CHRISTIAN TRINITY: Is Jesus Christ Truly The Almighty God?

PART SEVEN

The Development of the Trinity Doctrine

Please click on my signature to read the previous parts of these articles. The entire articles with the other to come are entirely written by me. I give any and everyone the express permission to copy all parts presented here. As usual, I would be most pleased if any Pastor can publicly refute what I have written.

Permit me to continue from part six.

The Trinity concept actually started almost three hundred years after Jesus Christ ascended into heaven and went through ‘development’ for almost another hundred years before it was made a decree that must be obeyed by all in 381 A.D with the threat of heresy hanging on anyone who opposes it. As at that time heresy is another word for death. Many do not know that hundreds of thousands of Christians were brutally killed for resisting the then growing pagan belief that Jesus Christ was the Almighty God himself.

Majority of the Bishops at the ‘Church Councils’ of 325 and 381 AD where this demonic doctrine was developed and implanted into the Christian faith really never believed in the Trinity. They had earlier condemned the developing doctrine in an earlier Council that was organized by the Christian Bishops themselves held in 268 AD.

I do not have the liberty of going into details about the great Christian conferences that were held on this matter. If you want to know more about it please Google it. It is sad that many Pastors who preach this demonic doctrine have never heard about the convening of the church councils where Jesus Christ was declared to be God by a pagan Emperor.

In the Church Council that was called by Emperor Constantine, a well known pagan, in 325 AD, held in his palace and greatly influenced by him, a man who knows absolutely nothing about the Bible, the existence or not of a Triune God was not a part of the agenda as at that time. The equality of Jesus Christ with his Father was the top issue to be discussed. No Bishop or pagan observer ever suggested, at that time and in that meeting, that God was a triune God. It was under ‘development’. The devil was taking his time to change the teachings of Almighty God, no need to rush.

It was at another conference held over fifty-five years later in the year 381 AD, that the developing Trinity Doctrine was discussed, accepted under the threat that anyone who rejects it will be regarded as an heretic and treated accordingly. With that threat all the opposition to the doctrine were suppressed and the doctrine made into a decree that is now called the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed.

Cairns, a believer in the doctrine, opined that at the Council where this doctrine was made law, the Bishops present gave extreme care to this issue:

“It was an era when the main dogmas of the Christian Church were developed… The dogmas or doctrines formulated in this period were the result of intense thought and searching of the soul [not searching of the scriptures] in order to interpret correctly the meaning of the Scriptures on the disputed points and to avoid the erroneous opinions of the philosophers”. (Emphasis mine).

What Cairns is essentially saying is that it took over four hundred years after the death of our Lord Jesus Christ for the belief that Jesus Christ was the Almighty God to be effectively and correctly interpreted ‘to avoid the erroneous opinions of the philosophers’.

Definitely, before the doctrine became worthy of discussion at any of the Councils, it was clear that it was not the major belief held by many. The ‘opinions of the Philosophers’ were the issues that really caused the arguments in the first place. Because the relatively very few Greek Philosophy inclined Bishops had much more influence on the Emperor who shares the same views with them, their opinions were accepted and the status quo changed.

Let’s reason it. The existing situation then was that most of the true Christians held on to the belief that Almighty God is absolutely one. Most Greek Philosophers do not believe in God but their understanding of the nature of God, if He truly does exists at all in their hearts, leans towards the belief in a triune ‘god’ that they have studied in their scholastic endeavors in Egyptian, Greek, Babylonian and Indian theology. In short, it was the erroneous opinions of the Philosophers that were accepted as true at the Councils headed principally by the pagan Emperor who himself believes in many gods.

The situation then could be likened to the situation now in which some Pastors in the United States openly conduct gay marriages. They use the scriptures to justify their actions thereby making the law of God of no relevance.

Demons have long permeated the Church. The Bible has been written and re-written so many times and with each re-writing, any part of scripture that does not support the trinity nonsense is altered to seem to support it. The real name of God has gradually disappeared from the modern day Bible, replaced by the word ‘Lord’ or ‘LORD’ , same names assigned to our Lord Jesus Christ. Our children do not now know the difference between the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and His Son, Jesus Christ.

