,
18 To such as keep His covenant,
And to those who remember His commandments to do them.

2 Samuel 7:22 - 22 Therefore You are great, [f]O Lord God. For there is none like You, nor is there any God besides You, according to all that we have heard with our ears.

Job 42:1-6 - Then Job answered the Lord and said:

2 “I know that You can do everything,
And that no purpose of Yours can be withheld from You.
3 You asked, ‘Who is this who hides counsel without knowledge?’
Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand,
Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.
4 Listen, please, and let me speak;
You said, ‘I will question you, and you shall answer Me.’

5 “I have heard of You by the hearing of the ear,
But now my eye sees You.
6 Therefore I abhor[a] myself,
And repent in dust and ashes.”

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Thanks again, Mark, for your willingness to respond to questions and objections. Unfortunately, we don’t seem to be able to get closer together. You seem to have doubled down on your statements, and to have dug in deep to maintain a position that I consider dangerously close to Gnosticism. A few responses to what you have posted in the two posts above, and then a closing remark:

Not personifying God takes one to, at best, Hinduism or Buddhism or Taoism, and, at worst, Gnosticism. To be a theist requires “personifying” God, to some extent. Christians and Jews don’t worship an impersonal One, but a being who has Reason, Will, Love, etc.

You’re misinterpreting Paul’s words. Paul is rejecting pagan ideas of God, but he isn’t rejecting the idea that God is personal. Indeed, if God is not in some sense personal, most of what Christians have been doing in their Church services for two thousand years, and in 95% of their prayers, has been a complete waste of time; they’ve been talking to a being who can’t possibly hear them or care about what they are saying to him. A Christian God who is not in some sense personal is a contradiction in terms.

What do you think the Damascus road experience was, if not a personal communication from God to Paul?

This statement is logically incoherent. But I don’t think I can get you to see that, as long as you are under the spell of Barthian types of theology.

The Lord pities those who fear Him – yet the Lord is not personal? That is incoherent.

The Lord gave commandments, yet the Lord is not personal? That’s incoherent. Only a personal being, or a corporate being channeling the will of a number of personal beings (e.g., the state), can give commandments. “Commandment” logically entails the existence of a personal being, if the true meaning of “command” is grasped.

Only a personal being can question anyone. To say that God questions us, yet is not Himself in some sense personal, is incoherent.

Aristotle’s God is not personal. He (or better, It) cannot create, give commandments, question anyone, love anyone, be angry with anyone, pity anyone, show mercy on anyone. The Christian God can. This is because the Christian God is in some sense personal.

I count myself fortunate to have spent so many years studying the Hebrew Bible, and to have had Jewish as well as Christian teachers. The experience enabled me to avoid the near-Gnosticism that pervades much of Protestantism. The greatest defect of many North American Protestants – and of most of their pastors and theologians – is that they don’t know their Old Testament. Any form of Christianity that does not give due weight to the conception of God found in the Old Testament is a flawed Christianity, and one that will tend in the direction of Gnosticism. I think you are avoiding a full encounter with the God of the Old Testament, insulating yourself from the Old Testament portrait of God by using a quasi-Gnostic reading of Paul as a sort of waterproof shield, to keep the Old Testament conceptions from seeping through.

I think we won’t get much further at this stage. Our disagreement is over large questions of theology, philosophy, and hermeneutics, and such disagreements aren’t resolved overnight. But I thank you for the gracious exchange. I think you are entirely sincere and have the best of motivations. Our disagreement is only over conceptualization.

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And yet, most of the scripture I cited regarding God in this conversation was OT…thanks for the chat.

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Yes, you cited OT passages, but you did not deal with the plainly personalistic descriptions of God in those passages. You sidestepped those descriptions, as if they weren’t there. That’s my complaint – that a theological orientation – whether one should call it Barthian or Gnostic or something else – is causing you to avoid dealing with the details of the text, details which often do not support the theological orientation you are bringing to the text. And if your fundamental principle is that Scripture rather than human theological opinion is supreme, then your theology ought to change to fit Scripture, not Scripture to fit your theology.

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We just disagree…cheers.

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Yes, that’s right. And the only way to settle the disagreement would be through textual study of the Old Testament. It would require both of us agreeing to relinquish all prior theological commitments and to accept the plainest and least forced meaning of the Old Testament text as what the Old Testament in fact teaches about God’s nature. And to alter our theologies, if need be, according to the result. So that would mean you would have to temporarily relinquish the claim that the Holy Spirit has taught you what the Old Testament means, until you could confirm from the text that you have understood the Holy Spirit’s promptings correctly. If one truly believes in sola scriptura, then the text trumps everything – including the strongly felt inner convictions of Christians that the Holy Spirit has spoken to them.

Unfortunately, I have not found, in most “sola scriptura” Protestants, a willingness to go “all the way” with the text and put everything at risk, including their own prior theological and personal convictions. Sola scriptura is almost always endorsed only with reservations, with certain interpretations regarded as beyond negotiation. But unless everything is up for negotiation, sola scriptura is of no use as a theological principle. As soon as one says, “I believe in sola scriptura, but only as long as the results stay within Nicene orthodoxy” or “I believe in sola scriptura, but only as long as the results conform with what I’m sure the Spirit has told me inwardly,” one might as well throw out sola scriptura as a principle, and believe what one intends to believe anyway.

I don’t personally subscribe to sola scriptura – I think it’s a fundamentally flawed theological principle. But if someone else says that he subscribes to it, then I insist that he holds to it rigorously, with no exceptions for anything – for any denominational convictions, for any systematic theology, or for any personal convictions that he has heard the voice of God. He must submit to the meaning of the text, whether he personally likes that meaning or not.