A review of biblical passages recorded between the synoptic gospel writers, Matthew and Luke, Mark, offers little insight into the human origins of Jesus Christ. Matthew engages with presenting a genealogy of Christ’s descendants. It engages with presenting a historical development that spans several generations. 

Matthew stands out as an evangelist because he realizes the long-standing debates about Jesus’s identity. There is a need to document that an effort to trace the historical roots of Jesus is not only subjected to fantasy and hearsay. Rather, it is a premise that can be affirmed through successive generations that seem to accommodate prophecies whose progressive sense of fulfilment can only be realised by trusting in the presence of God. 

Considerations about the identity and nature of Jesus’s divinity are within the materialistic scope of Jesus’ life and actions. However, in an analogous way to the heated debates between Jesus and the religious leaders about his true identity, there is a similar pattern of considerations. People need to come to terms with the scriptures as written accounts that seek to establish credible testimonies. Such information attains varied degrees of relevance as well as credibility according to contestation over its content. Readership can investigate but also question the evidence presented. A decision to accept the truthfulness of a series of events cannot be taken for granted but rather conditioned through acts of interpretation. 

 Testimonies that explain what ‘happened’ as they have occurred within a given society can constitute literary accounts and have little representation of anything else. In this sense, authoring a novel for the sake of capturing the interest of a given audience would not carry many differences of resemblance to a similar daily endeavour of discovering what a set of claims can be accepted or rejected.  

The credibility of the information disclosed through events as well as witnesses and narrators are not excluded from the human powers of doubt and ambiguity. Biblical interpretation demands some level of personal engagement where what is being declared goes through several layers of examination. The ambiguity or trustworthiness can be always contested. Any interpretive effort must consider the events that occurred as well as their wider significance and relevance for how people are to think of themselves. In contrast to any other public writing output, the biblical scriptures have sustained a special place of consideration. They are produced by people whose consideration of human affairs is situated as well as conditioned by other forces. Such force derives from a divine presence whose scope of orientation is to associate with the substance of such affairs. The challenge of achieving some sense of legitimation remains an ongoing phenomenon that continues to capture the study of people and events as well as their wider meaning and relevance for how people think about themselves. The scriptures are not designed to be a study of information so that readership can understand what was written ‘then’. Instead, the goal is to ask pivotal questions about life itself and the deep layers that comprise material as well as immaterial structures. For example, the act of faith is frequently associated with scriptures. However, it is a human activity that moves onto all areas of life including politics, sports, health etc. A study of faith becomes noticeable when people need to make decisions in the midst of uncertainty. However, the added-value relevance of faith is not limited to its existence as a construct but rather in its perceived power to exert impact on how decisions are made in the way circumstances are faced and managed. The power of legitimation is therefore not situated in whatever is proclaimed through scriptures but in the subsequent context generated from what readers are to personally make with the message communicated. The challenge of legitimation remains as relevant now as it was ‘back’ then’. An interest in the credibility of information, events, and developments comprises human affairs. People who act as writers grappled with the reality of the written accounts communicated to their contemporaries. Yet, the ultimate test about the reality of what is being said and how it is considered for its truthfulness lies in the subsequent stages of interpretation. For example, in spite of making significant claims for how society was organising its own affairs, making pronouncements about what is going to ‘happen’ acquired legitimacy about its controversial origins. Information was thought not to originate just from the person. It was not just what a human individual wanted to communicate to attract the interest of society. Instead, the gravity of a message seems to be situated in the source of its origins as well as in the difficulties in understanding how it could become meaningful against the locality of people’s own affairs. Prophets experienced rejection and resistance by their contemporaries. Such rejection is not inherently a negative force to be avoided. However, considerations between scriptures enter the realm of the subjective experience where specific concepts are to be attested to their identity by the very people. This function between the divine and the human realm is repeated in all forms of phenomena that attract public attention for discussion. God’s message is designed in some unique pattern of becoming deciphered as it enters the human layers of understanding. It is an event as well as an experience that needs to accommodate opposite forces, like the general and the specific, the relevant and the irrelevant, the orderly and the disorderly.

The Identity of Jesus

The birth, presence, and departure of Jesus Christ are treated as a historical phenomenon that happened within a particular time and place. Having access to the historical accounts presents the reader with a collection of events as building blocks of an enormous puzzle. They are organised in the form of a structure. The presence of ‘foundations’ enables subsequent considerations to become easier where peoples’ proximity about the events echo what occurred ‘back then’. Appreciating that the occurrence of an event is subjected to several conditions that attest for the reality of its existence is easily forgotten when the event is treated as a past encounter.

