The Trinity (Latin: Trinitas, lit. 'triad', from trinus 'threefold') is a Christian doctrine concerning the nature of God, which defines one God existing in three coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ), and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons (hypostases) sharing one essence/substance/nature (homoousion).
As the Fourth Lateran Council declared, it is the Father who begets, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds. In this context, one essence/nature defines what God is, while the three persons define who 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:
Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness [...]'
Then the LORD God said, 'Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil [...]'
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'; Hamilton thus argues for a framework of progressive revelation, in which the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed at first obscurely then plainly in the New Testament.
Another of these places is Isaiah 9, where, if interpreted to be about the Messiah, the Messiah is called "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace". Some Christians see this verse as meaning the Messiah will represent the Trinity on earth. This is because Counselor is a title for the Holy Spirit (John 14:26), the Trinity is God, Father is a title for God the Father, and Prince of Peace is a title for Jesus. This verse is also used to support the Deity of Christ.
The Deity of Christ can also be inferred from certain passages in the Book of Daniel:
I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.
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 LORD "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".
In Genesis 19, "two angels" visited Lot at Sodom. 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. 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 interpreted the God who visited Abraham as Jesus, the second person of the Trinity.
Augustine, in contrast, held that the three visitors to Abraham were the three persons of the Trinity. He saw no indication that the visitors were unequal, as would be the case in Justin's reading. Then, in Genesis 19, two of the visitors were addressed by Lot in the singular: "Lot said to them, 'Not so, my lord'" (Gen. 19:18). Augustine saw that Lot could address them as one because they had a single substance despite the plurality of persons.
Christians interpret the theophanies, or appearances of the Angel of the Lord, as revelations of a person distinct from God, who is nonetheless called God. This interpretation is found in Christianity as early as Justin Martyr and Melito of Sardis and reflects ideas that were already present in Philo. The Old Testament theophanies were thus seen as Christophanies, each a "preincarnate appearance of the Messiah".
New Testament
According to Larry Hurtado, while the developed doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in its books, the New Testament possesses a triadic understanding of God and several Trinitarian formulas, including Matthew 28:19, 2 Corinthians 13:13, Ephesians 4:4–6, 1 Peter 1:2, and Revelation 1:4–6. Harold W. Attridge (Yale Divinity School) and C. K. Barrett note its presence in John, which provided the foundation for the doctrine. 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:
Because there are three in Heaven that testify—the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit—and these three are one.
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
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:
Why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins but God alone?Jesus also receives προσκύνησις (proskynesis) 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 προσκύνησις 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). John features Thomas's declaration that he believed Jesus was God, "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28). Scholars agree that John 1:1 and John 20:28 identify Jesus with God. 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:
Moreover, the New Testament references often portray actions that seem to give the Spirit an intensely personal quality, probably more so than in Old Testament or ancient Jewish texts. So, for example, the Spirit "drove" Jesus into the wilderness (Mk 1:12; compare "led" in Mt. 4:1/Lk 4:1), and Paul refers to the Spirit interceding for believers (Romans 8:26–27) and witnessing to believers about their filial status with God (Romans 8:14–16). To cite other examples of this, in Acts the Spirit alerts Peter to the arrival of visitors from Cornelius (10:19), directs the church in Antioch to send forth Barnabas and Saul (13:2–4), guides the Jerusalem council to a decision about Gentile converts (15:28), at one point forbids Paul to missionize in Asia (16:6), and at another point warns Paul (via prophetic oracles) of trouble ahead in Jerusalem (21:11).
The Holy Spirit is described as God in the book of the Acts of the Apostles:But Peter said, "Ananias, why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and to keep back for yourself part of the proceeds of the land? 4 While it remained unsold, did it not remain your own? And after it was sold, was it not at your disposal? Why is it that you have contrived this deed in your heart? You have not lied to man but to God". Acts 5:3–4In 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 רוּחַ (ruach), 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
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 110, exhorting obedience to "Christ, and to the Father, and to the Spirit".
The pseudonymous Ascension of Isaiah, written sometime between the end of the first century and the beginning of the third century, possesses a "proto-Trinitarian" view, such as in its narrative of how the inhabitants of the sixth heaven sing praises to "the primal Father and his Beloved Christ, and the Holy 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". Justin Martyr is the first to use much of the terminology that would later become widespread in codified Trinitarian theology. For example, he describes that the Son and Father are the same "being" (ousia) and yet are also distinct faces (prosopa), anticipating the three persons (hypostases) that come with Tertullian and later authors. Justin describes how Jesus, the Son, is distinguishable from the Father but also derives from the Father, using the analogy of a fire (representing the Son) that is lit from its source, a torch (representing the Father). At another point, Justin Martyr wrote that "we worship him [Jesus Christ] with reason, since we have learned that he is the Son of the living God himself, and believe him to be in second place and the prophetic Spirit in the third" (1 Apology 13, cf. ch. 60).
About the Christian Baptism, he wrote that "in the name of God, the Father and Lord of the universe, and of our Saviour Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit, they then receive the washing with water", highlighting the liturgical use of a Trinitarian formula. 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.
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 (Logos), and his Wisdom (Sophia) in the context of a discussion of the first three days of creation, following the early Christian practice of identifying the Holy Spirit as the Wisdom of God.
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.
St. Justin and Clement of Alexandria referenced all three persons of the Trinity in their doxologies and St. Basil likewise, in the evening lighting of lamps.
Origen of Alexandria (AD 185 – c. 253) has often been interpreted as Subordinationist—believing in shared divinity of the three persons but not in co-equality. However, some modern researchers have argued that Origen might have actually been anti-Subordinationist and that his own Trinitarian theology inspired the Trinitarian theology of the later Cappadocian Fathers.