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Originally Posted by kerry
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.
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I understand this is your secular view on the subject.
However, yes it has always been Trinitarian. The apostle Paul was already fighting proto-gnostics in his letters and the Council of Nicaea condemned Arianism.
Yes, it took several councils to formally hammer out all the final details, but you seem to think that this stuff was up to debate. It wasn't. Councils were held to fight heresy, and most of the time the vote was unanimous if not a landslide. The bishops gathered together to created a statement removing ambiguity (not adding doctrine) from the known canon of beliefs.
The creeds that were created held their effectiveness in what they negated, not what they asserted. Heresy was the only reason many creeds existed. And in fact, if there were no heresies we'd know much less about the early Christians than we do now in a historical sense, as they wouldn't have written out the many creeds and councils wouldn't have been necessary.
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The Muslim analogy is off base. Muslims don't consider themselves Christians.
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But they do believe something about Christ. So why aren't they Christians?
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Gnostics, Marcionites, Ebionites, and Arians did consider themselves Christians
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So the criteria is "anyone who considers themselves a Christian is a Christian"?
Puleeze Kerry. That's absurd.
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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.
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Not really. We still have gnostics and pseudo-Arians today.
I really cannot believe you're buying into this garbage. Do you really believe that the gnostics developing their pseudopigraphia in the 2nd and 3rd centuries really are the original believers? The Marcionites flagrantly abandoning and editing the text for their own purposes are the original believers?