Questions on the Trinity

Shad,
this is from the forum Public Square : http://www.thebereans.net/forum2/showthread.php?t=50062

here is our discussion:

Daniel Marsh:

I have heard that there is a slight difference in understanding of the Trinity by EO. What is that difference and where does EO doctrine agree with Catholic doctrine on the Trinity. ---

Ben Marcing :

They both confess that God exists in three Persons but one being.

The difference is in the introduction of filioque in the Latin confession of the Nicene Creed. Although filioque was inserted in order to assert consubstantiality of the Father and the Son against Arian heresy, it is also a deviation from the Ecumenical Confession.

From Spain, ‘filioque’ spread to the Franks (present-day France). It was embraced by Charlemagne who went so far as to accuse the East of having deliberately omitted it from the ancient Creed. Pope Leo III (795-816) intervened, and forbade any interpolations or alterations in the Nicene Creed. He ordered the Creed, without filioque, to be engraved in Latin and Greek on two silver plates on the wall of St. Peter’s in Rome. Nevertheless, the addition was maintained by the Franks.
http://aggreen.net/filioque/filioque.html

Ben Marcing:

The Latins approached their theology first by considering that God is one. The "one" refers of course to the essence or nature of God.

This approach was acknowledged as owing from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. For them, "God" is denoted to the Trinity, not the Father. And as you can see, this safely guards the unity of God at once. While Roman Catholics will say that it also protects the equality of Persons, filioque undermines this claim.

The Greeks emphasis, contrary to the Latins, is on the three DISTINCT persons: the Father as the source and the origin, for whom "God" belongs, the Son as the only begotten of God is therefore "God" by virtue of the Father's own deity, and the Holy Spirit who proceeded from the Father alone (contrary to the assertion of the Western confession).

The Monarchical perspective of the Greeks may be viewed as subordination of the Son and the Holy Spirit, but this charge is without substance because of the indivisible relationship of the Son and the Spirit to the God the Father. For the Greeks God the Father is the locus of all things divine. What is true of him will be true to the others. It is also the "indivisibility" of their relationship of the divine persons that made tritheism impossible.

In Augustine, the Holy Spirit was a "result" of the communion of the Father and Son, and thus he is said as proceeding from the Father and the Son. This will later culminate in the filioque clause of the Latin Confession.

To the Greeks filioque undermines the equality of the Trinity and degraded the dignity of the Holy Spirit to that of the Father and the Son.

The teaching of the one true Catholic Church is that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, but as from one principle, not a double procession.

Catechism

246 The Latin tradition of the Creed confesses that the Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque)”. the Council of Florence in 1438 explains: “The Holy Spirit is eternally from Father and Son; He has his nature and subsistence at once (simul) from the Father and the Son. He proceeds eternally from both as from one principle and through one spiration... And, since the Father has through generation given to the only-begotten Son everything that belongs to the Father, except being Father, the Son has also eternally from the Father, from whom he is eternally born, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Son.” [75]

247 The affirmation of the filioque does not appear in the Creed confessed in 381 at Constantinople. But Pope St. Leo I, following an ancient Latin and Alexandrian tradition, had already confessed it dogmatically in 447, [76] even before Rome, in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, came to recognize and receive the Symbol of 381. the use of this formula in the Creed was gradually admitted into the Latin liturgy (between the eighth and eleventh centuries). the introduction of the filioque into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed by the Latin liturgy constitutes moreover, even today, a point of disagreement with the Orthodox Churches.

248 At the outset the Eastern tradition expresses the Father's character as first origin of the Spirit. By confessing the Spirit as he “who proceeds from the Father”, it affirms that he comes from the Father through the Son. [77] The Western tradition expresses first the consubstantial communion between Father and Son, by saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). It says this, “legitimately and with good reason”, [78] for the eternal order of the divine persons in their consubstantial communion implies that the Father, as “the principle without principle”, [79] is the first origin of the Spirit, but also that as Father of the only Son, he is, with the Son, the single principle from which the Holy Spirit proceeds. [80] This legitimate complementarity, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the identity of faith in the reality of the same mystery confessed.

I have followed the flow of your discussion on that site. The Eastern Orthodox are in a state of heresy and schism.