(July 19, 2018 at 10:56 am)Crossless2.0 Wrote:(July 19, 2018 at 10:32 am)SteveII Wrote: That's a very bad argument. Of course the doctrine of the Trinity is baked into Christian belief. ALL the support for it comes from the NT. Here's the test: would anyone trying to work up a systematic theology from the NT words of Jesus and overall events come to a different conclusion if they did not know anything about traditional theology? The answer is no--because it would have happened by now. The NT is the most carefully studied group of documents ever. The doctrine of the trinity is practically universal.
I said "necessarily baked into Christian belief" and stand by that. Of course the Trinity is derived from the NT (specifically out of a need to square John's high-Christology with those gospels that don't embrace it) but it's simply historically false to suggest that this was the only possible outcome of that effort. There were several previous theological positions meant to answer the same problem. I suspect a big reason you don't see people today widely and spontaneously embracing Docetism, to take but one example, is that this view was proscribed centuries ago and subsequent generations of priests, ministers, and laypeople have simply inherited the view that "obviously" the Trinity is the only sensible answer left standing. But councils of priests settling on one answer in a dispute that amounts to little more than imaginative literary criticism (the polite version) or mental masturbation (the less polite version) and declaring alternative viewpoints to be heresies doesn't fill me with much confidence.
You believe it. That's nice for you. But your belief is, itself, historically contingent. Left to your own devices and a NT, I rather doubt you alone would have stumbled across this particular solution.
Sure there were questions and competing thoughts. Your premise rests on the theory that there are other interpretations that can be derived from the same information. They hashed it out, proved a couple of of competing Christologies had flaws or entailed irreconcilable concepts to the rest of the NT (including Docetism). The trinitarian concept is mentioned in several early second century writings so to imply it was a result of some late council is plainly wrong. If there were other ways to look at the information, we would see examples today since we have pretty close to the original NT. You just can't work it out any other way. You seem to think that codifying the concept of the trinity somehow affects the truthfulness/logic/support for it.
A way to prove your point that there were other possible outcomes, then that should be easy to show. What are some divergent views that is not contradicted by a multitude of NT doctrines/discussions/teachings?
