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My interpretation is one actor with three roles.
God the Maker, God the Incarnate, and God the Presence
Seems like the best reflecting of everyone I've heard try to put down a legitimate explanation.
Plus these epithets don't confuse people into accidental arianism by implying god sired himself.
Christianity asking you to accept the trinity is asking you to accept a logical impossibility. There's no point in trying to figure it out, the entire exercise is to make you accept it on faith and not question it. It's not big and profound, it's a stupid waste of time like that mind trap they made for the Borg on star trek where they would get stuck thinking about it so much they'd die.
It's like a fantasy author that wrote himself into a corner.
"Hmm, i can't have Jesus and God be different people because i already said there was only one god, but i can't have them be the same person because then he'll be sacrificing himself to himself.
Hm... Demigod maybe? Nah, too cliché, i'll just leave it really vague and let the fans come up with something, maybe add a third character to make it seem intentional" - Some charlatan, 0BC
because then he’ll be sacrificing himself to himself.
Erm. Only Odin can do that:
I ween that I hung | on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, | and offered I was
To Othin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none | may ever know
What root beneath it runs.None made me happy | with loaf or horn,
And there below I looked;
I took up the runes, | shrieking I took them,
And forthwith back I fell.Nine mighty songs | I got from the son
Of Bolthorn, Bestla's father;
And a drink I got | of the goodly mead
Poured out from Othrörir.Then began I to thrive, | and wisdom to get,
I grew and well I was;
Each word led me on | to another word,
Each deed to another deed.Runes shalt thou find, | and fateful signs,
That the king of singers colored,
And the mighty gods have made;
Full strong the signs, | full mighty the signs
That the ruler of gods doth write.Goes on for a bit with a description of skills attained etc. Havamal, stanzas 146ff. (The stanzas look that odd because Old Norse poetry is nuts and essentially untranslatable)
If you want a boring, materialist interpretation it's a description of a psychological trial caused by the tree of life (the genome), with the result of gaining access to intuitive abilities from precisely there.
Jesus isn't sacrificed to God he's sacrificed to carry away original sin
The ancient ritual it's theologically compared to is the literal origin of the idea of a scape goat. It was a sacrifice that was either driven out of town or killed with the intent that it would carry away the sins of the village
And so Jesus was "sacrificed" and in that act absolved humanity of original sin. This is VERY IMPORTANT to understand, it is why most Christians don't practice Jewish covenant or tradition, because in Christian canon, Jesus abolished the conditions that made the covenant made by God's people necessary. AKA "look you cool and all guys but if we want this religion to go anywhere we need to recruit people who don't want to be circumcized to the faith, so we're just gonna say the old law was overthrown."
And that's why Christians who cite leviticus to continue being terrible to queer people are in fact practicing heresy against the literal roots of the faith and ergo are open season for public burnings and stonings.
There's actually an even more progressive interpretation here that what Jesus did wasn't just opening the door to heaven to more than just "god's people", but also abolishing the concept of the sins of the father, as the ancient world was known for legal codes where you could receive punishments for crimes a family member committed.
It didn't exactly take hold for a long while legally but there's definitely a moral sense now that killing a man's kids as revenge for him killing yours is well beyond the pale of justified payback.
It might not confuse people into Arianism, but it would confuse people into Modalism
Not necessarily, the epithets themselves don't suggest that this is one person switching between different settings, not anymore than the more common epithets.
The metaphorical description works better if you consider it like a TV or Internet situation where the same person can be playing multiple roles in the same scene.
What I'm trying to say is that Matt Mercer running a conversation between multiple NPCs is basically god, /s
Had a comp sci teacher do a decent job making an argument for the 3-in-1 as our limited three-dimensional interpretation of a multi-dimensional (4+) being. A multi-dimensional existence is going to interact with our three-dimensional world in ways that are impossible to interpret holistically since it extends into and is connected through dimensions that don't exist for us. Like a tesseract, we have visual representations of tesseracts but they aren't what a tesseract would actually look like if one appeared in front of you one day.
Confirmed, Jesus is in fact a three dimensional cross section of a fourth dimensional being which can inhabit our three dimensional cross section of fourth dimensional space.
cross section
heheheheh
And so is my cat.
Aren’t some representations exactly what they would look like to us if one did appear? We’re not gonna see it in 4D but we’ll see the 3D representation of it being pushed through our space. Like in Flatland, the sphere pushed through 2D would be a point that grows as a circle, shrinks back down to a point, then disappears. They’ll never see a sphere and can’t imagine a sphere, but they would see the 2D representations of it.
This would make a good explanation for the bizarre biblical angels, especially having parts of their "body" that aren't connected to each other. They only appear disconnected in the 3D projection we see, and are actually parts of a 4D organism.
I think it's more like if you really dig into what most religions believe, like in their leadership. It's well accepted that if you scrutinize it at all god is the unknowable all so in a way he's father son and holy Spirit and that's easy to communicate to the masses. But the truth is that any conception of a deity is so abstract that it shouldn't really be worth communicating.
But is God the Incarnate wholly God-nature, or is he partly God-nature and partly man-nature?
Short answer: yes
Long answer: one way I think of it in terms of classifying tags. We have the 'human' tag and the 'sinner' tag. Jesus has the 'human' tag and the 'God' tag. He didn't have less of the 'human' tag than we do, same with the 'God' tag than the other parts of the whole of God.
Again, more oversimplifications, because this shit is weird.
Well, Jesus did get the 'sinner' tag towards the end, even though he never sinned.
I'm talking about natures rather than labels though. Or does God only have the definitions humans ascribe to him?
So was I. The whole tags bit is a metaphor.
Yes. Jesus is fully the essence of god, and he is fully the role of God the incarnate here on earth.
So does that mean Jesus wasn't human?
It means that he's fully human but also fully God.
He lived, breathed, taught, and died as a man, and just as much, lived, breathed, taught, and ascended as god made into mortal flesh.
It's a bit more of that one actor many roles idea I've stated already, he's 100% Jesus the man, and he's also 100% the mortal face of God. It's like how you are 100% your father's child at the same time as you are 100% your mother's child, you don't stop being one or the other or shift between them as you deem needed or fit, you just are both, and in the same way, Jesus just is both.