Trinity Church Quotes

The next time believers tell you that 'separation of church and state' does not appear in our founding document, tell them to stop using the word 'trinity.' The word 'trinity' appears nowhere in the bible. Neither does Rapture, or Second Coming, or Original Sin. If they are still unfazed (or unphrased), by this, then add Omniscience, Omnipresence, Supernatural,Transcendence, Afterlife, Deity, Divinity, Theology, Monotheism, Missionary, Immaculate Conception, Christmas, Christianity, Evangelical, Fundamentalist, Methodist, Catholic, Pope, Cardinal, Catechism, Purgatory, Penance, Transubstantiation, Excommunication, Dogma, Chastity, Unpardonable Sin, Infallibility, Inerrancy, Incarnation, Epiphany, Sermon, Eucharist, the Lord's Prayer, Good Friday, Doubting Thomas, Advent, Sunday School, Dead Sea, Golden Rule, Moral, Morality, Ethics, Patriotism, Education, Atheism, Apostasy, Conservative (Liberal is in), Capital Punishment, Monogamy, Abortion, Pornography, Homosexual, Lesbian, Fairness, Logic, Republic, Democracy, Capitalism, Funeral, Decalogue, or Bible.

Until every soul is freely permitted to investigate every book, and creed, and dogma for itself, the world cannot be free. Mankind will be enslaved until there is mental grandeur enough to allow each man to have his thought and say. This earth will be a paradise when men can, upon all these questions differ, and yet grasp each other's hands as friends. It is amazing to me that a difference of opinion upon subjects that we know nothing with certainty about, should make us hate, persecute, and despise each other. Why a difference of opinion upon predestination, or the trinity, should make people imprison and burn each other seems beyond the comprehension of man; and yet in all countries where Christians have existed, they have destroyed each other to the exact extent of their power. Why should a believer in God hate an atheist? Surely the atheist has not injured God, and surely he is human, capable of joy and pain, and entitled to all the rights of man. Would it not be far better to treat this atheist, at least, as well as he treats us? Christians tell me that they love their enemies, and yet all I ask is—not that they love their enemies, not that they love their friends even, but that they treat those who differ from them, with simple fairness. We do not wish to be forgiven, but we wish Christians to so act that we will not have to forgive them. If all will admit that all have an equal right to think, then the question is forever solved; but as long as organized and powerful churches, pretending to hold the keys of heaven and hell, denounce every person as an outcast and criminal who thinks for himself and denies their authority, the world will be filled with hatred and suffering. To hate man and worship God seems to be the sum of all the creeds.

Why do you want a letter from me? Why don't you take the trouble to find out for yourselves what Christianity is? You take time to learn technical terms about electricity. Why don't you do as much for theology? Why do you never read the great writings on the subject, but take your information from the secular 'experts' who have picked it up as inaccurately as you? Why don't you learn the facts in this field as honestly as your own field? Why do you accept mildewed old heresies as the language of the church, when any handbook on church history will tell you where they came from? Why do you balk at the doctrine of the Trinity - God the three in One - yet meekly acquiesce when Einstein tells you E=mc2? What makes you suppose that the expression "God ordains" is narrow and bigoted, while your own expression, "Science demands" is taken as an objective statement of fact? You would be ashamed to know as little about internal combustion as you know about Christian beliefs. I admit, you can practice Christianity without knowing much theology, just as you can drive a car without knowing much about internal combustion. But when something breaks down in the car, you go humbly to the man who understands the works; whereas if something goes wrong with religion, you merely throw the works away and tell the theologian he is a liar. Why do you want a letter from me telling you about God? You will never bother to check on it or find out whether I'm giving you personal opinions or Christian doctrines. Don't bother. Go away and do some work and let me get on with mine.

Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.

Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion. One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the Triune God- a "foursome," as it were-- for the Christian God is not a private deity. Communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God. Hence one and the same act of faith places a person into a new relationship both with God and with all others who stand in communion with God.

The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and dominate. For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participant in what he perceives.

Marriage and family life give us constant opportunities to deny ourselves for the sake of others. And yet self-denial is not a mask for self-contempt, but the necessary means for achieving self-mastery; for self-mastery makes possible our self-giving and self-fulfillment. Sin is not wanting too much, but settling for too little. It's settling for self-gratification rather than self-fulfillment.

Each of the divine persons centers upon the others. None demands that the others revolve around him. Each voluntarily circles the other two, pouring love, delight, and adoration into them. Each person of the Trinity loves, adores, defers to, and rejoices in the others. That creates a dynamic, pulsating dance of joy and love. The early leaders of the Greek church had a word for this – perichoresis. Notice our word “choreography” within it. It means literally to “dance or flow around”.

The Christian cross comes from Egypt and India; the triple miter from the faith of the Mithraics; the shepherd’s crook from the Hermetic Mysteries and Greece; the immaculate conception from India; the transfiguration from Persia; and the trinity from the Brahmans. The Virgin Mary, as the mother of God, is found in a dozen different faiths. There are over twenty crucified world saviors. The church steeple is an adaptation of Egyptian obelisks and pyramids, while the Christian devil is the Egyptian Typhon with certain modifications

The famous field altar came from the Jewish firm of Moritz Mahler in Vienna, which manufactured all kinds of accessories for mass as well as religious objects like rosaries and images of saints. The altar was made up of three parts, lberally provided with sham gilt like the whole glory of the Holy Church. It was not possible without considerable ingenuity to detect what the pictures painted on these three parts actually represented. What was certain was that it was an altar which could have been used equally well by heathens in Zambesi or by the Shamans of the Buriats and Mongols. Painted in screaming colors it appeared from a distance like a coloured chart intended for colour-blind railway workers. One figure stood out prominently - a naked man with a halo and a body which was turning green, like the parson's nose of a goose which has begun to rot and is already stinking. No one was doing anything to this saint. On the contrary, he had on both sides of him two winged creatures which were supposed to represent angels. But anyone looking at them had the impression that this holy naked man was shrieking with horror at the company around him, for the angels looked like fairy-tale monsters and were a cross between a winged wild cat and the beast of the apocalypse. Opposite this was a picture which was meant to represent the Holy Trinity. By and large the painter had been unable to ruin the dove. He had painted a kind of bird which could equally well have been a pigeon or a White Wyandotte. God the Father looked like a bandit from the Wild West served up to the public in an American film thriller. The Son of God on the other hand was a gay young man with a handsome stomach draped in something like bathing drawers. Altogether he looked a sporting type. The cross which he had in his hand he held as elegantly as if it had been a tennis racquet. Seen from afar however all these details ran into each other and gave the impression of a train going into a station.

Inside the church, the bondsmaids were walking slowly down the aisle, with the little petal girls. Trinity turned to give Mimi her last words of motherly advice: 'Walk straight. Don't slouch. And for heavens's sake, smile! It's your bonding!?' Then she too walked through the door and down the aisle. The door shut behind her, leaving Mimi alone. Finally, Mimi heard the orchestra play the first strains of the 'Wedding March.' Wagner. Then the ushers opened the doors and Mimi moved to the threshold. There was an appreciative gasp from the crowd as they took in the sight of Mimi in her fantastic dress. But instead of acknowledging her triumph as New York?s most beautiful bride, Mimi looked straight ahead, at Jack, who was standing so tall and straight at the altar. He met her eyes and did not smile. 'Let's just get this over with.' His words were like an ice pick to the heart. He doesn't love me. He has never loved me. Not the way he loves Schuyler. Not the way he loved Allegra. He has come to every bonding with this darkness. With this regret and hesitation, doubt and despair. She couldn't deny it. She knew her twin, and she knew what he was feeling, and it wasn't joy or even relief. What am I doing? "Ready" Forsyth Llewellyn suddenly appeared by her side. Oh, right, she remembered, she had said yes when Forsyth had offered to walk her down the aisle. Here goes nothing. As if in a daze, Mimi took his arm, Jack's words still echoing in her head. She walked, zombie-like, down the aisle, not even noticing the flashing cameras or the murmurs of approval from the hard-to-impress crowd.

It is useful to reflect that the word 'liturgy' did not originate in church or worship settings. In the Greek world it referred to publish service, what a citizen did for the community. As the church used the word in relation to worship, ti kept this 'public service' quality - working for the community on behalf of or following orders from God. As we worship God, revealed personally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in our Holy Scriptures, we are not doing something apart form or away from the non-Scripture=reading world; we do it for the world - bringing all creation and all history before God, presenting our bodies and all the beauties and needs of humankind before God in praise and intercession, penetrating and serving the world for whom Christ died in the strong name of the Trinity.

