Point 1: The Trinity--Is it or is it not sound biblical doctrine?
These points were not addressed:
* The Bible describes God as one person, the Father, and never as three persons
* The pronouns 'He', 'His', 'Him', 'I', 'Me', 'My', and 'Mine' are used to describe God, not 'God the Father' or 'We', ‘They’, ‘Them’, nor are the Trinitarian distinctions 'God the Father', 'God the Son', and 'God the Holy Spirit' made in the Bible
* The Bible does not describe denial of the Trinity as a heresy, but does describe denial that Jesus is a man as heresy
* The apostles taught that to a true Christian there is one God, and that one God is one person, the Father, Jesus Christ is His son, a man who is the mediator between God and men
* Christ says it is life eternal to know that the Father is the only true God, not Father, son and Holy Spirit
* The earliest Christian creedal statements describe God as one person ('the Father Almighty'), Christ as His son, the Holy Spirit as simply 'the Holy Spirit' (not a person), and do not say the Trinity is essential to the Christian faith.
My opponent disagrees that God is nowhere described in the Bible as three persons in one being, so I request a list of every individual passage in the Bible which describes God as three persons in one being.
Contrary to my opponent's claim, reasons were given 'why the reasoning of the Athanasian Creed was fallacious or unscriptural'. I identified that it asserts the following errors:
* The Trinity is an essential doctrine of the Christian faith (the Bible never says this)
* A definition of God which is not only absent from the Bible, but contradicts the Bible's explicit definition of God as one person (John 17:3 the Father is 'the only true God', 1 Corinthians 8:6 'there is one God, the Father', Ephesians 4:6 'one God and Father of all', 1 Timothy 2:4 'one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus')
* The logical fallacy that A is X, B is X, C is X, but there is only one X
It was asserted by my opponent that the analogy I provided is 'clearly not the belief of Trinitarians', and yet he used this formula himself (his words in italics, my analogy inserted in bold):
(1) So the Father is God (Malachi 2:10)
* A is X
(2) the Son is God, (Hebrews 1:8)
* B is X
(3) and the Holy Ghost is God (Acts 5:3-4).
* C is X
(4) And yet they are not Three Gods, but One God (Isaiah 43:10-11, 44:6, 8, 45:5-6, 14, 21-22, 46:9)."
* But there is only one X
Note the inconsistent reasoning:
* The Father is a person
* The Son is a person
* The Holy Spirit is a person
* Therefore there are three persons
* The Father is God
* The Son is God
* The Holy Spirit is God
* But there is only one God
The logic of the syllogism is appealed to in one argument, but rejected in the other. The conclusion of the second argument contradicts the premises.
My opponent acknowledged that the Trinity is derived systematically from Scripture, and presented the traditional syllogism I predicted. Unable to find the doctrine preached by the apostles, he must assemble it himself by taking a verse from this letter, a verse from this book, a verse from this epistle, and constructing arguments which the apostles never preached nor penned. Why did the apostles never present such formulas?
As for the passages cited, Hebrews 1:8 does not refer to Christ as God (though it uses the term THEOS, used of the king of Israel in the psalm quoted), nor does Acts 5:3-4 define the Holy Spirit as God (though it does represent lying to a Divinely appointed man filled with the Holy Spirit as equivalent to lying to God). The reader can compare the claims made with the texts themselves, here.
Since the Holy Spirit itself is an attribute of God (referred to consistently 'the Spirit of God'), and explicitly the agent by which He works (Job 26:13 'by His spirit', Zechariah 4:6 'by My spirit', 1 Corinthians 2:10 'by His spirit', Ephesians 3:16 'by His spirit'), we should expect to see it described as omnipotent, omnipresent and eternal (though it is never described as such separate from the Father). In 1 Corinthians 2:10-11 the Holy Spirit is not referred to explicitly, Paul refers to 'the spirit of God', which he defines at the end of the chapter as 'the mind of God' (1 Corinthians 2:16, quoting LXX Isaiah 40:13).
