bingbagbo:
If the three persons of the Godhead are co-equal, co-eternal, and co-existent, why is it that Salvation can only be found in Jesus Christ? (Acts 4: 12)
By Denis Mercier a former Trinitarian

Because it's for that cause that He was sent, that all who believe on Him may have eternal life in Him.

Joh 3:16 For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.

bings main errors is that he doesn't believe scriptures, and constantly questions them.

Believers, those of faith, believe even what they don't understand, of that written
in the Bible.

Mat 28:19 Therefore go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,

2Co 13:14 May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.

Eph 2:18 For through Him we both have access by one Spirit to the Father

1Jn 5:7 For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.

Three persons, One God, One Spirit,
it could not be any plainer, except for them who preach false doctrine and are are blinded through unbelief.

I post here, not for bing who rejects the numerous scriptures I have posted, but for any who may get something from them.

Op needs to understand that man's limitations also affects his intellect in no small way. In other words, no man is mentally perfect hence it will be a case of chronic self-conceit to subject the acceptability or otherwise of a concept to the judgement of our intellects.["My intellect cant grasp it therefore it's a fallacy"] Especially when there are enough proofs to the contrary. When you read the epistles, you will notice the use of the words-by revelation: Galatians 1:12, Galatians 2:2, Ephesians 3:3- meaning there is only one way the understanding of these things can be grasped. Now, logical explanations can come after revelation but not before.

The op appears to be going about this using his intellect based on knowledge accumulated from nature and that's where the mistake of many lies.

2 Peter: "even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them"(2P. 2:1-AV)

The trick used by trinitarians to try and prove three Gods are three persons, is their use of segmentalism. They will take segments of Scripture, segments of a text, segments of an incident, out of the context of the whole Bible, and try to make them say what the entire Bible refutes. It is said that heresy in its first generation crawls, in the next walks, and in the next runs.

This characterizes the pagan trinity heresy of Nicaea where after birth it crawled back to the different regions and became law; Jerome was then hired to interpolate and incorporated such language into the Vulgate where it was next walked all over Europe by the Monks and interpolationist scribes; and then Priests and Preachers ran to all the world to pollute it before the Lord could reach the masses with his message of truth and salvation by the few persecuted and dicimated remaining Monarchist.

Rome and her daughters have persecuted Monarchist, tortured, multilated, and confiscated their homes and property. They have murdered those who would not recant the monotheism of the Scriptures. And, out of respect for that righteous blood, a true Monarchian will never conceed to trinitarianism, Papalism, or Creeds which were used as their law and authority to kill our people, and allow descendents of such to parade upon our platforms and speak behind our Pulpits. And, only the dead can forgive this injustice against their faith in Jesus Christ as their God and Saviour!

There are these and other attacks upon Oneness Apostolics who hold to the Monarchian doctrine of One God. Just because someone makes a claim that the trinity of three Gods is true, and just because Papal Rome and her Protestant daughters are the One Catholic Church based upon that confession, DOES NOT MAKE THEM RIGHT IN THEOLOGY or IDEALOGY.

Abuse us if you will, but to us there is one God, and as Jesus said in Revelation 1:8, he is the LORD GOD. we are proud to be persecuted, denied, and hated for the name of Jesus Christ.

The three branches of the Catholic Church that grew out of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD, are the Eastern orthodox Greek Catholic Church, The Roman Catholic Church, and Protestant Catholic Churches. The one identifying doctrine that makes all of these Catholic, is the mystery of the trinity doctrine and trinity baptism. This is the cult captivity of millions. The difference between the true Church that began at Jerusalem and the Catholic Nico-Latins is the Oneness Monarchian Message.

Few realize that the trinity doctrine that was adopted at the Council of Nicaea and thereafter molded into several Creeds , descends from Mystery Babylon via Greek philosophy in Plato's theories, and from Jewish Gnosticism, not from the Bible. Yet the Catholics all teach, that if a person does not believe in the trinity doctrine of Mystery Babylon, that person can not be saved. According to them, you and I can not be saved unless we believe Greek philosophy and Jewish Gnosticism that has reinterpreted God different from how God identified himself. This is wrong. Jesus did not ordain philosophers or Gnostic mystics, he ordained Apostles to be the authorities of Church doctrine. One great difference between the Arians, the Trinity-arians, Greek Plato philosophy, Mystery Babylon, and the true Apostolic Christians, is the Oneness Monarchian Message.

