View source for Mormonism and the nature of God/Nicene creed

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{{Resource Title|Are Latter-day Saints not Christian because they do not accept the Nicene Creed?}}
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== ==
{{Criticism label}}

Some Chritians claim that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are not Christian because they do not accept the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_creed Nicene Creed's] statement about the Trinity.

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== ==
{{ChurchResponseBar
|link=http://www.lds.org/topics/christians?lang=eng
|title=Are Mormons Christian?
|publication=Gospel Topics
|summary=Latter-day Saints Do Not Accept the Creeds of Post–New Testament Christianity.<br>
Scholars have long acknowledged that the view of God held by the earliest Christians changed dramatically over the course of centuries. Early Christian views of God were more personal, more anthropomorphic, and less abstract than those that emerged later from the creeds written over the next several hundred years. The key ideological shift that began in the second century A.D., after the loss of apostolic authority, resulted from a conceptual merger of Christian doctrine with Greek philosophy.
}}

== ==
{{Conclusion label}} 

{{:Source:Webb:BYUS:2011:15:Christian beliefs do not need to have Neo-Platonic influence to be true‎}}

Some modern Christians wish to apply a "doctrinal exclusion" to declare who is or isn't Christian.  Such definitions are generally self-serving, and not very helpful.  With the Nicene Creed, critics are ironically in the position of using a definition that would exclude all Christians for more than two centuries after Christ from the Christian fold.

:Thus the New Testament itself is far from any doctrine of the Trinity or of a triune God who is three co-equal Persons of One Nature.<ref>William J. Hill, ''The Three-Personed God'' (Washington DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 27.</ref>

:The New Testament does not contain the developed doctrine of the Trinity.<ref>''New Testament Theology'' (Grand Rapids MI, Zondervan, 1967), 1:84.</ref>

:There is in them [the Apostolic Fathers], of course, no trinitarian doctrine and no awareness of a trinitarian problem."<ref>JND Kelly, ''Early Christian Doctrines'', revised edition,  (New York: Harper, 1978), 95.</ref>

:The Church had to wait for more than three hundred years for a final synthesis, for not until the Council of Constantinople [AD 381] was the formula of one God existing in three coequal Persons formally ratified.<ref>Edmund J. Fortman, ''The Triune God: A Historical Study of the Doctrine of the Trinity'' (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1972), 44.</ref>

These passages are succinct summaries.  If a critic wishes to justify his or her belief in the creedal Trinity, they must rely on tradition and the creeds of the 4th century, and abandon claims of scriptural or historical support for such a belief in early Christianity, including among the apostles and those they taught.

Since the LDS believe in an apostasy from true doctrine, they see the creedal Trinitarianism&mdash;which is an admitted novelty in the centuries after Christ&mdash;as evidence of it.

{{:Source:Webb:BYUS:2011:5:Mormons, Nicea, and Plato‎}}
{{:Source:Webb:BYUS:2011:16:Joseph Smith more coherent than Augustine on matter and the divine‎}}
{{:Question: Was Nicean Trinitarianism always a key part of Christian belief?}}
{{:Question: What were early Christian beliefs on the nature of God?}}
{{:Question: Does the Bible contain also the necessary elements for Trinitarianism?}}
{{:Question: Are there new ideas necessary for creedal Trinitarianism?}}
{{:Question: What does John 10:30 have to do with Trinitarianism?}}
{{:Question: What does 1 John 5:7-8 have to do with Trinitariansim?}}
{{:Question: Why was Nicean Trinitarianism introduced at all?}}

{{FME-Source
|title=Question: Why was Nicean Trinitarianism introduced at all?
|category=Nature of God
}}
<onlyinclude>
==Question: Why was Nicean Trinitarianism introduced at all?==
===People tried a ‘new’ way of talking about God because of disputes about the nature and mission of Christ===

<blockquote>
Let us return to the second century, when it was first sensed that the formulations of the New Testament and the Apostolic Fathers were not sufficient to describe the nature of the divinity. A new way of doing this was attempted. Thus the so-called Monarchian controversy occurred... In addition to the Modalists (such as Sabellius), for whom Christ and the Holy Spirit were modes in which one Godhead appeared, there the Dynamists or Adoptionists, who conceived of Christ either as a man who was raised up by being adopted by God, or as a man filled with God's power.<ref>Kurt Aland, ''A History of Christianity'' (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 1:190.</ref>
</blockquote>

Simply put, people tried a ‘new’ way of talking about God because of disputes about the nature and mission of Christ.  In the LDS view, this is because the loss of revelation to the Apostles (due to the apostasy) meant that Christianity was divided about key issues.  No one had a good way to resolve the questions, and so they turned to the best intellectual tools they had&mdash;they merged Christian theology with Greek philosophy.