Supporting references for the following points are here:
* In Micah 5:2 Christ is not defined as eternal, but said to have an ancient lineage (‘whose origins are in the distant past’), and other passages make it clear the son had a beginning in time (such as Matthew 1:1), which a number of the Early Fathers acknowledged.
* In Matthew 28:18 Christ is not defined as omnipotent, but was given all authority, so there was a time when he did not have this authority, and there was one greater than himself who gave him this authority.
* In John 16:30 Christ is not defined as omniscient, the disciples simply say 'You know all things', when Christ had previously stated explicitly that he did not (Mark 13:32). Christ's knowledge was limited during his life in earth (Luke 2:52 'Jesus increased in wisdom', Hebrews 5:8 'he learned obedience'), and still is (Revelation 1:1 'The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him').
* In John 3:13 the phrase 'which is in heaven' is an interpolation (see Novum Testamentum Graece, Nestle-Aland 27th edition).
* Creator: In Genesis 1:26 the pronouns 'us' and 'our' are used, but in verse 27 the noun and verb are in the singular, declaring only one person is involved in the act of creation of man and woman (‘God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them'), repeated later in Genesis 2:8, 22; 5:1-2, and Matthew 19:4.
A range of Bible passages and Christian creedal confessions from the 1st to the 2nd centuries say the Father created alone (proof).
* Saviour: Christ and the Holy Spirit are described as involved in the process of salvation not because they effect it through their own acts, but because they are specifically agents by which God saves (Romans 6:23, Titus 3:5-6, Galatians 3:15, Hebrews 13:20-21), through justification (Romans 3:24-26; 5:1-2), sanctification (Hebrews 10:10), and glorification (2 Thessalonians 1:12). It should be noted that glorification is not effected by resurrection, but by that which takes place subsequent to resurrection (John 5:28-29).
Christ does not act independently of God (John 5:19, 30; 8:28), but is the agent through whom God worked (Matthew 9:8, Acts 2:22), by which God spoke (John 12:49-50, Hebrews 1:2), and the man appointed by God to raise and judge the dead on His behalf (John 5:22, Acts 10:42; 17:31).
It should be noted that Christ also had to be justified (1 Timothy 3:16), sanctified (John 10:36), and glorified (John 7:39; 11:4; 12:16, Acts 3:13), meaning he had to be saved through the same process as those he came to save.
* Indwelling: My opponent makes the assumption 'Since we are the temple of God, it makes no sense to believe that another other than God would dwell in us', and fails to take into account different senses of ‘dwell’.
A number of quotes were provided by my opponent from men who did not believe in the Trinity as he defines it (proof).
Athenagoras: Only describes the Father and Son as God.
Theophilus: Uses the Greek word 'trias' (anachronistically translated 'trinity', though it meant 'three', or 'a group of three', and was not used to refer to the Trinity until the 6th century, see Liddell, Scott, Jones exhaustive Greek lexicon, edition 9), referring not to the trinity (three persons in one being), but explicitly to a group of three, the Father, Word and Wisdom (not Father, Son and Holy Spirit), of which only the Father is identified as God.
Clement: No reference to the three of them being God.
Tertullian: Nowhere are all three referred to as God, and Tertullian was a Modalist in any case.
Hipplolytus: Here God is explicitly two persons, not three.
Cyprian: Uses a word translated 'trinity', but there is no definition of what this 'trinity' is.
The earliest of these quotes is dated to 175-177 AD, none of them are from creedal statements, and none refer to 'a Triune Godhead'. In contrast, I supplied three creedal statements predating the earliest quote by up to 100 years. This statement stands:
* The earliest Christian creedal statements describe God as one person ('the Father Almighty'), Christ as His son, the Holy Spirit as simply 'the Holy Spirit' (not a person), and do not say Trinity is essential to the Christian faith
