Interesting Quotes on the Doctrine of the Trinity
"The doctrine of the Trinity is a post-scriptural attempt to bring to coherent expression diverse affirmations about God..." -- Grolier Encyclopedia
"The Chalcedonian formula [the council's decision declaring Jesus both God and man] makes genuine humanity impossible. The conciliar definition says that Jesus is true man. But if there are two natures in him, it is clear which will dominate. And Jesus becomes immediately very different from us. He is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. He knows the past, present and future...He knows exactly what everyone is thinking and going to do. This is far from ordinary human experience. Jesus is tempted but cannot sin because he is God. What kind of temptation is this? It has little in common with the kinds of struggles we are familiar with." To Know and Follow Jesus, Roman Catholic writer Thomas Hart (Paulist Press, 1984), 46.
"It is exegesis of a mischievous if pious sort that would find the doctrine of the Trinity in the plural form elohim [God]" ("God," Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics)
Historian Will Durant: "Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. . . . From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity." And in the book Egyptian Religion, Siegfried Morenz notes: "The trinity was a major preoccupation of Egyptian theologians . . . Three gods are combined and treated as a single being, addressed in the singular. In this way the spiritual force of Egyptian religion shows a direct link with Christian theology."
"The New Testament does not actually speak of tri-unity. We seek this in vain in the triadic formulae of the N.T."—Kittels Theological Dictionary of the N.T.
"The doctrine of the Trinity has in the West come into increasing question...there has for long been a tendency to treat the doctrine as a problem rather than as encapsulating the heart of the Christian Gospel."
The Promise of the Trinity, Gunton, p.31
"Despite their orthodox confession of the Trinity, Christians are, in their practical life, almost mere monotheists. We must be willing to admit that, should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged." Karl Rahner, The Trinity, J. Donceel, trans, p.10
"There was no theoretical framework in Scripture that explained the relationship of the Father, Son and Spirit. No Old Testament author addressed the issue of a separate being, the Holy Spirit, and its ('her,' in Hebrew) relationship to the Father; the Spirit of God was God's 'spirit' or breath that carried his power. Likewise, no New Testament author addressed the interrelationship of Father, Son, and Spirit. There are triadic formulations in the New Testament, such as the command to baptize "in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit" (Matt 28:19), and the prayer of the blessing that "the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all" (2 Cor. 13:14). But all of these have to do with how God relates to the church. None explains how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit relate to each other in essence. That task fell to a particularly influential group of 'heretics' - Gnostic Christians of the second century." The River of God, by Gregory J. Riley, p. 62
"Why have Christians generally failed to grasp the grammar of the Trinity as the "fundamental grammar of Christian theology"? Why the "strange paucity of Trinitarian hymns in our modern repertoire of praise"? Or for that matter, in evangelical praise songs, hymns and choruses" Christianity Today, April 28 , 1997, p.28
"Whatever else might be said about the doctrine of the Trinity, it is safe to say that in the history of Christian doctrine there has been no single, universally accepted articulation of the specific way in which it is to be understood. Every attempt to articulate the doctrine has had its detractors and has been viewed as erring in one direction or the other. Articulations stressing the unity of God to the relative de-emphasis of divine threeness have most often been labelled modalist or Sabellian: whereas, those stressing the threefold existence of deity to the relative neglect of divine unity have been castigated as as tri-theistic or polytheistic. It has seemed next to impossible to achieve a balanced presentation of the triune nature of God that is both relatively detailed and also acceptable to most sincere Christians with theological sensitivity." Logic, Morris, pp. 207, 208
". . . it is a remarkable fact, that no single passage or verse of the Old or New Testament is received as an assured proof-text of the trinity by the unanimous consent of all Trinitarian writers: some ground their faith on one passage, some on another."
A Religious Encyclopædia: or Dictionary of Biblical, Historical, Doctrinal, and Practical Theology, Based on the Real-Encyklopädie of Herzog, Plitt, and Hauck."
