Page 23 - Countering Trinitarian Arguments With Historical Reference

Quoting Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. “Marcion believed that there were two Deities, one of Creation/ Hebrew Bible and one of the New Testament.” Marcion also read Christian writings, especially St. Paul's letters, and found there a wholly new religion. He concluded that there are two gods: the inferior god of justice of the Old Testament, and the higher God of love of the New Testament.
The Catholic/Gnostic Theologian Origen taught and wrote that Jesus is not the one and only true God in flesh (1 Tim 3:16) but that he is a number two or second God. Origen Against Celsus “...him (Jesus) who accepted death for mankind (is) worthy of the second place of honor after the (Father) God of the universe, the position given to him after the great deeds which he did in heaven and earth.”
This almost sounds like the Elohim/Gods of Mormonism. This parallels Greek Pagan mythology, like Zeus who sent his son Hercules to do some great deeds and then rewards him with a demigod status. Origen also says that Origen Against Celsus, 5:39 “...we may call him (Jesus) a second god,..”
A History of the Christian Church by Historian Williston Walker, 1953, page 114 “Arianism: Origen, still its most dominating theological influence,...If he had taught the eternal generation of the Son, he had also held Him to be a second God and a creature (ante, p. 81).”
Dr. John C. McDowell Professor of Theology at Edinburgh University quoting parts of his Theological lessons on Triad and Monad. We can see that both Trinity and Arian teachings are biased upon Pagan Platonic Philosophies and pluralistic Polytheism concepts:
“Greek Platonic ‘Gods’
-- Central problem for certain Platonists: ‘One’ and the ‘Many’ (in Christian terms, how
to connect the unknown God with a material creation).
-- Result – gradations of Middle Platonism, then common especially (but not only) in Alexandrian Christianity (subordinationationism).
Monas as absolutely transcendent
• Albinus –gods remote from world of sense perception – First God, unmoved (Aristotelian). He always knows himself and his own thoughts, and this activity is called Form.
• Apuleius – Plato's God is "incorporeal, one, immeasurable, begetter of everything, ... blessed and beneficent, the best, in lack of nothing, himself bearing all things, celestial, ineffable, unnamable, and as he himself says, ‘invisible, unconquerable’ – ‘whose nature is difficult to find and if found cannot be expressed among the many.’"
22