Algo, unless I am mistaken, I believe the material you posted originated from the below people. Of course, as guanophore pointed out, it is your responsibility to give proper references to your sources.
St. Thomas Aquinas:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Summa_...rt/Question_30St. Ambrose:
http://christianbookshelf.org/ambros..._father_is.htmSt. Victor of Lerins:
http://www.voskrese.info/spl/lerins16.htmlAt this point I think I need to reiterate the challenge I set before you, and maybe to give it a bit more clarification.
The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity teaches the following:
There is one God who exists in the perfect unity of three divine persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Divinity does not exist apart from these specific divine persons, therefore in the one God there are three and only three persons, no more, no less. The substantial nature of divinity shared by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is exactly the same, which means each person is the Eternal Living God. Despite this perfect unity, each divine person is fully distinct from the others. In light of all this, it is taught that the Father is the Son and is the Holy Spirit, but at the same time the Father is not the Son and is not the Holy Spirit. This same formula is used for each person (i.e., the Son is the Father, the Son is not the Father, etc.).In terms of the ramifications of this teaching for a Christian…
It is permissible for a Christian to focus his prayer on the Holy Spirit and to worship the Holy Spirit as a person (and therefore not simply understood as a manifestation of God's power) and moreover as a person distinct from the Father and the Son, but nonetheless their full equals.As far as I am concerned, Scripture alone is not sufficient to express what is taught in the above
red text, and therefore is not sufficient to allow the act of worship described in the above
purple text. To fully express the above definition of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity to the extent that makes the act of worshiping the Holy Spirit (as described) permissible, one needs Sacred Tradition. At best, the Bible implies the Holy Trinity, but such implications cannot support the full weight and ramifications of what is found in the above red & purple text.
Moreover, in declaring "Scripture alone" to be insufficient in attempting to teach the fullness of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, I do not simply state my opinion. To back this up, I point out that if the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity could be sufficiently demonstrated from Scripture alone then the following heresies would not have gotten any traction (i.e., they each contradict one or more points in the above text in red):
Macedonianism: The Holy Spirit does .shared between the Father and the Son was “similar” but not the “same.”
Monarchianism: God exists as only one person.
Adoptionism (a.k.a., Dynamic Monarchianism): Jesus is simply a man who, during his earthly life, was empowered by God and, in a manner-of-speaking, became God. Therefore, Christ is not eternal.
Modalism (a.k.a., Sabellianism): God exists as only one person, but acts in three “modes”: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Arianism: The Son is not the Eternal Living God, but is rather an entity subordinate to the Father.
Ebionitism: Jesus is the Messiah but not God. He is understood as a righteous man selected by God to be a messianic prophet.
Nestorianism: Jesus was born simply as a man but was later filled with the divine
logos and therefore can be considered a kind of incarnation of the Holy Spirit.
(Continued in my next post) 
May 9, '11, 4:56 pm
Re: Early Church Fathers and Sola Scriptura...
Posts
15 comments:
No wonder you were banned.
Moreover, in declaring "Scripture alone" to be insufficient in attempting to teach the fullness of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, I do not simply state my opinion. To back this up, I point out that if the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity could be sufficiently demonstrated from Scripture alone then the following heresies would not have gotten any traction (i.e., they each contradict one or more points in the above text in red):
While there certainly may have been incompetent people in church history, this statement confuses the ultimate authority with people's willingness to submit to that ultimate authority. More precisely, it confuses an ethical issue with an epistemic issue. If you don't care about authorial intent, you can make any document say anything you want. Just look at what is done to the constitution by people who think they can make it say whatever they want it to say.
What bothers me about this whole post, the more that I think about it, is the fact that, as Kevin Vanhoozer stated in his book Is There a Meaning in this Text? the real foundation of this issue is ethical. It is specifically related to the ninth commandment: "Thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor." When you ignore authorial intent, or seek to destroy the artifact of his intent within the text, and replace it with the church, you have broken the ninth commandment. Worst of all, it is not just bearing false witness against a human being; it is bearing false witness against God himself. Worse than that, in this case, you have someone bearing false witness against him in saying that he never claimed to be who he said he was.
That is why this traditionalist form of Roman Catholicism is so disturbing to me in its denial of Sola Scriptura. There are major ethical issues with people who misuse the text in service to church politics, whether they be Protestant or Catholic.
God Bless,
Adam
LOL James, I think they were more concerned about my ECF quotes claiming "God alone is without sin" in the Immaculate Conception discussion.
