[pelathais]

Originally Posted by Believer

...

Hi Believer,

I'm just getting (sort of) caught up with this thread so please forgive me for jumping in. I've enjoyed the discussion, and thanks BD for the thread!

Believer- as I have understood the development of Trinitarian doctrine, the language of "Persons" was used at first in an analogous sense, and not that the Three were Three Persons literally. The "official" use of this language really comes up for the first time in pseudo-Athanasius (The Athanasius Creed) of c. 500 AD.

I find the analogous use of "Persons" or "persons" to be helpful in explaining the contradictions that can exist within a single indiviual being. For example, a person can be "of two minds" about an issue. That is, the one person is so divided as to which choice is to be made that a writer could speak analogously of that one person's mind being two. We don't need a clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia to describe inner turmoil, just a figure of speech.

The Bible has some examples of the figure of speech I'm trying to describe here.

Psalm 42:5 - David uses a pronoun-preposition-pronoun construction to speak of his own soul ("thou within me"). His soul was "cast down" to the point that it seemed that he needed a second person to encourage himself. Of course, that "second person" was he himself.

In his appearance many years ago on the John Ankerberg show, Cal Bisner took a lot of time to try and argue that such noun/pronoun-preposition-pronoun types of sentence structure formed a "law" of language that argued that there had to be at least two persons involved. No one really called him on it at the time though and Cal neglected to find the examples that I have here.

When the Prodigal "came to himself" is another example from scripture. "He (pronoun) to (preposition) himself (pronoun)." The point of the Gospel being of course, that the awareness of his lost condition contrasted so remarkably with the condition he had in his "father's house" that it was as if he were two completely different persons. Yet we know from the context that only one person was involved as the Prodigal.

My point being: There is one God Who is:

1) Above all
2) Through all, and
3) In you all (Ephesians 4:6, along with doxologies).

1) The transcendent God that is above all is so holy and pure that no sinner of this earth can reach out to Him ("there is no searching His understanding..." Isaiah 40:28).

2) Yet, in a seeming paradox, this same God is immanent ("He is not far from each one of us..." Acts 17:27-28).

3) And, all believers are indwelt by this same God (Ephesians 4:3-4; 1 Corinthians 12:13).

Taking each of these "three" to their reasonable extremes we will find that the same "Person" could not possibly be described as possessing such seemingly contradictory qualities in ordinary language. We need a figure of speech here.

The Bible plainly reveals a God who is capable of such "contradictions" in nature. To explain this in the vernacular of human speech it is only natural that we would use the "two or more persons" language as in the examples of David and the Prodigal.

Analogously, God does exist like this. I think where the "Oneness" people (both ancient and modern) draw the line is in requiring boiler-plate language that all believers must adhere to that includes apparently extra-Biblical statements like, "Eternally existing in three Persons..." For some people this leads to an inherently tri-theistic view of the Godhead. This is something that I'm sure you would not fall for, but there are a lot of examples of tritheism within Church history.

I appreciate your posts and look forward to hearing more from you.