When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world. For Christians it’s not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity—all the Christological stuff the church hammered out in the first five centuries. That’s not hard for us. What’s hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian. It’s hard because his ideas for running the world are so radically different from anything we are accustomed to.

The Theology of The Holy Trinity has been well established for 1700 years. In my opinion, it is hyper-evident by the New Testament manuscripts in conjunction with the writings and ensuing Theologies of The Early & Later Church fathers that The Father,The Son, and The Holy Spirit are Objectively Real and True". ~R. Alan Woods [2012]

No priest, no theologian stood at the manger of Bethlehem. And yet all Christian theology has its origin in the wonder of all wonders: that God became human. Holy theology arises from knees bent before the mystery of the divine child in the stable. Without the holy night, there is no theology. “God is revealed in flesh,” the God-human Jesus Christ — that is the holy mystery that theology came into being to protect and preserve. How we fail to understand when we think that the task of theology is to solve the mystery of God, to drag it down to the flat, ordinary wisdom of human experience and reason! Its sole office is to preserve the miracle as miracle, to comprehend, defend, and glorify God’s mystery precisely as mystery. This and nothing else, therefore, is what the early church meant when, with never flagging zeal, it dealt with the mystery of the Trinity and the person of Jesus Christ…. If Christmas time cannot ignite within us again something like a love for holy theology, so that we—captured and compelled by the wonder of the manger of the son of God—must reverently reflect on the mysteries of God, then it must be that the glow of the divine mysteries has also been extinguished in our heart and has died out.

Two is the number which separates, three the number which transcends all separation: the one and the many find themselves gathered and circumscribed in the Trinity.

[U]nity isn’t just biblical in an abstract sense. It’s the Trinitarian telos of gospel ministry.

Doctrines are statements designed to point us to God; they are not meant as objects of faith themselves.

The loving oneness of the church is to reflect the loving oneness of the Trinity. Indeed, the loving oneness of the church is to participate in the loving oneness of the Trinity: “As you . . . are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us.” As we participate in God’s loving oneness, we replicate this loving oneness among ourselves. And as we replicate this loving oneness, the world sees and believes that Jesus Christ is sent from the Father. The world knows the reality of the triune God because they encounter the love of the triune God in us.

An error in the doctrine of God will have inevitable consequences in the sphere of action, of moral behaviour, of the polity of the Church, and of basic culture and social organization. A change in the doctrine of the Trinity in either of these directions cannot help but have political consequences. Farrell, commenting on Nazianzen's connection between Trinity and Holy Monarchy

the church has always confessed the doctrine of the Trinity as something to be believed on the grounds of revelation alone as recorded in Scripture alone. The church should continue to do so.

Del año 1696 recuerdo dos acontecimientos. Hacía unos años que se había trazado una nueva calle paralela a la vieja muralla del norte de la ciudad, que se estaba cayendo a pedazos. A esa nueva calle la llamaron Wall Street, o calle del Muro. Ese año, los anglicanos sentaron los cimientos de una gran iglesia en la esquina de Wall Street y Broadway, a la que pusieron por nombre Trinity Church, o iglesia de la Trinidad.

The church revealed itself to me then. Creaking wood planks, peeling and hot. Trinity Prism in the rafters, long in the face. The cheap common glitter, no specimen of heaven. Vern in a polyester robe fraying at the edges. I saw everything exactly as it was, dark and dirty, the people covered in filth, farm-beaten and raw, their deadened searching eyes, desperation. And the girls. The girls of blood, all full up like me.

In sum, the Trinity is manifest in a creation constituted as an icon of the God who is love, and thus a creation whose very form is Church, whose highest expression is the crucified, resurrected, and glorified Christ

With the best of intentions, the generation before mine worked diligently to prepare their children to make an intelligent case for Christianity. We were constantly reminded of the superiority of our own worldview and the shortcomings of all others. We learned that as Christians, we alone had access to absolute truth and could win any argument. The appropriate Bible verses were picked out for us, the opposing positions summarized for us, and the best responses articulated for us, so that we wouldn’t have to struggle through two thousand years of theological deliberations and debates but could get right to the bottom line on the important stuff: the deity of Christ, the nature of the Trinity, the role and interpretation of Scripture, and the fundamentals of Christianity. As a result, many of us entered the world with both an unparalleled level of conviction and a crippling lack of curiosity. So ready with the answers, we didn’t know what the questions were anymore. So prepared to defend the faith, we missed the thrill of discovering it for ourselves. So convinced we had God right, it never occurred to us that we might be wrong. In short, we never learned to doubt. Doubt is a difficult animal to master because it requires that we learn the difference between doubting God and doubting what we believe about God. The former has the potential to destroy faith; the latter has the power to enrich and refine it. The former is a vice; the latter a virtue. Where would we be if the apostle Peter had not doubted the necessity of food laws, or if Martin Luther had not doubted the notion that salvation can be purchased? What if Galileo had simply accepted church-instituted cosmology paradigms, or William Wilberforce the condition of slavery? We do an injustice to the intricacies and shadings of Christian history when we gloss over the struggles, when we read Paul’s epistles or Saint Augustine’s Confessions without acknowledging the difficult questions that these believers asked and the agony with which they often asked them. If I’ve learned anything over the past five years, it’s that doubt is the mechanism by which faith evolves. It helps us cast off false fundamentals so that we can recover what has been lost or embrace what is new. It is a refining fire, a hot flame that keeps our faith alive and moving and bubbling about, where certainty would only freeze it on the spot. I would argue that healthy doubt (questioning one’s beliefs) is perhaps the best defense against unhealthy doubt (questioning God). When we know how to make a distinction between our ideas about God and God himself, our faith remains safe when one of those ideas is seriously challenged. When we recognize that our theology is not the moon but rather a finger pointing at the moon, we enjoy the freedom of questioning it from time to time. We can say, as Tennyson said, Our little systems have their day; They have their day and cease to be; They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they.15 I sometimes wonder if I might have spent fewer nights in angry, resentful prayer if only I’d known that my little systems — my theology, my presuppositions, my beliefs, even my fundamentals — were but broken lights of a holy, transcendent God. I wish I had known to question them, not him. What my generation is learning the hard way is that faith is not about defending conquered ground but about discovering new territory. Faith isn’t about being right, or settling down, or refusing to change. Faith is a journey, and every generation contributes its own sketches to the map. I’ve got miles and miles to go on this journey, but I think I can see Jesus up ahead.

THE TRINITY LAVRA HAD been carved out of the wilderness. Though the feet of passing pilgrims had beaten a path through the snowy forest, the trees still pressed close on either side, dwarfing the bell-tower of the plain wooden church.

The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand: the statue of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus; the deification of heroes changed into the canonization of saints; the Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything; the church became as crowded with one, as the Pantheon had been with the other, and Rome was the place of both.

Love is the most easily dismissed of God’s commandments and characteristics. Christians sometimes seem to say, “Of course we should love people, we all know that. So now let’s get on with what we really want to do—fight about theology!” But love is the central Christian ethic, it’s the heartbeat of the church. It’s central to us because it’s essential to God. “God is love,” says the Bible (1 John 4:8, NIV). At the core of the Trinity is a love relationship between three Persons. God cannot be separated from love. Love is his nature. Unless the church is actively living out the reality of love, there is little reason to debate theology. And unless the church has a healthy theology we won’t recognize true love when we see it.

