Witness 007 wrote: My advice is keep reading..... read some Polycarp and other early christian writtings that state clearly that Jesus was 1."not equal to his father" 2."Created by his Father fron non existence." It was a slow change as many scholars {non Witness} fully agree.
Reply:
What the JWs don't disclose is that much of what those early theologians wrote and thought did not make it into official Trinitarian Doctrine, so it is immaterial for proving the Trinity wrong. And the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity took years to flesh out and understand doesn't carry any weight either. It took a long time for the early Jewish Christians to understand that one need not be a practicing Jew to be saved. The JWs themselves took 1,900 years to come up with their false teachings, and those are still evolving. The following from my web site explains this:
http://www.144000.110mb.com/trinity/index-3.html#12
Not all Trinitarian theology was assimilated into the doctrine of the Trinity; much was left out. The reformed Protestant churches have assimilated the Catholic church's doctrine of the Trinity with very minor alterations.
To further erode the Trinity doctrine, the Jehovah's Witnesses argue that even early church Fathers, the 2d, 3rd and 4th century theologians, did not teach the Trinity or the true divinity of Christ; that they did not regard Father, Son and Holy Spirit as co-equal, not as one numerical essence, not as three in one (Should You Believe, Chapter 2). The problem is that the Jehovah's Witnesses are focused on the chaff, not the wheat, emphasizing what was never assimilated by the church into the Trinity doctrine rather than what was officially sanctioned over the centuries.
Because much of what the early thinkers thought and wrote was not accepted or ratified, those views carry little weight in rejecting the Trinity. They are useful, however, in terms of historical reflection and academic observation of evolving thought processes:
As elemental Trinitarianism of the NT period has to be distinguished carefully from the gradually emerging Trinitarian dogma, so must Trinitarian dogma (doctrine in the strictest sense) be distinguished carefully from Trinitarian theology. The dogma in its preparatory stages had been merely theology: efforts on the part of individuals and schools to interpret and understand revealed mystery. Then, as certain of these efforts became assimilated through authoritative decision into the teaching of the Church, some of what had heretofore been theology was from now on also dogma of faith. But note some; for much else - in Tertullian and Origen, Athanasius and the Cappadocians, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas - would never receive such ratification, never attain such clear-cut status as Christian doctrine. (Catholic Encyclopedia, 302)
Therefore, even if Justin Martyr said the prehuman Jesus was inferior to God, a created angel and is other than God (Should You Believe, Chapter 4), or Irenaeus believed the prehuman Jesus was inferior to and had an existence separate from God who was not his equal, or Clement of Alexandria called Jesus a creature not equal to God, or Tertullian taught that the Father is greater than the son (ibid.), or Hippolytus said that God had nothing of equal age with him - even if those ancients believed all of this, those opinions do not constitute the Trinity doctrine but only deep musings of early theologians. Accordingly, their relevance lies more with showing what the official doctrine does not stand for, not what the Trinity doctrine teaches.
Just to clarify one thing, though the Jehovah's Witnesses claim that Justin Martyr believed, wrongly as it turned out, that the Word “is no less than something numerically other in relation to the Father …” (Catholic Encyclopedia, 296), the Jehovah's Witnesses failed to mention that in those very same passages he also stated that neither Word nor Spirit, the former more explicitly, are to be separated from the Father, from the being of the Godhead, since both Word and Spirit are God (ibid.).
Lastly, “Although a few distinct doctrinal changes were eventually made, the Trinitarian concept emerged relatively unchanged. “The Reformers,” states the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, “stood upon the ground of the Church catholic” in this matter. This meant, for many of the new-born Protestant groups, not only continued adherence to (and propagation of) the form of Trinitarianism advanced by the Athanasian Creed, but also - in many cases - actual approval and acceptance of the Catholic-spawned Creed itself” (Concepts, 14; in accord see the New Bible Dictionary, 1299-1300).
JD II
