BluePhantom
Educator (of liberals)
- Thread starter
- #41
Myself, I've understood the Trinity to be that the Holy Spirit and Jesus to be OF God, not necessarily three separate manifestations of the same Being.So I have been thinking a lot about God and the crucifixion. For the sake of this question let's assume that Jesus was God or at the very least God resided within Jesus through the Holy Spirit during His ministry. It creates a question about God suffering at the hands of man through Jesus. This was a really big issue in early Christianity and one of the reasons why there were so many different forms of Christianity in the early church.
The question was "if Jesus was God, and Jesus suffered at the hands of man, did man cause God to physically suffer as well?" There was a lot of debate. Some said that Jesus was God, but his physical form was merely an illusion and therefore God did not suffer because you can't harm an illusion. Some apocryphal gospels even depict Jesus as laughing during the crucifixion to really make this point stick. Some said that God entered Jesus either at birth or at his baptism by John the Baptist and left Jesus before His death to avoid the suffering. The thought here was that man cannot possibly harm God so God must have left before any actual harm befell Jesus. Still others argued that Jesus was God and the whole point was for God to experience what it was to be a man. Therefore, God suffered all the same pains and agonies as Jesus did during the passion and crucifixion.
As a point of Biblical history, these schools of thought (as well as others) created rivalries and completely separate branches of early Christianity such as the Gnostics, Ebinonites, Marcionites, proto-orthodox, etc. There were tons of them. To some degree all those different points of view remain within different branches of Christianity.
So I ask this question because I am interested in what most people think of have been taught. I know my point of view on this, but I am very curious to see what others think. For those who are atheist...yeah we already know your point of view. Bugger off.
(kind of like His right and left hands)
Yes that would be accurate. The potato explanation is bad theology but decent understanding.