Hello everyone. I was raised in a Christian community and family. I believe in God. I love the message Jesus give us. I just fall short on my belief in the trinity and divinity. I'm a husband and a father. My children love Jesus and God I've never expressed my personal views torwards them.
And I haven't been comfortable talking about it except with one other person who I work with most of the time in the oilfield. He also comes from a Christian background and shared a very similar view as me.
I look at all of us as sons and daughters of god. As I get older and think of it more. I feel like I'm becoming more of a deist I think.
I would put it like this:
When we examine the New Testament, in particular the letters of St. Paul, we have the earliest views which Christians had. While there is some debate in the scholarly community in regard to the authenticity of some of the Pauline epistles, most of them (sans the pastorals) are regarded as being authentically Pauline, and therefore are demonstrative of what the earliest followers of Jesus would have understood the meaning of Jesus and His mission/work.
The undisputed letters of St. Paul are as follows: Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.
So let's examine, just for example, the way Paul speaks in Philippians:
"
Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, Who, though He was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death--even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted Him and gave Him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." - Philippians 2:4-11
There is a general opinion that that beginning with "Who, though He was in the form of God..." Paul is actually quoting an ancient Christian hymn. There is also something else happening here, the language of "every knee should bend ...and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord" is a powerful allusion back to the writing of the prophet Isaiah,
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Turn to Me and be saved, all the ends of the earth. For I am God, and there is no other. I have sworn by Myself, the word has gone forth from My mouth in justice and I will not turn back, that to Me every knee will bow, and every tongue will swear allegiance. They will say of Me, 'Only in the LORD are righteousness and strength.'" - Isaiah 45-22-24a
What we see rather consistently is that Jesus is spoken of in terms that identify Him with Israel's God. By the time we get to the Gospel of John the language comes to appropriate Greek philosophical forms, specifically the concept of the Logos.
In Greek thought the idea of the Logos goes back hundreds of years before Christ, a literal translation of logos is "word" but it also means "reason" and is the root of our words like
logic. The logos in Greek philosophical thought could be quite complex, but a general idea is that the
kosmos (the ordered world) was held together, arranged, and maintained by the Logos, all things were came about because of and were held together by the Logos. Some Jewish thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria attempted to bring the idea of the Logos of Greek philosophy together with ideas of Hebrew thinking, perhaps most importantly with the idea of Divine Wisdom. So when the Evangelist writes in John 1:1-3 "In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God, this one was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by this one and not one thing came to be without this one." and later in verse 14, "The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father full of grace and truth."
What we have, very early, is Christians understanding that this Jesus the Messiah to be, in some sense, identified with God. God Himself was present in Jesus, not merely in the way God's presence could be experienced through the words of the ancient prophets, but in such a sense that the Fourth Evangelist would in the Gospel of John speak of Jesus with words such as Jesus saying, "I and My Father are one" and "Whoever has seen Me has seen the Father".
This language continues, for example in one of the pastorals attributed to St. Paul, Titus, we read, "Our God and Savior Jesus Christ", language Christians would continue to employ, such as here in the writings of St. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 107 AD),
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Let my spirit be counted as nothing for the sake of the cross, which is a stumbling-block to those that do not believe, but to us salvation and life eternal. 'Where is the wise man? Where is the disputer?' Where is the boasting of those who are styled prudent? For our God, Jesus Christ, was according to the appointment of God, conceived in the womb by Mary, of the seed of David, but by the Holy Ghost. He was born and baptized, that by His passion He might purify the water." - Ignatius to the Epheisans, ch. 18
And so on.
What ends up happening by the 2nd and 3rd centuries are more complex questions, specifically in what way is Jesus Divine/God? The early leaders of the Church had to deal with two forms of what is known as Monarchianism. The first is known as Dynamic Monarchianism, also called Adoptionism, according to this view the man Jesus by His baptism, resurrection, and ascension was adopted into being divine. God, therefore, granted Jesus divine status (apotheosis). Problematically is that this suggest that there are two divine powers, God and Demigod. The other form of Monarchianism which was far more pernicious was what is called Modalistic Monarchianism, also known as Sabellianism after one of its main proponents, Sabellius. According to Modalistic Monarchianism (or Modalism for short) God was like an actor in a Greek drama, changing roles by wearing different masks or faces (Greek:
prosopon) so God in some sense takes on a human form as Jesus, and in this wears the mask of Son, whereas as God above He wears the mask of Father, and further shows His face as the Holy Spirit.
These views were harshly criticized by early Christian leaders such as Tertullian of Carthage and St. Hippolytus of Rome. In fact it is in this period that Theophilus of Antioch first coins the term "trinity", and its Latin form in the writings of Tertullian (Latin
trinitas).
