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Stargazer43
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01 Mar 2015, 10:30 am

I really don't want for this thread to turn into a debate about religion, but I have a question about Christianity that's been bugging me for a while. I consider myself a Christian and have fairly strong spiritual beliefs, but I can't seem to reconcile one particular aspect.

I notice when I go to church that typically, the pastor will pray to Jesus, worship Jesus, and basically treat Jesus as God. Oftentimes he will never even say "God", but instead replace it with "Jesus". This seems to be the case regardless of denomination, but seems much more prevalent in the so-called evangelical or Baptist denominations. I know that this all goes back to the concept of the Holy Trinity, that suggests that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are inseparable. I have never fully bought into that concept though. As far as I know, there isn't a single instance in the Bible where Jesus referred to himself as God, or asked his followers to bow down and worship him...so why do we do so today? There is even a quote from one of my favorite stories in the Bible in which Jesus says "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God". That quote in and of itself suggests a separation between them and also suggests that even as the son of God he still had his flaws. Does anyone have any insight?



kraftiekortie
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01 Mar 2015, 10:50 am

According to many Christians, God begat Jesus in His image. By implication, he is God as well as the Son of God, according to the theory.



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01 Mar 2015, 10:55 am

The Trinity Concept is nonsense on stilts.

One God is hard enough to swallow. Three Gods in One is an utter contradiction.

Why not the Father, the Son, the Mother, the Brother, the Sister, the Aunt and the Uncle and lest I forget, the Holy Ghost.

God is one big happy Family,.

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01 Mar 2015, 10:59 am

God the Father: The 'Soul' and 'Conscience' of the Trinity.

God the Son: The physical body of the Trinity.

God the Holy Spirit: The personality of the Trinity.


Just as humans have souls, bodies, and personalities, so does God.

Now we can officially begin the usual mud-slinging debate on the existence of God, the definition of the Soul, and whose personality is too under-developed to form an opinion and post it on this website.

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01 Mar 2015, 11:24 am

kraftiekortie wrote:
According to many Christians, God begat Jesus in His image. By implication, he is God as well as the Son of God, according to the theory.


Don't see what that would have to do with it. Back in Genesis God had already created the whole human race "in his image".



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01 Mar 2015, 12:11 pm

He seemed to have meant it, pertaining to Jesus, more literally.

What do I know? I haven't studied theology much.



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01 Mar 2015, 5:47 pm

The trinity began to take shape after Jesus' death. There was a 300+ year debate regarding High vs Low Christology. IE was he a deity before he became human or did he become a deity after his death, and if he was a diety before his humanity what kind was he, was he eternal and infinite like god or did god create him.

The gospels essentially go backwards in time with a Low christology. Mark has him adopted by god at his death, Mathew at his baptism and Luke at his conception. Paul (the earliest of the christian writers) has him as a lower deity who is then elevated to the same level as God, and this is where the trouble starts.

Gradually a High Christology was adopted with Jesus being ever more highly deified, with people arguing was The Logos (The Word) and therefore eternal. Others continued to argue that he was created by god, maybe he was I Am or Wisdom.

Eventually a major row broke out between the priest Arius and his Bishop Alexander of Alexandria. Arius (from Wikipedia) "Arius taught that the Son had a beginning, and that he possessed neither the eternity nor the true divinity of the Father, but was rather made "God" only by the Father's permission and power, and that the Son was rather the very first and the most perfect of God's creatures" where as Alexander maintained he was the Son and therefore divine in the same sense as the father.

Now at this time the Roman Emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity and he saw in it the unifying ability of only having one God, this meant that all the petty arguments about whose gods were greater simply disappeared. Constantine in an attempt to stop all the debate calls a council of Bishops to Nicaea. At the council they thrash out the problems and face a major hurdle. If there is only one God and both the father and the son are the same level of deity IE they have always existed and will always exist, then that makes 2 Gods. If however Jesus is not the same level of divinity then this lessens his status and leads back to raging debate about his power.

Anyhow they settled the matter with the trinity, stating Jesus was the eternal Logos of the Father and they were one and the same and separate, binding them was the Hypostasis (the holy ghost/spirit) and hey presto The Trinity is born. The Nicaean Creed is formed and for ever after anyone not agreeing with it is guilty of Heresy


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01 Mar 2015, 7:35 pm

There are a lot of places in both old and new testaments where Jesus' is made equivalent to God, but as others have indicated, scripture was made to suit the theology.

The Christian trinity was not the first or last of such god-heads. Diana Nemorensis was a triple female god who also made it onto roman coin around 45BC. Lugus was a triple faced god of the Celtics, having roots that go back to Rome in the century before Christ. The Celts also had the Great Mother, a lunar goddess who had three personifications.

There is even some trinitarian association with Morgase of the Arthurian legend.