Foundation One: Monotheism: There Is Only One God
Foundation Two: There Are Three Divine Persons
Foundation Three: The Persons Are Coequal and Coeternal
These three foundations not only provide the grounds upon which the Trinity is based, they explain to us why Christians who accept all of the Bible believe this doctrine. This is very important. Often the discussions Christians have with others about the Trinity flounder and go in circles because we do not identify these three truths as biblical teachings. When someone says, "How can you claim to only believe the Bible, when you use terms like `Trinity' that don't appear in the Bible?" we must be quick to point out that we are forced to do so by the teaching of the Bible itself on these three points. Every error and heresy on this doctrine will find its origin in a denial of one or more of these truths.
James R. White. Forgotten Trinity, The (p. 28). Kindle Edition.
WHAT WE ARE NOT SAYING- The errors that result from denying, or misunderstanding, any one of the foundational truths presented above can be graphically illustrated through the use of the following triangle diagram: Each of the three sides represents a foundational truth. When any one of these truths is denied, the other two sides form an arrow that point to the resultant error. For example, if one denies monotheism, the other two sides of the triangle point to "polytheism." If one denies the equality of the persons, the result is "subordination ism." And if one denies the existence of three persons, the result is "modalism." This diagram also points out how balanced we must be in our study of this important subject. Failing to believe one fundamental element of God's revelation will lead us into grave danger and error.
James R. White. Forgotten Trinity, The (pp. 29-30). Kindle Edition.
See triangle diagram at bottom of main post above.
Algo,
Can you cut and paste material from Kindle? I've tried in the past, and not been able to.
If you don't care about authorial intent, you can make any document say anything you want.
I think this was clearly brought out in my recent post of quotes from Raymond Brown. The Roman Church, according to Brown, doesn't really care about authorial intent.
James,
Yes you can cut and paste from Kindle. A wonderful benefit and no limit to the amount of Text Per Day/Week etc.
I did have to copy the Triangle Chart from AOMin though. I could not copy that from Kindle but I remembered it was posted in the J.W article section.
Also, you don't need a Kindle device, you can get a free Kindle reader for your (phone?), PC, Tablet or Mac.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=sa_menu_karl3?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771
I installed the Kindle software on my computers a few months ago. I don't use it often, but I do recall not being able to figure out how to cut and paste.
I'll take a look again, thanks for the tip.
I have a hard time believing Algo was banned for this post, but if he was, that's unjust.
I think it's also a fallacy to allude that since since one can use Scripture to prove the Trinity that this somehow vindicates Sola Scriptura. To prove what this is a fallacy, consider that it's possible to prove the Christian Baptismal formula from simply quoting Matthew 28:19. That doesn't necessitate Sola Matthew, much less Sola Scriptura.
More importantly, it's very easy to not properly understand how Scripture supports the Trinity, and thus a proper understanding of the Doctrine is required before even exegesis can be done.
Take two examples:
QUOTE: "One of the characteristics of personal existence is will. Few would argue the point in relationship to the Father, as He obviously has a will. So too, the Son has a will, for he says to the Father in the Garden, "not as I will, but as you will." (Matthew 26:39) The ascription of will to the Persons indicates the ability to reason, to think, to act, to desire - all those things we associate with self-consciousness."
This quote comes from an article written by James White. This is a heretical statement, as it results in three-wills within the Trinity - one for each Person. Even the prooftext White quotes is botched, for it entails Christ has two-wills.
QUOTE: "The Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance and equal with the Father, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon Him man's nature, with all the essential properties, and common infirmities thereof, yet without sin; being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost, in the womb of the virgin Mary, of her substance. So that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. Which person is very God, and very man, yet one Christ, the only Mediator between God and man."
This comes from the Westminster Confession (8:2). This is likewise a trinitarian error, for the last sentence states the "person" is God and man, right after distinguishing person and two natures in the prior sentence.
The lesson here is that even folks well versed in the Scriptures and understanding of the Trinity can still botch key things about the Trinity. And clearly both relied on "Scripture Alone". This is precisely why a Dogmatic Church is necessary.
To clarify on my last post: The example James White gives fails to note that "Will" is a function of nature, not personhood. That's why there is One Divine Will, not three. The example White uses of Jesus saying "Not my but Your's be done" necessitates (that is, it doesn't say this clearly, and can even give the opposite impression, but orthodoxy demands it) that Jesus has a Divine and human will - folks who don't understand this end up reading it as Jesus having a single will.