"But how can such weak creatures ever take in so strange, so difficult and so abtruse a doctrine as this [the Trinity], in the explication and defence wherof multitudes of men, even men of learning and piety, have lost themselves in infinite subtleties of dispute and endless mazes of darkness? And can this strange and perplexing notion of three real persons going up to make one true God be so necessary and important a part of that Christian doctrine, which, in the Old Testament and the New, is represented as so plain and so easy, even to the meanest understandings."
William G. Eliot, Discourses on the Doctrines of Christianity (American Unitarian Association, Boston,1877), pp. 97, 100
The Eastern Theologian John of Damascus (c. 675-749) once used a very curios argument in favour of icons...John replied to the criticism are unscriptural by admitting the fact, and adding that you will not find in scripture the Trinity, of homousian or the two natures of Christ either. But we know those doctrines are true. And so, having acknowledged that icons, the Trinity and the incarnation are innovations, John goes on to urge his reader to hold fast to them as venerable traditions delivered to us by the Fathers...He was not the only one to use this argument: Theodore the Studite (759-826) adopted it too. It brings out an odd feature to Christianity, its mutability and speed with which innovations come to be vested with religious solemnity to such an extent that anyone who questions them find himself regarded as the dangerous innovator and heretic." The Christ of Christendom by Don Cupitt, as used in The Myth of God Incarnate, p. 133
"Jesus retorted, "Get away from me Satan!, it is written: 'Jehovah your God you should worship and him alone you should serve.'" Matthew 4:10 21st Century NT
Paul, of course, did not have an explicit doctrine of the Trinity, and he often appears to operate with a subordinationist christology (cf. 15:28)." (Richard Hays, 1 Corinthians, page 192).
"The doctrine of God as existing in three persons and one substance is not demonstrable by logic or by scriptural proofs.”--Hastings Dict. of The Bible -Revised edition by F.C. Grant & H.H. Rowley
In the preface to Edward Gibbon's History of Christianity, we read: "If Paganism was conquered by Christianity, it is equally true that Christianity was corrupted by Paganism. The pure Deism of the first Christians . . . was changed, by the Church of Rome, into the incomprehensible dogma of the trinity. Many of the pagan tenets, invented by the Egyptians and idealized by Plato, were retained as being worthy of belief."
"We must not contend that the Nicene Creed looks like the New Testament. The creed is an exercise in systematic theology. Although there are portions of the New Testament which are highly theological, the one thing we cannot say is that any of it is systematic theology as it was practiced three hundred years later."
Beisner, E. Calvin's "God in Three Persons." (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale House Publishers, c1984), footnote 7, p. 145. BT109 .B45 1984 / 84-051210.
"Throughout the Jewish scriptures, God never "screened or veiled his divine nature." In fact, Isaiah unequivocally proclaimed that the Almighty did not reveal Himself in darkness or in a hidden or veiled fashion. In Isaiah 45:19 the prophet, speaking in the Almighty's name, declares that, 'I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob's descendants, "Seek Me in vain." I, the Lord, speak the truth; I declare what is right.' Although the belief in the unity of God is taught and declared on virtually every page of the Jewish scriptures, the doctrine of the Trinity is never mentioned anywhere throughout the entire corpus of the Hebrew Bible. This is understandable when we consider that primitive Christianity, in its earliest stages, was still monotheistic. The authors of the New Testament were completely unaware that the church they had fashioned would eventually embrace a pagan deification of a triune deity. Although the worship of a three-part godhead was well known and fervently venerated throughout the Roman Empire and beyond in religious systems such as Hinduism and Mithraism, it was quite distant from the heretical Judaism out of which Christianity emerged. However, when the Greek and Roman rather than the Hebrew began to dominate the church, it created a theological disaster from which Christendom has never recovered. By the end of the fourth century, the doctrine of the Trinity was firmly in place as a central tenet of the church, and strict monotheism was formally rejected by Vatican councils in Nicea and Constantinople." Rabbi Singer
"Only one, the Father, can absolutely be termed the ‘only true God,’ not at the same time Christ (who is not even in I John 5:20 the true God…). Jesus, in unity with the Father, works as his commissioner (John 10:30), and is His representative (John 14:9, 10) (Professor H.A.W. Meyer, Commentary on the New Testament. The quotation is from his comment on John 17:3).
