Trinity
The Trinity is the Christian doctrine that one God exists as three persons: the Father, the Son, who is Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. Its name comes from the Latin Trinitas, which grows out of trinus, meaning threefold. The Church Father Gregory of Nazianzus described how the idea felt from the inside. Thinking of the One, he said, filled him with the splendour of the Three. Thinking of the Three carried him straight back to the One. Of all three together he wrote, "I see but one torch, and cannot divide or measure out the undivided light."
The doctrine holds that the three persons share a single essence while remaining distinct. Yet its developed form is not spelled out in the New Testament. Christians reached it over several centuries of arguing about scripture, vocabulary and worship. Where did early believers find hints of a threefold God in their oldest texts? Which verse, familiar from older English Bibles, turned out to be a later addition? How did councils and thinkers settle on words for the bond between Father, Son and Spirit? And what did the people who refused the doctrine believe instead?
Genesis 1:26 has God say, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." The plural pronoun has long drawn the attention of Christian readers. A traditional interpretation takes it as a sign of a plurality of persons within the Godhead. Genesis 3:22 uses the same plural, in the words "one of us."
The biblical commentator Victor P. Hamilton lays out several readings of these verses. The one most widely held among biblical scholars is that God is speaking to the heavenly court pictured in Isaiah 6. Meredith Kline and Gerhard von Rad defend this view. Von Rad said the odd plural keeps the divine image from pointing too directly at God himself. Hamilton sees a problem. Isaiah 40:13-14 asks whom God consulted, and the implied answer is nobody. A God who creates with a court seems to contradict that passage.
Hamilton prefers a reading that approaches the Trinitarian understanding with less direct language. Following D. J. A. Clines, he says the plural reveals a duality within the Godhead. That duality recalls the Spirit of God hovering over the waters in the second verse of Genesis. Hamilton also finds it unreasonable to think the author was too theologically primitive for the idea of plurality within unity. He argues instead for progressive revelation, in which the doctrine appears first obscurely and later plainly.
Genesis 18 gave readers a second puzzle: three men visit Abraham. Justin Martyr and John Calvin read the scene as God arriving with two angels. Justin took the God who visited to be Jesus, the second person of the Trinity. Augustine disagreed. He saw no sign that the visitors were unequal, so he took them to be the three persons themselves. In Genesis 19, Lot addresses two of the visitors in the singular with the words "Not so, my lord." Augustine explained that Lot could speak this way because the persons share a single substance.
Other passages were pressed into service too. Isaiah 9 calls a figure "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace," and some Christians read it as the Messiah representing the Trinity on earth. Daniel describes one like a son of man coming to the Ancient of Days. Both receive an everlasting dominion, which Psalm 145:13 ascribes to God. Some writers also saw the Trinity in God's word from Psalm 33:6, God's Spirit from Isaiah 61:1, and Wisdom from Proverbs 9:1. Trinitarian scholars generally agree, however, that tying these directly to later doctrine goes beyond the spirit of the Old Testament.
Gregory of Nazianzus explained the silence as a matter of timing. In his Orations he argued that the Father was proclaimed openly and the Son only obscurely. In his words, it was not safe to proclaim the Son plainly when the Godhead of the Father was not yet acknowledged. Justin Martyr and Melito of Sardis went further. They read the appearances of the Angel of the Lord as Christophanies, each a preincarnate appearance of the Messiah.
The Great Commission in Matthew 28:19 tells the disciples to make disciples of all nations, "baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." Paul closes 2 Corinthians with a blessing that names the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Larry Hurtado counts such lines among several Trinitarian formulas in the New Testament. His list also includes Ephesians 4:4-6, 1 Peter 1:2 and Revelation 1:4-6. He still stresses that the developed doctrine is not explicit there.
Harold W. Attridge of Yale Divinity School and C. K. Barrett find the clearest foundation in the Gospel of John. James Barker argues that John already contains an economic Trinity, a God known through what he does. Early Christians kept reflecting on these passages and tried to describe how Father, Son and Spirit relate. Eventually the scattered references to God, Jesus and the Spirit were gathered into one idea. The resulting concept of one Godhead in three persons defended the church against charges of worshiping two or three gods.
