Jason.
Btw, I’m a disciple of Jesus Christ…not some man made label. I don’t think Jesus has called anyone to be an “hyper orthodox trinitarian theologian”.
Hi Tom,
I haven’t read Boyd’s doctoral dissertation on the Trinity (though I’d like to, eventually), so I can only respond to what you’ve posted (and I realize what you gave was a very brief summary that I’m sure does not do full justice to Boyd’s argument!).
You said:
My initial thoughts: I just don’t see why “person” need be understood as an inherently relational notion. I understand “person” to mean “a being with rational self-awareness.” Now this may imply the potential for “other-awareness” but it doesn’t necessitate it as something fully realized. So if rational self-awareness is what it means to be a person (which implies the capacity or potential for inter-personal relationship, but does not necessitate it for one’s personhood to be fully actualized), then certainly God can be maximally personal without the need for another self-existent person(s) to eternally complete or “maximize” this personal attribute. We can even speak of God being “love” even apart from there being other personal beings around to love yet. The “greatest commandment” according to Christ is that we love (ascribe worth to) others as we love (ascribe worth to) ourselves, which implies that self-love is presupposed; but one doesn’t need to consist of more than one person in order to love oneself, so self-love for God does not necessitate that he consist of two or more persons. And since I think we can all agree that God loves (ascribes worth to) himself, this would satisfy the condition of his being “maximally personal love” (at least, according to the definition of “person” above). Moreover, when we drop the (I think incoherent) idea of “creation ex nihilo” and instead view everything as having been created out of God’s own fullness (which means that we are, in a sense, an extension of Godself!), then we may understand God to be fully and necessarily disposed to love all personal beings that he creates even before they exist as such, by virtue of the fact that God necessarily ascribes worth to himself!
Yes; but you still weren’t interacting with my explanation, even then. You only repeated yourself again in slightly more detail. I might as well not have bothered to write anything at all.
It doesn’t take much of that non-interaction before people decide they might as well not bother to write anything to you at all.
Ran’s reply to me was much better.
Ran:
The first two verses are a little more vague than that (unless creatively translated 
). The only way to get that specific meaning from those verses is to read more details into those verses from elsewhere. Which might as well be done in regard to the verse from chp 4, and save a step!
I don’t mean it’s wrong to read those details in–that’s part of a contextual evaluation of the verses. But it’s begging the question to appeal to them as being decisive testimony in themselves. And unitarians don’t (yet) accept the same things we do concerning those larger contexts, so appealing to those larger contexts as making a decisive difference in these verses is also begging the question.
It just means the debate has to go back to those other details; for example, what the NT authors demonstrably mean when they call Christ “Lord”. Or (if common authorship of GosJohn and 1 John is acknowledged, or at least a common school of early Christian thought) what the author of GosJohn is declaring about Christ (and reports Christ as declaring to be true about Himself–or about himself, perhaps.) Which are each hugely extensive topics.
Jason.
Lol. This is a fact… If you do not believe Jesus Christ is God incarnate in human flesh… you have the spirit of the Antichrist and are not a child of God. Period! You can Hebrew it…You can Greek it…You can harmonically exegesis it… the truth will not change.
Aaron37,
Lots of people claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ; including the unitarians, whom you are harshly criticising for not (in effect) being hyper-orthodox trinitarians.
If you actually bothered to take a few months to study things here before writing your opinions about them, you might discover:
1.) By ‘hyper-orthodox trinitarian’ I mean that I’m extremely in favor of orthodox trinitarian theism; I am extremely detailed and picky about why I believe it to be true; and I routinely pick at other trinitarians for not being trinitarian enough. (e.g. when a trinitarian’s position elsewhere involves schisming the substance or the intentions of the Persons of the Trinity.)
2.) I don’t consider my hyper-orthodoxy to be of any moral or spiritual value, in itself. (On the contrary, I would consider that to be a variation of the gnostic heresy.) Which is why I can recognize in principle and in practice that people don’t have to believe the same technical things I do, in order to be further ahead of me in the kingdom.
