“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your calling: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all, through all and in all." ~Ephesians 4:4-6Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The doctrine of the Trinity is the teaching that God the father, God the son, and God the holy spirit are three distinct divine persons who are one God. As we all know, we cannot know everything there is it is to be known about God, because God himself reveals himself. Theologians have many reasons why the Trinity has meaning in our lives today. Although this doctrine is not defined in the Scriptures, there are many that refer to the Trinity. Because God's transcendence is absolutely incomprehensible, which is beyond our ability to fully understand it, the Trinity is very difficult to grasp or understand. This is why this doctrine raises questioning aspects of Christianity. Rausch introduces the Trinity as another self-revelation of God, which is a divine mystery in itself. He contemplates that the Trinity is “at the heart of the Christian faith” (Rausch 59). To truly understand the Trinity, you must understand and believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit as three in one. The question commonly asked here is: If there is one God, how can there be three? There are several Old Testament scriptures that allude to more than one person within the Godhead. Two scriptures that allude to divinity as three in one are Psalm 45:6-7 and Isaiah 6:8. Even if they do not say it explicitly, they lay the foundation for the plurality of God. As mentioned before, the Doctrine of the Trinity is not found in the Scriptures but is founded on them. The New Testament contains many scriptures that testify to the fact that the early Christians had some sort of awareness of God's work taking place through Christ and the Spirit. Matthew 28:19 Jesus commands his disciples to baptize people “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Rausch 61). This clearly states that the deity is composed of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. These three are not separate but united as three distinct divine persons. In the article “Three in One” by William C. Placher, he mentions how traditional Trinitarian terminology does not incorporate the aspect of how the Trinity fits together. But the terms were rather developed to support the mystery of God. It also reviews the relationship between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity, which are two ways of contemplating the Trinity. The immanent Trinity focuses on the inner divine life of God while the economic Trinity focuses on how God reveals himself as triune. Rausch goes further to explain that Karl Rahner insisted that the immanent and economic trinity are inseparable from each other. Placher also says that the doctrine of the Trinity consists of believing that “God is truly like Jesus,” or basically “understanding the story of Jesus as the story of God” (Placher). I did not fully understand the development of the Trinity. But what I do know is that it is the foundation of the two major creeds, the Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed. They both have a different way of contemplating the Trinity, but what they have in common is that they affirm that Jesus is God. I have found that when I read about the doctrine of the Trinity, there is a lot of confusion or division in the procession of the Holy Spirit or in other words in the filioque. The East wanted to emphasize the monarchy according to which the Holy Spirit comes from the father and only from the father. But Western churches added to the creed, without.
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