One verse that seems to state the doctrine outright is 1 John 5:7. Known as the Johannine Comma, it reads, "Because there are three in Heaven that testify, the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one." Modern biblical scholarship largely agrees that it is missing from the oldest Greek and Latin texts. Most scholars consider it a later addition by a copyist. Ethiopic, Aramaic, Syriac, early Slavic, early Armenian, Georgian and Arabic translations all lack it. It appears mainly in Latin manuscripts, with a minority of Greek, late Slavonic and late Armenian witnesses.
The earliest hint of the verse may come from Cyprian of Carthage, who lived from about 210 to 258. Even that may be an allegorical reading of the undisputed part of the text. Later Latin authors used the verse often, among them Priscillian, Peter Lombard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham. In the 16th century it entered the earliest printed New Testaments, including the Complutensian Polyglot and the Textus Receptus. That is how it reached the King James translation and most vernacular Bibles of the Reformation era.
Baptism offers a sturdier path. Basil the Great wrote that believers are bound to be baptized in the terms they received and to profess faith in the terms of their baptism. Oneness Pentecostals dissent. They stress baptism in the name of Jesus Christ alone, which they hold to be the original apostolic formula. Many who emphasize the baptisms in Acts also doubt Matthew 28:19 in its present form. Most scholars of textual criticism accept the passage because no manuscript varies on the wording. Early writers such as Ignatius, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian and Gregory Thaumaturgus also attest it. The theologian Gerhard Kittel concluded that Father, Son and Spirit are linked here in an indissoluble threefold relationship.
In Paul's letters, the way early believers treat Jesus points to a high view of his status. Scholars call the pattern binitarian devotion, because both "God" and Jesus are invoked in worship. Jesus receives prayer in 1 Corinthians 1:2 and 2 Corinthians 12:8-9. People are baptized in his name, and the Lord's Supper centers on him. Philippians 2:6 describes him as existing in the very form of God. Colossians 2:9 says the fullness of the Deity lives in him bodily. Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13 and 2 Peter 1:1 appear to call him God directly.
The Synoptic gospels show a similar picture. When Jesus forgives sins, the teachers of the law object with the question, "Who can forgive sins but God alone?" Many scholars see a claim to divinity here, because people normally forgive only wrongs done to themselves. After the resurrection, Jesus receives proskynesis. The Greek word can mean a bow to a superior, as when a slave in Matthew 18:26 begs his master. It can also mean an act of worship. In Matthew 28:16-20 the disciples worship the risen Jesus after he claims authority over the cosmos. Near the start of that Gospel he is given the name Emmanuel, "God with us."
The Book of Acts shows Stephen crying out to Jesus in his final moments, asking him to receive his spirit. New members are inducted by baptism in Jesus' name. Dale Allison reads the appearances of Jesus to Paul as a divine theophany. He says they are styled on the God of Ezekiel's vision.
The Gospel of John opens with the line, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Near its end, Thomas answers the risen Jesus with, "My Lord and my God!" Scholars agree that John 1:1 and John 20:28 identify Jesus with God. In a 1973 article in the Journal of Biblical Literature, Philip B. Harner of Heidelberg College challenged the traditional translation of the last clause of John 1:1. He endorsed the New English Bible rendering, "and what God was, the Word was." Other scholars criticized his claim. Harner also allowed that the clause could mean the Word had the same nature as God. John presents Jesus as the agent of creation as well.
A line in the same Gospel gave opponents ammunition. Jesus says, "The Father is greater than I," and Arians appealed to the saying. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas answered that Jesus was speaking of his human nature.
The Spirit presents a different case. The Old Testament mentions the Spirit 75 times, and the Dead Sea Scrolls 35 times. The New Testament is much shorter, yet it mentions the Spirit 275 times. It also describes the Spirit in more personal terms. In Mark 1:12 the Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness. Paul says the Spirit intercedes for believers. In Acts the Spirit alerts Peter to visitors sent by Cornelius, directs the church in Antioch to send Barnabas and Saul, and forbids Paul to preach in Asia. When Peter confronts Ananias, he says Ananias has lied not to man but to God, and the Spirit is the one he lied to.
The New Testament does not show the Spirit receiving devotion the way the Father and the risen Jesus do. The nearest it comes is the Spirit's place in ritual formulas. Once the Arian controversy faded, the debate moved to whether the Spirit stood level with the Father and Son. The Pneumatomachi declared the Spirit inferior. The Cappadocian Fathers argued the Spirit shares their nature.