All Pagan religions from the time of Babylon, have adopted in one form or another a trinity doctrine or a triad or trinity of gods. In Babylon it was Nimrod, Semiramas, and Tammuz; In Egypt it was Osiris, Isis, and Horus; within Israel pagan gnosticism it was Kether, Hokhmah, and Binah; In Plato's philosophy it was the[b] Unknown Father, Nous/Logos, and the world soul.[/b] But in Old Testament Judaism there was only One God, a numerical ONE. The difference between paganism and God's people has always been the Oneness Monarchian Message reinforced by the First Commandment that prohibits any theory of a plurality.

What God Says About His Oneness

EXO 20:3 Thou shalt have n[b]o other gods before me.[/b]

ISA 45:22 Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else.

ISA 44:6 Thus saith the LORD the King of Israel, and his redeemer the LORD of hosts; I am the first, and I am the last; and beside me there is no God.

ISA 46:9 Remember the former things of old: for I am God, and there is none else; I am God, and there is none like me.

ISA 44:8 Fear ye not, neither be afraid: have not I told thee from that time, and have declared it? ye are even my witnesses. Is there a God beside me? yea, there is no God; I know not any.

REV 1:8 I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

The cult that arose in Babylon and spread its cult tentacles throughout the world was trinitarian (Two Babylons, by Alexander Hislop). At first, this doctrine was merely humanism, man making himself god. The first humanism trinity of record to be setup and worshiped as gods, was that of Nimrod, Simeramus, and Tammuz. These are in the Old Testament in the Canaanite language identified as Baal, Ashtoreth, and Tammuz. At the dispersion of the people at the Tower of Babel, this trinity doctrine of humanism was spread all over the world. Each religion of all the pagan religions held two common traits: 1.) A trinity of gods and; 2.) These were in a form of human gods.

These consisted of a man (sacred husband-king), a woman (sacred wife-queen), and a sacred child (son-prince). In Mystery Babylon, the entire body of religious beliefs about God, good and evil, morals, and worship, were reinterpreted with a spiritualist view that we now call mysticism or the left hand path of the cult. In most instances everything contained in the ancient orthodox faith of the Patriarchs was reversed, reinterpreted, or corrupted.

To prove the singular is the intent of one-God in Genesis 1:1 the verb is singular which identifies the subject as being singular. Although trinitarians do not like it and say the Jews are telling lies, the ancient Godly Israelites always understood God to be one person, a numerical ONE and not three. They understood the plural Elohim to speak of the majesty of intensity and his attributes of power. And for any trinitarian to say the plural means *GODS*, then let them translate it that way and see what a mess they make of the Scriptures. Even staunch trinitarians know this would be a pollution and sacrilege. T[b]he great schema: Hear O Israel the LORD our God is one LORD, settles the argument.[/b] But within Mystery Babylon the skilled scribes of the occult would not be so easily exposed and rebuked by Jewish doctrine. No, they would live by the reinterpretations of Nimrod and his gnosticism and impregnate the world with his doctrines. And thus we have Ministers and people today who believe in the trinitarian doctrine of Mystery Babylon and don't know it is a philosophy of man and not a true doctrine of God.

Within Nimrod's Mystery Babylon eventually came the philosophy that the trinity was a unity of persons whose perfect agreement upon all things, made them one. They were one in agreement and this mutual consent merged into the idea of the one unity of essence. The trinity in unity doctrine was thus stated in the cult as the one essence or nature of the three. As it relates to Nimrod, Simeramus, and Tammuz, they were one in essence, the essence being identified as human gods. When these human gods became deified, it was accepted these three gods were in reality reincarnated avatars or spiritual guides.

It was taught that these three deceased gods were in fact not only once human but were actually sparks of the cosmic soul of one essence. This is interpreted within the occult as the one. This is interpreted as saying that the cosmos is God and man is a microcosm of the cosmos, in reincarnation. The idea of their karma is the perfecting of the soul and merging back into the unity and perfection of the one. This is alleged to rule all human affairs. Thus the zodiac becomes the rule of the one god of the cosmos upon and charting the human purpose.

