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March 17 - March 19, 2021
bouncy.
sounds cold and stodgy.
aim of this book is to stop the madness.
the truth is that God is love because God is a Trinity. This book, then, will simply be about growing in our enjoyment of God and seeing how God’s t...
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it is only when you grasp what it means for God to be a Trinity that you really sense the beauty, the overflowing kindness, the heart-grabbing loveliness of God.
irksome
we would be shearing him of precisely what is so deli...
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I must congratulate you for having read so far as this.
“Theodore Oswaldtwistle the thistle sifter sifted a sack of thistles”—rather
Yet Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God. To know and grow to enjoy him is what we are saved for—and
getting to know God better does actually make for far more profound and practical change as well. Knowing the love of God is the very thing that makes us loving. Sensing the desirability of God alters our preferences and inclinations, the things that drive our behavior: we begin to want God more than anything else.
No exaggeration: the knowledge of this God turns lives around.
There is, of course, that major obstacle in our way: that the Trinity is seen not as a solution and a delight, but as an oddity and a problem.
“The Trinity,” some helpful soul explains, “is a bit like an egg, where there is the shell, the yolk and the white, and yet it is all one egg!” “No,” says another, “the Trinity is more like a shamrock leaf: that’s one leaf, but it’s got three bits sticking out. Just like the Father, Son and Spirit.” And one wonders why the world laughs.
For whether the Trinity is compared to shrubbery, streaky bacon, the three states
of H2O or a three-headed giant, it begins to sound, well, bizarre, like some pointless and unsightly growth on our understanding of God, one that could surely be lopped off with no ...
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weird and fantastic monstrosity,
How could the eggishness of God ever be more than a weird curiosity?
I am never going to fall down in awe or find my heart drawn to ...
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the egg illustration and its kind may not be the way to go.
Another way to go that can reinforce the idea that the Trinity is essentially a problem is to stick solely to saying what the Trinity is not.
it can leave one with the hollow sense that one has successfully avoided all sorts of nasty-sounding heresies, but at the cost of wondering who or what one is actually to worship.
“God is a mystery,” we can whisper in our most piously hushed tones.
“We are simply not meant to know such things.” But while such sentiments score high for their ring of reverence, they score pretty low for accuracy.
God is a mystery, but not in the alien abductions, things-that-go-bump-in-the-night sense.
God is a mystery in that who he is and what he is like are secrets, things we would never have worked out by ourselves. But this triune God has revealed himself to us.
the Trinity is not some piece of inexplicable apparent nonsense, like a square circle or ...
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To know the Trinity is to know God, an eternal and personal God of infinite beauty, interest and fascination. The Trinity is a God we can know, and forever grow to know better.
the Trinity is not a problem.
Bored Monks on Rainy Afternoons
the word never appears in the Bible.
cloister-bound theologians with too much time on their hands.
rigamarole,
the church managed to cook up this knotty and perplexing dish, the Trinity.
they were not trying to add to God’s revelation of himself, as if Scripture were insufficient; they were trying to express the truth of who God is as revealed in Scripture.
for each new distortion a new language of response was needed.
the Trinity is a scriptural truth—and
I want to avoid giving the impression that they were at some higher stage of religious evolution than the Bible. They were mere heralds of the triune God revealed in Scripture.
the point of Deuteronomy 6:4 is not to teach that “The Lord our God, the Lord is a mathematical singularity.”
the Lord as the one object of their affections:
The word is also used, for example, in Genesis 2:24, where Adam and Eve—two persons—are said to be one.
Is it the sticky toffee pudding of faith—a nice way to round things off, but incidental—or is it the main course?
Steel yourself
catholic faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.”
while we might be happy enough to include the Trinity in our list of “things Christians believe,” the suggestion that our very salvation depends on the Trinity comes across as ridiculously overinflated bluster.
like the Reformer Martin Luther, these Buddhists believed in salvation by grace alone and not by human effort.
the “salvation” in view here was nothing like Christian salvation: it was not about knowing Amida or being known by him;
what is essential for Christian faith.
Salvation by grace alone? Christ’s atoning work on the
cross? His bodily resurrection?
