General Question for my trini friends 2
- Thread starter benadam1974
- Start date
Thank you for your posts, If I am correct you are an XJW? If mistaken let me know. I was witness for 50 years and often get involved with defending the Trinity which still sounds strange to me after attacking it all my life. What I found out is what JW's taught was the belief of the Trinity was actually the teaching of modalism. I did not understand what the teaching of the Trinity was until I listened to the following video by Jay Hess who was also a Witness for decades and even wrote articles for the Writing Dept in NY. Now he teaches the doctrine of the Trinity to seminary students. Until you understand the actual teaching of the Trinity it will answer a lot of questions before they are asked. Please look at video
Thanks.
I grew up agnostic and started reading the Bible at 32 years of age.
So how would you answer my question?
Hi
Happy to try and answer your question, it's because when God appears (e.g. Gen 18) it's just one and not 3 who appear. I suspect you may be mistaking the trinity for Modalism .
Modalism teaches the father, son and HS are one person.
trinity teaches they are 3 separate persons but all under a group identify of God.
Same as the "Board" of a company is a group identity of many separate persons.
Most of the arguments I've seen on this forum seem to be against Modalism and not the trinity. Partly because the definition of the trinity that JW's teach is Modalism and most JWs when they leave never research the trinity afresh. Just my experience, other experiences may vary!
hope that helps,
Post edited to replace monotheism with Modalism as I put the wrong term, sorry! (thanks Lori for highlighting the mistake)
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I have to disagree with you there. I define it per the Oxford dictionary
"the doctrine or belief that there is only one God". -- Oxford Dictionary
But I can see some trinitarians lay claim to the word as well per Wikipedia
Monotheism - Wikipedia
It really helps when we get all of our personal definitions on the table - that is what confuses poor new ones.
thanks, typo on my part, I edited the post and fixedI have to disagree with you there. I define it per the Oxford dictionary
"the doctrine or belief that there is only one God". -- Oxford Dictionary
But I can see some trinitarians lay claim to the word as well per Wikipedia
Monotheism - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
It really helps when we get all of our personal definitions on the table - that is what confuses poor new ones.
Ah ok "modalism" that makes more sense - that was a headscratcher
"There's one thing created the universe and this one thing, in this one thing, are three distinct persons or testifiers and blah, blah blah blah, blah......" - I didn't bother listening to the rest of this video. It was too grating on my ears. I may have nightmares tonight.
