Hey PnP,
I appreciate your passion. I’m grateful for all Sacred Writ however it comes, and for all the sacrifices made to preserve it. I do believe that the faith taught by Jesus and the Apostles was unfortunately modified after the passing of the Apostles. The doctrine of the Trinity is a fine example.
…(snipped for brevity)
Hey Gazelam,
I’m curious, have you read all of those sources? It seems as if they all come from this page on FAIR:
en.fairmormon.org/Mormonism_and_the_nature_of_God/Trinity/Nicene_creed
(some of the quotes also appear on various anti-Trinitarian, Muslim, etc websites as well, and seem to be quoted repeatedly in different LDS, Muslim, Unitarian, etc websites, interestingly enough).
I ask because providing those quotes without surrounding context, nor appreciating the theological thinking behind them makes them seem to say what the actual authors probably don’t mean, and what you and others would like them to be saying. I doubt that a Catholic author, let alone a Catholic Encyclopedia, would claim that the Trinity doctrine is not found in the New Testament.
So what are they actually saying? Well, I think that if we substituted “LDS Godhead” for “Trinity”, it would be the same point: The Bible is not a Catechism. It doesn’t spell out doctrinal matters. You simply won’t find a verse that says “The Trinity is composed of three distinct Persons that are of the same Divine essence”. Further, you simply won’t find a verse that says “The Godhead is composed of three separate Beings that are one in purpose” or “The Father has a body of flesh and bones” or “The Father is eternally married to Heavenly Mother”. The fact is that the Bible does not have an explicit Trinity doctrine, nor does it have an explicit LDS Godhead doctrine.
A Trinitarian would also say that the Bible does contain the Trinity implicitly. The Bible teaches one God, and also that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are each God, and they are not each other. Further, when we read the writings of the earliest Christians, outside of the Bible, we see the essentials of the Trinity doctrine. However the “
formal doctrine” of the Trinity, what those quotes are talking about, did not come until later, when the Church was faced with various heresies, such as Arianism. Catholics and Orthodox believe that the Church was guided by the Holy Spirit, and had the authority, by virtue of it holding the keys and the power of binding and loosing, to come to a more fuller understanding of the Trinity, and the Bishops, having apostolic authority as successors of the original apostles, in council together, were able to explicitly and formally define the Trinity.
So, I hope you can see that the quotes that you provided really don’t support an LDS or non-Trinitarian view at all, when understood within the believing-Trinitarian context that they come out from (and it definitely would be interesting to see the surrounding context that they were pulled from). They are not saying that the Trinity was invented centuries after Christ. They are not saying that the Trinity is the opposite of what was originally believed. What they are saying, and what all Catholics are aware of, is that the Bible, sacred history, is not a Catechism, and does not explicitly lay out doctrines in most cases. A formal, explicit doctrine on the nature of God came later (when it was really necessary, when combating heretical teachings that challenged what was always believed), and Catholics believe that that process was inspired by the Spirit, which guides the Church always, and that the Church holds the keys, the authority, to do so. Catholics are not Bible-alone, and believe that God guides His Church, and guides the Bishops, as successors of the Apostles, when formally defining doctrines in council. Catholics accept that through the Spirit, as time passes, we come to fuller understandings on the doctrines of God, as we unpack the vast mysteries that He has revealed.