Their arguments leaned on scripture. In Hebrew the word ruach means both breath and spirit, so Psalm 33:6 seemed to name the Son and Spirit as co-creators. Only a holy God, they reasoned, can create holy beings such as angels. From 1 Corinthians 2:11 they argued that the Spirit relates to God as the spirit within us relates to us. From 1 Corinthians 3:16 they argued that an inferior being would not dwell in God's temple. They combined John 15:15 with 1 Corinthians 2:11 to show the Spirit is no slave of God.
The Pneumatomachi answered with Hebrews 1:14, which calls angels ministering spirits sent to serve. The Spirit, they said, is no different. The Fathers replied that the Spirit is greater than the angels. The Spirit grants the foreknowledge of prophecy in 1 Corinthians 12:8-10, so that angels can announce what is to come.
Late in the first century, Clement of Rome asked in his epistle, "Do we not have one God, and one Christ, and one gracious Spirit that has been poured out upon us, and one calling in Christ?" His target was corruption among some in the Christian community. Around AD 110, Ignatius of Antioch urged obedience to "Christ, and to the Father, and to the Spirit." The pseudonymous Ascension of Isaiah, written between the end of the first century and the beginning of the third, has a proto-Trinitarian vision. Dwellers in the sixth heaven sing praises to "the primal Father and his Beloved Christ, and the Holy Spirit." Margaret Baker traces Trinitarian theology back further, to pre-Christian Palestinian beliefs about angels.
Justin Martyr, who lived from about AD 100 to around 165, supplied much of the vocabulary that later became standard. He described the Son and Father as sharing one being, ousia, yet appearing as distinct faces, prosopa. This anticipated the three persons, hypostases, that Tertullian and later authors would name. Justin compared the Son to a fire lit from a torch, which stands for the Father. In his First Apology he wrote that Christians worship Jesus Christ as the Son of the living God, placing him in second place and the prophetic Spirit in the third. He also described baptism as washing with water in the name of God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. Some authors nonetheless call the texts of Justin, Tertullian and Eusebius of Caesarea binitarian.
The first Church Father recorded using the word Trinity was Theophilus of Antioch, in the late 2nd century. He defined it as God, his Word, called Logos, and his Wisdom, called Sophia. He did so while discussing the first three days of creation. Tertullian, born around AD 150-160, offered the first defense of the doctrine. He explicitly defined the Trinity as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and argued against a teacher named Praxeas. He conceded that most believers of his day objected to his teaching.
Origen of Alexandria, who lived from about AD 185 to around 253, is often read as a Subordinationist. That reading says he believed the three persons share divinity but are not co-equal. Some modern researchers argue the opposite. They think Origen opposed Subordinationism and that his theology inspired the later Cappadocian Fathers. Over the first four centuries, the Church Fathers shaped the doctrine in reaction to Adoptionism, Sabellianism and Arianism. In 269, the Synods of Antioch condemned Paul of Samosata for his Adoptionist theology. They also condemned the term homoousios in the modalist sense he gave it. That Greek word, meaning "of the same being," would soon return in a very different role.
In 325 the First Council of Nicaea met to answer Arianism. As traditionally understood, Arianism taught that the Father existed before the Son. The Son, in this view, was a changeable creature given the dignity of being called Son of God. The council's creed called Christ "God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father." Its key word, homoousios, defined the link between Father and Son. After more than fifty years of debate, the word was recognized as the hallmark of orthodoxy. It grew into the formula "three persons, one being."
The Spirit got only a passing line at Nicaea, which says simply "And we believe in the Holy Ghost." All attention had gone to Father and Son, and some therefore consider the 325 creed binitarian. The First Council of Constantinople in 381 expanded the text into what is known as the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. It calls the Spirit "the Lord and Giver of life" and says the Spirit is worshiped and glorified together with the Father and the Son. That wording suggests the Spirit is also of one substance with them.
Athanasius developed the doctrine of the Spirit's divinity and personality in the last decades of his life. He defended and refined the Nicene formula. By the end of the 4th century, under Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, the doctrine had reached substantially its current form. These three held that the persons differ only in their inner relations. There are not three gods, but one divine Being in three persons. The Cappadocians reached for social analogies, while Augustine of Hippo preferred a psychological one. He held that if humans are made in God's image, they are made in the image of the Trinity. His model was the memory, intelligence and will in a single human mind.
