Trinity

• Judaism is a monotheistic religion and Christians affirm the Shema of Deuteronomy 6:4: God is One.
• The followers of Jesus experienced him as more than a rabbi or a prophet: he forgave sins and spoke with authority.
• Christians reconciled the convictions of praying to the Father through ‘the Son’ and the oneness of God by viewing Jesus as one person of God.
• The Holy Spirit came to also be viewed similarly.
• The monotheism of Christians includes a mystery that oneness also includes ‘three-ness’.
• The plural for ‘God’ is used in Genesis 1:26 and the plural term ‘Elohim’ is used for God in Genesis 1:1.
• Accounts of the virgin birth and resurrection affirmed the approach of viewing Jesus as one person of God.
• The term ‘Trinity’ is not in the Bible; it was coined by Tertullian in the 3rd Century.
• Three heresies ruled out by the Church were Adoptionism, Modalism, and Arianism.
• There are three interlocking beliefs considered orthodox by Christians: there is one God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each fully God, and each person of the Trinity is not the same.
• Jesus, for example, is both fully God and fully human; a member of the Trinity whilst also incarnate as the human Jesus.
• The Nicene Creed (325 CE) formalised the doctrine of the Trinity; it declared Jesus to be of the same substance (homoousios) as the Father.
• Each person of the Trinity is co-equal and co-eternal; this is expressed in the liturgy by prayers and blessings made using the Trinitarian formula: ‘in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’
• In 381 CE it was agreed by the Church to amend the Nicene creed with a detail about the Holy Spirit: he ‘proceeds from the Father’.
• This was confirmed at another ecumenical (worldwide) creed, the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE).
• However, it became popular in some churches (both eastern and western) to refer to the Spirit ‘proceeding from the Father and the Son’ (‘and the Son’ = ‘filioque’).
• Augustine made the case that God is a relationship in which the Spirit acts as the bond of love between the Father and the Son.
• Augustine used as a proof text John 20:22: Jesus ‘breathes’ the Holy Spirit onto the disciples.
• Many in the East believed that the inclusion of ‘filioque’ threatened the role of the Father as the sole source of divinity in the Trinity and weakened the distinction between the Son and the Spirit.
• When the creed was eventually changed to accept filioque, this was seen as unacceptable by the East, since this no longer rendered the creeds as ‘ecumenical’.