Catholic Pope Leo XIV will now travel from the Vatican in Rome to Iznik, Turkey, a very Islamic country, to celebrate this weekend the Catholic Church’s Nicene Council that met there 1,700 years ago (when it was Nicaea), in the year 325 CE. That council of 318 bishops produced the Nicene Creed, under political pressure from Emperor Constantine to do so. Nearly all Christians since, even of the Protestant tradition, have bound themselves to this document as the foremost credal confession of Christianity.
Ironically, the Nicene Creed says Jesus is “very God of very God,” meaning he is just as much God as God the Father is; yet this issue is the foremost plank in the Church’s later formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity that has always divided Christians from Muslims. Thus, Christians will celebrate this weekend in a very Islamic country (only 2% of its population is Christian) the chief issue that divides them from Muslims.
On this issue, Muslims and Jews are right and Trinitarian Christians are wrong. I was a Trinitarian Christian for 22 years before “reading myself out of it in the Bible.” To learn how this happened to me, see my book, The Gospel Corrupted: When Jesus Was Made God, and how I explain it by examining the Bible in depth in my book, The Restitution: Biblical Proof Jesus Is Not God.
Thus, I maintain that Jesus and the early Christians taught that Jesus is Savior and Lord, but not God. The Restitution has 100 pages of church history that show how the Catholic Church went astray, starting especially at Nicaea, by claiming Jesus is God, this must be believed to receive salvation and thus be a Christian, and that God is a trinity of persons.
The Nicene Creed therefore represents a departure from the monotheistic faith that Christianity first adopted from Judaism and rightly so—that God is a single person whom Jesus called “Father.” In the four New Testament gospels, Jesus never calls himself “God.” And when he asked his disciples who he was, they did not say he was God. Rather, Peter answered, “You are the Messiah [=Christ], the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16.16). Nowhere does the New Testament say God is three persons as the Catholic Church later determined in its next council, in the year 381 CE.
In preparation for the celebration in Turkey, Pope Leo met today at the Vatican with members of the Catholic Church’s International Theological Commission, established in 1969 due to the formation of the earlier Second Vatican Council. He called the Nicene Creed an “authoritative text.” He said it enables Christians to “proclaim with creative fidelity the Good News [gospel] given to the world ‘once for all’ by God our Father through the Lord Jesus Christ.” The pope is wrong in saying the declaration that Jesus is God is part of the New Testament gospel; but he gets it quite right with the expression “God the Father through the Lord Jesus Christ.”
The apostle Paul writes that expression (with “and” substituted for “through”) many times in his New Testament letters. But you will not find Paul, or any other New Testament writer, saying “the God Jesus (Christ)” or “God the Son,” referring to Jesus as the Son of God that many Trinitarians say.
In Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, he writes two times about “the God (and Father) of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1.3, 17). Thus, Paul says that God the Father is the God of Jesus Christ, which nullifies that Jesus also is God. Paul later makes this even more clear by telling the Ephesian believers to make “every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” by affirming that “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all” (4.3-6). Paul then concludes this epistle by writing, “Peace be to the whole community, and love with faith, from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (6.23), thereby reaffirming that only the Father is God and that Jesus is Lord.
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