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01 Mar 2015, 10:26 pm

Stargazer43 wrote:
I notice when I go to church that typically, the pastor will pray to Jesus, worship Jesus, and basically treat Jesus as God. Oftentimes he will never even say "God", but instead replace it with "Jesus". This seems to be the case regardless of denomination, but seems much more prevalent in the so-called evangelical or Baptist denominations. I know that this all goes back to the concept of the Holy Trinity, that suggests that God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are inseparable. I have never fully bought into that concept though. As far as I know, there isn't a single instance in the Bible where Jesus referred to himself as God, or asked his followers to bow down and worship him...so why do we do so today? There is even a quote from one of my favorite stories in the Bible in which Jesus says "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God". That quote in and of itself suggests a separation between them and also suggests that even as the son of God he still had his flaws. Does anyone have any insight?


I'm thinking your preacher is NOT praying TO Jesus, but praying THROUGH him----that is why we are taught to end our prayers with "In Jesus' name, I pray, Amen". Jesus told us that anything is possible, through him----to ask ANYTHING, of the Father (God), but you had to go-through Jesus ("Jesus told him, 'I am the Way...... No one can get to the Father except by means of me'" - John 14:6).

As for worshiping Jesus: maybe, instead, he is THANKING Jesus, for his salvation; and / or, heralding Jesus' good deeds so that the congregation will know of his goodness, and kindness, etc., and trust Him.

As for the Holy Trinity..... I think of it, as a family----a father, mother, and son, for instance. They are PHYSICALLY separated; but, they are forever united, by blood. I feel that the Trinity IS separable; but, UNITED in God's plan for us----His plan, for our care, and guidance, etc. I don't think "Holy Trinity" is meant to suggest "inseparable"----the name, alone, "says" THREE----the name is not "The Holy Thing"; which would, then, suggest one (inseparable).

As for Jesus never saying He was God, you are correct! (He DID say "I am in Him, and He is in me"----but, I took that to be similar to a father and son, on earth, having the same genes.) I think what might be happening, is either your misinterpreting people's actions / words; and / or, people will oftentimes use "Jesus", and "God" interchangeably, and that is confusing. Also, people can get what God said, mixed-up with what Jesus said----and, what Jesus said, that God said, etc.----I've done it, myself.

As for Jesus saying, "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God": it MIGHT not have been meant to be taken literally----He MIGHT have been saying: "Don't worship ME----I'm not the one you should be worshiping----ALL the glory goes to God; and God, alone".



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02 Mar 2015, 2:09 am

When Jesus departed, his disciples would have shared their accounts of Jesus with the next generation.

The next generation would pass the information on to the next generation and so on.

But every generation would add a bit of falsehood or omit something from the information.

This happens deliberately and by accident.

The original message is now corrupted beyond recognition.



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02 Mar 2015, 5:26 am

^
Heck, you agree with history. Makes me wonder why you can't do the same with the ancient story of genesis vs empirical evidence.


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02 Mar 2015, 6:01 am

DentArthurDent wrote:
^
Heck, you agree with history. Makes me wonder why you can't do the same with the ancient story of genesis vs empirical evidence.


Agree with your empirical evidence ? What empirical evidence ?



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02 Mar 2015, 6:05 am

^^ Hey you two.. cut that out. ;)

Stargazer43 wrote:
I really don't want for this thread to turn into a debate about religion...


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02 Mar 2015, 4:44 pm

Trouble is most Christians will not enter into this discussion. It would appear discussing how Jesus became God in a historical context is far to confronting. The history of the first few hundred years after Jesus death has been lost to the majority of Christians, to the point that they do not know why they believe what they do. Or more to the point they do not know why they are told to believe it.

The history of the early church is fascinating, but it also challenges faith in that you learn just how man made the stories of Jesus life, death and rebirth actually are.


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02 Mar 2015, 4:45 pm

Stargazer43 wrote:
As far as I know, there isn't a single instance in the Bible where Jesus referred to himself as God, or asked his followers to bow down and worship him...so why do we do so today? There is even a quote from one of my favorite stories in the Bible in which Jesus says "Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God". That quote in and of itself suggests a separation between them and also suggests that even as the son of God he still had his flaws. Does anyone have any insight?


That's not quite true. Jesus never unambiguously asserts divinity, or being of equal status with God, in the three synoptic gospels, but the high Christology of John has him asserting it unambiguously on many occasions. There he is the Logos, the Word, with God and in fact God himself at the dawn of time according to the author right in the preamble, and Jesus asserts it at various places throughout the gospel.


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02 Mar 2015, 8:50 pm

Shoegazer,

One of the big challenges with the bible is that the philosophy it's comprised of is necessarily obscured - ie. you'll see echoes of it in places like John but in a lot of ways the places ideas or concepts like the trinity came from aren't easily self-related in the bible, much like the words 'soul' and 'spirit' and defining the two as well as the difference between the two seems like a place where the reader is left high and dry.

I do wonder if you'd get a lot out of reading Philo Judaeus, Plato, or some of the Corpus Hermetica just because things like the idea of the world emanating from God's mouth, the seven-eyed stone in Zachariah, the four faces of the cherubim, or the clues as to what the functions of a 'rule of three' would consist of meaningfully in a Godhead as understood by the authors of the old and new testament - you're getting context clues to the philosophy and the meanings behind the symbols that way rather than trying fit a 20th or 21st century frame of reference over them.


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