OUTLINE Nicea Constantinople INTRODUCTION For those who suffer from technologophobia (the fear of technical terms); or those those who suffer from disconeologophobia (the fear of learning new words); or who have Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia (the fear of long words), today is going to be a living nightmare. We come to one of the most important teachings in the Bible, the Trinitarian nature of our God and this is an area where we are stretched to the ends of human language and conception to articulate what we understand the bible to be saying. I know there is a reactionary attitude that thinks that technical terms are somehow bad when it comes to Christianity. I suspect that this has something to do with the laziness we have embraced in our thinking, we look to people with strong opinions to combatively state what we ought to instantly believe in slogan type statements and give us an enemy to hate; we are suspicious of anything to do with the past considering ourselves smarter and better than those who have gone before us. Anti-institutionalism, anti-traditionalism, individualism, a hermeneutic of suspicion, and many other things make teaching on these matters very difficult. Now we must begin by admitting a most important problem, modern evangelicalism is either ignorant of how the church has confessed the trinity up until around the 1700s; or rejects it for modern reconstructions that are seriously at odds with the traditional view. The 1689s doctrine of the Trinity is what we call a catholic doctrine, Catholic with a small c meaning simply, universal. It repeats and identifies itself with the long standing view of the Trinity that has been held by all orthodox Christian traditions. It is the view held by the Pre Roman Catholic Church, the RCC, the Orthodox Churches, Lutheran, Anglican, Reformed and...

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