| Different ideas about Christ\'s divinity lead to conflict
This was the setting in which the doctrine of the Trinity emerged. In those early decades after Jesus Christ\'s ministry, death and resurrection, and spanning the next few centuries, various ideas sprang up as to His exact nature. Was He man? Was He God? Was He God appearing as a man? Was He an illusion? Was He a mere man who became God? Was He created by God the Father, or did He exist eternally with the Father?
All of these ideas had their proponents. The unity of belief of the original Church was lost as new beliefs, many borrowed or adapted from pagan religions, replaced the teachings of Jesus and the apostles.
Let us be clear that when it comes to the intellectual and theological debates in those early centuries that led to the formulation of the Trinity, the true Church was largely absent from the scene, having been driven underground. (See the chapter "The Rise of a Counterfeit Christianity" in our free booklet The Church Jesus Built for an overview of this critical period.).
For this reason, in that stormy period we often see debates not between truth and error, but between one error and a different error—a fact seldom recognized by many modern scholars yet critical for our understanding.
A classic example of this was the dispute over the nature of Christ that led the Roman emperor Constantine the Great to convene the Council of Nicaea (in modern-day western Turkey) in A.D. 325.
Constantine, although held by many to be the first "Christian" Roman Emperor, was actually a sun-worshiper who was only baptized on his deathbed. During his reign he had his eldest son and his wife murdered. He was also vehemently anti-Semitic, referring in one of his edicts to "the detestable Jewish crowd" and "the customs of these most wicked men"—customs that were in fact rooted in the Bible and practiced by Jesus and the apostles.
As emperor in a period of great tumult within the Roman Empire, Constantine was challenged with keeping the empire unified. He recognized the value of religion in uniting his empire. This was, in fact, one of his primary motivations in accepting and sanctioning the "Christian" religion (which, by this time, had drifted far from the teachings of Jesus Christ and the apostles and was Christian in name only).
But now Constantine faced a new challenge. Religion researcher Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God that "one of the first problems that had to be solved was the doctrine of God . . . a new danger arose from within which split Christians into bitterly warring camps" (1993, p. 106). |
| Debate over the nature of God at the Council of Nicaea
Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 as much for political reasons—for unity in the empire—as religious ones. The primary issue at that time came to be known as the Arian controversy.
"In the hope of securing for his throne the support of the growing body of Christians he had shown them considerable favor and it was to his interest to have the church vigorous and united. The Arian controversy was threatening its unity and menacing its strength. He therefore undertook to put an end to the trouble. It was suggested to him, perhaps by the Spanish bishop Hosius, who was influential at court, that if a synod were to meet representing the whole church both east and west, it might be possible to restore harmony.
"Constantine himself of course neither knew nor cared anything about the matter in dispute but he was eager to bring the controversy to a close, and Hosius\' advice appealed to him as sound" (Arthur Cushman McGiffert, A History of Christian Thought, 1954, Vol. 1, p. 25 .
Arius, a priest from Alexandria, Egypt, taught that Christ, because He was the Son of God, must have had a beginning and therefore was a special creation of God. Further, if Jesus was the Son, the Father of necessity must be older.
Opposing the teachings of Arius was Athanasius, a deacon also from Alexandria. His view was an early form of Trinitarianism wherein the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were one but at the same time distinct from each other.
The decision as to which view the church council would accept was to a large extent arbitrary. Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God: "When the bishops gathered at Nicaea on May 20, 325, to resolve the crisis, very few would have shared Athanasius\'s view of Christ. Most held a position midway between Athanasius and Arius" (p. 110).
As emperor, Constantine was in the unusual position of deciding church doctrine even though he was not really a Christian. (The following year is when he had both his wife and son murdered, as previously mentioned). |
| Historian Henry Chadwick attests, "Constantine, like his father, worshipped the Unconquered Sun" (The Early Church, 1993, p. 122). As to the emperor\'s embrace of Christianity, Chadwick admits, "His conversion should not be interpreted as an inward experience of grace . . . It was a military matter. His comprehension of Christian doctrine was never very clear" (p. 125).
Chadwick does say that Constantine\'s deathbed baptism itself "implies no doubt about his Christian belief," it being common for rulers to put off baptism to avoid accountability for things like torture and executing criminals (p. 127). But this justification doesn\'t really help the case for the emperor\'s conversion being genuine.
