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Monday 20 April 2015

Problems correspondents have with the Trinity Doctrine

cuadro que representa a la Trinidad (santuario della Santissima Trinità - Vallepietra RM) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Several people have difficulty with taking the words of the bible like they are written. When there is written that God says "This is my beloved son" they still prefer to read that God says He came down and is standing there being incarnated, instead of His son standing there.

We got a message saying

Now here is one of the problems I have with the Trinity Doctrine:

If it was taught by the Bible then why didn't Christians of the first century believe in it? Why didn't Christians of the second century believe in it, or Christians of the third century believe in it? The council of Nicaea in 325 C.E. only talked about the Son and Father, but not the Holy Spirit. So if you do not believe in the Trinity then you share the Faith of Christians for more than 300 years after the death and resurrection of Christ.

And that sums up the reason why we prefer too to keep to the same faith of Jesus and his disciples, worshipping the Only One True God, the God of Abraham. By the years lots of false teachings entered Christianity and as the leaders of the country insisted to have a worship system allowing all the traditions of the regions being kept, several preachers and priests adapted their teachings and way of worship to the regional customs.

bambootigerwrites:

First let's look at a definition of the Trinity: do you agree with this one?

According to the Athanasian Creed, there are three divine Persons

(the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost), each said to be eternal, each

said to be almighty, none greater or less than another, each said to be God, and yet together being but one God. Other statements of the dogma emphasize that these three "Persons" are not separate and distinct individuals but are three modes in which the divine essence exists.

First of all there are not three divine persons described in the first chapter of John's gospel, the Word is not described as eternal here or anywhere else, and the Word is not said to be almighty, or equal with God, or being one with God. but the Word is described here as a separate and distinct individual since the Greek text says that he is "toward (pros)" God, rather than using the prepasition for "in (en)", "from (apo)", or "out of (ek)" , and in a diagram of Greek prepositions "toward" would have to be describing someone outside of and separate and distinct from God.

So not only does the word "Trinity" appear here, but neither does any possible description of a Trinity, and for someone to say that the Word is equal to God because it is with him they would have to explain why this is the case for the Word, but not for the Angels who are elsewhere said to be with God as well.

(Proverbs 8:22) 22 "Jehovah himself produced me as the beginning of
his way, the earliest of his achievements of long ago.

Livingbreeze writes:

Commentators have observed (cf. Keener) that the book of John is bracketed by references to Jesus as theos (God - I want to be clear that I am not arguing here for a translation of Jn. 1:1, only that application of the title theos to Jesus) in Jn 1:1 and Jn 20:28. This seems to draw the attention of the reader to Jesus as theos in both its introductory and concluding remarks.

Jesus is also called theos in v. 18 and seems to reflect in a couple of ways both on Jn 1:1 and Jn 20:28. First, it links the prologue and the remainder of the Gospel by highlighting the dual themes of the Father as directly and fully known to the Son and the Son as the unique exegete of the Father - themes that are prominent throughout the Gospel. Second, together with the opening verse of the Prologue, verse 18 forms one of the two bookends that support and give shape to the whole Gospel, for 1:1 and 1:18 (at the beginning and the end of the Prologue) and 20:28 (at the end of the Gospel) all use theos of Jesus, whether he be thought of as the eternally preexistent Logos (1:1), the incarnate Son (1:18), or the risen Christ (20:28). The evangelist thereby indicates that the acknowledgment of the messiahship of Jesus (20:31) necessarily involves belief in his deity.

As elsewhere in John, the title ho uios tou theou (the Son of God), which is in apposition to ho christos (the Christ) in John 20:31, denotes more than simply the Davidic Messiah. The Gospel was written to produce belief that Jesus was the promised Jewish Messiah and that this Messiah was none other than the "one and only" Son of God who had come from the Father (Jn 11:42; 17:8), who shared his nature (Jn 1:1, 18; 10:30) and fellowship (Jn 1:18; 14:11) and who therefore might appropriately be addressed and worshipped as ho theos mou ("My God"). Unique sonship implies deity (Jn 5:18; cf. 19:7).

That is basically what I think - that because Jesus is God (theos) he may rightfully be called Messiah and Son of God. Unless the former Jn 20:28 is true the latter Jn 20:31 is not true.