Exoneration of Jesus Christ If Christ was in fact God, he knew all the future. Before Him like a panorama moved the history yet to be. He knew how his words would be interpreted. He knew what crimes, what horrors, what infamies, would be committed in his name. He knew that the hungry flames of persecution would climb around the limbs of countless martyrs. He knew that thousands and thousands of brave men and women would languish in dungeons in darkness, filled with pain. He knew that his church would invent and use instruments of torture; that his followers would appeal to whip and fagot, to chain and rack. He saw the horizon of the future lurid with the flames of the auto da fe. He knew what creeds would spring like poisonous fungi from every text. He saw the ignorant sects waging war against each other. He saw thousands of men, under the orders of priests, building prisons for their fellow-men. He saw thousands of scaffolds dripping with the best and bravest blood. He saw his followers using the instruments of pain. He heard the groans—saw the faces white with agony. He heard the shrieks and sobs and cries of all the moaning, martyred multitudes. He knew that commentaries would be written on his words with swords, to be read by the light of fagots. He knew that the Inquisition would be born of the teachings attributed to him. He saw the interpolations and falsehoods that hypocrisy would write and tell. He saw all wars that would be waged, and-he knew that above these fields of death, these dungeons, these rackings, these burnings, these executions, for a thousand years would float the dripping banner of the cross. He knew that hypocrisy would be robed and crowned—that cruelty and credulity would rule the world; knew that liberty would perish from the earth; knew that popes and kings in his name would enslave the souls and bodies of men; knew that they would persecute and destroy the discoverers, thinkers and inventors; knew that his church would extinguish reason’s holy light and leave the world without a star. He saw his disciples extinguishing the eyes of men, flaying them alive, cutting out their tongues, searching for all the nerves of pain. He knew that in his name his followers would trade in human flesh; that cradles would be robbed and women’s breasts unbabed for gold. And yet he died with voiceless lips. Why did he fail to speak? Why did he not tell his disciples, and through them the world: “You shall not burn, imprison and torture in my name. You shall not persecute your fellow-men.” Why did he not plainly say: “I am the Son of God,” or, “I am God”? Why did he not explain the Trinity? Why did he not tell the mode of baptism that was pleasing to him? Why did he not write a creed? Why did he not break the chains of slaves? Why did he not say that the Old Testament was or was not the inspired word of God? Why did he not write the New Testament himself? Why did he leave his words to ignorance, hypocrisy and chance? Why did he not say something positive, definite and satisfactory about another world? Why did he not turn the tear-stained hope of heaven into the glad knowledge of another life? Why did he not tell us something of the rights of man, of the liberty of hand and brain? Why did he go dumbly to his death, leaving the world to misery and to doubt? I will tell you why. He was a man, and did not know.

O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery! Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given over to your creative action.102

despite the visible disunity of the church throughout the world, we can rightly attribute unity to the church insofar as it is the same Holy Spirit who enables the church in all of its manifestations to bear witness to Jesus Christ and to worship the Holy Trinity in truth and love.

Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor’s famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico’s. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf’s, Tiffany’s.

Because Jesus died instead of ushering in the messianic age, Paul responded with a doctrine of atonement. Because the risen Christ struck his followers as very close kin to God, the early church responded with a doctrine of the Trinity. Because Christians did not turn out to be much better behaved than anyone else, Augustine responded with a doctrine of original sin. The doctrines are works of genius, for the most part, but like books they tend to draw people's attention away from the living human neighbors who are standing right in front of them. They can also lead people to look to outer authorities for direction instead of to the inner teaching of the Holy Spirit.

Don’t start with the One and try to make it into Three, but start with the Three and see that this is the deepest nature of the One. This starting point, along with the contemplative mind to understand it, was much more emphasized and developed in the Eastern church, which is frankly why it still sounds foreign to most of the Western churches.

The Christian state religion was crowned by the dogma of the Trinity. Only now can this term be used, since the Second Ecumenical Council, of Constantinople, convened by Theodosius the Great in 381, defined the identity of substance of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son. The creed supplemented by this council, and therefore called the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, is still in use in the Catholic Church today—alongside the brief Apostles’ Creed. So much did it finally come to be taken for granted that centuries later it was to be turned into great music by the greatest composers of Christianity (Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, in their settings of the mass). After this council, what the three Cappadocians (from Cappadocia,

For Christians, the Trinity is the primary symbol of a community that holds together by containing diversity within itself. Another symbol of a unity that is not uniform might be the Bible itself, with its two creation accounts in the Book of Genesis, and four gospels, each with a strikingly different approach to telling the story of Jesus and his ministry. Church historians such as Margaret Miles point out that “Christianity is, and historically has been, pluralistic in beliefs, creeds, and liturgical and devotional practices in different geographical settings as well as over the 2,000 years of its existence.” The wonder is that this flexibility and diversity has often been considered more of an embarrassment than celebrated as one of the religion’s strengths.

Fellow composers would sometimes drop by Holy Trinity to find out what kind of music Messiaen played for the parishioners on an ordinary Sunday. Aaron Copland wrote in his 1949 diary: “Visited Messiaen in the organ loft at the Trinité. Heard him improvise at noon. Everything from the ‘devil’ in the bass, to Radio City Music Hall harmonies in the treble. Why the Church allows it during service is a mystery.

On the other hand, the religious heritage of some Protestants is “economic trinitarianism,” by which they mean a belief in one God who has revealed Himself in three different manifestations as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They reject the claim that the Christian God is a trinity of three distinct “persons.” Today many Presbyterians and other Christians among various Protestant churches have this view of God.

I always think of a fresco in one of my favorite churches in Florence. Masaccio painted it around 1424 on the wall of Santa Maria Novella. It shows the Holy Trinity: Christ on the cross, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit. Beneath them lies a skeleton in a tomb, and an inscription, in Italian: "What you are I once was; What I am, you will be." A reminder that our time is short. A reminder that it goes so fast.

MELITO OF SARDIS Melito, bishop of Sardis, died around the year A.D. 180. Until recently, few students of church history paid much attention to him. One of the reasons might be that he ended up on the “wrong side” of the ancient debate over how to determine the date of Easter. Only recently a sermon on the Passover was found, penned by Melito. It provides us with a tremendous insight into the theology of the late second century. I reproduce here just one section, which requires no commentary, only a hearty “Amen!”: And so he was lifted up upon a tree and an inscription was attached indicating who was being killed. Who was it? It is a grievous thing to tell, but a most fearful thing to refrain from telling. But listen, as you tremble before him on whose account the earth trembled! He who hung the earth in place is hanged. He who fixed the heavens in place is fixed in place. He who made all things fast is made fast on a tree. The Sovereign is insulted. God is murdered. The King of Israel is destroyed by an Israelite hand. This is the One who made the heavens and the earth, and formed mankind in the beginning, The One proclaimed by the Law and the Prophets, The One enfleshed in a virgin, The One hanged on a tree, The One buried in the earth, The One raised from the dead and who went up into the heights of heaven, The One sitting at the right hand of the Father, The One having all authority to judge and save, Through Whom the Father made the things which exist from the beginning of time. This One is “the Alpha and the Omega,” This One is “the beginning and the end” . . . the beginning indescribable and the end incomprehensible. This One is the Christ. This One is the King. This One is Jesus. This One is the Leader. This One is the Lord. This One is the One who rose from the dead. This One is the One sitting on the right hand of the Father. He bears the Father and is borne by the Father. “To him be the glory and the power forever. Amen.” The deity of Christ, His two natures, His virgin birth, His being the Creator, His distinction from the Father—all part and parcel of the preaching of the bishop of Sardis near the end of the second century.

I walked down the empty Broad to breakfast, as I often did on Sundays, at a tea-shop opposite Balliol. The air was full of bells from the surrounding spires and the sun, casting long shadows across the open spaces, dispelled the fears of night. The tea-shop was hushed as a library; a few solitary men in bedroom slippers from Balliol and Trinity looked up as I entered, then turned back to their Sunday newspapers. I ate my scrambled eggs and bitter marmalade with the zest which in youth follows a restless night. I lit a cigarette and sat on, while one by one the Balliol and Trinity men paid their bills and shuffled away, slip-slop, across the street to their colleges. It was nearly eleven when I left, and during my walk I heard the change-ringing cease and, all over the town, give place to the single chime which warned the city that service was about to start.

Saint Augustine proliferated central theological and political doctrines of the Church, following Saint Paul closely. History is the scene of the struggle between the Heavenly and Earthly Cities, but only God before the Last Judgment knows the membership rolls. Human nature is so sinful (rebellious and corrupt) that only those who have received grace, i.e., have been chosen by God to love Him, can be saved for eternal life. This theory caused a lot of trouble for the medieval church, which by and large abandoned it. It was revived much later by Martin Luther. "By the early fifth century, at a series of church councils, the Christians had hammered out a compromise theory of the Trinity -- God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (Church) -- more or less of one substance but with three personalities. Those who would not accept this compromise were branded as heretics and sooner or later persecuted by the imperial state.

It is a simple test, but an immediate one: for the doctrine of the Trinity, of the Incarnation, of human sin and our need for redemption, the victory of the cross and the grace of the resurrection, forgiveness and repentance, love and deification, the intercession of the saints and especially of the Mother of God – all these are present in the prayers we offer in the liturgy, present not just as doctrines but as truths that express the mystery in which we participate through the prayer of the Church, with the divine liturgy at its heart.

