In this interesting presentation called “Yet Another Music City Miracle” pastor J. Dan Gill points out that the way evangelicals evangelize is incompatible with the old catholic tradition, famously asserted in the “Athanasian” creed,
Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith; Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity…
Part of Gill’s point may be put as an inconsistent triad. We must, to be consistent, deny one of these, even though tradition may push us to accept all three. But which should we deny?
- People have been born again at Billy Graham crusades.
- People have not been taught the Trinity or the two natures of Christ at Billy Graham crusades.
- One must believe in the Trinity and the two natures of Christ to be saved.
2, I think, is undeniable, given the content of the preaching at such crusades, and the instructions given to the trained “counselors” who interact with people who answer the altar call. Pastor Gill believes 1 is true, and I concur. I’m not sure if I’ve known any such people, but I take it this is why such a broad coalition of Christians supported those, and like crusades for decades. Also, if you’re a Christian, consider your own case. When were you converted? At that time, did you at any level understand the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon, or the “Athanasian” creed? Many will say no, yet are sure they were nonetheless born again. Well, then 3 must be false. This is not huge news to many of us. I was brought up in various evangelical churches, and never really was taught 3.
This biblical unitarian pastor from Tennessee noticed what the great Christian philosopher John Locke did about New Testament preaching, particularly in Acts: it simply doesn’t include the Trinity or two natures doctrines.
Here are a few additional thoughts. This is one question:
- What must one believe to be saved?
and here’s another:
- What must one believe. having been saved?
Surely, generally speaking, the latter requires more than the former. But if the terms of the deal changed, when did they change? And how long could one remain a Christian in good standing, whilst only believing the minimum required? I suppose that one is responsible to believe, or at least to confess or not publicly disagree with essential Christian teachings when one has been adequately taught those truths. If you believe the Bible to be inspired, and as best you can tell, it teaches X, you must believe X. This X, as best you can tell, is part of what God is saying. Because of this, in my view, many Christians ought to believe some version of the Trinity doctrine. But also, they should be open to a clash between apostolic teaching and later traditions. (That’s what I’ve discovered in this area.) And if you hold some theory, and the one you’re teaching can’t see that this is actually what the sources teach, then you can’t impose it on him as a condition of fellowship. (Of course, you can respectfully argue the matter!) This is the key point that’s so often lost on people – Trinity theories are many, and they are mutually inconsistent, and so the matter is simply not clear enough for everyone to be obligated to believe something very specific about this matter. But this is the beauty of reasoned dialogue; we start wherever we’re both at, and try to find the truth of the matter together.
A major confusion here is that tell ourselves that we don’t have any theory – we’re just reading what the Bible says. This is a sure sign of being a prisoner to someone else’s speculations, being unable to see anything else in the texts, when in fact, many do see (or think they see) other things there. Got to read more widely, argue with more people. Got to understand why the other sides think what they do.
[P.S.] “I am reminded that a very similar thing happened in the 620s CE in the Middle East!”
Are you referring to the origin of Islam? I was not aware that Islam was born in a Christian “broth” of antitrinitarianism. Care to explain? If not, what are you referring to?
@ John
I hope you don’t mind my adding a comment in reply to your question.
“Don’t you think that the Doctrine of the Trinity is just an idiosyncratic reaction to the very unique circumstances which prevailed during the first few centuries? I’m referring particularly to the fact that Christ, a Jew, was preaching to two very different audiences.”
The doctrine of the “trinity” is certainly a reaction, but, I believe not so much to “unique circumstances”; rather to the fact that the strict monotheism of Judaism, which certainly Jesus did NOT contradict, was soon polluted by the contact with Hellenism, especially the toxic combination of Judaism, Hellenism and Greek philosophy of which Philo is the epitome.
As for the “different audiences”, I am not sure what you are referring to. The simple people (am ha’aretz) vs the educated ones (scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees)? If this is what you have in mind, how would this have a connection with the development of the doctrine of the “trinity”? Otherwise, what do you mean by “different audiences”?