A single added phrase later split the churches. In the late 6th century, some Latin-speaking churches added the words "and from the Son," known as the Filioque, to the account of the Spirit's procession. Neither Nicaea nor Constantinople had included them. The words entered the liturgy of Rome in 1014. They became one of the main causes of the East-West Schism of 1054, and of the failure of repeated attempts at reunion.
Later councils sharpened the language. The Eleventh Council of Toledo, in 675, separated two kinds of statement. Saying the Father is not the Son refers to a distinction of persons. Saying the Father is what the Son is refers to shared nature or substance. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 insisted on "only a Trinity, not a quaternity." It said the Father begets, the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds, yet all are one reality. The Council of Florence, held from 1431 to 1449, restated that the three persons are one God and not three gods.
Augustine wrote De trinitate between 399 and 419, and he approached the mystery through love. He started from the scriptural line "God is love" and asked whether love belongs especially to the Holy Spirit. Following his reasoning, he concluded that love itself is triune. It consists of "three: the lover, the beloved, and the love."
Greek has a word for the way the persons share one life: perichoresis, meaning going around or envelopment. Its Latin counterpart is circumincessio. The idea rests on passages in John, including 10:38 and 14:11, where Jesus says he is in the Father and the Father is in him. Hilary of Poitiers wrote that the persons reciprocally contain one another. John of Damascus, who died in 749, was its most prominent exponent. He used it for both the union of Christ's divine and human natures and the relations among the three hypostases. Perichoresis rules out the notion that God has parts.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church draws on a distinction made by the Fathers between theology and economy. Theology means God's inmost life. Economy means all the works by which God reveals himself and shares his life. From these terms come the labels immanent Trinity, about who God is, and economic Trinity, about what God does. Creation and grace are one shared action, so everything comes from the Father, through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. Each person performs the common work according to a unique personal property.
Basil of Caesarea argued that the persons act with one will. When Jesus says he speaks not of himself, Basil said, it does not mean the Son lacks initiative. It means his will is joined in indissoluble union with the Father's. Basil pictured the will passing from Father to Son like the reflection of an object in a mirror. Athanasius of Alexandria added that any subordination of the Son belongs to his incarnate ministry. Aquinas agreed, placing the Son's prayer and obedience in his human nature. Hilary of Poitiers, Augustine and Leo the Great developed the theory of appropriation, which gives certain names or works to one person in preference to the others without excluding them. Bonaventure later taught it systematically.
Theologians still disagree about how the persons relate. Eternal generation describes the Father begetting the Son by communicating the whole divine essence, as a necessity of nature rather than an act of will. The Athanasian Creed and Nicene Creed affirm it, and Origen was the first to mention it explicitly. Some modern theologians reject it, but William Lane Craig argues that rejecting it brings subordinationism into the Trinity. Another modern debate concerns social Trinitarianism. Its advocates see each person with their own center of consciousness and will, united in love. Critics warn that it risks tritheism, the belief in three gods.
Suffering raised the sharpest questions. Aquinas held that Jesus suffered and died in his human nature and could not do so in his divine nature. In 1946, the Lutheran theologian Kazoh Kitamori published Theology of the Pain of God. He was deeply affected by the atomic bomb, and he pushed the theology of the Cross into the immanent Trinity. Jurgen Moltmann followed in 1971 with The Crucified God. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in a 1972 preface to his 1969 German book on the three days of Easter, called God's love an eternal super-kenosis. He wrote that the persons of the Trinity "constitute themselves as who they are through the very act of pouring themselves out for each other."
Adoptionists believed Jesus became divine only at his baptism, resurrection or ascension. Arians held that only God has independent existence, so the dependent Son must be a creature. Such views are grouped as nontrinitarianism, or antitrinitarianism, and include Unitarianism, binitarianism and modalism. They differ widely on the nature of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit, and they reject the Nicene doctrine as lacking scriptural origin. Many mainline groups consider them non-Christian.
