Alexander Campbell was an American Religious reformer in the early 19th century. Here is a resource for him. For him, his greatest desire was to return to the New Testament Church, meaning that he attempted to rid himself of 1800 years of theology and made an effort to seek Theology from the Apostles. I am not endorsing the Church of Christ here, but I do think that he made a serious effort to right the ship and truly restore the Church. Where as Calvin and Luther attempted to reform Rome, Campbell and his ilk attempted to restore the New Testament Church.
On the Trinity, he said,
“This God is never called a person. The word person was never applied to God in the Middle ages. The reason for this is that the three members of the trinity were called personae (faces or countenances): The Father is persona, the Son is persona, and the Spirit is persona. Persona here means a special characteristic of the divine ground, expressing itself in an independent hypostasis.
“Thus, we can say that it was the nineteenth century which made God into a person, with the result that the greatness of the classical idea of God was destroyed by this way of speaking… but to speak of God as a person would have been heretical for the Middle Ages; it would have been to them a Unitarian heresy, because it would have conflicted with the statement that God has three personae, three expressions of his being. (Tillich, Paul, A History of Christian Thought, p. 190)
Barton Stone, a fellow Restorer said,
“The word Trinity is not found in the Bible. This is acknowledged by the celebrated Calvin, who calls the Trinity “a popish God, or idol, a mere human invention, a barbarous, insipid, and profane word; and he utterly condemns that prayer in the litany–O holy, glorious, and blessed Trinity, &c. as unknown to the prophets and apostles, and grounded upon no testimony of God’s holy word.” Admon. 1st. ad Polonos–Cardale’s true Doct.–The language, like the man, I confess is too severe
Joel Landon Watts is a Masters of Theological Studies student with a focus in Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark. His interests include exploring the role of mimesis in human civilization, specifically in the study of religion and media, as well as science fiction and the way in which it has allowed mythology to be explored in light of scientific ideals of the past century. Currently, he is a TA for Old Testament at United Theological Seminary under Dr. Vivian Johnson, Associate Professor of Old Testament. His first book, Rhetorical Strategies of the Evangelist: Mimetic Criticism of the Gospel of Mark, is expected to be published by Wipf and Stock early next year. He is currently co-editing a book on moving from Fear to Faith (Energion, 2013).
