Yes, because that is a horrible way to formulate it. The Father is fully divine, as is the Son, as is the Spirit, but to say that each Person is 100% of God makes little sense. You and I are 100% human, but we are not each 100% of humanity. The Trinity is one in common nature, in will, and in action.My Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church gives the Trinity doctrine as:
The One God exists in Three Persons and One Substance.The Catholic Encyclopedia says
in the unity of the Godhead there are Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another. Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed : "the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God."
Wikipedia (the highest spiritual authority, as you know) says
God is one God, but three coeternal consubstantial persons or hypostases—the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit—as "one God in three Divine Persons". The three Persons are distinct, yet are one "substance, essence or nature" (homoousios).The formulation was devised in the 4th century CE, to solve a longstanding problem in the politics of the early church, namely how to raise Jesus to god status but at the same time avoid the charge of polytheism, which was associated with paganism.
Therefore a number of earlier ideas are excluded by the formulation eg
nor is God a corporation with a board of three,
that the one God has three manifestations, as the Father, as the Son, and as the Ghost
that the Father + the Son + the Ghost = God as with, for example, ⅓+⅓+⅓=1
that the Father is a god, the Son is a god, and the Ghost is a god (and there are no other gods)
nor a partnership of three partners
and so on.
Instead, as the Catholic Encyclopedia entry above expressly states, "the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.". That is, the Father is 100% of God, the Son is 100% of God, and the Ghost is 100% of God. Yet 100%+100%+100% = 300% = 3 Gods, and in insisting that 100%+100%+100%=100% (and only 100%, one god) the doctrine is incoherent.
What Messaien is actually saying is that the Trinity is revealed to us in the Scriptures and in the teachings of the Apostles. I would, however, disagree with him about the idea that the Trinity cannot be reasonably defended and demonstrated from the Scriptures and from careful consideration of what it means to be God.The churches do not deny this. Instead they say that the Trinity doctrine is "a mystery in the strict sense", and that means it "can neither be known by unaided human reason apart from revelation, nor cogently demonstrated by reason once it has been revealed" ─ their words, not mine. But if you unpack that wording, the only meaning is that the doctrine is incoherent, is in plain words a nonsense.
Christ did say that He is not the Father. He did, however, say that He and the Father are one, and before Abraham was, I AM. He also said that he would come riding on the clouds of Heaven (imagery used in the Old Testament almost exclusively for God).(It also leads to nonsensical consequences. In the NT Jesus never once claims to be God, and through Paul and in all four gospels expressly denies that he's God, being instead God's envoy and, implicitly, and in John expressly, having only such powers as God allows him.
You're confusing Trinitarianism for Sabellianism. We literally quote the parts where Jesus prays to the Father as a refutation of this faulty theology on the regular.So if the doctrine is correct and Jesus is God, then Jesus is at all times a self-conscious and deliberate deceiver. Moreover, all versions of Jesus must be taken to be talking to themselves on each occasion when Jesus prays to God;
Jesus was crying out to the Father. Please note that Jesus=/= the Father.Mark's and Matthew's Jesuses on the cross must be understood to have cried out, Me, me, why have I forsaken me?
Also, I see you haven't read Psalm 21 yet? Christ was referencing that Psalm to prophesy about His own death and resurrection.
I hope you don't imagine that's how we think this works. Because this is clearly not how this works.And since Matthew's and Luke's Jesuses are the genetic offspring of God, and have his Y-chromosome,
Each of them have as good a claim to the title of "God" as the Father does, because they all share in His kingship and dominion over all creation. However, only the Father is Father, because only the Father begets the Son and causes the Spirit to eternally proceed. The Son does not beget, nor does He cause the Spirit to eternally proceed.and since under the doctrine Jesus is 100% of God, and the Ghost is 100% of God, each has as good a claim to the title the Father as the Father has. And so on.)
We should properly define the term "mystery" first.Thanks for this. Those exclusions from the formulation are extremely useful.
When they say the Trinity is a mystery, then there is no reason to accept that their formula is correct because they are actually admitting that they don't know, so I don't know how they logically came up with the formula.
The word "mystery", or in Greek μυστήριον, properly means something else. As Metropolitan Kallistos Ware explains in his book The Orthodox Way,
“In the Christian context, we do not mean by a "mystery" merely that which is baffling and mysterious, an enigma or insoluble problem. A mystery is, on the contrary, something that is revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God. The eyes are closed—but they are also opened.”
A good analogy would be trying to see in the ocean. We can see the water around us, we can see the sand at the bottom, we can observe many things about the creatures that live in the ocean. However, when we try to go into the deep, open ocean, we cannot see past a certain point. Everything around us disappears into blue, and eventually black. Things may come into view, but we can never see the entirety of it.The Trinity is like this. We can experience it, we know it is true from revelation because we have seen it and we can explain it and comprehend it inasmuch as humans can comprehend the Eternal Creator, but our understanding is never complete, no matter how long we spend in communion with God. There is always more depth to be explored.
For us, the problem is as follows: To say that the Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son is to confuse the Persons of Father and Son. The Father alone is the source and beginning of the Trinity, and it is from Him that the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds. To have the Spirit proceed from the Son as well is to assign to the Son a quality unique to the Father--namely, being the source of the Trinity. The Spirit cannot eternally proceed from two different eternal points of origin. The Son can send the Spirit into the world, so the Spirit can "proceed" in a temporal sense, but the Son is not the cause of the Spirit's eternally proceeding. The Father alone is the eternal source of the Spirit, just as the Son is eternally begotten of the Father.I suspect that this is the difference between the Catholic view and Orthodox view. It seems that the conflict between the eastern and western Christian church is that the east says that the Holy Spirit and the Son proceed from the Father, whereas the Western church says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son. Also, apparently the Western Christians added words or changed words of the Nicene Creed, so they don't strictly follow it.:
Filioque - Wikipedia
So i think the Eastern Orthodox Trinity is very different to the Catholic one. I do not know if the east has that problem because they say that both the Holy Spirit and Son are subordinate to the Father. The Father would be the source of them.
As St. Gregory of Nyssa explains in his treatise On Not Three Gods, the Persons of the Trinity do not act separately like three separate humans. They share the same Divine Will and they all participate in the same divine action. You do not have three coordinated Divine wills and three coordinated Divine actions as the Mormons teach, but one Divine Will and one divine action that all three share in. So when everything was created, God the Father used His Word (God the Son) and His Spirit to create all things. The Fathers teach that grace comes from the Father, through the Son and in the Spirit. All three Persons shared in the same divine act of creation.I think the biggest problem with the idea of Jesus from the scriptures themselves is what is meant by everything being created by God and through Jesus. How did God do it and why did he need Jesus to create? Or did he even need him? If Jesus is the word then could that be the creative word?
And this is where we get to John 1:1. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This "in the beginning" is a reference to eternity, before time began and outside of time as we know it. "The Word was with God" shows that the Word was there with the Father in the beginning. "The Word was God" is easy to misinterpret in English. It's not saying that the Word is the Father. Rather, it's saying that the Word is what the Father is--i.e. the Word shares the same qualities as the Father. God, divine, eternal, king of all.It is the explanation of Jesus preexistence in the bible that are the strongest points for the idea that he was more than a mere man, if not God.
I don't know anybody who says that the three Persons are each 100% of God. I know plenty who say that they are each truly God and not semi-divine or merely angelic or a creature. "God" in this context denotes not a Person but a Nature. They are all God the same way that you and I are both Human. They are one God because they share one common divine Nature, one divine Will, one divine action and one divine kingship.I don't know whether the Eastern version involves the idea that each of the persons is 100% of God.