Page 24 - Countering Trinitarian Arguments With Historical Reference
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God alone in a real and unqualified sense – Being permitting no differentiation.
Duas - Demiurge, dyad the second God
Cosmological and soteriological intermediary – divine through participation in the monad.
Atticus’ strict subordinationism.
Albinus – first Nous becomes the cause of a cosmic Nous who – himself ordered by
the Father – now becomes a principle of order for the whole world.
Numenius, on Plato – above is the completely unknown "First God, being in himself, simple", ‘at rest’; then there is the "second God", the demiurge, the creative principle of the sensible world (= the "World-Soul" of the Timaeus, in Albinus), good through participation in the First God.
Such an extreme view of God’s transcendence necessarily requires an intermediate agent for the purposes of creation and revelation.
The Father’s intelligence or rational thought, the Logos, immanent within God
Justin – not only in name distinct from the Father – as light is from the sun - but was "numerically distinct too". Proof, against Jewish monotheism, was threefold: implied by [Note all three Proofs given to combat Biblical Monotheism are the false Allegorical Method of interpreting the Scriptures and Paganism]
Alleged appearances of God in the OT suggest that "below the creator of all things, there is Another who is, and is called, God and Lord," – inconceivable that the "Master and Father of all things should have abandoned all supercelestial affairs and made himself visible in a minute corner of the world;"
Numerous OT passages (eg.Gen.1:26) represent God as conversing with another, who is presumably a rational being like himself;
The great Wisdom texts, since everyone must agree that an offspring is other than its begetter (e.g., Prov. 8). Therefore, the Logos, having been put forth as an offspring from the Father, was with him before all creatures, and the Father had converse with him.
Even though the Logos is "also God" he is only so as a "second God", worshipped "in a secondary rank", subordinate to the Father.
Origen’s Platonic stress on the absolute transcendence of God and his impassibility (albeit not an exaggerated impassibility as being postulated by many [Pagan] philosophers of the day) made it necessary, as with the Apologists, to postulate some sort of mediator between God and the world. Thus, the Son has to be a distinct entity or hypostasis from the Father so as to mediate between God and the world.
Therefore, the development of the doctrine of the Trinity did not come as a flash of inspiration or revelation. Working out the Trinitarian nature of the God that Christians felt had revealed God’s Self in the person of Jesus of Nazareth
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