Well, read the following regarding the doctrine of the trinity:
1 Thessalonians 5:21 (KJV), “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good”?
“God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24).
a) Author and theology professor James White writes: “We hang a person’s
very salvation upon the acceptance of the doctrine . . . No one dares question the Trinity for fear of being branded a ‘heretic’ . . . We must know, understand, and love the Trinity to be fully and completely Christian” (The Forgotten Trinity, 1998, pp. 14-15,
emphasis added throughout unless otherwise noted).
b) Author and theology professor Harold Brown writes: “It has proved impossible for Christians actually to understand the doctrine or to explain it in any comprehensive way. The doctrine of the Trinity . . . surpasses our human ability to understand and that must be respected as a divine mystery” (Heresies: Heresy and Orthodoxy in the History of the Church, 2003, p. 128).
c) Religious writer A.W. Tozer, in his book The Knowledge of the Holy, states that the Trinity is an “incomprehensible mystery” and that attempts to understand it “must remain forever futile.” He admits that churches, “without pretending to understand,” have nevertheless continued to teach this doctrine (1961, pp. 17-18).
d) Cyril Richardson, professor of church history at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, though a dedicated Trinitarian himself, said this in his book The Doctrine of The Trinity: “My conclusion, then, about the doctrine of the Trinity is that it is an artificial construct . . . It produces confusion rather than clarification; and while the problems with which it deals are real ones, the solutions it offers are not illuminating. It has posed for many Christians dark and mysterious statements, which are ultimately meaningless, because it does not sufficiently discriminate in its use of terms” (1958, pp. 148-149).
e) The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia acknowledges that “‘trinity’ is a second-century term found nowhere in the Bible, and the Scriptures present no finished trinitarian statement” (1988, Vol. 4, “Trinity,” p. 914)
f) The HarperCollins Bible Dictionary tells us, “The formal doctrine of the Trinity as it was defined by the great church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries is not to be found in the NT [New Testament]” (Paul Achtemeier, editor, 1996, “Trinity”).
g) The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism states: “Today, however, scholars generally agree that there is no doctrine of the Trinity as such in either the OT [Old Testament] or the NT [New Testament] . . . It would go far beyond the intention and thought-forms of the OT to suppose that a late-fourth-century or thirteenth-century Christian doctrine can be found there . . . Likewise, the NT does not contain an explicit doctrine of the Trinity” (Richard McBrien, general editor, 1995, “God,” pp. 564-565).
h) The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its article on the Trinity, explains: “Neither the word Trinity nor the explicit doctrine appears in the New Testament . . . The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies . . . It was not until the 4th century that the distinctness of the three and their unity were brought together in a single orthodox doctrine of one essence and three persons” (1985 edition,
Micropaedia, Vol. 11, p. 928).
i) Historian and science fiction writer H.G. Wells, in his noted work The Outline of History, points out, “There is no evidence that the apostles of Jesus ever heard of the trinity—at any rate from him” (1920, Vol. 2, p. 499).
j) The Oxford Companion to the Bible states: “Because the Trinity is such an important part of later Christian doctrine, it is striking that the term does not appear in the New Testament. 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 *” (Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan, editors, 1993, “Trinity,”
p. 782).
k) Shirley Guthrie, Jr., professor of theology at Columbia Theological Seminary, writes: “The Bible does not teach the doctrine of the Trinity. Neither the word ‘trinity’ itself nor such language as ‘one-in-three,’ ‘three-in-one,’ one ‘essence’ (or ‘substance’), and three ‘persons,’ is biblical language. The language of the doctrine is the language of the ancient church taken from classical Greek philosophy” (Christian Doctrine, 1994, pp. 76-77).”
The real origins of this idea many debates, council meetings and killings by the church and eventually the following took place:
Professor Ryrie, also cited earlier, writes, “In the second half of the fourth century, three theologians from the province of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor [today central Turkey] gave definitive shape to the doctrine of the Trinity” (p. 65). They proposed an idea that was a step beyond Athanasius’ view—that God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit
were coequal and together in one being, yet also distinct from one another.
These men—Basil, bishop of Caesarea, his brother Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus—were all “trained in Greek philosophy” (Armstrong, p. 113), which no doubt affected their outlook and beliefs (see “Greek Philosophy’s Influence on the Trinity Doctrine,” beginning on page 14).
In the year 381, 44 years after Constantine’s death, Emperor Theodosius the Great convened the Council of Constantinople (today Istanbul, Turkey) to resolve these disputes. Gregory of Nazianzus, recently appointed as archbishop of Constantinople, presided over the council and urged the adoption of his view of the Holy Spirit.
Historian Charles Freeman states: “Whether he dealt with the matter clumsily or whether there was simply no chance of consensus, the ‘Macedonians,’ bishops who refused to accept the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, left the council . . . Typically, Gregory berated the bishops for preferring to have a majority rather than simply accepting ‘the Divine Word’ of the Trinity on his authority” (A.D. 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State, 2008, p. 96).
The teaching of the three Cappadocian theologians “made it possible for the Council of Constantinople (381) to affirm the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which up to that point had nowhere been clearly stated, not even in Scripture” (The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, “God,” p. 568).
With the few sources, one wonders how many more distortions and corruption has been done to the scriptures? We need to take note of the following assertion regarding the evolution of the church:
“For fifty years after St. Paul’s life a curtain hangs over the church, through which we strive vainly to look; and when at last it rises, about 120 A.D. with the writings of the earliest church fathers, we find a church in many aspects very different from that in the days of St. Peter and St. Paul” (The Story of the Christian Church, 1970, p. 33).*
I will be very careful next time and comment only on a topic I understand