Norbert Brox, a professor of church history, confirms that Constantine was never actually a converted Christian: "Constantine did not experience any conversion; there are no signs of a change of faith in him. He never said of himself that he had turned to another god . . . At the time when he turned to Christianity, for him this was Sol Invictus (the victorious sun god)" (A Concise History of the Early Church, 1996, p. 4.
When it came to the Nicene Council, The Encyclopaedia Britannica states: "Constantine himself presided, actively guiding the discussions, and personally proposed . . . the crucial formula expressing the relation of Christ to God in the creed issued by the council . . . Overawed by the emperor, the bishops, with two exceptions only, signed the creed, many of them much against their inclination" (1971 edition, Vol. 6, "Constantine," p. 386).
With the emperor\'s approval, the Council rejected the minority view of Arius and, having nothing definitive with which to replace it, approved the view of Athanasius—also a minority view. The church was left in the odd position of officially supporting, from that point forward, the decision made at Nicaea to endorse a belief held by only a minority of those attending.
The groundwork for official acceptance of the Trinity was now laid—but it took more than three centuries after Jesus Christ\'s death and resurrection for this unbiblical teaching to emerge! |
| Debate shifts to the nature of the Holy Spirit
Disagreements soon centered around another issue, the nature of the Holy Spirit. In that regard, the statement issued at the Council of Nicaea said simply, "We believe in the Holy Spirit." This "seemed to have been added to Athanasius\'s creed almost as an afterthought," writes Karen Armstrong. "People were confused about the Holy Spirit. Was it simply a synonym for God or was it something more?" (p. 115).
Professor Ryrie, also cited earlier,writes, "In the second half of the fourth century, three theologians from the province of Cappadocia in eastern Asia Minor [today central Turkey] gave definitive shape to the doctrine of the Trinity" (p. 65). They proposed an idea that was a step beyond Athanasius\' view—that God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit were coequal and together in one being, yet also distinct from one another.
These men—Basil, bishop of Caesarea, his brother Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus—were all "trained in Greek philosophy" (Armstrong, p. 113), which no doubt affected their outlook and beliefs (see "Greek Philosophy\'s Influence on the Trinity Doctrine").
In their view, as Karen Armstrong explains, "the Trinity only made sense as a mystical or spiritual experience . . . It was not a logical or intellectual formulation but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. Gregory of Nazianzus made this clear when he explained that contemplation of the Three in One induced a profound and overwhelming emotion that confounded thought and intellectual clarity.
"\'No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me\'" (p. 117). Little wonder that, as Armstrong concludes, "For many Western Christians . . . the Trinity is simply baffling" (ibid.).
Ongoing disputes lead to the Council of Constantinople
In the year 381, 44 years after Constantine\'s death, Emperor Theodosius the Great convened the Council of Constantinople (today Istanbul, Turkey) to resolve these disputes. Gregory of Nazianzus, recently appointed as archbishop of Constantinople, presided over the council and urged the adoption of his view of the Holy Spirit.
Historian Charles Freeman states: "Virtually nothing is known of the theological debates of the council of 381, but Gregory was certainly hoping to get some acceptance of his belief that the Spirit was consubstantial with the Father [meaning that the persons are of the same being, as substance in this context denotes individual quality].
"Whether he dealt with the matter clumsily or whether there was simply no chance of consensus, the \'Macedonians,\' bishops who refused to accept the full divinity of the Holy Spirit, left the council . . . Typically, Gregory berated the bishops for preferring to have a majority rather than simply accepting \'the Divine Word\' of the Trinity on his authority" (A.D. 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Dawn of the Monotheistic State, 2008, p. 96).
Gregory soon became ill and had to withdraw from the council. Who would preside now? "So it was that one Nectarius, an elderly city senator who had been a popular prefect in the city as a result of his patronage of the games, but who was still not a baptized Christian, was selected . . . Nectarius appeared to know no theology, and he had to be initiated into the required faith before being baptized and consecrated" (Freeman, pp. 97-9.
Bizarrely, a man who up to this point wasn\'t a Christian was appointed to preside over a major church council tasked with determining what it would teach regarding the nature of God! |
| The Trinity becomes official doctrine
The teaching of the three Cappadocian theologians "made it possible for the Council of Constantinople (381) to affirm the divinity of the Holy Spirit, which up to that point had nowhere been clearly stated, not even in Scripture" (The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, "God," p. 56.