Within this occult mysticism, the spirits within Nimrod, Simeramus, and Tammuz were the real essence of the cosmos that made their trinity family a unique fullness of the one pluralistic cosmos. The next step in the formation of the trinity in unity concept, was to teach the idea of emanation. The doctrine of emanation is the pantheistic concept behind the teachings of evolution, all things emanate and evolve from the one source and are a part of the whole in unity and of the same substance.

The idea of emanation of a primary God making of himself another God by subdividing his person as an amoeba splits in half to form another like being, is purely pagan. From Genesis 1:1 and the words: *In the beginning God,* we have the idea of a singular God and there being none else. It is true that the Hebrew word Elohim from which we get the word *God* is a plural word. But that does not mean there are plural Gods.

From ancient time Mystery Babylon has tried to make God what he is not. The ancient Godly Jews would have never dreamed of their being more than one God. They were prohibited by the first Commandment of having a pluralistic concept or view. It was from within this revelation, in contradiction to the surrounding religions of Pagan trinitarians, that Israel worship the One LORD of the Old Testament, chanting : *Hear O Israel, the LORD our GOD is ONE LORD.*

The plural use of *us* as in let *us* make man; Let *u*s go down; were interpreted by the Jews to be God speaking to his angels. It was only after the Council of Nicaea that the Catholics fled to these verses in order to find Scriptural support and excuse for adopting Plato's trinity in unity doctrine that he borrowed from Mystery Babylon.

Theory was then based upon spiritualizing or bending toward mysticism and philosophy for its support of the great Mystery of Babylon. Except they drop the word Babylon and say only that the trinity is a great MYSTERY that no one can understand. The world is deceived to believe the trinity should be left to mystics and philosophers to interpret, exactly as they did in ancient Mystery Babylon.

The next shoe to drop is to inhibit the human mind from examining the theory, by claiming no one can understand it, it must be accepted by faith. Or as one Minister once said: "If you try to understand the trinity you will lose your mind, but if you don't believe it you will lose your soul." This from a man who preached salvation by faith and then said: "O, by the way, if you don't believe in the trinity you can never be saved." .

The purpose of this lesson, is to acquaint individuals with the side of the cult doctrine of the trinity that their Church will never tell them. The side that book writers try to exclude from their reference materials.

This one doctrine makes the Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodist, Pentecostals, Episcopals, Charismatics, Presbyterians, Armstrongites, and several more groups and cults, ALL ONE PEOPLE in their basic statement of faith. And the statement to which they subscribe is the doctrine of the trinity however they explain it. Of course the Jehovah's Witnesses deny the trinity as taught by Rome but they have their own trinity of God the Father, the Archangel Jesus-Michael, and the Archangel Lucifer-Devil.

As the Nicaea trinity has two brothers in the trinity, so the Jehovah's Witnesses have a two-brother trinity of Jesus and the devil. Today the Nicaea trinitarians deny the two-brother doctrine, of Jesus and the Holy Spirit being brothers. But what else could the doctrine teach: The Father begets the son, the Holy Spirit proceeds (emanates from) the Father and the Son, hence the Holy Spirit is of the Father and a brother to the Son, or else, the Holy Spirit is the Son of the Father and the Son. God is not the author of confusion.

The clear teaching of the Old Testament is that there is one God, undivided as to his person and that he made man in his IMAGE and in his LIKENESS. That we are all ONE PERSON having a three-fold composition of body, soul, and spirit, but still ONE PERSON, is the exact picture of God. Our soul is manifest in a body. God is manifest in a body. God is one. Jesus is God by virtue of his dual nature. God in Christ; the Father in the Son; Emmanuel God with us; The LORD who ye seek shall come to his Temple; In that day, they shall say this is our God, we have waited for him.

If Jesus is not God, the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last, then he is not God at all. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one God. Not one God in unity or three Gods or even three persons, but ONE GOD. *When ye have seen me ye have seen the Father.* Who is antichrist but he that denieth the Father and the Son (It does not say believe in the Father separate from the Son). When a person confesses that the Father and the Son are the same God in manifestation, they are called heretics by the Catholic Church and Protestant Catholics.

