Monday, January 24, 2022

My attack on the Trinity at Bellator Christi

I attacked the Trinity doctrine with a post over at 

https://bellatorchristi.com/2022/01/24/the-foundation-of-a-family/

The post hasn't showed up yet, so here's the content in case Jesus advises the Bellator Christi author Justin Angelos that the ancient church was doing the will of god by destroying anti-Trinitarian works.

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 If even god cannot act without implicating his own nature, then Jesus was similarly limited.  Indeed, there is no such thing as acting apart from one's nature.

If Jesus had "two natures", then he necessarily implicated both in everything he said or did.

Meaning, both of his natures were equally implicated in his cry of dereliction, that the Father had "forsaken" Jesus.

You will say the Father only forsook the human "nature" of Jesus, because the Father's forsaking Jesus' divine nature is not consistent with your understanding of the Trinity.

But Jesus is "person" who is indivisible.  If he has two natures, that doesn't open the door to splitting him up whenever theological expediency dictates.  The Father did not forsake Jesus' human nature, but forsook Jesus as an entire two-natured  indivisible person.

Meaning the Father also forsook Jesus' divine nature.

Regardless, if Jesus can, by physical breathing on them,  infuse the disciples with the Holy Spirit, then the Holy Spirit is essential to Jesus' physical humanity.  That's required by NT theology, no matter how rational it might be for skeptics to say that Jesus the human being breathed oxygen normally just like any other human.  No, Jesus' breath was the Holy Spirit, whether that is absurdly fantastic, contradictory, or otherwise.

Therefore, if you press the point that the Father only abandoned the physical or human nature of Jesus, you are also saying the Father forsook the Holy Spirit, for the Holy Spirit cannot be subtracted from Jesus without asphyxiating him.

And since Jesus cannot be wrong, his belief that the Father forsook him must be correct.

Since Jesus told the truth about his forsakenness while he was still alive, the forsaking was a completed action at the precise movement he said it...while he was still alive...and while the Holy Spirit was still part of that human nature you think the Father forsook.

The Nicaean version of Jesus' nature and relationship to the Father is refuted by these observations.

The consequence of achieving that rebuttal is that the traditional understanding of the Trinity as three persons who are in eternally unbroken harmony, is also refuted.

For these reasons,  It was God the Second person of the Trinity, who truthfully confessed to being forsaken by the Father, the First person of the Trinity.

So while God might be triparte still, the "unbroken harmony" part must be false by logical necessity, which means any surviving doctrine of the Trinity would have to be a major change away from the traditional understanding that has existed for the last 2,000 years.

Jason Engwer doesn't appreciate the strong justification for skepticism found in John 7:5

Bart Ehrman, like thousands of other skeptics, uses Mark 3:21 and John 7:5 to argue that Jesus' virgin birth (VB) is fiction.  Jason Eng...