Just here on Easter to remind you that Jesus was a real historical figure
(media.conspiracies.win)
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You can believe anything you want to believe. I'm fine with that. But, I don't have to choose anything that you suggest.
By divinity you mean the Holy Trinity, that is... God is nothing and everything? isn't why emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in 325? to affirm the full divinity of Jesus, declaring him to be of the same homoousios as God, rather than a created being. To me Trinity means God is both real and not real. God is a symbol and reality itself. It is the weirdest idea I've ever come across in my life. btw, you can laugh all you wish, I don't care.
Some opposites are between something and nothing, like real and unreal. God is real and God is not unreal, God is all being and is not nothing.
Some opposites are between two poles that ultimately resolve, even if paradoxically. God is Father and God is Son, God is Reality and God is Symbol. In Greek, fathers and sons have the same "living" and "substance", referring to their estate; that's what bios and ousia mean.
If by "trinity" you want to mean that God is nothing or is unreal, that won't work. "Trinity" literally just means threeness but has come lately to mean triunity, three-in-oneness; it doesn't mean nothing or unreality.
So, you are another Christian apologist like Tertullian. If I'm not mistaken, it was Tertullian who became the first Christian author to adopt the term Trinity as a way of understanding the relationship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Jesus does not say “I am the Father” or “the Father and I am one.”. He says “the Father and I are [plural] one". I don't care if to you "Trinity" literally just means threeness, or triunity, or three-in-oneness... to me is extreme confusion.
I stick to God's Word revealed in the Bible; if that's an "apologist" sobeit.
If you accept "the Father and I are [plural] one" that implies that Father and Son have both diversity and unity. You, mind and body, have unity, and you, mind and body, have diversity. Pretty simple.
What would be confusion is if someone said something is unity and diversity at the same time and in the same sense; that would be a contradiction instead of a resolvable paradox. But nobody says that. If you think people are saying something contradictory, just go a bit deeper to see the different things that different clauses refer to. You are one, mind and body are two, but you are yet mind and body, because you are not one in the same way that you are two. If you understand how that paradox works then there's no problem applying the same reasoning to All Being.
You say "united somehow", but Jesus also says "one" i.e. united somehow. If you're mindboggled it can be resolved simply by analyzing what you or others are saying; there's always a resolution. I apologize for the billions of Christians who have copped out and said it can't be understood. I've concluded anything can be understood.
Correct! Yet what else did Jesus's own disciples see in him? Omniscience ("you know all things"), omnipresence ("there I am in the midst of them"), omnipotence ("none can snatch them from my hand"), eternity ("before Abraham was, I am"), I have a list of 40 divine attributes around here somewhere.
Yeah, John 1. As Christians we accept the whole Bible as infallible in the original manuscripts. You haven't objected to that so if you have a problem with texts you might want to explain it so I know where you're coming from.
Yeah. There is one exception, which I already pointed out to you: when an opposite has two complementary poles, like father and son, or greater and lesser, God is both of them in his diversity (and God is the whole spectrum in his unity). The rest of the time, when the opposite of a thing is a nothing, God is the the thing (being all being). So Jesus is God in every respect in which the Father is God, except a very small number of respects in which Jesus and the Father are two diverse expressions of the same spectrum.
I looked at the development of these things and sought to be very considerate of antitrinitarian concerns. I found that the sincere antitrinitarians (not the reactionary ones) were willing to agree to uphold the whole text and then it's simply a matter of not forcing any propositions that aren't clear in the text. The development of the doctrines was not the problem, it was the adding of words that are very tenuously tied to the text (like Latin "person") that distances the doctrine from the text and allows mistakes in the minds of modern readers. I am very hopeful your sincere inquiry will get all your questions answered and confusions dispelled.