A Few Notes On Trinitarianism Being Advanced Over Time:
(I know it's long but I believe you'll find it worth your time)
Specific construals of Jesus Christ were in the third century termed modalism.
Tertullian and other scholars of that period, biased by philosophical teachings of their day, had agnst with this modalistic construct of God, His person and Godhead.
"In an effort to explain himself, Tertullian resorts to neologisms. Alister McGrath has noted that Tertullian is responsible for creating new words and ideas to support and argue his developing views; “509 new nouns, 284 new adjectives, and 161 new verbs in the Latin language” one of which is the word "Trinitas" from which the English word Trinity came into being.
Tertullian had come to accept a view of God that disallowed the God of the Old Testament from physically being present and participating in human affairs. Tertullian’s antipathy with Praxeas seems to stem from the fact that the Praxean party was large and not above opposing the position of Tertullian as that of polytheists.
Tertullian disliked Praxeas greatly because Praxeas allowed that it was God who literally became incarnate, there was an obvious corollary: Praxean christology allowed that the Father suffered. Tertullian was enraged by this possibility and in his ire framed an epitaph for Praxeas: “Patripassian.”
In so doing Tertullian betrays his indebtedness and commit to philosophy above all. As church historian Jaroslav Pelikan notes, Tertullian, for all of his hostility to metaphysics, freely accepts the notion of the impassability of God without either biblical support or theological proof.
It was Tertullian, who in Latin, first constructed God in terms of “persons,” the term Trinitas coined over against Praxeas. For Tertullian, the Logos was a second person, and though “person” did not mean to Tertullian what it would later come to mean, threeness was fully intended!
Tertullian was not in fact arguing against innovators, but the rank and file of early Christianity and teachings of the original apostles.
As Arthur Cushman McGiffert notes, “Those to whom Tertullian refers as ‘the simple, who are always the majority of believers’ were certainly not innovators.”
Tertullian was neither particularly convincing nor consistent. His terminology is drawn unevenly from Hellenistic categories, and in the end it would all be reshuffled by later church fathers.
Nonetheless, Tertullian’s contribution to language and the beginnings of definition for Trinitarianism cannot be denied. Though Tertullian would in the end of his life argue against the church that he worked to build, during these christological debates, he would assume the high ground as orthodox and is much responsible for the construct of a triune, multiplistic concept of The One True God, Yahweh.
However, in all honesty, in the end, it was Oneness christologians who caused their own demise.
While the Oneness doctrine was “embraced by the great majority of Christians in the first earlier centuries” it was when teachers in the movement turned from a christology that was “markedly monotheistic, and had real interest in Biblical Christianity” to a defense that was “scientific” (philosophical) and “lost its raison d’être” (reason to exist). Trying to argue with and rationalize with Rome was a fatal mistake. Thus, while a turn to a Stoic style defense of its christology seemed to be a good strategy, it failed. Ultimately a political victory in Rome was assured and turned the tide in favor of developing Trinitarianism.
When Constantine converted to Christianity at the beginning of the fourth century, such an alliance mutually furthered the fortunes of Constantine while giving significant power to the church. Because Christianity was an important vehicle for solidifying Constantine’s empire, he was concerned the debate between Athanasius and Arius might fracture the unity of the church. He therefore had a vested interest in the outcome of the Oneness vs newly formed Trinitarian debate.
***Because of the potential disunity in the empire, Constantine worked toward a solution.
In AD 325, a regional council in Antioch condemned the position of Arius by the Imperial council at the Council of Nicea and the newly proposed orthodoxy, but yet to be fully developed teaching of the Trinity, was quickly signed on to by the political and religious leaders of the Council which paved the way for the crushing of and killing of all dissenting teachings, even the original teachings of the apostles which were discarded. This union of political and christological needs would fundamentally change the gospel, until this day, as most even today teach the doctrine of the Trinity, conceived by the man Tertullian, used by the man Constantine to solidify his power, and ultimately adopted and commissioned as truth by the Council of Nicea and subsequent counsils for several centuries thereafter as the wording of the Creeds and development of the verbiage of this new doctrine was worked out by the Church of Rome.