The council adopted a statement that translates into English as, in part: "We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all ages . . . And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified, who spoke by the prophets . . ." The statement also affirmed belief "in one holy, catholic [meaning in this context universal, whole or complete] and apostolic Church . . ."
With this declaration in 381, which would become known as the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, the Trinity as generally understood today became the official belief and teaching concerning the nature of God.
Theology professor Richard Hanson observes that a result of the council\'s decision "was to reduce the meanings of the word \'God\' from a very large selection of alternatives to one only," such that "when Western man today says \'God\' he means the one, sole exclusive [Trinitarian] God and nothing else" (Studies in Christian Antiquity, 1985,pp. 243-244).
Thus, Emperor Theodosius—who himself had been baptized only a year before convening the council—was, like Constantine nearly six decades earlier, instrumental in establishing major church doctrine. As historian Charles Freeman notes: "It is important to remember that Theodosius had no theological background of his own and that he put in place as dogma a formula containing intractable philosophical problems of which he would have been unaware. In effect, the emperor\'s laws had silenced the debate when it was still unresolved"
Other beliefs about the nature of God banned
Now that a decision had been reached, Theodosius would tolerate no dissenting views. He issued his own edict that read: "We now order that all churches are to be handed over to the bishops who profess Father, Son and Holy Spirit of a single majesty, of the same glory, of one splendor, who establish no difference by sacrilegious separation, but (who affirm) the order of the Trinity by recognizing the Persons and uniting the Godhead" (quoted by Richard Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God, 1999, p. 223).
Another edict from Theodosius went further in demanding adherence to the new teaching: "Let us believe the one deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, in equal majesty and in a holy Trinity. We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians; but as for the others, since, in our judgement, they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give their conventicles [assemblies] the name of churches.
"They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation, and the second the punishment which our authority, in accordance with the will of Heaven, shall decide to inflict" (reproduced in Documents of the Christian Church, Henry Bettenson, editor, 1967, p. 22).
Thus we see that a teaching that was foreign to Jesus Christ, never taught by the apostles and unknown to the other biblical writers, was locked into place and the true biblical revelation about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit was locked out. Any who disagreed were, in accordance with the edicts of the emperor and church authorities, branded heretics and dealt with accordingly. (p. 103). |
| Trinity doctrine decided by trial and error
This unusual chain of events is why theology professors Anthony and Richard Hanson would summarize the story in their book Reasonable Belief: A Survey of the Christian Faith by noting that the adoption of the Trinity doctrine came as a result of "a process of theological exploration which lasted at least three hundred years . . . In fact it was a process of trial and error (almost of hit and miss), in which the error was by no means all confined to the unorthodox . . . It would be foolish to represent the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as having been achieved by any other way" (1980, p. 172).
They then conclude: "This was a long, confused, process whereby different schools of thought in the Church worked out for themselves, and then tried to impose on others, their answer to the question, \'How divine is Jesus Christ?\' . . . If ever there was a controversy decided by the method of trial and error, it was this one" (p. 175).
Anglican churchman and Oxford University lecturer K.E. Kirk revealingly writes of the adoption of the doctrine of the Trinity: "The theological and philosophical vindication of the divinity of the Spirit begins in the fourth century; we naturally turn to the writers of that period to discover what grounds they have for their belief. To our surprise, we are forced to admit that they have none . . .
"This failure of Christian theology . . . to produce logical justification of the cardinal point in its trinitarian doctrine is of the greatest possible significance. We are forced, even before turning to the question of the vindication of the doctrine by experience, to ask ourselves whether theology or philosophy has ever produced any reasons why its belief should be Trinitarian" ("The Evolution of the Doctrine of the Trinity," published in Essays on the Trinity and the Incarnation, A.E.J. Rawlinson, editor, 1928, pp. 221-222).
Why believe a teaching that isn\'t biblical?
This, in brief, is the amazing story of how the doctrine of the Trinity came to be introduced—and how those who refused to accept it came to be branded as heretics or unbelievers.
But should we really base our view of God on a doctrine that isn\'t spelled out in the Bible, that wasn\'t formalized until three centuries after the time of Jesus Christ and the apostles, that was debated and argued for decades (not to mention for centuries since), that was imposed by religious councils presided over by novices or nonbelievers and that was "decided by the method of trial and error"?
Of course not. We should instead look to the Word of God—not to ideas of men—to see how our Creator reveals Himself! |
| Jesus said that He didn\'t come to bring peace to the earth, but division. And that has definitely happened.
