Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
Surely the centurion had a thought-world behind his statements. And Jesus complied fully with it. .
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Jesus complied fully with the centurion's thoughts as they were related to Jesus, as they pertained to the situation at hand. "Just speak a word and my servant will be healed."
But there is danger in reading too much into the bare statements. We assume there was a coherent thought world, waiting to be fleshed out, had the centurion ever done so. But he didn't. And Jesus would probably approve of some, and reject or modify some. So what the centurion thought beyond the bare words of the story is essentially moot.
However, it might be worth considering thought-worlds, theologies, and theories of God as they unfold in scripture, and in subsequent commentaries by the Fathers, and others. Because this long train of socialization largely frames our own thought-worlds, which we invest with emotional meaning and then live out.
First, I daresay few had our resources, to systematically put it all together like Augustine, Calvin, Darby, and then Nee and Lee (or whomever) tried to do. The Second Temple Period, during which the NT was being experienced and composed, was a time when the actual sacred texts were scarce, and information (i.e. 'what is') flowed through populations and to individuals via oral transmission. And oral transmission brings distortion. People say this, people say that. Opinion and fact are so freely mixed that where one leaves off and the other begins is unknowable. There was no monolithic repository of orthodoxy. Pharisee and Sadducee squabbled and split. The Essene packed up his parchments and headed into the desert.
Jesus asked, "What do people say" and the disciples replied, "Some say this, some say that..." (Matt 16:13,14). Yet even when Peter channeled truth, and received pure revelation from the Father in heaven, it clearly emerged as an admixture of revelation and erroneous speculation. Jesus was indeed the Christ, the Son of the Living Eternal God (v. 16), but Peter's "Christ" was supposed to ride into Jerusalem on a big horse and knock off Herod, Pilate, and the rest. No shameful death, here!! Jesus was going to restore the True Kingdom to Israel. For corroboration see e.g. Jesus' entry into Jerusalem in Matt 21:9 and Luke 19:37-38; also the question posed in Acts 1:6, "Are you at this time restoring the Kingdom to Israel?"
Obviously the gospel disciples and companions didn't get the suffering, and the entering into glory. See Jesus explaining His mission, post-resurrection:
"Was it not necessary for the Christ to suffer these things and then to enter His glory?” And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He explained to them what was written in all the Scriptures about Himself.(Luke 24:27,28). Before they got it, Jesus had to explain it.
We don't know how little or much the centurion knew in the gospel scene as portrayed to us, and how much it corresponded to "reality as it existed" at that moment. But we do know that people (including the centurion) attempted to co-operate with the world as it was presented to them, and this presentation importantly includes God's revelation of Himself in scripture, and His revelation of His Beloved Son, and the subsequent narrative of the Son's arrival and declaration of the Father in Heaven (i.e. the four gospel accounts).
And thus it has arrived to us. We have the scriptures, the various nearby texts to add meaning, we have the epistles and the Fathers and subsequent church history.
Certainly at the NT composition level there wasn't any widespread concept of Trinity, else it would have been explicitly stated. It wasn't baldly assumed by the authors and readers; these were "people of the Book" and if it wasn't written in the Book it didn't exist. Certainly a Three-in-One God would need some fairly clear statement.(and when they tried, as in the "Comma Johanneum" it was struck out).
Regarding Igzy's thought-world overlay of the Trinity being "Self-image" and "relations", it isn't disprovably wrong but really isn't any more attractive to me than any of 25 other possible overlays. My own, of which I'm obviously partial, is quite different, and I've gone on at length elsewhere. Image and relations are included, but they don't mean a Three-One God. My own son is my "spitting image" but he is not me nor I him; my father and I love each other but such relations don't mean that I'm my father.
Suffice it to say that each of us is responsible for our own vision, and, especially, our response, consistently played out each day, to that vision. Paul said, "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision". Certainly we all want to say that.
And the reason that I began this riff was because
OBW wrote, "Why did the Jordan stand still . . . doesn't matter", yet
my vision is at least partly subjectively framed by Psalm 114, so I raised my virtual hand and said, "not so fast".
But again, as we all know, the truth is not merely in dialectics but in living. And typing on a keypad doesn't equal living. I get that.