Triune God, modalism, or are you heretic?

[Cal]

Originally Posted by Ohio

I like expressions like this -- "the Son is the Spirit, yet He is not" -- simply because the Bible basically says both of these. Expressions like this one acknowledges that we understand our God is three-one, yet He is inexhaustible, beyond our ability to understand.

The Son is the Spirit in the sense that both are God and there is one God. He is not the Spirit in the sense of obliterating any personal distinction between the two.

The Spirit didn't die on the cross for our sins. The Son did. When God stepped into time as a human being only the Son was incarnated.

Imagine it like a three-dimensional being stepping into a two-dimensional world. He cannot exist in the two-dimensional world as a three-dimensional being. Yet he can adapt to it because his three-dimensional world is built upon two-dimensional principles. God is like a cube made of of six sides (only he has three). When the cube steps into the two-dimensional world, it appears as one square, yet is still connected to the rest of the cube. Likewise when God stepped into our world, he appeared as one Person--the Son--yet still part of the Trinity.

The beings in the two-dimensional world can understand the cube as a square, but they can never quite fathom it as a cube, because that plane is totally beyond their experience and points of reference.

I think the Trinity works something like that, only on a personal scale. God is one being that is three persons, like the cube is one figure while being six squares. Two-dimensional beings cannot understand a cube, and won't be able to until they are somehow elevated to the three-dimensional world. Likewise we really can't imagine the Trinity from our frame of reference either.

Any attempt to explain it creates paradoxes. Like when viewing a cube from two-dimensions, some of the angles appear as if they are not 90 degrees when they are 90 degrees. Yet when you adjust the angles to all be 90 degrees, then the figure is no longer a cube. So one says things like "that angle is not 90 degrees, but it is 90 degrees." Likewise with the Trinity we say equally strange-sounding things like "the Son is the Spirit, yet He is not."