"It was impossible for the Apostles to identify Christ with Jehovah. Psalm 110:1 and Malachi 3:1 prevented this" (R.A Bigg, D.D. Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Oxford, in International Critical Commentary on I Peter).
"A classic contrast is between [John] 10:30, 'The Father and I are one,' and 14:28, 'The Father is greater than I.' It is the perdurance of such lower christological statements which shows that the Johannine community had not made a rival God out of Jesus, but it also shows that the christology of John still stands at quite a distance from the christology of Nicaea wherein the Father is not greater than the Son." (R.E. Brown "The Johannine Community" 53)
"During these years [the first three centuries of Christianity's existence], most Christians vaguely thought of Jesus as God; yet they did not actually think of him in the same way as they thought of God the Father. They seldom addressed prayers to him, and thought of him somehow as second to God--divine, yes, but not fully God" (Robert Wilken, The Myth of Christian Beginnings, 179).
"Does this mean that early Christian theology was "nothing but" paganism with a biblical accent? Or, to paraphrase Numenius, was Christianity no more than Plato with a faint Palestinian accent?...We should not say it was "no more than" the sum of its parts, but the reality of the pagan environment cannot be neglected." Gods and the One God, Robert M. Grant, p. 170
"Christendom has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it" (Soren Kierkegaard, cited in Time magazine, Dec. 16, 1946, p. 64).
Emil Brunner, in Dogmatics I:205, writes: "On the triadic passages in the N. T., see below. The only trinitarian passage which is found in some ancient versions of the Bible (1 John 5:7) is regarded as not genuine."
"The attempt to superimpose these three abstract categories [Father, Son, and Holy Spirit] on the Godhead and then to claim a Trinity has been discovered, is misleading in the extreme. It is no genuine Trinity, but merely a useful and at times quite penetrating analysis of three aspects of what is involved in making something. But there is no real reason to stop at three, nor is there any validity in isolating idea, energy, and power from a complex process with an indefinite number of terms" (CC Richardson, The Doctrine of the Trinity, 139-140).
"In his theological interpretation of the idea of God, Arius was interested in maintaining a formal understanding of the oneness of God. In defense of the oneness of God, he was obliged to dispute the sameness of essence of the Son and the Holy Spirit with God the Father, as stressed by the theologians of the Neoplatonically influenced Alexandrian school. From the outset, the controversy between both parties took place upon the common basis of the Neoplatonic concept of substance, which was foreign to the New Testament itself. It is no wonder that the continuation of the dispute on the basis of the metaphysics of substance likewise led to concepts that have no foundation in the New Testament--such as the question of the sameness of essence (homoousia) or similarity of essence (homoiousia) of the divine persons." Brittanica.com
"The three-in-one/one-in-three mystery of Father, Son and Holy Ghost made tritheism official. The subsequent almost-deification of the Virgin Mary made it quatrotheism . . . Finally, cart-loads of saints raised to quarter-deification turned Christianity into plain old-fashioned polytheism. By the time of the Crusades, it was the most polytheistic religion to ever have existed, with the possible exception of Hinduism. This untenable contradiction between the assertion of monotheism and the reality of polytheism was dealt with by accusing other religions of the Christian fault. The Church - Catholic and later Protestant - turned aggressively on the two most clearly monotheistic religions in view - Judaism and Islam - and persecuted them as heathen or pagan. "
"The external history of Christianity consists largely of accusations that other religions rely on the worship of more than one god and therefore not the true God. These pagans must therefore be converted, conquered and/or killed for their own good in order that they benefit from the singularity of the Holy Trinity, plus appendages." --
The Doubter's Companion (John Ralston Saul)
"In brief, the ante-Nicene Fathers taught the real distinction and divinity of the three persons . . . but in their attempts at a philosophical interpretation of the Dogma, the ante-Nicene Fathers used certain expressions which would favor sudordinationism. In the late 17th century, the Socinians cited these expressions that the ante-Nicene tradition agreed rather with Arius than with Athanasius . . . Catholic theologians commonly defend the orthodoxy of these early Fathers, while admitting that certain of their expressions were inaccurate and eventually dangerous." -- Colliers Encyclopedia
"You simply simply cannot find the doctrine of the Trinity set out anywhere in the Bible. St Paul has the highest view of Jesus' role and person, but nowhere does he call him God. Nor does Jesus himself explicitly claim to be the second person of the Trinity, wholly equal to his heavenly Father." --
For Christ's Sake by Tom Harpur (Anglican Priest).
