In Trinitarian doctrine, God exists as three persons or hypostases, but is one being, having a single divine nature.[52] The members of the Trinity are co-equal and co-eternal, one in essence, nature, power, action, and will. As stated in the Athanasian Creed, the Father is uncreated, the Son is uncreated, and the Holy Spirit is uncreated, and all three are eternal with no beginning.[53] The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are not names for different parts of God, but one name for God[54] because three persons exist in God as one entity.[55] They cannot be separate from one another. Each person is understood as having the identical essence or nature, not merely similar natures.[56] God has always loved, and there has always existed perfectly harmonious communion among the three persons of the Trinity. One consequence of this teaching is that God could not have created man in order to have someone to talk to or to love: God already enjoyed personal communion; being perfect, he did not create man because of a lack or inadequacy he had. Another consequence, according to Rev. Fr. Thomas Hopko, an Eastern Orthodox theologian, is that if God were not a Trinity, he could not have loved prior to creating other beings on whom to bestow his love. Thus God says, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.[Gen 1:26–7] For Trinitarians, emphasis in Genesis 1:26 is on the plurality in the Deity, and in 1:27 on the unity of the divine Essence. A possible interpretation of Genesis 1:26 is that Gods relationships in the Trinity are mirrored in man by the ideal relationship between husband and wife, two persons becoming one flesh, as described in Eves creation later in the next chapter.[2:22]
Posted on: Fri, 27 Jun 2014 09:18:57 +0000
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