All Christians have been warned in so many places in the scriptures that:

1 Timothy 4:1

“But the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons”.

This piece of scriptures clearly refers to the Trinity Doctrine. It is indeed a Doctrine of demons. No doubt about that.

Colossians 2:8

“See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ".

2 Peter 2:1-3

“But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves. Many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of the truth will be maligned; and in their greed they will exploit you with false words [‘Essence’, ‘Persons’, ‘Substance’, ‘Trinity’]; their judgment from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep”.

Acts 13:10

"You who are full of all deceit and fraud, you son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, will you not cease to make crooked the straight ways of the Lord?”

The devil is very cunning. Since to spite God is his major preoccupation, making Jesus Christ equal with Almighty God was his first mission towards enforcing this belief in a Triune God created by him and held sacred by pagans. His agents actually succeeded in planting that belief on the growing Christian farmland in the Church Council held in Nicaea in 325 AD. Today, that belief has grown into a weed that has suppressed the good crop of the true teachings of the Almighty God, leading mankind astray.

It is the duty of all Christians to uproot that weed from the farmyard of Almighty God.

It is really not strange to me that many believe in this doctrine. This is because there are many who do are not intellectually and spiritually prepared to know what the Bible really teaches. They rely on their Pastors to teach them all they know because they believe they lack the capacity, the natural intellectual curiosity, to find out why things are the way they are by themselves.

William G. Eliot, in Discourses on the Doctrines of Christianity (American Unitarian Association, Boston, 1877), pp. 97, 100, writes that:

"But how can such weak creatures ever take in so strange, so difficult and so abstruse a doctrine as this, in the explication and defense whereof multitudes of men, even men of learning and piety, have lost themselves in infinite subtleties of dispute and endless mazes of darkness? And can this strange and perplexing notion of three real persons going up to make one true God be so necessary and important a part of that Christian doctrine, which, in the Old Testament and the New, is represented as so plain and so easy, even to the meanest understandings”.

Those who do not have the time to study the Bible themselves must allow Biblical reasoning to take the place of inexplicable nonchalance in their hearts and learn from those who have studied the Bible with a view of finding out the truth about the Trinity. In this light, I have presented the views of some above and will present a few more below so that they may know the truth about what they believe. It is beyond me to make them accept it.

In Thomas Jefferson: Letter to James Smith, Dec. 8, 1822, we read:

"No historical fact is better established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity. Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the will of the Athanasians. The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands of martyrs”.

He continues:

“The Athanasian paradox, that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such person, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck”.

There are thousands of people who have studied the Bible critically and objectively to find out the truth about this Trinity nonsense. Below I present some of their findings.

The new International Dictionary of the New Testament Theology states:

“The New Testament does not contain the developed doctrine of the Trinity”.

In Origin and Evolution of Religion, Professor Washburn E. Hopkins believes that:

“To Jesus and Paul the Doctrine of Trinity was apparently unknown ...”.

In the Book, The Triune God, Edmund Fortman reported his findings that:

“The Old Testament … tells us nothing explicitly, or by necessary implication, of a triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit … there is no evidence that any sacred writer even suspected the existence of a Trinity within the Godhead … The New Testament writers … gives us no formal or formulated doctrine of the Trinity, no explicit teaching that in one God there are three co-equal divine persons… Nowhere do we find any Trinitarian doctrine of three distinct subjects of divine life and activity in the same Godhead”.

Arthur Weigall, a historian, notes, in the Book Paganism in our Christianity that:

“Jesus Christ never mentioned such a phenomenon and nowhere in the New Testament does the word Trinity appear. The idea was only adopted by the Church three hundred years after the death of our Lord”.

The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology, 1986, p. 84, Vol. 2, Zondervan, admits that:

"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… It also lacks such terms as `Trinity' ... and homoousios, which featured in the Creed of Nicaea (325) to denote that Christ was of the same substance as the Father… Primitive Christianity did not have an explicit doctrine of the Trinity such as was subsequently elaborated in the creeds [after 325 A. D.] of the early church".

