Friday Night Philosophy – POC: Tom

Nature

Nature Is what a thing is.

Described by essential characteristics

Person

Person is who the thing is

Persons act in and through their nature

Persons have agency – intellect & will

Persons is different from personal nature

Three types of personal nature

Human – intellect/will/fleshy

Angelic – Persons – Agents; can choose

Divine – Divine essence/substance. Has intellect/will. Non material. Never created and unchanging. Acts in accord with their nature

3^rd Friday Night (1/30/2026)

Holy Trinity

Nature of God – Pure spirit, non-created, limitless, outside of time, unchanging

Omnipresence – Knows everything including things that could be that won't be (doesn’t happen). Even though I have free will, God knows everything about me. It is present to him in one moment, sees all that I do and what I could have done at each second of my day.

If God knows a soul will end up in hell, why would he create it? The mistake is the assumption that knowing the outcome causes the outcome. God knows the outcome but that does not impede, define, obstruct or even bolster our exercise of free will.

Trinity

Bulk of what we should know – The ability to describe the trinity and the existence of 3 persons totally possessing the divine nature in relationship to the operations of knowing and loving.

The Greeks recognized that God was one God and was a personal God (intellect and will). Strict philosophy – We can say if we look at what it is to be human, and we recognize that we can reason and to abstract and will (to make choices) and we understand through reason by looking at creation that there is one God, we could reason without divine revelation at least that the God that exists since he is going to be the source of everything, he will have the perfection of whatever else that exists. Sometimes our intellect is misguided or wrong assumptions or will is not strong, but because I have it (intellect and will), we must have gotten will and intellect from a source who has it in its totality, in its perfection. An unmoved mover, some creator out there that has the perfection that everything come forth that we share in and possess to a degree but not the highest degree possible......I got an intellect, you got an intellect will,

What does a will do: To choose

What does an intellect do: To think/reason

God’s choice to love is love itself and his will is his love. Operation of thinking and operation of willing....operation of reasoning operation of loving.

The relationship is there because they are literally in relationship one to the other. There is distinction but no separation between each. Each is God and each totally possess the divine nature

God the father – non-created, will always have the perfect thought of himself. The perfect thought, because it is perfect, has everything that the father has....which means that it is God.

Holy Spirit – The father looking at the son, who is distinct from him, is loving the son (operation of the will). From that gift of love from the father to sone and the son receiving the gift and giving it back is the perfect expression of love, spirates the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the perfect expression of the love of God, the perfect expression of the operation of Love.

Two processions in the Trinity:

1) Generation: Jesus calls himself the son and refers to the first person of the trinity as the father and that has connotations of the human family. The human father generates a son, the nature that he has he communicates to his offspring. Human nature will beget human nature (A human will not beget a pig).

2) Spiration: To make a distinction that the son is not the spirit, the son has been generated by the operation of thought and the spirit spirating from the love (the perfect operation of the 2^nd operation.) This perfect spiration, perfect expression is also God, but not the father nor the son.

AVOID: Do not say the son is the divine intellect and the holy spirit is the divine will.

Scripture Passages: All over the bible

Jesus speaks of himself as being sent. The Father is not mentioned as being sent. The holy spirit being sent by Christ and the Father. Shows distinction between the 3.

Go out to all nations to