Quote:
Originally Posted by OBW
But even though the God se serve is in Three (whether persons, or something else, the scripture is too clear that they are not simply each other), therefore it is not as simple as "if you say three then you are a tritheist."
Tritheism is the worship of three gods. We doe not worship three gods. We worship One God that is in three "persons." We do not worship the three separately though we do acknowledge their unique attributes as described in the scripture. But they are not worshipped as separate beings to be separately appeased. Rather we worship One God who is a unified three. Therefore we "appease" only God, not the Spirit separately from the Son or the Father (and so on). (I realize that there is nothing that we do to appease God, but my point is to make a comparison between the worship of three who are three and three who are One.)
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Well said.
Look at it this way,
Drake. Everyone acknowledges that we are separate entities apart from God, as are the angels. We know that God created us to have relationships with us and so we could have relationships with each other.
But how would God think to have a relationship with anyone else if the essence of relationship did not exist within him from the beginning? If there was not a initial, divine, only-begotten relationship within God before all, then you would have to conclude God had a terrible lack within himself to have to create the idea of relationship after the initial fact of himself. Thus this "lonely God" idea is deeply flawed.
Therefore, consensus says that the essence of Relationship--that is an actual, full relationship--existed within God from the beginning. This is the relationship between the Father and the Son. Jesus speaks of this in John 17:5 where he prays, "And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began."
I believe the relationship of the Father and Son is in some way God's relationship with himself. But because he is God it is more than that. It is somehow also a relationship between two persons. Why otherwise would Jesus talk of the Father as if he was another person? Why would he bother to pray to him? It could not just be to set an example for us. It has to be there is an actual relationship going on.
Don't you see? God is so great that his relationship with himself 'blossomed' into something more, the relationship between two persons, which became the model for all other relationships, which we were created to have, and without which we would not have even been created.