As contemporary readers are situated in a much different place and time from when biblical passages were written about Jesus, they are encouraged to consider the magnitude of an absence that transcends their experience to a comfortable state of knowing. The absence of understanding of how the succession of events preluded the coming of Christ is a phenomenon that cannot be ignored. It generated considerable constraints for those who happened to be the immediate witness. Establishing the identity of Jesus as the Messiah becomes simplified through speculation. However, it becomes much more challenging when considering the many alternative scenarios that might have been in operation during this time. As people were confronted with various scenarios of personal fame that could resist prior anticipations of earthly kingship, Jesus assumed the role of a servant rather than a leader who carried public fame. Hence, Jesus does not fit a pattern as the attributes that should indicate his true identity seem to contradict the power of influence. As prophecies identified the significance of a Messiah whose presence could not be denied with ease. Such a person was anticipated to generate a significant impact. To establish a liberated state breaking ways prior structures of ‘occupation.’ The physical proximity of a Messiah’s arrival was not to be disguised but rather easily identified from the early stages of its emergence. Hence, Jesus is not manifested in a society that can easily be recognised. This is because he does not have the specific credentials that can enable such an individual to exert resistance or acquire fame.  

As the arrival of such type of prophecy fulfilment happens in a way that resists the contemporary expectations of the people in anticipation of the Messiah, it follows how acquiring access to the truthfulness of Jesus’s identity becomes not a mundane task. In fact, it becomes a provocative journey where society needs to rethink prior structures that established a set of cohesion in its organising order.

As Jesus comes across in a way that resists challenging the ‘status quo’ of his day, such an approach generates more questions than gives answers about his true intentions and the added value of his earthly accomplishments. For reasons that cannot be championed through the exercise of human reason alone, the Messiah’s appearance emerges from a fashion where, at the outset, it creates the impression of being self-contradictory. However, such a contradiction should not generate surprises to the readership. The same pattern is repeated between opposite forces that existed in the past, exist in the present and will exist in the future.

    The exercise of faith is not a privilege that can be taken for granted because of the natural human capacity to accommodate it. Rather, it is a property that requires some type of personalisation that resonates with the personal needs, interests, efforts and overarching decision-making approach and behaviour of the individual concerned. Hence, a space of negotiating the truth of Jesus’s identity is oddly situated within God’s own patterns of revelation. Here, truth is not to be treated as an abstract idea and information. It is to be considered for its powers to regulate decision making and behaviour at the individual and collective level.

 The Trinity

Debates on the trinity often treat the term as being a contingent phenomenon to the number of entities it accommodates. The constitution of the trinity shifts between numerical considerations that identify with the representation of ‘things’ included in it. As the topic attracts interest for its constitution as well as its manifestation it is essential to establish that an inclination to address the numerical nature of the concept falls short of any proper interpretive effort to understand its essence. This is because God cannot be accommodated within a consideration of numbers that produce categorical layers to its being. Instead, God remains a being that becomes manifested for its own purpose of expression and for aiding human understanding about its identity and ways of becoming known before human understanding. Hence, there is a risk in presupposing that the properties defined through the term comprise all that can be understood about this term.

As topics of discussion are increasingly interested in the single identity of God as a self-autonomous being, it is reasonable to understand that debates about its forms of plurality are considered with suspicion. This is because the plural representation of the divine cannot be equally represented within a single dimension. The forces that push our understanding to take sides between the identity of God carry a misconception about the starting point of our interpretation. Put differently, what is the orientation and ultimate purpose for explaining the constitution of God’s nature as being triune or not being triune? This question remains pivotal for establishing the boundaries of the explanatory paradigm that seeks to give reasons and interpret God.

If the numerical constituency of God becomes of ultimate importance then the conditioning of divine properties becomes the primary subject of anticipation for what God is and how God is revealed to humanity. However, this interpretive approach remains futile because an understanding of God cannot be based on categories that simply lie outside human experience and consciousness. In other words, any effort to understand God is subjected to limitations of human language, logic and reasoning that cannot fully accommodate God as an entity.  

As the description of God becomes defined and applied through the use of words, descriptions matter, not only for what they seek to describe but also for what they are believed to represent in themselves. Descriptions can be treated as approximations that help close a gap between experience, understanding, and knowledge between the divine and the human dimension. Without sustaining this wider relationship in focus, it is likely that subsequent efforts to establish the make-up qualities of God remain limited. Moreover, they provide ill-understood considerations about the character and the purpose of God wanting to become known to people.

