On second thought, since it’s so quiet around here on the weekends, I’m waiting till Monday to give the answers for the test in the previous post.
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Last night, we went to the big annual fair they have here in Amarillo. Of course, there was a midway with lots of rides and expensive food. We were there mainly for the rodeo, which featured a good number of the world’s top contenders in that rough-and-tumble sport.
I can still remember the days when the National Finals Rodeo was always held in Oklahoma City (a real cow town, unlike Las Vegas which simply out-bid OKC). One year back in the day, I got to tag along with a friend and his family who had tickets to the NFR. Our seats weren’t terrible, but weren’t the best either, which made it all the more surprising when we discovered we were sitting next to Larry Mahan, who struck me as one of those people who wasn’t quite prepared to be semi-famous.
After the rodeo, we walked through the livestock building, peering at all the show horses in their stalls. What beautiful animals they are.
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Who hasn’t had the experience of hearing his or her religion sized up by someone else who clearly doesn’t understand? Consider the following:
“In the beginning was the Divinity in his splendor,
manifested as the sole Lord of creation,
and he upheld the earth and the heavens.
Who is the Deity we shall worship with our offerings?”
The source of the quote? It’s the Rig Veda (X, 121:1), one of the foundational scriptures of the religion known as Hinduism. Notice again the language of “sole Lord.” It doesn’t sound polytheistic, does it? And yet, polytheism and henotheism (a type of polytheism that acknowledges the supremacy of one of its gods) are the terms often used to size up Hinduism.
Ask a well-read Hindu if his or her religion is polytheistic, and you’ll likely hear that all of the different deities in Hinduism are simply different masks on the same Deity. In the same way that I am a son, a brother, a father, and a husband, yet still the same person, so the gods of Hinduism are ultimately not essentially different gods.
Christians are not polytheists. But they do believe that three distinct persons (or however you want to speak of the Father, the Christ, and the Spirit of God) have the character or quality of being God. On this point, I don’t know that the outlook of Hinduism is really that different from the outlook of Christianity.
Other experiences? Thoughts? Comments?
Frank,
ReplyDeleteJames White puts it this way, "The Being of God is what makes God, God. It is the substance of God. When we speak of such things, we are entering into the discussion of ontology, the study of “being.” God’s being is eternal (i.e., not limited by both time and omnipresent (not limited by space). In this matter God is utterly unique. Human beings are limited by both time and space. It is here that we encounter the vast chasm that separates the Creator from all creation. God is infinite in His being, while all creatures are, by nature, limited.
It is vitally important that we recognize the difference between the words Being and Person. The failure to recognize that the definition given above is using these two terms in different ways is one of the prime reasons for confusion in regard to the Trinity. Being is what makes something what it is. Person is what makes someone who he or she is. As Hank Hanegraaff puts it, when speaking of the Trinity, we speak of one what (the Being of God) and three whos (the three divine Persons). Most cultic rejections of the Trinity focus on blurring this distinction.
We speak of these three divine Persons as coequal and coeternal. The Father has eternally been the Father, and the Son has eternally been the Son. The terms Father and Son refer to an eternal relationship that they have with each other. It is vitally important to understand that this relationship has always been. If we neglect to recognize this fact, we run the danger of thinking that the Father precedes or creates the Son, when this is not the case. While theologians speak of the Father begetting the Son, they do so in such a way that completely denies that the Son is a creation of, or ontologically inferior to, the Father. Each of the divine Persons shares fully and completely in the divine Being, but they likewise bear a relationship to one another within the Godhead itself. Many arguments raised against the Trinity actually focus on the relationship between the Persons, as if these automatically indicate an inferiority of nature. We do well to recognize this kind of error in the arguments of those who oppose the Christian faith."
There is perhaps more error on this subject in our coC fellowship possibly than any other. Not understanding this basic idea of the trinity leads to foolish ideas about the deity of Jesus and the person and work of the Holy Spirit.
Grace and Peace,
Royce Ogle