God, creation and the fall
The Trinity
One God in three Persons - the ground on which everything else in this course stands.
You are reading the brief version. Switch the depth control to Complete for the full treatment.
Christians are monotheists. There is one God, not three. But this one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit: three who are distinct from one another, each fully God, and not three Gods.
Two words carry the load. Substance (or essence, or being) answers the question what? - and the answer is one. Person answers the question who?
- and the answer is three. The Father is not the Son; the Son is not the Spirit;
the Spirit is not the Father. Yet each is the one God, entirely, not a third of Him.
This is not arithmetic and it is not a riddle. It is the shape the evidence forced on the Church. The first Christians were Jews who prayed the Shema - the Lord our God, the Lord is one. They also worshipped Jesus, who forgave sins, accepted worship, and was called God. And they received the Spirit as God present, not as an influence. Three facts, all refusing to go away. The doctrine of the Trinity is what you get when you refuse to drop any of them.
The Church settled the language at Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381. The Son is homoousios with the Father - of one substance, not merely similar. The Spirit is worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son.
What distinguishes the Persons is not what they are but how they stand to each other: the Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds. Nothing else.
Catholic
The West says the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son - the filioque.
Orthodox
The East says the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and rejects the Western addition of and the Son to the Creed.
Lutheran
Lutherans confess the Creed with the filioque, as Article 1 of the Augsburg Confession states.
Anglican
Anglicans inherited the filioque, though several provinces now print the Creed without it.
Why it matters: if God is eternally three in loving relation, then love is not something God took up when He made the world. It is what He is.
Start with the problem, not the answer
The doctrine of the Trinity is usually taught backwards. Someone states the formula - one substance, three Persons - and then tries to make it plausible with an analogy about water or shamrocks. The analogies all fail, the listener concludes the whole thing is a puzzle invented by theologians, and nothing has been learned.
Turn it around. Start where the Church started: with a set of facts that could not all be true, and were.
Fact one. There is one God. The first Christians were Jews, and no Jew would compromise on this. Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). They died rather than offer a pinch of incense to a second god. Whatever they came to believe about Jesus, they never stopped being monotheists.
Fact two. Jesus is God. Not a great man, not the highest creature, not a being God adopted. He forgives sins on His own authority, which the bystanders correctly recognise as something only God can do (Mark 2:5-7). He accepts worship rather than refusing it, which no angel and no prophet in Scripture ever does. He says before Abraham was, I am, using the divine name, and His hearers pick up stones (John 8:58). Thomas looks at Him and says my Lord and my God, and Jesus does not correct him (John 20:28).
Fact three. The Holy Spirit is God. Lying to the Spirit is lying to God (Acts 5:3-4). The Spirit searches the depths of God, which no creature can do (1 Corinthians 2:10-11). And the commission is given not into three names but into one: in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19) - one name, three who bear it.
Pause and thinkBefore reading on - suppose you wanted to hold facts one and two but drop the Trinity. What would you have to say about Jesus, and what would go wrong?
You have two options and both fail.
Say Jesus is a very exalted creature - the first and greatest thing God made. This is Arianism, and it was the majority view for a stretch of the fourth century. It fails because Christians worship Jesus. If He is a creature, then every Christian in history has been an idolater. And it fails at the cross: a creature, however grand, cannot reconcile the world to God. Only God can do that.
Or say that Father, Son and Spirit are three masks the one God wears in succession - God as Father in the Old Testament, as Son in the Gospels, as Spirit now. This is modalism, and it is what most people mean when they say they believe in the Trinity. It fails at the Jordan: the Son is in the water, the Father speaks from heaven, the Spirit descends as a dove - all at once. A man cannot wear three masks simultaneously. And it destroys the cross, which becomes God play-acting a conversation with Himself.
The vocabulary, and why it is not optional
By the fourth century the argument could not proceed without agreed terms. Two did the work.
Substance - in Greek ousia, in Latin substantia, often translated being or essence. It answers the question what is it? Your substance and mine are the same: we are both human. In God, substance is one. There is one divine being, one divine will, one divine power, one divine knowledge. Not three cooperating beings, however harmonious.
Person - in Greek hypostasis, in Latin persona. It answers the question who is it? In God there are three. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit. These are not names for one who is sometimes addressed differently; they are three who address each other.
