Jesus is God

[dizerner]

Try reading Proverbs 1-8 with the idea it could possibly be that Wisdom is the Holy Spirit, the more feminine personality of God.

[darinhouston]

Hi Darin,

I wouldn't quarrel with his believing it, but I simply can't understand it. I truly don't understand how someone can believe that Jesus just "is" the Father and yet deny they are Oneness of some sort. Whatever it is, it's not Trinitarian. But, no matter what "system" of belief it falls into, if it's true then whatever is true about the Father would have to be true also of Jesus. And I don't believe that can be demonstrated even superficially much less proven.

I resonate. When I said I understand more than when i jumped in, I was referring to seeing now why Dwight see's no need for Jesus to have faith. I still think Jesus was a true man, and so demonstrated for all of us what it looks like to trust in our father in heaven in all things.

My response was summarized from a much longer explanation of my own punctuated movements to and fro in the past ten years on this subject. I tried to save the draft and when I came back to it, it was lost.

Even though the nature of God seems like it should be among the most important understandings to come to, i feel less and less compelled to nail down what all I believe about it. And since I have many more questions than answers, I figured it better to 'sit back down' a while and return to sorting out the muddled view I currently have.

There was a time years ago when I rejected trinitarian categories all together, but the more I read the NT scriptures, I found the lofty language of Jesus by the apostles to be inexplicably higher and wholly other than I had decided it was in my earlier rejection. Among 'orthodox' trinitarians, I'm sure I'd be seen as outside the gate, and that's fine, they're still my brothers and sisters.

Some of my biggest heroes are certainly die hard trinitarians(NT Wright & James White*), and I've listened to them for many years and so am sort of able to articulate the position. Admittedly, as I hear the explanations even come out of my mouth, or by others, often i'm either able to beautifully catch of glimpse of the truth of it, or it just plain sounds like nonsense at times.

The divinity of Jesus is not really that hard for me, what that implies, and/or how exactly we explain the fullness of that is still quite mysterious to me. My biggest difficulty comes with seeing the holy Spirit as a third person. My reading of the Hebrew scriptures was devastating to this view for me, and then in the NT, the absence, or to my eyes anyway, of such elevated language as we find of Jesus makes it at best problematic for me.

*I love James White and his ministry, but I'm no Calvanist. Besides the apostles and prophets, George MacDonald has been one of my favorites for many years now. Where he spoke of Jonathan Edwards' presentation of God, I can only agree and would add to the stack many of the notions of God and his Christ found in the Institutes. At the very end of his "Justice" chapter in "Unspoken Sermons" MacDonald says this of him:

...I love the one God seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From all copies of Jonathan Edwards’s por-trait of God, however faded by time, however softened by the use of less glaring pigments, I turn with loathing. Not such a God is he concerning whom was the message John heard from Jesus, that he is light, and in him is no darkness at all.

We're not so far apart - and again well said. NT Wright has long been one of my favorites, along with Steve. There are a few areas where he loses me and I think he just tries to hard not to go with his style of reasoning clearly would seem to take him if it let him and he becomes a bit sloppy and illogical. One thing that I love is that he seems to tend to avoid categories and historical nomenclature - that clears the way for clear thinking I think but drives Calvinists (for example) crazy. Just as I think he's "on to something" in that area, he just can't seem to let go of some of his presuppositions and I just lose him there. Much the same with his Christology. He seems much more willing to go where I see Scripture going in that area than most Trinitarians but he is definitely still in that vein even if he might not be a credal Trinitarian.

James White is very much a mixed bag for me. I do not like his personality at all and think he's a bombastic blowhard.... but!..... I also recognize the sin in myself when I see how much I love seeing those skills and tactics utilized against Islam and Catholicism and other things with which I agree but I bristle when he uses the approach against non-calvinists or non-trinitarians. On balance, engaging with his positions just doesn't seem "good for me" and I tend to avoid it. His post-debate videos seem downright un-Christian and at the very least are wholly uncharitable and dishonest. His arrogance is just hard to watch for me anymore.

I started my Christology journey with a questioning about the personality of the Holy Spirit - I just don't find it in any way reasonable and at the end of the day the only decent proofs seem to come down to use of personal pronouns, and I think that's pretty weak in light of the distance we are to the culture and language and the freedom they had with notions such as agency and personification and so forth.

[dwight92070]

Try reading Proverbs 1-8 with the idea it could possibly be that Wisdom is the Holy Spirit, the more feminine personality of God.

I can see those chapters being the personification of wisdom, but not that wisdom is the Holy Spirit. Also I cannot see the Holy Spirit being feminine in any way. Jesus always refers to the Holy Spirit as "He". Also, since in Christ, we see all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, then these chapters are more associated with Him then they are the Holy Spirit. Although God created man (which includes both male and female) in His own image, we are never told that God has a feminine personality. God is never referred to with female pronouns.
The church is called the Bride of Christ, so collectively we are presented metaphorically as female, with Christ being our "Husband".

[darinhouston]

I started my Christology journey with a questioning about the personality of the Holy Spirit - I just don't find it in any way reasonable and at the end of the day the only decent proofs seem to come down to use of personal pronouns, and I think that's pretty weak in light of the distance we are to the culture and language and the freedom they had with notions such as agency and personification and so forth.

