The Duality -- The Father and The Son

by UnDisfellowshipped 218 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  fjtoth

  Undisfellowshiped,

  You wrote:

  However, just because the Jews did not believe in the Trinity does not automatically mean that it is false. The Jews (for the most part) also rejected Jesus as the Messiah.

  Aren't you overlooking what Jesus said about the Jews and their knowledge of God? He said: "We Jews worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews." (John 4:22) According to the Good News Translation, he said: "We Jews know whom we worship." And according to The Message translation by Eugene H. Peterson, Jesus said: "You worship guessing in the dark; we Jews worship in the clear light of day."

  So it does seem perfectly logical to conclude that the Trinity is false, based upon what Jesus himself said concerning the Jews and their knowledge of God.

  Frank
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  fjtoth
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  icocer

  fjthoth wrote:

  Shouldn’t the Torture and Death Penalty Be Restoredfor Persons Who Reject the Trinity???

  The word “Trinity” appears not even once in the entire Bible. That’s a grand total of zero times regardless of the popular translation or version we use.

  However, hundreds of years after the Bible was completed, some religious and political men got together and wrote up the Athanasian Creed. In the Creed, they set forth the doctrine of the Trinity, and they laid down the law that anyone, Christian or non-Christian, who doesn’t believe their Creed will enter eternal fire!

  Now, the apostles and other early Christians knew nothing about that Creed. It was written long after they had all died. Will those early Christians be resurrected? Jesus said they will, but there is no record that any of them ever used the word “Trinity” in their daily conversations or in letters to friends and others.

  If believers in the Athanasian Creed are right, Jesus was wrong, and there will be no resurrection for anybody who lived during the earliest centures of the Christian era! We are made to wonder why Jesus was not more considerate. If only he had thought to use the word “Trinity” at least on a few occasions, his apostles and others might have gotten the hint that maybe this was something they better believe or else! Alas, however, they all died without ever even hearing the name of a doctrine so vital to their resurrection and eternal existence!

  There might have been some hope for them if only the compilers of the Athanasian Creed had been around to remind Jesus of this very important matter! How sad!

  On the other hand, would they have understood? Many today are also doomed eternally because they just can’t comprehend this teaching of the Athanasian Creed. They just can’t get their minds around the notion that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not the same entity, and yet at the same time they are the same entity, namely, God. How sad for them!

  hundreds of years after the Bible was completed, some religious and political men got together and wrote up the Athanasian Creed - This was around 500 AD or there abouts. A few hundred years before this is Arius (300 ad). Before that the early church writters who were not Athanasian Creeders but Trinitarians in a different form. Is there any writtings before 300 ad and after 100 ad that show a more Unitarian point of view? Please dont just say the Bible.
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  fjtoth

  icocer,

  You wrote:

  Before that the early church writters who were not Athanasian Creeders but Trinitarians in a different form.

  Please explain what you mean by "Trinitarians in a different form."

  The Apostle's Creed was not composed by the apostles, but it is the oldest creed subscribed to by modern Christians. It says nothing about a Trinity.

  The Apostles' Creed

  I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.
  And in Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son, our Lord;
  Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary;
  Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell;
  The third day He rose again from the dead;
  He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
  From thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
  I believe in the Holy Spirit.
  I believe a holy catholic Church, the communion of saints;
  the forgiveness of sins;
  the resurrection of the body;
  and the life everlasting. AMEN.

  The original Nicene Creed was composed in 325. It described the Son as "very God of very God" along with the Father. The holy spirit wasn't added until 56 years later, in 381, when the creed was revised. So, as much as Trinitarians would like to have us believe that the earliest Christians believed in a Trinity of some kind, they can offer no evidence of it.

  The Creed of Chalcedon was drafted in 451 to define and declare "the two natures of Christ." It also described Mary as "the Mother of God." The Athanasian Creed was composed later.

  You wrote:

  Please dont just say the Bible.

  I'm sorry, but I can't do any better than that.

  Frank
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  fjtoth
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  icocer

  books

  A great book for laypeople on the Jewish context of early Christianity is George Nickelsburg's Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins: Diversity, Continuity, and Transformation. On the subject of early Christian theology (and the development of the Trinity), the classic book is certainly JND Kelly's Early Christian Doctrine. There are a host of other great books that take different positions and offer different insights, but those can get you started. :) A very important recent book that may be a little more advanced is Larry Hurtado's Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity...which is the definitive analysis of early Christian binitarianism.

  Before I open my mouth any more on this topic I wanted to do some research. I asked one of this sites more respected (in my opinion) posters about books on early christianity for the average layperson. This was thier responce to me.

