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In this episode, Rod continues with part 2 of his interview with h well known apologist and author, Abdu Murray.
For most of his life, Abdu was a proud Muslim who studied the Qur’an and Islam. After a nine-year investigation into the historical, philosophical, and scientific underpinnings of the major world religions and views, Abdu discovered that the historic Christian faith can answer the questions of the mind and the longings of the heart.
In this episode, Rod and Abdu discuss the doctrine of the Trinity, including:
- the biblical basis for the doctrine of the Trinity;
- the logical basis for the doctrine of the Trinity;
- how the doctrine of the Trinity proves God to be the Greatest Possible Being over and above a Oneness or Islamic conception of God;
- the concept of persons in the Trinity and perichoresis;
- Specific issues raised by Oneness Pentecostals or modalists, including:
- Isaiah 9:6
- John 10:30
- John 12:45
- John 14:9; and
- the charge made by modalists and Islam of tritheism.
External Links:
- Abdu Murray’s video testimony
- Abdu Murray’s website
- Books by Abdu Murray on Amazon
Music – I Believe by Charles Johnson and the Revivers from I Believe (1995) – available from Amazon
(1) I’m curious to ask if trinitarian Doctrine makes any distinction between the flesh nature and divine nature of Jesus Christ?
A possible context being in the Garden of Gethsemane, the flesh crying out let this cup pass (I don’t want to lay my life down) but submitting to the divine nature and doing what God had planned?
(2) IF this where to display the flesh nature Jesus Christ crying out to the Divine, and we were to explain it as such, would this cause problems or be contrary to trinitarian Doctrine (aside from the fact that the traditional interpretation of this verse being the Divine person of Jesus crying out to the Divine person of the Father ((I am more interested in understanding if there is a distinction between flesh and spirit in the trinitarian doctrine)))?
If you try to separate the divine and human nature in Jesus, you end up with the heresy of Nestorianism, that Jesus had 2 separate natures. He didn’t. Jesus was 100% human (so he did not want to die) and 100% God (so he was obedient to death). Read Phil 2:6-8 in this context – “…who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
He “emptied himself”. That is why Jesus said he did not know the day or the hour, only the Father did. He had emptied himself of that knowledge.
In the garden, Jesus tells the 3 disciples of his feelings, and describes the intensity of the painful emotions by declaring to them that his soul was “exceeding sorrowful, even unto death.” And with the true natural impulse of a suffering man, he asks them to abide with him and watch with him. The prayer in Gethsemane is a revelation of the true human nature of Christ. It is one of the great proofs that Jesus was a true man, like unto us in all save sin. We cannot explain the union of the two natures (referred to as the hypostatic union) but we understand that being both God and man, Jesus Christ was capable of suffering every human pain and the natural feelings of the human heart.