only thing is, I’ve heard about those in the Catholic church coming together and deciding on this all (I forget the name of their meeting or where it was published, sorry to be so vague but i’m sure you know what i’m talking about), so I thought, if they understood it enough to be able to decide on it, surely I should be able to understand it as well? At least close to the point they were able to? I doubt anyone can understand it fully, but i’d like to be able to understand it enough to comprehend it a bit better without getting so confused.
It sounds like you’re thinking of the Ecumenical Councils of the Church that defined these doctrines.
The first one was the Council of Nicaea that was held in 325 and it wanted to define whether or not Christ was Divine or not. From the beginning, the Church had thought that Jesus was God (it’s most clearly laid out in the beginning of the Gospel of Saint John: “In the beginning, the Word was with God and the Word was God.” But the Church never formally defined that Christ was Divine, probably because up until that time the Church was underground and persecuted; numbers were small, Christianity was essentially a cult in the eyes of the world, and I’d guess it would be hard for the leaders to get together and formally pronounce something.
In 312, the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (whom we recognise as a saint) began to open up to Christianity and he made it legal in 313. It no longer had to be underground. Christianity became vogue and people wanted in, and it became the dominant religion.
A priest from Alexandria, Egypt, named Arius began to theorise that Jesus wasn’t God. Since nothing had formally been declared by the Church about this yet, Arius’ belief gained some growing acceptance. It was opposed by Arius’ own Bishop, Saint Athanasius, who held that Christ is Divine. Debate about this spread through the Empire, and by the 320s, it actually became a topic of major contention in the Empire and Saint Constantine feared that they would start to riot about this.
Constantine called a Council in 325 for the Bishops to define whether or not Christ was God (I like using the word “define” rather than “decide”; some people will use the word “decide” but the Bishops didn’t *choose *anything – their job was just to figure out what the truth was). This Council was the first “Ecumenical” Council, meaning it was for the entire Church. The Bishops got together and overwhelmingly agreed that Jesus is God.
The issue wasn’t totally settled, though. While the Church had already defined it and the Bishops already agreed, there were some pockets of people who still believed in Arius around the Empire. So, another Ecumenical Council was held at Constantinople in 381. It reaffirmed that Christ is Divine, but it also wanted to affirm that the Holy Spirit is God.
There were 21 Ecumenical Councils all together, the last one (Vatican II, popularly named that way because it was the Second Council held at the Vatican) finished in 1965, though it didn’t deal with dogma.
You can read the texts of the documents these Councils made. You can find it online as PDF files, but if you have trouble, let me know and I can send them to you through e-mail or through messenger.
A lot of the stuff in there is pretty arcane and don’t apply anymore; only a handful of the topics they covered were dogmatic. Most of it was disciplinary rules for Church governance. If I remember right, Nicaea also declared that a Bishop was married to his diocese, and transferring to another diocese would be tantamount to adultery. This is one of the things that don’t apply anymore and wasn’t dogmatic; if it still applied, then the current Pope would be an adulterer too (now he is Bishop of Rome, but before that, he was Archbishop of Munich and later the Bishop of Ostia). So, when reading these things, keep in mind that they were in a different mindset back then, and a lot of these things were customs and disciplinary rules that can change and indeed have changed.
But anyway, are those the meetings you were thinking of that tried to talk about the Trinity? Or was it something more recent?
The basics of the Trinity are this:
We believe in One God.
God exists in Three Persons,
*but *, we do not believe in three gods
and each Person is not 1/3 God.
Each is fully God. Each is Eternal.
Each is Equal,
however the Father comes first in precedence, then the Son, then the Holy Spirit.
come to the kitchen and lets see if I can help you a bit.” So off to the kitchen went this wise mum