Christian Unitarians To fully understand the conflict, we must go back hundreds of years before the birth of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in 570. We must understand a vital split within the Christian community in the years after the Prophet Jesus (‘Isa). While today almost all Christians believe in a concept called the Trinity, this was not always the case. The Trinity is a belief that God has three parts – the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Jesus is depicted as being the Son of God, and thus part of God himself. This belief began to emerge during the time of Paul, a missionary who introduced the idea to make Christianity more popular among the polytheistic Roman Empire in the 40s-60s AD. This new innovation in beliefs was highly disturbing to many who followed Jesus’s true message of monotheism and devotion to God. There soon emerged two groups in the early Christian Church – those who accepted Jesus as the Son of God (the Trinitarians), and those who simply accepted him as a prophet (the Unitarians). To the Roman government, the distinction between the two groups was not important. Both the Trinitarians and the Unitarians were oppressed in the early decades of the AD era. That all changed in the late 200s and early 300s, AD. During this time, a Unitarian preacher, Arius, began to accumulate a large following among people in North Africa. He preached the Oneness of God, and the fact that Jesus was a prophet of God, not His son. As such, he was fiercely opposed by the proponents of the Trinity, who attacked and tried to marginalize him as a crazed madman. Despite their opposition, his beliefs took hold in his native Libya, and across North Africa. Emperor Constantine burning the books of Arius Emperor Constantine burning the books of Arius At this time, the Roman Emperor was a man by the name of Constantine. He is best remembered for his transformation of the declining Roman Empire. He moved the capital to Constantinople (modern Istanbul), and managed to defeat some of the barbarian tribes that had been attacking Rome from the north. When Constantine moved to Constantinople (which he named after himself), he became aware of the Trinitarian Christian Church, which informed him that if he converted to Christianity, he could have all of his previous sins forgiven. Having done so, he realized he could use the Christian Church to strengthen himself politically. As such, he began to promote the Trinitarian view of Christianity, and violently oppress Unitarians, such as Arius. During this time, the Council of Nicaea was convened in 325. The purpose was to settle at last whether or not Jesus was the son of God. Naturally, the conclusion of the Council was that Jesus was a part of God and His son, and anyone who denies this is to be excommunicated from the Christian Church. The Unitarians, who were by now a strong majority of the population in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, were thus officially banned and forced to practice their beliefs in hiding. Constantine even ordered that all Unitarian documents be burned and Arius himself be exiled.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Jul 2013 08:35:48 +0000
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