Yes, and that is the problem here. While it's OK and encouraged here to share your own homespun view on the Trinity, there is too much wacky stuff floating around, because members had not studied the history of teh doctrine, the church fathers, and the classical problems with the Trinity.
Why were the Fathers right?
Men writing 200 and 300 years after Jesus died were not really any "closer" to Jesus than we are, they did not have complete Bibles to work with, and they were living in an Empire that presented its own particular challenges and religious challenges. There is no doubt they had a set of opinions based upon the challenges of their time and place. They were also a lot more ignorant than we are of anything outside of their own towns and villages and cities. They did not travel as we did. There was no mail, no newspaper, and very little communication from one end of the Empire to the other. They were just like us in their ability to reason and speculate, but they did not have the ability to research or communicate or travel as extensively as we do.
So what precisely about a man living in what would today be the third world, hundreds of years after the death of Christ, would give him any more authority to read and interpret than you or I?
Nothing that persuades me that I should give up my own God-given capacity to read and reason and substitute theirs.
The same is true when we move to the Reformation Era. Now we're 1500 years removed from Christ. John Calvin is famous, and he wrote a famous and influential work. But when he wrote the first edition of that book, he was a teenager in French law school in the provinces. I too went to French law school, not in the provinces but the premier one in Paris.
In his day and age, and in the place he settled in Geneva, one could debate religion, but if one challenged TOO hard, one was apt to be burnt alive or otherwise tormented and killed. Which means that none of the theologians of that era ever had the really RIGOROUS intellectual challenge of being unable to resort to the sword if they were losing an argument. The resort to violence made ALL of their arguments weaker.
So, why should I substitute the judgment of a teenager from a second-tier law school on things that, when challenged in their day, were replied to with murder, not logical argument? Why should I not, correctly, view my own education as superior to his (because it was), and not view my own life experience as vastly more extensive than his (it is), and view the fact that I cannot silence the people arguing religion with me through fear the way he did, as all combining to make my knowledge, wisdom and conclusions vastly superior to his? They are.
The Fathers are old. They had their opinions. Their opinions were theirs - they did not come right out of the mouth of Christ. Christ had been gone relative to them as long as George Washington is from us.
Their opinions can be considered. Often their opinions conflict, as do ours today. And often, their opinions are wrong.
St. Augustine had interesting things to say. But he came from deeper in the muck than most of us. And in the end, as a teacher of children, he was quite abusive. He had a very strong opinion and a bad temper. Why, then, precisely, should I substitute his poor judgment both in his youth as a wastrel, and then in his old age, as a mean bully of a bishop towards children, for mine?
I'm not going to. Not ever. If the argument cannot carry the day before me, in my own day, in my own court, then it isn't a good one.
The Catholic Church has been arguing for centuries that its traditions are the final word on what God wants. It would be far easier to believe that if the Church hadn't murdered so many thousands of people over the course of history, demonstrating that, however Holy the Church may be, that that holiness means absolutely nothing when it comes to a matter in contention. The Church sheds the holiness to reach for authority, and has killed doing that. I will accept a degree of authority - I will listen. But substitute my own authority for that of demonstrated killers, abusers and teenagers, and people who were, objectively, younger, more ignorant and less travelled and experienced than I am? Absolutely not. Not ever.
In the end, each person has to be convinced in his own court. Nobody burnt at the stake for heresy was ever convinced of anything, but the people who did the burning are remembered for all time, and lost their argument for all time because they were monstrous servants of Satan. The fact of the killings destroyed the legitimacy of the argument. It is not trivial.
Appeals to authority are useless. I do not accept the authority of the men of old. I am willing to listen to their arguments, if presented, but I do not grant those arguments any authority other than the logic they carry. And when they appealed to force, as many of them did, that is evidence to me that their argument was unpersuasive even in its own day, so they resorted to violence and evil to impose it. And that pretty much wipes out their moral authority.
So, if you'd like to present what it is about the Fathers' writings that is particularly germane, I'm all ears. But suggesting that without a knowledge of what some long-dead men who never were close in time to Jesus thought, and that that should be a substitute for my own reasoning, is a silly argument.
I respect God. I only respect human tradition to the extent that it proves itself worthy. When humans resort to violence to force their opinion, it means that their argument was weak and bad, inferior to arguments that can carry the day by words alone.
They're dead. We're alive. It is the living who have to be persuaded anew, each generation. Appealing to the "authority" of the past doesn't go very far. The past was pretty bad. The argument must be proven anew, with things that are relevant to the people doing the seeking. The only thing that has authority is the argument itself. IT has to persuade.