The emergent Church is the latest act in the wave of antimodernist revolt by liturgical renewal and charismatic revival, a rebellion whose central insight is that rationalistic fundamentalism, as much as liberalism, is a mass of worldly accretions. The historical record and human feeling, not the illusion of inerrancy, are supposed to command authority in the post-Christian age. Yet American evangelicals' craving for clear authority is second only to their refusal to let any authority boss them around. Skeptics note that the Emergent Church is a movement of quintessentially evangelical individualists. 'By constantly appealing to the "capital T" Tradition, and then in effect picking and choosing from its offerings, they do not succeed in living out any of the traditions that flow from the Tradition, but create their own eclectic, ad hod churchmanship,' wrote D.A. Carson, a professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. 'It is controlled by what these emerging thinkers judge to be appropriate in the postmodern world - and this results, rather ironically, in one of the most self-serving appeals to tradition I have ever seen.

One who uses the morning prayer from A Manual of Eastern Orthodox Prayers will not only begin each day with the sign of the cross and an invocation of the Trinity, but will next say this: God, be merciful to me, a sinner. And then there follows a prayer to the Holy Spirit: O Heavenly King, O Comforter, the Spirit of truth, who are everywhere and fillest all things, the treasure of blessings, and giver of life, come and abide in us. In truth Orthodox fashion, the next sentence brings back the matter of sin: Cleanse us from all impurity, and of thy goodness save our souls.

Capital . . . in the political field is analogous to government . . . The economic idea of capitalism, the politics of government or of authority, and the theological idea of the Church are three identical ideas, linked in various ways. To attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of them . . . What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice as it is in philosophy. The most effective means for oppressing the people would be simultaneously to enslave its body, its will and its reason.

I’m sure we must. Browborough has taken up the other side. He went to church last Sunday with the Mayor and two of the Aldermen, and I’m told he said all the responses louder than anybody else. He dined with the Vicar of Trinity on Monday. He has been very loud in denouncing Mr. Finn as a Roman Catholic, and has declared that everything will be up with the State if Tankerville returns a friend and supporter of the Pope. You’ll find that the Church will be the cry here this election. You can’t get anything by supporting it, but you may make a strong party by pledging yourself to disendowment.

Given the fantastic forms of the mythology of the time, it all seems exotically remote. In fact, when we look more closely, we can see that we are dealing with a confrontation which has never ended and is constantly assuming new forms. The confusion mentioned above between the spirit of man and the Spirit of God characterizes all of mankind’s more ambitious religious and philosophical speculations and mysticisms. It constantly devalues the sensible world, visible organization, the flesh, matter: these are mere ‘appearances’, either a deception or something to be seen through and overcome. Concealed behind them lies the only truth, the spirit, which must be set free and brought out into the open. This is the central axiom of all the religions of the East—from their ancient beginnings to their present-day posterity in this allegedly ‘post-Christian age’. We shall see how hard it was for the Fathers after Irenaeus to ward off Gnostic infiltration. In the Middle Ages, from the remote Calabrian monastery of Fiore, the doctrine of Abbot Joachim was to exert an incalculable influence on later generations which has lasted to the present day. He thought that the age of the Incarnation of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity (together with the organized structure of His Church) would eventually ‘dissolve’ into an age of Pure (Holy!) Spirit.

Mary isn’t simply another saint; she is the singular mode through which Christ came and comes to us. She has been given a unique role in salvation history through the Trinity. She makes this clear in her apparitions, and many a pope, saint, and Church document has reiterated this over the ages. Pope St. John Paul II explained that we are living in very unique times and facing a struggle unlike that of previous generations. He said, “We are today before the greatest combat that mankind has ever seen. I do not believe that the Christian community has completely understood it. We are today before the final struggle between the Church and the anti-Church, between the Gospel and the anti-Gospel.”4

The faith in body mass index and the existence of mental illness is unquestioned, like the Christian belief in the Holy Trinity. And like in the Church, there is a rule of infallibility: any attempt at questioning these dogmas meets with an anathema and excommunication. Extra medicinam nulla salus preaches the new religion. There is nor can be any alternative to medicine. Consequently, the medical heresies which question the truth of the new gospel of health: the anti-vaccination movement (James 1988), AIDS (Duesberg 1996) and cancer (Efron 1984) denialists, the critical psychiatry (Szasz 2003) and alternative medicine (Piątkowski 2008) are the source of the same fears as Medieval witches, quacks and sects and are persecuted and punished alike

Western people today may have acquaintances, but few have relationships that even remotely approximate the honest, vulnerable, committed, covenantal relationships that weave the body of Christ together in the New Testament. Related to this, while the New Testament views the church as a community of people who unite around a mission, who spend significant amounts of time together in study, worship, and ministry, and who help one another become “fully mature in Christ” (Col. 1:28; cf. Eph. 4:13; James 1:4), most Westerners assume church is a place they go to once a week to sit alongside strangers, sing a few songs, and listen to a message before returning to their insulated lives. So too, whereas the New Testament envisions the bride of Christ as a community of people who convince the world that Jesus is for real by the way our unity reflects and participates in the loving unity of the Trinity (John 17:20–23), the Western church today has been reduced to little more than a brief gathering of consumers who are otherwise unconnected and who attend the weekend event with hopes of getting something that will benefit their lives. From a kingdom perspective, this individualistic and impoverished consumer-driven view of the church is nothing short of tragic, as is the perpetual immaturity of the believers who are trapped in it. If we are serious about our covenant with Christ, we have no choice but to get serious about cultivating covenant relationships with other disciples. There are no individual brides of Christ. Jesus is not a polygamist! There

Christians and Jews hold in common one theological basis for hospitality: Creation. Creation is the ultimate expression of God's hospitality to His creatures. In the words of on rabbi, everything God created is a "manifestation of His kindness. [The] world is one big hospitality inn." As Church historian Amy Oden has put it, "God offers hospitality to all humanity... by establishing a home.. for all." To invite people into our homes is to respond with gratitude to the God who made a home for us. In the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, we find another resource for hospitality. The trinity shows God in relationships with Himself. our Three-in-one God has welcomed us into Himself and invited us to participate in divine life. And so the invitation that we as Christians extend to one another is not simply an invitation into our homes or to our tables; what we ask of other people it that hey enter into our lives.

LaVey’s bible (1969), members worship the trinity of the devil—Lucifer, Satan, and the Devil—including nine pronouncements of the devil that Satan represents: 1. indulgence, instead of abstinence, 2. vital existence, instead of spiritual pipe dreams, 3. undefiled wisdom instead of hypocritical self-deceit, 4. kindness to those who deserve it, instead of love wasted on ingrates, 5. vengeance, instead of turning the other cheek, 6. responsibility, instead of concern for the psychic vampires, 7. man as just another animal, sometimes better, more often worse, than those who walk on all fours, who because of his divine and intellectual development has become the most vicious of all, 8. all of the so-called sins, as they lead to physical, mental, or emotional gratification, 9. the best friend the church has ever had, as he has kept it in business all these years (LaVey, 1969, p. 25). Holmes (1990), who interviewed two

Paul himself spent years of his life on the road, carrying (presumably on pack animals) his tent, clothing and tools - not many scrolls, if any. He carried the Bible safely tucked away in his head, where it belongs. As an apostle, he often supported himself by plying his trade. He was busy, traveling, working with his hands, winning people for Christ, shepherding or coping with his converts, responding to questions and problems. And he was very human; he knew not only fighting without but also fears within (2 Cor 7:5). Paul the completely confident academic and systematic theologian - sitting at his desk, studying the Bible, working out a system, perfect and consistent in all its parts, unchanging over a period of thirty years, no matter how many new experiences he and his churches had - is an almost inhuman character, either a thinking machine or a fourth person of the Trinity. The real Paul knew anger, joy, depression, triumph, and anguish; he reacted, overreacted, he repented, he apologized, he flattered and cajoled, he rebuked and threatened, he argued this way and that way: he did everything he could think of in order to win some.

September 19 “The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.” Zephaniah 3:17 WHAT a word is this! Jehovah God in the centre of his people in all the majesty of his power! This presence alone suffices to inspire us with peace and hope. Treasures of boundless might are stored in our Jehovah, and he dwells in his church, therefore may his people shout for joy. We not only have his presence, but he is engaged upon his choice work of salvation. “He will save.” He is always saving: he takes his name of Jesus from it. Let us not fear any danger, for he is mighty to save. Nor is this all. He abides evermore the same; he loves, he finds rest in loving, he will not cease to love. His love gives him joy. He even finds a theme for song in his beloved. This is exceedingly wonderful. When God wrought creation he did not sing, but simply said, “It is very good;” but when he came to redemption, then the sacred Trinity felt a joy to be expressed in song. Think of it, and be astonished! Jehovah Jesus sings a marriage song over his chosen bride. She is to him his love, his joy, his rest, his song. O Lord Jesus, by thine immeasurable love to us teach us to love thee, to rejoice in thee, and to sing unto thee our life-psalm.