But we believe John 1:1 against all gnosticism however it raises a protest:

In the beginning was the WORD and the WORD was with GOD and the WORD was GOD (John 1:1).

Should we rephrase this to suit trinitarians who teach that the WORD is the second person of the trinity who was with God the Father, the first person of the trinity, here is what we would get by changing the word God to Father like they want:

In the beginning was the WORD and the WORD was with the FATHER and the WORD was the FATHER!

Wow! ...now, how can they deny what they make the verse to say? By this change in their own language, the Word and the Father are the same God exactly what we are teaching here.

read some remarks made by trinitarians about their own doctrine.

"The necessity to formulate the doctrine was thrust upon the Church by forces from without, and it was, in particular, its faith in the deity of Christ, and the necessity to defend it, that first compelled the Church to face the duty of formulating a full doctrine of the Trinity for its rule of faith" (New Bible Dictionary, J. D. Douglas & F. F. Bruce, Trinity, p 1298).

"In the immediate post New Testament period of the Apostolic Fathers no attempt was made to work out the God-Christ (Father-Son) relationship in ontological terms. By the end of the fourth century, and owing mainly to the challenge posed by various heresies, theologians went beyond the immediate testimony of the Bible and also beyond liturgical and creedal expressions of trinitarian faith to the ontological trinity of coequal persons "within" God. The shift is from function to ontology, from the "economic trinity" (Father, Son, and Spirit in relation to us) to the "immanent" or "essential Trinity" (Father, Son, and Spirit in relation to each other). It was prompted chiefly by belief in the divinity of Christ and later in the divinity of the Holy Spirit, but even earlier by the consistent worship of God in a trinitarian pattern and the practice of baptism into the threefold name of God. By the close of the fourth century the orthodox teaching was in place: God is one nature, three persons (mia ousia, treis hupostaseis)" (The Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade, Trinity, Vol 15, p53-57).

read some remarks made by trinitarians about their own doctrine.

"In the New Testament affirmations about the Son were largely functional and soteriological, and stressed what the Son is to us. Arians willingly recited these affirmations but read into them their own meaning. To preclude this Arian abuse of the Scripture affirmations Nicea transposed these Biblical affirmations into ontological formulas, and gathered the multiplicity of scriptural affirmations, titles, symbols, images, and predicates about the Son into a single affirmation that the Son is not made but born of the Father, true God from true God, and consubstantial with the Father" (The Triune God, Edmund J. Fortman, p 66-70).

"Economic and essential trinity:- (a) The transition from the Trinity of experience to the Trinity of dogma is describable in other terms as the transition from the economic or dispensational Trinity [Greek] to the essential, immanent or ontological Trinity [Greek]. At first the Christian faith was not Trinitarian in the a strictly ontological reference. It was not so in the apostolic and sub-apostolic ages, as reflected in apostolic the NT and other early Christian writings. Nor was it so even in the age of the Christian apologists. And even Tertullian, who founded the nomenclature of the orthodox doctrine, knew as little of an ontological Trinity as did the apologists; his still the economic or relative conception of the Johannine and Pauline theology. So Harnack holds, and he says further that the whole history of Christological and Trinitarian dogma from Athanasius to Augustine is the history of the displacement of the Logos-conception by that of the Son, of the substitution of the immanent and absolute Trinity for the economic and relative. In any case the orthodox doctrine in its developed form is a Trinity of essence rather than of manifestation, as having to do in the first instance with the subjective rather than the objective Being of God. And, just because these two meanings of the Trinity-the theoretical and the practical, as they might also be described-are being sharply distinguished in modern Christian thought, it might be well if the term 'Trinity' were employed to designate the Trinity of revelation or the doctrine of the threefold self-manifestation of God), and the term ‘Triunity' (cf. Germ. Dreienigkeit) Adopted as the designation of the essential Trinity (or the doctrine of the tri-personal nature of God)" (Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, James Hastings, Trinity, p 461).

"Of course the doctrine of our Lord's divinity itself partly implies and partly recommends the doctrine of the Trinity ... First, the Creeds of that early day make no mention in their letter of the Catholic doctrine at all. They make mention indeed of a Three; but that there is any mystery in the doctrine, that the Three are One, that They are coequal, coeternal, all increate, all omnipotent, all incomprehensible, is not stated and never could be gathered from them. Of course we believe that they imply it, or rather intend it" (Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman, a cardinal by Pope Leo III in 1879, 1878, p40-42).

