PeterG wrote:Being a trinitarian is about a conception of God, not the use of the word "trinity." I rarely use or think of the word. The Nicene Creed itself does not use the word. The Dordrecht Confession is certainly trinitarian:
We confess with the mouth, and believe with the heart, with all the pious, according to the holy Scriptures, in one eternal, almighty, and incomprehensible God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and in none more, nor in any other; before whom no God was made or existed, nor shall there be any after Him: for of Him, and through Him, and in Him, are all things; to Him be praise and honor forever and ever, Amen.
As far as I know, the only real alternative to trinitarianism is modalism. If you're going to be a monotheist who believes in the deity of Christ you pretty much have to be one or the other. Trinitarianism is far, far more predominant in the doctrinal confessions of churches that uphold the deity of Christ, Oneness Pentecostals being the only notable modalist group that I'm aware of. As you said, it's probably impossible to determine exactly what the Christian rank-and-file believe, but I strongly suspect that they would incline toward trinitarianism rather than modalism, regardless of their degree of familiarity with theological terminology. That would certainly fit with my experience.
None of this is to say that it is necessary or even desirable for every Christian to be familiar with formal theological concepts. You seem wary of that idea, and I appreciate that.
I would go one step further. I am not certain that some of these grand theological concepts are correct, and they have led to bloody divisions about things that are beyond our understanding. I worry that we sometimes create grand edifices of our own understanding and put our trust in them.
To me, it's really important to remember that God is beyond our understanding. I definitely believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and in the deity of Jesus Christ. I am not sure how to relate that to other depictions of God - Elohim, the seven spirits of God, etc. The Bible never gives us a neatly packaged explanation of the exact relationships between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I suspect you would probably call me trinitarian, but the Nicene Creed was written as the result of a council that said I am a heretic
if I don't believe this:
Homoousion (/ˌhɒmoʊˈuːsiən/; Greek: ὁμοούσιον, translit. homooúsion, lit. 'same in being', from ὁμός, homós, "same" and οὐσία, ousía, "being") is a Christian theological term, used in the Nicene Creed for describing Jesus (God the Son) as ὁμοούσιον τῷ Πατρί, "same in being" or "of single essence", with God the Father. That notion became one of the cornerstones of theology in Nicene Christianity, and also one of the most important theological concepts within the Trinitarian doctrinal understanding of God.
The term was adopted at the First Council of Nicaea (325) in order to clarify the ontology of Christ. From its Greek original, the term was translated into other languages. In Latin, which is lacking a present participle of the verb 'to be', the translation consubstantialis was chosen, since the noun substantia was commonly used in Latin as translation of the Aristotelian term ousia).
This whole debate of substances and essences leaves me cold, there's nothing like this in the Bible. And it's not just Latin that has difficulty translating this precisely, English does too. The Nicene Creed insists that the right word to describe this relationship is a term taken from Gnostic teachers. Some of the early church fathers, including Origen, thought the right explanation was more like this:
A homoiousian (from the Greek: ὁμοιούσιος from ὅμοιος, hómoios, "similar" and οὐσία, ousía, "essence, being") was a member of 4th-century AD theological party which held that God the Son was of a similar, but not identical, substance or essence to God the Father. Proponents of this view included Eustathius of Sebaste and George of Laodicea.:580, 668 Homoiousianism arose in the early period of the Christian religion out of a wing of Arianism. It was an attempt to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable views of the pro-Nicene homoousians, who believed that God the Father and Jesus his son were identical (ὁμός, homós) in substance, with the "neo-Arian" position that God the Father is "incomparable" and therefore the Son of God can not be described in any sense as "equal in substance or attributes" but only "like" (ὅμοιος, hómoios) the Father in some subordinate sense of the term.
I don't know the right theological explanation, and it's not because I haven't spent time on it. You can really get lost in this stuff. It's not particularly edifying or useful. It doesn't make you a better disciple. It doesn't involve the kind of worshipful descriptions of God we find in the Bible. I think it's better for us to love, serve, and worship God.
Constantine thought the way to united Christianity was to establish a detailed common theology that settled questions like this, but it actually led to deep divisions among people who believed what the Bible teaches but disagreed about systematic theology. And perhaps they got a little lost in trying to explain what cannot be explained.
I would rather worship God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. I don't need a lot of fancy theology to do that, what the Bible tells me is enough. Instead of a creed that ensures I am on the right side of a dispute I don't understand, I would rather spend more time worshiping in church.