That great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is, in its rudiments or in its separate parts, to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honours to the dead are a polytheism. Such is the general nature of the fact before us; Mr. Milman argues from it,—'These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:' we, on the contrary, prefer to say, 'these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.' That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine. What man is amid the brute creation, such is the Church among the schools of the world; and as Adam gave names to the animals about him, so has the Church from the first looked round upon the earth, noting and visiting the doctrines she found there.

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths”—that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a “kingdom of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, and of a “son of God” as the second person of the Trinity. All this—if I may be forgiven the phrase—is like thrusting one’s fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols “Father” and “Son”— not, of course, to every one—: the word “Son” expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father” expresses that feeling itself —the sensation of eternity and of perfection.—I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” for good measure?... And thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness— The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea —“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere.... This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived and taught—not to “save mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers, before his accusers—his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme penalty—more, he invites it.... And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil.... Not to defend one’s self, not to show anger, not to lay blames.... On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One—to love him.... 36. —We free spirits—we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood—that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the “holy lie” even more than upon all other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created the church out of denial of the Gospels.... That mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the concept of the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy that the “bearer of glad tidings” regards as beneath him and behind him—it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world- historical irony—

I bind to myself today The strong virtue of the Invocation of the Trinity: I believe the Trinity in the Unity The Creator of the Universe. I bind to myself today The virtue of the Incarnation of Christ with His Baptism, The virtue of His crucifixion with His burial, The virtue of His Resurrection with His Ascension, The virtue of His coming on the Judgement Day. I bind to myself today The virtue of the love of seraphim, In the obedience of angels, In the hope of resurrection unto reward, In prayers of Patriarchs, In predictions of Prophets, In preaching of Apostles, In faith of Confessors, In purity of holy Virgins, In deeds of righteous men. I bind to myself today The power of Heaven, The light of the sun, The brightness of the moon, The splendour of fire, The flashing of lightning, The swiftness of wind, The depth of sea, The stability of earth, The compactness of rocks. I bind to myself today God's Power to guide me, God's Might to uphold me, God's Wisdom to teach me, God's Eye to watch over me, God's Ear to hear me, God's Word to give me speech, God's Hand to guide me, God's Way to lie before me, God's Shield to shelter me, God's Host to secure me, Against the snares of demons, Against the seductions of vices, Against the lusts of nature, Against everyone who meditates injury to me, Whether far or near, Whether few or with many. I invoke today all these virtues Against every hostile merciless power Which may assail my body and my soul, Against the incantations of false prophets, Against the black laws of heathenism, Against the false laws of heresy, Against the deceits of idolatry, Against the spells of women, and smiths, and druids, Against every knowledge that binds the soul of man. Christ, protect me today Against every poison, against burning, Against drowning, against death-wound, That I may receive abundant reward. Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ within me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ at my right, Christ at my left, Christ in the fort, Christ in the chariot seat, Christ in the poop, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks to me, Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me. I bind to myself today The strong virtue of an invocation of the Trinity, I believe the Trinity in the Unity The Creator of the Universe.

[T]here was a prophetic medieval Italian abbot, Joachim of Floris, who in the early thirteenth century foresaw the dissolution of the Christian Church and dawn of a terminal period of earthly spiritual life, when the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit, would speak directly to the human heart without ecclesiastical mediation. His view, like that of Frobenius, was of a sequence of historic stages, of which our own was to be the last; and of these he counted four. The first was, of course, that immediately following the Fall of Man, before the opening of the main story, after which there was to unfold the whole great drama of Redemption, each stage under the inspiration of one Person of the Trinity. The first was to be of the Father, the Laws of Moses and the People of Israel; the second of the Son, the New Testament and the Church; and now finally (and here, of course, the teachings of this clergyman went apart from the others of his communion), a third age, which he believed was about to commence, of the Holy Spirit, that was to be of saints in meditation, when the Church, become superfluous, would in time dissolve. It was thought by not a few in Joachim’s day that Saint Francis of Assisi might represent the opening of the coming age of direct, pentecostal spirituality. But as I look about today and observe what is happening to our churches in this time of perhaps the greatest access of mystically toned religious zeal our civilization has known since the close of the Middle Ages, I am inclined to think that the years foreseen by the good Father Joachim of Floris must have been our own. For there is no divinely ordained authority any more that we have to recognize. There is no anointed messenger of God’s law. In our world today all civil law is conventional. No divine authority is claimed for it: no Sinai; no Mount of Olives. Our laws are enacted and altered by human determination, and within their secular jurisdiction each of us is free to seek his own destiny, his own truth, to quest for this or for that and to find it through his own doing. The mythologies, religions, philosophies, and modes of thought that came into being six thousand years ago and out of which all the monumental cultures both of the Occident and of the Orient - of Europe, the Near and Middle East, the Far East, even early America - derived their truths and lives, are dissolving from around us, and we are left, each on his own to follow the star and spirit of his own life.

What is meant in Revelation 17 goes beyond the physical act of prostitution and applies to the spiritual aspects of turning away from the true God, “to other gods.” The United States has turned away from the God who founded and birthed us, “to other gods.’ Founded as a Christian nation, as our Supreme Court acknowledged over one hundred years ago (Holy Trinity Church v. U.S., 12 Sup. Ct. 511 – 1892), we have become anything but.

So, look at the Trinity and think again about what it means to be human. Yes, the relationships in the Trinity call for and call forth a created community of persons. We need to think very hard about this in our churches. It is one of the reasons a small group ministry is such a good thing. Small groups are one key way in which we can establish, in our churches, communities of interconnection and interdependence. Surely this is also one of the main reasons that the Spirit assigns gifts to each believer in the body of Christ, so that we will both give to one another and depend on one another in our growing in Christ. Interconnection and interdependence are key themes we see in the Trinity that we need to see lived out increasingly in our lives and churches. Let’s give thoughtful and prayerful attention to building Trinity-like communities of interdependence and interconnection with one another, working with each other, for each other, and doing so with harmony and love for one another.

Belief in the Divinity of Haile Selassie Chevannes (1998a) observed that the most important belief of the Rastafari is that Haile Selassie, the late Emperor of Ethiopia, is God, thus leading to the Rastafari claim that God is Black. In the same vein, Henry observed that the foundation of Rastafari theology is the mystical knowledge of the divinity of Haile Selassie (1997, 160). However, there appears to be divergent views among Rastafari regarding the divinity of Haile Selassie. Thus, Barnett (2005) claims that the original Twelve Tribes of Israel teachings hold that Jesus Christ was manifested in his second coming in the person of Haile Selassie; the Bobo Shanti hold that Haile Selassie is the father of Jesus Christ (who is Prince Emmanuel, the founder of the house, so far as the Bobo Shanti are concerned); and the Nyahbinghi Order holds that Haile Selaisse is the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost). The Ethiopian Zion Coptic Church (a mansion that occupies a marginal status in the movement) does not accept the divinity of Haile Selassie I, although they still believe that he is of the Solomonic dynasty, thereby linking him with King David and therefore to Christ (Barnett 2005).

As you pass from outer to inner narthex [in Istanbul’s Church of St. Savior], the doorway is crowned with a magnificent mosaic of Christ Pantokrator…. As in all such Eastern icons, frescoes, or mosaics of Christ, his right hand is raised in an authoritative teaching gesture, with his fingers separated into a twosome and a threesome to command Christian faith in the two natures of Christ and the three persons of the Trinity. As usual, he holds a book in his left hand. But he is not reading the book—it is not even open, but securely closed and tightly clasped. Christ does not read the Bible, the New Testament, or the Gospel. He is the norm of the Bible, the criterion of the New Testament, the incarnation of the Gospel. That is how we Christians decide between a violent and nonviolent God in the Bible, New Testament, or Gospel. The person, not the book, and the life, not the text, are decisive and constitutive for us.*

History abounds in and around New York City, however much of it is buried in the concrete of newer construction. The downtown financial district from Battery Park to Wall Street is such a historical district. Trinity Church at Wall Street and Broadway and the Churchyard surrounding it is where Alexander Hamilton and his wife Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton along with other notables are buried. The story of Alexander Hamilton is an important part of New York City’s history and has become a Broadway musical. At the top of the Palisades in Weehawken is a small park known as the Dueling Grounds. This Revolutionary War site, overlooking New York City to the east, and what had been Half Moon Bay to the north and directly beneath it, is where Alexander Hamilton, a founding father of the United States, was mortally wounded by a single shot from Aaron Burr’s dueling pistol. He died the following day in Greenwich Village at the home of his friend William Bayard Jr.

there was music . . . after church and food, like the third point in a holy trinity

Many of the fathers of the church believed in an actual ontological, metaphysical, objective union between humanity and God, which alone would allow Jesus to take us “back with him” into the life of the Trinity (John 17:23–24, 14:3, 12:26). This was how real “participation” was for many in the early church. It changed people and offered them their deepest identity and form (“trans-formation”). We had thought our form was merely human, but Jesus came to tell us that our actual form is human-divine, just as he is. He was not much interested in proclaiming himself the exclusive or exclusionary son of God, but he went out of his way to communicate an inclusive sonship and daughterhood to the crowds.

