What is the Trinity?

What is the Trinity?
December 20 2002
A Canadian

This, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, thing is always bothering me.
Does anyone have any good explanation about it?


Paul JDSN replied:
December 21 2002

Trinity has to do with an important Christian belief that God was and is present among humans and will be so.
God showed his love through his son, Jesus and also does in his Holy Spirit. Therefore, in Trinity, we see that God is not just foreign to us because of God’s absoluteness.

Christianity believes that God share the suffering of human in history. And God will guard and lead us to the right way through his Spirit.
In common sense, we think that we must serve God because God is divine while we are mortal.
However, in Christianity, God firstly serves human beings participating in our concrete context.

So, we call God as a gracious thing. It is better that you understand Trinity not as a dogmatic formula but as a metaphorical description.


Let us make a modern God
December 31, 2002

“Truth is never absolute, since new discoveries could always replace the old; it has to be demonstrated objectively and measured by its effectiveness in the practical world”


In a reply to an inquiry by “a Canadian” in this forum, Lee SH tried, rightly and scrupulously, to avoid to define or elaborate the dogmatic theology of the Trinity that the Christians for centuries have struggled to understand the nature of God as three persons in One, as early as in1533, the Protestant reformer, John Calvin had the Spanish theologian Michael Servetus executed for his denial of the Trinity

As Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon in the fourth Century, had lamented that the mystery of the Trinity was not only indescribable but also incomprehensible to human mind, the belief in Trinitarianism was the most difficult idea for the human beings to comprehend or imagine the existence of three beings, each of whom is equal to the three, that was shoved into the Christian throats by the arbitrary decree of early Christian fathers.

Jesus Christ, according to the pulpit, is the second person in the Trinity, the Father being the first and the Holy Ghost the third…each of these three persons is God…that is, God exists in three persons, but these are not three Gods but one God revealing himself in three person.

In other words, the pulpit would compare the trinity to identical reflections in the several fragments of a broken mirror, or to the identical composition of water, snow, and ice.

In secular understanding, the son (Jesus Christ) is just as old as his father, and the father is just as young as his son.
The son was begotten by the father, but existed before he was begotten. Christ is his own father and his own son. The Holy Ghost is neither father nor son, but both.
Therefore, it is declared that the Father is God, and the Son God and the Holy Ghost God, and that these three Gods make one God.

Then, who has developed this absurd doctrine that only the gaping primates may take it in their belief system?

It is true that the doctrine of the Trinity is important to Christianity, not because, as LEE SH indicated, God showed his love through his son Jesus and his Holy Spirit, but because it has tremendous implication for how one understands the Jesus who had two natures, one human, the other divine, or who had one nature of a fusion of human and divine…that is, the doctrine of the Trinity consolidated a human Jesus Christ evolving to a divine Son God when the Church functionaries under the guidance of the Pope and the Roman Emperor in the fourth Centuries voted to crown Him with divinity.

In the early Christian history, the theological doctrine of Trinity was hotly debated among the bishops and priests, and the Emperor of Rome, Constantine wanted to settle the matter once and for all, convening the first Ecumenical Council of the Church in 325 CE (Common Era).

At the meeting, the Pope Celestine the First declared, with the help from St. Athanacius, the bishop of Alexandria, that Jesus Christ was the Son of God who has the same nature or essence (homo-osion) with God the Father, therefore, one in being.
Other bishops argued that the Father and the Son were “homo-iousion”, similar essence or nature, which means that the Son might be similar to God, not really divine.
Then, the Pope won and other dissenters were exiled…

The argument over the divinity did not stop there…Nestorius, a monk of Antioch later became the archbishop of Constantinople, taught that Mary, the Mother of Jesus was only the Mother of the human person in Jesus, therefore, she should not be called the Mother of God, “theotokos”, but only “Christokos”, the Christ-bearer.

This caused the widespread anger among the people that gave rise to convene the Council of Ephesus under the guidance again of the same Pope.
He declared that in Jesus, there were two natures, one human, one divine, but united in only one person, the divine Person of the Son of God, and since Mary gives birth to a person cum divine Jesus, not just a body or a soul, Mary could truly called “theotokos” the Mother of God.
When the decision was announced, the people of Ephesus went wild with joy, parading the streets with torches, dancing and singing with abandon.

In the modern society that values only rational or scientifically demonstrable truth, the dogma like the Trinity, Immaculate Conception, Original Sin, or Armageddon theology, becomes an idiotic and absurd problem that occasioned the beau-coup conflicts among the nations.
The Middle-east conflict is one of the human conflicts that was caused by the egocentric dogma of the Chosen Land by the Chosen People with the financial help of the Christian dispensationalists who believe in a God not of love, but of war, the Armageddon theology.

And I read loud and clear that LEE SH sought to bypass the dogma and got back to the fundamentals of all religions; the love of God manifested through the Prophets, Jesus Christ, or Muhammad, warning me not to understand the Trinity as a dogmatic formula but a metaphorical description.

However, his assertion, that “God shares the suffering of human in history, therefore, God is a gracious being”, appears to be a highfalutin self-adulation in his endorsement on the Christian dogma of the Trinity.

From the beginning, God was fundamentally to blame all the sufferings of the human race, contrary to what LEE SH proposed and believed…I only can surmise…that God shares the human pains through his Son to be nailed in the cross for the salvation of the human kinds (the Trinity).

Though I am not using the Bible as a proof-text, God was a slow-learning, bungled, and absent-minded scientist in the creation of the universe, later drowning 99 percent of his masterpiece, human races save a sample of them, and “re-peopled” the world.
(Noah’s cargo list did not have the name of dinosaur since at that time America was not discovered yet?)

Of course, I am sure LEE SH believes that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, and ever-present entity in our life…in this perspective, nothing could happen without his knowing beforehand that it did happen in human history.
Nothing happens without His permission and acquiescence; nothing could happen if He chose to prevent it.

This means that God in his loft throne in the sky allows knowingly inflicting a one-two punch on his products whenever he feels fit to do it, and He is one and only responsible for everything that happens.
And curiously, the devout Christians still adore Him as our Father, “who serves firstly human beings,” as Paul JDSN gloats..

Throughout the human history, people commit as many deicides as they required to do when God no longer works for them, and there is no reason why we should not throw the absurd and idiotic dogmas, like the Trinity, into the dustbin of ancient nonsense and wash our hands.

The concept of loving God is simply impossible to accept after we had experienced the Christian Crusades, Auschwitz and Hiroshima, to name the few human catastrophes, and we are still on the war wagons to kill each other, who I believe are perhaps the poorest of all the invention of God.

If Christ had really been God, He could have proved it, since nothing is impossible with God.
The pulpit where LEE SH works says for thousands years He is coming, He is coming, He is coming, and He still seems to be thinking about it for TWO thousands years and could not make up His mind, while for hundreds of generation billions of His loving products die and go to hell.

Why don’t we kill this slow-moving, unresponsive, and lethargic god of Bible and replace it with more fast-moving, efficient, and passionate god of the present day?
After all, Jesus Christ, the Bible God was born and lived in a cow town, and died ignominiously there only knowing that there was no other place beyond the horizon of Jerusalem, let alone the stupendous nature of real universe.
Let’s create a modern God, folks!