"The ideas implicit in these early catechedical and liturgical formulae, as in the New Testament writers' use of the same dyadic and triadic patterns, represent a pre-reflective, pre-theological phase of Christian belief. It was out of the raw material thus provided by the preaching, worshiping Church that theologians had to construct their more sophisticated accounts of the Christian doctrine of the Godhead" (J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, p 90).

"First, it is important to note that the doctrine of the Trinity does not go back to non-Christian sources [this is his opinion], as has sometimes been supposed in the past. There has been no lack of attempts to find the initial form of the doctrine of the Trinity in Plato, or in Hinduism, or in Parsiism. All such attempts may be regarded today as having floundered [again his opinion refuted below]. It is another question, of course, whether or not the church, in developing the doctrine of the Trinity [why develop something if it already existed?], had recourse to certain thought forms already present in the philosophical and religious environment, in order that, with the help of these, it might give its own faith clear intellectual expression [see an admission of borrowing pagan philosophy]. This question must definitely be answered in the affirmative. In particular cases the appropriation of this concept or that can often be proved. Unfortunately, however, it is true that particularly in reference to the beginnings of the doctrine of the Trinity there is still much uncertainty. In this area[b] final clarity has not yet been achieved. As far as the New Testament is concerned, one does not find in it an actual doctrine of the Trinity.[/b] This does not mean very much, however, for generally speaking the New Testament is less intent upon setting forth certain doctrines than it is upon proclaiming the kingdom of God, a kingdom that dawns in and with the person of Jesus Christ. At the same time, however, there are in the New Testament the rudiments of a concept of God that was susceptible of further development and clarification, along doctrinal lines [his opinion]. ... Speaking first of the person of Jesus Christ ... In other passages of the New Testament the predicate "God" is without a doubt applied to Christ" (A Short History of Christian Doctrine, Bernard Lohse, 1966, p37-39).

AND THESE ARE TRINITARIANS

More from trinitarians themselves

"It is a good thing to examine the revelation that God made to the Jewish people in the Old Testament. We shall not find in it a lesson on the trinity--there is none [Twentieth Century Encyclopedia of Catholicism, Vol. 20, What Is The Trinity, Bernard Piault]."

"In the book A Statement of Reasons, Andrews Norton says of the Trinity: 'We can trace the history of this doctrine, and discover its source, not in the Christian revelation, but in the Platonic philosophy . . . The Trinity is not a doctrine of Christ and his Apostles, but a fiction of the school of the later Platonists" (A Statement of Reasons, Andrews Norton, 1872, Fifth edition, American Unitarian Association, Boston, MA, p 94, 104).

"What does the Old Testament tell us of God? It tells us there is one God, a wonderful God of life and love and righteousness and power and glory and mystery, who is the creator and lord of the whole universe, who is intensely concerned with the tiny people of Israel. It tells us of His Word, Wisdom. Spirit, of the Messieh He will send, of a Son of Man and a Suffering Servant to come. But it tells us nothing explicitly or by necessary implication of a Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit." "But nowhere do we find any trinitarian doctrine of three distinct subjects of divine life and activity in the same Godhead" (The Triune God, Edmund Fortman, pp 6, 15).

"The Bible does not teach the doctrine of the trinity. Neither the word trinity itself, nor such language as one in three, three in one, one essence or substance or three persons, is biblical language. The language of the doctrine is the language of the ancient Church, taken not from the Bible but from classical Greek philosophy [Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr., Christian Doctrine, p 92]."


"There is no evidence the Apostles of Jesus ever heard of a trinity [H. G. Wells, Outline of History, 1920 Edition, p 499]."

"The word trinity is not found in the Bible [The Illustrated Bible Dictionary]."

"The doctrine of the Trinity is considered beyond the grasp of human reasoning [The Encyclopedia Americana]."

