Plain Speaking About Nicaea and the Trinity
WELL-KNOWN writer and historian H. G. Wells had very definite ideas about the doctrine of the trinity. In his book God the Invisible King he outlined his own religious belief and why he rejected the Trinity. In the preface he remarks: “The writer is of opinion that the Council of Nicaea, which forcibly crystallised the controversies of two centuries and formulated the creed upon which all the existing Christian churches are based, was one of the most disastrous and one of the least venerable of all religious gatherings.”
Yes, that is where all the trouble started, thought H. G. Wells, and any who raised a voice in protest did not stand a chance. He adds, “The systematic destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings, had about it none of that quality of honest conviction which comes to those who have a real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of dissensions that, left to work themselves out, would have spoiled good business.” Emperor Constantine took the lead in this because he wanted a united empire at any price.
But if this is true, how could such a deception persist through the centuries until today? Says Wells, “A large majority of those who possess and repeat the Christian creeds have come into the practice so insensibly from unthinking childhood that only in the slightest way do they realise the nature of the statements to which they subscribe. They will speak and think of both Christ and God in ways flatly incompatible with the doctrine of the Triune deity upon which, theoretically, the entire fabric of all the churches rests.”
It was the firm belief of H. G. Wells that there was no greater stumbling block to understanding God than the trinity. He turned away from it with the comment, “By faith we said of that stuffed scarecrow of divinity, that incoherent accumulation of antique theological notions, the Nicene deity, ‘This is certainly no God.’”