Church Leaders Summary

Church Leaders Summary

I have documented the fact that every significant church leader after Poly­carp, was influenced by the princi­ples of philos­ophy.  Possessing a knowledge of Greek philosophy, lit­erature, rhetoric, mathematics, as­tronomy and the sciences does not imply wrong­doing in and of itself.  The im­plementation of this man-made knowledge while attempting to interpret/understand scripture is wrong.  The influence described not only distorted the truth of scrip­ture, it resulted in scriptural truths being ne­glected.  The doctrine of the Church fell from the view that God was One and ONE ALONE, as described by Tertullian, to a three in One.  This was ac­complished in order to rationalize the lack of understanding concerning the person of Jesus Christ and his Deity.  The unquestion­able ac­complice in this slaughter of scriptural truth was the presupposi­tion of, and preoccupation with, philo­sophical teaching. 

Many if not all of the leaders condemned the im­plementation of phi­losophy in theological discus­sions.  It has been stated in the quoted texts several times that they believed that scripture was all that was nec­essary to the de­velopment of accurate theology.  But in practice, this is not what occurred.  The state­ment made earlier concerning Tertullian is ap­plicable to the other leaders of the early church in a modified form:de­spite their vehe­ment oppostion to Hellenic speculation, they are indebted to it and their writings are permeated by the influence of the Greek philosophers.

The influence of philosophy, which was crucial to the development of the doctrine of the orthodox church, has been ignored if not denied.  This re­fusal to re-evalu­ate the contribution of phi­losophy in church doctrine has caused the orthodox church to be or­thodox only in a historical sense.  It is orthodox because through­out history, it has been the church in power.  How­ever, the historic orthodox Christian church is totally unorthodox biblically when considering the doctrine of the Trinity.  This un­orthodoxy grows like a cancer and with time, causes fur­ther aberra­tions within the church, as will we will see.