Meaning, yes, in point of fact I agree: Jesus calls us to be disciples, not necessarily to be hyper-orthodox trinitarian theologians.
(Too bad you don’t actually agree with that, or you wouldn’t be dissing the unitarians for not being ortho-trin; and you’d be taking the statement of 1 John 4:2-3 in context not only with what the NT authors have to say about the Lordship of Christ, but also in context with what Jesus has to say about appropriate faith and discipleship in the Synoptics: where, for example, the sheep are not welcomed into zoe eonian and the goats sent into eonian kolasis due to technical beliefs about whether Christ is God come in the flesh.)
Jason.
1 Corinthians 12:27-28. Each person who is in the body of Christ is called to one or more of these eight offices in the kingdom of God. 1 apostles 2. prophets 3. teachers. 4.evangelists 5. pastors 6 helps 7 administrations 8 diversities of tongues. Notice “theologian” is not one of them. It is up to you to found out what God’s particular call( ministry) is on your life and to fulfill it.
“I will tell of the decree:The LORD said to me, ‘You are my Son; today I have begotten you.’” Psalm 2:7 (ESV) Unless “today” really means “outside of time” ( 
) Jesus Christ was “begotten” in history. Moreover, this was clearly a prophecy (Acts 13:32-33; Heb 1:5), which means it had not yet been fulfilled when the Psalm was written.
“And the messenger answering said to her, `The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee, therefore also the holy-begotten (gennaō) thing shall be called Son of God.” Luke 1:35 (YLT)
“And on his thinking of these things, lo, a messenger of the Lord in a dream appeared to him, saying, `Joseph, son of David, thou mayest not fear to receive Mary thy wife, for ***that which in her was begotten *(gennaō) is of the Holy Spirit…” Matt 1:20 (YLT).
And in Matt 1:18 we read of the “gennēsis” of Jesus Christ. The word suggests origin, and not “birth” alone.
Jason.
You can Hebrew it…You can Greek it…You can harmonically exegesis it… the truth will not change…If you do not believe Jesus Christ is God incarnate in human flesh you are not of God and have the spirit of the Antichrist. You are not a child of God.
Thanks for coming to our defense, Jason! 
“Yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist.” 1Cor 8:6
“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Rom 10:9
Aaron.
Do you believe Jesus is God incarnate in human flesh?
Then jump to the end of the book to find out who ‘the eternal life’ John introduces us to in the beginning, in fact, IS. More vagueness? Sure. It can be seen that way if the reader is in a vacuum apart from the church - and judge the doctrine from that vacuum.
A naive trinitarianism is still trinitarianism. If the truth of it is only truly enjoyed by the elite or the esoteric - then the ‘common Christian’ cannot be said to have known Christ at all, only a facet of Christ. But we both know that is not the case. The real question then is can the doctrine be known and understood and ACCEPTED outside of the church and the communion of saints? I say no. Outside of the church The Trinity will never rise above a theory - which is to say, it will never be confessed.
If belief in the Trinity were merely a ‘technical matter’, then why the insistence that it be confessed in determining a Christian, and by extension, it’s messengers? Or, contrawise, as A37 keeps reminding us - in determining a messenger for someone else.
Which is another way of saying, ‘If we build up a case properly from other scriptures first, then we can understand what is being said here, too.’
Which I agreed was the proper thing to do. What I’ve been saying pretty constantly is that the doctrine cannot be read out of these verses in themselves.
That being said, I think I did in fact make an argument about the grammatic syntax of 1 John 5:20 in my 76 page digest. It’s something that wouldn’t necessarily be noticed by someone just reading an English translation (and doubtless would be rejected by some unitarians along the lines of, “You can Hebrew it… You can Greek it… You can harmonically exegesis it… the truth will not change…” (In-joke. 
) )
I’ll save some time and look up the entry myself:
See how {cough} obvious it is?! 
I don’t blame non-trinitarians for not picking up on it; not without a lot of study anyway.
