difficult to entertain any belief that seemed to conflict with their dominating concept of Yahweh. And the early Christians inherited the Hebraic prejudice against the Trinity concept.
104:1.11 The first Trinity of Christianity was proclaimed at Antioch and consisted of God, his Word, and his Wisdom. Paul knew of the Paradise Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, but he seldom preached about it and made mention thereof in only a few of his letters to the newly forming churches. Even then, as did his fellow apostles, Paul confused Jesus, the Creator Son of the local universe, with the Second Person of Deity, the Eternal Son of Paradise.
104:1.12 The Christian concept of the Trinity, which began to gain recognition near the close of the first century after Christ, was comprised of the Universal Father, the Creator Son of Nebadon, and the Divine Minister of Salvington — Mother Spirit of the local universe and creative consort of the Creator Son.
104:1.13 Not since the times of Jesus has the factual identity of the Paradise Trinity been known on Urantia (except by a few individuals to whom it was especially revealed) until its presentation in these revelatory disclosures. But though the Christian concept of the Trinity erred in fact, it was practically true with respect to spiritual relationships. Only in its philosophic implications and cosmological consequences did this concept suffer embarrassment: It has been difficult for many who are cosmic minded to believe that the Second Person of Deity, the second member of an infinite Trinity, once dwelt on Urantia; and while in spirit this is true, in actuality it is not a fact. The Michael Creators fully embody the divinity of the Eternal Son, but they are not the absolute personality.
2. TRINITY UNITY AND DEITY PLURALITY
104:2.1 Monotheism arose as a philosophic protest against the inconsistency of polytheism. It developed first through pantheon organizations with the departmentalization of supernatural activities, then through the henotheistic exaltation of one god above the many, and finally through the exclusion of all but the One God of final value.
104:2.2 Trinitarianism grows out of the experiential protest against the impossibility of conceiving the oneness of a deanthropomorphized solitary Deity of unrelated universe significance. Given a sufficient time, philosophy tends to abstract the personal qualities from the Deity concept of pure monotheism, thus reducing this idea of an unrelated God to the status of a pantheistic Absolute. It has always been difficult to understand the personal nature of a God who has no personal relationships in equality with other and co-ordinate personal beings. Personality in Deity demands that such Deity exist in relation to other and equal personal Deity.
104:2.3 Through the recognition of the Trinity concept the mind of man can hope to grasp something of the interrelationship of love and law in the time-space creations. Through spiritual faith man gains insight into the love of God but soon discovers that this spiritual faith has no influence on the ordained laws of the material universe. Irrespective of the firmness of man’s belief in God as his Paradise Father, expanding cosmic horizons demand that he also give recognition to the reality of Paradise Deity as universal law, that he recognize the Trinity sovereignty extending outward from Paradise and overshadowing even the evolving local universes of the Creator Sons and Creative Daughters of the three eternal persons whose deity union
104:2.4 And this selfsame Paradise Trinity is a real entity — not a personality but nonetheless a true and absolute reality; not a personality but nonetheless compatible with coexistent personalities — the personalities of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The Trinity is a supersummative Deity reality eventuating out of the conjoining of the three Paradise Deities. The qualities, characteristics, and functions of the Trinity are not the simple sum of the attributes of the three Paradise Deities; Trinity functions are something unique, original, and not wholly predictable from an analysis of the attributes of Father, Son, and Spirit.
104:2.5 For example: The Master, when on earth, admonished his followers that justice is never a
104:2.6 The conceptual grasp of the Trinity association of Father, Son, and Spirit prepares the human mind for the further presentation of certain other threefold relationships. Theological reason may be fully satisfied by the concept of the Paradise Trinity, but philosophical and cosmological reason demand the recognition of the other triune associations of the First Source and Centre, those triunities in which the Infinite functions in various non-Father capacities of universal manifestation — the relationships of the God of force, energy, power, causation, reaction, potentiality, actuality, gravity, tension, pattern, principle, and unity.
3. TRINITIES AND TRIUNITIES
104:3.1 While mankind has sometimes grasped at an understanding of the Trinity of the three persons of Deity, consistency demands that the human intellect perceive that there are certain relationships between all seven Absolutes. But all that which is true of the Paradise Trinity is not necessarily true of a
104:3.2 Mortal man is passing through a great age of expanding horizons and enlarging concepts on Urantia, and his cosmic philosophy must accelerate in evolution to keep pace with the expansion of the intellectual arena of human thought. As the cosmic consciousness of mortal man expands, he perceives the interrelatedness of all that he finds in his material science, intellectual philosophy, and spiritual insight. Still, with all this belief in the unity of the cosmos, man perceives the diversity of all existence. In spite of all concepts concerning the immutability of Deity, man perceives that he lives in a universe of constant change and experiential growth. Regardless of the realization of the survival of spiritual values, man has ever to reckon with the mathematics and premathematics of force, energy, and power.
104:3.3 In some manner the eternal repleteness of infinity must be reconciled with the time- growth of the evolving universes and with the incompleteness of the experiential inhabitants thereof. In some way the conception of total infinitude must be so segmented and qualified that the mortal intellect and the morontia soul can grasp this concept of final value and spiritualizing significance.
104:3.4 While reason demands a monotheistic unity of cosmic reality, finite experience requires the postulate of plural Absolutes and of their co-ordination in cosmic relationships. Without co-ordinate existences there is no possibility for the appearance of diversity of absolute relationships, no chance for the operation of differentials, variables, modifiers, attenuators, qualifiers, or diminishers.
104:3.5 ¶ In these papers total reality (infinity) has been presented as it exists in the seven Absolutes:
104:3.6 1. The Universal Father.
104:3.7 2. The Eternal Son.
104:3.8 3. The Infinite Spirit.
104:3.9 4. The Isle of Paradise.
104:3.10 5. The Deity Absolute.
104:3.11 6. The Universal Absolute.
104:3.12 7. The Unqualified Absolute.
104:3.13 ¶ The First Source and Centre, who is Father to the Eternal Son, is also Pattern to the Paradise Isle. He is personality unqualified in the Son but personality potentialized in the Deity Absolute. The Father is energy revealed in Paradise-Havona and at the same time energy concealed in the Unqualified Absolute. The Infinite is ever disclosed in the ceaseless acts of the Conjoint Actor while he is eternally functioning in the compensating but enshrouded activities of the Universal Absolute. Thus is the Father related to the six co-ordinate Absolutes, and thus do all seven encompass the circle of infinity throughout the endless cycles of eternity.
