Trinity

thumb|A [[Shield of the Trinity diagram, illustrating relationships between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.|class=skin-invert-image]]

thumb|An artistic depiction of the Trinity, with the [[Hand of God (art)|hand representing the Father, the ichthys representing the Son, and the dove representing the Holy Spirit.]]

The Trinity<!-- Do not add the word "holy" --> (, from 'threefold') In this context, one essence/nature defines God is, while the three persons define God is. This expresses at once their distinction and their indissoluble unity. Thus, the entire process of creation and grace is viewed as a single shared action of the three divine persons, in which each person manifests the attributes unique to them in the Trinity, thereby proving that everything comes "from the Father", "through the Son", and "in the Holy Spirit".

This doctrine is called Trinitarianism, and its adherents are called Trinitarians, while its opponents are called antitrinitarians or nontrinitarians and are considered non-Christian by many mainline groups. Nontrinitarian positions include Unitarianism, binitarianism and modalism. The theological study of the Trinity is called "triadology" or "Trinitarian theology".

While the developed doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in the New Testament, the Gospel of John provided a foundation for the doctrine, and the New Testament possesses a triadic understanding of God and contains a number of Trinitarian formulas. The doctrine of the Trinity was first formulated among the early Christians (mid-2nd century and later) and fathers of the Church as they attempted to understand the relationship between Jesus and God in their scriptural documents and prior traditions.

Old Testament

The Old Testament has been interpreted as referring to the Trinity in several places. For example, in the Genesis creation narrative, the first-person plural pronouns in Genesis 1:26–27 and Genesis 3:22 have been used to argue for a Trinitarian understanding of God:

A traditional Christian interpretation of these pronouns is that they refer to a plurality of persons within the Godhead. Biblical commentator Victor P. Hamilton outlines several interpretations, including the most widely held among Biblical scholars, which is that the pronouns do not refer to other persons within the Godhead but to the 'heavenly court' of Isaiah 6. Theologians Meredith Kline and Gerhard von Rad argue for this view; as von Rad says, 'The extraordinary plural ("Let us") is to prevent one from referring God's image too directly to God the Lord. God includes himself among the heavenly beings of his court and thereby conceals himself in this majority.' Hamilton notes that this interpretation assumes that Genesis 1 is at variance with Isaiah 40:13–14, Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, or what man shows him his counsel? Whom did he consult, and who made him understand? Who taught him the path of justice, and taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding? That is, if the plural pronouns of Genesis 1 teach that God consults and creates with a 'heavenly court', then it contradicts the statement in Isaiah that God seeks the counsel of nobody. According to Hamilton, the best interpretation 'approaches the Trinitarian understanding but employs less direct terminology'. Following D. J. A. Clines, he states that the plural reveals a 'duality within the Godhead' that recalls the 'Spirit of God' mentioned in verse 2, And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Hamilton also says that it is unreasonable to assume that the author of Genesis was too theologically primitive to deal with such a concept as 'plurality within unity';

The Deity of Christ can also be inferred from certain passages in the Book of Daniel:

This is because both the Ancient of Days (God the Father) and the Son of Man (God the Son, Matt 16:13) have an everlasting dominion, which is ascribed to God in Psalm 145:13.

Some writers also see the Trinity when the Old Testament refers to God's word (Psalm 33:6), God's Spirit (Isaiah 61:1), and Wisdom (Proverbs 9:1), as well as narratives such as the three men who visit Abraham in Genesis 18. The narrative here has the "appearing to Abraham" as he was visited by three men. However, it is generally agreed among Trinitarian Christian scholars that it would go beyond the intention and spirit of the Old Testament to correlate these notions directly with later Trinitarian doctrine.

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, Genesis 21:17, Genesis 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". The interplay between Abraham, on the one hand, and the Lord, the three men and 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 as such that Abraham was visited by God, who was accompanied by two angels.

thumb|The Trinity by Russian icon painter [[Andrei Rublev, early 15th century.]]

Augustine, in contrast, held that the three visitors to Abraham were the three persons of the Trinity. James Barker argues that important aspects of Trinitarianism are present in the New Testament, with an economic Trinity being present in the Gospel of John. 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" 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", lead to attempts to articulate the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Eventually, the diverse references to God, Jesus, and the Spirit found in the New Testament were brought together to form the concept of the Trinity—one Godhead subsisting in three persons and one substance. The concept of the Trinity was used to oppose alternative views of how the three are related and to defend the church against charges of worshiping two or three gods.

