The Christian Vanguard

 In a discussion between a Christian and Muslim, I heard the following analogy. To understand how God can be three persons and one nature, think of three humans. You have three persons, but all one nature, the human nature.  Preliminary comment. All analogies for understanding God will come short in some respect since God is totally unique. God can't be compared to anything, so no analogy is appropriate. That said, they are helpful. We just need to understand that they will have limits.  The limit here is that one could easily respond with: yes, there are three persons, and they all are of the same nature, human. But there are also three humans, which would mean you would have to say there are also three gods. That's an unacceptable consequence for a Trinitarian, and it's often what Muslims will say Christians are forced to believe.  I read the following explanation from J.P. Moreland some years ago, I forgot the title of the book, but a similar analogy, which I thin...

 A common question you might hear from Muslims is, "Does Jesus have a God?" The answer is Yes, of course He does. He says this repeatedly in scripture. Romans 15:6, 2 Cor 1:3, Ephesians 1:3;7. Now where this goes from here is usually with a follow up question: How is this possible? I've listened to many Christians stumble in trying to answer this question and get steamrolled by Muslims. And I've seen it happen enough to motivate me to write down an answer.  How is possible that God have a God? There are a couple ways to answer this. The first is to analyze what "to have a God" means. Because this could be interpreted in a few different ways, I suspect that Muslim apologists get a lot of mileage out of not defining this relation. What it means to "have" a God is commonly meant as something like creator. We commonly understand the Christian God to be our Creator and Sustainer. So, to say that Jesus has a God would mean that Jesus is also a created be...

If A and B share the same essences, like "Being" and "Goodness" share the same essence, does that mean that the terms we use for A and B respectively are synonymous? This question was brought up to me in the context of a discussion had on the Trinity and Divine Simplicity. If all three persons of the Trinity share in the same essence, then the terms would be synonymous, which is absurd. Obviously The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit do not refer to the same person and are not interchangeable.  But it doesn't follow that if something shares in the same essence that the terms must be synonymous, and this is illustrated when we think about the convertibility thesis, which is what my last few posts have been touching on. Though being and goodness are convertible and the same, they are not synonymous terms. They refer to the same thing, but differ in thought. “Good” expresses the idea of desirability, which the term “being” does not express. “Good” adds the ...

The following is a study I wrote for the Newman Bible Study. Feel free to use it as you see fit. What Does The Bible Say About: The Trinity Definition: In one substance God, there are three divine persons , The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit Some Notes: 1) Because anti-Trinitarians, such as the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses, typically do not deny the deity of the Father, we will not be going over biblical data proving it. We will only be focusing on the deity of the Son and the Holy Spirit. 2) While there may be Christians who disagree with Catholics on some issues, such as the modes of baptism, it is still true they are Christians. However, anyone who denies the Trinity cannot be said to be Christian at all. Biblical Data: Acts 5:1-6 But a man named Ananias, with the consent of his wife Sapphira, sold a piece of property; 2 with his wife’s knowledge, he kept back some of the proceeds, and brought only a part and laid it at the apostles’ feet. 3 “Ananias,” Peter asked, “why has S...

The Trinity. If that last sentence made you feel weary or made yourself prepared to be confused, yeah, you’re not alone. I know a lot of Christians who feel that way. I used to be there. I get it the feeling. What I don’t get is when one’s inability to comprehend the Trinity is used as an objection against it. A distinction needs to be made between something not making sense, and something being incoherent. You can say reject something on the basis of it being incoherent, but you can’t reject it on the basis of you not being able to understand it. All things that are incoherent don’t make sense, but not all things that don’t make sense are incoherent.

I was sharing my faith on Cal State Long Beach a few days ago and I had a conversation with a Muslim fellow about the Trinity. The objection he raised to me is a common one that the Jehovah’s Witnesses and some Unitarian sects raise against the Trinity, which is, if Jesus is God, to whom was he praying to?