God is three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.The Heresies:
Each person is fully God; there is one God
That God is a single being who wears the masks of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as he appears in history. What this lot make of Gen.19:24 and Matt. 3:17, I'm not sure.
That there are three Gods who are as different from each other as I am from you and who come together to divide the booty of creation. What they make of Heb.1:3, I'm not sure
That the Son and Spirit are clones of the Father. The Son is the exact representation of the Father, but he is not a clone. Here is a mystery to be held in tension. Just as Jesus is fully man and fully God, so he is fully the representation of the Father and his complement. There is unity of nature and distinction of personhood: Heb.1:3 again. The Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, but he is neither the Father nor the Son (John 14:23).
That the Son and the Spirit are both eternally God, but that they are somehow less God than the Father, they are "divinity diluted." If the Father was a 100W bulb, then the Son and Spirit would only be 60W bulbs. John 1:1-2 states otherwise.
Perhaps the most common heresy: that at some point before the whole universe was created, the Son and the Spirit were created. There are no verses to refute this per se, but the early church fathers felt that the Son's divinity was so strongly affirmed in Scripture (e.g. John 1:1-2) that "begotten" in places like 1 John 4:9 (sometimes rendered "only") could not mean created.
That Jesus was a normal human being, but at his baptism, he had special powers conferred upon him by the Father, a bit like when Peter Parker got bitten by a special spider and woke up superhuman. Again - John 1:1-2 says otherwise.
Which of these lesser understandings of God do you most easily fall into?
I probably fall into Subordinationism most easily. I think that because Jesus serves his Father, and that he can be "squeezed" into the body of a human, he is somehow inferior. That is exactly how the world thinks, (that if you are are small and serve you're inferior) but this is not how God thinks and I need to learn how to think his/their thoughts after him/them. ;o)




1 be the comment tally:
Greetings Richard Walker
On the subject of the Trinity,
I recommend this video:
The Human Jesus
Take a couple of hours to watch it; and prayerfully it will aid you to reconsider "The Trinity"
Yours In Messiah
Adam Pastor
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