THE MIGHTY GOD IS JESUS! Part 2

In creeds where God is declared to be one God in three using the "persona" is not offensive to us by any means.   However, when the Latin "persona" became the English "person" it came to be greatly misunderstood.   It is misunderstood to this very day.   Without theological training, the word was taken at "street value" and horrified some of our spiritual fathers because of the tri-theistic implications inherent in such an interpretation.   The question we can justifiably ask is this: is the common lay person, unschooled in theology or classical languages, apt to fare better in his or her understanding?

The most extensive treatment of the Trinity in contemporary theology is by Karl Barth, who discusses it in more than two hundred pages of his Church Dogmatics (I/1, 339ff.)   Barth rejects the use of the word "person" because of the radical change in its meaning since the days of the first Trinitarian formulation.   (Once again, the Latin, "persona" does not convey the meaning of "person" in the modern sense.)   Modalism is also rejected.   Barth prefers the German word weise.   "This distinction or arrangement," says Barth, "is the distinction or arrangement of three 'persons' - we prefer to say, the three 'modes of being' in God" (ibid., p.407).   Further, he said, "God Himself, in unimpaired unity, yet also in unimpaired difference, is Revealer [Father], Revelation [Son], and Revealedness [Holy Spirit]" (ibid., p.339). 2   According to Theologian, Paul Tillich: "There appears to be no Athanasian doctrine of one God in three persons, but rather one God in a complexity of relationships to creation." ( Systematic Theology, I, 250f.).

Accused of trying to modernize the Christian Gospel, the late Episcopal Bishop James A. Pike declared, "The concept of three divine persons - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit united in one Godhead - came into Christianity, not via the Bible, but from the philosophical categories of the fourth and fifth centuries A.D."   He said, "It baffles and repels modern man, who misses the nuances of the Greek ('Prosopon') in which the doctrine was formulated and therefore concludes, mistakenly, that Christianity preaches a kind of Polytheism."   Bishop Pike contends that "nothing essential would be lost and much clarity would be gained if Christians abandoned traditional Trinitarian terminology and simply spoke of God acting as the creator and sustainer of the universe, revealing Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, or dwelling within men as a holy spirit."

(Watch for more of this important article next week!)