Because the concept of the Trinity is not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament (the term was coined by one of the oldest and most formidable church fathers, Tertullian of Carthage, early in the third century C.E.), it was neither widely adopted nor universally construed by the early Christian communities.

Eugene Peterson has said, “Trinity is the most comprehensive and integrative framework that we have for understanding and participating in the Christian life.” 4

embedded her theology in song and liturgy, so the simple act of going to church is a big part of how faith and commitment are passed from generation to generation. This brief hymn to the Holy Spirit from the morning service of Matins reminds us that our blessings ultimately come from outside ourselves—a good lesson for any generation to learn. The “divine treasures” we enjoy are not ours by nature but by the grace of the Holy Spirit. The most valuable of those treasures were considered in chapter 3—the truths that the Holy Spirit reveals about the Holy Trinity, about ourselves, and about the Church.

A comparison for clarification of the mystery of the Holy Trinity is given by the Fathers of the Church. John of Damascus says, “As fire and the light proceeding from it exist together, not fire first and then the light proceeding from it, and as light being begotten from the fire always abides in it and is not at all separated from it, thus the Son is begotten of the Father, no way separated from Him.

Hamilton hit the ground running: the very next day, he arranged a fifty-thousand-dollar loan for the federal government from the Bank of New York. The day after that, a Sunday, he worked all day at the Treasury’s new office on Broadway, just south of Trinity Church. He dashed off a plea to the Bank of North America in Philadelphia, asking for another fifty thousand dollars.

At the end, the council brought all its discussions together into a single conclusion: The divine Trinity exists within the Lord the Savior; the Trinity is made up of the divine nature as an origin called “the Father,” the divine human manifestation called “the Son,” and the emanating divine influence called “the Holy Spirit”; therefore there is one God in the church. After the council came to an end, the participants were given shining clothing and were led to the new heaven.

Newton, a devout Puritan believer, has anecdote that when he claimed that no disciple had God, he refused to claim atheism, saying, "Do not speak disrespectfully about God, I am studying God." He paid much attention to the Bible and had an eschatological belief that the Saints would resurrect and live in heaven and reign with Christ invisibly. And even after the day of judgment, people would continue to live on the ground, thinking that it would be forever, not only for a thousand years. According to historian Steven Snowovell, he thought that the presence of Christ would be in the distant future centuries after, because he was very pessimistic about the deeply rooted ideas that denied the Trinity around him. He thought that before the great tribulation came, the gospel activity had to be on a global scale. 카톡【AKR331】텔레【RDH705】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】 믿고 주문해주세요~저희는 제품판매를 고객님들과 신용과신뢰의 거래로 하고있습니다. 24시간 문의상담과 서울 경기지방은 퀵으로도 가능합니다 믿고 주문하시면좋은인연으로 vip고객님으로 모시겠습니다. 원하시는제품있으시면 추천상으로 구입문의 도와드릴수있습니다 ☆100%정품보장 ☆총알배송 ☆투명한 가격 ☆편한 상담 ☆끝내주는 서비스 ☆고객님 정보 보호 ☆깔끔한 거래 포폴,에토미,알약수면제 판매하고있습니다 Newton studied alchemy as a hobby, and his research notes were about three books. Newton served as a member of parliament on the recommendation of the University of Cambridge, but his character was silent and unable to adapt to the life of a parliamentarian. When he lived in the National Assembly for a year, the only thing he said was "Shut the door!" In Newton's "Optics" Volume 4, he tried to introduce the theory of unification that covered all of physics and solved his chosen tasks, but he went out with a candle on his desk, and his private diamond threw a candle There is a story that all of his research, which has not been published yet, has turned to ashes. Newton was also appointed to the president of the Minting Service, who said he enjoyed grabbing and executing the counterfeiters. Newton was a woman who was engaged to be a young man, but because he was so engaged in research and work he could not go on to marriage, and he lived alone for the rest of his life. He regarded poetry as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." [6] Newton was talented in crafting inventions by hand (for reference, Newton's craftsmanship was so good at his childhood that when he was a primary school student he was running his own spinning wheel after school, A child who throws a stone and breaks down a spinning wheel, so there is an anecdote that an angry Newton scatters the child.) He said he created a lantern fountain that could be carried around as a student at Cambridge University. Thanks to this, it was said that students who were going to attend the Thanksgiving ceremony (Episcopal Mass) were able to go to the Anglican Church in the university easily. Newton lost 20,000 pounds due to a South Sea company stock discovery, when "I can calculate the movement of the celestial body, but I can not measure the insanity of a human being" ("I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men ").

If we cannot trust the Church to have understood Jesus, then we have lost Jesus: and the resources of modern scholarship will not help us to find him.47

We are mad if we imagine that the God of love revealed in Jesus will bless us in waging war. That is madness! But it’s a pervasive and beloved madness. And I know from experience that it’s hard to oppose a crowd fuming for war. When we have identified a hated enemy, we want to be assured that God is on our side as we go to war with our enemy. And we believe that surely God is on our side, because we feel so unified in the moment. Everyone knows the nation is most unified in times of war. Nothing unites a nation like war. But what’s so tragic is when Christian leaders pretend that a rally around the war god is compatible with worshipping the God revealed in Jesus Christ. We refuse to face the truth that waging war is incompatible with following Jesus. We forget that God is most clearly revealed, not in the nascent understanding of the ancient Hebrews but in the Word made flesh. We forget that “being disguised under the disfigurement of an ugly crucifixion and death, the Christform upon the cross is paradoxically the clearest revelation of who God is.”6 We forget that “the worst day in history was not a Tuesday in New York, but a Friday in Jerusalem when a consortium of clergy and politicians colluded to run the world on our own terms by crucifying God’s own Son.”7 We forget that when we see Christ dead upon the cross, we discover a God who would rather die than kill his enemies. We forget all of this because the disturbing truth is this—it’s hard to believe in Jesus. When I say it’s hard to believe in Jesus, I mean it’s hard to believe in Jesus’s ideas—in his way of saving the world. For Christians it’s not hard to believe in Jesus as the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity—all the Christological stuff the church hammered out in the first five centuries. That’s not hard for us. What’s hard is to believe in Jesus as a political theologian. It’s hard because his ideas for running the world are so radically different from anything we are accustomed to. Which is why, I suspect, for so long, the Gospels have been treated as mere narratives and have not been taken seriously as theological documents in their own right. We want to hear how Jesus was born in Bethlehem, died on the cross, and rose again on the third day. We use these historical bits as the raw material for our theology that we mostly shape from a particular misreading of Paul. In doing this we conveniently screen out Jesus’s own teachings about the kingdom of God and especially his ideas about nonviolence and enemy love.

That this is really the case was made plain to me by the questions asked me, mostly by young men, about my Canterbury play, The Zeal of Thy House. The action of the play involves a dramatic presentation of a few fundamental Christian dogmas— in particular, the application to human affairs of the doctrine of the Incarnation. That the Church believed Christ to be in any real sense God, or that the eternal word was supposed to be associated in any way with the word of creation; that Christ was held to be at the same time man in any real sense of the word; that the doctrine of the Trinity could be considered to have any relation to fact or any bearing on psychological truth; that the Church considered pride to be sinful, or indeed took notice of any sin beyond the more disreputable sins of the flesh—all these things were looked upon as astonishing and revolutionary novelties, imported into the faith by the feverish imagination of a playwright. I protested in vain against this flattering tribute to my powers of invention, referring my inquirers to the creeds, to the gospels, and to the offices of the Church; I insisted that if my play were dramatic it was so, not in spite of the dogma, but because of it—that, in short, the dogma was the drama. The explanation was, however, not well received; it was felt that if there were anything attractive in Christian philosophy I must have put it there myself.