So when making reference to God, and God alone, which person are we refering to?

In surveys of the NT use of theos it has been suggested that when theos occurs with the article it generally means the Father. That would suggest that in Acts it is the Father who annoints the Son with the Holy Spirit.

I think this applies to your question regarding the "Revelation of Christ" as well.

In the modern era, in his treatment of Sabellianism and the beginning of the trinitarian discussion, W. P. du Bose remarks (72; similarily Liddon, Romans, 154) that "the Christian doctrine of the Trinity was perhaps before anything else an effor to express how Jesus was God (theos) and yet in another sense was not God (ho theos), that is to say was not the whole Godhead." In particular reference to Johannine usage (which is found to be representative of the NT in general; cf. Murray, 37), B. F. Westcott claims that "the difference between ho theos and theos is such as might have been expected antecedently. The former brings before us the Personal God who has been revealed to us in a personal relation to ourselves: the latter fixes our thoughts on the general conception of the Divine Character and Being" (Epistles, 172).

About the Trinity it self we can find:

from the Encyclopedia Britannica 2005:

The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies. Initially, both the requirements of monotheism inherited from the Old Testament and the implications of the need to interpret the biblical teaching to Greco-Roman religions seemed to demand that the divine in Christ as the Word, or Logos, be interpreted as subordinate to the Supreme Being. An alternative solution was to interpret Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three modes of the self-disclosure of the one God but not as distinct within the being of God itself. The first tendency recognized the distinctness among the three, but at the cost of their equality and hence of their unity (subordinationism); the second came to terms with their unity, but at the cost of their distinctness as “persons” (modalism). It was not until the 4th century that the distinctness of the three and their unity were brought together in a single orthodox doctrine of one essence and three persons.

The Council of Nicaea in 325 stated the crucial formula for that doctrine in its confession that the Son is “of the same substance [homoousios] as the Father,” even though it said very little aboutthe Holy Spirit. Over the next half century, Athanasius defended and refined the Nicene formula, and, by the end of the 4th century, under the leadership of Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus (the Cappadocian Fathers), the doctrine of the Trinity took substantially the form it has maintained ever since.

Arthur Weigall, in his book The Paganism in Our Christianity, states:

"Jesus Christ never mentioned such a phenomenon, and nowhere in the New Testament does the word ‘Trinity’ appear."

He says the idea of a coequal trinity

"was only adopted by the [Roman Catholic] Church three hundred years after the death of our Lord; and the origin of the conception is entirely pagan."

On page 198 of his book Weigall gives a brief history of the trinity doctrine, saying:

"In the Fourth Century B.C. Aristotle wrote: ‘All things are three, and thrice is all: and let us use this number in the worship of the gods; for, as the Pythagoreans say, everything and all things are bound by threes, for the end, the middle, and the beginning have this number in everything, and these compose the number of the Trinity.’

The ancient Egyptians, whose influence on early religious thought was profound, usually arranged their gods or goddesses in trinities: there was the trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, the trinity of Amen, Mut, and Khonsu, the trinity of Khnum, Satis, and Anukis, and so forth. The Hindu trinity of Brahman, Siva, and Vishnu is another of the many and widespread instances of this theological conception. The early Christians, however, did not at first think of applying the idea to their own faith. They paid their devotions to God the Father and to Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and they recognized the mysterious and undefined existence of the Holy Spirit; but there was no thought of these three being an actual Trinity, co-equal and united in One, and the Apostles’ Creed, which is the earliest of the formulated articles of Christian faith, does not mention it."

(1 Timothy 4:1) 4 However, the inspired utterance says definitely that in later periods of time some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to misleading inspired utterances and teachings of demons,

Please do find also to read:

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Saturday 18 April 2015

A Passover for unity in God's community

V11p133001 Torah (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the Torah we do have laws which are case-based. These holy days remembering the passover in many societies the Shir HaShirim — The Song of Songs are read, where we get a magnificent expression of affection between lovers.

This period is an important want concerning the intimate relationship and unity between people and between God. the Nazarene master teacher rabbi Jeshua asked his followers to become one. They had to become one with him, Jesus Christ, but also with their fellow man and with God.

when Jesus came together with his disciples in preparation of the Passover it was to remember how God rescued us from slavery and how god had chosen Himself a People. With the instalment of the New Covenant the followers of Jesus, even when they not originally belonged to the Jewish race, became acceptable to become part of that unity which formed God's community.

