Feb 18, 2010 Article by Alex Sharp | 0 comments

Trinitarian Belief In Christianity: An Eternal Struggle To Understand The Nature Of God

The nature of God in Christianity is a debate fraught with difficultly. Chief among these difficulties is the establishment and nature of the Trinitarian doctrine. This doctrine states that there are three distinct persons (The Father, The Son and The Holy Spirit) unified by a single essence into a Triune God. This is probably the most central belief in Christianity, and it has been the subject of rigorous debate ever since the first days of the Christian movement.

The Trinity is a shockingly complex concept in Christianity. While major tenets of the belief can be found in nearly every modern version of Christianity, debate over the true meaning of the triune nature of God has berthed some of the most fundamental rifts between the different flavors of Christian belief. The theological lynchpin of the Great Schism (the separation of the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches) is based on a one word difference in a confession of faith known as the Nicene Creed. The one word, filioque (and the son), deals exclusively with the nature of the Trinity.

It does not help that the debate is littered with obscure terms like filioque, perichoresis, hypostasis, ousia (and the variants of on this term: homoousios and homoiousios). If you do not have a degree in theology, or some intimate knowledge of classical Latin and Koine Greek, just looking at these words can scare away even the most curious reader. So today I am going to try to straighten out a few things about the Trinity and dispel some of the mystery surrounding a few of the terms above.

The Bible never directly references the Trinity by name, nor does it specifically require belief in the triune nature of God. However, it would be a mistake to think that the roots for Trinitarian belief cannot be found in the Bible. In forming the specifics of this belief certain passages in the Bible are relied upon heavily. Perhaps the most important verse is Matthew 28:19 (“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”). This unifying of three distinct persons (hypostases) in one essence (ouisa) as a fundamental part of the baptism ritual is the central building block of Trinitarianism.

There are several other references to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the Bible. Luke 1:35, Mark 1:10-11, Hebrews 9:14 and Acts 7:55 all contain specific references to all three hypostases of God.

This loose understanding of the Trinity served the early Christians fairly well until the rise of the Arian heresy. The Arian movement rejected the Trinity, citing a belief that Jesus was created by God the Father, and thus not on an equal footing with him as Trinitarian belief requires. This would open the door to the first serious debates over the nature of the Trinity. It culminated in the dogmatic clarification of the nature of the Trinity, assuring the co-indwelling, co-inhering, and mutual interpenetration within the threefold nature of the Trinity. This status is referred to with the term perichoresis.

When Constantine the Great adopted Christianity as his religion (and therefore the religion of the Roman Empire) he demanded that there be a final ruling on the nature of God within the Christian Church. Various councils were held by the Church Fathers. The ultimate outcome was that the Church found the Trinitarian doctrine to be sound, and that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were homoousios (meaning ‘of one essence’ – note the root of the word is ousia) as opposed to the Arian homoiousios (of similar essence).

This was not the last time this fragile and complex balance was to be irritated. If there is one thing that theologians do well, it is find different interpretations to the same rule. So while it is a relatively fixed teaching that God has one essence but three persons, the specifics of the interaction and roles of these three persons has been subject to debate.

As I mentioned earlier, the Great Schism is centered on the use of the filioque clause in the confession of faith. This Latin term is included in the Creed of the Roman Catholic Church, but not in the Eastern Orthodox traditions. “Et in Spiritum Sanctum, Dominum, et vivificantem: qui ex Patre Filioque procedit.” Yes, I know, more annoying Latin. It translates to, “and in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son.” The original Creed did not contain the filioque, referencing the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the Father alone. This was ultimately seen by the western theologians as a disruption of the perfectly balanced perichoresis doctrine, and so at the Council of Toledo they added the filioque. This addition has been accepted by the Roman Catholic, Anglican and most Protestant churches, but the Orthodox Church refuses to this day to put Father and Son on equal footing in this one instance.

Modern Christian movements are varied on belief in the Trinity to this day. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints supports the Trinity, though they consider the Trinity to be three distinctly separate beings united in a similar cause. Then there are the Unitarian faith systems, which say they are Christian but heavily modify or openly reject traditional Trinitarian teaching. There is a movement within Pentecostalism that teaches a doctrine known as Oneness. It shares a root with the modalism once taught by the Sabellian movement in the early Church. Modalism teaches that the different persons within the Trinity are only ‘masks’ for the one, true God and not distinct hypostases. Oneness Pentecostalism agrees with this assertion, thus putting it in conflict with traditional Trinitarian theology. Baptism in an Oneness tradition is done exclusively in the name of Jesus Christ.

The question of the true nature (or even the validity) of the Trinity shows no sign of abating, and promises to remain a major source of debate in the Christian community for centuries to come.