There is a song with the lyric "I get knocked down, but I get up again..." In turn I like the image of a Phoenix rising from the ashes. It makes me think how we Christian's should never accept defeat. Indeed our Lord has conquered that evil trinity of the world, the flesh and the devil. He made a spectacle of death. His enemies had him marked down as defeated, crushed forever, but he rose again in victory and still rises. He too encourages us, though storms may rage, to rise from the rubble. To run and not grow weary, to walk and not faint, to mount up on wings like eagles! So rise up church, roar like a mighty lion! In Christ we have the victory!

Unity is the soul of fellowship. Destroy it, and you rip the heart out of Christ’s Body. It is the essence, the core, of how God intends for us to experience life together in his church. Our supreme model for unity is the Trinity. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are completely unified as one. God himself is the highest example of sacrificial love, humble other-centeredness, and perfect harmony.

The course which the rector had pursued was speedily the subject of universal conversation in Stilborough. Many were the speculations as to the cause of Mr. Gray’s extraordinary conduct. Some asserted it was because Mr. Newland believed everybody went to heaven, and that he had told the clergyman to his teeth that there was no bottomless pit burning forever with fire and brimstone. Others asserted it was because he had a different Bible. Some said it was because he didn’t believe in Jesus Christ, and others that it was because he made too much of Him and wanted to put Him in the first place in the Trinity. The wildest possible guesses were made by the simple people, and the measure in which they loved Mr. Newland determined the amount of pity which they felt for so good a man so deeply plunged into false doctrine, heresy, and schism.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”-Anonymous 12/10/17, Harbor Trinity Church Kids event

the church had three burial sites—the churchyard at Wall Street and Broadway, the Trinity Church

I leave it to the male humans to speak for themselves (as they have long done anyway) concerning whether their path to spiritual union is through identification with "The Father", a "God" image, or any other sort of male personification of a "Savior": including those who call themselves "Gay". Has it occurred to any psychological sleuths the extent to which male identification with a totally male God, Trinity, Christ-image, not to mention all the male Buddhas, partakes of homosexuality? Who condemns "the beloved disciple, John, because he "lay in Jesus' bosom"? It would not be hard to see the Christian church as an exclusive male homosexual club.

...the problem that many Roman Catholics fail to see is that there is a difference between development and contradiction. It is one thing to use different language to teach something the church has always taught (e.g., the “Trinity”). It is another thing altogether to begin teaching something that the church always denied (e.g., papal supremacy or infallibility). Those doctrines in particular were built on multitudes of forgeries.

Newton, a devout Puritan believer, has anecdote that when he claimed that no disciple had God, he refused to claim atheism, saying, "Do not speak disrespectfully about God, I am studying God." He paid much attention to the Bible and had an eschatological belief that the Saints would resurrect and live in heaven and reign with Christ invisibly. And even after the day of judgment, people would continue to live on the ground, thinking that it would be forever, not only for a thousand years. According to historian Steven Snowovell, he thought that the presence of Christ would be in the distant future centuries after, because he was very pessimistic about the deeply rooted ideas that denied the Trinity around him. He thought that before the great tribulation came, the gospel activity had to be on a global scale. 카톡pak6 텔레:【JRJR331】텔레:【TTZZZ6】라인【TTZZ6】 믿고 주문해주세요~저희는 제품판매를 고객님들과 신용과신뢰의 거래로 하고있습니다. 24시간 문의상담과 서울 경기지방은 퀵으로도 가능합니다 믿고 주문하시면좋은인연으로 vip고객님으로 모시겠습니다. 원하시는제품있으시면 추천상으로 구입문의 도와드릴수있습니다 ☆100%정품보장 ☆총알배송 ☆투명한 가격 ☆편한 상담 ☆끝내주는 서비스 ☆고객님 정보 보호 ☆깔끔한 거래 포폴,에토미,알약수면제 판매하고있습니다 Newton studied alchemy as a hobby, and his research notes were about three books. Newton served as a member of parliament on the recommendation of the University of Cambridge, but his character was silent and unable to adapt to the life of a parliamentarian. When he lived in the National Assembly for a year, the only thing he said was "Shut the door!" In Newton's "Optics" Volume 4, he tried to introduce the theory of unification that covered all of physics and solved his chosen tasks, but he went out with a candle on his desk, and his private diamond threw a candle There is a story that all of his research, which has not been published yet, has turned to ashes. Newton was also appointed to the president of the Minting Service, who said he enjoyed grabbing and executing the counterfeiters. Newton was a woman who was engaged to be a young man, but because he was so engaged in research and work he could not go on to marriage, and he lived alone for the rest of his life. He regarded poetry as "a kind of ingenious nonsense." [6] Newton was talented in crafting inventions by hand (for reference, Newton's craftsmanship was so good at his childhood that when he was a primary school student he was running his own spinning wheel after school, A child who throws a stone and breaks down a spinning wheel, so there is an anecdote that an angry Newton scatters the child.) He said he created a lantern fountain that could be carried around as a student at Cambridge University. Thanks to this, it was said that students who were going to attend the Thanksgiving ceremony (Episcopal Mass) were able to go to the Anglican Church in the university easily. Newton lost 20,000 pounds due to a South Sea company stock discovery, when "I can calculate the movement of the celestial body, but I can not measure the insanity of a human being" ("I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men ").

Paul Hiebert of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School calls this kind of thinking “bounded-set thinking.” That is, there is a boundary that sets the standard. One either qualifies or is rejected; it’s pass or fail. What I’m advocating in this chapter is that we move from bounded-set thinking to what Hiebert refers to as “centered-set thinking” in our understanding of the church.24 In a centered set, what counts is how each member is moving in relation to the center. The focus is on the center, and each individual is in dynamic relationship to it. Belonging, in this case, is not a matter of performing according to an agreed-upon profile; it is a matter of living and acting out of commitment to a common center. The focus is on the center and on pointing people to that center. Process is more important than definitions. Centered-set thinking affirms initiatives that would otherwise not find a place. It rewards creativity.

From this standpoint, the whole study of Christian theology, biblical, historical and systematic, is the exploring of a three-tier hierarchy of models: first, the 'control' models given in Scripture (God, Son of God, kingdom of God, word of God, love of God, glory of God, body of Christ, justification, adoption, redemption, new birth and so forth — in short, all the concepts analysed in Kittel's great Wörterbuch and its many epigoni) next, dogmatic models which the church crystallized out to define and defend the faith (homoousion, Trinity, nature, hypostatic union, double procession, sacrament, supernatural, etc. — in short, all the concepts usually dealt with in doctrinal textbooks); finally, interpretive models lying between Scripture and defined dogma which particular theologians and theological schools developed for stating the faith to contemporaries (penal substitution, verbal inspiration, divinization, Barth's 'Nihil' — das Nichtige — and many more).

the heart of Opus Dei is the Christian experience of divine filiation. God is our Father. We are His children in Christ Jesus, the eternal Son; thus, gathered together around His table, the Church is the family of God on earth, as the Trinity is the Family of God in heaven.

It was she as set her bonnet at him!' cried Mrs Williams, who had never yet let her husband finish a sentence since his 'I will' at Trinity Church, Plymouth Dock, in 1782.

