Are God really three personalities?
Vishakha Singh
"...in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."
It sound familiar, does it not? It is the Christian doctrine of Trinity and they believe that God is
three persons, even if the Old Testament claims he is one:
"Hear O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord." - Deuternomy 6:4
I have checked both Testaments and the word Trinity does not exist in the Bible.
However, I have learned that the dogmatic Trinity comes from the second of five (in)famous
ecumenical councils, they were held between 325-553 A.D in order to determind the Christian belief.
The second ecumenical council at Constantinopel (381) started the idea of Trinity by
proposing the Nicene Creed,
which was finally accepted by all churches at the fouth ecumenical council
(Kalcedor 451). It was used to fight other christian doctrines, like
Apollinarianism
and Arianism.
Maybe, the idea of the Trinity composing of three persons together forming God, can be
found in First John 5:6-7
"It is he who came through water and blood, Jesus Christ, not just water alone, but water
and blood, and the Spirit is our witness because the Spirit is truth. That makes three witnesses: the
Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three make one."
Note that the text above does not state that the Spirit is one person, the water another
person and the blood the third person.
Nowhere in the New Testament can I found Jesus or his followers saying
-The father is a person, the son is person and the holy spirit is a person and these three persons
together is the Lord our God who is one.
Needless to say there is no text in the Old Testamnet claiming that God is made out of
three persons. In other words there is no biblical ground for the belief in the Trinity made out of three
persons.
But there is a Father, a Son and a Holy Spirit, what are they and where can we find them?
Maybe I shall give place to one of the Masters of the Far East to give his opinion of the
Christian Trinity:
"The tendency to personalize all things has degraded that which is called Blessed Trinity
into the impossible concept of three in one; when it can be best understood as the Omnipresence,
Omnipotence, Omniscience of the Universal Mind, God.
As long as men consider the Blessed Trinity as three persons in one, and as something that must
be accepted even thought it cannot be explained, they will dwell in the wilderness of superstition, and
thus of doubt and fear."
-
Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East volume 2, page 68.
I must say that I am happy to live close to the twentyfirst century and not in 1553 when
Michael Servetus
was murdered, after being captured by
John Calvin in Geneva.
Michael Servetus was burned at the stake as an heretic for questioning the truth of Trinity in his
writing:
De Trinitatis Erroribus (On the Errors of Trinity in 1531.)
Later, Francis David
(1510-1579) revived the movement and began to preach activetly against the doctrine of the Trinity
in Transylvania.
In 1571
King John II Sigismund of Hungary
granted a decree, which gave birth to Unitarianism
by giving the questioning of Trinity a legal standing. The Unitarian movement has continued until today
in United States with over 1000 Unitarian Universalist Churches
and they have together around 150 000 members.
In the early 90's the Trinity teaching made a comeback in Sweden because of "New
Ageists" proclaiming God was a Power (Force).
As the Holy Spirit is a part of God, Christians had to answer "New Ageists", and they found the
answer in the
Nicene Creed,
proposed at the second ecumenical council at Contantinopel in 381.
An individual is Multiple Personality when he display more than one personality. An actor/actress
can show many personalities and turn them off by will, but the Multiple Personality person cannot.
The Multiple Personality state might be a development of Pseudopersonalities used to handle
different kinds of situations, that the original personality for some reason have difficult to handle.
A former Swedish Scizofrenic mentalpatient , who later became a psycologist. Claims,
the developed Scizofrenic state is a lack of identity with the original personality.
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