Diogenes the Cynic

Wouldn't you have to have some idea of what the "right reading" is before you can know if you have the right reading? How do you know you're not wrong?
I doubt that most of us believe that any such "meta-narrative" exists at all, but since you seem so confident that such exists, the least you can do is tell us what it is and how you derived it. Why keep your light under a bushel, eh? There are souls here that need to be saved. Why would you keep vital information away from them?
Personally, I would just like to know the method by which you are able to determine what is the *right* "Christian meta-narrative" and what is wrong.

Incidentally, couldn't God have made it easier on everybody by just giving them a book that clear and unambiguous on its own without having to learn a whole meta-narrative to understand it?

Cross Examiner

I'm sure He could have. But then without the possibility of eisegesis what would that tell Him about you? If Biblical language were more like a laboratory notebook rather than so much ANE poetry and prophecy then how could you feasibly read your own desires into it? Anyway, I must take my leave of this thread. I'm spread too thin as it is and I must tend to my own. While my involvement is in stasis, do please continue talking about this stuff if it interests. I might circle back later on.

RGD

True. And my primary concern here is to discover how the meta-narrative was established: what texts and tenets specifically played into the various assertions that BGIC listed, and which I have 'rationalized' into discrete statements.

So far I don't see that we have made any progress whatever on this point - every request to BGIC is met with a well, tell me YOUR interpretation. But I'm not as yet interested in the interpretation itself - merely how it was derived.

If BGIC's point is that such a breakdown cannot be done - that all statements of Christian theology are pure in and of themselves, and cannot be ascribed to or derived from some underlying tenets or texts... then his statements become merely personal opinions, rather than theological claims. If that's the case then I will bow out - since I'm not interested in BGIC's personal opinions; I'm interested in Christian theology.

RGD

It seems much more likely that the 'Trinity' is an a posterioi rationalization attempt to salvage Monotheism along with the implication of three separate divine entities mentioned in the NT. The idea that maybe metaphor entered into it doesn't seem to have occured to anybody in the first thousand or so years of Christianity.

Sven

Great. RGD asked BGic a question. He came to the thread, waffled a lot, asked questions back, and then left without having addressed the question in an way. One really wonders why he came here in the first place.

andrewcriddle

If by metaphor you means the idea that the Trinity is a way of describing different functions and roles of one God then this was suggested by various early Christians in one form or another.

Sabellius, Paul of Samosata, Photinus etc.

However the church as a whole held such views to be heretical.

Andrew Criddle

RGD

Worse yet, he suggested that I start this thread to discuss that question. While I am disappointed, I am not at all surprised; I am quite familiar with BGIC's track record of evasion and refusal to answer any questions - even when he deliberately solicites questions - indeed, based on the evidence in the very thread that BGIC links to, he never actually answers any questions.

RGD

That's not actually what I meant. If you read the NT, you notice that certain entities are specifically referred to as divine: "God", "Holy Spirit", "Christ". But the Jews were intensely (at this point, anyway) monotheistic. Much of the work of Origen and Tertullian and the original Church councils is concerned with various ways to reconcile those two facts: monotheism, and the identification of three different entities as divine.

John A. Broussard

I'm not quite up to it, but there does seem to be the need for a thread here on these early Christian heresies (and orthodoxies) revolving around the nature of god. Arians, semi arians, homoousians, homoiousians, gnostics--and so on almost ad infinitum. These seem remote to us, but they were then worth pillage, rapine and massacres over them.

I wonder how much we are spinning our wheels in the same fashion? (No killings, so far) Trinitarianism seems to have gone onto a back burner while we furiously debate the nature of an omnimax god. Odd shift.

So much for today's maunderings.

Chili

Sorry, I forgot about my posts here.

??? There is nothing to salvage. Catholicism is a new religion with Christ in our midst instead of a futuristic journey by way of prophesy. The Trinity is evidence of the presence of God that the Jews cannot have in their vocabulary if it is a future event.

They knew and many people knew. I think that fear of God or fear of hell is a recent phenomenon that came with the rise of sola scriptura salvation.

Also note that the Trinity is resolved prior to ascension with "My Lord and my God."