Thank you.
@ Dale
“[1] If you believe the Bible to be inspired, and as best you can tell, it teaches X, you must believe X. This X, as best you can tell, is part of what God is saying. [2] Because of this, in my view, many Christians ought to believe some version of the Trinity doctrine.”
Unless you affirm (and give evidence) that the Bible provides (or implies) “some version of the Trinity doctrine”, your stetement [2] is a manifest non sequitur from [1].
Dale,
Thanks! Also, if you don’t mind, I’ll reply to John to ease the burden of a lengthy reply on your part:
John, “Messiah” means anointed. There were many messiahs, whether it was a priest anointed to be in charge, such as Samuel, or the kings afterwards, such as Saul, David, and Solomon; even David’s line are called messiahs, as in Psalm 105:15 and 1 Chronicles 16:22 – literally, do not touch My messiahs. Even Cyrus was called a messiah, being that he was anointed by God to rule for a time.
Since there were many “messiahs”, this particular Messiah that they were waiting for was promised in a few places, but especially 1 Chronicles 17:10-14. This is what God is saying when He says, “this is My beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased!” and also why they kept putting Messiah (or Christ) and “Son of God” together throughout the Gospel accounts.
Christ and Messiah mean the same thing and are synonymous. In a couple of verses, it even says that plainly:
John 1:41,
“He first finds his own brother Simon, and said to him, We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ.”
(Messias there is just Messiah in Greek with a masculine ending, like how they rendered Moshe as Moses and Yeshua as Iesous)
Consider passages like Psalm 2 and Isaiah 9:1-7 to see why they would feel that the Messiah would become the ruler of the nations by conquering them. Despite Zechariah 12 also seeming to show the same thing, there is also Zechariah 4:6-9.
I think that what is explained in the New Testament helps with the understanding better as to the sequence of events, but don’t forget that they are all speaking about things already written in the Old Testament when they talk about what God had revealed or spoken, unless it is otherwise stated (for the most part, anyway). For instance, you have the revelation of Jesus Christ, right? The account of that is given as a revelation, and it explains very many things throughout the Old Testament. If you use cross-references, like from bible.cc for instance, you can catch a lot of the references with little effort.
Then there are other things spoken from God which, when not spoken word-for-word, can be confusing. For instance, in Revelation 8:8-11, there are a few references there against Babylon. One is in Jeremiah 51:25, which is the second angel sounding. The third angel sounding refers to two things:
1) Amos 5:7
2) Numbers 5
The numbers 5 is significant, because since Babylon is cheating, she is given a “test of unfaithfulness” and made to drink bitter waters. The third of them die because of it. Since it doesn’t say “it’s written here” or “it’s written there”, people have imagined that they are completely new things being spoken of, not having retained the knowledge of the Old Testament, and proclaim that a meteorite is going to fall in the last days, and even elsewhere that the locust army is supposedly helicopters.
In other words, the apostles and prophets and even Jesus don’t just pull things out of the air. Remember that the Jewish sages didn’t have some secret knowledge or anything like that, but they did study those things a lot, as do many these days.
God bless!
Hi Dale,
I must say that I really struggle with the concept of ‘the Messiah’
I am told by two authorities on the subject ,that the concept of ‘Messiah’ was always very ill-defined in the minds of Jewish scholars.
Clearly the Jews anticipated the arrival of a ‘Messiah’ who would be a ‘conquering hero’ – and Christ was far from that.! In fact he was a ‘suffering servant’ Messiah.
I find the concept of ‘the Christ’ far more understandable – someone who is anointed by God.
Certainly those accompanying Christ in his last days were aware of this designation (‘you are the Christ’) , but I don’t recall any of the disciples referring directly to Christ as Messiah.
In your opinion are the words ‘the Christ’ and ‘the Messiah’ synonymous?
