The following excerpt was taken from St. Patrick's Confessio:
"there is no other God, nor will there ever be, nor was there ever, except God the Father. He is the one who was not begotten, the one without a beginning, the one from whom all beginnings come, the one who holds all things in being – this is our teaching. And his son, Jesus Christ, whom we testify has always been, since before the beginning of this age, with the father in a spiritual way. He was begotten in an indescribable way before every beginning. Everything we can see, and everything beyond our sight, was made through him. He became a human being; and, having overcome death, was welcomed to the heavens to the Father. The Father gave him all power over every being, both heavenly and earthly and beneath the earth. Let every tongue confess that Jesus Christ, in whom we believe and whom we await to come back to us in the near future, is Lord and God. He is judge of the living and of the dead; he rewards every person according to their deeds. He has generously poured on us the Holy Spirit, the gift and promise of immortality, who makes believers and those who listen to be children of God and co-heirs with Christ."
I appreciate the writing and work of our early brothers and sisters. One might think, taking a secular view, that Christian theology developed incrementally over a very lengthy period of time. While I think understanding has become more refined over time because of advances in many areas of knowledge, the early brothers and sisters had it essentially right at the outset. And because they had it essentially right, it argues against the idea that the true gospel was suppressed for eighteen and half centuries until it was re-discovered in a public library in Des Mones, Iowa.
ReplyDeleteI found the following statement in a Seventh Day Adventist publication: "For much of the 1800s the Adventist church was dominated by Arianism." Arianism asserts that Jesus was not co-equal with God but was created by God. And the Holy Spirit is also a creation of God. I have not yet discovered why this view was so appealing in the Restoration Movement denominations. I think it is somehow connected with the exaltation of legalism and the diminishing of grace. If grace is deprecated, Jesus Christ is also automatically deprecated.
The SDA church adopted the Trinity in the early Twentieth Century. But Arianism seems to have survived residually in modern denominations descending from Millerism. This survival is seen mostly in the renunciation of the co-equality of Jesus with the Father and the rejection of the Personhood of the Holy Spirit. But brother Patrick kept the faith as did many true Christians across that span of that eighteen and a half centuries.