Forest Man

I have wondered if it is possible to combine the spirit seer Emanuel Swedenborg's (1688-1772) teaching that Jesus is the only God, with the teaching of the Nicea - trinitarians, and at the same time avoid the usual, vulgar arianism and nontrinitarianism, stripping Jesus from divinity.  

 

It helps to meditate on Swedenborg's words that The Father is the invisible God, and the Son, Jesus Christ is the visible God. But are they two separate entities? Betty J. Eadies (b. 1942) near-death experience indicates that God and Jesus are two separate entities or "beings".

 

Jesus could not have prayed to himself. 

 

But still it is possible that Jesus is the Incarnation of God number one in the history of the Cosmos. That he is the highest being that is, and that therefore he is God's fullest incarnation, "For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form," (Col. 2:9)

 

Jesus can be a created being (though existing from eternity), like the arians and Jehovah's Witnesses teach, and still be the full incarnation of God. Because we should not imagine God the Father as a human, as a person in the normal sense. God the Father is so much more, He/She is transpersonal. Therefore the only person who can be considered being God in person, as a being in our sense of the word, is the Lord of the Cosmos, Jesus Christ. Here Swedenborg is right. Jesus is the only God in this sense. 

 

But in the end our language is too limited and fragile to be suitable for meditating upon the trinity. We can maybe only say what trinity is not, in a negative, apofatic theology. It is not two or three distinct persons, which is biteism and triteism. 

 

Therefore the solution to the trinity debate might be something that goes beyond both trinitarianism and arianism.