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Posts tagged Trinity
Mike Reeves on the Trinity (2) God is love
Sep 3rd
So if the Christian God is entirely different to whatever God anyone else worships, then what – or who – is this God? Mike Reeves, part 2 (with a bit of help from the Cappadocian Fathers):
God is Father, Son and Spirit loving each other. That’s it.
Okay, that’s a bit more appealing than Aristotle’s definition. But hold on! One God or three Gods?
But this just looks to us like you’ve got three Gods and they just happen to like each other a lot.
What’s the solution?
We’re not tritheists because we don’t say the Father, Son and Spirit are three individuals; we say they are three persons. … An individual is something that can be divided off … so it can stand all on its own. … Persons need relationship; they can only be understood in terms of their relations. …
God is just these three persons loving each other. But that is not to say there are three Gods here, because their love for each other is so essential to who they are that none of them would exist without the others. …
And so, you see, Basil and the boys are really majoring on verses like 1 John 4:16, “God is love”, because they’re seeing love, which is the relationship between the persons, is the being of God. It makes up the divine unity. God is one because God is love, because the Father, Son and Spirit love each other.
Mike Reeves on the Trinity (1)
Aug 28th
Do you believe in God? Yes?
Whoa, hold on a minute! Which God are we talking about?
Sorry?
Which God do you believe in?
You see, the assumption is that we all know what God is; we may differ on the details, but there’s no dispute about the fundamental definition. So if you were of a philosophical bent and didn’t get out much, you might say:
God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God. … It is clear then from what has been said that there is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible [touchable] things. It has been shown also that this substance cannot have any magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible … . But it has also been shown that it is impassive and unalterable
Many Christians would think that’s a pretty good description of God. Trouble is that it was written by a pagan philosopher from the 4th Century BC!
Those words, from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, are quoted by Mike Reeves in the first of his sensational four-part series on the Trinity, the God of the Bible. The question is whether Aristotle got it right: is his description of “God” a good summary of what the Bible’s God is like?
Mike Reeves’ answer: No.
We need to acknowledge straight up that the Christian worships an entirely different God to whatever God anyone else worships.
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