3 Nephi & Mormon 9: Nature of God & The Trinity

A great deal of Christian history is groups struggling over the nature of God. That struggle increased when Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion and the need for an acknowledged and standardized theology arose (Studer does a respectable job balancing political needs against participants' beliefs, pointing out that the resultant dogma was accepted by many congregations for its own sake--though obviously not by all, as the Lollards and future Millennialists demonstrate). 

The culture of the times and social/political needs immediately provided an outlet for people who like to debate about ideas. 

In many ways, the debates had a point. In many ways, they did not. 

They had a point because what we humans imagine God to be has a great deal to do with how we imagine ourselves to be--a vengeful God, a loving God, an inclusive God, an exclusive God, and so on. 

They didn't have a point because often trying to figure out the nature of God results in putting God in a box. As C.S. Lewis wrote, "He is not a tamed lion." Trying to tame God to our particular mindset or worldview strikes me as somewhat blasphemous. 

And yet, trying to get closer to God, to commune with God, to understand our purpose through God, is to a huge extent the purpose of religion. Charity can be accomplished through other means (though perhaps not as effectively). The modern era struggles with community, to which religion is often a solution, but truthfully, these days, even religions struggle with community. Andy Griffith's churchgoers existed, in part, because the small-town/small-neighborhood world still existed. Cultures change. 

In the end, the consistent focus of religions is thinking and talking and acting on one's understanding of the divine.

Which doesn't mean some of the thinking and talking doesn't go too far. 

The Trinity

Early Christianity was not that invested in the trinity, one way or the other. Robert M. Grant points out in Gods and the One God that God, the Father; His Only Begotten Son; and the Holy Ghost were not originally presented as a trinity but a triad. In the earliest years of Christianity, there was no real attempt to explain exactly how the three beings interacted--any more than there was any real attempt to explain exactly how God created the earth. Basil Studer in his extremely dense tome Trinity and the Incarnation, makes the same point. 

The need to explain the exact relationship between God and Christ grew out of a reaction, in part, to the Arian controversy, whether, in sum, "Jesus and the Father were of 'one substance' [or] three distinct 'persons--Father, Son and Spirit" (Page). The issues are far too complex for me to explain in this post. Nick Page sums up the issues quite well in A Nearly Infallible History of Christianity:

"And what is interesting--and frankly, depressing--about the debate over Arianism is that it is the first major example of theology turning into brain surgery...At one stage, the debate becomes between two Greek words: homoiousios, which means 'similar essence,' and homoousios, which means 'same essence.'"   

I grew up hearing that the "angels dancing on the head of a pin" obsession here was the fault of the Nicaean Council. But, in fact, the Council(s) of Nicea (there was more than one) worked to resolve the matter. The Council ultimately came down on the side that, at the time, I likely would have favored myself. That is, the Council determined that Christ as a deity truly had lived as a human and truly had suffered resurrected. It wasn't some kind of shell game. The material world did matter.

However, the idea that God would allow Himself or his Son to suffer still bothered people. Theologians also worried about how Christ or the Holy Spirit could save if they weren't God. So Christ became God and the Holy Spirit became God in order to make the matter work theoretically. 

This is where I stop praising the Council and just sigh. 

I suggest one reason very early Christianity didn't care about how atonement/salvation work as a system or machine is because those early believers--including Paul--were in essence what I call mythologists. What mattered wasn't HOW God rescued human beings (exact number of blood drops) but the STORY of God's rescue/interaction with humans in mortality. 

In addition, that world was still thoroughly pagan in its understanding of gods, even within Judaism. The difference between Judeo-Christianity and paganism wasn't necessarily monotheism as moderns understand it. It was the belief (1) this god expects righteousness because this god is righteous and just; (2) this god is more powerful than all other gods and (by the early C.E. era) this god is the god of all people; (3) this god, according to Paul and others, no longer requires propitiation through any type of ritual sacrifice. Humans no longer have to bargain for their birth-rights.

In sum, God being both singular and all-important; God having a Son; the Son having a Mother was not in any way odd to the early Christians. They were quite familiar with Osiris-Horus-Isis.

For any number of reasons, including possibly a desire to break entirely with the pagan past and some of its more (in fairness) unpalatable practices, the need for a single all-in-one God became paramount in the 300 C.E. era. Again, it is to the credit of the Council of Nicea that a God with three faces (three functions that humans can relate to) was retained. 

Protestants like Calvin, however, took the need for monotheism to another level. The world became suddenly somewhat barren of angels and saints and other supernatural beings (except Satan). Consequently, by the 1800s, a declared stance on monotheism was a mark of adherence to a set of related beliefs.

The Book of Mormon starts out with a thoroughly monotheistic perspective. It quickly adopts the language of three acting as one. Christ's appearance in 3 Nephi is, like his baptism in the New Testament, heralded by a declaration: 

Behold my Beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased, in whom I have glorified my name—hear ye him.

Further references to "my Father and I are one" can easily be interpreted as "one in purpose." Ether 12 references "the grace of God the Father, and also the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost."

In the end, Joseph Smith halved the difference between the Nicene Creed and the Arians. Everybody (gods and humans) is eternal and has always existed, including Jesus Christ and Mary and the Holy Spirit. God didn't "create" them or us. God "organized" them and us.

That is, Joseph Smith promoted a mythology rather than a theology. The mythology borrows from Arianism but avoids the dreary ex nihilo business of God creating stuff out of nothing as well as the underlying boredom of trying to put God in a box, tidy up a deity who is supposed to have agency.  Mormon 9 argues, "[W]hy [would] God [have] ceased to be a God of miracles and yet [continued to] be an unchangeable Being? And behold, I say unto you he changeth not; if so, he would cease to be God; and he ceaseth not to be God, and is a God of miracles” (19). 

In Joseph Smith's hands, God deals with the world all the time--as much as He can. Personality and change is the unchangeable constant.

In sum, a deity who has His own agency is the point--but then, like Joseph Smith, I'm a mythologist to my bones.