Be careful with person. The modern word suggests a separate centre of consciousness - a distinct individual with his own mind and will. That is not what the Fathers meant, and reading it that way produces three Gods. A divine Person is a distinct who, subsisting in the one divine what, distinguished only by relation of origin.
So: one what, three whos. It is not a contradiction, because what and who are different questions. A contradiction would be one God and three Gods, or one Person and three Persons. Nobody says that.
What actually distinguishes the three
If the three Persons share one substance entirely, what makes them different? Not their attributes - each is equally eternal, equally almighty, equally God. Not their roles in creation or salvation - the three always act together, and the Church insists that the external works of the Trinity are undivided.
The answer is startlingly thin, and deliberately so. The Persons are distinguished only by their relations of origin:
- The Father is unbegotten. He is from no one. He eternally begets the Son and is the source from which the Spirit proceeds.
- The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. Begotten, not made - which is the whole fight at Nicaea in three words. What is made is a creature; what is begotten shares the nature of the begetter.
- The Spirit eternally proceeds. Not begotten, not made.
Note eternally. There was never a time when the Father was alone and later produced a Son. Begetting here is not an event; it is an eternal relation, the way a light source and its light are simultaneous. The Arian slogan was there was when He was not. Nicaea answered: no, there was not.
Pause and thinkPause: why does the Church insist the Son is "begotten, not made"? What would be lost if He were made?
Everything the gospel rests on. If the Son is made, He is on the creature side of the line between God and creation - and then the incarnation is God sending a deputy rather than God coming Himself; the cross is a creature suffering for creatures, which saves no one; worship of Christ is idolatry; and God so loved the world that He gave His only Son means God gave someone else's life, not His own. Athanasius spent forty years and five exiles on this one word because he could see all of it.
Where the four traditions stand
All four confess the Nicene Creed and hold the doctrine as stated above. The disagreement is over one clause and what it implies.
Catholic
The Catholic Church confesses that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son - in Latin, Filioque. The clause entered Western usage in Spain in the sixth century, spread through the Frankish church, and was in Roman use by
- The Catechism explains it as expressing what the New Testament calls the
Spirit of the Son (Galatians 4:6), and stresses that the Father remains the sole principle without principle - the Son receives from the Father the capacity to spirate the Spirit. Since 1995 the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity has acknowledged that the Greek ekporeusis signifies origin from the Father alone, and that the Latin procedere is a broader word. Catholic theology follows Augustine in approaching the Trinity through the unity of the divine essence first, and in using the psychological analogy: the Son as the Word the divine mind speaks, the Spirit as the Love between Father and Son. Thomas Aquinas develops this at length in the Summa.
Orthodox
The Orthodox Church confesses that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father, and objects to the filioque on two grounds. The first is procedural and is not a technicality: the Creed is the common possession of the whole Church, settled by ecumenical council, and no local church - Rome included - has the authority to add a word to it unilaterally. The Council of Ephesus in 431 expressly forbade composing another creed. The second is theological. The Father alone is the source of divinity within the Trinity; giving the Son a share in that causal role blurs what makes the Father the Father, and, in Photios's argument, either introduces two principles into God or collapses Father and Son together. Orthodox theology begins with the three Persons rather than the one essence, and tends to resist systematisation. Gregory of Nazianzus is characteristic: he says he cannot think of the One without being encircled by the splendour of the Three. Gregory Palamas later distinguishes God's unknowable essence from His energies, by which He is truly known and shared - a distinction the West never adopted.
Lutheran
Lutherans confess the filioque without hesitation. The Augsburg Confession opens with it: Article 1 affirms the decree of Nicaea concerning the unity of the divine essence and the three Persons, and condemns by name the Arians, the Manichaeans, the Samosatenes and all such heresies. The Athanasian Creed, which states the doctrine most exactly, is one of the three ecumenical creeds retained in the Book of Concord and is appointed to be used. Lutheran theology adds a distinctive emphasis: Luther insisted that God must be sought where He has promised to be found - in the incarnate Christ, in the word preached, in the sacraments - rather than in speculation about the divine essence. This is his distinction between the deus absconditus, the hidden God whose majesty unaided reason cannot approach, and the deus revelatus, God revealed in the manger and on the cross. The Trinity is confessed exactly, and then one is pointed to Christ.
