I am very sorry to hear you rely on Wikipedia for either your theology or your history. There is a better source. It’s called the Bible. Nicea was the culmination of a long debate. The Gnostics had begun, within the lifetime of the apostle John, to attempt to discredit the early church belief in Jesus as God, because they wanted to sell their “secret knowledge” that could put you in an altered state of consciousness where you could rise above moral limitations and become one with the divine.
This pitch worked well enough with the pagans, but Christians were a problem. You only had to openly believe in Jesus, and repent of your sin, and God would accept you. That’s it. No eternal quest to reach God. He had already come to us in Jesus. No secrets to sell. Jesus revealed everything we really need to know. No altered states of consciousness to achieve. God had freely given us his Holy Spirit.
And no complicated man-made rules to artificially come between you and the enjoyment of life. Because you see, for the Gnostic, the material world was such an evil place, you had to avoid clouding your mind with sensory experiences and mortal passions. But those Christians, simpletons that they were, thought they could get around all that by just putting their faith in Christ.
So as it happened, the Gnostics did try, for centuries, to corrupt the church, in several ways, but mainly by attacking the deity of Christ, which, BTW, was believed by the apostles, especially after the resurrection. Even the doubter Thomas, when confronted with the living Christ, addressed him personally as “my Lord and my God.” And the Greek makes it clear he was speaking of Jesus when he said this. Don’t let anyone kid you about translation issues. That is the meaning.
Nevertheless, the battle raged on, and by the third century, it began to look as if the original belief in Jesus being God in the flesh might lose out to the Gnostic perversion. But God raised up men, and one man in particular, Athanatius, who would argue relentlessly from the Scriptures for the old belief, the first belief, that Jesus was in fact God. And God was pleased to use him and others to secure the truth about Jesus, so that it could be passed on to later generations who would be faithful to God’s written word.
Now I understand that it seems confused to you, that the trinity challenges your sense of logic. It challenges anyone who thinks about it honestly. That does not make it untrue. Quite the opposite. If God was just as we imagined him to be, we might rightly be worried he was just the product of our imagination. The truth about God really should be, at least in some respects, unexpected. Even more importantly, it should be based on what he has told us of himself, in his own words, and the words he inspired his unique messengers the apostles to write. And all those words point to Jesus being both with God from uncreated eternity past, but also being God Himself, “and the word was God.” Not a mistranslation.
Does it seem foolish? It should, at least for some. Paul said it would. For the gospel he says is foolishness to those who are lost. But for those who believe, it is the power of God unto salvation. The unconverted mind cannot grasp it, and hates it, and seeks to create its own path to redemption. The childlike faith of which Christ spoke was faith, not in some convoluted retread gnostic controlled mental shutdown, but faith simply in Jesus, to save us from our sins by his death and resurrection. God has hidden this simplicity from the wise and revealed it to mere children. He teaches it to the world even now through the foolishness of preaching. Can you hear it yet?
Peace,
SR
Aye!
Now THERE's the rub!
Very well stated! I heard it said that man could not have written the Bible even if he wanted to and wouldn't have even if he could. The truth you stated so well is that God is unfathomable to mortal and finite man. That God has revealed himself to us in the ways he has is testament to the veracity of the revelation. God bless you!