Quote:
Originally posted by Lebell
I would argue that anyone who doesn't believe in the Trinity is by definition not Christian, since it is the belief in Jesus' divinity that defines a Christian.
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Yes and no. I agree, in the sense that I accept it for the same reasons that the multiple councils debating the matter decided that it must be true, over many many debates. (Those reasons aren't really important here so I won't bother getting into them.) But, the belief in the Trinity and Jesus' divinity is only a core part of Christianity because of the decisions of these early councils as the church was forming. It took a few hundred years for Christianity to take the form it has today - of Jesus being somehow fully Himself but fully God, somehow fully human yet fully divine, etc. The church was really only forced to look at and come to a decision regarding these issues by people who taught things - before it was understood that they shouldn't be taught - that their instincts told them were not true. Most variations take one accepted truth of the church so far that it denies another.
Gnostics, for example, believed that "God" was the divine Creator God and that "Jesus" was the divine Redeemer God. Two God's working against each other. As has been mentioned, Arius taught - before the issue was addressed, although he continued to believe and teach this after his teachings were debated and officially rejected - that Jesus was not fully God. And then there were those later on that thought that Jesus was not fully human, so the church had to get together and debate that and come up with a response to it.
The point is, while I agree from a standpoint that the reason it is seen the way it is is because it is necessary for it to be the case in Christianity, it was not always so clear and it never will be - that's why they're called Mysteries. So, there will always be Christians who, in their effort to grasp beyond the Mystery and understand what can't be understood, take one of these viewpoints of accepting one point of the Mystery so much that they reject another.