I find it amusing that you pick Arius as a 'special heretic'.
Not special; Arius was the worst of the worst.
All indicated reference we have to Arius is that He was quite devoted to God and His Son,
Not at all. His contempt for God is legendary. He rejected sacred scripture in order to attempt to redefine the person of Jesus Christ based on Hellenic philosophy.
(considering that practically everything he ever wrote was burned by the 'Church', we actually have very little to consider). Died, (most likely from being poisoned), on his way back to be reintroduced into the 'Church'.
He was not poisioned. His bowells rather quite literally exploded, in a manner St. Gregory the Theologian likened, aptly, to the demise of Judas.
You often make it sound like Arius was 'anti Christ' when all indications are that he was a very pious and devoted follower of Christ.
Arius was certainly a type of the anti-Christ; he operated in the spirit of Antichrist in a more extreme manner than most of the Gnostic heretics St. John refers to in 3 John.
And his ideas of Christ being 'begotten', (having a beginning), and not being 'equal to God' were not exclusively 'his own'.
His heresy was regarding our Lord as having a temporal befinning, of being a creature, which is contrary to Scripture.
There were many other Bishops that believed in the same 'essence' as Arius. He was simply having a more profound effect on the 'Church' than most others.
Most of which were appointed by Arian sympathizers. There were only a handful of actual dissenters at Nicea. Only two Arian bishops were of any importance: Eusebius of Caesarea amd Eusebius of Nicomedia; the former was a great admirer of St. Constantine, and the latter actually baptized him, which puts paid your whole theory of the Trinity being a Constantinian conspiracy.
I am not an Arian or whatever others choose to label. While I agree with the same concept, I am not a 'follower of Arius' and had already formed my beliefs on the issue long before ever hearing his name. My beliefs and understanding were not based upon a 'man' named Arius. My beliefs and understanding are straight out of the Bible. They were formed before I had ever even heard of the doctrine of 'trinity'.
This is to your credit, as there are very few people who, having read about Arius, would snap their fingers and exclaim "Oh! This chap was right all along, and all of the Christians persecuted in his name were like, totally wrong!"
For you see, I wasn't introduced to God or His Son through a 'Church', but through the Bible itself. Without anyone guiding through the Bible starting with the Book of John as most 'Churches' that profess 'trinity'. I started with the first page and read through to the last.
And I consider that you reading of St. John ignores several key verses in John 1.
And I had no one 'telling me' what to believe. I prayed for guidance and understood it as it revealed itself to me.
No one told me what to believe either. I converted to Orthodoxy out of a very bland Protestant denomination entirely on my own volition. I was tempted greatly by Gnosticism, interestingly enough.
My word IS 'with me'. It is always 'with me'. If I couldn't speak verbally, it would still be the manner in which I communicate with myself in my mind. It's been with me since I was 'born'. Maybe even before I was born. So it's certainly been with me since 'my beginning'.
But your word is not a discrete Prosopon capable of incarnation.
Funny that the beginning of the Book of John is used in an attempt to 'prove trinity'. For it does no such thing. The Book of John is basically a recap of the story of 'creation' and God's relationship with His creation. It starts with 'in the beginning' and basically goes through the relationship of God with mankind.
When the Word became flesh, Christ's words mirror this very concept. Not in 'God' becoming flesh, but His Son. And if the Word were Christ Himself, a proper noun as the capital letter exists, then many of the words of Christ documented would be contradiction.
No, they would not be. We have been over your many misconceptions of the Trinitarian position ad nauseum.
For Christ Himself states that the words He offered were 'not His own', but 'given Him' by 'His Father'. And we all 'know' that the Father IS God.
The Father is God, but the Son (the Word) is also God.
If Christ 'were' the Word, then the words He offered would not only have 'been His own', but He would have been those very words. Yet He states that they, (His words), were 'not' His own, but belonged to The Father.
No, because Christ is the Word, and what He says consists of the words of the Father, which He, as the Word, is called to speak. Words cannot become incarnate.
However I must commend you for at least trying to deal with John 1:14 this time, however unsuccessfully, rather than merely glossing over it as hapoened in our previous conversations.
He even went further in explanation in offering that they were words He heard from the Father. Words He was directed to offer. Like His deeds themselves. He stated that they were 'things He had seen 'of the Father'. What He had seen of the Father were the things that He Himself 'did'.
None of which is contrary to the Trinitarian position.
And if we are to gather 'doctrine' or 'beliefs' pertaining to 'one liners', (or three), how about these: "My God, my God, why hath thou forsaken me?" It would seem that these words offer a more profound understanding than the vague words concerning 'The Word' in John 1, More profound in that they convey an actual 'understanding' that is without confusion. God, His very Spirit, was forced to abandon the Son on the cross for the Son to 'take on' the sins of this world and die 'for' them.
