OK, first of all, I have to correct a big typo in the last post: it should be "Doctrines were
NOT taught by the Bible, then disappeared, and then magically restored by the Nicene era/Athanasian church".
So what I was saying, is that while being closer to the NT times does not guarantee it is not a heresy, still, when you see concepts (with associated terms, interpretations, etc) developing over the centuries (especially in an area where the Bible is more inferential, then clear), then an earlier expression is more likely to be closer to the truth. Baptism regeration may have begun in early centuries, but we can clearly see that it was not taught in the NT,and that it started later. One is either a baptismal regenerationist, or he is not. One is either a gnostic, or he is not. With the Trinity, many terms and ways of expressing it were added (including things such as symmetry and words like "person"), and this did develop, and the earlier formulations were closer to the NT (because less terminology and philosophy had been added), though it no less represented "orthodoxy". So the fourth century expression should not be upheld so exclusively, and in ignorance of the earlier simpler expression. There was heresy back then, but at the same time, there was a bit more of a biblical simplicity.
Arianism and gnosticism both were in the era of New Testament times
Arianism? That developed centuries later.
Actually, formulas like this and the others sprang out of the same biblical revelation, developed together, and diverged as different points, such as the oneness or threeness of God or the humanity or deity of the Son were emphasized by different people or schools of thought. The challenge was to put all these truths together in some way, and it was hard to do that without
overemphasizing certain points and thus neglecting others. Still, there was through all of that an "orthodox" position, but even this changed, being perfected at Nicaea, and polished at Chalcedon. The new terms chosen safeguarded against the heretical views, but the resulting symmetry of it often confused people.
I would have thought the opposite - that they were unhappy with Athanasius' position because it seemed to Sabellian. I would be interested to know where you got that.
Basically, as I said, it shared in common with Sabellianism the symmetry. Even right before the Nicene Council, the Bishop of Rome himself, Dionysius, "was clearly shocked at the Origen-inspired doctrine of the three hypostases", as suggested by Dionysius of Alexandria, "which seemed to him to undermine the divine monarchy", and he implied they were "virtual tritheists,
splitting the indivisible oneness of the Deity into 'three powers, three absolutely separate hypostases, three divinities'" (Early Christian Doctrines, p. 134. This book, by the way, is the source of a lot of my information. It is very good, and an orthodox resource, even cited by CRI and others!)
So we see, the objection raised by many, was that it overly divided, not melded too close together, the Three. This was the
opposite direction from Sabellianism, though the symmetry was similar. The problem between the two positions, IMO, was shifting between terms such as "person" and "manifestation", and projecting them onto the same completely symmetrical model.
I have never seen where they put it at the Incarnation....do you have any examples? I think Tertullian only, as far as I can tell, put the begetting at creation.
Hyppolytus was one. Some of Tertullian's statements seem to point to the Incarnation as well. Of course, later leaders saw associating the begettal with His birth or the Creation as being misunderstood as Him being "created" at a point in time (hence Arianism), so they moved the "begettal" back to "past eternity". Problem is, this would the raise the questions of what exactly "begettal" was (apparentely obscuring the meaning of the term), and why it was different from the "procession" of the Spirit. So more philosophy was added in time to try to explain that.
(Another point I forgotto mention is that even the creeds acknowledged that the Father "Was 'OF' non; neither begotten...". In the common symmetrical expression we hear today, you would think there would be a "Father OF God", just as there is a Son of God and Spirit of God.)
They remained throughout the church until after the Nicene period, when the three Cappadocians and Augustine influenced theology for the worse.
With Augustine, you have no problem with me. But the Cappadocian fathers were actually critical of Augustine's doctrine for being overexplained.
Karen Armstrong's A History of God, p.116-8, shows the PURPOSE of the nice symmetrical (i.e.—3 coeternal coequals) formula was basically to make it more of a mystery just for the sake of mystery! To the Greek church, it was something by which one experiences God through
contemplation. (This is where the symmetry of it was useful). It "only made sense as a mystical or spiritual experience: It had to be lived, not thought, because God went far beyond human concepts. It was not a logical or intellectual formulation but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason". After all, the Trinity is
dogma. We usually think of dogma as those statements, that must be believed INTELLECTUALLY, no matter how ridiculous it seems. But that's actually
kerygma! Dogma is truth "that is only grasped intuitively and as a result of religious experience. Logically, it made no sense at all. It reminds us that we must not hope to understand Him". It wasn't meant to be taken literally or to make sense or be explained. But that is precisely what the Western church tried to do (even attempting to represent it through pictures) —only to have the larger society jettison the whole idea in the Age of Reason. Where the East, following the Cappadocian Fathers, started from the threeness, thinking of each hypostasis as the whole (Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration, 40:41), the West, following Augustine, started from the divine unity (the mysterious "substance") and then was left trying to figure out how the Three hypostases fit in. THIS is precisely the root of the problem in the West. Looking through history, we see that the West is where all of the later problems with it arose, with dissenters like Servetus, the Socinians, the Unitarians, and now the "kingdom of the cults". The East never experienced all of this dissent over the doctrine. And the Eastern fathers, while regarding Augustine as a great father, were still mistrustful of his Trinitarian theology. It too, like Arianism, was seen as making God seem too rational and anthropomorphic.
