Imagine any president calling together all the prominent Christian leaders and making them hammer out a consensus. And imagine this president can have you executed at will.
>This has always bothered me too. Someone desiring to use Christianity to advance himself politically (Constantine) presiding over the first council, which would start a series of councils that would conclude a century later, concluding with the making of a ruling on the Godhead that would pronounce anathema (a curse) on anybody who didn’t see it precisely the way these Bishops saw it?
This doesn’t ring right at all. Something wrong in Denmark. All kinds of questions arise:
Other than Constantine, what makes the bishops that assembled the last word on this issue? The NT warns of falling away from original truths, these people lived three to four hundred years after the apostles, a lot of backsliding can take place in a far shorter time than that.
Not only so, but the very fact that councils were called on this issue begs the question: if the scripture is supposed to be so crystal clear on this issue, why all the dissent in the first place? It would help if there were a passage spelling this out very authoritatively for us somewhere. Stating it precisely as the bishops did by the time of the last council on the issue.
Why is these bishops take on the Godhead superior to anyone else with the Bible in front of them?
Well, they had a better idea of what Arius was saying. He did not invent the ideas he was promoting. He was a popular preacher who had come from the Levant and was in conflict with his own bishop, the Patriarch of Alexandria. He was trained as a sophist and dealt more in slogans and shibboleths than in deep theology. He even spread the word by popular hymns.