"It was at this stage that Constantine made his momentous suggestion. Might not the relationship of Son to Father be expressed by the term homoousios ("of the same substance" ). Its use, however, by the Sabellian bishops of Libya had been condemned by Dionysius of Alexandria in the 260s, and, in a different sense, its use by Paul of Samosata bad been condemned by the Council of Antioch in 268. It was thus a "loaded" word as well as being unscriptural. Why Constantine put it forward we do not know. The possibility is that once again he was prompted by Hosius, and he may have been using it as a "translation" of the traditional view held in the West, that the Trinity was composed of "Three Persons in one substance," without inquiring further into the meaning of these terms. The Emperor bad spoken, and no one dared touch the creed during his lifetime. The great majority of the Eastern bishops found themselves in a false position" (The Rise of Christianity, 1985, W.H.C. Frend, p140-141).

"Because the Trinity is such an important part of later Christian doctrine, it is striking that the term does not appear in the New Testament. [/b]Likewise, the [b]developed concept of three coequal partners in the Godhead found in later creedal formulations cannot be clearly detected within the confines of the canon. Since the Christians have come to worship Jesus as a god ... Matthew 28.19 ... Matthew records a special connection between God the Father and Jesus the Son (e.g., 11.27), but he falls short of claiming that Jesus is equal with God. It is John's gospel that suggests the idea of equality between Jesus and God ... While there are other New Testament texts where God, Jesus, and the Spirit are referred to in the same passage (e.g., Jude 20-21), it is important to avoid reading the Trinity into places where it does not appear. An example is 1 Peter 1.1-2" (Oxford Companion to the Bible, Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, Trinity, p 782).

"The trinity is not directly and immediately the Word of God [New Catholic Encyclopedia]."

"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 conception of the divine trinity ... can be found in all the ancient [pagan] religions" (French Nouveau Dictionnaire Universel [New Universal Dictionary], Vol. 2, p. 1467).

"The doctrine of the holy trinity is not taught in the Old Testament [New Catholic Encyclopedia]."

"Without abandoning our principle that Egyptian influence made itself felt as an undercurrent throughout Hellenism, we may nevertheless claim pride of place for Alexandria and so consider Alexandrian theology as the intermediary between the Egyptian religious heritage and Christianity [yet those who accept the Alexandria trinity infusion cry the loudest over Alexandrian manuscripts for the Bible?]. The Trinity is not the only subject- matter at issue here. Also Christology, which is closely linked to it - the doctrine concerning the nature of Christ and especially his pre-existence before the creation and time - revolves around questions which had been posed earlier by Egyptian theologians and which they solved in a strikingly similar way" (Egyptian Religion, Siegfried Morenz, p254-257).

"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" (The Catholic Encyclopedia, 1912, Vol. 15, Trinity, p 47).

"The Old Testament tells us nothing explicitly or by necessary implication of a triune God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no evidence that any sacred writer even suspected the existence of a trinity within the Godhead. Even to see in the Old Testament, suggestions or fore-shadowings or veiled signs of the trinity of persons, is to go beyond the words and intent of the sacred writers. The New Testament writers give us no formal or formulated doctrine of the trinity, [/b]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 Triune God, by Edmund Fortman, Jesuit].

[b]"Neither the word trinity nor the explicit doctrine appears in the New Testament" [The New Encyclopedia Britannica].

"Let us allow that the whole circle of doctrines, of which our Lord is the subject, was consistently and uniformly confessed by the Primitive Church . . . But it surely is otherwise with the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity. I do not see in what sense it can be said that there is a consensus of primitive [church authorities] in its favour . . . The Creeds of that early day make no mention . . . of the [Trinity] at all. They make mention indeed of a Three; but that there is any mystery in the doctrine, that the Three are One, that They are coequal, co-eternal, all increate, all omnipotent, all incomprehensible, is not stated, and never could be gathered from them" (Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, John Henry Newman, a cardinal by Pope Leo III in 1879, 1878, p40).

"As Far as the New Testament is concerned, one does not find in it an actual doctrine of the trinity [A Short History of Christian Doctrine, by Bernhard Lohse]."