Every Blessing
John
Hi Jonathan,
Yes, basically I agree. I think we can’t really give precise minimal beliefs, because what a person ought to believe is, at any given time, relative to her available evidence. That Jesus is Messiah, I think, is what must be *confessed*. This is assumed to be sincere, and hence involves belief. But it goes beyond mere belief – it is a public, even potentially political act. It is siding with Jesus, and so with his God. And it is putting yourself under Jesus as his subject in God’s Kingdom. Confessions we can require – we’re able to tell, generally, when someone is really professing allegiance in that way. Then we set to fixing the beliefs, indirectly, by teaching, modeling, etc.
Dale,
If I may ask, what do you think about your two questions posed? After a while of pinpointing the points made throughout the New Testament, backed by the Old Testament, my conclusion is currently this:
1) What one must believe to be saved is that Jesus is the Christ.
2) What one must believe, being saved, is what Jesus (even from the Father) taught.
I don’t believe that number 1 includes that “Messiah is God” and such “advanced” conclusions.
I don’t believe that number 2 includes secret mysteries about “the Godhead”.
I believe that number 1 is equivalent to saying that Jesus is Lord, since that specific Messiah (unlike Samuel, Saul, David, Solomon, and others) would be given the nations as His inheritance, and would be master, or lord, over them. The consequence of not believing this would be Luke 19:27.
I believe that number 2 is Jesus’ actual teachings and commands, not allusions and mysteries about what Jesus might have insinuated. In other words, even if Orthodox Trinitarianism is true, it is still not enforced as part of faith, since the very definition of faith means that believing is believing what you’ve heard – not what you’ve come up with or imagined.
So, you must believe that Jesus is God’s chosen ruler, which in turn would force them, being saved from the world, to obey His commands, especially the most important ones (Matthew 23:23), such as forgiving your neighbor as many times as he asks, doing good to those who treat you poorly, and keeping yourselves unstained by the wicked things in and from the world.
These points, I believe, are backed by plain statements and commands, and not by any insinuation or imagination.
What do you think?
Sean,
As you know, the doctrine of the Trinty is not scriptural, and is an affront to reason, yet the Early Church Fathers opinions seem to hold sway.
As Sir Anthony Buzzard notes in the preface of the book you mentioned (above) the doctrine proved to be the clear dividing line between Christianity and Judaism and Islam. One cannot help suggest that the doctrine was viewed by the Catholic Church as a ‘unique selling proposition ‘ to ‘brand’ Christianity as something ‘better.’ They would argue “our Messiah isn’t just any old prophet, He’s God Himself”!
That might have gone down well in an earlier age -but in the ‘information age’ the truth will out!
The desperation of Trinitarians is reflected in the enormous amount of money which is spent on internet marketing. How often does one encounter a web site advertised “Y Jesus, Is Christ God’?
Dale once published a paper on the subject ‘Truth or Tradition’. The trajedy is
that the two seem to have become mutually exclusive!
BTW I have shown your ‘comments regarding Relative Identity (another blog) to friends here in Zimbabwe , and they are aghast at the foolishness of the whole concept.
As you say ‘one brain or self-consciousness is functionally dominant and begets another, while the third emerges via spiration” Yes !!! and one calls another “The only true God’!!!
One is reminded of the little boy who shouted out from the crowd “The Emperor’s got no clothes”!
Every Blessing
John
!
I had said:
“Thom Stark once pointed out that if theologians and bible scholars were to stop leaning on the writings of the Fathers and instead seek to interpret the biblical texts in relation to Christ then they’d reach very different conclusions.”
My, my, I left out part of that sentence! This is what I meant to say:
Thom Stark once pointed out that if theologians and bible scholars were to stop leaning on the writings of the Fathers — which are too late to tell us what the original authors meant – and would instead seek to interpret the biblical texts in relation to Christ in light of the intertestamental Jewish literature then they’d reach very different conclusions.
