Hey all,
As the title says. I’m having a hard time understanding the Christian beleif of Jesus and God.
They seem to be worshipped like separately? But Christianity is Montheistic.
It’s so confusing.
Does anyone have any good resources (I’m not opposed to like Sunday school teachings for kids) that can explain this to me in a way it makes sense?
Christianity is a long tradition with many developments in many times places to ensure that the tradition remains relevant. Cutting off that tradition, or pretending that we can some how refuse to “deviate from Jesus’s teachings,” even though we live in a completely different context than Jesus did, is both a denial of reality and a recipe to make the tradition irrelevant. If the Trinity is no longer relevant, then the thing to do is to make arguments based on where we are, the context we’re in, for a development to something else. Purporting to leapfrog back in time as though the intervening two millennia didn’t happen isn’t going to work.
While I agree that our context changes, I don’t see why it would have an impact on God’s very nature.
We can’t see God, so only Himself can tell us about His nature. And who does God talk to? Who does God reveal things to ? To select people He sent to the rest, prophets and messengers.
That’s why some people coming together to vote in multiple occasions (ie. the different councils) how they want God to be is far from divine revelation especially when it contradicts Jesus.
The nature of God does not change. But doctrines of God have changed constantly throughout history. We can see them change in scripture itself—from bodied to disembodied; from visible to invisible; from poly- and henotheistic to monotheistic; from geographically local to cosmically universal, and so on. They may do that because they are only doctrines, which are linguistically and culturally rooted. This is how our Jewish friends and our Muslim friends can understand God differently, even though God is, in Godself, only ever God.
And another problem with purporting to limit oneself to just the teachings of Jesus is that we have nothing Jesus wrote (if he wrote anything, and he probably did not), and Jesus did not have anything of our New Testament, all of which was written in a series of decades long after his time in Judea. That means Jesus cannot possibly have had the same doctrine of scripture that we might have (for example, he could not have affirmed the canon of the New Testament), and so saying that we should be limited to the words of Jesus in our scripture is really no different than affirming the Christian, trinitarian doctrine of God—both of those things post-date Jesus.
And doctrines are not just people getting together and voting. They are imagined, and argued, and circulated, and engaged, and argued some more, all out in the wilds of the church universal, until gradually they become part of the substance of the conversation comprising the tradition. That some of those processes of conversation and argumentation might be ecumenical councils is only a small fraction of the life of doctrine.