Making its contribution to the knowledge of world and Biblical history, the New Encyclopedia Britannica states:

“Neither the word Trinity, nor the explicit doctrine as such, appears in the New Testament… nor did Jesus and his followers intend to contradict the Shema in the Old Testament, ‘Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, is one God… The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies”.

In The Church of the First Three Centuries, by Alvan Lamson, we read that:

"... the doctrine of the Trinity was of gradual and comparatively late formation; that it had its origin in a source entirely foreign from that of the Jewish and Christian scriptures; that it grew up, and was ingrafted on Christianity, through the hands of the Platonizing Fathers; that in the time of Justin [c. 100-165 A. D.], and long after, the distinct nature and inferiority of the Son [to the Father] were universally taught; and that only the first shadowy outline of the Trinity had then become visible".

In The History of Christianity, (Preface by Eckler), we read that:

"If Paganism was conquered by Christianity, it is equally true that Christianity was corrupted by paganism. The pure Deism of the first Christians (who differed from their fellow Jews only in the belief that Jesus was the promised Messiah) was changed by the Church at Rome, into the incomprehensible dogma of the Trinity. Many of the pagan tenets, invented by the Egyptians and idealized by Plato, were retained as being worthy of belief".

Tom Harpur, in his Book, For Christ’s Sake, states:

"As early as the 8th century, the Theologian St. John of Damascus frankly admitted what every modern critical scholar of the NT now realizes: that neither the Doctrine of the Trinity nor that of the two natures of Jesus Christ is explicitly set out in scripture. In fact, if you take the record as it is and avoid reading back into it the dogmatic definitions of a later age, you cannot find what is traditionally regarded as orthodox Christianity in the Bible at all"

Many agree that the key words used in formulating the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed are foreign to the Bible and were words already in use by the pagan Philosophers in several of their teachings.

John L. McKenzie, S.J. Dictionary of the Bible p. 899 opines that:

"The [Trinity] belief as so defined was reached only in the 4th and 5th centuries AD and hence is not explicitly and formally a Biblical belief. The Trinity of persons within the unity of nature is defined in terms of "person" and "nature: which are Gk philosophical terms; actually the terms do not appear in the Bible. The Trinitarian definitions arose as the result of long controversies in which these terms and others such as "essence" and "substance" were erroneously applied to God by some theologians”.

Perhaps no single organization on planet earth has done a lot of research on the Trinity like the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society that succinctly summarizes one of their research findings as follows:

“If God is a coeternal, coequal, one substance, three-in-one Godhead, Trinity, if that is what God really is, then he would have made himself known as such to the first century apostles; they would have made the Trinity part of their beliefs, teachings and writings. They would have used words like God the Son, coequal, coeternal, one substance, or Trinity, but the scripture is devoid of all of these trinitarian words and phrases because the first century apostles did not believe or teach, or write about God being a Trinity, or Jesus Christ being God. But the pagan and Greek and Babylonian religions used those words”.

They continue with their findings:

“The early Christians began mixing Greek and pagan and Babylonian philosophical and religious trinitarian concepts with their Christian doctrine which lead them to begin considering the Trinity, and after three centuries that thinking finally took hold. Acts 17:22 says that the Greeks were too superstitious, and I Corinthians 1:22 says that the Jews require a sign and the Greeks seek after wisdom. The Greeks were too intellectual in their approach to God’s Word. They became wise in their own eyes and the truth of God's Word became foolishness to them, so they grafted their own superstitious philosophical wisdom into God's Word and changed the truth into a lie; they changed the Son of God to God the Son”.

Just like the Catholic Church mocked the Protestant Churches for adopting Sunday as a day of worship, they have also mocked them for accepting the Doctrine of Trinity hook, line and sinker. Assumption of Mary, Life magazine, October 30, 1950, p. 51 carries this saying:

“Our opponents sometimes claim that no belief should be held dogmatically which is not explicitly stated in scripture ...But the Protestant Churches have themselves accepted such dogmas, as the Trinity, for which there is no such precise authority in the Gospels”.

Having quoted some of the discoveries of organizations and historical figures who have studied the Bible hard enough to give their opinions about the Trinity, I must now discuss some of the most important verses from the scriptures that those who believe in the Doctrine of Trinity use to support it.
Watch out for part eight.