Lily Samson, The Switch, Outtakes & Quotes, shameless manipulation of. A one minute reading test I am dog --Dog, Marina Lewycka, Two Caravans, 2007 Allergies disclaimer: One must stress that this book is not intended for the unwashed masses: I delayed showering after the last switch. I’ve created a Pavlovian response: he must associate its floral sweetness with sexual fulfilment. Adam has a “Pavlovian” reaction to Elena’s BO? Bribes her with cake to lessen the wrath when asking Elena to wash? He frowns, seeing that I’m silent and trembling. ‘My perfume was weak; hers much stronger.’ I say, my temper flaring. Now, ladies and gentlemen, the usual wasteman chatting up yours truly in Sarf London would probably assume that a big phat slice of Marks & Spencer’s Strawberry Pavlova will get him into the lady’s knickers. Nope, she’s allergic to stupid. A merengue dessert will hardly cause a rash, but a moron makes her skin crawl. A female of the human species displayed an unconditioned response: shoved cream cake into the courting male’s face. Requested a substantial meal of Shchavel Borscht with hard boiled egg --Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Russian Cookbook for Love, Romance, and mating behaviours: Humans, 1904 Ding-dong! --Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, Neutral Triggers & Conditioned Responses: Canines, 1907 It is I! I make the best Byzantine shchi to entice a female. --Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Dead Souls, Notebook (1841-1844), The Nose and other short stories Right! She turned her nose up at his advances: Idiot! I hate strawberries! --Seraphima Vasilievna Karchevskaya Pavlova, Mrs, My Husband and I – Memoirs The lady did not have a sweet tooth. Man didn’t do his research. This is a cleverly written book. So some of you, keen aspiring readers, please have your Oxford fictionary handy. Just saying! In the words of our hero: Bloody pricey...But God, it is a nice smell. Don’t you like it? And then he “squirts onto her wrist, playfully.” Shhhh.. Doctors Pavlov & Chekhov are not amused. Shall we shuffle the deck with these random quotes? One minute! Plenty of time is a full minute for a skilled bullshit dealer to shuffle themselves out of a gloomy Russian medical clerical predicament. Not tricky when Lily Samson gives treats: All around us are dog walkers, their expensive breeds racing about, barking and sniffing each other’s genitals. ..thinking it all through those awful dog ornaments she hated... feisty feminist...she simply hates them. Men are so stupid! And then.. She took another whiff and yet another. She sniffed him up and down like a dog before realizing what it was: the aroma of a woman’s cunt. --Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being Gratuitous use of one particular French vulgarism nested in the English language since the Norman conquest of 1066 is well demonstrated by this Milan Kundera translation. One has to wonder if the original 1984 edition contained the word “pizda”? It is one of the few remaining words in the English language with a genuine power to shock. --Scholar Germaine Greer But of course a cunt, in French, as much as el coño in Spanish does not carry near enough as much uncouth weight as in English. The English language doesn’t exist. It’s just badly pronounced French. --Bernard Cerquiglini Quelle conne! Un con reste un con! --William Shakespeare, Last Words, Holy Trinity Church, Gropecunt Lane, Stratford upon Avon, April 23rd 1616

The Trinity is precisely a way of recognizing and celebrating the fact that the human being Jesus of Nazareth as distinct from while still identified with God the Father, on the one hand (he didn't just "go back to being God again" after his earthly one), and the Spirit, on the other hand (the Jesus who is near us and with us by the Spirit remains the Jesus who is other than us).

This order, the presbyterial and synodical constitution, which he felt obliged to read out of the NT, is, so far as the Reformed Church is concerned, instituted by God’s command as sacra et inviolable (“holy and inviolable”). In this sense the French Reformed of Old Prussia declared in 1930: “For us Reformed, a discussion about the correctness and applicability of this church constitution is … just as much out of the question as say a discussion on the dogma of the Trinity or the doctrine of Holy Communion or the Sacraments is for other Christians. For us the question of the constitution is a confessional question.

Matthew, Kyd and I walked purposefully over rough cobbles, towards the covered passageway that Andromeda the cat had alerted me to on our first visit. As we reached the passage, I turned, and in hushed tones explained to them both what I wanted them to do. Kyd followed me down the passageway, while Matthew walked back down the street and round past the ancient, crumbling walls of the church dedicated to St Trinity. I had asked him to find a way to the back of the house and to wait there for a signal to enter.

According to the teachings of the Holy Bible and the Fathers of the Church, man is able to achieve Theosis because within the Orthodox Church of Christ the Grace of God is uncreated. God is not only essence, as the West thinks; He is also energy. If God was only essence, we could not unite with Him, could not commune with Him, because the essence of God is awesome and unapproachable for man, as was written: “Never will man see My face and live” (Exodus 33:20). Let us give a relevant example from things human. If we grasp a bare electric wire, we will die. However, if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated. We see, enjoy, and are assisted by, the energy of electric current, but we are not able to grasp its essence. Let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God. If we were able to unite with the essence of God, we would become gods in essence. Then everything would become a god, and there would be confusion so that, essentially, nothing would be a god. In a few words, this is what they believe in the Oriental religions, e.g. in Hinduism, where the god is not a personal existence but an indistinct power dispersed through all the world, in men, in animals, and in objects (Pantheism). God, according to the Orthodox theological view, is One in a Trinity and a Trinity in One. As St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and other holy Fathers repeatedly say, God is filled with a divine eros, a divine love for His creatures. Because of this infinite and ecstatic love of His, He comes out of Himself and seeks to unite with them. This is expressed and realised as His energy, or better, His energies. With these, His uncreated energies, God created the world and continues to preserve it. He gives essence and substance to our world through His essence-creating energies; He illuminates man with His illuminating energies; He sanctifies him with His sanctifying energies. Finally, He deifies him with His deifying energies. Thus, through His uncreated energies holy God enters nature, the world, history, and human life.

Western Conservative Baptist Seminary Moishe Rosen Jews for Jesus Ray C. Stedman, D.D. (deceased) Peninsula Bible Church (Palo Alto, CA) Stanley D. Toussaint, Th.D. Dallas Theological Seminary Willem VanGemeren, Ph.D. Trinity Evangelical Divinity

What justifies specifically churchly exegesis of Scripture? Can church doctrine guide our reading? Why should it? Why should we interpret the story of Abraham and Isaac by the passion of Jesus? The answer is bluntly simple: What justifies churchly reading of Scripture is that there is no other way to read it, since “it” dissolves under other regimes. Thus a hermeneutical exhortation from this first perspective. Be entirely blatant and unabashed in reading Scripture for the church’s purposes and within the context of Christian faith and practice. Indeed, guide your reading by church doctrine. For if, say, the doctrine of Trinity and Matthew’s construal of the passion do not fit each other, then the church lost its diachronic self in the early fourth century at the latest, and the whole enterprise of Bible reading is moot. The question, after all, is not whether churchly reading of Scripture is justified; the question is, what could possibly justify any other?

Christ has brought it to pass, that those that the Father had given him, should be brought into the household of God; that he, and his Father, and his people should be as it were one society, one family; that the church should be as it were admitted into the society of the blessed Trinity.156

the remains of Yaroslav the Wise disappeared from Kyiv in 1944, during the German occupation of the city. By some accounts, they ended up in the hands of Ukrainian Orthodox hierarchs in the United States and were spotted in Manhattan after the war. Some suspect that they may now be in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Brooklyn.

Philosophy and science have not always been friendly toward the idea of God, the reason being that they are dedicated to the task of accounting for things and are impatient with anything that refuses to give an account of itself. The philosopher and the scientist will admit that there is much that they do not know; but that is quite another thing from admitting that there is something which they can never know, which indeed they have no technique for discovering. To admit that there is One who lies beyond us, who exists outside of all our categories, who will not be dismissed with a name, who will not appear before the bar of our reason, nor submit to our curious inquiries: this requires a great deal of humility, more than most of us possess, so we save face by thinking God down to our level, or at least down to where we can manage Him. Yet how He eludes us! For He is everywhere while He is nowhere, for "where" has to do with matter and space, and God is independent of both. He is unaffected by time or motion, is wholly self-dependent and owes nothing to the worlds His hands have made. Timeless, spaceless, single, lonely, Yet sublimely Three, Thou art grandly, always, only God is Unity! Lone in grandeur, lone in glory, Who shall tell Thy wondrous story? Awful Trinity! FREDERICK W. FABER It is not a cheerful thought that millions of us who live in a land of Bibles, who belong to churches and labor to promote the Christian religion, may yet pass our whole life on this earth without once having thought or tried to think seriously about the being of God. Few of us have let our hearts gaze in wonder at the I AM, the self-existent Self back of which no creature can think. Such thoughts are too painful for us. We prefer to think where it will do more good - about how to build a better mousetrap, for instance, or how to make two blades of grass grow where one grew before. And for this we are now paying a too heavy price in the secularlzation of our religion and the decay of our inner lives. Perhaps some sincere but puzzled Christian may at this juncture wish to inquire about the practicality of such concepts as I am trying to set forth here. "What bearing does this have on my life?" he may ask. "What possible meaning can the self-existence of God have for me and others like me in a world such as this and in times such as these?" To this I reply that, because we are the handiwork of God, it follows that all our problems and their solutions are theological. Some knowledge of what kind of God it is that operates the universe is indispensable to a sound philosophy of life and a sane outlook on the world scene. The much-quoted advice of Alexander Pope, "Know then thyself, presume not God to scan: The proper study of mankind is man," if followed literally would destroy any possibility of man's ever knowing himself in any but the most superficial way. We can never know who or what we are till we know at least something of what God is. For this reason the self-existence of God is not a wisp of dry doctrine, academic and remote; it is in fact as near as our breath and as practical as the latest surgical technique.

Holding indifference, apathy, or bitterness toward the church sets you against what God holds dear.

By advancing and progressing “from glory to glory,” the light of the Trinity will shine in ever more brilliant rays.