1 John 5:7

Modern Biblical scholarship largely agrees that 1 John 5:7, which was seen in Latin and Greek texts after the 4th century and found in later translations such as the King James Translation due to its inclusion in the Textus Receptus, cannot be found in the oldest Greek and Latin texts. Verse 7 is known as the Johannine Comma, which most scholars agree to be a later addition by a later copyist or what is termed a textual gloss and not part of the original text. This verse reads:

This verse is absent from the Ethiopic, Aramaic, Syriac, early Slavic, early Armenian, Georgian, and Arabic translations of the Greek New Testament. It is primarily found in Latin manuscripts, although a minority of Greek, late Slavonic, and late Armenian manuscripts contain it.

Perhaps the earliest mention of the Johannine Comma comes from the writings of Cyprian of Carthage (210 - 258ad), although this may have been an allegorical interpretation of the undisputed part of the verse. Nevertheless, the comma was often used in many later Latin-speaking authors such as Priscillian (4th century), Contra Varimadum (5th century), Donation of Constantine (8th), Peter Lombard (12th century), Bernard of Clairvaux (12th century), Thomas Aquinas (13th century) and William of Ockham (14th century), alongside having found its way into the earliest printed editions of the New Testament such as the Complutensian Polyglot and the Textus Receptus in the 16th century, causing the comma to become a part of most Reformation-era vernacular translations.

Jesus in the New Testament

thumb|God in the person of the Son confronts [[Adam and Eve, by Master Bertram (d. c. 1415)]]

In the Pauline epistles, the public, collective devotional patterns towards Jesus in the early Christian community are reflective of Paul's perspective on the divine status of Jesus in what scholars have termed a "binitarian" pattern or shape of devotional practice (worship) in the New Testament, in which "God" and Jesus are thematized and invoked. Jesus receives prayer (1 Corinthians 1:2; 2 Corinthians 12:8–9), the presence of Jesus is confessionally invoked by believers (1 Corinthians 16:22; Romans 10:9–13; Philippians 2:10–11), people are baptized in Jesus' name (1 Corinthians 6:11; Romans 6:3), Jesus is the reference in Christian fellowship for a religious ritual meal (the Lord's Supper; 1 Corinthians 11:17–34). Jesus is described as "existing in the very form of God" (Philippians 2:6), and having the "fullness of the Deity [living] in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). Jesus is also in some verses directly called God (Romans 9:5, Titus 2:13, 2 Peter 1:1).

Many scholars today concede the Synoptic gospels portray Jesus as divine. Jesus is described as forgiving sins, leading some theologians to believe Jesus is portrayed as God. This is because Jesus forgives sins on behalf of others; people normally only forgive transgressions against themselves. The teachers of the law recognized this and said:

Jesus also receives () in the aftermath of the resurrection, a Greek term that either expresses the contemporary social gesture of bowing to a superior, either on one's knees or in full prostration (in Matthew 18:26 a slave performs to his master so that he would not be sold after being unable to pay his debts). The term can also refer to the religious act of devotion towards a deity. While Jesus receives proskynesis a number of times in the synoptic Gospels, only a few can be said to refer to divine worship.

This includes Matthew 28:16–20, an account of the resurrected Jesus receiving worship from his disciples after proclaiming his authority over the cosmos and his ever-continuing presence with the disciples (forming an inclusion with the beginning of the Gospel, where Jesus is given the name Emmanuel, "God with us", a name that alludes to the God of Israel's ongoing presence with his followers throughout the Old Testament (Genesis 28:15; Deuteronomy 20:1). Whereas some have argued that Matthew 28:19 was an interpolation on account of its absence from the first few centuries of early Christian quotations, scholars largely accept the passage as authentic due to its supporting manuscript evidence and that it does appear to be either quoted in the Didache (7:1–3) or at least reflected in the Didache as part of a common tradition from which both Matthew and the Didache emerged. Jesus receiving divine worship in the post-resurrection accounts is further mirrored in Luke 24:52.

