This seemed like as good a place as any to insert this contribution of questionable worth. As always, I’m simply responding to whatever happens to strike me at the moment, and simply trying to offer another perspective, which, though largely redundant, will perhaps nudge the discussion forward another inch, while including perhaps one or two thoughts not yet examined. You decide:
(BTW, it’s going to sound like I’ve lost the thread of this conversation before I even begin. Trust me, I have a point to make, and it will lead me back around to “The Trinity,” the subject at hand, eventually.) Blog rants from angry former Fundamentalists are a dime a dozen. I understand them…I’m often angry too…I bear some of the scars as well. But I often feel as if my ranting now comes from a different position: I no longer self-identify as an Evangelical (although I certainly can and do still learn and glean from those that do), and I no longer consider myself to be drawing principally from an Evangelical’s primary categories of thought. So, for instance, I feel like I’m not being addressed very well, to say the least, when I read something like this article I found once upon a time: gordonatkinson.net/rlp-archive/i … e-for-this. Granted, this particular rant was about a different topic - homosexuality - and I am not trying to dredge up that issue here - but the tenor of the author’s words serves as an illustration of my larger point. He dismissively demands, “Show me what you got, Christian,” and then proceeds to “debunk” a collection of Bible passages - IOW, to speak around, not to, someone like me. My response, should he even care to hear it, would be, “Well, I’m not trying to prove the rightness of a moral [or, in the current thread to which I’m replying, doctrinal] stance by the Bible, because I don’t think the Bible is there for that purpose, and because unlike the average Evangelical, the Bible is not all I have to turn to, nor am I burdened with the necessity of making it ‘agree with itself’ in every detail. So ‘what I’ve got’ is not limited to a few scattered and (obviously) highly debatable excerpts of Scripture. Thanks be to God, I also have 2,000 years of ongoing Tradition within the Church: that is, the still evolving theological struggle of the whole Body of Christ, informed by the indwelling and ever-revealing Spirit of God.” That now carries an authority for me that I couldn’t have begun to imagine in my “evangelical” days. It runs hand-in-hand with the inward testimony or confirmation an individual must feel to see the truth of anything (what GMac called the “doctrine of the Spirit”).
So it is with the Incarnation and the Holy Trinity. If it took centuries (millennia, really) to begin to see the truth of God as Trinity; if St. Paul barely saw it himself, or didn’t see it at all; if the jewel of it is buried in Scripture only in the most recondite, esoteric, and undeveloped references; if God made use of human corruption, intrigue, and heavy-handed religious politics to fully bring it to the world’s attention; if it could only be confirmed in this sinner’s heart by an ecstasy over the beauty of the thought of perfect relationship within God himself…well, what of it? Does any of that make it any less beautiful, or any less true? For me, “Jesus of Nazareth” is not enough; the “cosmic Christ” who holds all things, including me, together, and can answer every need I have because he shares in the very essence of God - in a way I never will, nor ever want to - is infinitely satisfying. For me, inside the Circle of Father, Son, and Spirit is the only universe I care for.