Anglican
Article 1 of the Thirty-Nine Articles states that there is one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts or passions, and that in the unity of this Godhead there are three Persons of one substance, power and eternity: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Article 5 affirms that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son. Article 8 receives the three creeds - Nicene, Athanasian and Apostles' - as to be thoroughly received and believed, because they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture, which is a characteristically Anglican way of putting it: the creeds bind, and their warrant is scriptural. The Book of Common Prayer builds the doctrine into daily practice through the Gloria Patri after every psalm, the Creed at Morning and Evening Prayer, and Trinity Sunday. Since the Lambeth Conference of 1978 and 1988, several provinces have recommended printing the Creed in its original form without the filioque as a gesture towards the East; the Church of England retains it in authorised liturgies, while some provinces have made the omission optional.
Work with it
Check yourself
The Nicene Creed calls the Son "consubstantial with the Father" (in Greek, homoousios). What was this word chosen to rule out?
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Exactly. Homoousios - of the same substance - was chosen because every softer word could be signed by Arians. The rival proposal, homoiousios, meant "of similar substance", and similar is precisely what a very good creature would be.
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The opposite. The Creed affirms the incarnation a few lines later, and Chalcedon spells it out further. Homoousios concerns the Son's relation to the Father, not His humanity.
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No one disputed this. The Creed's first line affirms it and the Arians agreed.
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That question was settled at Constantinople in 381, which expanded the third article. It is a separate argument.
Check yourself
What distinguishes the three Persons of the Trinity from one another?
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Correct, and the thinness of the answer is the point. Any other difference - in power, knowledge, eternity or will - would make one of them less than God.
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A common answer and a dangerous one. The Church holds that the external works of the Trinity are undivided: all three act in creation, all three in redemption. We appropriate works to Persons for teaching, but that is not what distinguishes them.
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This is subordinationism. John 14:28 - "the Father is greater than I" - is spoken by the incarnate Son with respect to His humanity, not of the eternal Son's nature.
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Three wills would be three Gods. There is one divine will, because will belongs to nature, and the divine nature is one.
Check yourself
Someone says the Trinity is like water, which can be ice, liquid or steam. What is wrong with this?
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Right. At the Jordan all three are present at once. Water is not ice and steam at the same moment; the Father is not the Son at any moment, and always was not.
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It is common, and it teaches a heresy the Church condemned in the third century. Sabellius taught essentially this.
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That is the shamrock's failure, not water's. Water errs towards modalism; the shamrock errs towards tritheism.
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That is the sun-and-its-light analogy's weakness, not this one's.
Objection drill
The word "Trinity" appears nowhere in the Bible. The doctrine was invented at the Council of Nicaea in 325 under pressure from the Emperor Constantine, who wanted a unified religion for political reasons. You are reading fourth-century Greek philosophy back into a first-century Jewish text.
A model answer
Three claims are packed in here. Take them in order.
The word. True, and not interesting. Bible, monotheism, incarnation and omniscience are not in Scripture either. A doctrine is not a word; it is a summary of what a set of texts requires you to hold together. The question is whether the New Testament forces this summary, and it does: one God, and Jesus worshipped as God, and the Spirit spoken of as God, with one name for all three in the baptismal formula.
Constantine. The history is checkable and it does not support the charge. The emperor convened the council and wanted peace; he had no theology of his own to impose. Within a few years he had been persuaded towards the Arian side, received Arius back, and exiled Athanasius - the man who had argued hardest for Nicaea's formula. For most of the fifty years after 325 the imperial court favoured Arianism. Jerome wrote that the whole world groaned to find itself Arian. Nicaea prevailed despite imperial pressure, not because of it, and it prevailed because bishops kept being deposed for it and kept teaching it anyway.
The philosophy. The charge inverts what happened. Greek philosophy had no category for this. A god who is one being in three who love each other eternally, who becomes a particular Jew, and who dies, was an embarrassment to educated pagans - Celsus and Porphyry said so in print. The Church borrowed Greek vocabulary, which is a different thing: it needed precise words to say what the Scriptures had already said imprecisely, because people were using the loose words to mean opposite things. Ousia and hypostasis were the tools; the material was Jewish and apostolic.
One more thing worth saying out loud. Nicaea was not a committee choosing a convenient position. It was an attempt to state what the Church already did. She had baptised into three names since the beginning and worshipped Jesus from the start - Pliny the Younger reports in about 112 that Christians sang hymns to Christ as to a god, two hundred years before the council. The doctrine is the explanation of an existing practice, not the invention of a new one.
Memory work
Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.