The Church of Jesus Christ

Here, I began my response to a post over as Ad Gloriam Dei. This is merely an interlude.

Bare in mind, that Mr. Davis said that he didn’t care about the Church Fathers, himself being a good Protestant, yet he freely mentions Hippolytus.

Also, as the early church leaders (e.g. Hippolytus) argued in their writings, Modalism was derived from the pagan Greek philosophy of Heraclitus and Plato, who believed that God was a Monad.

So, let’s examine Hippolytus, who by the way was not an orthodox Protestant.

At the Catholic Encyclopedia website, we read:

The Christian common people held firmly, above all, to the Unity of God and at the same time to the true Godhead of Jesus Christ. Originally no distrust of this doctrine was felt among them. Pope Zephyrinus did not interpose authoritatively in the dispute between the two schools. The heresy of the Modalists was not at first clearly evident, and the doctrine of Hippolytus offered many difficulties as regards the tradition of the Church. Zephyrinus said simply that he acknowledged only one God, and this was the Lord Jesus Christ, but it was the Son, not the Father, Who had died. This was the doctrine of the tradition of the Church. Hippolytus urged that the pope should approve of a distinct dogma which represented the Person of Christ as actually different from that of the Father and condemned the opposing views of the Monarchians and Patripassians. However, Zephyrinus would not consent to this.

So, by admission of the largest Trinitarian denominaton in the world, Hippolytus challenged the tradition of the Church. It is because the Bishop of Rome would not issue a decision (how could he?) in favor of Hippolytus that the world saw the first ‘antipope’.