continued from “A Dialogue on Trinity-II”
Madeleine: Then, when did this become a problem?
Clarke: It became a serious problem some 300 years after Christ, when a certain presbyter named Arius began teaching that Jesus was not God but the first creation of God. God created Jesus first; then, all other things through him, he said. Many preachers did oppose him and a Council was called at Nicaea in 325 AD, in which, after rigorous debates from both sides for a period of two months, Arius’ teaching was declared heretical, or false.
Madeleine: Is the divinity of Jesus so important?
Clarke: Yes, very important. If Jesus is not God, He cannot give us eternal life; neither can He provide for us eternal redemption, nor can He be the author of the new creation, nor a proper mediator between God and man.
Madeleine: What if there were no Father and no Holy Spirit, but only Jesus is God?
Clarke: Then, Jesus could neither be moral nor relational. To be moral would require the presence of another person. One cannot possess nor be the embodiment of love unless there exists an object of that love. God is love, because the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are bound together in the Holy Triune Community by God’s infinite and divine love. If God were not a person and Triune at the same instance, then He would be a lonely person before the creation. But, God is by nature a good, kind, merciful, and a communicating Master. This is only possible because in His being, God is never a singular person, He is a community of three persons from all eternity.
Madeleine: That almost makes it appear as if He was composed of three different persons.
Clarke: Certainly not.
Madeleine: But, if not, how would persons in the divine community be different from persons in our communities, that is, they are three different people? We come back to the same question.
Clarke: This is where faith exhausts analogy from human experience. This truth is so crystal clear in the Scripture and yet we don't find any illustration that could rightly explain it to us. But, someone has offered a few that are close to it.
We don't believe that the three persons are 1+1+1=3
Let's take the analogy of 1x1x1=1; then as
Length x Breadth x Height = Space,
Energy x Motion x Phenomenon = Matter,
Future x Present x Past = Time,
Space x Matter x Time = Universe,
Nature x Person x Personality = Man;
in the like manner, we can talk of the three persons in the Trinity as one God.
Madeleine: Oh, wow!
to be continued…
© Domenic Marbaniang, February 2011.
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