A systematic theology problem (regarding the Trinity)

The original Korean text: https://blog.naver.com/stevision/223238879856

 

I write this in order to explain the Trinity once again because some Christians keep saying that the translation of the sentence, God is one, into a Korean sentence, 하나님은 한 분이시다(God is a person of God), in the Korean Bible is wrong. (They say the God, the Trinity, can't be called a God. And the Korean sentence, 하나님은 한 분이시다, can be translated into an English sentence, There is only one God, too.)

 

They, of course, have no objection to calling the three Persons of the Trinity, that is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, three persons of God. So let's move on to the main issue.

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Then is it wrong to call the whole Trinity a God? Not at all!​

 

The doctrine of the Trinity is summed up as one substance and three hypostases. A substance of something refers to an individual of the thing. Tom and Jane are two human substances, so they are two human beings. The God of Trinity is one substance of God, therefore, is one person (of God). There is only one will of God in the Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and the three Persons are one life of God that can never be divided. Therefore it by no means is wrong to call the Trinity a God. If you can't call the Trinity a God, then is the whole Trinity a union of three Persons? Or is the only God a group of three Persons? It is correct to call the God a God, as is written in the Bible, and according to 'one substance of God' the church determined after the Bible.

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Of course, since the three Persons are divine persons, each with perfect divinity, they are called three Persons, or three divine persons. Therefore, as I said before, the God is one (person) in existence and three (persons) in hypostasis. We must call the God of Trinity the only God.

 

> Comparisons of the Trinity <

 

It is extremely blasphemous to explain the holy, unique, and precious God by comparing him to something in the creation, but I'm going to give following analogy to remove misunderstanding about God.

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1. Let's compare a complete divinity to a whole pizza.

 

Then it's wrong that each of the Persons has a third of the whole pizza. At first the Father, who has a whole circular pizza of divinity, begot the Son with a whole pizza of divinity equal to the Father's. So the Son has an equal divinity to the Father's, and it is not subordinate to Father's. Christianity believes in the equal divinity of the Father and the Son, not denying at the same time that the Son is the only son of the Father. Christianity rejects any degraded divinity of the Son, but confesses the Son is a perfect God. That is what 'homoousios' says about. Homoousios means that the Son is a perfect God having the same divinity as the Father. This means that, just as the Father is a hypostasis (or a Personal substance) having a perfect divinity, so the Son is the same hypostasis as the Father. (I suggest 'a Personal substance' as a synonym for 'hypostasis' because a Person is a kind of substance, so a kind of individual.) And the Holy Spirit, with a whole pizza of divinity, came out of the Father and the Son. Therefore the Trinity has three disks of pizza. Nevertheless the Trinity is not three separate Gods but a God.​

 

2. Let’s compare the Trinity to a blog.

 

Blog A, the original blog 'Dongtoma Sunshine Church', was in Chong-tack Kim's head. This original blog uploaded itself on NAVER as its second individual, the second self. So the second blog B really exists in NAVER. A and B are perfectly equal in all respects, the contents of being, the structure of being, authority, character, personality, etc. In particular, A and B share the pronoun 'I'. He who saw B saw A (Jn12:45, Jn14:9). If a man gets on the Internet and accesses blog A, B itself is copied, sent and planted into his computer, and a new 'Dongtoma Sunshine Church', a blog C, really begins to exist there. So he who sees C sees A and B. Now blog A exists as A, B and C at a time. These three individuals are not three blogs but a blog, not a union of the three but 'three hypostases of one inseparable blog'. This analogy, though imperfect, explains a little about the Trinity. Each Person of the Trinity is a perfect God. And the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have the same status, and I think they share the pronoun 'I'. The hypostases of the blog are spatially separated. But the three Persons of the Trinity do not seem to be separated from one another even spatially, for they are infinite spirits, I think. Therefore we must call three hypostases of the Trinity three divine persons, and must call the God of Trinity a God. In general, we say the Father is God, that the Son is God, and that the Holy Spirit is God, but we don't say they are three Gods but three Persons. We can say the three Persons are a (or one) God. And, of course, we can say the Trinity is a (or one) God, or rather the God. (And we can say the Father is the God, that the Son is the God, and that the Holy Spirit is the God.)