"No historical fact is better established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity . . . Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the will of the Athanasius. The hocus-pocus phantasm of a God like another Cerberus, with one body and three heads, had its birth and growth in the blood of thousands of martyrs . . . The Athanasian paradox that one is three, and three but one, is so incomprehensible to the human mind, that no candid man can say he has any idea of it, and how can he believe what presents no idea? He who thinks he does, only deceives himself. He proves, also, that man, once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such person, gullibility which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck." -- Thomas Jefferson: Letter to James Smith, Dec. 8, 1822 For more Letters from T. Jefferson see:
http://www.nidlink.com/~bobhard/tjletters.html
"The doctrine is not taught explicitly in the New Testament, where the word God almost invariably refers to the Father" -- MS Encarta 99
"The word itself does not occur in the Bible...The explicit formula was thus formulated in the post-biblical period, although the early stages of its development can be seen in the NT. Attempts to trace the origin still earlier (to the OT literature) cannot be supported by historical-critical scholarship, and these attempts must be understood as retrospective interpretations of this earlier corpus of Scripture in the light of later theological developments." The Harper Collins Study Bible Dictionary
"We are judged to be heretics because we can no longer believe in essence, person, nature, incarnation, as they want us to believe. If these things are necessary for salvation, it is certain that no poor peasant Christian be saved, because he could never understand them in all his life." -- Francis David (1510-79)
Christ's deity was "repugnant not only to sound Reason, but also to the holy Scriptures." -- Fostus Socinus (1539-1604)
Catholic theologian Hans Küng in Christianity and the World Religions, "Even well-informed Muslims simply cannot follow, as the Jews thus far have likewise failed to grasp, the idea of the Trinity . . . The distinctions made by the doctrine of the Trinity between one God and three hypostases do not satisfy Muslims, who are confused, rather than enlightened, by theological terms derived from Syriac, Greek, and Latin. Muslims find it all a word game . . . Why should anyone want to add anything to the notion of God's oneness and uniqueness that can only dilute or nullify that oneness and uniqueness?"
"The word Trinity is not found in the Bible . . . It did not find a place formally in the theology of the church till the 4th century." -- The Illustrated Bible Dictionary
And a Catholic authority says that the Trinity "is not . . . directly and immediately [the] word of God." -- New Catholic Encyclopedia
The Catholic Encyclopedia also says: "In Scripture there is as yet no single term by which the Three Divine Persons are denoted together. The word [tri'as] (of which the Latin trinitas is a translation) is first found in Theophilus of Antioch about A. D. 180 . . . Shortly afterwards it appears in its Latin form of trinitas in Tertullian." However, this is no proof in itself that Tertullian taught the Trinity. The Catholic work Trinitas - A Theological Encyclopedia of the Holy Trinity, for example, notes that some of Tertullian's words were later used by others to describe the Trinity. But then it states: "But hasty conclusions cannot be drawn from usage, for he does not apply the words to Trinitarian theology."
The Encyclopedia of Religion says: "Theologians agree that the New Testament also does not contain an explicit doctrine of the Trinity."
Jesuit Fortman: "The New Testament writers . . . give us no formal or formulated doctrine of the Trinity, no explicit teaching that in one God there are three co-equal divine persons. . . . Nowhere do we find any trinitarian doctrine of three distinct subjects of divine life and activity in the same Godhead."
The New Encyclopædia Britannica: "Neither the word Trinity nor the explicit doctrine appears in the New Testament."