The Church answered with condemnations. The Council of Nicaea condemned Arianism, and the Second Ecumenical Council condemned it along with Sabellianism. In 794, the Emperor Charlemagne convened the Council of Frankfurt, which declared Adoptionism heretical for the Latin West. Arianism was driven from the Roman Empire after 381 but kept a foothold among the Germanic tribes. It faded gradually after the Franks converted to Catholicism in 496. Nontrinitarian ideas returned with the Gnosticism of the Cathars between the 11th and 13th centuries. They surfaced again in the Age of Enlightenment, and in groups that arose during the Second Great Awakening.
Judaism traditionally rejects the doctrine, yet some mystical texts echo it. The Zohar, from 1286, says of God, "God is they, and they are it," and speaks of three hidden lights in the root of all roots. Some medieval Jewish thinkers suggested the Christian Trinity came from misreading Kabbalah. Some recent Jewish scholars think the influence ran the other way. Later Jewish Aristotelians borrowed Augustine's analogies, calling God a thinker, thinking and thought itself. Earlier, Philo, who lived from 20 BC to about AD 50, made the Logos the instrument of creation. For him the ultimate Being has two attributes, goodness and authority, and the Logos unites them. Scholars still debate whether Philo saw the Logos as a distinct person or an impersonal force.
Gnostic texts offered their own triads. In the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Father, the Mother and the Son come from the Great Invisible Spirit. In the Apocryphon of John, the One is the Father, and the female being Barbelo is the Mother or Holy Spirit. Together they bear a child.
The doctrine also shaped buildings. Gothic cathedrals show the Trinity in trefoils and the four evangelists in quatrefoils. Many churches have three doors for the Trinity, and windows and steps are grouped in threes for the same reason. The practice began in spolia churches built from the remains of ancient pre-Christian holy structures. Eastern churches have three royal doors, and the Heiligen-Geist-Kapelle in Austria uses a triangular floor plan.
In art, the Spirit is most often a dove with outspread wings, as in the gospel accounts of the baptism of Christ. The Father is often an older man with a white beard, perhaps inspired by the Ancient of Days. Eastern Orthodoxy usually reads that figure as the Son, and early Byzantine images show Christ in that role. Some images give the Father a halo shaped like an equilateral triangle. In early medieval art, the Father may be only a hand from a cloud. The Throne of Mercy showed the Father supporting a crucified Son, a type the Germans call the Not Gottes, and it stayed popular until at least the 18th century. In the Renaissance, the Eye of Providence became a symbol of the Trinity, and 17th-century versions sometimes show it ringed by clouds or sunbursts.
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Common questions
What is the Trinity in Christianity?
The Trinity is the Christian doctrine that one God exists as three persons: the Father, the Son (Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit. The three persons are distinct yet share a single essence.
Where does the word Trinity come from?
The word Trinity comes from the Latin Trinitas, which grows out of trinus, meaning threefold. Theophilus of Antioch, writing in the late 2nd century, was the first Church Father recorded using the word.
Is the Trinity explicitly taught in the New Testament?
No. The developed doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in the New Testament, though it contains triadic formulas such as Matthew 28:19 and 2 Corinthians 13:13. The Gospel of John is seen as providing the foundation for the doctrine.
What did the Council of Nicaea decide about the Trinity?
The First Council of Nicaea in 325 adopted a creed describing Christ as "being of one substance with the Father" and used the word homoousios. This answered Arianism, which taught that the Son was a changeable creature.
What is the Johannine Comma in the Trinity debate?
The Johannine Comma is the wording of 1 John 5:7 that says the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit are three that testify and are one. Most scholars agree it is a later addition, because it is missing from the oldest Greek and Latin texts.
How did the Filioque affect the doctrine of the Trinity?
The Filioque, meaning "and from the Son," was added by some Latin-speaking churches in the late 6th century to the description of the Spirit's procession. It entered Rome's liturgy in 1014 and became a main cause of the East-West Schism of 1054.
Who rejects the Trinity and what do they believe?
Nontrinitarians, also called antitrinitarians, reject the doctrine of the Trinity as found in the Nicene Creed. Their views include Adoptionism, Arianism, Unitarianism, binitarianism and modalism, which differ widely on the nature of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
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- 151BookGlobal Perspectives on Catholic Religious Education in Schools. Volume II: Learning and Leading in a Pluralist WorldPauline Dimech — Springer — 2019
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