"(b) Although the notion of a divine Triad or Trinity is characteristic of the Christian religion, it is by no means peculiar to it. In Indian religion e.g., we meet with the trinitarian group of Brahma, siva, and Visnu; and in Egyptian religion with the trinitarian group of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, constituting a divine family, like the Father, Mother, and Son in medieval Christian pictures. Nor is it only in historical religions that we find God viewed as a Trinity. One recalls in particular the Neo-Platonic view of the Supreme or Ultimate Reality, which was suggested by Plato in the Timmoeus; e.g., in the philosophy of Plotinus the primary or original Realities are triadically represented as the Good or (in numerical symbol) the One, the Intelligence or the One-Many, and the World-Soul or the One and Many. The religious Trinity associated, if somewhat loosely, with Comte's philosophy might also be cited here: the cultus of humanity as the Great Being, of space as the Great Medium, and of the earth as the Great Fetish. (c) What lends a special character to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is its close association with the distinctive Christian view of divine incarnation" [still borrowed from paganism]... " As Augustine said, "if in the books of the Platonists it was to be found that 'in the beginning was the Word,' it was not found there that 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.'" ... "None the less Christ is acknowledged as the eternal Son of God and the supreme revelation of the Father, and the quickening Spirit of life is acknowledged to be derived ' from on high." And so, when the early Christians would describe their conception of God, all the three elements-God, Christ, and the Spirit-enter into the description, and the one God is found to be revealed in a threefold way" [revealed via Plato philosophy] (Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, James Hastings, Trinity, p 458).

"The New Testament does not contain the developed doctrine of the trinity [The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology]."

"The doctrine of the Trinity did not form part of the apostles' preaching, as this is reported in the New Testament" (Encyclopedia International, Ian Henderson, University of Glasgow, 1969, page 226).


"This sublime pronouncement of absolute monotheism was a declaration of war against all polytheism . . . In the same way, the Shema excludes the trinity of the Christian creed as a violation of the Unity of God" (The Pentateuch and Haftorahs, J. H. Hertz, 1941, Vol. 1, p. 215).


"Luther was uneasy with the term trinity, not the idea of Trinity, for Luther most certainly always was a trinitarian: "On the words persona, (etc. ). . . . Much has been said, about the time of the Reformation, concerning the tendency of these terms to lead to tritheism [believing in three gods]; and among the advocates for their expulsion from theological disquisition, might be mentioned a number of the first divines of the age, not excepting Minnius and even Luther himself.--Yet, to prevent the charge of Arianism or Socinianism, which he knew his enemies would eagerly seize the least pretext to prefer against them, Luther yielded to Melanchthon's wishes, and in the Augsburg Confession, the doctrine of the Trinity is couched in the old scholastic terms" [scholastic, meaning borrowed paganism] (G. C. Storr & Flatt's , Biblical Theology. S. S. Schmucker, trans., p. 301).

"The fanciful idea that [elo-him] referred to the trinity of persons in the Godhead hardly finds now a supporter among scholars. It is either what grammarians call the plural of majesty, or it denotes the fullness of divine strength, the sum of powers displayed by God" (William Smith: A Dictionary Of The Bible, p220).

"The doctrine of the trinity he [Michael Servetus] felt to be a Catholic perversion and himself to be a good New Testament Christian in combating it. According to his conception, a trinity composed of three distinct persons in one God is a rational impossibility" (Man's Religion, John B. Noss, 1968) [note: John Calvin, founder of the Presbyterian Church, had Servetus burned at the stake because of his anti-trinitarian views].

"The doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity received their shape from Greek Fathers, who ... were much influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Platonic philosophy ... That errors and corruptions crept into the Church from this source can not be denied" (The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, edited by Samuel Macauley Jackson, 1957, Vol. IX, p. 91).

"To Jesus and Paul the doctrine of the trinity was apparently never known. They say nothing about it [Origin and Evolution of Religion, by Yale University Professor E. Washburn Hopkins]."

"Christianity had conquered paganism, and paganism had corrupted Christianity" (Winwood Reade, Philosopher and historian, The Martyrdom of Man, p 183-84).

"Yet it is self-evident that Father, Son and Spirit are here linked in an indissoluble threefold relationship. On the other hand, the NT does not actually speak of triunity. We seek this in vain in the triadic formulae of the NT. ... Early Christianity itself, however, does not yet have the problem of the Trinity in view" (Gerhard Kittel, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. 3, p. 108).