From a discussion with @TheLightWithin
Trinity and Incarnation – Two mysteries at the very heart of Christianity and from which everything flows.
From the very beginning, the Church believed in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that initiation into the Faith, or as it was then called, The Way, was by baptism, and that baptism was in a tripartite formula, In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
For a monotheist religion, a dogma which Christianity defended from the get-go, that formula posits three 'powers', if not three gods, as some o9f its critics assumed. But Christianity was never a belief in Gods, always One God, in Three Persons.
Quite how was something for theologians to work out and wrangle over, sometimes with calamitous consequences for the laity. Various dogmatic definitions and statements were made at various times in the following centuries, but it would be erroneous to assume that those declarations, invariably delivered via the Councils, were something new and made up on the fly, as it were. Famously, the first Council, at Nicaea in 325AD, declared the Father and the Son were of the same substance, the same 'divine stuff'; whatever made God the Father God, made God the Son God as well. Not two substances, one substance, so we have to arrive at a distinction, and taking Jesus' own self-designation, we have Father and Son.
Questions of the relation of the Holy Spirit to Father and Son arose very quickly after ... but this is a church wrangling over theological determinations and definitions in a community who had believed in 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit', for centuries, by then.
The question of the physicality of the person of Jesus and His relationship to the Divine Person of Christ threw up various offerings; that God subsumed the human nature so the humanity of the man was all but effaced. Or that there was never a man as such, but an angelic being who appeared to be a man.
The Church defined the most paradoxical definition of the lot at Chalcedon in 451AD, that Jesus Christ was fully human, fully divine, one person with two natures, in what was called in philosophical terms a Hypostatic Union between the human and the divine.
These two – Trinity and Incarnation – became essentially markers of Christianity and were common to all the early congregations, the later Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, the Coptic and so on ... there may well be nuances of theological distinction, but fundamentally the same.
Non-Trinitarian beliefs were held by the Cathars in the 11th century (Good God source of the NT and an Evil God source of the OT). Thus two co-equal but opposed deities at war. Paulicians existed and were generally persecuted in the Greek East.
This general rule held, I think, up to an including the Reformation. The Reformation rejected neither Trinity nor Incarnation – simply it was the authority and practices of the Roman Catholic Church which was sought to be dismantled. The Unitarian Church (no relation to Unity) emerges about this time, a belief in God, in Jesus as Saviour but not divine, no Trinity as such. This arose in Poland and established in Transylvania.
Really it's with America's declaration of religious freedom that non-Trinitarians denominations take off in the 18th-19th centuries.
Trinity and Incarnation – Two mysteries at the very heart of Christianity and from which everything flows.
From the very beginning, the Church believed in Jesus Christ as the Son of God, born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, and that initiation into the Faith, or as it was then called, The Way, was by baptism, and that baptism was in a tripartite formula, In the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
For a monotheist religion, a dogma which Christianity defended from the get-go, that formula posits three 'powers', if not three gods, as some o9f its critics assumed. But Christianity was never a belief in Gods, always One God, in Three Persons.
Quite how was something for theologians to work out and wrangle over, sometimes with calamitous consequences for the laity. Various dogmatic definitions and statements were made at various times in the following centuries, but it would be erroneous to assume that those declarations, invariably delivered via the Councils, were something new and made up on the fly, as it were. Famously, the first Council, at Nicaea in 325AD, declared the Father and the Son were of the same substance, the same 'divine stuff'; whatever made God the Father God, made God the Son God as well. Not two substances, one substance, so we have to arrive at a distinction, and taking Jesus' own self-designation, we have Father and Son.
Questions of the relation of the Holy Spirit to Father and Son arose very quickly after ... but this is a church wrangling over theological determinations and definitions in a community who had believed in 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit', for centuries, by then.
The question of the physicality of the person of Jesus and His relationship to the Divine Person of Christ threw up various offerings; that God subsumed the human nature so the humanity of the man was all but effaced. Or that there was never a man as such, but an angelic being who appeared to be a man.
The Church defined the most paradoxical definition of the lot at Chalcedon in 451AD, that Jesus Christ was fully human, fully divine, one person with two natures, in what was called in philosophical terms a Hypostatic Union between the human and the divine.
These two – Trinity and Incarnation – became essentially markers of Christianity and were common to all the early congregations, the later Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox, the Coptic and so on ... there may well be nuances of theological distinction, but fundamentally the same.
Non-Trinitarian beliefs were held by the Cathars in the 11th century (Good God source of the NT and an Evil God source of the OT). Thus two co-equal but opposed deities at war. Paulicians existed and were generally persecuted in the Greek East.
This general rule held, I think, up to an including the Reformation. The Reformation rejected neither Trinity nor Incarnation – simply it was the authority and practices of the Roman Catholic Church which was sought to be dismantled. The Unitarian Church (no relation to Unity) emerges about this time, a belief in God, in Jesus as Saviour but not divine, no Trinity as such. This arose in Poland and established in Transylvania.
Really it's with America's declaration of religious freedom that non-Trinitarians denominations take off in the 18th-19th centuries.
