Quote:
Originally Posted by Drake
When Jesus referred to I in You, You in Me, they is Us ... He obviously was not referring to His physical body. He was apparently referring to something deeper. more intrinsic. We know now in retrospect that this refers to Christ's spiritual Body.
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But if it is part of something "intrinsic," then it is not simply anything.
And what exactly is "instrinsisc"? Yet another extra-biblical term added into the discussion which covers for something we really don't know much about. But you are quite clear that it is beyond what the description actually provided infers.
And when it comes to inferring, if there is something "intrinsic" between us that is "as" the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father" (I am using the John verse here — there is no mention of in us) then intrinsic does not cause the Father to be "in the Son" in a manner that makes him actually experience what the Son experiences in the crucifixion.
I know that you will rush to warn about tritheism, but it would appear that the manner in which Jesus spoke of his relationship with the Father would seem to infer more nearly two (and ultimately three) that have an everlasting unity rather than one that has some sense in which there are three. But the God you try to force through the added terms is inconsistent with the God actually revealed. He is revealed as Father, Son, and Spirit, But also as One God.
The real evidence presents us with a mystery. One in which three are so one that there is never the opportunity to play one against the other (like one parent against another). There is no place in which they are at odds with each other. They are one. To take it to your extreme is to need it to fit within human understanding of one. Tritheism would be to worship three Gods that are not one in the manner that our God is one. But how that oneness comes to be is a mystery. How three could be truly one is not rational. It is a mystery.
We give the oneness funny terms like essence, hypostatic union, intrinsic. But these words do not define how it works. They are placeholders for what we cannot understand. But you, and Lee before you, and a few others before that, have tried to take some natural understanding of these terms and force it to define the unity of God. I will admit that there is a chance that it could actually be right. But there is nothing that makes it simply so. And nothing that supports that as more than conjecture.
However, there are some aspects of how God is revealed as three that makes that kind of thinking much more likely wrong than right. If the Father is there on the cross with Christ, then he can't turn his face because he would turn his face on himself. There isn't even a mystery in which that would be considered possible. Just because it would be a mystery if it were true does not make it a rational mystery. The trinity does not present us with something that is simply ludicrous to say out loud. It is just so ill-defined (if at all) and outside of our realm of reasoning that we cannot grasp the how. But it is still not an unreasonable premise. But determining that someone would turn his face from himself is to suggest a kind of schizophrenia in which two disparate minds take turns ruling a body. Sort of like the two-headed president of the galaxy in The Hitchhiker's Guide.
And if your insistence on the presence of the Father being with Christ on the cross is just about that intrinsic, hypostatic, essential unity, then you are missing that these are more like bonds that unite than factors in which they are physically inseparable. It is about the nature of their unity and not the obscuring of the separateness.
Could you say that the Father had a sense of the pain and suffering of Christ on the cross. Plausibly so. But can you say that the Father was there? Even in the death and burial? Not if he is going to turn his face from it. Not if he is going to be active during that time in which Christ was not present outside the tomb living and breathing.