If God’s ultimate purpose is to generate a sense of confusion so that His qualities are misunderstood within the boundaries of human logic and experience, then such paradigm stimulates a set of negative properties that generate more problems than provide solutions. However, such an approach comes directly in contrast with the purpose of God as an entity that wants to become known so that the level of hope, faith and aspiration in people can change significantly.

 Back and Forth

The purpose of this website is to become a point of reference in contemporary debates around God that extend to considerations about triune nature. Its point of reference begins with an understanding of God that remains cohesive in the Old Testament as well as in the New Testament. This understanding takes the view that God remains a single divine being whose form of manifestations sets in motion a set of functions. Such functions can be understood for their symbolic as well as literal activity. For example, God remains above distinctions of gender as we identify them through our common experiences. God is represented as a Father that gives His Son to the world. However, God is not a father by means of meeting the criteria of ‘earthly fatherhood’ only. He is considered in a fashion that far exceeds the singularity of a human person when he becomes a parent.

Whereas parenthood properties are made evidence in God’s being, consideration of gender or sex convolutes prior representation of fatherhood that meets a context of service, acceptance, and belonging. In this sense, God remains a Father who manifests a set of qualities that transcend human qualities, yet they accommodate them in its representation. In this sense, Jesus becomes a Son at the point of taking on human nature. Jesus remains an actual person who comes through the pains of human labour. He has an actual Mother named Maria who has cared for him throughout his life on this earth. The sonship attached to Jesus both accommodates and transcends the earthly relationship with his mother without such relationship resisting his Sonship as God-sent. Without understanding the issues of descendants and how they generated significant questions of negation to Jesus’s contemporaries it is simply impossible to understand the interpretive scope of the gospels as the ‘good news’.

Jesus’s identification with becoming the Christ, or the Messiah, resonates in the very event of his descendance from the Father. The questions and rejections that people expressed at the time of Jesu’s life on earth, with doubting about his Messianic origin go through the same highs and lows when people today also grapple with understanding God’s triune nature. The pathway for understanding the possibility of God’s manifestation as a Father but also as Spirit very much takes precedence when categories of ‘being’ become subjected to efforts of definition. However, it is the conviction of this site that such misrepresentations can become toxic within church communities. Especially, when people choose to isolate topics away from their wider biblical context. Hence, this site was conceived to shed light on particular biblical passages to establish how considerations of God’s triune character are situated in scriptures invite our understanding and aid our personal development and inner growth.

God, Singular or Plural?

Considerations about God’s nature are frequently discussed by seeking to decipher God’s constitutional characteristics that define the very properties of His Being. Whereas a study of the scriptures allows people to come to terms with key elements that comprise God’s manifestations consideration of God’s nature-properties become increasingly complex when thinking of how these become organised. An interest in the constitution of God’s unity ‘with’ and ‘within’ His Son would not have advanced into such stages of heated debate between Christian communities without such interest in God’s nature. To explain the reasons behind God’s decision to ‘give over’ His Son, for the purpose of atoning the sins of the world, people produce categories for explaining the mechanisms of God’s activities. Such endeavour increasingly calls attention for defining and re-defining the self-constitution of His very being. In thinking that God is ‘one God’ there is little room for considering about ‘what else’ can be added to ‘singleness’ from God being ONE.

The Majestic Plural

Communities that seek to defend a position of a perspective on explaining the singularity in God’s character and nature, correctly describe it in self-defined terms. Yet, they are missing out from how such considerations about God are applied in the Old Testament. Here the presence of God happens to be in the plural. Yet, it does not negate the singular sense.

The use of the plural tense is often referred to as the ‘majestic plural’. Readers who are not familiar with this type of language can experience confusion for how God (who is singular) can be also discussed in a plural tense.

An application of God’s attributes, in the plural, comprises of actions, roles, attitudes, manifestations, interests, etc. On the surface such attributes seem to self-contradict a God who can only be understood in the singular. In the Old Testament the majestic plural underpins whatever cannot be contained within a single numerical category deployed in conventional human reasoning. In this sense, God is identified with a type of Being whose very nature sets in motions actions that surpasses numerical categories.

Whereas the majestic plural seems to be self-contradicting, as a term on its own, readers have difficulty understanding when and why such use becomes prominent in the scriptures.

The majestic plural accommodates the presence of a singular God not limited by the laws of physics and mathematics, as we understand them in our contemporary thought. For example, in demonstrating different ways of manifesting His divine presence, God is demonstrated through material and non-material forms. For example, God is described as the ‘wind’ (John 3:8). People cannot decipher where it came from and where it is going. The direction of the wind can become a topic of human enquiry because the subject of ‘direction’ carries specific connotations about order and systems. Such entities can only become understood through the application of logic. Their sophistication achieves recognition through the sophistication of a disciplines. Such development demonstrates the varied layers of human experience.

