How or why?
There seems to be four views of the deemed Biblical Trinity. Any of them?
How?
Why?
1 John 5:1, "Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: . . ."
Yes. He was specifically addressing the Chalcedonian doctrine in the provided quotes.
"The ‘Latin heresy’ is Torrance’s term for Western Christianity’s historic tendency to think only in terms of external relations, one manifestation of which is to attribute to Christ an unfallen humanity. Leo’s
Tome is a prime example, although Tertullian and Augustine share the blame for the West’s bifurcation of Christ’s humanity from ours. Torrance also faults the Chalcedonian Definition failure clearly to indicate that Christ’s humanity was fallen, not neutral. The ‘Latin heresy’ has infected most Western theology from the fifth century forward. Among those who have escaped its influence, Torrance lists Peter Lombard, Martin Luther, John McLeod Campbell, H.R. Macintosh, and Karl Barth."
(Kuiken,
Christ’s Humanity In Current And Ancient Controversy: Fallen Or Not?)
Here is Paul D. Molnar on the topic (from "Thomas F. Torrance: Theologian of the Trinity,”)
Torrance’s objections to aspects of the “Westminster theology” should be seen together with his objection to “Federal Theology”. His main objection to Federal theology is to the ideas that Christ died only for the elect and not for the whole human race and that salvation is conditional on our observance of the law. The ultimate difficulty here that one could “trace the ultimate ground of belief back to eternal divine decrees behind the back of the Incarnation of God’s beloved Son, as in a federal concept of
pre-destination, [and this] tended to foster a hidden Nestorian dualism between the divine and human natures in the on Person of Jesus Christ, and thus even to provide ground for a dangerous form of Arian and Socinian heresy in which the atoning work of Christ regarded as an organ of God’s activity was separated from the intrinsic nature and character of God as Love”. This then allowed people to read back into “God’s saving purpose” the idea that “in the end some people will not actually be saved”, thus limiting the scope of God’s grace. And Torrance believed they reached their conclusions precisely because they allowed the law rather than the Gospel to shape their thinking about our covenant relations with God fulfilled in Christ’s atonement. Torrance noted that the framework of Westminster theology “derived from seventeenth-century federal theology formulated in sharp contrast to the highly rationalised conception of a sacramental universe of Roman theology, but combined with a similar way of thinking in terms of primary and secondary causes (reached through various stages of grace leading to union with Christ), which reversed the teaching of Calvin that it is through union with Christ first that we participate in all his benefits”. This gave the
Westminster Confession and
Catechisms “a very legalistic and constitutional character in which theological statements were formalised at times with ‘almost frigidly logical definiton'”. Torrance’s main objection to the federal view of the covenant was that it allowed its theology to be dictated on grounds other than the grace of God attested in Scripture and was then allowed to dictate in a legalistic way God’s actions in his Word and Spirit, thus undermining ultimately the freedom of grace and the assurance of salvation that could only be had by seeing that our regenerated lives were hidden with Christ in God. Torrance thought of the Federal theologians as embracing a kind of “biblical nominalism” because “biblical sentences tend to be adduced out of their context and to be interpreted arbitrarily and singly in detachment from the spiritual ground and theological intention and content”. Most importantly, they tended to give biblical statements, understood in this way, priority over “fundamental doctrines of the Gospel” with the result that “Westminster theology treats biblical statements as definitive propositions from which deductions are to be made, so that in their expression doctrines thus logically derived are given a categorical or canonical character”. For Torrance, these statements should have been treated, as in the
Scots Confession, in an “open-structured” way, “pointing away from themselves to divine truth which by its nature cannot be contained in finite forms of speech and thought, although it may be mediated through them”. Among other things, Torrance believed that the Westminster approach led them to weaken the importance of the Doctrine of the Trinity because their concept of God fored without reference to who God is in revelation led them ultimately to a different God than the God of classical Nicene theology."
Limited Atonement directly rejects the Chalcedonian doctrine when it comes to the Son (rather than God becoming man, God becomes the man Adam could have been....not not actually man). Universal Salvation is the same error at the opposite end.