For the goim or gentiles Jesus became the passover, the crossing of the sea of death, giving liberation to all people who are willing to accept Jesus as their Messiah.

Passover celebrates our redemption from slavery to freedom. That is binary. One is either a slave or one is a not a slave. There are no degrees of slavery. so how much do you still want to be slave of this world or slave of sin?

Being presented the end of slavery it is up to us to follow God's directions and to accept this given freedom or to refuse God's offering. When freedom was given to Israel in Egypt it was a new beginning and so it is also for us. It is the beginning of everything else.

Like the followers of Moses as slaves had no autonomy, no time, or even emotional energy to engage in the challenges of love, they now faced a new generation were strangely enough the people had again to be re-educated, because soon they seem to have had forgotten the wonders God did to bring them out of slavery. The Jewish slaves might have merely transferred their allegiances from Pharaoh to their God. Their relationship with God would have been the same as their relationship with Pharaoh. Different master, still slaves.

Though God does not want to see slaves. He wants us to come freely to Him. He does not want to bind us. for Him the commandments are not the chains for the people, but the way to protect ourselves. For God those rules are also a sign of His love for His creation, giving them guidelines to make the best out of life.

God does not want to be the Dictator of the universe. Straight from the beginning He made man partner of His creation, giving them tasks to name all things and to take care of the earth. God has chosen man to be His partner.

Shir HaShirim is a magnificent expression of affection between lovers. Allegorically, the song is interpreted as a love song between God and the Jewish people.

After the laws of the altar God empowers the heroes of the Oral law to bring the Torah to life by interpreting it and applying it in the way appropriate for their particular generation. We get a story of full of drama, intrigue and adventure and God's Words is an open book showing us how God wanted to create a good relationship with man.

Shir HaShirim reminds us we are now free to love, and we are free to feel God’s love. From slavery, to freedom, to love.

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Please do find to read:

Maintaining unity of Spirit in the bond of peace becoming one with God

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Monday 13 April 2015

Declaring a Jihad Against ISIS

Arabic script. Eghra, Read. The first Quoranic word, in order of arrival. (Letter Qaf eight times, letter 'Alif sixteen times.) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Muslim Youth League UK (MYL), an active UK based Islamic youth organisation, has declared an ideological war against ISIS and other terrorist groups. Issuing a 7-point declaration on the 27th of March, at an event in Glasgow, they claimed the terrorist groups have 'no link with Islam or the Muslim community'.

The Youth League represents young Muslims from around the UK and works actively to promote unity and tolerance. It hopes to embolden other Muslim organisations to issue similar declarations that unequivocally condemn extremism.
The denunciation by the League comes at a time when ISIS recruitment is on the rise in the UK. Shaykh Rehan Ahmed Raza, president of Muslim Youth League UK and a community activist from Glasgow has said "our efforts are aimed at deterring further ISIS recruitment in Britain and defending the Muslim community, who feel their religion has been hijacked".

In their 7-point declaration against ISIS and other terrorist groups, MYL states:

"1. We declare their killing of human beings, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, to be un-Islamic.
2. Supporters of these groups have deviated from the teachings of Prophet Muhammad and the Quran.
3. The emergence of the terrorists, who would use the name of Islam to justify their atrocious activities, was prophesied by Prophet Muhammad. He declared them as being out of the ambit of Islam.
4. We challenge ISIS, similar groups and their supporters ideologically and intellectually.
5. We reject all generalised Islamophobic labelling of Muslims as extremists or terrorists by the media, politicians and the general public.
6. We ask Muslims from all walks of life, regardless of the school of thought to which they belong, to stand united against extremists who have hijacked the true teachings of Islam.
7. We call upon scholars and community leaders to raise a united and unwavering voice against extremism."

Social media has proven to be a key tool for ISIS to promote their message and recruit young Muslims. As a countermeasure, MYL have revealed their strategy to use twitter and other popular social networking sites to spread the true and peaceful image of Islam.
The barbarism and lack of respect for the sanctity of human life shown by ISIS is a challenge to every civilised value, not least to the tenets of Islam. As Muslims, the MYL will continue to oppose them at every opportunity.