We have been over this before. These words express lament at the separation of the human nature from the impassable divine at the point of death. As an interesting aside, the docetic Gospel of Peter says "Power" instead of "God"; had the Trinitarians believed what you say we believe, we would not have rejected that Gnostic text, but rather would likely have exalted it over the synoptics.
And, 'The Father is greater than the Son'. These words too make a profound statement that 'trinity' is unable to successfully address.
Not true; we have been over this ad nauseum. Every pious Trinitarian readily admits the greatness of the Father owing to His paternity.
If the Son and The Father are two persons that make up one God, how is it possible for the two to be 'equal' when the Son openly states that The Father is 'greater'?
We do not teach an absolute equality. Perhaps if you took the time to actually study our faith, you might see many of your reasons for rejecting it are in fact unwarranted.
And then we have the words: "Father and Son" to begin with. Look at the lengths that the 'creators of trinity' went to in an attempt to alter these very words.
Here, you confuse us with Arians. Arius taught that the Son was created, which if true, would have the effect of denying His true sonship. For we beget, rather than create, our own children.
A 'father' becomes a father when he has children. It is a term that expresses paternity. Why would Christ call Himself Son if it had no specific meaning concerning the very word 'son'? And then when we take into consideration that He constantly, throughout His entire Gospel, refer to God as His Father. Not 'God the Father' as in one person of 'trinity'. But THE God as His Father.
All Trinitarians readily admit God the Father is the Father precisely because He begat our Lord, so you have no point here. You are falling back on a strawman of epic proportions, or alternately tilting at windmills.
Then there are the words of the apostles that offer that God is THE God of Christ as well as 'our God'. And we have examples of the Son praying to 'His Father': God.
Of course God is the God of our Lord. Let us not resort to silliness.
All this adds up to exactly what God revealed to the Hebrews/Jews: One God, uncompounded, without any other Gods beside Him.
Perhaps if I had not just posted an entire thread dedicated to refuting the false claim Trinitarians believe in a compounded God or multiple deities, I would not find this post of yours so vexatious. To spare myself grey hair earned not through ascetic toil but rather through impassioned agitatation, I will simply gloss over any further remarks of this sort.
That's what was believed of God for thousands of years before the Son was sent to die for our sins. That is why the Jews find 'trinity' to be polytheistic.
I find the Jewish Kabbalist belief in God being "shattered" into ten Sephirot to be an import from pagan Gnosticism, and a blasphemous corruption of the ancient faith with polytheism.
For no matter how one tries to talk around the issue, one plus one plus one equals three.
No; the prosopa are of one essence and are ontologically God. Not three gods, but one uncreated God.
The Jews and the Arabs look upon 'trinity' as polytheistic for the same reason.
The opinions of the Jews who rejected our Lord; who sided with those who denied Jesus was the messiah, who crucified Him, and did not relent by embracing Christianity, are not relevant. Even less relevant are the views of those who follow the craven ramblings of a deranged demonaic polygamous merchant to the point of crashing commercial airliners into buildings, shooting up innocent civillians, and devising novel ways of killing people in Syria, are utterly irrelevant. Really I could mot care less what Muslims have to say anout my faith; they are practitioners of the most deplorable religion in existence, whose abominable history of blood soaked attrocities (such as the murder of most Syriac Christians in the thirteenth century, the genocides of the Armenians, Assyrians and Pontic Greeks, ISIL, et al) dwarfs even the worst excesses of Western Christianity in the 16th-17th centuries.
I frankly care more about what the Dalai Lama says about Christianity than any Muslim. Because at least HH the Dalai Lama, the lawful ruler of Tibet, although the head of a greatly overrated and false religion, is unlikely to incite his followers to behead me with a scimitar, and is thus in this respect, and also according to the persecution of his faith by the PRC, much closer to Christianity. His opinion is still irrelevant, but at least one can respect the source of it on some level. Whereas I have precisely zero respect for Islam as a religion or institution; there is quite possibly more to admire in Anton LaVey than in Mohammed.
And considering that the Jews and Arabs were introduced to God thousands of years 'before' the Romans or Europeans, it would only stand to reason that they 'knew' God as introduced.
Herein, you ignore the substantia numbers of Jewish converts to Christianity, whose descendants can still be found in the Antiochian, Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopian and Greek Orthodox Churches of the Levant in large numbers. My own bishop is of early Christian Jewish extraction, as is the assistant priest of my cathedral Parish.
On the other hand, as is well known, the Arabs of Mecca were pagan polytheists. They had rejected the Abrahamic faith they presumably received from Hagar millenia before Mohammed.
They didn't come to their understanding by trying to 'create' a god of their own design. They were introduced to God and that introduction was to a 'singular God'.