Vertical Thought recently interviewed Ronald Wroblewski, who has been an instructor at Spoon River College in Canton, Illinois, for the past 12 years. He teaches such courses as World Religions, Introduction to Philosophy, Ethics, and Logic and Critical Thinking.
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Vertical Thought: At the beginning of your World Religions course, you mention that there are thousands of different Christian churches. If they all trace their beliefs to the Bible, are they really all that different?
Ron Wroblewski: Yes. There are major differences in governance, how rituals are carried out and many other things. It also seems there is a different church for each variation of doctrine that has occurred during the centuries.
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Jesus said that He didn\'t come to bring peace to the earth, but division. And that has definitely happened.
VT: When did all the differences first start to appear, and why did these Christians—whose name indicates that they are followers of Christ—deviate from what He and His disciples taught?
RW: As we know, differences were referred to in the letters of the New Testament. By the middle of the second century, several major doctrinal divisions were developing. For example, debate began on what happens after death. The controversy over whether human beings have an immortal soul versus whether they are waiting to be resurrected is still with Christianity today.
My personal feelings are that since the early Church expected Christ to return quickly, hope of that was fading after two generations and people began to look for other explanations of what happens after death. When the hope of the early Church didn\'t come to pass, many people gave up on it.
VT: Where did the alternative ideas originate?
RW: It looks like the Gnostics were the first to attempt to combine portions of Christianity with Greek philosophy. They rejected the resurrection of the body and replaced it with Plato\'s doctrine of the immortality of the soul. They believed the spirit is everything, the body nothing, and fell into moral licentiousness. Much of their time was spent learning the "correct" magic passwords that would enable the delivered soul to pass back to its heavenly home.
In the second century, [the Catholic theologian] Origen taught that souls might be eternal—preexisting birth and surviving death through reincarnation. He was very sympathetic to the Platonic doctrine of the soul as being akin to God but obliged to live in a material world that is not its true home.
Another church father, Augustine, also attempted to combine Plato\'s ideas about the immortality of the soul with Christian teachings. Many of these doctrinal divisions came to a head in the fourth century when the Roman emperor Constantine forced them to be settled by the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325. |
| VT: How did the Roman emperor get involved in Christianity? Didn\'t the Romans persecute Christians?
RW: At first, many Christians were killed for refusing to worship the emperor. Later, Constantine saw Christianity as something that could bring unity to his far-flung empire. But to do so, the disputes that divided Christianity had to be resolved. He called for a meeting of all bishops at Nicaea [in what is now northwestern Turkey] in A.D. 325 to discuss these issues.
After heated debate at the Council of Nicaea, Constantine made several declarations, one of which established Sunday as the official day of worship. It is noteworthy that Constantine\'s stated motive for introducing this custom was respect for the sun. He was not aware of any mutual exclusiveness between Christianity and his faith in the sun. The transition from solar monotheism (the most popular form of contemporary paganism) to Christianity was not difficult.
Constantine also decreed that Christians would observe Easter, and it would be forbidden to keep Passover. In fact, he stated that Christians were to stay away from anything that was "Jewish."
VT: Is that why other observances listed in the Bible, like Passover, the Days of Unleavened Bread and Pentecost, disappeared from modern Christianity?
RW: Yes. The Romans turned to persecuting all things Jewish, and Christians often had to decide whether to hold what appeared to be Jewish beliefs and likely suffer persecution or to worship on different dates and avoid that persecution.
Easter definitely replaced Passover. Wiccans claim Christians stole Easter from them. One text I use in class, Phyllis Curott\'s Book of Shadows, explains that the name Easter comes from the name of the German fertility goddess Eostre. Eggs and rabbits—commonly associated with the holiday—are symbols of fertility.
The Catholic Church timed Easter to coincide with the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox, another remnant of the old (pagan) religion just below the surface of the new.
VT: Did this happen with other modern Christian holidays?
RW: Other holidays were adopted to add numbers to the church without requiring people to give up their cherished practices. There are letters between bishops that discuss ways to convert pagans. The answer was to attempt to eliminate the worst of the practices and put the others under the umbrella of Christianity. They simply changed the name of who was being worshiped. Christmas, originally the birthday of the sun god, became the day to worship the Son of God.
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| Constantine\'s reign as Roman emperor (A.D. 306-337) dramatically changed the direction of Christianity, though in ways far different from those portrayed in The Da Vinci Code. This grew out of his strategy for unifying his empire by creating a "catholic"—meaning universal —church that would blend elements from many religions into one.
