I dont really understand why people regard the rejection of the Trinity as "Heresy".
In my opinion, phallic worship seems heretic enough!
It's all about dogma, ideology, semantics and conformity. People who insist on conformity to the doctrine are usually not that interested that you worship God, but that you
validate their beliefs. They want to feel important. If you chant the same slogans as they do, you show that their beliefs are important, and therefore that
they (not God) are important. You validate the beliefs of that group of people and the movement they represent, and the ideology and doctrine to which those people align themselves. You are telling them that they are doing something right. When you contradict them, it's an insult to their beliefs, and they feel you are the enemy.
I'm not so much in favour of the idea as, it sounds like a kind of idolatry. The doctrine is made to be more important than your
actual devotion to God, which I think is wrong. People worship the doctrine more than God Himself. Of course, the doctrine itself doesn't state that they are worshipping the doctrine, but it's what they do with the doctrine that I don't like. It was said that we are not supposed to create graven images, but this seems to be one of them!!!
I can understand that many people believe that this is how we were meant to see God because of what they've been taught, and because it's been done for so many centuries (since the 4th century). People seem to have accepted it as
the gospel.
But a reading of the New Testament seems to suggest that its authors, the first-century Christians, didn't care about the nature, structure and properties of God. Were these people heretics because there was no Trinity doctrine to serve as a guiding principle for how they were to form their concept of God? No. They didn't need a Trinity doctrine. The Trinity doctrine formulated in the 4th century was just a
tool of apologetics. We became dependent on a concept that was never essential in Christianity, but was merely how a particular group of Christians wanted to see things.
The first-century Christians didn't need doctrine. They had an experience. We have to try to be more like the first-century Christians and relive the experience!!! It really doesn't matter how you think of God. What matters is that you can relive the experience. Most importantly, we need to have a personal relationship with God!!!
One of the reasons why the Trinity sprang to existence, I believe, was because of the politics of the time. The first-century Christians knew their purpose, but the Christians of later centuries were less sure of their purpose. They didn't have the first-century experience, and had to rely on a written tradition about the first-century experience (ie. the New Testament). I think a lot of people got confused when they read the Gospel of John and John and Paul's epistles. The author of the Gospel of John knew what he was doing, but
we don't know
exactly what he was doing.
But maybe that's the problem. People think it's all about precision and exactitude. As more and more Gentiles accumulated in churches, the Church became more and more influenced by ideas of "precision and exactitude" with regards to interpreting the Texts. They were influenced by Greek philosophy and gnosticism, where you had to present logical arguments that had no loopholes, and find ways to structure an argument so it couldn't be refuted. The doctrine of the Trinity presented in the 4th century was intended to be one that could not be refuted, based on what the New Testament said. Adherence to the doctrine has been justified by the statement, "The Texts don't declare there is a Trinity, but there is one in the Texts." But Christianity was not meant to be a philosophy that could be proven and refuted, therefore thinking in terms of "precision and exactitude" was pointless. This is where those who saw it as heresy to not believe in a Trinity got it wrong. They took it "too literally," or as I would put it, they mistook it as a
prescription, rather than a
description of what Christianity represented. But Christians from the 2nd century onwards didn't understand that. For the next 1800 years, we've been operating under this misunderstanding. The story of the Trinity is one where people took a
prescriptive, rather than a
descriptive approach to Christianity.
We must free ourselves from the idea that belief in the Trinity is
the only way to relive the experience, as this could be akin to idol-worship. The 4th century Christians needed the Trinity for political reasons, but we don't need it, because the politics that conceived of the Trinity was in the 4th century, not the 21st century. It is completely acceptable to churches and congregations to form
local doctrine to formulate concepts that pertain to the needs of a
local population, but it cannot speak for all times, places and generations. Such
local doctrine is "sound doctrine" for that
local population, but not "sound doctrine" for the whole population. We have to leave the past behind and move on.
Is the Trinity a heresy? No, but then nor is it essential. It is only useful for apologetics, ie. against Arianism. Every community, country, nation and group of people has its struggles. This is what makes a religion, a community, country or nation. It is working through our problems. It becomes a part of our individual and collective identity. It is what makes us who we are, and the New Testament is what tells us who we are . . . but, the Trinity is not an essential part of our identity. It only identifies the Christians of the 4th century because they are the ones who conceived it, just as the New Testament identifies the Christians of the first century. For the 21st century, one must perform an
exegesis of the first-century Texts.