Most people assume that the Trinity is found in the Bible. It is not found there. Both Catholic and Protestant theologians agree that the Bible and the logical belief system which is called rational theism are Unitarian. That is, they do not have three personalities vested in God.

Bishop Shelby Spong in his book Rescuing the Bible From Fundamentalism said simply: Paul was not a Trinitarian. None of the apostles were Trinitarian.

No official of any of the major churches believes or argues that Christ and the apostles were Trinitarian. They acknowledge that the Triune god was grafted onto the God of the Bible (see, for example, LaCugna God For Us). How then do the fundamentalists deal with this fact? They simply ignore the history and use Scripture selectively.

The truth is that the view that Christ was God in the same co-equal and co-eternal way as the Father was God was not accepted in the church until the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE and then under duress of the Roman emperor.

This was three hundred years after the ministry of Christ. They had to use armed force to achieve it.

The Holy Spirit was not defined as a person and a third part of the Godhead until the Council of Constantinople in 381 CE.

The full doctrinal position was not agreed until the Council of Chalcedon in 451 CE.

Even then, there was not agreement as to the way in which it operated. The Catholics would later claim (from the Council of Toledo) that it proceeded from the Father and the Son, and the Orthodox would disagree saying it proceeded from the Father only.

How then did we get to this extraordinary state of affairs where the God decided on in the fourth century was not the God of the early church?

What other important changes took place that we do not know about? The answer is that there were a multitude of changes. These changes involved the changes from Sabbath to Sunday worship and from keeping the Passover to keeping the pagan festival of Easter. The pagan festival which we now call Christmas had not even then been adopted by the church.

Fundamentalists try to argue that Sunday worship was kept by the early church – but all scholars know that this is not true. It is a lie or, more correctly, a self-delusion of the people who say they are fundamentalists. They say they only do what the Bible says and so they have to try to find some basis in the Bible for the things they do – such as going to church on Sundays.