The spirit is described as the wind so that it can be understood. Its attributes can become sensible as the wind cannot be physically contained in an artefact. However, an understanding of the wind’s direction or types of flowing cannot be championed through human effort. This is because the very substance of the spirit as the ‘wind’ comprises qualities that are not easily testable or predictable.

Without an appreciation of the biblical context, where descriptions about God develop in context, it is hard to produce a fair interpretation of the scriptures. By their very nature such written account demand an understanding of their historical, social, political, context so that people can produce fair interpretations.

The majestic plural is a way of understanding God’s nature by considering unidentified elements that surpass the boundaries of human understanding. We can think of a mundane example to describe such difficulty. We can imagine the development of a contemporary product. How  it could be understood by consumers that lived in previous centuries. At a time where the presence of engines was not available in daily modes of transportation the possibility of making business scenarios about selling self-driving cars would be highly absurd. This absurdness is  happens because the thinking-system that define what can be known within a particular context (i.e. mechanical terms) becomes scarcely available. People simply do not have access to the necessary categories in order to understanding the very knowledge that comprises it. Hence, there is no point in talking about ‘engines’ without understanding about the function of motors, engineering, clogs, material, connections, etc.  Any consideration of engine-development, as a technological subject of study and manufacturing, can be applied in a car or in any other mode of transportation. However, this cannot happen without an appreciation of the mechanical infrastructure (i.e. the pretext) that gives way to primary information leads about energy sources and distribution. Any consideration of engine applications in cars, airplanes, trains, etc, are illogical without some given pre-text. Such efforts miss the goal of human understanding because they are brought into an area of discussion, a totally foreign entity that resists the habitat of commonly understood terms. In a primitive context, the task of introducing ideas about engine would need to be conditioned against alternative ways of thinking about movement, force, connection, material, etc.  In seeking to establish a position of knowledge about God’s nature, people are limited by their understanding for what can be known in isolation and also become understood in ‘definitive terms’.

The Baalim

The struggle of ‘faith’ between the Israelites as well as the surrounding nations is founded, not only in the naming of God per se, but also in understanding the type of ‘this’ God who seeks peoples’ attention over ‘other gods’. Put differently, why does this God require commitment and a relationship with the people in a distinctively different fashion from other gods? One’s exercise of faith is not based on name-descriptions but rather in considerations about personal self and his/her association-development. Hence, the experience of one’s faith cannot be materialized in recognizing God’s nature through calling Him with many attributions. God is not ‘offended’ because people have merely chosen to worship ‘Bal’ and the ‘Baalim’. The problem remains much greater than this. It is the consideration of who ‘this’ God is regarding His identity and association with the people that qualify with Him over ‘other’ gods. The tension between the people who have happened to move away from the ‘true worship’ did not occur because they happened to subscribe to ‘different’ gods. It is the type of merit that happens to be present in the relationship with God that gains precedence.

It is this very nature of peoples’ understanding that demands personal conditions of development. Peoples’ experience matter because they identify with life’s circumstances by producing interpretations of who they really are as a people. Such requirement of having a different relationship with ‘this’ God generates a contrasting interface between conventional religious gods. Having a relationship with ‘this’ God cannot become self-contained by performing religious rituals. It is precisely for this reason that God does not take pleasure in ‘sacrifices’. In studying the life of  prophets we can see that God’s growing dissatisfaction with ritual practices generates an unpredictable yet parodical sense of dissatisfaction about society. In a longitudinal storyline between religious practices of many societies animal offerings and rituals are both welcome and encouraged. However, the scriptures make abundantly clear that in ‘this’ God’s case, strong, negative emotions emerge because people do not identify inwardly with ‘other’ qualities that make ‘this’ God stand out from other gods.

Such parallel contrasts repetitively (a) the act of performing religious ritual and (b) the performing of rites for appeasing God outwardly. This is a classic motif we find in most polytheistic traditions. This is one of few cases where a God is not only resisting religious practice but takes personal offence in the attitudes, aspirations, that comprise subsequent interpretations about the person. This gap widens between the two models of religious service as they take precedence. Their significance is not because of what has happened in the past but because of what follows. Thus, there is an unquestionable development for how mandate religious practice have led to repetition, routines, leading to a demarcated absence of inner realisation about what is important. Establishing a relationship with ‘this’ God, people are encouraged to think differently of what they need to do and who they need to be thinking of themselves as becoming.

