I am not opposed to a better, truer articulation/formulation of the Trinity doctrine, even if that means my articulation must change. What I am concerned to do is hold true to what the Scriptures describe as the nature of the relationships within the Trinity. This is essential for obvious reasons, but specifically because those relationships define the way we are to relate both to God and to others.
Example: John 15.9 "As the Father loved Me, I also have loved you; abide in My love," and John 17:23 "I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one, and that the world may know that You have sent Me, and have loved them as You have loved Me."
The nature of the Father's love for the Son sets the criterion for our sanctification (that we may be made perfect), the way in which we are to live in God's love (abide), and the way in which we are to accurately demonstrate that love to the world (that others may know). How do we know the nature of the Father's love for the Son, that we may examine love in our own lives? We may know this by examining the way in which Jesus loved his disciples ("I also have loved you"). Without going into an in depth study on agape, we may immediately conclude that that love was active, other-centered, risky-thus-sacrificial, and that it offered reciprocity ~ in other words, it called forth from the will of its recipients to love in return.
My question to you, PPS, is this: Can your non-hypostatic Father love in this way?
And beyond.
The Father IS a hypostasis, as is the hypostasized qualitatively distinct internal Logos as the external Son. The express image OF God's hypostasis, not another hypostasis. The eternal Logos OF the Father IS the Son. The exact same foundational underlying substantial objective reality as subsistence for existence.
Can your one-physis Father-and-Son apape in this way?
Eternally. One must understand timelessness versus time. There has "never" not been the Son.
Whether you or anyone else ever realizes it or not, all historical formulaics begin post-procession and post-creation and then attempt to account for procession and creation, along with their doctrine for God's constitution while often declaring to have included the created heavenly realm.
Please explain how. Specifially, how can your Father, having no individuated economy, will to love the Son in a real and meaningful, relational way? From Scripture we know he does: I would like to know how.
You don't yet have a grid for it. You've already locked into time-constrained false rhema as the foundation for your logos. Barth was trying to get there with Universal Atonement, but mistook the ontology of creation for our hypostatic faith ontology, etc. And he doesn't have a grid for transcendent timelessness interfacing with sempiternal and temporal time as "everyWHEN".
Right now... By faith-based hypostatic union IN Christ, I'm seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus, translated into the kingdom of God's dear Son, sheathed in the scabbard of the place (topos) He went to prepare for us, and partaking of God's divine nature.
By this, I'm communing with God in His infinitude and eternality of His immutable transcendent mind and will. By this I am foreknown, and thus participating in my predestination to be conformed to the image of His Son. (Calvinism, Arminianism, Open Theism, Process Theology, and Multiverse Theory, etc. are ALL in the immutable nous of God in His infinity and eternity of simultaneity of Self-Conscious Self-Existence.)
With God, there is no time. Since He's everywhen, by being IN Christ I am communing with Him in trans-creation. His communion with the eternal Son is the same. And the Holy Spirit is his own set-apart Pneuma. The Logos pierced and divided asunder the noumenological from the phenomenological of His inherent transcendent Self AS Spirit to be exhaled into creation, also animating all life by that Breath.
By the Word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth. Psalm 33:6
Linear sequential time-based doctrine will never represent God's constitution, and will lead to every kind of internal and external false/incomplete belief system, including Pantheism, PanEntheism/PanenTheism, Esotericism, Gnosticism, Sophistrism, and competing formulaics in the Christian faith.
God is apart from time, created time, and now pervades time while being timeless; with His own Logos and Pneuma as multi-omni within creation while "formatted" to the constraints of creation. God Himself remains transcendent TO creation while being immanent IN creation, hypostatically co-inherent to His own processed Logos and Pneuma, which are the Son and Holy (set apart) Spirit.
Your Holy Spirit AS the perichoretic is at least headed in the right direction; but you're still embracing a 2D understanding of a 3D God, bound by time-based thought.
There is no before or after or always or never for God. He IS.
For God, creation has "always" existed, and the Logos has "always" been Incarnate AS the Son. Eternally. (That's because the phenomenological existence of creation was God's noumenon relative to His own infinity and eternity and aseity and persesatisity and phenomenology).
In creation, God dwells in the unapproachable light of His inherent prosopon that lighted creation at the procession of His Logos and Pneuma. The Logos has a prosopon. The Holy Spirit, being hypostatically co-inherent with the Son, shares that prosopon. (Their qualitative distinction is omnipresence versus localized personal presence, obviating the need for an additional perichoresis; the Holy Spirit IS the perichoretic.)
Your God-box is infinitely too small. But it's certainly bigger than most people's.
atrol:
