“Indeed throughout the New Testament while there is belief in God the Father, in Jesus the Son and in God’s Holy Spirit, there is no doctrine of one God in three persons (modes of being), no doctrine of a ‘triune God’, a ‘Trinity’.”
- Hans Küng - Christianity, p.95
(Wiki - [Kung] "served as a theological adviser during the Second Vatican Council"
This is what God the Father reveals about Christ...
"Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God" - Matt 16:15-17
This is what flesh and blood reveals about Christ....
"If the eternal person who is the Son took to himself a perfect and complete human nature, what is the status of that human nature? Normally, any instance of human nature that we come into contact with is also a human person. Is the human nature of Christ, therefore, also a human person? The christology we are considering gives a twofold answer. On the one hand, the human nature of Jesus Christ is in fact a nature joined to a person, and it is therefore personal. To use the Greek term, it is en-hypostatic. But the person who personalizes the human nature of Christ is not a created human person (like all the other persons personalizing the other human natures we encounter); rather it —that is, he— is the eternal second person of the Trinity. So the human nature of Christ is personal, but with a personhood from above. Considered in itself, on the other hand, and abstracted from its personalizing by the eternal person of the Son, the human nature of Jesus Christ is simply human nature, and is not personal. The human nature of Christ, therefore, is an-hypostatic (not personal in itself) and en-hypostatic (personalized by union with the eternal person of the Son)."
- Fred Sanders "The Second Person, in Person" 2007
Is this the kind of revelation that will give the simplistic understanding of God and Christ that can bring even a child to the faith? About as clear as mud right?
"For flesh and blood (Man) has NOT revealed it to you, but my Father in heaven" - Jesus
“Constantine probably didn’t care whether Jesus was God. He did, however, care about a
united Empire.” (Timothy Paul Jones, Christian History Made Easy, p.39).
J.N.D. Kelly: “Whatever the theology of the council was, Constantine’s own overriding motive was to secure the widest possible measure of agreement. For this reason he was not prepared to bar the door to anyone who was willing to append his signature to the creed. There is thus a sense in which it is unrealistic to speak of the theology of the council.” (Early Christian Doctrines, p.237)
“In the final irony, the emperor’s deathbed baptism would be performed by an Arian, the same Eusebius of Nicomedia whose interests Constantine had protected in 325” (Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine, p.130). Constantine was baptized on Easter 337 by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, and died on May 22, the day of Pentecost, while preparing a campaign against Persia (Eusebius: Life of Constantine, p.49)
“it is no longer possible to defend the divinity of Jesus by reference to the claims of Jesus”
- Brian Hebblethwaite, The Incarnation: Collected Essays in Christology (Cambridge: University, 1987), 74
“And this,” Jesus adds, “is eternal life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent.” The proper order of the words is, “That they may know Thee and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent, as the only true God.” Consequently, therefore, the Holy Spirit is also understood, because He is the Spirit of the Father and Son, as the substantial and consubstantial love of both. For the Father and Son are not two Gods, nor are the Father and Son and Holy Spirit three Gods; but the Trinity itself is the one only true God.
- Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 1, vol.7, St. Augustine: Lectures or Tractates on the Gospel According to St. John, tractate CV, chapter XVII.1-5, paragraph 3, translated into English by Rev. John Gibb, D.D.
"The term “Trinity” is not a Biblical term, and we are not using Biblical language when we define what is expressed by it as the doctrine that there is one only and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three coeternal and coequal Persons, the same in substance but distinct in subsistence. A doctrine so defined can be spoken of as a Biblical doctrine only on the principle that the sense of Scripture is Scripture. And the definition of a Biblical doctrine in such un-Biblical language can be justified only on the principle that it is better to preserve the truth of Scripture than the words of Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity lies in Scripture in solution; when it is crystallized from its solvent it does not cease to be Scriptural, but only comes into clearer view. Or, to speak without figure, the doctrine of the Trinity is given to us in Scripture, not in formulated definition, but in fragmentary allusions."
- “Trinity” in ISBE (vol.5, pp.3012f) by B.B. Warfield
"Christian theology does not believe God to be a person. It believes Him to be such that in Him a trinity of persons is consistent with a unity of Deity. In that sense it believes Him to be something very different from a person."
- (C.S. Lewis - Christian Reflections, p.79)
“Our adversaries … are fanatics about words because they want us to demonstrate the truth of the trinitarian article … by asking us to assent to the term homoousios”. The Cambridge Companion goes on to say that “trinitarian terms such as homoousios are for Luther a ‘stammering’ and ‘babbling’”.
- The Cambridge Companion to the Trinity (p.151) quotes Luther
[Luther] declared such a term as homoousios to be unallowable in the strict sense, because it represents a bad state of things when such words are invented in the Christian system of faith: “… but if my soul hates the word homoousios and I prefer not to use it, I shall not be a heretic; for who will compel me to use it … Although the Arians had wrong views with regard to the faith, they were nevertheless very right in this …that they required that no profane and novel word should be allowed to be introduced into the rules of faith.”
- (History of Dogma, vol.7, ch.4, p.225)
"… while [in the New Testament] there is belief in God the Father, in Jesus the Son, and in God’s Holy Spirit, there is no doctrine of one God in three persons (modes of being), no doctrine of a ‘triune God’, a ‘Trinity’.… according to the New Testament, the principle of unity is clearly not the one divine ‘nature’ (physis) that is common to several entities, as people were to think after the neo-Nicene theology of the fourth century. For the New Testament, as for the Hebrew Bible, the principle of unity is clearly the one God (ho theos: the God = the Father), from whom are all things and to whom are all things. … where does this doctrine of the Trinity really come from? The answer is that it was a product of the great paradigm shift from the early Christian apocalyptic paradigm to the early church Hellenistic paradigm."
- Hans Küng, one of the greatest Catholic theologians of the 20th century, in the section titled, “No doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament,” in his classic work, Christianity: Essence, History, and Future (page 95)
"[The Trinity] is not clearly or explicitly taught anywhere in Scripture, yet it is widely regarded as a central doctrine, indispensable to the Christian faith. In this regard, it goes contrary to what is virtually an axiom of biblical doctrine, namely, that there is a direct correlation between the scriptural clarity of a doctrine and its cruciality to the faith and life of the church."
- Millard Erickson, a prominent specialist on trinitarian doctrine and the author of Christian Theology (God in Three Persons: A Contemporary Interpretation of the Trinity, p.11)
"When speaking of the Trinity, we need to realize that we are talking about one what and three who’s. The one what is the Being or essence of God; the three who’s are the Father, Son, and Spirit."
- James R. White, The Forgotten Trinity, p.26
“The Bible lacks the express declaration that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are of equal essence and therefore in an equal sense God himself. And the other express declaration is also lacking, that God is God thus and only thus, i.e., as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These two express declarations, which go beyond the witness of the Bible, are the twofold content of the Church doctrine of the Trinity”
- (Karl Barth, CD, I, 1, 437)
"But many doctrines are accepted by evangelicals as being clearly taught in the Scripture for which there are no proof texts. The doctrine of the Trinity furnishes the best example of this. It is fair to say that the Bible does not clearly teach the doctrine of the Trinity. In fact, there is not even one proof text, if by proof text we mean a verse or passage that ‘clearly’ states that there is one God who exists in three persons … The above illustrations prove the fallacy of concluding that if something is not proof texted in the Bible we cannot clearly teach the results … If that were so, I could never teach the doctrine of the Trinity or the deity of Christ or the deity of the Holy Spirit."
- Charles C. Ryrie, author of Ryrie Study Bible, and longtime professor of systematic theology at Dallas Theological Seminary (Basic Theology, pp. 89-90)
"God is what happens between Jesus and his Father in their spirit…This makes God an event, not a being." - Ted Peters, "God Happens: The Timeliness of the Triune God," The Christian Century, April 1, 1998, p. 342.
"The simple indeed, I will call them unwise and unlearned—who always constitute the majority of believers, are startled at the dispensation of the three in one." - Tertullian, Wolfson, op. cit., Philosophy of the Church Fathers, p. 105
"Whatever else may be said about the doctrine of the Trinity, it is safe to say that in the history of Christian doctrine there has been no single, universally accepted articulation of the specific way in which it is to be understood. Every attempt to articulate the doctrine in detail has had its detractors and has been viewed as erring in one direction or the other. Articulations stressing the unity of God to the relative de-emphasis of divine threeness have most often been labelled modalist or Sabellian: whereas, those stressing the threefold existence of deity to the relative neglect of divine unity have been castigated as tri-theistic or polytheistic. It has seemed next to impossible to achieve a balanced presentation of the triune nature of God that is both relatively detailed and also acceptable to most sincere Christians with theological sensitivity." - Morris, op., cit., Logic of God Incarnate, pp. 207 and 208.
“The divine and human natures exist in a single being, although how that can be is the greatest mystery of the faith. - ”Justo Gonzalez, A History of Christian Thought (Abingdon Press, Nashville, 1992), pp. 222 and 223.
".contemporary exegetes [ Bible teachers] affirm unanimously that the Old Testament did not bring to the Jewish people a clear and distinct Revelation of the existence of a plurality of persons in God. In this they agree wvith the clear and frequent affrmation of Fathers such as Irenaeus, Hilary, and Gregory of Nazianzus: that the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed only in the New Testament." - Distinguised trinitarian scholar Bertrand de Margerie, The christian Trinity in History, Translated by Edmund J. Fortman. p. 3.
PHILO ON THE LOGOS
God governs the universe and sustains it via his "right reason [logos], his first-born son..as the lieutenant of the great king" (On Husbandry 51)
"The most universal of all things is God; and in the second place the word [logos] of God" (Allegory 2.86)
[The Logos] "is the most ancient, and the most universal of all the things that are created" (Allegory 3.175)
The Logos was God's organ (body part) to create and rule the universe (Migration 1.6)
Puzzling over why those guilty of manslaughter would go free from cities of refuge when the high priest dies, Philo applies allegory to escape he difficulty. He writes: "This difficult and scarcely explicable perplexity we may escape if we adopt the inner and allegorical explanation in accordance with natural philosophy. For we say that the high priest is not a man, but is the word [logos] of God, who has not only no participation in intentional errors, but none even in those which are involuntary. For Moses says that he cannot be defiled neither in respect of his father, that is, the mind , nor his mother, that is, the external sense; because, I imagine, he has received imperishable and wholly pure parents, God being his father, who is also the father of all things, and wisdom [Sophia] being his mother, by means of whom the universe arrived at creation.." (On Flight and Finding 1.108-109)
" If we understand what prayer is, it will appear that it is never to be offered to any originated being, not to Christ himself, but only to the God and Father of all ; to whom our Saviour himself prayed, and taught us to pray. For when his disciples asked him , Teach us to pray, he did not teach them to pray to himself, but to the Father." Origen, De Oratione, cc. 25 , 26. Opp . I. pp. 222–224.
The Concessions of Trinitarians
The article on the “Trinity” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible: “Likewise, the developed concept of three coequal partners in the Godhead found in later creedal formulations cannot be clearly detected within the confines of the canon.”
The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, vol. 2, ed. Colin Brown 1976, p. 84: “Primitive Christianity did not have an explicit doctrine of the Trinity such as was subsequently elaborated in the creeds.”
Dr. Murray Harris, Jesus as God, p 47: "It would be inappropriate for Elohim or YHVH ever to refer to the Trinity in the OT, when in the NT theos [God] regularly refers to the Father alone and apparently never to the Trinity.”
The Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, p. 461: “At first the Christian faith was not Trinitarian…It was not so in the apostolic and sub-apostolic ages, as reflected in the New Testament and other early Christian writings.”