_3_The Trinitarian Controversies

It is a mistaken idea that the doctrine of the Trinity and the deity of Christ were developed by the church councils of the fourth and fifth centuries. On the basis of the oral and written Word of the Apostles the Apostolic Church knew and accepted these doctrines. (Acts 2:42; Eph. 2:20; 2 Thess. 2:15). Luther therefore is right when he says that the doctrines formulated by the Councils of Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon are presented “far more abundantly and powerfully” in the Holy Scriptures themselves (St. L. XVI:2248). Nevertheless, the Christian Church has been compelled to fight bitter wars not only against professed Anti-Trinitarians outside the Church, against heathen, Jews, Mohammedans,11 but also against those in her own borders who disturbed and disrupted the Church by teaching a doctrine of God which was nothing but the result of their own speculation. Some maintained that the Church must discard the three Persons in order to retain the unity of God; others, however, renounced the unity of God (the ) in order to maintain —so they claimed — the three distinct Persons in the divine essence. Modernism, which rejects Scripture, naturally also rejects the doctrine of the Trinity. In line with the Koran’s ridicule of this doctrine (“Triad — the Creator has no wife”) the doctrine of three Persons in one God has been represented as “establishing a heavenly family.”

Since the Christian knowledge of God consists in this, “that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in Unity, neither confounding the Persons nor dividing the Substance,” the Christian Church must necessarily take an uncompromising position a) against all such as deny the three Persons and b) against all who deny the one God, or the one divine essence.