Bernhard Lohse in A Short History of Christian Doctrine: "As far as the New Testament is concerned, one does not find in it an actual doctrine of the Trinity."
Rotherham - The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology:
"The N[ew] T[estament] does not contain the developed doctrine of the Trinity."
"The Bible lacks the express declaration that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are of equal essence.", said Protestant theologian Karl Barth
Yale University Professor E. Washburn Hopkins: "To Jesus and Paul the doctrine of the trinity was apparently unknown; . . . they say nothing about it." -- Origin and Evolution of Religion.
Tom Harpur states, "As early as the 8th century, the Theologian St. John of Damascus frankly admitted what every modern critical scholar of the NT now realizes: that neither the Doctrine of the Trinity nor that of the 2 natures of Jesus Christ is explicitly set out in scripture. In fact, if you take the record as it is and avoid reading back into it the dogmatic definitions of a later age, you cannot find what is traditionally regarded as orthodox Christianity in the Bible at all." -- For Christ's Sake.
Historian Arthur Weigall: "Jesus Christ never mentioned such a phenomenon, and nowhere in the New Testament does the word 'Trinity' appear. The idea was only adopted by the Church three hundred years after the death of our Lord." -- The Paganism in Our Christianity
The New Encyclopædia Britannica: "Neither the word Trinity, nor the explicit doctrine as such, appears in the New Testament, nor did Jesus and his followers intend to contradict the Shema in the Old Testament: 'Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord' -- Deut. 6:4
. . . The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies . . . By the end of the 4th century . . . the doctrine of the Trinity took substantially the form it has maintained ever since." -- Micropædia, Vol. X, p. 126. (1976)
The New Catholic Encyclopedia states: "The formulation 'one God in three Persons' was not solidly established, certainly not fully assimilated into Christian life and its profession of faith, prior to the end of the 4th century. But it is precisely this formulation that has first claim to the title the Trinitarian dogma. Among the Apostolic Fathers, there had been nothing even remotely approaching such a mentality or perspective." - (1967), Vol. XIV, p. 299.
The Encyclopedia Americana: "Christianity derived from Judaism and Judaism was strictly Unitarian [believing that God is one person]. The road which led from Jerusalem to Nicea was scarcely a straight one. Fourth century Trinitarianism did not reflect accurately early Christian teaching regarding the nature of God; it was, on the contrary, a deviation from this teaching." -- (1956), Vol. XXVII, p. 294L.
"It is fair to say that no one in the first century was a Trinitarian as the doctrine was later defined in the creeds of the fourth century." p. 55 The River of God by G.J. Riley
The Nouveau Dictionnaire Universel, "The Platonic trinity, itself merely a rearrangement of older trinities dating back to earlier peoples, appears to be the rational philosophic trinity of attributes that gave birth to the three hypostases or divine persons taught by the Christian churches . . . This Greek philosopher's [Plato, fourth century B.C.E.] conception of the divine trinity . . . can be found in all the ancient [pagan] religions." -- (Paris, 1865-1870), edited by M. Lachâtre, Vol. 2, p. 1467.
"The belief as so defined was reached only in the 4th and 5th centuries AD and hence is not explicitly and formally a biblical belief. The trinity of persons within the unity of nature is defined in terms of "person" and "nature: which are Gk philosophical terms; actually the terms do not appear in the Bible. The trinitarian definitions arose as the result of long controversies in which these terms and others such as "essense" and "substance" were erroneously applied to God by some theologians." Dictionary of the Bible by John L. McKenzie, S.J. p. 899
Regarding the Nicene Council and those that followed, Hans Kung in Christianity says, "The conciliar decisions plunged Chrisitianity into undreamed-of theological confusions with constant entanglements in church politics. They produced splits and sparked off a persecution of heretics unique in the history of religion. This is what Christianity became as it changed its nature from a persecuted minority to a majority persecuting others."
"Anyone who can worship a trinity and insist that his religion is a monotheism can believe anything." -- Robert A. Heinlein
