Posted on 08/30/2015 10:04:00 AM PDT by CHRISTIAN DIARIST
“Who do men say I am?” Jesus posed the question to his disciples as they went out to the towns of Caesarea Philippi. John the Baptist, Elijah or other of the prophets, they answered.
“But who do you say that I am?” Jesus asked them. And while 11 of the 12 disciples were uncertain, Peter responded, “You are the Christ.”
This account, taken from the Gospel According to Mark, appears in slightly different form in Matthew and Luke, the other two synoptic gospels. What is noteworthy is that in none of the accounts does Jesus say He is other than the Son of God.
He does not say He is, at once, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
It is because of that ambiguity that in 325 AD the Roman emperor Constantine the Great – who reputedly converted to Christianity 13 years earlier – summoned some 300 bishops of the post-Apostolic church – including Philocalus of Caesarea Philippi – to the lakeside city of Nicaea to decide who the church believed Jesus to be.
And 1,690 years ago this past week, the so-called First Council of Nicaea concluded two months of ecumenical debate with the decision that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one and the same.
That bestowed the church’s official imprimatur upon the disputed doctrine of trinitarianism, leaving a mark on Christendom that endures to this very day.
Indeed, those who refused to accept the conclusions at Nicaea were condemned as heretics – like Arius, the Alexandrian presbyter who accepted the divinity of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but who challenged the idea of a triune “godhead” made up of three coequal, coeternal supreme beings.
Arius believed God the Alpha and the Omega; the beginning and the ending; the One Who was, Who is, and is to come; the Almighty.
He believed Jesus to be, “the first born of all creation,” the “only begotten Son of God.” He held that Jesus and God were of like essence, but not the same essence. He also taught that Jesus was perfect and unchanging; that He was in all things subject and obedient to the Father; that He was sent to earth to take away the sin of the world.
As to the Holy Spirit, Arius did not think it an actual being, but the illuminating and sanctifying power of God, which was indeed divine, but unequal to either the Father or the Son.
In today’s Christian church, be it Roman Catholic or Protestant, those who bend towards the Arian view, who question the “mystery” of the Trinity – that “the Lord is one,” yet He manifests Himself as three distinct beings – are perceived as having theological views that border on the blasphemous.
But the Trinitarian doctrine is extremely problematic. It requires those who read the Word of God to convince themselves that it doesn’t really mean what it plainly says with respect to the relationship between God and the Son of God.
Indeed, if Jesus is God, and God Jesus, as most Christian churches espouse today, why did Jesus say, in the Gospel According to John, “I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I.”?
Why did Jesus advise his disciples, in the Gospel According to Mark, all would one day see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory, but that of that day and hour no one knows, “not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the father.”
Then there’s the passion of Christ, from the Garden of Gethsemane to the cross at Golgotha.
As the Lord prayed in the garden, He cried out, according to Mark’s gospel, “Abba, Father, all things are possible for You. Take this cup away from Me; nevertheless, not what I will, but what You will.”
Then on the cross, the Gospel of Matthew tells us that, about the ninth hour Jesus cried out, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” that is, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”
If Jesus and God were one and the same being, then the Lord need not have asked the Father to spare Him the ordeal that awaited. He could have decided so Himself. And he needn’t have asked God why He had forsaken Him. Because He would have been asking Himself why He had forsaken Himself.
Because the Trinitarian doctrine has been accepted wisdom in Christendom since the First Council of Nicaea nearly 1,700 years ago, we accept it today as gospel truth. But it is abundantly clear, not from church traditions, but from the words of Christ Himself, that the doctrine is wrong.
It does not require acceptance of the Nicaean Creed.
Are their others beside Pentecostals who don’t accept the trinity?
Unitarian
The Holy Spirit is of God Himself, Holy, The Power - poured out like oil or water, descending as a dove or resting atop those imbued with it’s power an appearing like divided tongues of flame.
I do not hold to the doctrine that teaches it is a separate entity or person.
If so, the New Testament letters always greets the congregations and the recipient in the Name of God the Father and Jesus Christ - never a mention of a separate person in the Holy Spirit.
I think the English translations from the Greek to give The Power a gender assignment also has contributed to the Nicaean doctrine being accepted as holy writ.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS, the Mormons) believe that they are three distinct personages, acting in accord towards a common goal.
Consider the story of Jesus being baptized by John the Baptist, as Jesus emerges from the waters, a Dove depends from Heaven and a voice calls out "Behold, this is my Son, in whom I am well pleased". The Dove representing the Holy Ghost, the voice being that of God. It wasn't just Jesus saying "Yay Me".
Thanks
I know better than to jump in here. But that Nicean conference has one element that has always bothered me, Constantine.
The emperor of Rome calls church leaders somewhere to settle differences.
Rome and America have more parallels than most people want to admit. Imagine any president calling together all the prominent Christian leaders and making them hammer out a consensus.
And imagine this preside can have you executed at will.
Do you think Greek is a language with genders?
My apologies, I meant “without genders?”
NO
>> Are their others beside Pentecostals who don’t accept the trinity? <<
Jehovah’s Witnesses?
Christian Scientists?
Certain Quakers?
Swedenborgians?
Are you suggesting they caught the last train for the coast?
Would it make you feel any better to know that the council’s decision went against Constantine’s favored position? Constantine favored Arianism, a school of thought that regarded Jesus as merely the greatest of God’s creations and not divine.
The problem with this piece is it fails to deal with all the contradictions and difficulties that come from a non-Trinitarian views of God. The councils (plural, Nicea wasn’t the only one to handle these questions) looked at all the variations of understanding the human and divine nature of Jesus and the relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit and finally settled on the orthodox Trinitarian, homeostatic understanding of God and Jesus that all but those on the fringes of Christianity hold today.
Could the Doctrine of the Trinity Be Wrong?
Gen 19:24 Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven;
The old testament does not have trinity doctrine but it used God form singular article plural noun Elohim. As this text identifies God on Earth and God in heaven in instance the God head being called Yaweh. John 1 does explain the mystery of the God head in a way mortal men can understand.
There’s no argument there. He quotes Jesus acknowledging that He is a separate person from the Father, but that’s the entire point of the Trinity. How then is the Trinity debunked? That Jesus is God is fully established in scripture, so if Jesus is God and also a separate person, then what option is there other than the Trinity?
http://christianthinktank.com/cw4hx.html#iam
I suppose you could argue that the Holy Spirit is a manifestation of Christ or the Father and maybe argue your way down to two distinct persons, and some may argue that Jesus wasn’t a distinct person until God “split” Himself at the incarnation but the Bible doesn’t speak to that. All we know is that now, post-incarnation there are at least two and probably three persons in God.
The Trinity is pretty clearly strewn throughout the Bible.
Of course it's incorrect, look around, there's no such thing as a Father and a Son without a Mother. Every particle in the universe is positive or negative male or female.
Just read... a little enhancement is in order.
Genesis 1, 26 And ELoHIM said, Let us make ADaM in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. 27 And ELoHIM created ADaM in his own image, in the image of ELoHIM created he him; male and female created he them.
And ELoHIM said, Let us make ADaM in our image... in the image of ELoHIM created he him; male and female created he them.
Ergo, ELoHIM is male and female.
Note: The soul of ADaM was created in chapter one, the physical form of ADaM was formed in chapter 2.
God has all characteristics both male and female yes, but you error if you think that means that there is a separate female entity within God. That’s reading far more into the text than is really there.
Note: Chapter 1 and 2 of Genesis don’t record chronologically sequential events, they describe the same event first in overview and then the important part (Adam’s creation) specifically. It’s a common Hebrew literary device.
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