Find out more about MYL UK:
Website - www.myl.org.uk
Twitter - www.twitter.com/MYL_UK
Facebook - www.facebook.com/MuslimYouthLeagueUK

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State and attitude of certain people to blame for radicalisation

We have seen the behaviour of the Western people going more and more away from the Judeo Christian values. Ethics of all sort are not any more important for lots of inhabitants of crowded areas where not everybody finds work and/or gets respected for whom and what he is.

In Great Britain almost three quarters of Muslims polled said they believe the “values of British society” are compatible with those of their religion, one in seven said they were not.Abotu the action of certain Muslims they do have comprehension for them disagreeing with the evolution of the British society. But Four in 10 British Muslims believe that police and MI5 are partly responsible for the radicalization of young people who support extremists, a survey commissioned by Sky News, has found.

Sky News said the survey is the first of its kind, setting out to determine what Muslims and non-Muslims think about controversial issues relating to radicalization, security and prejudice.

Police escort an Islamist demonstrator marching to protest outside the US embassy in London Photo: CARL COURT/AFP

Three missing schoolgirls feared to be in Syria

> MI5 and police partly to blame for radicalisation – say four in 10 British Muslims

Preceding: Wrong ideas about religious terrorism

Please do find additional reading:

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Wrong ideas about religious terrorism

Al-Fatiha Muslim Gays - Gay Parade 2008 in San Francisco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Lots of people do have a wrong idea about the amount of religious terrorism. Most badly affected is the Muslim community which has to cope with the bad name those fools of ISIS do give them.

Belgium and the United Kingdom have seen many people recruited, surprisingly also several women to come to Syria and help the jihad. The present going on series about those recruitments on BBC is a must see.

We can not ignore those militant groups in Muslim countries who make a big effort to radicalise and recruit Muslims living in the West. They even use for it a British girl from Birmingham to do that. West Europe has seen many leaving their capitalist soil for what they call the good cause. The United States of America looked at those happenings with a magnifying glass and got a terrible fear that large-scale terrorist would strike on their home soil.

Such fears, however, have been largely unfounded, because Muslims in the United States have overwhelmingly ignored the calls to militancy, said Charles Kurzman, a researcher with the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security in North Carolina.

“We have not seen mass radicalization of Muslims in the United States,”

he said.
As part of a Triangle Center study, Kurzman, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill who researches Islamic movements, tallied a total of 250 American Muslims who have been arrested for — or who have engaged in — acts that might be called terrorism since 2001. That’s out of an estimated population of 3 million Muslims in the U.S.

Kurzman’s study found that the death toll as a result of all their plots was 50 — over a period of time in which 200,000 people were murdered in the United States.
Although comparisons are tricky, other studies suggest that right-wing violence claimed more lives in the U.S. than terrorism committed in the name of Islam.

There have been serious attacks, of course. The 2009 shooting at the Fort Hood military base in Texas and the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon were carried out by Muslim U.S. citizens who claimed to be avenging American military actions overseas.

Though we must not exaggerate such a Muslim violence and should be well aware there is much more intern violence by non-believing people going on. When we look at the figures for Belgium religious violence is negligible with less than 0.14% of more than 700 terrorist attack in one year. The only thing is that often such Muslim fed terrorism gets more attention in the media. Cases as the attack around the Charlie Hebdo got the fantasy of many heads turning wild.

Also in the United States there are less Muslim American terrorism suspects the last few years than two decades ago. Kurzman said the numbers have actually been declining, and over the last couple of years there have been almost no plots aimed at the United States. Most of those arrested recently on suspicion of terrorism were attempting to travel to Syria or Yemen to join groups that the U.S. government considers terrorist organizations.

David Schanzer, a Duke University expert on homegrown terrorism who directs the Triangle center, said that while federal authorities spend “a disproportionate amount of energy” thinking about domestic terrorism, local police departments across the country have other things on their minds.

“They very much realize that the things that are threats to public safety in their communities are much more things like drugs, gangs, domestic violence,” he said.