In Acts, it is common for individual Christians to "call" upon the name of Jesus (9:14, 21; 22:16), an idea precedented in the Old Testament descriptions of calling on the name of YHWH as a form of prayer. The story of Stephen depicts Stephen invoking and crying out to Jesus in the final moments of his life to receive his spirit (7:59–60). Acts further describes a common ritual practice of inducting new members into the early Jesus sect by baptizing them in Jesus' name (2:38; 8:16; 10:48; 19:5). According to Dale Allison, Acts depicts the appearances of Jesus to Paul as a divine theophany, styled on and identified with the God responsible for the theophany of Ezekiel in the Old Testament.

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). However, in a 1973 Journal of Biblical Literature article, Philip B. Harner, Professor Emeritus of Religion at Heidelberg College, claimed that the traditional translation of John 1:1c ("and the Word was God") is incorrect. He endorses the New English Bible translation of John 1:1c, "and what God was, the Word was". However, other scholars have criticized Harner's claim. In the same article, Harner also noted that, "Perhaps the clause could be translated, 'the Word had the same nature as God'. This would be one way of representing John's thought, which is, as I understand it, that [the] logos, no less than [the] theos, had the nature of theos", which in his case means the Word is as fully God as the person called "God". John also portrays Jesus as the agent of creation of the universe.

Jesus in later Christian theology

Some have suggested that John presents a hierarchy when he quotes Jesus as saying, "The Father is greater than I", a statement which was appealed to by nontrinitarian groups such as Arianism. However, influential theologians such as Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas argued this statement was to be understood as Jesus speaking about his human nature.

Holy Spirit in the New Testament

Prior Israelite theology held that the Spirit is merely the divine presence of God himself, whereas orthodox Christian theology holds that the Holy Spirit is a distinct person of God the Father himself. This development begins early in the New Testament, as the Spirit of God receives much more emphasis and description comparably than it had in earlier Jewish writing. Whereas there are 75 references to the Spirit within the Old Testament and 35 identified in the non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls, the New Testament, despite its significantly shorter length, mentions the Spirit 275 times. In addition to its larger emphasis and importance placed on the Spirit in the New Testament, the Spirit is also described in much more personalized and individualized terms than earlier. Larry Hurtado writes:

The Holy Spirit is described as God in the book of the Acts of the Apostles:In the New Testament, the Spirit is not portrayed as the recipient of cultic devotion, which, instead, is typically offered to God the Father and to the risen/glorified Jesus. Although what became mainstream Christianity subsequently affirmed the propriety of including the Spirit as the recipient of worship as reflected in the developed form of the Nicene Creed, perhaps the closest to this in the New Testament is in Matthew 28:19 and 2 Corinthians 13:14, which describe the Spirit as the subject of religious ritual.

Holy Spirit in later Christian theology

As the Arian controversy was dissipating, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus Christ to the equality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and Son. On one hand, the Pneumatomachi sect declared that the Holy Spirit was an inferior person to the Father and Son. On the other hand, the Cappadocian Fathers argued that the Holy Spirit was equal to the Father and Son in nature or substance.

Although the main text used in defense of the deity of the Holy Spirit was Matthew 28:19, the Cappadocian Fathers argued from other verses such as: "By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their host" (Psalm 33:6). According to their understanding, because "breath" and "spirit" in Hebrew are both (), Psalm 33:6 is revealing the roles of the Son and Holy Spirit as co-creators. And since, according to them, because only the holy God can create holy beings such as the angels, the Son and Holy Spirit must be God.

Yet another argument from the Cappadocian Fathers to prove that the Holy Spirit is of the same nature as the Father and Son comes from "For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person, which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God" (1 Corinthians 2:11). They reasoned that this passage proves that the Holy Spirit has the same relationship to God as the spirit within us has to us.

The Cappadocian Fathers also quoted, "Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you?" (1 Corinthians 3:16) and reasoned that it would be blasphemous for an inferior being to take up residence in a temple of God, thus proving that the Holy Spirit is equal with the Father and the Son.

They also combined "the servant does not know what his master is doing" (John 15:15) with 1 Corinthians 2:11 in an attempt to show that the Holy Spirit is not the slave of God and therefore, his equal.

The Pneumatomachi contradicted the Cappadocian Fathers by quoting, "Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?" (Hebrews 1:14) in effect arguing that the Holy Spirit is no different from other created angelic spirits. The Church Fathers disagreed, saying that the Holy Spirit is greater than the angels since the Holy Spirit is the one who grants the foreknowledge for prophecy (1 Corinthians 12:8–10) so that the angels could announce events to come.