Nick,
I'm fairly certain that you misread the Westminster Confession.
If I understand your criticism correctly, you're taking "person" in that last sentence to mean "personhood"--as though the Confession was saying that Jesus' personhood was both God and man.
But the last sentence doesn't say anything other than that the person Jesus is both God and man, yet one Christ. "Which person" was a pronoun phrase, a pronoun resolved a "Jesus"; the last sentence is attached as a subordinate clause to "one person".
It would have meant exactly the same thing if the last two sentences had been combined into the following. (To highlight the changes I make, I'll annotate them with italics and bold.)
"So that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures, the Godhead and the manhood, were inseparably joined together without conversion, composition, or confusion--joined in one person, Jesus (who is very God, and very man, yet one Christ, the only Mediator between God and man)."
For grammatical clarity, I shifted the part in italics to before "in one person". (I didn't change it, just shifted it.) The words I added are in bold. (I added a redundant repetition of "joined", and added a redundant "Jesus" after "one person" to make the referent explicit. And I changed "Which person" to "who".)
James Swan,
I think this was clearly brought out in my recent post of quotes from Raymond Brown. The Roman Church, according to Brown, doesn't really care about authorial intent.
It is also brought out clearly in the fact that these Catholic apologists on the Catholic Answers Forums are using the very same arguments as the deconstructionists. Deconstruction, by its very definition, seeks to do away with the author.
The problem is that the Roman Catholic cannot have it both ways. Deconstruction can also be applied to the teachings of the Catholic Magisterium. The Catholic Magisterium, if it is to communicate, must communicate with human language, and that human language can be interpreted in many different ways. The only response I have heard is that Catholics can ask the magisterium what they mean by a certain statement. The problem is, if you didn't understand the first time, what makes you think you understood this time?
I have been in conversations like this many times, where I didn't understand what someone was saying, and so I went to them, and asked them. We talked for a while, and I thought I understood, and the person who made the original statement thought I understood. However, come to find out later, I didn't understand, and to this day do not understand what they were saying.
This kind of deconstructionist "death of the author" works as well on the magisterium as it does on the Bible. It is a bad, self-refuting argument I wish Catholics would stop using.
God Bless,
Adam
Jugulum,
The wording of the WCF can certainly be taken to mean the personhood of Jesus was a divine-human hybrid, though I realize that wasn't necessarily their intention. Your clarification certainly adds more precision, since using the term "person" in the last sentence is dubious.
Even substituting the the term "Jesus" for "person" here doesn't automatically resolve the issue, since the name "Jesus" only applies after the Incarnation, and thus the implication that a hybrid personhood resulted still exists.
My goal here isn't to read the text with an uncharitable bias, only to point out that precision is important and that anyone who goes around thinking proving the Trinity from "Scripture Alone" is a cake-walk is seriously kidding themselves (as the two examples I gave show how easily it is to botch the teaching).
The example I gave of James White's problematic comments is more serious than the WCF example, both because it's less reconcilable on semantic grounds and because the 'cult of personality' (pardon the pun) regarding the author of those remarks often makes the fans evasive when mistakes need to be acknowledged.
Hello Algo,
Interesting post. I especially appreciated the following:
==Failing to believe one fundamental element of God's revelation will lead us into grave danger and error.==
AMEN!
One "fundamental element of God's revelation" that has been absent so far in the dialogue of this particular thread is this: the phrases "one God" and "one true God" are applied to only of ONE the THREE persons of the Trinity. In an older thread I wrote:
==I have presented evidence that the Bible makes some important distinctions between the One who called ό θεός and the one called θεός; between the ό θεός who begets, and the μονογενής θεός who is begotten; between the one termed "τοῦ μόνου θεοῦ" (John 5:44) and "τὸν μόνον ἀληθινὸν θεὸν" (John 17:3), and the one He sends. I also pointed out that only one person in the Bible is declared to be the "εἷς θεὸς" (and it is not Jesus).== [LINK]
Another "fundamental element of God's revelation" concerns the issue of etiology, which is directly related to why the Bible restricts the phrases "one God" and "one true God" to only of ONE the THREE persons of the Trinity.
Nick was spot-on when he said, "that precision is important and that anyone who goes around thinking proving the Trinity from 'Scripture Alone' is a cake-walk is seriously kidding themselves".
For the record, I do not believe that "the Trinity" (no one has yet to weigh in on just which doctrine of the Trinity they accept) can be "proved" via sola scriptura; defended, yes, but "proved", no.
Grace and peace,
David
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