Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 121
- 1
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
An intriguing new theological heresy came to me as I was preparing to sleep.
I'm a Trinitarian Christian and a geek, so I can't help getting nerd-sniped by discussions of the Trinity's internal "economy". My Triessentialism philosophy started from praying that God would resolve the apparent logical contradiction of the Trinity, and seeing an answer which has satisfied me for over twenty years. I've listened to the Trinities podcast (which turned out to be run by a blatant unitarian) and discussions of different formulations of understanding God's Trinitarian nature.
Now, I'm a fan of the Lutheran Satire channel's videos because of the hilarious and interesting ways they puncture heresies. Their most famous video, St. Patrick's Bad Analogies, source of the "That's modalism, Patrick!" meme, is a must-watch on or around St. Patrick's Day.
So this is the thought which came to me at bedtime and put a wide grin on my face. What if each Person of the Trinity is the only One Who exists, truly God before all and above all, but each in a different one of the three overlapping realms of the Physical, Logical, and Emotional? What if none of the Persons of the Trinity has ever met the others, but would have had to infer their existence through their effects on humans were He not omniscient?
It would make a fun and fascinating cosmological foundation for a fictional work of high fantasy, but here in our universe it's an obvious heresy, and I don't believe it.
So I think Jesus would have to be the physical one (the physical aspect?). Is the Law-giving Father logic, and the Spirit emotion?
Is the Old Testament God showing the emotional Spirit when he gets angry? Is He showing the physical Jesus when He leads the Israelites from the pillars of fire and cloud?
And I guess my questions can apply both to your sincere Triessentialism belief and also to your heresy (does it have a name?). I'm reminded of that SSC post from ages back of AIs in parallel universes deducing each other's existences.
(I wrote a better version of this answer, but the web ate it when I accidentally reloaded the page. Oof.)
I saw what I now call Triessentialism first in a passage which many scholars say was not in the original manuscript but was added by a later hand due to tradition: the doxology of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6.
I had been pondering the make-up of man, what the heck the "spirit" and the "soul" are and how they're differentiated, and "where" they are in relation to each other in the body in a Christian ontology. I'd also been thinking the idea that emotion and logic are as fundamentally different from each other as are the material world and the immutable laws of logic. (You can't hold a "two" in your hand, nor burn a "deduction" to release warmth.)
It was while pondering the differences between the three ontological categories that I realized this distinction was also present in the doxology. My reasoning?
So I identified the power as belonging to God the Father, the glory to the Holy Spirit, and the kingdom to the Son. (Of course, all three Persons have power and glory, and God is rightfully sovereign over everything, so it's not a "this Person of the Godhead doesn't have X" heresy.)
Once I'd seen this pattern there, I started seeing it throughout Scripture. (I don't have the Bible where I highlighted them (highlit?) with me at the moment, and Google is being unhelpful as usual nowadays.)
So do I have more reason to identify Jesus the Son with logic, and not the Father or Spirit? Quite a lot. John described Jesus as both "the Logos"/"The Word" and "the Light." Jesus called Himself "The Way, the Truth, and the Light."
Early Christians said they were followers of "The Way," a word that means both paths and processes. Paths lead the sojourner from the origin to the destination. Processes turn intention into action. Logic is about processes and algorithms as much as it is about interactions of the descriptions of things.
In Chinese, "Tao" means "The Way" and implies "The Right Way". Logos was a Greek concept akin to the Tao: an inherent order and regulation underlying the universe. Heraclitus pioneered the concept and wrote about it in various ways, non-systematically and sometimes contradictorily as a universal consciousness or the mind of a supreme Being, but usually as a receptacle of truth. Other writers picked it up before John, but John identified the Logos as co-equal with God the Father.
Light has taken on a more fascinating meaning to me ever since I pondered waveforms as a carrier of the information of what impacted the wave's medium and holograms as a capture of that waveform. The unknown writer of the Letter to the Hebrews has some of the highest quality Greek prose in the New Testament, speaking with the precision of a programmer and the expression of a poet.
"He is the radiance (apaugasma) of the glory (doxa) of God and the exact imprint (charakter) of His nature (hypostasis)..." - English Standard Version
"He is the emittance of His majesty and the hologram of His person..." - my gloss
To perfectly describe God the infinite Being would take an infinitely precise Likeness, as flawless and divine as He. To measure God would take a standard as perfect and infinite as He.
In a way, the logical measurement is the "son" of that physical thing which is measured, existing with it even if the measurement has not been read out or recorded.
The Muslim writers sometimes speak of the Quran ("The Recitation") as God's uncreated word, not something created by humankind, the ultimate revelation, existing eternally with God.
Here, then, is that perfect formal logic which describes God: Jesus of Nazareth, who told the religious elites to love, and was killed for it. His resurrection is the proof of His correctness and their corruption.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you get like a prize or a title when you invent an entirely new heresy?
Also, there’s a chance Santa Claus will slap you.
More options
Context Copy link
Heresiarch
Okay, that’s probably worth it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Fun. I was thinking recently that so much “religious experience” makes sense even when only including the emotional, and ignoring altogether physical facts and logic and memory. If you are praying in awe at God, then God can just be a placeholder, and provided the experience of “awe” occurs in relation to your life, it is a very beneficial experience to cultivate. Same with humility (a beneficial and adaptive state), petitions (salience of your desires), sustained worship (the training of our attention), thanks (the training of appreciation for things we ought to be appreciate of), apology (salience of wrongs), favor (confidence). We could be tempted to call a person who cultivates these feelings religious, even if it occurs entirely within one’s emotional activity and with no actual belief in God. And then, if there’s some scholarly theist who believes all the right things but lacks this emotional dimension, we would be tempted to call them totally lacking in God. It’s a fun thought: God as Divine Placeholder. God existing in periphery but lost as soon as we focus, like an object in the dark that can only be seen when we aren’t directly seeing it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link