Early Christianity

Before the Council of Nicaea

thumb|right|Detail of the [[Early Christian art and architecture|earliest known artwork of the Trinity, the Dogmatic or Trinity Sarcophagus, (Vatican Museums).

Three similar figures, representing the Trinity, are involved in the creation of Eve, whose much smaller figure is cut off at lower right; to her right, Adam lies on the ground.]]

The Trinity was formulated as early Christians attempted to understand the relationship between Jesus and God in their scriptures and prior traditions. According to Margaret Baker, Trinitarian theology has roots in pre-Christian Palestinian beliefs about angels.

An early reference to the three "persons" of later Trinitarian doctrines appears towards the end of the first century, where Clement of Rome rhetorically asks in his epistle as to why corruption exists among some in the Christian community; "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?" (1 Clement 46:6). A similar example is found in the first-century Didache, which directs Christians to "baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit".

Ignatius of Antioch similarly refers to all three persons around AD&nbsp;110, exhorting obedience to "Christ, and to the Father, and to the Spirit". Justin Martyr produced a rudimentary version of the Trinitarian doctrine.

Some authors state that Justin's texts were Binitarian, and the same applies to the texts of Tertullian and Eusebius of Caesarea.

thumb|left|The Adoration of the Trinity by [[Albrecht Dürer (1511)

From top to bottom: Holy Spirit (dove), God the Father and Christ on the cross]]

The first of the early Church Fathers to be recorded using the word "Trinity" was Theophilus of Antioch, writing in the late 2nd century. He defines the Trinity as God, his Word (), and his Wisdom ()

The first defense of the doctrine of the Trinity was by Tertullian, who was born around AD 150–160, explicitly "defined" the Trinity as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and defended his theology against Praxeas, although he noted that the majority of the believers in his day found issue with his doctrine. Tertullian confession, although it implies a Trinity, is binitarian in structure. ("the Word was made flesh and dwelled among us"). About the Father and the Son, the creed used the term (of one substance) to define the relationship between the Father and the Son. After more than fifty years of debate, was recognized as the hallmark of orthodoxy and was further developed into the formula of "three persons, one being".

The Confession of the First Council of Nicaea, the Nicene Creed, said little about the Holy Spirit.

First Council of Constantinople (381)

Later, at the First Council of Constantinople (381), the Nicene Creed would be expanded, known as Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, by saying that the Holy Spirit is worshiped and glorified together with the Father and the Son (), suggesting that he was also consubstantial with them:

The doctrine of the divinity and personality of the Holy Spirit was developed by Athanasius in the last decades of his life. He defended and refined the Nicene formula. Where the Cappadocian Fathers used social analogies to describe the triune nature of God, Augustine of Hippo used psychological analogy. He believed that if man is created in the image of God, he is created in the image of the Trinity. Augustine's analogy for the Trinity is the memory, intelligence, and will in the mind of a man. In short, Christians do not have to think of three persons when they think of God; they may think of one person. This was incorporated into the liturgical practice of Rome in 1014. eventually became one of the main causes for the East–West Schism in 1054 and the failures of the repeated union attempts.

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."

Theology

Baptismal formula

thumb|left|[[The Baptism of Christ (Piero della Francesca)|The Baptism of Christ, by Piero della Francesca, 15th century]]

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." This may be taken to indicate that baptism was associated with this formula from the earliest decades of the Church's existence. Other Trinitarian formulas found in the New Testament include 2 Corinthians 13:14, 1 Corinthians 12:4–6, Ephesians 4:4–6, 1 Peter 1:2, and Revelation 1:4–5.

Oneness Pentecostals demur from the Trinitarian view of baptism and emphasize baptism "in the name of Jesus Christ" only, what they hold to be the original apostolic formula. For this reason, they often focus on the baptisms in Acts. Those who place great emphasis on the baptisms in Acts often likewise question the authenticity of Matthew 28:19 in its present form. Most scholars of New Testament textual criticism accept the authenticity of the passage since there are no variant manuscripts regarding the formula, and the extant form of the passage is attested in the Didache and in 1 Corinthians 12:4–6. The form is first found in the baptismal formula in Matthew 28:19 Did., 7. 1 and 3.&nbsp;... [I]t is self-evident that Father, Son and Spirit are here linked in an indissoluble threefold relationship.

Economic and immanent Trinity

The term "immanent Trinity" focuses on who God is; the term "economic Trinity" focuses on what God does. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

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. 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. On this point St. Basil said: