[OBW]

While no analysis is simply it. And no metaphorical explanation gets it all right, there are things to consider from them.

In Dallas, there is a police department. There are many persons who are part of the police department. If someone breaks into your house and you call 911, the police department comes to investigate (or at least take a report). And very often only one person arrives.

Within a Police department there is detective Jones who is not Sargent Smith, yet they are all police and part of the police department.

Not really a very satisfactory explanation of the Godhead/Trinity. But at the same time, what does it mean that God is "One" or "One God"? Does it absolutely mean that there could be seen a single "individual" that would be God, yet there could also be seen these three individuals — Father, Son, Spirit — that are also separately referred to as God? Does the Bible clearly support one position or the other. Or have we inferred one, and because it has some history, we stick to it like it was included in the scripture in that way?

Or could it mean that there are the Three — Father, Son, Spirit — that are by nature a unity yet by "sight" three? They cannot be at odds with each other yet they are not (within any realm) a single thing to see.

I know that some will immediately shout "heresy!" and relative to the standard definition of the Trinity, it would seem so. But is it just heresy because people have decided to describe what they don't really understand in a way that excludes other reasonable possibilities?

The somewhat different description of God as One might bother some because they do not see how we could, in human language, describe Jesus as being "one with the Father" (I and the Father are one) yet to me, he very idea that such a declaration would be excluded by it seems silly.

Now, before you (whoever) go off writing a long-winded post decrying all of my heresies, be assured that I do not propose that this is it and the other is not. But I honestly see that either could be true.

And I'm not sure that it makes any difference to how I read and understand the various verses about the Godhead — together and as three persons. And neither seems difficult to me to understand (as much as humanly pissible) a oneness among them that is manifested as Three.

The point is not that I am pushing a different view of the Trinity. Rather, I am suggesting something like the point Igzy made about the level of precision on something in which we have little true precision being required to refute every strange position. And the better approach is not to try to be so precise, but rather to see the ridiculous when it rears its head and call it for what it is.

There is much that is not specified in scripture about what we have labeled the Trinity. The problem is not that some think that the gaps in information might be one way or the other. It is that they insist that it is true. And too often, in such a way that the meaning of either One or Three becomes lost or irrelevant. And when that happens we lose. We either lose the meaning of passages that tell us of the attributes and connection we have with one or the other of the Three, or the aspect of the One.

Is it a Singular that is also a Plural? Or is it a Plural with aspects of Singular (what Lee almost seems to suggest)? Or is it a Plural that has something common that is more than absolute commitment of mind and will (that some like to call essence) that makes the Plural absolutely united and One in all ways (other than thefact that you might not be able to ever see simply something that looks like a single person).

Are any of us sure that it is precisely one of these? A whole lot of theologians who have tacked one onto another in support of one version without anything more than the influence of some significant person in the 3rd century (or something like that) that mashed it together as the Trinity as we now tend to know it does not make it the gold standard of understanding the Trinity. Just a decent way to look at it.

And that is why I tend to take the position that any notion that does not contradict the actual descriptions in the scripture is OK. It really does no matter if the classic position is simply right or the police department example turns out to be right. The words in scripture could support either. But they cannot support God is first the Father, then becomes the Son, then the Spirit and never do two or more of them exist at one time.

And Lee was not that far with it. My problem with Lee's position is that he seems to have little use for the Three of the Trinity other than to argue that it is there to prove that he is not a modalist. He liked the oneness side of things so strongly that he saw no purpose for the Three. They were just One to him. That was all that mattered.

(And when he came to 1 Cor 15:45, he had a position that needed to be supported, so he declared that there could be no life-giving spirit other than the Spirit, so, presto-chango, Christ becomes the Holy Spirit. I beleive that it was a foregone conclusion to Lee. He just needed a way to prove it. So he sees something he can "simply" to death and changes tha nature of he Godhead.)

And it does matter that they are One. But not entirely and exclusively. Otherwise the inspiration and ink spent on describing the Three in the scripture was a waste of time by God. And I don't think he was wasting his time.