John is warning about people going about in the world claiming to be prophets. (As anyone might have noticed from the immediately preceding verse, for example. ) Someone going around claiming prophetic authority and especially speaking as representative of a spirit, is a VERY different thing from the regular guy on the street, or even a teacher, trying to figure out the proper things to believe true about Jesus. (Though the teacher has more liability.) Much of 1 John is devoted to warning about these false prophets, and the brief 2 John (which looks like a cover letter written to the female leader of a house church) focuses on the same topic: “If anyone comes to you and does not bring this doctrine, do not receive him into the house or give him any greeting; for he who greets him shares in his wicked work.” (vv.10-11) That isn’t bad advice anyway, but it’s especially important for the leader of a congregation who has a special responsibility to sort out apostolic and prophetic claimants.
The 1 John verses are also a good guideline for testing supernatural spirits claiming to come bring revelation to a person; but the principles are the same either way.
If (as I agree) the Epistles are written by the author of GosJohn (and, by the way, similar themes show up in RevJohn, too 
), this synchs up with the narrative contexts in that Gospel indicating that the high-level Christological controversies, and responsibilities for believing rightly or not, are aimed at the Jewish leadership: the people who had the most opportunity to get things right, and who had been granted authority to lead the people. Consequently, they’re also the people Christ comes down hardest on for trying to duck out of accepting the implications of what they knew. (Which is also how the Synoptic “sin against the Holy Spirit” is aimed, too.)
I think the letter is more likely directed at Gnostic sects that had popped up claiming that the Word only appeared to have a body, i.e. appeared to be a man because He was divine. Which means aspects of the ‘Godhead on earth’ - the Word amongst us - may be assumed to be believed by the very Gnostics he was warning about. Christ’s divinity was a given. He body - His very manhood - was not believed by the Gnostics since divinity could not be touched directly by touching a filthy, material body. So I see the Gnostics attacking the Great Hope - the Resurrection itself, primarily - and not the Trinity per se.
If, as you have done, switch that warning to Jewish ‘prophets’ then it does become a question of divinity…though I see the Trinity being assumed to be the belief of the recipients of the letter.
Besides, the letter was written well after 70ad and the ‘Jewish leadership’ was no longer a factor - they were either dead or working in Roman salt mines.
That would all certainly fit with the definition I found…
I’m not sure if that helps the case one way or the other. The question in my mind still is; can we definitively say that the man Jesus Christ was definitively God, or was he God in the functional, subordinate sense.
We all know and I think, agree, that Jesus is not the Father. Jesus is always subordinate to the Father, at least in the functional sense. So is it really just a Western mindset hair-splitting distinction to say that he is not God/ is God? it seems like perhaps we could say that in some senses he was, and in some he wasn’t.
As that great theologian, Forrest Gump, once said: ‘Why can’t it be both?’
Which is pretty much what the church came up with. 100% God and 100% man - but in a single (never to be divided) PERSON.
Meanwhile, the elite tell us that these things are above the understanding of ordinary people. Ha! (I’m not picking on you, Jason, but, rather, that general mindset.)
And if He’s 100% God and God’s only Son and not the Spirit (spirits don’t have bodies or eat chocolates). Bingo! The Trinity!
Thank you, Forrest.
Obviously it would work well with that; and you’re probably right. (This is the standard educated guess in the field, too; and for good reasons.)
I doubt that the warning is about Jewish prophets per se, or even about Jewish anti-missionaries; the warning looks aimed more at charismatic prophets claiming Christian status looking to take advantage of congregations. But the condemnation synchs up with authoritative concerns in GosJohn. It isn’t Yosef bar Schmo being condemned for doctrinal error in such strong language, but people at (or claiming to have) top-level religious authority over the lives of other people. (Looking back over what I wrote, I see how it might seem like I was trying to say 1 John 4 was also aimed at Pharisee authorities. But that wasn’t what I meant; I only meant to be drawing comparisons about where the greatest condemnations are aimed. Sorry–my paragraph composition could have been better there. 
