The Christian doctrine of the Trinity
defines God as three consubstantial persons, expressions, or hypostases: the
Father, the Son (Jesus Christ), and the Holy Spirit; "one God in three
persons". The three persons are distinct, yet are one "substance,
essence or nature". In this context, a "nature" is what one is,
while a "person" is who one is.
According to this central mystery of the
Christian faith, there is only one God in three persons: while distinct from
one another in their relations of origin (as the Fourth Lateran Council
declared, "it is the Father who generates, the Son who is begotten, and
the Holy Spirit who proceeds") and in their relations with one another,
they are stated to be one in all else, co-equal, co-eternal and consubstantial,
and "each is God, whole and entire". Accordingly, the whole work of
creation and grace is seen as a single operation common to all three divine
persons, in which each shows forth what is proper to him in the Trinity, so
that all things are "from the Father", "through the Son"
and "in the Holy Spirit".
Ignatius of Antioch provides early support
for the Trinity around 110, exhorting obedience to "Christ, and to the
Father, and to the Spirit". Justin Martyr (AD 100–c. 165) also writes,
"in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our
Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit". The first defence of the
doctrine of the Trinity was in the early 3rd century by the early church father
Tertullian. He explicitly defined the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
and defended the Trinitarian theology against the "Praxean" heresy.
In 325, the Council of Nicaea adopted the
Nicene Creed which described Christ as "God of God, Light of Light, very
God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the
Father". The creed used the term homoousios (of one substance) to define
the relationship between the Father and the Son.
Gregory of Nazianzus would say of the
Trinity, "No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the
splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back
into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole,
and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.
I cannot grasp the greatness of that One so as to attribute a greater greatness
to the rest. When I contemplate the Three together, I see but one torch, and
cannot divide or measure out the undivided light."
In the synoptic Gospels the baptism of
Jesus is often interpreted as a manifestation of all three persons of the
Trinity: "And when Jesus was baptized, he went up immediately from the
water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the spirit of God
descending like a dove, and alighting on him; and lo, a voice from heaven,
saying, 'This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.'" Baptism is
generally conferred with the Trinitarian formula, "in the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit". Trinitarians identify
this name with the Christian faith into which baptism is an initiation, as seen
for example in the statement of Basil the Great (330–379): "We are bound
to be baptized in the terms we have received, and to profess faith in the terms
in which we have been baptized." The First Council of Constantinople (381)
also says, "This is the Faith of our baptism that teaches us to believe in
the Name of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. According to this
Faith there is one Godhead, Power, and Being of the Father, of the Son, and of
the Holy Spirit."
Christianity, having emerged from Judaism,
is a monotheistic religion. Never in the New Testament does the Trinitarian
concept become a "tritheism" (three Gods) nor even two. God is one, and
that God is a single being is strongly declared in the Bible:
The Shema of the Hebrew Scriptures:
"Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one."[Deut 6:4]
The first of the Ten
Commandments—"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
And "Thus saith the LORD the King of
Israel and his redeemer the LORD of hosts: I am the first and I am the last;
and beside me there is no God."[Isa 44:6]
In the New Testament: "The LORD our
God is one."
In the Trinitarian view, the Father and
the Son and the Holy Spirit share the one essence, substance or being. The
central and crucial affirmation of Christian faith is that there is one savior,
God, and one salvation, manifest in Jesus Christ, to which there is access only
because of the Holy Spirit. The God of the Old Testament is still the same as
the God of the New. In Christianity, statements about a single God are intended
to distinguish the Hebraic understanding from the polytheistic view, which see
divine power as shared by several beings, beings which can and do disagree and
have conflicts with each other.
In Trinitarian doctrine, God exists as
three persons or hypostases, but is one being, having a single divine nature.
The members of the Trinity are co-equal and co-eternal, one in essence, nature,
power, action, and will. As stated in the Athanasian Creed, the Father is
uncreated, the Son is uncreated, and the Holy Spirit is uncreated, and all
three are eternal without beginning. "The Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit" are not names for different parts of God, but one name for God
because three persons exist in God as one entity. They cannot be separate from
one another. Each person is understood as having the identical essence or
nature, not merely similar natures.
For Trinitarians, emphasis in Genesis 1:26
is on the plurality in the Deity, and in 1:27 on the unity of the divine
Essence. A possible interpretation of Genesis 1:26 is that God's relationships
in the Trinity are mirrored in man by the ideal relationship between husband
and wife, two persons becoming one flesh, as described in Eve's creation later
in the next chapter.
The ancient Nicene theologians argued that
everything the Trinity does is done by Father, Son, and Spirit working in unity
with one will. The three persons of the Trinity always work inseparably, for
their work is always the work of the one God. Because of this unity of will,
the Trinity cannot involve the eternal subordination of the Son to the Father.