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Please find to read:
Acts of Terrorism Very Rare Among US Muslims, Study Finds

Of old and new ideas to sustain power and to feel good by loving to be connected and worship something

Please do find additional reading:

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Welcome

Welcome at this zone created by Marcus Ampe for the Belgian Free Christadelphians, where previous articles from the MSN Groups and Multiply are brought together and made available again to the general public. On 2012 October 26 this site came into development and new articles shall be added next to our main site and to the Christadelphian Ecclesia site: Christadelphian Ecclesia.
You are welcome at that site to find more articles.

All who want to follow Jesus/Jeshua (Yeshua/Yahsua) from Nazareth, the Christ, the Messiah and wants to be united with people who sincerely want to keep to those teachings of this masterteacher are welcome to share their love for Christ and their hope for the coming Kingdom.

The names "Christadelphia" and 'Christadelphian' is compounded of two Greek words: 'christos' and 'adelphoi' and means 'brethren in Christ'.

This site is created by a Free Christadelphian only bounded to Jesus Christ. We are open to anybody who wants to share the brotherly love of Christ. Coming together by a common belief in 'the things concerning the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ' (Acts 8:12).

In the older Multiply messages links to Multiply shall not always work from 2012 December 1, but you shall be able to find them by copying and pasting the title in the search machine. I have worked on re-editing those links from 2005 onwards, so that they could work in the future, but it became a to much time consuming job, so I stopped doing it after a while. (My apologies for certain links not working any more.)

Thanks for visiting us and hope to see you again.

Welkom

Wij wensen allen welkom die hier op deze pagina's terecht komen en hopen dat zij geïnspireerd mogen geraken om verder de Bijbel ter hand te nemen en zelf op onderzoek te gaan wat er in de Heilige Schrift werkelijk staat.

De namen "Christadelphia" en "Christadelphian" is een samentelling van twee Griekse woorden : "Christos" en "adelphoi" en betekent 'broer in Christus'. De Christadelphians zijn een groep van mensen die samen verbonden zijn door hun gemeenschappelijk geloof betreffende de dingen aangaande het Koninkrijk van God en de naam van Jezus Christus (Jeshua, de Messias) (Handelingen van de Apostelen 8v12).
Christadelphian mensen zouden tot een wereldwijde gemeenschap moeten behoren, wiens doel is zo trouw als mogelijke de leerstelling en voorbeeld van Jezus/Jehsua Christus te volgen, zoals het geregistreerd staat in de Bijbel.
In een wereld die vol is van onzekerheden genieten wij van een eenvoudig, rechtstreeks en logisch geloof, dat nu al vrede en voldoening aanbiedt en de belofte van het nog te komen eeuwigdurende vreugderijk: het Koninkijk van God.

Op deze site, gecreëerd door Marcus Ampe voor de Vrije Belgische Christadelphians, of Broeders in Christus, zijn in oktober 2012 de vroegere berichten uit de MSN Groepen en Multiply samen gebracht en terug zichtbaar gemaakt voor het algemeen publiek.

Meerdere linken in de vroegere artikelen zullen vermoedelijk niet werken, maar u kan de titel dan kopiëren en plakken in het "Zoek" venster om zo bij het juiste artikel te komen. Ik maakte er werk van om de artikelen vanaf 2005 terug te editen en daarin de linken te vernieuwen, zodat zij terug zouden werken. Maar dit vroeg zo veel tijd dat ik het heb opgegeven. Daarom verzoek ik mij te verontschuldigen indien u een link tegen komt die niet meer werkt.

Vanaf 26 oktober 2012 is deze website opengesteld naar het publiek en zullen er in de toekomst nog enkele artikelen bij komen. Maar de meerderheid van de teksten zullen nu geplaatst worden op de site van de Vlaamse Broeders in Christus of Christadelphians en op de kerkgemeenschapssite
Christadelphian Ecclesia.

Graag ontmoeten wij u daar voor meerdere artikelen.

Pages

Monday 20 April 2015

Problems correspondents have with the Trinity Doctrine

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Saturday 18 April 2015

A Passover for unity in God's community

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Monday 13 April 2015

Declaring a Jihad Against ISIS

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State and attitude of certain people to blame for radicalisation

Please do find additional reading:

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Wrong ideas about religious terrorism

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