While Constantine supposedly converted to Christianity in 312, he wasn\'t baptized until on his deathbed 25 years later. In the intervening years he had his wife and eldest son murdered, and from all appearances he continued as a worshipper of the sun god. Long after his supposed conversion he had coins minted with a portrait of himself on one side and a depiction of his "companion, the unconquered Sol [sun]" on the other.
The "Christianity" Constantine endorsed was already considerably different from that practiced by Jesus Christ and the apostles. The emperor accelerated the change by his own hatred of Jews and religious practices he considered Jewish.
For example, at the Council of Nicea (A.D. 325), church authorities essentially replaced the biblical Passover with Easter, a popular holiday rooted in ancient springtime fertility celebrations. Endorsing this change, Constantine announced: "It appeared an unworthy thing that in the celebration of this most holy feast [Easter] we should follow the practice of the Jews, who have impiously defiled their hands with enormous sin, and are, therefore, deservedly afflicted with blindness of soul . . . Let us then have nothing in common with the detestable Jewish crowd" (Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3, 18-19, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1979, second series, Vol. 1, pp. 524-525).
Constantine\'s affection for sun worship had earlier led him to endorse Sunday, the first day of the week and a day dedicated to honoring the sun, as a weekly day of rest in the Roman empire . This created considerable hardship on those Jews and true Christians who continued to keep the biblical Sabbath on the seventh day of the week. (A century later the Council of Laodicea would essentially outlaw Sabbath-keeping and Christian observance of the biblical Holy Days.)
British historian Paul Johnson summarizes how Constantine\'s approach of merging religious practices produced a corrupted Christianity that meshed paganism with biblical elements: "Thus the followers of Isis adored a madonna nursing her holy child; the cult of Attis and Cybele celebrated a day of blood and fasting, followed by the Hilaria resurrection-feast . . . the elitist Mithraics, many of whom were senior army officers, ate a sacred meal ...
"Many Christians did not make a clear distinction between this sun-cult [Mithraism] and their own. They . . . held their services on Sunday, knelt towards the East and had their nativity-feast on 25 December, the birthday of the sun at the winter solstice ...
"How could the Christian Church, apparently quite willingly, accommodate this weird megalomaniac [Constantine] in its theocratic system? Was there a conscious bargain? Which side benefited most from this unseemly marriage between Church and State? ... Did the empire surrender to Christianity, or did Christianity prostitute itself to the empire?" ( A History of Christianity, 1976, pp. 67-69).
When we consider the vast differences between the mainstream Christianity of today and the original Christianity of Jesus Christ and the apostles, we can trace much of that change to Constantine and the religious system he put in power.
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| The traditional holidays with their annual rituals are coming: Halloween costumes, Christmas decorations, Easter bunnies. Where did those traditions and practices come from? Celebrated as Christian holidays, shouldn\'t these occasions be faithful to what the Bible says?
Halloween
Jack-o-lanterns have been around for centuries as part of an ancient Celtic celebration at the start of the winter season. The Druids (a sort of pagan priesthood) believed that at this time of year the barriers between our world and the supernatural weakened and broke down. Expecting the souls of the dead to roam the land, they built large bonfires to frighten them off and slaughtered animals—or even people—to appease the evil spirits. The jack-o-lantern represents a poor soul caught between the two worlds, and some believe it served as a warning meant to ward off bad spirits. Incidentally, pumpkins are not common in Europe, so the original jack-o-lanterns were carved from turnips (The Encyclopedia of Religion, 1987, p. 176, "Halloween").
Why is much of modern Christian ritual and belief based on pagan practice rather than the Bible? Isn’t it enough that people honor God however they want?
Carved vegetables, talismans against evil spirits, human sacrifice—these are not in line with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Halloween is still looked to by some as All Hallows\' Eve—the night before the Catholic All Saints\' Day, a supposedly holy occasion. Yet with all its ties to the occult and dark forces, Halloween is anything but holy. And it\'s now shunned by many professing Christians. They see no value in celebrating a holiday that clearly originated from polytheism (the worship of multiple gods) and animism (belief in spiritual forces in inanimate objects). Such religions have been broadly referred to as pagan in Western societies since the time of the late Roman Empire.
If most of the beliefs and practices associated with Halloween originated in paganism, does the pagan influence end there? |
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