Eternal subordination can only exist if the Son's will is at least conceivably
different from the Father's. But Nicene orthodoxy says it is not. The Son's
will cannot be different from the Father's because it is the Father's. They
have but one will as they have but one being. Otherwise they would not be one
God. If there were relations of command and obedience between the Father and
the Son, there would be no Trinity at all but rather three gods. On this point
St. Basil observes "When then He says, 'I have not spoken of myself', and
again, 'As the Father said unto me, so I speak', and 'The word which ye hear is
not mine, but [the Father's] which sent me', and in another place, 'As the
Father gave me commandment, even so I do', it is not because He lacks
deliberate purpose or power of initiation, nor yet because He has to wait for
the preconcerted key-note, that he employs language of this kind. His object is
to make it plain that His own will is connected in indissoluble union with the
Father. Do not then let us understand by what is called a 'commandment' a
peremptory mandate delivered by organs of speech, and giving orders to the Son,
as to a subordinate, concerning what He ought to do. Let us rather, in a sense
befitting the Godhead, perceive a transmission of will, like the reflexion of
an object in a mirror, passing without note of time from Father to Son."
From the Old Testament the early church
retained the conviction that God is one. The New Testament does not use the
word Τριάς (Trinity) nor explicitly teach the Nicene Trinitarian doctrine, but
it contains several passages that use twofold and threefold patterns to speak
of God. Passages which refer to the Godhead with a threefold pattern include
Matt. 28:19, 1 Cor. 6:11 and 12:4ff., Gal. 3:11–14, Heb. 10:29, and 1 Pet. 1:2.
Reflection by early Christians on passages such as the Great Commission:
"Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the
name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit"[Matt 28:19] and
Paul the Apostle's blessing: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the
love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all",[2 Cor.
13:14] while at the same time the Jewish Shema Yisrael: "Hear, O Israel:
the Lord our God, the Lord is one"[Deuteronomy 6:4] led the early
Christians to question how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are "one".
Later, the diverse references to God, Jesus, and the Spirit found in the New
Testament were systematized into a Trinity—one God subsisting in three persons
and one substance—to combat heretical tendencies of how the three are related
and to defend the church against charges of worshiping two or three gods.
The Gospel of John has been seen as
especially aimed at emphasizing Jesus' divinity, presenting Jesus as the Logos,
pre-existent and divine, from its first words, "In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."[John 1:1] The
Gospel of John ends with Thomas's declaration that he believed Jesus was God,
"My Lord and my God!"[John 20:28] There is no significant tendency
among modern scholars to deny that John 1:1 and John 20:28 identify Jesus with
God. John also portrays Jesus as the agent of creation of the universe.
There are also a few possible biblical
supports for the divinity of Jesus found in the Synoptic Gospels. The Gospel of
Matthew, for example, quotes Jesus as saying, "All things have been handed
over to me by my Father."[Mt 11:27] This is similar to John, who wrote
that Jesus said, "All that the Father has is mine."[John 16:15] These
verses have been quoted to defend the omnipotence of Christ, having all power,
as well as the omniscience of Christ, having all wisdom.
Expressions also in the Pauline epistles
have been interpreted as attributing divinity to Jesus. They include: "For
by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and
invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were
created by him and for him"[Colossians 1:16] and "For in Christ all
the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form",[Colossians 2:9] and in
Paul the Apostle's claim to have been "sent not from men nor by man, but
by Jesus Christ and God the Father".[Galatians 1:1]
Some Church Fathers believed that a
knowledge of the mystery was granted to the prophets and saints of the Old
Testament, and that they identified the divine messenger of Genesis 16:7,21:17,
31:11, Exodus 3:2 and Wisdom of the sapiential books with the Son, and
"the spirit of the Lord" with the Holy Spirit. Other Church Fathers,
such as Gregory Nazianzen, argued in his Orations that the revelation was
gradual, claiming that the Father was proclaimed in the Old Testament openly,
but the Son only obscurely, because "it was not safe, when the Godhead of
the Father was not yet acknowledged, plainly to proclaim the Son".
Genesis 18–19 has been interpreted by
Christians as a Trinitarian text. The narrative has the Lord appearing to
Abraham, who was visited by three men.[Gen 18:1–2] Then in Genesis 19,
"the two angels" visited Lot at Sodom. The interplay between Abraham
on the one hand and the Lord/three men/the two angels on the other was an
intriguing text for those who believed in a single God in three persons. Justin
Martyr, and John Calvin similarly, interpreted it such that Abraham was visited
by God, who was accompanied by two angels. Justin supposed that the God who
visited Abraham was distinguishable from the God who remains in the heavens,
but was nevertheless identified as the (monotheistic) God. Justin appropriated
the God who visited Abraham to Jesus, the second person of the Trinity.
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