Is the Trinity False

Question from a Site Viewer
There is only one God, and his name is LORD JESUS CHRIST as per the revelation in the new Testament; pray and study these: Isaiah 7:14, Isaiah 9:6, Isaiah 35:3, Zachariah 14:8, Malachi 3:1, Matthew 1:21-23, Matthew 22:41-46, John 1:1-14, John 14:7-9, John 8:24, John 20:26-29, Acts 20:28, Colossians 2:8, Titus 2:12-14, Revelation 1:8 and many others. Pray to our God Jesus Christ that you may understand his mystery that Paul requested Timothy to know (1 Timothy 3:16). The story of the trinity is for pagans and infidels that was started by the Romans; the word trinity is not in the Bible. It is a summary or imagination of human beings.

Tim’s Answer
I read with interest your information. The passages you cite provide evidence that Jesus is God. But none of them explain the Father who spoke to Jesus, the Father to whom Jesus prayed, and the One who the apostles called the God of the Lord Jesus (2 Corinthians 1:3; Ephesians 1:3; Colossians 1:3; 1 Peter 1:3). Nor do the passages explain the Comforter who would be like Jesus (John 14:16-17), nor why Jesus commanded us to baptize in the name of “the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28:19). Nor does it explain Acts 7:55; Ephesians 2:18; 1 Corinthians 8:6; 1 Timothy 2:5; Revelation 5:6-7. The doctrine of the Trinity was not developed out of thin air. The church used the word “Trinity” to describe that which Scripture portrays; that there is a Father to whom Jesus spoke, there is Jesus who is fully God, and there is a Spirit who is a Comforter just like Jesus.

The word Trinity did not come from the Romans or from the pagans. The word was first used to describe the Christian Godhead by a North African bishop named Tertullian, in the first decade of the third century where he writes in his treatise, Against Praxeas, Ch. 2, that some argued that the only way one can believe in one God is to say that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are the same person. He disputes this, stating that:

the mystery of the dispensation . . . distributes the Unity into a Trinity, placing in their order the three Persons–the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: three, however, not in condition, but in degree; not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in aspect; yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, inasmuch as He is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned, under the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

Tertullian writes over 100 years before the council of Nicea, and while the Romans were heavily persecuting the church.

He, however, was not the first to see a separation within the unity of the Godhead. Ireneus, who was a disciple of Polycarp, the great bishop of Smyrna who personally knew John the Apostle, writes around 165 A.D., or within 70 years of the Apostle John’s death, these words:

The Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: [She believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God . . .
Against Heresies, Bk. 1, Ch. 10, Sect. 1

Ireneus was from Asia Minor, not Rome, and was sent by the church at Smyrna (modern day Ismer, Turkey) to Gaul to work with Pothinus, another Smyrnan who established a mission to the Gauls. Ireneus’ direct linkage to the Apostle John through Polycarp gives us reason to believe that he knew what he was saying when he said that this is what the church had received from the apostles and their disciples in the faith.

Justin Martyr, who writes about 15 years earlier (around 150 A.D.), states:

But both Him [the most true God, the Father of righteousness], and the Son (who came forth from Him and taught us these things, and the host of the other good angels who follow and are made like to Him), and the prophetic Spirit, we worship and adore . . .
The First Apology of Justin, Ch. 6

Later, in that same work, he describes the administration of the sacraments, stating:

There is then brought to the president of the brethren bread and a cup of wine mixed with water; and he taking them, gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe, through the name of the Son and of the Holy Spirit . . .
Ch. 65

Before Ireneus and Justin Martyr, Ignatius, the third bishop of Antioch and a personal friend of the apostles, in 107 A.D.,writes:

Be subject to the bishop, and to one another, as Jesus Christ to the Father, according to the flesh, and the apostles to Christ, and to the Father, and to the Spirit; that so there may be a union both fleshly and spiritual . . .
Epistle to the Magnesians, Ch. 8

Again, he distinguishes the three persons of the Trinity from each other, just as the writers of Scripture do. Polycarp, around the same time, writes to the Philippians and distinguishes the Father from the Son in these words:

But may the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ Himself, who is the Son of God, and our everlasting High Priest, build you up in faith and truth . . . and may He bestow on you a lot and portion among His saints, and on us with you, and on all that are under heaven, who shall believe in our Lord Jesus Christ, and in His Father, who raised Him from the dead.
Epistle to the Philippians, Ch. 12

And Clement, at the end of the first century, also speaks of the different persons of the Godhead (First Epistle of Clement, Ch. 42).

So, while the name “Trinity” did not appear in early church writings until the dawn of the third century, the concept goes back to the earliest days of the church. Moreover, what is equally impressive is that not only the Roman church, but all churches throughout the ancient world, including the Nestorian Church (the church of ancient Persia), the Ethiopian Church, and the Orthodox churches, all affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity, though none of these ancient churches ever looked to Rome for their theology. Thus, the concept of three persons in one God not only goes back to the earliest days of the church and to those who personally knew the apostles, but the concept was widely distributed wherever the church went. The reason we use the word “Trinity” is that it best describes the truths found in Scripture, that there will be One who is both with God and is God (John 1:1), and yet who submits fully to the Father, goes to the cross not according to the His own will, but according to the will of the Father, and who when dying cries out to the Father. The Son dies. The Father never dies. The Son is resurrected. The Father is never resurrected. The Son intercedes for us. The Father intercedes for no one. The Son is the mediator between us and the Father. These distinctions are consistently maintained throughout the pages of Scripture. And the Spirit is a Comforter just like the Son, who can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30), lied to (Acts 5:3), and despised (Hebrews 10:29).

You may not like the term “Trinity.” But if you follow Scripture, you must accept that there are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, and these three each in various passages of Scripture are called God, and yet in a multitude of passages are distinguished one from the other. I do not know of a better word to describe the interrelationship of the Father and the Son, the Son and the Spirit, and the Father and the Spirit, than “Trinity.”

I encourage you to research for yourself the pages of Scripture, and, if you want, the ancient documents of the church. I think you will find that the One who submitted His own will to the Father’s will (Luke 22:43) was separate from (Matthew 27:46) but with the Father for all eternity (John 17:1-5).

a stone in the community of His church,

tim