Ex-Church of Christ Support Board

Zeek is right. God was God the Father. Jesus was God the Son (only much, much nicer). And the Holy Spirit essentially vanished from human knowledge as soon as the New Testament was written,which was immediately after Jesus' resurrection if not sooner (we have agreed, have we not, that the coc is shaky on actual history?).

The 'gifts of the Holy Spirit' were given to the apostles, who could pass them on to THEIR disciples, BUT that was the end of THAT silly nonsense! CERTAINLY nobody NOW had any of those gifts of the spirit! What are we? Pentecostals!?

HIGHLY SUSPECT. The coc - being in their view - TOTALLY logical, could not possibly envisage a belief system that included anything so SUPERNATURAL as the Holy Spirit! Besides, everybody knows ghosts aren't real.

(yikes)

I KNOW I was taught - explicitly taught - that the gifts of the Holy Spirit (like speaking in tongues, and healing by laying on of hands) were specific gifts to the apostles, and they ended with the death of the last disciple of the apostles, who may have HAD those gifts, but could not pass them on.

This explains why the coc doesn't have any saints, either, by the way. That and a very strong anti-Catholic reaction, of course.
Honestly, the more I think about this, the more I understand why I was in the pew three times a week, and mentally checked out by age 14.

Well that, and the idea that even HAVING a doubt (never mind expressing it out loud) was a dire sin.

Anyway, yes, the CoC does indeed teach 'the Trinity' but is prone to say 'Godhead' instead, because 'Trinity' sounds too Catholic. HOWEVER, the CoC Trinity (Godhead) addresses only God the Father (OT God) and God the Son (NT God, much nicer), and the HS is fossilized in the Bible, never to be allowed out of the closet, and certainly never acknowledged as having any role in the world.

The CoC (and a lot of other Protestant denominations really) is a very poor conception of their monotheism. One can see where the JW's and LDS dual God-concept comes from - a dire lack of understanding of and unwillingness to responsibly deal with, a core traditional Christian teaching of 'God in Three Persons'.

Uncomfortable with nuance, unwilling to say 'I don't know' and a lot of dishonesty and pretense used to control the membership.

I was taught that God was three-in-one, citing the Biblical command to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” I John 5:7 was also cited: “For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.” (This verse has been removed in more recent translations because it isn’t in the oldest manuscripts.) And the first chapter of John says “The Word was God.”

But people were reluctant to affirm “the doctrine of the Trinity” because that word for it isn’t used in the Bible, and probably also because they couldn’t understand what the non-Biblical phrase “three persons in one substance” means. (I can’t either; I’m not steeped in Aristotelian philosophy the way the people who wrote the Creed were.)

In short, for the CoC, it was all about what the Bible says or doesn’t say. Not a surprise.

Probably the best analogy I ever came across concerning the trinity was an egg. An egg has three distinct components...Egg the yolk, Egg the white, and Egg the shell. A sample of any one of these if properly identified will be called "egg" just as there is God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit and, if recognized, any one of those would be identified as "God".