You’re Hearing It from Someone Else As Well

Headstrong?

I regularly receive criticism because the GoedBericht site explicitly distances itself from the church doctrine of the Trinity.

• The church’s most important dogma didn’t just come about, did it? Haven’t brilliant minds intensely worked on this and formulated these things?
• If all churches have conformed to this doctrine, who are you to set it aside? Do you want to ignore so many centuries of church history?
• And so on.

My response to such criticism is always: the doctrine of the Trinity is demonstrably a construction of human ideas. Scripture does not speak of ‘one essence, three persons.’ These concepts are unknown to Scripture, let alone the distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘person.’ Scripture repeatedly speaks of “one God, the Father” but never of ‘God the Son.’ Consistently, He is called “the Son of God.” The terminology used by the classical dogma makes the doctrine of the Trinity fundamentally unbiblical. This is not an opinion but a fact that anyone can verify for themselves.

A Theological Confirmation

That the above claim is true, I found strikingly confirmed today in the Nederlands Dagblad (Dutch newspaper). A Roman Catholic theologian, Hendro Munsterman, affiliated with the mentioned newspaper, wrote the following (bold and capital letters are mine; AP):

… the Catholic tradition [likes to refer] to the councils from the early centuries of Christianity. For example, Scripture nowhere literally states that there is one God who consists of three persons. Yet this dogma of the divine Trinity is the core of the Christian faith.

By reading Scripture, but using the prevailing Greek culture and philosophical tradition of the time, the church came to the — STRICTLY SPEAKING ‘UNBIBLICAL’ — CONCLUSION that the Christian God is ‘one God in three persons.‘ The same applies to the dogmas that these councils have proclaimed about the two natures of Christ (’truly God and truly man’) and that one should therefore call Mary ‘Mother of God.’

Here is a theologian who calls the doctrine of the Trinity “the core of the Christian faith,” but frankly admits that this doctrine is, strictly speaking, an “unbiblical conclusion,” inspired by “Greek culture and philosophical tradition.”

I rest my case.

Delen: