Transcript

Hi folks, and welcome back to The Original Church.

I'm Jim Papandrea.

Thanks for joining me.

I want to do a series of videos to do some more follow-up on the concept of the doctrine of the Trinity.

And so I did one about the fact that the Original Church was Trinitarian.

And then I did one on the concept or the doctrine of consubstantiality.

So if you haven't seen that one, I hope you'll watch that one.

What does consubstantial mean?

And for this video, I'm going to talk about a doctrine called inseparable operation.

Sounds complicated, but it's not.

But the first thing you have to understand is another doctrine which says that God is simplex.

Sometimes written in English as simple, but it doesn't mean uncomplicated.

It means not composed of parts.

God is simplex because God is not made up of smaller parts.

And part of the reason we know this is because, philosophically, anything made up of smaller parts can break down into those parts.

In other words, decay and die.

And God does not die because God is eternal.

Therefore, God cannot break down into smaller parts.

Therefore, God is not made up of smaller parts.

God is simplex.

God is one thing through and through.

Whatever that one thing is, we call it divinity.

But the point is that the three persons of the Trinity are not each one-third of God.

God cannot be divvied up in that way, because God is simplex.

And that's another way of saying that God is one.

There is only one God.

Now, of course, as you know, God is one, but God is also three.

But we have to be careful when we talk about the threeness of God, or the fancy term is the triplicity of God, when we talk about God as existing in three persons, we have to be very careful that we don't make it sound like we're talking about three gods.

So, inseparable operation is a doctrine that clarifies the oneness of God or the unity of the three persons of the Trinity.

The operation, that is the activity, of all three persons of the Trinity is inseparable.

It's inseparable because it is only one activity.

And so, here is the doctrine of inseparable operation.

All three persons of the Trinity are unified in all divine activity.

I'm going to repeat that.

All three persons of the Trinity are unified in all divine activity.

There are these things called divine attributes.

Attributes of the divine.

These are ways that we can describe who God is and what God is like.

And sometimes we might be tempted to say these are attributes that God has, but they're not really something God has as if you can separate the attributes from God's very substance.

that one thing that God is throughout, which is divinity.

Attributes are not something that God has, they are simply what God is.

So what do I mean by that?

One of the divine attributes we often talk about is omnipresence.

God is everywhere at once.

God is omnipresent, not only in space but also in time.

God is everywhere, which is interesting because in the original church, the early Christian apologists pointed out that if God is omnipresent, if God is truly everywhere at once, then there is room for only one God.

There isn't room for any other gods to have other spheres of influence.

So there is only one God who fills up everything.

God is omnipresent.

Another divine attribute that we sometimes talk about is God is omnipotent, or sometimes simply called almighty.

But this means that God is all-powerful, which means that there is only one divine power.

Only one power.

And so, because God is simplex, God is one thing through and through, that one thing that we call divinity is omnipresent and omnipotent Again, God doesn't have these things.

God simply is these things.

Now, this means that even though there are three persons in the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity has only one will.

Remember that for God to enact His will, He only has to will something.

God does not need hands or tools to enact His will.

God simply wills and it is.

But God has only one will.

There is not a separate will for the Father, a separate will for the Son, and a separate will for the Holy Spirit.

No. There is one will for all three persons of the Trinity.

I have to nuance that a little bit because Jesus Christ in his incarnation has two wills because his human nature has a will also.

But his divine nature has a will which is the same will as the will of the Trinity.

The Trinity has only one will.

So there is a single, divine, active will and power of God and so that tells us All three persons of the Trinity are unified in all divine activity.

You cannot separate out the Father is doing this, the Son is doing this other thing, and the Holy Spirit's over there doing that.

No. All three persons of the Trinity are unified in all divine activity.

That's inseparable operation.

Now, in addition to the divine attributes, there are also these things we call personal properties So, in other words, the divine attributes describe what God is, who God is in the oneness of God.

The personal properties describe who the individual persons of the divinity are.

And we're going to get into this in another video.

But for now, I just want to clarify something.

So, for example, one of the personal properties that would be unique to the second person of the Trinity is Only the second person of the Trinity became incarnate.

Only the Son became human.

The Father did not become human.

The Holy Spirit did not become human.

Now you might be thinking, well wait a minute, doesn't that contradict the doctrine of inseparable operation?

And actually it doesn't, because still, even though only the second person of the Trinity became human, all three persons of the Trinity are at work in the incarnation And so, for example, even when we say in the Creed that the Holy Spirit spoke through the prophets, well that's true, but really the Trinity spoke through the prophets.

And even when we read in the Gospel of John that the Holy Spirit inspired the writing of Scripture, that is true, but technically it was the Trinity All three persons of the Trinity are united in all divine activity.

And so divine activity is not even three activities working together.

Divine activity is a single activity because God is a single God.

And this is how the original Christians understood and how we still understand the one God, the Holy Trinity.

Thanks for joining me.

See you next time.

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I really appreciate that.

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