QuagDabPeg said:
I've been reading in the Unorthodox theology section and now I'm kind of confused about the trinity.I've always believed in it becasue I was just taught to and told you can't understand it you just have to accept it. Does anyone have a better explation? Where does the belief come from? Is there evidence that the first christians held this view?
Good Day, QuagdabPeg
The best book on the issue is "the forgotten Trinity" by James white.
Early Christians:
Melito of Sardis, on the other hand, refers to such doctrines as "assured" by what we're told about Jesus in the Bible. He tells us that any "person of intelligence" can see Christ's deity and His two natures just by knowing some of the basic facts about His life:
"For there is no need, to persons of intelligence, to attempt to prove, from the deeds of Christ subsequent to His baptism, that His soul and His body, His human nature like ours, were real, and no phantom of the imagination. For the deeds done by Christ after His baptism, and especially His miracles, gave indication and assurance to the world of the Deity hidden in His flesh. For, being at once both God and perfect man likewise, He gave us sure indications of His two natures: of His Deity, by His miracles during the three years that elapsed after His baptism; of His humanity, during the thirty similar periods which preceded His baptism, in which, by reason of His low estate as regards the flesh, He concealed the signs of His Deity, although He was the true God existing before all ages." (Fragments, 7).
The third century Roman bishop Dionysius:
"For these indeed rightly know that the Trinity is declared in the divine Scripture, but that the doctrine that there are three gods is neither taught in the Old nor in the New Testament....And if Christ is the Word, the Wisdom, and the Power,-for the divine writings tell us that Christ is these, as ye yourselves know,-assuredly these are powers of God....But why should I discourse at greater length to you about these matters, since ye are men filled with the Spirit, and especially understanding what absurd results follow from the opinion which asserts that the Son was made? The leaders of this view seem to me to have given very little heed to these things, and for that reason to have strayed absolutely, by explaining the passage otherwise than as the divine and prophetic Scripture demands....Finally, any one may read in many parts of the divine utterances that the Son is said to have been begotten, but never that He was made. From which considerations, they who dare to say that His divine and inexplicable generation was a creation, are openly convicted of thinking that which is false concerning the generation of the Lord." (Against the Sabellians, 1-2)
Peace to u,
Bill