In the 4th century following the end of the Roman persecutions by the Edict of Milan in 313 signed by co-emperors Constantine and Licinius gave way to a relatively more peaceful age for Christians whose religion was no longer illegal. And in fact under Constantine's patronage Christians suddenly found themselves favored by the Roman authorities. It is during this period that a presbyter from Alexandria named Arius attacked the teaching of his bishop, Alexander. Alexander taught that the Son had always been, uncreated, begotten not made. Arius found this unacceptable and rejected his bishop's teaching and began to teach on his own--his teaching was that there was God the Father the uncreated and unbegotten and the junior deity, the Logos or Son, the first creation of God and a secondary God and the Creator of all things (that is, it was similar to the Platonic view that there was a supreme unoriginated One and a lesser power, the Demiurge, that created the universe). A local council of Egyptian bishops found Arius' teachings to be heretical and he was removed from his post as presbyter and excommunicated. Arius then left Egypt for Palestine, where he found many willing to listen to his ideas in the region of Caesarea.
This started to escalate to a full on controversy as, according to one historian from the period, you could not so much as enter the market to buy bread without an argument over the nature of the Son breaking out. Throughout the entire eastern half of the Roman Empire the debate escalated and raged; this did not bode well for Constantine who having eventually deposed Licinius in the East was now the sole ruler of the empire and was moving the seat of power from Rome to Byzantium (renamed Constantinople) in order to better secure his power in the region. And given that Constantine had championed the Christian religion it was likely seen by him as politically dangerous to have such a divisive issue. So he called bishops from across the empire to meet at Nicea to settle the issue; though as the issue was primarily and eastern problem relatively few western bishops attended, including the bishop of Rome who was too old to make the trip and had two presbyters go in his place.
The decision that was ultimately reached at Nicea was in agreement with Alexander and earlier Christians writers; the Son was not a junior God, but was truly and fully God, of one substance with the Father (homoousios). The Father is God, so also the Son is God, not a second or other God, but the same God, being of the Father's essence or substance.
That didn't settle the debate of course, as shortly some of Arius' comrades convinced Constantine that the council and its creed weren't the end of the discussion and, because one of these persons was himself an Arian and friend of Arius--Eusebius of Nicomedia (not to be confused with Eusebius of Caesarea who wrote the Church History, though this Eusebius was also sympathetic to the Arians and was probably a Semi-Arian at least). To that end the decision at Nicea was largely rejected by the imperial powers that be, that also meant that Alexander's successor in Alexandria, Athanasius, was forceably removed by imperial decree from his post as bishop and sent into exile, and Arius took his place. This also led to a series of other councils, where Arian creeds were drawn up. Constantine himself was on his deathbed baptized by Eusebius of Nicomedia, and his sons Constans, Constantine II, and Constantius II would squabble not over imperial power but took sides in the theological factions of Church affairs. For most of the 4th century the Arians had the upper hand, they were usually the favored among Constantine's successors, and the Nicene Christians were often targets. During this period Athanasius was yo-yo'd from his post as bishop in Alexandria several times, depending on who happened to be in power, which led to the Latin phrase, "
Athanasius contra mundum", Athanasius against the world.
During this period there were some of the best theologians to ever grace the Church: St. Athanasius, St. Hillary of Poitiers (often known as the Western Athanasius), and the Cappadocian Fathers, Sts. Basil the Great, Gregory Nazianzen, and Gregory of Nyssa. We can largely thank these for the sharpest and most clear language on the doctrine of the Trinity we have.
Ultimately, following the death of the last of the Constantinian emperors, Julian the Apostate, Jovian took the reins, and after him Theodosius. As the dust was settling from the Arian controversy another council was held in Constantinople, where the creed put forward at Nicea fifty years prior was reasserted to be a prime symbol of faith, amended to deal with the Macedonian heresy (Macedonianism was a teaching that said that the Holy Spirit wasn't divine), we have what is today known as the Nicene-Constantinoplian Creed, or just the Nicene Creed for short--it's what is read in churches around the world to this day as the central confession of Christian faith in every denomination of the world, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant. From the Coptic Christians of Egypt, the Mar Thoma Christians of India, to your local Methodist, Presbyterian, or Lutheran church around the block.
It is in the crucible of history and the Church seeking to hold fast to the teaching it had received from the beginning--as we see in the writings of St. Paul and the Gospels--that gets us from point A to point B on these important theological matters. And which were further tested in the fires of later theological controversies of the 5th, 6th, and 7th centuries; and these things being adhered to and maintained even until the present day.
-CryptoLutheran