Themes of Liberation

A distinctive theme that sets out ‘this’ God from other gods in the landscape of the Old Testament polytheistic traditions, is an interest in the human experience. Instances of suffering and liberation are contingent in large scale accomplishments. For example, in building monuments, temples, etc, the people identify a religious relationship with the gods that reign over them. Understanding what the gods want from ‘Man’ is not always clear. Messengers are needed to communicate a set of explicit desires that stem from gods’ desires. The recipients need to act them out as tools of service. Subsequently, the religious experience develops into an ongoing struggle between understanding what the gods want and performing a set of rituals in order to satisfy desires. The possibility of not generating some adequate level of satisfaction is viewed as some ongoing cause of destruction and punishment. On the contrary, understanding what the gods want sets a new paradigm because this is how people can fulfil their ultimate purpose in life. Fate is subjected to gods and their decision-making power.

In contrast to the gods we find among polytheistic traditions ‘this’ God calls a broken nation out of Egypt. Gives hope for a new place. Sets in motion a paradigm of calling for a people to find their own sense of destiny. In contrast to other gods, ‘this’ God becomes interested in their external as well as internal sense of liberation. Submission to a higher ruler is not the ultimate cornerstone of a peoples’ civilised state of development. For some unaccountable reason ‘this’ God becomes stubbornly interested in liberating the people from external as well as internal ‘bondage’. The readers are introduced to a different narrative that contrasts the position of divine powers before the stakes of human experience. Hence, ritual offerings can gain or lose their significance considering how they become internalized.

Such consideration places new attributes to a relationship with the divine. Stages of personal development about faith increasingly matter over how and why this relationship becomes regulated. A God who interested in the lives of daily people remains a God who is not interested in their service-demands through ritual. Instead, this is a God who stands out from other gods because people need to consider what happens within their own selves rather than what is followed through a prescription of acts that come from a religious institution and authority.  In this alternative paradigm of human understanding the individual’s experience of God is not generalized but self-customised. It is not an experience of the ‘people’ but of the ‘person’. Considerations of being loose their significance when they are only treated as abstracted entities that seek to affirm an institution or organized religion being the ultimate objective.

God can express love that can enter the calibre of human imagination as a Father who gives away his only Son to rescue a people that happen to be in trouble and need rescuing.  Considerations of ‘this’ God’s identity cannot attain any sense of merit when they are seated merely within boundaries of an overarching system that dictates what needs to happen.  Instead, God sets in motion a set of various activities, events, developments, experiences, where considerations about human life achieve some alternative interpretation. In this sense, ‘this’ God differs significantly from the Baalim. This is precisely because the expectations for self-fulfilment are not based on religious attribution and blind commitment, rigid practices that do not echo inner dimensions of human experience. This is not a God that simply demands from others to bring their selves to achieve wealth, fame, and power and control over other people.

The Why Question

Our explanatory remarks of God’s triune character follows very different lines of meaning when we seek to understand God’s ‘origins’ as well as ‘functions’.

People that seek to argue for the existence of a clear separation between God (as the Father) and Jesus Christ (as the Son) are establishing such distinction on scriptures that indeed describes a clear line of separation between the two entities.

People who seek to defend God’s triune nature will never produce adequate explanatory arguments for persuasively demonstrating how this constitution might happen. This is because the boundaries that restrict God’s properties, role, and function cannot be contained within the boundaries of human logic. People who support a triune understanding of God will always be limited for explaining how this relationship can be understood in its entirety. However, attention in explaining God’s origins should not be associated with what purpose this God serves. Accepting God’s triune nature is guided by an appreciation of the different outlets of demonstration. God is demonstrating His properties by manifesting behaviours of consideration, interest, care, and concern. In seeking to establish God’s nature our understanding is guided by the meaning of what is to be accomplished. Discussions about liberation should not exist as topics of debate that only satisfy the powers of human curiosity. There is needs to be an additional arena where considerations about God are powerful enough to stimulate reactions in the other party.

In this sense, interpretations that seek to build from a point of a clear separation between God and the Son, as being two entities, might succeed in affirming in logical terms the consistency of what is proposed.

However, it needs to be noted that this line of reasoning cannot disentangle itself from those similar considerations that seek to present the same God as an entity that cannot be limited within the terrain of symbols and words, produced through human language.

In coming to terms with the limits of the human efforts to describe and define God, there is a significant movement of emphasis on considerations of God’s functions, ministry, forms of operating into the world.

Communities that ascribe to a triune understanding of God’s nature do not disregard the operational difficulties in coming to terms with the limits of explanation. The goal is not producing adequate accounts of explanation. Rather, to understand the constellation of attributes that set apart a prototype of religious experience that can competitively qualify before alternative paradigms of participating and living in this religious journey.