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Trinity

In our continuing dialogue with Bosco, some interesting vitas are opening up. Bosco believes that Jesus is the Father. As is his wont, he bases this on his personal reading of Scripture. As he put it in one comment:

 Ive said it millions of time here that Christ is the Father. i use the names interchangeably.

When I commented that Jesus is not the Father, I fear it caused him a problem:

Do you still think Jesus isnt the Father?
I get it..you were pulling my leg. I guess i deserve it.

Bosco is convinced that Jesus is the Father, that they are one and the same. He is willing to admit: ‘True, one can say they are separate but the same. One is still saying that Jesus is the Father.’ If it were not so tragic, it would be funny that Bosco goes on to write:  ‘I had no idea that the pharisees in here didnt think Jesus is the Father. It proves my point that they are blind to scripture. ‘ What this proves is that those who seek to read the Bible, a book canonised by the early church, outside of it, are the blind leading the blind to destruction. In the folly of his own pride, Bosco tells us that we can ignore what ‘Cyril of Cyprian’ says. Well, as Jessica has reminded him, if he actually took the trouble to see what other Christians had written, he might come to a better understanding of what Jesus meant when he said that he who had seen the Father had seen him, and when he said that he and the Father were one. As he refuses to read anything, he may not read this, but as there are many others labouring under the same error, this is for them too.

The question of who Jesus is lies at the centre of our relationship with Him; if we think He is other than He is, then we have a relationship not with Him, but with someone we have constructed from our reading of the Bible.

We need to remember that long before there was a written text, the Church founded by Jesus spread His word, and we know that long before there was any Canon, Christians had puzzled over how Jesus could be God and yet pray to God; how he could pray to the Father if the Father was God and He was God; and just what the relationship between Father and Son was. One answer was the one Bosco prefers, which is that Jesus is the Father, and when He prays to the Father or asks Him for help, He is really showing us how to pray, not doing something real; to the question of who was governing the Universe during the Incarnation, if Jesus is the Father, there has never been an answer, except that it is all a miracle. But what then of the idea that Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father? At this point, Bosco has to abandon his usual literalist reading, as it makes no sense.

But he has no such need, because Christians have been there long before him. So, John 10:14:

Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works.

Jesus often emphasises that He speaks for the Father, and the Father speaks through Him, and that the one who has seen Him has seen the Father; but not once, not anywhere, does He say He is the Father. So we have the irony that Bosco, the most literalist reader, tells us something Jesus never said. As so often, Bosco is reading into the Bible something that is not there in order to justify a reading he claims is literalist, but is nothing of the sort. So, if Jesus saying He and the Father are ‘one’ is not the same as Jesus saying ‘I am the Father’, what does it mean?  It was precisely that problem Christians wrestled with from the beginning. Bosco, like too many modern Christians, especially those claiming to have been given a new spirit, neglects these lessons, and in so doing, repeats mistakes.  I do not know why, when these people are given a new spirit, they are not given a brain to go with it.

The claim being made here is that Bosco has been given a spirit which tells him Jesus is the Father, even though Jesus made no such claim; that is Bosco reading John 14:7-8 incorrectly. Verse 10 says the Father is in Him and He is in the Father – not “i am the Father’. It is this personal misreading that shows that whatever spirit enters those like Bosco it is not the Holy Spirit, but the spirit of personal pride. Let us now turn to the answers provided by the early Church rather than by personal revelation in modern America.