But that's not why I'm posting, I have question on resources. Does anyone have ANY good explanation or can point me to a good explanation that explains what exactly the holy Spirit is??? (Honestly the trinity for that matter) And how it's theologically sound? I got into an irl convo with some atheist and they said "well how is it not paganism" and I couldn't respond because I just didn't know. I remember back in university I asked a priest this question and he pointed me to some video to watch but I forgot the name of. I don't want to derail this thread with questions I might have but my questions wouldn't be unique. Is there a "cannon law/theology 101 for retards" or some old theologian?
The real chad answer is "who the fuck cares if it's monotheist?" I mean, are you a Catholic/Orthodox/something? If you are I can't help you but if you aren't the answer is that this creedal bullshit built off some dead homo's pagan philosophy is irrelevant to practicing Christianity. You want a quick trump card, though, tell him that paganism generally assumed a generative Chaos that spawned separate gods with separate personalities, which is completely different from Christian metaphysics assuming that reality was generated from a Logos ("Word" in the Bible, but it means something more like "discourse/reason" in proper translation), a disembodied intelligence, that logicked the world into being and that Jesus and the Holy Ghost are in perfect obedience to. If he's a midwit he'll blow that off, but that IS the answer. Paganism = Chaos + dudes running around like in a capeshit movie fighting each other, ethical monotheism = God IS the source of reality.
I can't answer the Holy Ghost well but I recently came to a personally satisfying understanding of the Trinity. This is my headcanon, not theology, and some faggot ITT will get pissy at it.
I'm a panentheist, meaning I believe that God both "is the universe" (or, being more precise, everything's soul) and is also something more than that from which everything else comes. This is a common view in a lot of religions, and in Christianity there have been some theologians, mystics and other such that hold that view. Hegel was a Lutheran and he was panentheist, Whitehead was a panentheist theologian, Maximus the Confessor was an Orthodox theologian and a panentheist. That's just to say that it's a legitimate stance to take.
I tend to like to visualize God as being metaphorically like a tree, like, say, the Tree of Life or the Burning Bush. (Again, other people have used this motif.) You've got the trunk, which is God, and then all the living things souls/consciousnesses budding off of it like branches, and you can say that part that is not part of anything else, the trunk, is God, and so too the whole thing is God, but you wouldn't say a branch by itself is God.
Well, how does this help with the Trinity? Well, CS Lewis - apologist, not theologian, but a good one - had an argument that it may be best to think of the "father/son" relationship of the Big Guy and Jesus as being something that exists beyond time. He likened it to how you can say that if you have a book on a coffee table, it would be accurate to say that the coffee table supports the book regardless of if this relation existed from the beginning of time.
At the time I thought this was a bunch of wank, but later on I got to thinking about it and realized this makes a lot of sense in a panentheist framework if you take father/son as being a little more metaphorical. The Bible is full of language where it's taking very alien, metaphysical ideas and trying to convey them in a way that a Bronze Age sheep farmer could understand. Is the reason it likes using king/tyrant type language/characterization, for example, even though we all know that God is something beyond human social organization. Similarly, serious theologians hold that the Bible uses gendered language to refer to God because it's telling us something about how we think about the God relates to the world, even though this disembodied superintelligence obviously doesn't really have a real dick and balls.
So, I get to thinking, maybe the key here is to not think so literally about father/son and think more about the relation its trying to suggest. A thing that generates and one that is generated by. The familial metaphor is just something that naturally comes to mind when Jesus does have a literal biological mother.
And in those terms, I think it makes sense to think of Jesus as the "trunk" of the "tree" and God the Father as the "tree." Are the two coeternal? Absolutely; one cannot have a tree without a trunk, the tree begins with the trunk. But does one beget the other? In a metaphysical sense, yes. You cannot have a "trunk" without a "tree," and if you were to define these concepts, you'd always have to start with "tree" first because "trunk" is a concept that only exists in reference to "tree." It's sort of... implied by, begotten by, the existence of "tree."
So Jesus is the trunk, God the Father is the tree, and when Jesus empties himself (kenosis) to step into the world as a physical human, that's the trunk taking on a human form. That part of God that was always beyond the reach of the physical, material world becomes physical and material too, momentarily.
This is also satisfying to me because it literalizes the grafting metaphor of Jesus being the vine, a bit. Adam and Eve's decision to sin (metaphor: man becoming psychologically complex enough to become rational moral agents and thus fall out of perfect alignment with cosmic order) means that they became crooked, so to speak. All humanity on down inherited the same state, not just because we too are rational moral agents but also in that even if we were to act right it is still building off of a chain of events that began with a rupture from cosmic order. Jesus, as a new Adam, compares himself to a vine that is grafted; he is restoring order by directly bridging the gap between us and the divine that the initial act of sin created. Not being a man like us, the act doesn't have to occur in the same moment in time for all of us; it unwinds, like one of those higher-than-3D figures, touching each of us in our own moment.
I like to think that in my visual metaphor the Holy Ghost maybe is the fire on the Burning Bush, and analogous to the sensation of the passing of time that takes dead, discrete moments and makes them tumble into one another as actual qualia, living consciousness, and in doing so directly links us to God as a whole too (the Holy Ghost seems to usually come up in scripture and Chrisitan traditions - Pentecostals care way more about it than Evangelicals who care about it way more than "the Church" - as a sort of intermediary), but at that point that's building symbols, not reasoning.
Other tree lovers
- Presbyterian Church in Ireland uses the Burning Bush as its symbol with a slogan that, translated from pretentious Latin, says "burning but flourishing"
- The Shakers used the tree of life as their main motif extensively
- Maximus the Confessor as noted, he was working within Eastern Orthodoxy
- A random Black Baptist church I went to had it on their stuff, which is hte only encounter with that symbol I can remember in a normal Evangelical church
It's just a symbol but I very much prefer visualizing God as this thing instead of a dude in the clouds. Something that apparently offended the Orthodox who found it infantile. Did you know the burning is generally taken to be representative of suffering that purifies (burns, but is not consumed)? Ive read that the Orthodox actually banned depicting God as Sky Daddy and I think it's very wise. Much of the fedora mindset is fueled by folk religion and folk religion makes religion into something much more ridiculous than it really is. Sky Daddy teaches people to think of God as a dude in the clouds, your buddy or a dictator, instead of as the very alien, wondrous and unique thing that it is. I like to call it "cosmic comedy." Lovecraft's cosmic horror was essentially paganism (the cosmos are ruled by indifferent, omnipotent and incomprehensible entities) with transactional relationships swapped out for indifference; what if paganism's pessimism was even worse, because they don't even notice us. Abrahamic religion swapped it for omnibenevolence. What if the world is in control of an ominpotent, incomprehensible and wonderful being.