Mohammed was introduced to the false idol lf a unipersonal God by an Arian monk, a follower of Arius, who in turn got the idea from Plato and Hellenic philosophy.
He also erroneously believed, perhaps owing to the lies of a Nestorian monk he is known to have met, that St. Mary was part of the Holy Trinity.
Not other Gods beside Him. And trying to make a God that consists of 'three persons in one God' is much more akin to pagan beliefs than the beliefs of those that KNEW God long before such ideas were introduced into Christianity.
Not at all. It was Arianism that was expressly derived from Hellenic paganism, much like Gnosticism.
And also add to all this the 'pagan' type ritual that was introduced by those that 'created and instituted trinity'.
What "pagan type ritual"?
It certainly lends credence to the idea that 'trinity' created a 'new God' of the design of those that 'created it'. I see 'no trinity' in the Bible. In fact, from my perspective, it is contrary to what 'is' offered in the Bible.
A perspective we have shown to be invalid many, many times.
It's not only simple to find 'one' point offered in 'trinity' that doesn't exist, I can find many. Many points offered in the Bible that are contrary to any such concept.
Not true. On the other hand, it can be proven, from many verses
@Der Alter has iterated over, that the rejection of the Trinity is directly contrary to Scripture. A fact recognized by most people (an actual fact, not a mere subjective opinion; to believe, reasonably, in a non-Trinitarian interpretation, one is required to redefine scripture, a point made by, for example,
@cgaviria's rejection of Matthew 28:19).
For 'trinity' insists that there are a number of points that 'must' exist in order for 'trinity' to exist in truth. And each one, the Bible contradicts.
Not true; cue the strawman, however:
The words of the Son Himself are contrary to the concept of 'trinity'. God and His Son are 'not the same'.
We don't say they are.
The Son is 'not' God. God is the Father. The Father 'is' God. The Son 'is' the Son. Plain and simple and using some vague poetic lines of scripture do not alter this reality.
What you describe is not reality. That notwithstanding, I appreciate your admission that you regard John 1:1-14, for example, as "vague" and "poetic," which furthers my point that non-Trinitarianism cannot survive a literal interpretation of these passages.
And then there is 'this': Why would men find it necessary to 'create' their own God through such a doctrine as 'trinity'?
Now we move from what was supposed to be an iteration of facts to a speculative ad hominem. I could just as easily ask why Arius valued the writings of philosophers over the wise council of his own Patriarch. It wouldn't do any good however; I can sit here endlessly ascribing all manner of foul motives to various heretics, and in so doing, merely heap condemnation on myself.
I should stress that I do not hate Arius; I am required by the Trinitarian faith to love him. I disagree what he did, emphatically, but I do not hate him personally.
If Godhead was clear to those to whom it was revealed, why the need to create an entirely 'new' concept to explain something as a 'mystery' that had already been revealed by God and His Son? God is the 'head of Christ' as 'Christ is the head' as "man is the head of woman". Are these words not offered in the Bible?
The concept of the Trinity was not "entirely new."
1 Corinthians 11:3
But I would have you know, that the
head of every man is
Christ; and the
head of the woman is the man; and the
head of Christ is God.
This does not offer that the head of Christ is: The Father. It specifically states: God. The head of Christ is God. And simply look at the order offered through these words. It is showing
preeminence. It is showing 'order'. It is showing that one came 'before' another.
Nowhere does scripture support the quintessential Arian conceit that there was a time when the Son was not.
And that order cannot be altered by the imaginings of men. Only in their own minds and hearts. And only if they choose to rebel against the order laid out by God. God is the head of Christ who is the head of man. Clearly showing that one is greater than the other: Godhead. Get it? God is the head of Christ. God is the head of 'everything'. And whatever He has chosen to 'give' to the Son is through His power. Not the power of the Son to take it. But the power is what is 'allowed' by God.
I am bypassing this, as these points were addressed previously.
For it was Satan that tried to 'take' such a position: being equal with God, not the Son. And the Bible even tells us that the Son did 'not' consider 'robbery' to be a means of 'taking' equality from God. The Son is perfectly content with 'being the Son'. Whereas, at one point, Satan wasn't Satisfied with being merely an 'angel' and sought to 'steal equality' with God.
The Son is God. The devil rebelled against God in an act of infinite futility.
And I would offer that if men had to force others to believe in 'trinity', then it couldn't have been a concept delivered by God or His Son or the apostles. For neither God, His Son or the apostles tried to force the Gospels upon 'anyone'.
It was Arians who sought to use force on the Trinitarian laity, not vice versa. Trinitarians endured centuries of persecution by Arian Visigoths and Ostrogoths, many of whom later embraced Islam.
