Watching believers twist themselves into knots trying to explain the unexplainable is amusing but it is time to bring in an expert to sort through the centuries of xtian bullshit which preceded the invention of the "trinity."
From Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities Pages 156 -
Tertullian who invented this stupidity later went on to become a member of the Montanist heresy. So easy it was to run afoul of proto-orthodox silliness, apparently!
From Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities Pages 156 -
Quote:If nothing else, Origen shows that in the second and third centuries, not
only are there clearly defined boundaries between the proto-orthodox and the
“heretics”; there are also some vague boundaries between what counts as orthodox
and what does not. The orthodoxy of one age can become the heresy of
the next. The Ebionites were arguably the first to learn this theological maxim,
as those who represented a very ancient form of Christianity, possibly rooted
in the beliefs of Jesus’ own Jewish apostles. They had numerous unlucky successors
in later ages, advocates of once acceptable views later to be condemned
as heretical.
The Beginnings of the Trinity
Neither Tertullian nor Hippolytus approached the questions of the nature of
Christ as God and man and of the relationship of the divine members of the
Godhead with the erudition, nuance, and acumen of Origen. But in some ways,
their less daring approaches became more useful to orthodox thinkers of later
times. Their opposition to patripassianist understandings (the belief that “the
Father suffered”) forced them to think in trinitarian terms, of God being distinctively
three in expression though one in essence. As Hippolytus puts it,
“With respect to the power, God is one; but with respect to the economy [i.e.,
to how this power expresses itself], the manifestation is triple” (Refutation
8:2). In Tertullian’s formulation, God is three in degree, not condition; in form,
not substance; in aspect, not power (Against Praxeas, 2). Tertullian was the
first Latin theologian to use the term Trinity.
Within the broad contours of proto-orthodoxy, then, one can see development
and variety. As time progressed, theologians became more entranced with
the mystery of the Trinity and developed a more highly refined vocabulary for
dealing with it. But that was long after the major issues had been resolved, of
whether Christ was man but not God (Ebionites; Theodotians), God but not
man (Marcionites, some Gnostics), or two beings, one man and one God (most
Gnostics). The proto-orthodox opted for none of the above. Christ was God
and man, yet he was one being, not two.24
Once that was acknowledged, the details still had to be worked out. And
they were worked out for centuries. If it were easy, it would not be a mystery.
Theologians began to be obsessed with the question of how and in what way
Christ could be both human and divine, completely both. Did he have a human
soul but a divine spirit? Did he have a divine soul instead of a human soul? Was
his body really like everyone else’s body? How could God have a body? Was
he subordinate to the Father, as in Origen?25 If he was not subordinate to the
Father, why was he the one sent, rather than the other way around? And so on,
almost ad infinitum.
In this earlier period, however, the debates were both more basic and more
fundamental. As a result, the alternatives within the proto-orthodox tradition—
as opposed to the alternatives that separated the proto-orthodox from everyone
else—were less clear and less obvious. All that was to change when the protoorthodox
found themselves to be the last ones standing and were forced then to
move forward into the orthodox forms of Christianity of the fourth and fifth
centuries.
Tertullian who invented this stupidity later went on to become a member of the Montanist heresy. So easy it was to run afoul of proto-orthodox silliness, apparently!
