and robbers. I am the door. Anyone who enters through me will be
saved” [John 10 : 1 , 9 ].
The crime just mentioned was committed by Arius and his followers.
[ 2 ] Therefore Constantine the Great called a council in Nicaea, a city in
Bithynia. The people who had been called there to throw out Arius’s
damaging heresy invented, defended, and gave sanction to the idea that
three divine persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—had
existed from eternity, each with a personality, a reality, and a continued
existence of his own. They also concluded that the second person, the
Son, came down, took on a human manifestation, and brought about
redemption; and that his human nature was divine because of a hyposta-
tic union. Through this union he had a close relationship with God the
Father.
From that time on, balls of atrocious heresies relating to God and the
person of Christ began to roll out across the globe, raising the head of
the Antichrist, dividing God into three and the Lord the Savior into two,
and destroying the temple that the Lord had erected through his apostles
to the point where not one stone was left attached to another, as the
Lord said (Matthew 24 : 2 , where “the temple” means not only the Temple
in Jerusalem but also the church, on whose close or end that whole chap-
ter focuses).
[ 3 ] What else could be expected from the Council of Nicaea? What
else could be expected from subsequent councils that likewise split divin-
ity into three parts and placed the incarnate God beneath all three, on
their footstool? These councils removed the church’s head from its body
by “climbing up some other way,” that is, bypassing the Lord and going
up to God the Father as some other god. They kept just the phrase “the
merit of Christ” in their mouths, wishing for God the Father to have
mercy on its account and hoping that justification would thereby flow in
directly with its whole entourage: the forgiving of sins, renewal, sanctifi-
cation, regeneration, and salvation—all without any participation from
the individual.175 It is very obvious from the creed of what is known as the apostolic
church that it had no awareness at all of any trinity of persons or of three
persons from eternity. There the following words occur: “I believe in
God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus
Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy
Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. And I believe in the Holy Spirit.”