Father Charles Curran, a Roman Catholic priest, said, 

<blockquote>
We [the Christians] went through the problem of appropriating the word in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries with the great trinitarian and Christalogical{{cs}} councils where we finally came to the conclusion of three persons in God and two natures in Jesus. Many people at the time said, ‘Well, you can’t say that because those words aren’t in the scriptures.’ That’s right, they aren’t in the scriptures, they are borrowed from Greek philosophy, but they are the on-going account of the believing community to understand, appropriate and live the word of God in its own circumstances.<ref>{{Sunstone1|author=Charles Curran|article=Creative Fidelity: Keeping the Religion a Living Tradition|vol=11|date=July 1987|start=45}} Cited in {{BYUS1|author=Robert L. Millet|article=Joseph Smith and Modern Mormonism: Orthodoxy, Neoorthodoxy, Tension, and Tradition|vol=29|num=3|date=1989|start=footnote 14}}</ref>
</blockquote>
</onlyinclude>
{{endnotes sources}}


===Is modern Trinitarianism all understood in the same sense?===
Owen Thomas, a professor of systemic theology, noted that: 

:...our survey of the history of the [Trinity] doctrine in the text has indicated that there are several doctrines of the trinity: Eastern, Western, social analogy, modal, so forth. There is one doctrine in the sense of the threefold name of God of the rule of faith as found, for example, in the Apostle's Creed. This, however, is not yet a doctrine. It is ambiguous and can be interpreted in a number of ways. There is one doctrine in the sense of the Western formula of "three persons in one substance." However, this formula is also ambiguous if not misleading and can be interpreted in a number of ways. A doctrine of the trinity would presumably be one interpretation of this formula . . . let us assume that the phrase "doctrine of the trinity" in the question refers to any of a number of widely accepted interpretations of the threefold name of God in the role of faith.<ref>Owen C. Thomas, ''Theological Questions: Analysis and Argument'' (Wilton, Conn.: Morehouse-Barlow, 1983), 34.</ref>

So, there is ambiguity and disagreement still.  This is not characteristic of revelation, but rather of man’s imperfect intellectual efforts to define God according to philosophical criteria.  Proponents of this view have even added text to the Bible and opposed the correcting of such errors when it was discovered.

As one current thinker about the Trinity writes:

:The notion that in the Trinity one Person may be the font or source of being or Godhead for another lingered on to be a cause of friction and controversy between the East and the West, and still persists today. The main thesis of these lectures, I have said, is that the act of faith required for acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity is faith that the Divine unity is a dynamic unity actively unifying in the one divine life the lives of the three divine persons. I now wish to add that in this unity there is no room for any trace of subordinationism, and that the thought of the Father as the source or fount of God-head is a relic of pre Christian theology which has not fully assimilated the Christian revelation.<ref>Leonard Hodgson, ''Doctrine of the Trinity'' (London: Nisbet & Co. Ltd., 1944), 102.</ref>

There is no room in his doctrine for ‘subordinationism’, but remember (already quoted above) that: "'Subordinationism', it is true, was pre-Nicean orthodoxy." 

It is interesting that ideas that were once perfectly orthodox within early Christianity (like subordinationism) are now classed as “pre-Christian theology” which hasn’t yet “assimilated the Christian revelation”.  If anything, this looks like a ‘post-Christian theology’ that has ‘altered the Christian revelation’.  This observation is not intended to argue that subordinationism is correct in all particulars, but merely to point out that current creedal ideas are not what all Christians have always believed.

===A move to change?===

Some Christian theologians have recognized the above difficulties with the Nicene formulation of the trinity, and are advocating a removal of the Greek philosophical ideals that have unnecessarily clouded the issue:

:If we search for a concept of unity corresponding to the biblical testimony of the triune God, the God who unites others with himself, then we must dispense with both the concept of the one substance and the concept of the identical subject. All that remains is: the unitedness, the at-oneness of the three Persons with one another, or: the unitedness, the at-oneness of the triune God.<ref>Jürgen Moltmann, ''The Trinity and the Kingdom of God'', trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM, 1981), 150.</ref>

{{:Source:Webb:BYUS:2011:14:Joseph Smith could hold his own in early Christian debates}}

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