To elaborate further on my journey if you're interested, there were really two converging streams for me - I was trying to diagram John 1:1 a decade or more ago and it was leading to a lot of observations I had never made about the identities of the referents. At the same time, I was contemplating a binitarian view (not questioning the Christology at all, really, but focusing on the HS as the third person). Seeing binitarian views I had never seen before it led me to a historical realization of the strong binitarian representation at Nicea - then learning more about the history of Nice and especially the post-Nicene councils and history thereafter and the VAST mostly-anti-Nicene diversity of views before and after I realized how the simplistic view of Arius as a lone heretic was not just wrong but was dishonest. There is no way anyone who did any amount of historic research as a scholar could honestly teach Nicea the way they seem to do at seminaries. It just seems like a third rail they aren't academically free to be honest - or they are deceived or just plain disinterested. In any event, that led to a scriptural re-evaluation of the various scripture that seemed plain on their face in light of my traditions and so forth, learning more about the history of various translation and manuscript differences and finding those who believe differently are academically rigorous and not all like the door-knocker JWs Trinitarians lampoon them as, and here I am.

[dizerner]

Although God created man (which includes both male and female) in His own image, we are never told that God has a feminine personality.

The Spirit does the calling. We are called "BY his Spirit." The Spirit is how we fellowship: "the fellowship OF the Spirit."

Who does the calling in Proverbs and with whom is the fellowship offered? It is with Wisdom Who was in the very beginning with God (the Father).

But of course if you think the Spirit IS Christ then they are same thing anyway and your argument is nonsensical and self-contradictory.


If the image of God is the image of God—it is doublespeak to say woman was created in God's image but God's image has nothing feminine.

I would encourage meditating on the mothering aspects of God in Scripture such as a mother hen guarding her chicks.

The Spirit is always in both OT and NT referred to in the sense of a distinct Personality, Christ even distinguished sins against each of the Trinity.

[dwight92070]

Actually, my beliefs about the "Godhead" are less contradictory, it seems to me, than the classic Trinity doctrine itself. Also, I sort of adopted this view from Steve, as He explained to me His understanding of the "Godhead". But I think that He saw me headed in that direction anyway, because I couldn't understand how the Trinity doctrine could say that the Son was not the Father, but Isaiah 9:6 said just that. He shared my frustration and then shared his belief that in a sense, the Son IS the Father, yet in another sense, He is not. (and that that was true of EACH of the three persons)
The apostle John says the same thing: The Word WAS God (the same), and yet the Word was WITH GOD (distinct). Paul agrees with this in 2 Corinthians 3:17: "Now the Lord (this could be either the Father or the Son) IS (the same) the Spirit, yet Jesus called Him ANOTHER (distinct) Helper.
So our understanding lines up quite accurately with the word of God.

[dwight92070]

Let's say:
The Father is A
The Son is B
The Holy Spirit is C and
God is D.

If A=D, B=D, and C=D, then A=B=C=D or to put it in words:

If the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, then the Father is the Son who is the Spirit who is God,
and the Son is the Father who is the Spirit who is God, and the Spirit is the Son who is the Father who is God.

You can't get more logical than that, both mathematically and Biblically.

The Trinity doctrine says:
A=D, B=D, and C=D, but A does not equal B, B does not equal C, and C does not equal A.

This is illogical, both mathematically and Biblically.

[dwight92070]

Try reading Proverbs 1-8 with the idea it could possibly be that Wisdom is the Holy Spirit, the more feminine personality of God.

My understanding is that the only people that the Holy Spirit came on was prophets, priests and kings in the Old Testament. Therefore it seems that the average man would not have access to the Holy Spirit when Proverbs was written. So according to your theory, they wouldn't have access to wisdom either, unless they got it from prophets, priests, or kings, which wasn't always possible, especially if the prophet, priest, or king was not righteous themselves. They could have had access to wisdom, if there was a copy of the scriptures around, but that was quite rare too. Yet the Old Testament speaks many times of wise men, so there must have been a way to access wisdom without necessarily having the Holy Spirit come on them. Also the call of wisdom in Proverbs seems to be to ALL men, not just to those three categories.

[darinhouston]

Let's say:
The Father is A
The Son is B
The Holy Spirit is C and
God is D.

If A=D, B=D, and C=D, then A=B=C=D or to put it in words:

If the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, then the Father is the Son who is the Spirit who is God,
and the Son is the Father who is the Spirit who is God, and the Spirit is the Son who is the Father who is God.

You can't get more logical than that, both mathematically and Biblically.

The Trinity doctrine says:
A=D, B=D, and C=D, but A does not equal B, B does not equal C, and C does not equal A.

This is illogical, both mathematically and Biblically.

You have sort of put your finger on the most illogical aspect of the Trinity - if they are = then they share all essential attributes. If they do not, then they do not have identity. That is the very definition of identity.

[dizerner]

The Trinity does not say the Being of God is equal to the Person of God—or at least it shouldn't, and any who do say that are wrong.

The law of identity allows for overlap. Things can be in some way joined or partially each other.

So in fact, the Being of God is a bigger set including the Persons of God, but it does not go in reverse.

Each Person can share the Being without the Person's sharing each other's identities; a demand that Being equals Person has no basis.


Now, even if it were so, there may be room for things that seem to violate the law of logic to us.

But we should only accept them on the basis of the revealed fiat of God's authority.

That is, if God directly reveals a thing which violates the laws of logic, we are to accept it no matter what, as God is not subject to anything else.

God has things that are completely above creation's ability to understand, and we must humbly accept that.