The language of Nicea would need further refinement; something that occurred largely in the work of Basil and the Council of Constantinople in 381. Basil used language suggested by Origen, that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit shared one "ousia" but were different in hypostasis. This language was enacted with an anathema clause at the Council of Chalcedon. Indeed, the first martyr of the church—that is, the first one that was martyred by the church was Priscillian, a believer in Oneness christology in the latter part of the fourth century.
Augustine of Hippo would soon gain a firm grip and voice in directing theological discussions on these matters. It was Augustine who would largely become the norm for finding the church’s position on arguably every major position of theology, and it was Augustine’s view of the Trinity that would become the normative model for Western Christianity. Epistemologically, Augustine argues for the view of the philosophers, not as examples or as useful for analogy, but rather as a normative way of doing business doctrinally. He was lead by Greek and other philosophies and not solely by the leading of the Holy Ghost/ Holy Spirit.
*** Augustine argues that church tradition recommended the use of philosophers to construct doctrine!
What can be agreed upon is that Augustine conflated understandings from both Greek thought and church fathers in constructing his theology.
In Augustine, what sadly occurred was a hermeneutical divorce between the church and its Old Testament roots of namely Hear OH Israel, the LORD our God is one LORD with radically monotheistic Jews having no concept of a triune or aggregated Godhead.
Augustine read his philosophical constructs back into the New Testament and then utilized this understanding to read his position back into the Old Testament.
Trinitarianism continued to develop in its understanding of persons of the Godhead, in part because the introduction of one Hellenistic construct called for another to buoy it up. For instance, in attempting to understand how the “Lord of glory,” mentioned in I Corinthians 2:8 could be said to have been crucified, church theologians had to work through how it was that God could have suffered.
One solution was the development of the fourth-century enigmatic formulations of mutual interpenetration (Greek: perichoresis/Latin: circumincessio); this development continued until the seventh and eighth centuries.This, along with “appropriation,” working toward a notion of God as a “community,” largely became a normative way of talking about the Trinity.
In some ways, this was more pronounced in the East, where for Alister McGrath, it is represented by an “understated form of tritheism which is often regarded as undergirding the understanding of the Trinity found in the writing of the Cappadocian fathers. In the West, an Augustinian approach worked toward limiting such tendencies toward tritheism, but the Trinity would still be thought of as a “community.”
Oneness christology existed strongly through the fourth and fifth centuries, but it was largely labeled for its most prominent recent spokesperson, one who had been repeatedly condemned, Sabellius.
Although modalism was officially condemned by the church it did not go away. For instance, it continued to be formally condemned by the sixth-century Synod of Braga.
For many, Trinitarianism is an allowable expression of God both because it largely utilizes the language of the Bible as it has been transformed by the creeds and further, because for the vast majority of the Christian Church, it has become orthodox and understood as correct.
The real question, though, is to what extent our relationship with Jesus Christ is affected by what we believe about christology. It would be easy to summarize how church history went out of control; the church fathers went awry when they could no longer see Jesus Christ as a man who prayed to God and as the man in whom God dwelt. The New Covenant is possible only because Jesus is absolutely a man and because Jesus is a man in whom God dwelt absolutely. Unfortunately, church history made Jesus a “man who is not” instead of truly "The God-Man."
Jesus....
For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government shall be upon His shoulder. And His (Jesus) name shall be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty GOD, Everlasting FATHER, Prince of Peace.....They shall call His name EMMANUEL, which being interpreted is "GOD WITH US."
(Isaiah 9:6, Matthew 1:23)
*** What does it matter?
In John 8:24, Jesus said "....if ye believe not that I AM He (God), ye shall die in your sins.
Jesus once again uses the Old Testament "I AM" phrasing to impress and profess that He alone is God robed in flesh, God with us, and that being God, He is the one that forgives sin and is our only option to avoid hell and obtain eternal life with Him in Heaven.
WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH:
https://www.mediafire.com/file_premium/cc0jycarm1zagtt/What%2527s_Wrong_with_the_Roman_Catholic_Church_%2528RCC%2529.pdf/file
The First church was NOT Trinitarian....
https://www.mediafire.com/file_premium/qn8cssr7bwh40h5/The_Early_Church_Was_Absolutely%252C_Unequivocally_NOT_Trinitarian..doc/file
