I’ve been re-visiting some old threads this morning - there have been some GREAT threads on this forum.
Since I am still ‘agnostic’ on the subject of the trinity, I was happy to see the following from Fr. Kimel’s Most Excellent) Blog (afkimel.wordpress.com) - it has become one of my favorites - as the selections I am quoting neatly wrap up the reason for my agnosticism. The first selection is from Channing, with whom Fr. Kimel and others (wrongly imo) disagree, followed by further elucidation - or may I say, with respect, non-elucidation (read it to see what I mean) - of the actual trinitarian position as per that blog.
This is not actually a big deal for me now - I worship God the Father through the Son Jesus Christ, with the help of the Holy Spirit - and the sophisticated metaphysics that become a measure of one’s Christianity is, for me, if not trivial, then superfluous.
All the following is from the blog:
What particularly interests me is Channing’s interpretation of “the irrational and unscriptural doctrine of the Trinity”:
( Channing) We object to the doctrine of the Trinity, that, whilst acknowledging in words, it subverts in effect, the unity of God. According to this doctrine, there are three infinite and equal persons, possessing supreme divinity, called the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Each of these persons, as described by theologians, has his own particular consciousness, will, and perceptions. They love each other, converse with each other, and delight in each other’s society. They perform different parts in man’s redemption, each having his appropriate office, and neither doing the work of the other. The Son is mediator and not the Father. The Father sends the Son, and is not himself sent; nor is he conscious, like the Son, of taking flesh. Here, then, we have three intelligent agents, possessed of different consciousness, different wills, and different perceptions, performing different acts, and sustaining different relations; and if these things do not imply and constitute three minds or beings, we are utterly at a loss to know how three minds or beings are to be formed. It is difference of properties, and acts, and consciousness, which leads us to the belief of different intelligent beings, and, if this mark fails us, our whole knowledge fall; we have no proof, that all the agents and persons in the universe are not one and the same mind. When we attempt to conceive of three Gods, we can do nothing more than represent to ourselves three agents, distinguished from each other by similar marks and peculiarities to those which separate the persons of the Trinity; and when common Christians hear these persons spoken of as conversing with each other, loving each other, and performing different acts, how can they help regarding them as different beings, different minds?
(Fr. Kimel) The Fathers did not understand the divine persons as three independent agents “possessed of different consciousness, different wills, and different perceptions, performing different acts, and sustaining different relations.” If this were the catholic doctrine, St Athanasius and the Cappadocians would have joined Channing in rejecting it. As St Gregory of Nyssa writes: “For the persons of the Divinity are not separated from one another either by time or place, not by will or by practice, not by activity or by passion, not by anything of this sort, such as is observed with regard to human beings” (Ad Graecos 25).
That which distinguishes the divine hypostases are their originating relations: the Father is unoriginate, the Son is begotten by the Father, the Spirit is spirated by the Father. The persons of the Godhead are not “persons” in the way that individual human beings or even angels are “persons.” We need to stop thinking in such anthropomorphic terms.
When someone objects to the trinitarian doctrine on the ground that it makes no sense to them, that is precisely the point. If the doctrine made sense, it would not be speaking of the holy and ineffable three-personed Creator narrated in the Scriptures and experienced in the eucharistic liturgy. Karen Kilby elaborates:
We learn to worship the Father through the Son in the Spirit, but we do not have some very sophisticated idea with which to put all this together, with which to envisage or explain or understand that the three are one, with which to put to rest on a conceptual level worries about the coherence of a claim to monotheism. This is why attention to the doctrine of the Trinity should serve to intensify rather than diminish our sense of God’s unknownness: believing in the Trinity, we are not so much in possession of a more fully textured concept of God than a mere Enlightenment deist has, but in fact much less than any deist in possession of any sort of manageable concept of God at all. (“Is an Apophatic Trinitarianism Possible?” International Journal of Systematic Theology 12 [January 2010]: 76)
Me: in a nutshell, there’s the problem. Neither ‘side’ understands the concept ‘trinity’. And we will defend our not understanding come hell or high water!