  I am a bit emberassed about the "please dont just say the Bible" comment. The guy I debate with allways comes back with the "bible" responce when I tell him that I see no proof that his theology continued after the apostolic age until 300 ad with Arius. He tells me how the church went apostate on the duality issue the second (probably withing the millisecond) the apostle John died. So only his 20th century theologians (the Bible) are right, disregarding what guys decades or centuries removed from the source have to say on the issue.
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  fjtoth

  icocer,

  So only his 20th century theologians (the Bible) are right, disregarding what guys decades or centuries removed from the real sources have to say on the issue.

  Are you making an effort to start a new thread, as if the preceding pages of this debate don't exist? We've already dealt with this issue involving the "Early Church Fathers." Have you read those previous pages?

  And, as I plainly showed above, the earliest recorded "orthodox" document for public consumption on the Trinity is the revised edition of the Nicene Creed. Even if the idea of a Trinity was floating around in the 3rd Century, what would it prove? The U.S. Constitution was composed about 200 years ago, and small as it is compared to the New Testament, scholars debate over its meaning. So, who is correct? Should we swallow what recent debaters are saying about the Constitution, or should we check the Constitution ourselves to see what it actually says?

  The same is true of the Bible. We can read all sorts of books and creeds about it, but the only way we'll ever know what it really says is by reading the book for ourselves.

  Genuine Christian theology begins with the creed subscribed to by Jesus:

  One of the scribes came and . . . asked him, "What commandment is the foremost of all?" Jesus answered, "The foremost is, `HEAR, O ISRAEL! THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE LORD; AND YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH.' The second is this, 'YOU SHALL LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.' There is no other commandment greater than these." The scribe said to him, "Right, Teacher; you have truly stated that HE IS ONE, AND THERE IS NO ONE ELSE BESIDES HIM; AND TO LOVE HIM WITH ALL THE HEART AND WITH ALL THE UNDERSTANDING AND WITH ALL THE STRENGTH, AND TO LOVE ONE'S NEIGHBOR AS HIMSELF, is much more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices." When Jesus saw that he had answered intelligently, he said to him, "You are not far from the kingdom of God." After that, no one would venture to ask him any more questions. -- Mark 12:28-34.

  Jesus subscribed to the creed of Israel and the gospel concerning the kingdom of God:

  Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. -- Deuteronomy 6:4-7.

  Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel." -- Mark 1:14, 15.

  Jesus was born into the religion of the Jews. The Jews did not believe in a Trinity, and neither did Jesus. As I wrote above on this page:

  He [Jesus] said: "We Jews worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews." (John 4:22) According to the Good News Translation, he said: "We Jews know whom we worship." And according to The Message translation by Eugene H. Peterson, Jesus said: "You worship guessing in the dark; we Jews worship in the clear light of day."

  Frank
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  icocer

  Are you making an effort to start a new thread

  sorry dawg. Like I said I'll shut my mouth. Defeated soundly.
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  fjtoth

  Undisfellowshiped,

  Here is another obvious mistake in the Jamieson, Fausset, and Brown Commentary, a quote you included in your post #2293:

  Mar 13:31 -
  Heaven and earth shall pass away; but my words shall not pass away — the strongest possible expression of the divine authority by which He spake; not as Moses or Paul might have said of their own inspiration, for such language would be unsuitable in any merely human mouth.

  Notice the claim that Jesus' statement in verse 31 "would be unsuitable in any merely human mouth." But look at the verse that follows, verse 32, a statement that Trinitarians tell us was uttered by Jesus' human nature:

  "But of that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but the Father alone."

  Don't you think it's a bit silly to say Jesus' divine nature was speaking in one sentence and his human nature was speaking in his very next sentence? In fact, that's what the Jamieson Commentary does! After mentioning several Trinitarians, it says that they "and others understood it to mean that as man our Lord was ignorant of this." (Emphasis is partly Jamieson's and partly mine.) This would be laughable if it wasn't such a serious twisting of the Scriptures, and if it didn't make Jesus look like someone who was quite mixed up in his thoughts! Who is it that has authority on earth to tell us when Jesus was speaking as God and when he was speaking as a man? The whole idea of Jesus being a God-man is absurd as well as unscriptural!

  Once again I say, more and better insights are gleaned by reading the Bible alone, without interference from the writings of uninspired men. There's nothing wrong with reading such writings, but what they say needs to be carefully examined in the light of the Scriptures, not in the light of human creeds. Otherwise, we end up doing what the JWs do, comparing the Scriptures with their Watchtower writings and accepting the uninspired writings instead of the Bible.

  Frank
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  Mary

  In my opinion, the trinity is a crock.......I think Jesus was deified decades after he died----not an uncommon event for someone who died a martyrs death. I don't believe for a second that he was God, or part of a triune God. It doesn't take much to change the meaning of something. A good example is the Gospel of Judas. Writen only 200 or 300 years after the cruxifiction, yet Judas went from being the most vilified person in the history of the world, to being a hero.

  It wouldn't have taken much for those that were say, two or three generations past the time of Jesus, to start making him out to be something that he wasn't. In two or three hundred years, it's easy to make a God out of a man.