Thanks, John, I appreciate your comments as well. BTW, it appears that Marian Hillar has offered argumentation/evidence to support the view that the Trinity emerged via syncretism in his book, “From Logos to Trinity: The Evolution of Religious Beliefs from Pythagoras to Tertullian”. You can read about the book, including a nice review by Anthony Buzzard, at Amazon, here:
http://www.amazon.com/Logos-Trinity-Evolution-Pythagoras-Tertullian/dp/1107013305/ref=la_B000APYZTC_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1413167422&sr=1-1
It’s a little expensive for me right now, but I’m going to see if I can’t obtain a copy via inter-library loan.
Thom Stark once pointed out that if theologians and bible scholars were to stop leaning on the writings of the Fathers and instead seek to interpret the biblical texts in relation to Christ then they’d reach very different conclusions. He was going to publish a book on how the Church’s teaching that Jesus is God is a distortion, but then it was pulled from Wipf & Stock’s list and they informed me that it’s no longer among their corpus of books to be published. That’s a shame, IMO. I’m not sure what happened to that project, but I suspect that Thom decided that making movies is more fulfilling, at least for now.
Sean,
Yes, the Hurtado view that Trinitarian thinking emerged within a few years of Christ’s death is fairly widely held – particularly among Protestant evangelicals. It is asserted that a plain reading of Philippians 2 and a short Christian hymn based thereon ‘proves’ this.
I am pursuaded that Philippians 2 vs 1-11 are about the Second Adam who did not seek to equate himself to God , but humbled himself and became obedient – even to death on a cross.
You will recall a lively debate about a year ago , on the subject of ‘worship’ and I thought that there was a fairly general consensus that there are different ‘types’ of worship – some to idols, some to false gods – but a very specific type of worship afforded to the Lord God Almighty (latreou)
I agree with your use of the word ‘syncratic’ in the context that the Apostles were speaking to two very different audiances and trying to show that there really was very little that divided them.
I find your responses me very helpful!
Blessings
John
John
“Don’t you think that the Doctrine of the Trinity is just an idiosyncratic reaction to the very unique circumstances which prevailed during the first few centuries.? I’m referring particularly to the fact that Christ, a Jew, was preaching to two very different audiances.”
My tentative belief is that the Trinity doctrine emerged via syncretism, which view is probably less popular today than it was previously. It seems that many people believe that Larry Hurtado’s work invalidates that view, but I suspect that this flows from the assumption that to prove that Jesus was worshiped by the earliest Christians is ipso facto to prove that the Trinity was indeed necessary. While I disagree with Dale’s view that Jesus was and should be worshiped, I think he has demonstrated very clearly that the worship of Jesus does not necessitate the conclusion that he is God.
Dale
Don’t you think that the Doctrine of the Trinity is just an idiosyncratic reaction to the very unique circumstances which prevailed during the first few centuries.? I’m referring particularly to the fact that Christ, a Jew, was preaching to two very different audiances.
I’ll be that were we to discover another inhabited planet with a population of (say) one million inhabitants and we were to give each inhabitant a Bible, written in the ‘local’ language , that the
doctrine of the Tinity would not emerge – not in a million years.
I live in Africa , in a country which is predominantly Christian, and encounter people each day who would shame many westerners in their devotion to their Christian faith. However, I rarely encounter people who would profess to understand the doctrine.of the Trinity.
I have conducted a couple of ‘snap’ surveys and find that most of those who think that deeply, would say that Christ is ‘the word of God’ – but not God. By the ‘word of God’ they are meaning ‘the one through whom God speaks’.
I have challenged many missionaries and evangelists on this point and they admit that dare not press this matter too deeply !
The churches are happy to call such persons ‘Christian’.
More recently I am encountering an interesting phenomenon among the more ‘educated’ people.
Many of these are drifting away from the denominations of the missionaries, to home-grown ‘Apostolic ‘churches . Many of these are moving towards a rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity.
I am reminded that a very similar thing happened in the 620s CE in the Middle East!
Every Blessing
John
Comments are closed.