184. You can clearly tell that a trinity of gods dwells in the minds of Christians - although out of shame they would never say so - by the way many of them ingeniously demonstrate that three are one and one is three. They use various phenomena in plane geometry, solid geometry, arithmetic, and physics, as well as folding pieces of clothing and pieces of paper. Like a bunch of clowns, they horse around with the divine Trinity.

Their clowning is like people's eyesight when they have a fever: they see one object, be it a person, a table, or a candle, as three objects, or three objects as one. It is like the trick people play by softening wax in their fingers and pressing it into different shapes. First they make a three-sided shape to show the trinity; then they make a ball to show the unity, and they say, "Isn't the substance one and the same?"

Truly, though, the divine Trinity is like the pearl of great price [Matthew 13:46]. Dividing the Trinity into persons is like cutting a pearl into three parts: it completely destroys the pearl.

760. This, the Christian Church's Final Hour, Is the Same Kind of Night in Which the Former Churches Came to an End

Since creation first took place, there have been four churches on this planet, one after the other. Both the historical and the prophetic Word make this clear. It is especially clear in Daniel, where these four churches are described in the form of the statue that Nebuchadnezzar saw in a dream (Daniel 2); later on they are portrayed as the four beasts that rose up from the sea (Daniel 7).

The first church, which should be called the earliest church, existed before the Flood; the Flood itself symbolically depicts the end and demise of that church. The second church, which should be called the early church, existed in the Middle East and also in parts of North Africa; it came to a close and perished as the result of various forms of idolatry. The third church was the Israelite church. It began with the issuing of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai and was further established through the Word that was written by Moses and the prophets. It came to a close and was brought to an end by people's desecration of the Word, which desecration reached a peak at the time that the Lord came into the world. Because of it, the people crucified the One who was the Word. The fourth church is the Christian church that was established by the Lord through the Gospel writers and the apostles. There were two phases of this church: the first lasted from the time of the Lord until the Council of Nicaea; the second lasted from then until the present day. Along the way, however, the church split into three main parts: the Greek, the Roman Catholic, and the Protestant; nevertheless, all three are referred to as Christian. Within each of these parts, there were also many individual movements that broke away and yet retained the name of the parent body; they became heresies within the Christian church.