June 16, 2019
John 16:15 …“All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” vs. 15
According to John’s gospel, Jesus told his disciples that he and the Father were one and that after Jesus left the earth, the Father would send the Spirit of Truth to be with the disciples. There is no doctrine spelled out in his words, but, within the next couple hundred years, church leaders began to have conversations about how those three entities were related. Some of them found it helpful to use terms lifted from Greek philosophy to define what came to be known as the Trinity. That idea of a Trinitarian God now seems cumbersome and there are some who think we’d be better off with a less complex way of understanding divinity. What we’ve found however, is that the Trinity has remarkable staying power, and as long as we don’t get too rigid in our definitions, it can be useful in understanding our God-experiences. We know that in the beginning, the Creator used the divine Word to bring light into darkness, and that the Spirit breathed life into the Universe. Those three, Creator, Word, and Spirit continue to be present with us in a never-ending dance throughout our entire lives. In them, we experience the fullness of God even when we lack the words to describe it; and in the end, those experiences matter far more than our most theologically correct definitions!
Thought for the Day: What is the value of theological doctrines?
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