Paul Lacey retweetet
If you actually knew the history of Christianity, you'd see why Latter-day Saints don't accept the Trinity the way other Christians define it. And why that's a totally reasonable position.
Start with the timeline. For the first 300 years of Christianity, there was no Nicene Trinity. The word "trinity" wasn't even used until around 200 AD, by an early Christian writer named Tertullian. Early Christian writers had all kinds of different views about how the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost related to each other. They didn't agree. Many of those views wouldn't match the formal doctrine that came later.
Same goes for the body of God. The Bible describes him with face, hands, and form. The idea that he's bodiless came from Greek philosophy, not from scripture.
So what changed? In 325 AD, the Roman emperor Constantine called a council at Nicaea to settle the argument. The argument was about whether Jesus was fully divine or a created being. Bishops were told to sign the creed or get exiled. Even some of the bishops who signed it didn't fully agree with it. That's how the Trinity became official. Not because the Bible spelled it out. Because an emperor needed unity. The same thing was happening with how God himself was described. The Bible talked about God in physical terms. The councils used Greek philosophical categories to settle the question. The Bible's more physical language about God got reinterpreted in those abstract terms.
Here's where Latter-day Saints actually land. We believe in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. We pray to the Father in the name of the Son. We baptize in all three names. What we don't accept is the philosophy added later, that they're "one substance" in some Greek metaphysical sense. That part isn't in the Bible. It was developed later by theologians working out questions the Bible didn't directly answer. We also read the Bible's language about God's body the way the original audiences did, instead of reinterpreting it to fit Greek philosophy.
And this isn't just a Latter-day Saint argument. Mainstream Bible scholars say the same thing. A Jesuit priest named Edmund Fortman wrote that there's "no formal doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament writers." Harper's Bible Dictionary says the formal Trinity doctrine "is not to be found in the New Testament."
Here's a way to think about it: Imagine a grandmother passes down a recipe. Three hundred years later, her descendants argue about whether she meant a pinch of salt or a teaspoon, and whether butter or olive oil is acceptable. One branch of the family writes up an "official" version and says anyone who doesn't follow it isn't really making grandma's recipe. The original recipe didn't say. The official version was added later. That's the situation with the Bible and the Trinity. The Bible has Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The specific Nicene formula came centuries later.
The disagreement didn't end at Nicaea, either. For over 1,000 years, Catholics and Orthodox have argued about whether the Holy Spirit comes from the Father alone or from the Father and the Son. That's a fight about the nature of the Trinity itself. Two ancient Christian traditions, two different views, both still considered Christian. So the idea that there's one fixed Trinity test for being Christian doesn't hold up.
To be clear, none of this is a shot at people who believe the Nicene Trinity. Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, all of them are sincere Christians. Their faith is real. They have every right to worship how they see fit. The point here is just that Latter-day Saints reading the Bible and reaching a different conclusion isn't weird, dishonest, or anti-Christian. It's a position that fits the historical record.
There's also a contradiction worth noticing. A lot of people say "the Bible alone is enough," and then turn around and say "you also have to accept the creeds to be Christian." Those two ideas can't both be true. Either the Bible is enough or it isn't.
Early Christian art reflected the same uncertainty. Different communities pictured God in different ways for centuries before a unified image took hold.
So here's the bottom line. Reasonable people read the New Testament and land where Latter-day Saints land. So did a lot of early Christians before the councils made one view official. You don't have to agree with us. Just understand that our position has roots in actual Christian history, not in some random departure from it.
Believe the Trinity. Don't believe the Trinity. The history is what it is. Knowing it doesn't threaten anyone's faith. It just clears up why other Christians read the Bible the way they do.
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