The Trinity is the central Christian doctrine that the one God exists as three coequal, coeternal persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — a doctrine that has organized Christian theology and shaped Western philosophy of personhood for seventeen centuries.
trinity
The central Christian doctrine that the one God exists as three coequal, coeternal persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), articulated at the Councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381) and continuously contested across the patristic, medieval, and modern theological traditions.
Definition
The Trinity is the central Christian doctrine that the one God exists eternally as three coequal, coeternal persons (Greek hypostaseis; Latin personae) — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — sharing a single divine essence (Greek ousia; Latin substantia). The doctrine is not derived from any single biblical passage but is the theological synthesis worked out in the patristic period in response to the Christological and pneumatological controversies of the second through fifth centuries. Its canonical formulations are the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (325/381) and the Athanasian Creed (probably late fifth century).
The problem it answers
The early Christian community inherited the monotheistic framework of Second Temple Judaism and at the same time attributed divine status to Jesus Christ and to the Holy Spirit through the practice of worship, prayer, and baptismal formulae. The theological work of the second through fifth centuries was the articulation of how these commitments could be held together: how the one God of monotheism could be three distinct subjects of religious devotion without compromising either the unity (against tritheism) or the genuine distinction (against modalism) of the divine persons.
The doctrine of the Trinity is the answer the major patristic tradition produced. The one divine essence is genuinely shared by three genuinely distinct persons; the persons are not three gods (tritheism), not three modes or appearances of one God (modalism), and not three creatures of God (Arianism). The formulation is famously paradoxical, and the patristic and medieval traditions devoted considerable intellectual energy to articulating it in ways that preserve both the genuine threeness and the genuine oneness.
The patristic formulation
The doctrine took its canonical shape through three major controversies. The Arian controversy of the fourth century, occasioned by the Alexandrian presbyter Arius's claim that the Son was a created being subordinate to the Father, produced the Nicene Creed of 325 with its assertion that the Son is homoousios (of the same essence) with the Father. The work of Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa) developed the Nicene formulation through the fourth century. The Council of Constantinople of 381 extended the formulation by addressing the divinity of the Holy Spirit, producing the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed that remains the canonical statement.
The technical apparatus the Cappadocians developed distinguishes ousia (essence, what God is) from hypostasis (person, who each of the three is). The one ousia is shared by three hypostaseis.
Augustine's De Trinitate (composed 399–419) gave the canonical Latin Western statement. Augustine emphasizes the unity of the divine essence and develops the psychological analogy in which the structure of the human mind (memory, intellect, will) reflects the trinitarian structure of God.
The scholastic formulation
Thomas Aquinas's treatment in the Summa Theologiae Ia qq.27–43 is the canonical scholastic statement. Aquinas distinguishes the divine processions (the Son's procession from the Father by intellect; the Spirit's procession from the Father and the Son by will) from the divine relations (paternity, filiation, spiration, procession) and from the divine persons.
The scholastic dispute over the filioque (the Latin Western addition to the Creed asserting that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son) divided the Latin and Greek traditions. The Eastern Orthodox tradition holds that the Spirit proceeds from the Father alone (through the Son); the Latin tradition holds that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The dispute is one of the principal doctrinal differences between the Eastern and Western churches.
Modern engagement
The doctrine of the Trinity was widely marginalized in much modern theology (Schleiermacher famously placed it at the end of The Christian Faith, 1821, as an appendix). The twentieth-century recovery began with Karl Barth's treatment in the Church Dogmatics (begun 1932) and Karl Rahner's The Trinity (1967), which restored the doctrine to a central place in contemporary Christian theology.
The analytic philosophy of religion engagement with the Trinity is substantial. Peter van Inwagen, Brian Leftow (A Trinitarian Theology, 2007 and 2012), Michael Rea, Jeffrey Brower, William Hasker (Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God, 2013), and Dale Tuggy have produced the major recent technical work.
Common confusions
The Trinity is not three gods. The doctrine is monotheistic; the three persons share one divine essence and are one God, not three gods. The persistent popular misunderstanding of Christian Trinitarianism as tritheism is a misreading.
The Trinity is not three modes of one God. Modalism (the doctrine that the three persons are modes or appearances of one divine subject) was rejected at Nicaea. The persons are genuinely distinct subjects who relate to each other.
The Son is not a creature. Arianism (the doctrine that the Son was created by the Father at a particular moment) was the central position rejected at Nicaea. The Son is eternally generated by the Father, sharing the same divine essence.
Contemporary engagement
Major recent scholarly work includes Lewis Ayres's Nicaea and Its Legacy (2004), Khaled Anatolios's Retrieving Nicaea (2011), Stephen Holmes's The Holy Trinity (2012), Brian Leftow's corpus, and the Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Emery and Levering, eds., 2011). The journal International Journal of Systematic Theology, the Modern Theology journal, and the Faith and Philosophy journal anchor continuing scholarly engagement.
Place in the wiki
The Trinity is the central doctrine of Christian theology and the focal point of seventeen centuries of philosophical-theological work on the metaphysics of God.
Further reading
- Augustine — the canonical Latin Western theologian of the Trinity
- Aquinas — the canonical scholastic theologian
- Christian Theology — the broader tradition the doctrine organizes
- John's Gospel — the principal New Testament source for trinitarian Christology
- Logos — the philosophical concept the doctrine of the Son appropriates
- God — the broader concept the Trinity specifies
Satellite of God / Christian Theology. The central Christian doctrine that the one God exists as three coequal persons.