)
The charismatic prophets could have been proto-Gnostics (the standard educated guess)–and their notion of divinity, including Christ’s divinity, wouldn’t necessarily be as strong as a monotheistic docetism, but the warning works against them, too. (And considering that there’s strong evidence elsewhere that Jesus was claiming the identity of the Shekinah/Presence, it’s easy to see how a Jewish-Christian docetism or a Greco-Roman one either one could get going: the Angel of the Face might manifest bodily, but wouldn’t “come in the flesh” in an Incarnational way, and need not have a human body at all.)
Or, the prophets might have been denying the historicity of the events at all and promoting a purely heavenly or merely ‘spiritual’ meaning to the story–which would get around the scandal of a ‘real’ crucifixion. (Somewhat like some Dutch hypersceptics are currently trying to argue for the origin of Christianity. I haven’t yet figured out why Christians were supposed to invent a fictional history with loads of early-mid-1st century verisimilitude in the mid-late 2nd century, against practically all observed folklore development schemas; but that’s their problem I guess, not ours. )
Or the prophets might have been denying the eternal and original Shema-unity of the Son with the Father, thus denying Jesus’ Lordship in the highest Jewish religious sense. The finale to 1 John, notably, doesn’t even mention the coming of Christ in the flesh (unlike the opening, and chapter 4)–so what is the author aiming at there? The grammar in Greek, with relevant immediate contexts, points toward him affirming the co-Godship of Christ with the Father–while in practically the same breath warning against idolatry. (This is the point to that statement from 1 Cor 8 Aaron quoted, not incidentally. But that’s a whole other discussion.) Consequently, the author would be aiming at those charismatic prophet claimants who deny this (whether proto-Gnostic or proto-Arians of various sorts.)
But he’s doing so in language already familiar to his readers, including in its meanings; which means it may be more obscure to us.
Not so; the Pharisee party (and its Hillel and Shammai branches) regrouped, quickly re-established good relations with the Romans, and worked hard to solidify religious leadership over Jewish believers in order to fill the void created by the destruction of the Temple sacrificial system.
But I don’t think the letter has to have been written long after (or any after) 70 either. On the contrary, its antichrist language synchs up pretty well with RevJohn’s notion of the antichrist (and via that route with Paul’s Thessalonian warnings, too–both texts of which presuppose the Temple is still standing and operational); and its theology (which is the typical ground for dating it later) is demonstrably pre-70, insofar as there is any solid core of authentic Pauline epistles.
Still, as I said I doubt it’s aimed primarily at Jewish counter-Christian missionary outreach (via the Pharisees)–I don’t think they’d be sending charismatic prophets to house churches claiming Christian religious inspiration. (GosJohn, on the other hand, looks a lot like being aimed primarily against counter-Christian missionary outreach via the Pharisees.)
Referencing the under-lined: Where the heck do you see THAT anywhere in First John???
I see where you are going with this. (I think) Because I think you just said: The traditional, orthodox, and ecclesiastical Church (is it where the antichrist dwells?) has sold people a bill of goods about the Trinity and you, the Hyper-Ortho-Trin guy, have come to save the day. (Are you sure that ‘Ortho’ should be on your cape?). Say it ain’t so, Jason.
Imagine a Church claiming any authority to teach!!!
Ran.
The harmonical- pharmaceutical- exegetical of scripture says so. Ran, btw, did I ever tell you where I learned those words from? From going to Cemetery…I mean Seminary. Lol.
But Ran, the very idea that Jesus is “100% God and 100% man” is “above the understanding of ordinary people.” It flies in the face of simple logic: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=743&start=0#p8354 It’s like trying to believe that God is love while at the same time believing that he’s going to allow billions of people to be tortured for all eternity; it just ain’t rational. And while the church elite have historically demanded that believers travel to Mystery Land to accept such things, I don’t think Scripture makes such demands on us.
Aaron.
If Jesus was not 100% God then he could not pay for the sins of the world. It took the precious blood of God to pay the penalty for sin. I’m not going to go into the whole story because it will be hard for your gnostic mind to wrap around it and will just reject it.
The church also demands you must believe in Jesus’ finished work on the cross to be born again and saved. That flies in the simple face of logic, but it does not make it any less true. That is why you must believe from your heart and not from your intellectual knowledge to appropriate what God has already done by grace.