The Learner
Well-Known Member
The above three posts demonstrates "in the name of" relates to by whoose authority something is done.
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I am tempted to weigh in here, but the Moderators might shut it down. So I will just add this for my $0.02:
One can believe in the Trinity (as I do), yet still concede (as I do) that Scriptural "proofs" are ambiguous enough that no definitive conclusion can be drawn from them. You won’t find me underscoring supposed proof-texts, because I’m convinced that none truly qualify as “proof.” From the standpoint of word meaning, Scripture is maddeningly equivocal. Arguments over Hebrew words ending in “-im” as establishing plurality; over how kurios or adonai are to be interpreted as a referent; over proper rendering of phrases like theos en ho logos from a language with no indefinite article and which uses case rather than word order to convey meaning – all of these arguments are, in my view, ultimately unpersuasive, and while each of these have their standard bearers (who will now come gunning for me!), it’s obvious that nothing will ever be decided in this way.
Even where word meaning is clear, intention of the author often is not; we sometimes need to pay mind to the historical context, the intended audience and the purpose of writing in order to distill that intention.
Then there is the matter of separating the pre-incarnate Son from the incarnate Jesus, which injects additional ambiguity when, for example, construing gospel passages indicating Jesus’ subservience to the Father – all of which were all uttered during the 30-odd years that Jesus had “emptied himself” of whatever “equality” he may have had with the Father (Philippians 2:7). How much are we to discount those subservience quotes as a result?
And enough ink has been spilled over John’s Prologue – obviously a key piece of Scripture on our issue. I can add little, other than to point out an exegetical question: given that John was the last to write a (canonical) gospel, are we to understand his Prologue, to quote James J. G. Dunn, “as a variation on an already well formed conception of incarnation or as itself a decisive step forward in the organic growth or evolution of the Christian doctrine.” If the former, it will inevitably cast the incarnation as a refinement of first-century Jewish messianic expectations (which, by the way, come in several flavors), and inform our interpretation of the Prologue.
I am persuaded that the Trinity is, in fact, the outgrowth of the early Church’s effort to understand and explain its own experience of the risen Christ in philosophical terms. And I think they got it right.
My fellow Trinitarians who are in the sola scriptura camp will chastise me. So be it. (I think sola scriptura is so galactically stupid as to make it difficult for me to engage in debate over it -- but I am straying off topic . . .)
There's so much of the Catholic thinking in our culture. For hundreds and hundreds even more than a thousand years there was only one religion. Them or you were tortured or killed.Two Priests, one with a cast on his arm, the other Two were Hippies. When they met each other, one asked, " Hey Man, what happened to your arm? A Priest answered that he fell in his Bathtub. As the Hippies were beyond the Priests, one asked, "Hey Man, what is a Bathtub?" The other said, "It must be a Catholic thing."