Summations Only

What you believe is simply what you've been taught since childhood. You've been a Unitarian (heretic) all your life, right? So you don't have to bother thinking about the Biblical basis for the Trinity, you "know" it's nonsense because that's what you've been taught.Trinitarian signing off, over and out.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

But it isn't a denial of Monotheism, it's just one of the ways you misunderstand the Trinity. God is ONE is affirmed in the formulation of the Trinity, ONE GOD only, just one, but Three Persons in that one God. This is determined by scriptural descriptions that make it clear that God is One but that the Three Persons are all independent and all have the attributes of God. It's not an invented idea, it's all based on scriptural descriptions that amount to revelations, that come from many different books of the Bible and is not the invention of a single person.[ABE: I like Jonathan Edwards' analogy to the sun: the burning sun is the Trinity as a whole, the orb itself represents God the Father, the light it emits represents the Son of God, the heat it emits represents the Holy Spirit. Three in One. Of course there's always St. Patrick's analogy of the three-leafed clover too. /ABE]Of course the Islamic view makes sense to you, the Trinity is counterintuitive and difficult to grasp. Islam denies the Deity of Christ and so does Unitarianism, nothing easier than that except that it contradicts scripture which clearly requires worship of Christ which would be idolatry if He weren't God Himself. But then you can deny that scripture is God's word and save yourself there. Why not admit that Unitarianism has no basis in anything at all then except the mental insufficiency of its founders, or that your own inability to grasp the Trinity is an insufficiency of your own?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Study the scriptural basis for it before you spout your ignorant nonsense.

Sigh, the usual bogus history there, dwise. There were some pagan ideas that got mixed into some of the early churches, yes, principally Gnosticism, but those were even identified in scripture as well as by early church fathers. There was nothing resembling a "committee" about the Council of Nicea, it was convened to resolve some issues, it heard arguments and it formulated official doctrine, which was already held by a majority of the churches anyway, though the Council refined it. The criteria for officializing doctrine was of course its authority from scripture, and you can see the Biblical sources for the Trinity at the link I provided. The ablest theologians made the case for the Trinity, from scripture and only scripture, and showed Arianism to be a heresy. Again, based on scripture. There is no other basis for doctrine than scripture.No, there was not yet a Roman Catholic Church by the time of Nicea; the papacy was not officially formed until 606, when Emperor Phocas bestowed primacy of spiritual authority on the Bishop of Rome, who before had been merely one among other bishops. There were already signs of apostasy in the Roman See and they only increased down the centuries after that. There were groups of Bible-based Christians outside the official church too, though, from very early on, groups that recognized the Antichrist in the papacy.I guess you are attracted to the anti-Christians and that's your choice, though of course a dangerous one. I started out my belief in things supernatural by reading Hinduism and Buddhism and a bunch of occultic stuff and continued reading until I was a Christian, took maybe two or three years, so your ponderings about Eastern religion don't hold any attraction for me. I understand scripture to be God-breathed and everything I have experienced since becoming a Christian only confirms it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I don't have the slightest clue what you are trying to say, GDR, sorry.

I couldn't have faith in anything I didn't regard as reasonable, logical, rational, understandable in at least its basics, and above all true.

Those who formulated the Trinity weren't looking for it, why should they? What would they get out of picking and choosing scriptures to come up with such a difficult doctrine as the Trinity? They observed it in scripture and arrived at the only reasonable concept of what they found there by studying the verses in relation to each other.

Apparently not to you if you reject the Bible verses it's based on. C'est la vie.

I have no idea what you find to be "tortured rationales" since the whole thing rests on actual descriptions from scripture. The concept itself IS difficult to grasp, don't know why you insist it isn't, especially since you've already made two of the most common mistakes with it that people make. It's hard to wrap one's mind around One God in Three Persons and that's why everybody has so much trouble with it. It takes a while to get it. Of course there's nothing I can say to someone who calls it all a book of myths when I know it's not. Some things can't be proved. Way it goes.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The verses are THERE, they hold together, here's no way any of that could have been made up. I read quite a bit of the apologetics of the early Church Fathers at one point, they're honest intelligent believers. But there's no point trying to persuade you, is there?

What?

What?

What?

There's no reason they would be looking for it. Even if they were looking for it, it would have to be there in order to find it, and it most definitely is there, but it's too ridiculous to think they were looking for it. They could just as easily all have become Arians if it wasn't in scripture.It is something they discovered from reading the scriptures deeply.Once they discovered it of course they wanted to teach it to others, it's a very important doctrine, and when a heresy arose that denied it, particularly denying the Deity of Christ, that made it all the more necessary to teach it to the Church.You are getting the order of things backwards.

I feel like pleading with you both to rethink what you are saying because it's scary you could think such a conspiracy could be the history of the Church, it's like seeing people turn reality inside out and backwards, and of course you think that's what I'm doing. This is really depressing.