This idea was borne out of mysterious passages in the Tanakh i. Why is any of this important? Because to deny any part of the Trinity is to deny a part of Holy Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity is a foundational teaching of the Bible that has long been held as a litmus test for heresy. Scripture teaches five truths that we must hold in tension. Consider the following small sampling of scriptural data that supports each of these five facts, which are all true at the same time:.
It may be hard for our finite minds to grasp what this means fully, but the amount of scriptural data that supports each of the five statements above is overwhelming. First, there are many passages in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit stand alongside one another and share divine status. In this passage, Yeshua asserts three distinct, divine entities: 1. The Son tells us that 2. As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water.
At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. Again, we see three distinct persons; the Father speaking from heaven, the Son being baptized on earth, and the Holy Spirit descending from the Father to the Son.
And at the same time, we know that God is one. Without the concept of the Trinity, this passage becomes nonsensical. When it comes to the Trinity, there is something more stirring than the mystery of how. It is the majesty of the why. Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias notes:. There is unity and diversity in the community of the Trinity; there is both majesty and mystery. If God ever says He loves, who was He loving before creation?
If God says He speaks, who was He speaking to before creation? Both communication and love are contained in the Godhead right from the beginning. In every other belief system, life precedes love. They were certainly wrong about some things and did not agree on everything, just like church people still can't agree on everything. However, since after centuries of debate, this is what almost everyone agreed on, which probably means that they got what the Bible was trying to say.
I think the trinity is sort of like the glue that holds the Bible together. It's the only way to make sense of everything the Bible has to say about God. If you take the trinity away, how do you make sense of the claim that there is one God, but that Jesus is also God, and that the Spirit is mentioned right alongside the Father and the Son?
This isn't the place to dive into all of the details, but the Bible turns into a bit of a mess without the trinity to make sense of everything it says about God and Jesus. Besides making sense of the Bible, the Trinity also makes sense of the gospel. The trinity allows us to say that the baby who was born to Mary in Bethlehem was actually God Himself in the flesh.
Jesus was not a powerful angel or demigod or any other created thing sent to do God's bidding. If that were the case, the cross would be nothing more than a horrible act of abuse towards one of God's creatures. If, however, Jesus was God in the flesh, then we don't have an abuse victim, but rather a willing sacrifice.
The Holy Spirit gives you the strength to want to pray. When you fail to pray with this understanding, God still hears; but when you understand the Trinity while you pray, you have a greater sense of confidence and hope that God will answer. In the same way, we worship the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit specifically for what they do and who they are. As you worship each person, understanding his work of salvation, your mind will stretch and your heart will rejoice.
The Trinity adds depth to our worship. We worship a God who is beyond us, above us, and within us. The Trinity is beyond our ability to understand.
God is big. God is able. This different meaning may have contributed in a small way to the dispute. Latin theologians taught that the Spirit comes from both the Father and the Son, but comes from each of them in significantly different ways. These differences do not diminish the Father's role as the only cause of everything that exists. The arguments in the dispute are highly technical, and seem pretty dull to anyone except a theologian - but they stirred hugely passionate debates in the church because they were about something that mattered terribly: the nature of God.
To get a flavour of the passion the debate aroused, look at this comment from a 9th century Patriarch:. But when the Counsellor comes, whom I shall send to you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness to me. Jesus said to them again, "Peace be unto you.
As the Father has sent me, even so send I you. In December Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople revoked the excommunications of and called for an active pursuit of mutual understanding. Appropriation and Perichoresis are two ideas that are important in reconciling God's one-ness with the three-ness of God in human experience. Appropriation teaches that all three persons of the Trinity do everything God does, but that it is appropriate to see some actions as being particularly associated with one specific person of the Trinity.
So the Father is associated with creation and the Son with redemption, but all three persons are actually involved with these actions. This is the idea that each of the persons of the Trinity shares completely in the life of the other two. Theologians say that each of the persons of the Trinity "interpenetrates" the others, so that the distinctions between the persons are preserved and the substance of God is not divided into three.
The theologian Leonardo Boff described perichoresis as "the intimate and perfect inhabitation of one Person in the other," meaning that the three persons of the Trinity live in and relate to each other perfectly. Many modern writers prefer to use the word indwelling to express the idea of perichoresis. They say there is a mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity. All facets of divine activity are reflected in all three persons of the Trinity.
They are dynamically intermingled. They may not be separated. The traditional statement of the doctrine of the Trinity is this: There are three persons within the Godhead; Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
These three persons have equal status and are equally divine. But the word person in this definition doesn't mean person in any sense that modern people understand it - it's an ancient technical philosophical term, which originally meant the mask worn by actors playing parts in an ancient Greek play. The Greek word was hypostases the singular term is hypostasis.
The ancient writers said that there were three distinct hypostases in one ousia ousia is the word now translated as substance - see below.
There's a hint here of a very important concept in the idea of the Trinity. Actors playing a part in a play do so in relationship to other members of the cast, and a key element of the doctrine of the Trinity is that the three persons of the Trinity are in relationship with one another. But "person" to modern people means, at the very least, a separate centre of consciousness, and more usually, an individual human being.
That is not what it means in the definition of the Trinity. The idea that the three persons of the Trinity are separate individuals is the heresy of tritheism. Unfortunately, modern theological translations of the word "persons" into phrases such as "distinct manners of subsisting" don't make things much clearer and that particular phrase, as it happens, sounds very like the heresy of modalism.
This word is used to describe the coming forth of one of the persons of the Trinity from another or from both the others. The use of this word in statements of the Trinity is a reminder that there is movement and dynamic energy in the Christian concept of God. It comes from the Greek word ousia , which means "beingness", but it has a more restricted meaning in this context than it had had to the ancient Greek philosophers who coined the word. A substance is a thing which fully exists; a presence in the universe - so for example, a dog is a substance.
Although in the case of God this is not a substance made of matter. The key concept of substance is that of unity - it's not separate from the three persons of the Trinity, it's what makes them one. Search term:. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled.
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Find out more about page archiving. The Trinity Last updated Bible and why Christians believe in the Trinity The Bible and why Christians believe in the Trinity Christianity adopted this complicated idea of God because it was the only way they could make sense of One God in the context of the events and teaching of the Bible.
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