The Testimony of Leading Theologians and Biblical Scholars on the Doctrine of the Trinity
Some christians come on this page and they start interpret Bible's
texts according to what they have been taught on sunday evening from their priests, for the christian the trinity is always is unclear issue when he start asking they told him the human mind can't understand this great Godhead just believe and have faith on trinity and believe that Jesus your savior then you will enter the kingdom of God, as you see the whole issue is just about faith as other before them had faith hindu trinity egyptien trinity babylon trinity.
“A search of the Hebrew Scriptures for any sign of a duality or Trinity of divine personsactive in the creation will provide fruitless. To propose a Godhead of more than one person would require us to cast aside the rules of language and grammar. Responsiblehistorians, both secular and religious, agree that the Jews of Jesus’ time held firmly tofaith in a unipersonal God. It is one of the great ironies of history that Christiantheologians have denied the Jews the right to explain the meaning of God in their ownScriptures.”--Sir Anthony F. Buzzard and Charles F. Hunting,
The Doctrine of the Trinity:Christianity’s Self-Inflicted Wound
(Oxford: International Scholars Publications, 1998),29.
“There is in the Old Testament no indication of distinctions in the Godhead; it is ananachronism to find either the doctrine of the Incarnation or that of the Trinity in its pages.”--W.T. Davison, “God (Biblical and Christian),”
Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics(T&T Clark, 1913) 6:252-269
“Theologians today are in agreement that the Hebrew Bible does not contain a doctrine of the Trinity.”4
The Encyclopedia of Religion
, ed. Mircea Eliade, Macmillan Publishing Company,1987, 15:54
“The doctrine of the Trinity is not taught in the Old Testament.”--
New Catholic Encyclopedia
, Pub. Guild., 1967, 14:306.
“The Old Testament tells us nothing explicitly or by necessary implication of a TriuneGod who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit…
There is no evidence that any sacred writer even suspected the existence of a [Trinity] within the Godhead…
Even to see in the OldTestament suggestions or foreshadowings or ‘veiled signs’ of the Trinity of persons, is togo beyond the words and intent of the sacred writers.”--Edmund J. Fortman,
The Triune God
, Baker Book House, 1972, xv, 8, 9.
“The Old Testament can scarcely be used as authority for the existence of distinctionswithin the Godhead.”--A.B. Davidson, “God”,
Hastings Dictionary of the Bible
, Charles Scribner’s Sons,1911, 2:205
“It cannot be proved, out of the whole number of passages in the Old Testament in whichthe Holy Spirit is mentioned, that this is a person in the Godhead; and it is now the almostuniversally received opinion of learned commentators, that, in the language of the Jews,the ‘Holy Spirit’ means nothing more than divine inspiration, without any reference to a person.”--J.D. Michaelis,
Remarks
on John 16:13-15, cited by Wilson,
Unitarian PrinciplesConfirmed by Trinitarian Testimonies
, 477
“The Old Testament is strictly monotheistic. God is a single personal being. The ideathat a Trinity is to be found there or even in any way shadowed forth, is an assumptionthat has long held sway in theology, but is utterly without foundation. The Jews, as a people, under its teachings became stern opponents of all polytheistic tendencies, andthey have remained unflinching monotheists to this day. On this point there is no break between the Old Testament Scriptures and the New. The monotheistic tradition iscontinued. Jesus was a Jew, trained by Jewish parents in the Old Testament Scriptures.His teaching was Jewish to the core; a new gospel indeed, but not a new theology.”--L.L. Paine,
A Critical History of the Evolution of Trinitarianism
(Boston and New York:Houghton Mifflin and Co., 1902), 4.
“Nowhere does the New Testament identify Jesus with God.”--William Barclay,A Spiritual Autobiography
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 50
“Paul never equates Jesus with God.”--Professor W.R. Matthews
“Apparently Paul did not call Jesus God.”--Sydney Cave,
The Doctrine of the Person of Christ
(Duckworth, 1925), 48
“Paul habitually differentiates Christ from God.”--C.J. Cadoux,
A Pilgrim’s Further Progress: Dialogues on Christian Teaching
(Blackwell, 1943), 40-42.
“Paul neither calls [Jesus] God, nor identifies him anywhere with God. It is true he doesGod’s work; he is certainly God’s supernatural agent, who acts because of God’sinitiative.”--Frances Young, “A Cloud of Witnesses,”
The Myth of God Incarnate, 21.
“St. Paul never gives to Christ the name or description of God…Reviewing the whole of Paul’s utterances regarding Christ, the total impression is that of a monotheisticconviction consistently resisting the impulse to do this very thing – to call Jesus God.”--Anderson Scott, “Christology,”
Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, 1:194.
“All New Testament Christology is subordinationist [supporting the belief that the Son isnot equal with the Father].”--I. Howard Marshall, book review of Jervell,
The Theology of the Acts of the Apostles
, inEvangelical Quarterly70:1, Jan. 1998, 76.
”Ho Theos
[God] is never used in the New Testament to speak of thepneuma hagion[Holy Spirit].”--Karl Rahner,
Theological Investigations
(Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1963), 1:143.
“Theologically considered, the Trinity grew out of a syncretism of Judaism andChristianity with Hellenism and a resulting combination of Jewish and Christianmonotheism with Hellenistic monism…What the theologian thus discovers poses aquestion to theology about the legitimacy of such a construct. When it is clear – andthere is no way around this -that Jesus himself knew only the God of Israel, whom hecalled Father, and knew nothing abut his own later ‘being made God,’ what right have weto call the doctrine of the Trinity normative and binding on Christians?...However weinterpret the various stages of the development of the Trinity, it is clear that this doctrine,which became ‘dogma’ in the East and West has no biblical basis and cannot be tracedcontinuously back to the New Testament…Gradually, theology must face the facts.”--Karl-Heinz Ohlig,Ein Gott in drei Personen? Vom Vater zum “Myserium” der Trinitat
Mainz: Matthias Grunewald-Verlag, 1999, 123-125, translated by Anthony F. Buzzardand Charles F. Hunting
“The history of Christian theology and of dogma teaches us to regard the dogma of theTrinity as the distinctive element in the Christian idea of God….On the other hand wemust honestly admit that the doctrine of the Trinity did not form part of the earlyChristian New Testament…it was never the intent of the original witnesses to Christ inthe New Testament to set before us the intellectual problem – that of three divine persons – and then to tell us silently to worship this mystery of three-in-one. There is no trace of such an idea in the New Testament. This ‘mysterioum logicum,’ the fact that God is threeyet one, lies wholly outside the message of the Bible. It is a mystery which the Church places before the faithful in her theology…but which has n connection with the messageof Jesus and the Apostles. No Apostle would have dreamt of thinking that here are threedivine persons whose mutual relations and paradoxical unity are beyond our understanding. The mystery of the Trinity…is a pseudo-mystery which sprang out of anaberration in logical thought from the lines laid down in the Bible, and not from the biblical doctrine itself.”--Emil Brunner,
Christian Doctrine of God, Dogmatics
(Westminster Press, 1950), 1:205,226, 238
