Quote:
Originally Posted by martureo
I never said it did.
I am a Trinitarian. Historically Christianity has always been Trinitarian.
Arius declared that "there was when he [Jesus] was not". In doing so he declared that Jesus was a creation rather then the Creator. To do so he had to ignore a great part of the NT and tradition.
Furthermore, Christianity has always asserted strict monotheism (one god). Since Arius believed that Jesus was created and deified he was effectively violating monotheism.
I would also not consider gnostics, Marcionites or the Ebionites as Christians either. They all reject Christian beliefs, thus they are not Christians. Christian describes what you believe about Christ, not just that you believe anything about him (otherwise Muslims could be called Christians).
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You're imposing your own narrow normative definition of Christianity on a huge range of differing versions of Christianity, excluding those Christians who fail to meet your narrow definition. Obviously Christianity has not always been Trinitarian because it took Christian church councils many years to hammer out Trinitarianism and then impose those developed ideas on a diverse movement by excluding those Christians who didn't accept the conclusions of those councils. The Muslim analogy is off base. Muslims don't consider themselves Christians. Gnostics, Marcionites, Ebionites, and Arians did consider themselves Christians and it was only due to the fact that they ended up being the losers in internal theological/power conflicts within Christianity that they were excluded from further development.