Why do we use trinitarian..........

Originally Posted by mizpeh

Sorry, Chan, I wasn't clear. I can't find the teaching or concept of the Trinity in the Bible. It's not taught in the OT or the NT. I didn't mean the word, Trinity. I quoted from the creed CARM had listed. I believe those at CARM think of themselves as being ORTHODOX.

No, they consider themselves orthodox, not Orthodox. The difference is not just in the capitalizing of the first letter. There are differences between the Eastern Church (which became the Orthodox Church after the great schism) and the Western Church (which became the Roman Catholic Church after the great schism).

Then why don't they just say 'same substance' instead of God. The way I understand when God speaks of himself in the Bible, He is not calling himself a substance. ie: Isa 43:12 I have declared, and have saved, and I have shewed, when there was no strange god among you: therefore ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, that I am God.

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed says "of one essence with the Father." The Greek word they used was homoousion (same substance/essence).

I agree with you that eternally begotten is an oxymoron. Also why would the Spirit proceeding from the Father necessitate that the Spirit is a different person than the Father instead of a manifestion of the same God.

The term "person" was never used in the earliest Creeds (and not just because English didn't exist as a language then). Where the problem arises is in the confusion that came about when translating the Greek word "hypostasis" that Cyril in the fifth century insisted should be used for Father, Son and Holy Spirit individually instead of prosopon. Hebrews 1:3 translates "hypostasis" as "person" in the KJV and applied it to God ("the express image of [God's] person") but Cyril changed the trinity doctrine (at least "changed" if we look at how people today think of the doctrine) by applying the Greek equivalent of "person" individually to Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It was mainly under the influence of the Cappadocian Fathers that the terminology (hypostasis) was clarified and standardized, so that the formula "Three Hypostases in one Ousia" came to be everywhere accepted as an epitome of the orthodox doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This consensus, however, was not achieved without some confusion at first in the minds of Western theologians, who had translated hypo-stasis as "sub-stantia" (substance, and see also Consubstantial) and understood the Eastern Christians, when speaking of three "Hypostases" in the Godhead, to mean three "Substances," i.e. they suspected them of Tritheism. But, from the middle of the fourth century onwards the word came to be contrasted with ousia and used to mean "individual reality," especially in the Trinitarian and Christological contexts. With regard to the doctrine of the Trinity, hypostasis is usually understood with a meaning akin to the Greek word prosopon, which is translated into Latin as persona and then into English as person. The Christian view of the Trinity is often described as a view of one God existing in three distinct hypostases/personae/persons. It should be noted, though that the Latin "persona" does not mean the same thing as the English "person."


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