Third Post.
GOD DOESN'T LIE!
A grace-filled Trinity Sunday, y'all of Roman rite! And a grace-filled Sunday of All Saints, y'all who are Byzantine (like me)!
I normally wouldn't write on the Lord's Day, but today's Feasts are very apropos the direction this writer will be taking in his future posts.
First, a little bit of talk about God Himself:
— To be God, He has to be totally independent, i.e. not needing ANYTHING.
--He also needs to be all-powerful. That's a no-brainer!
— To be God, He also needs to be greater than any of His creatures. The greatest of His creatures are persons, human and angelic. Thus, He AT LEAST has to be a person.
--Persons by nature relate. Therefore, God, to be at least like a person, needs minimally to be two persons.
— Two human persons lovingly interacting produce beautiful projects together, or children if they're married. So, to at least be like humans, and being all-powerful, the two Divine Persons of God would end up producing a third person from their mutual love.
— Thus the Blessed Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
— WAIT!!! Stop the bus! I wanna get off!! HOW, pray tell, could God be totally independent if He’s three separate persons?
— I'm glad you asked! And I have an answer (Suddenly-stopping buses are no fun to be on, BTW.): the Three Persons of the Blessed Trinity are one Divine substance. They are ONE GOD OF THREE PERSONS. Both/and. Despite the simplistic explanation above, it's a reality that we won't fully comprehend even in eternity.
OK, OK, fine. How do I know that about God?
He. Said. So.
About Himself.
See the Gospels, especially the accounts of Our Lord's Baptism in the Jordan, plus wherever He speaks about His Father or the Holy Ghost. (Do your homework! 😁)
God DOES NOT LIE. He ALWAYS speaks the Truth.
And Truth never changes, no matter the historical period, language, culture, what have you. It can only be better known, but never in a different sense (Remember the Principle of Non-contradiction from the Second Post?).
The Blessed Trinity was explicated in the Gospels, is even better known now, and was even prefigured in the Old Testament (Homework anyone? 🫣 Hint: start in Genesis.) God told us about Himself.
Thus, we honor Trinity Sunday!
What about the Sunday of All Saints?
Well, the saints, starting with Adam and Eve (Our first parents became saints the hard way.), held to and passed on what they knew about God to people following them. Neither the nature of God nor the understanding of Him since their times has changed. The understanding has DEEPENED, but not changed into something contradictory. For millenia.
That's the litmus test: consistency.
Sadly, there are many people walking about nowadays, mostly in academia, but not exclusively so, suffering from the Chronometric subtype of Aerially Longitudinal Proboscis Syndrome (ALPS…no insult meant to the beautiful mountains of the same name), colloquially known as “historicity nose-in-the-air” or, most simply, TEMPORAL SNOBBERY.
Temporal snobbery is the prideful assumption that all times before mine were primitive, in the ancient past so primitive that the folks then were…
…drum roll…
…dumb!
So dumb, in fact, that Almighty God Himself had to address their puny minds with myths and images because they just couldn't handle the full truth of things the way us sophisticated smart-phone-gazing superior atheist moderns can. Thus what the ancients considered Truth isn't, really…WE know better! No, BEST!
Ya, the same old boring pride.
Homework (🤗):
— Look up Genetic Entropy. Our genes degrade over the generations, a process which affects our memory, too. To wit, consider (Homework!! 🙄) that folks in Ancient Greece knew the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey” by heart. Closer to our time, illiterate farmers understood the advanced (for moderns) English of the Lincoln-Douglas debates because they heard it read at services on Sundays. There's a book-length Ukrainian poem, “Lys Mykyta,” by Ivan Franko that a few older people in my early lifetime knew by heart.
— Look up (Homework!!! 😄) the complexity of various languages over time. The overall trend has been a simplification…a dumbing down of language. I can see it starkly, for example, when comparing the relatively modern Ukrainian (pre-WW2 Galician dialect) that I speak with the amazingly elegant, compact, and complex Church Slavonic used in the Divine Liturgies of my youth.
The question to ask ourselves is: how do we know that folks before us were less intelligent? Less sophisticated? Less capable of understanding things?
What is the data set to back that up?
There ultimately is none. Wires, microchips, and light-emitting diodes do not a sophisticated, advanced human being make.
Our Mother of Perpetual Help, aid us!!
Ademar