Trinity
The Trinity is a Christian doctrine concerning the nature of God, which defines one God existing in three, consubstantial divine persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons sharing one essence/substance/nature.
As the Fourth Lateran Council declared, it is the Father who s, the Son who is, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds. In this context, one essence/nature defines God is, while the three persons define God is. This expresses at once their distinction and their indissoluble unity. Thus, the entire process of creation and grace is viewed as a single shared action of the three divine persons, in which each person manifests the attributes unique to them in the Trinity, thereby proving that everything comes "from the Father", "through the Son", and "in the Holy Spirit".
This doctrine is called Trinitarianism, and its adherents are called Trinitarians, while its opponents are called antitrinitarians or nontrinitarians and are considered non-Christian by many mainline groups. Nontrinitarian positions include Unitarianism, binitarianism and modalism. The theological study of the Trinity is called "triadology" or "Trinitarian theology".
While the developed doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in the books that constitute the New Testament, it is implicit in John, and the New Testament possesses a triadic understanding of God and contains a number of Trinitarian formulas. The doctrine of the Trinity was first formulated among the early Christians and fathers of the Church as they attempted to understand the relationship between Jesus and God in their scriptural documents and prior traditions.
Old Testament
The Old Testament has been interpreted as referring to the Trinity in many places. For example, in the Genesis creation narrative, the first-person plural pronouns in Genesis 1:26–27 and Genesis 3:22 have been used to argue for a Trinitarian understanding of God:A traditional Christian interpretation of these pronouns is that they refer to a plurality of persons within the Godhead. Biblical commentator Victor P. Hamilton outlines several interpretations, including the most widely held among Biblical scholars, which is that the pronouns do not refer to other persons within the Godhead but to the 'heavenly court' of Isaiah 6. Theologians Meredith Kline and Gerhard von Rad argue for this view; as von Rad says, 'The extraordinary plural is to prevent one from referring God's image too directly to God the Lord. God includes himself among the heavenly beings of his court and thereby conceals himself in this majority.' Hamilton notes that this interpretation assumes that Genesis 1 is at variance with Isaiah 40:13–14, Who has measured the Spirit of the Lord, or what man shows him his counsel? Whom did he consult, and who made him understand? Who taught him the path of justice, and taught him knowledge, and showed him the way of understanding? That is, if the plural pronouns of Genesis 1 teach that God consults and creates with a 'heavenly court', then it contradicts the statement in Isaiah that God seeks the counsel of nobody. According to Hamilton, the best interpretation 'approaches the Trinitarian understanding but employs less direct terminology'. Following D. J. A. Clines, he states that the plural reveals a 'duality within the Godhead' that recalls the 'Spirit of God' mentioned in verse 2, And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Hamilton also says that it is unreasonable to assume that the author of Genesis was too theologically primitive to deal with such a concept as 'plurality within unity'; Hamilton thus argues for a framework of progressive revelation, in which the doctrine of the Trinity is revealed at first obscurely then plainly in the New Testament.
Another of these places is Isaiah 9, where, if interpreted to be about the Messiah, the Messiah is called "Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace". Some Christians see this verse as meaning the Messiah will represent the Trinity on earth. This is because Counselor is a title for the Holy Spirit, the Trinity is God, Father is a title for God the Father, and Prince of Peace is a title for Jesus. This verse is also used to support the Deity of Christ.
The Deity of Christ can also be inferred from certain passages in the Book of Daniel:
This is because both the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man have an everlasting dominion, which is ascribed to God in Psalm 145:13.
People also see the Trinity when the Old Testament refers to God's word, His Spirit, and Wisdom, as well as narratives such as the appearance of the three men to Abraham. However, it is generally agreed among Trinitarian Christian scholars that it would go beyond the intention and spirit of the Old Testament to correlate these notions directly with later Trinitarian doctrine.
Some Church Fathers believed that a knowledge of the mystery was granted to the prophets and saints of the Old Testament and that they identified the divine messenger of Genesis 16:7, Genesis 21:17, Genesis 31:11, Exodus 3:2, and Wisdom of the sapiential books with the Son, and "the spirit of the Lord" with the Holy Spirit.
Other Church Fathers, such as Gregory Nazianzen, argued in his Orations that the revelation was gradual, claiming that the Father was proclaimed in the Old Testament openly, but the Son only obscurely, because "it was not safe, when the Godhead of the Father was not yet acknowledged, plainly to proclaim the Son".
Genesis 18–19 has been interpreted by Christians as a Trinitarian text. The narrative has the Lord appearing to Abraham, who was visited by three men. In Genesis 19, "the two angels" visited Lot at Sodom. The interplay between Abraham on the one hand and the Lord/three men/the two angels on the other was an intriguing text for those who believed in a single God in three persons. Justin Martyr and John Calvin similarly interpreted it as such that Abraham was visited by God, who was accompanied by two angels. Justin supposed that the God who visited Abraham was distinguishable from the God who remains in the heavens but was nevertheless identified as the God. Justin interpreted the God who visited Abraham as Jesus, the second person of the Trinity.
Augustine, in contrast, held that the three visitors to Abraham were the three persons of the Trinity. He saw no indication that the visitors were unequal, as would be the case in Justin's reading. Then, in Genesis 19, two of the visitors were addressed by Lot in the singular: "Lot said to them, 'Not so, my lord. Augustine saw that Lot could address them as one because they had a single substance despite the plurality of persons.
Christians interpret the theophanies, or appearances of the Angel of the Lord, as revelations of a person distinct from God, who is nonetheless called God. This interpretation is found in Christianity as early as Justin Martyr and Melito of Sardis and reflects ideas that were already present in Philo. The Old Testament theophanies were thus seen as Christophanies, each a "preincarnate appearance of the Messiah".
New Testament
According to Januariy and Fee, while the developed doctrine of the Trinity is not explicit in the books that constitute the New Testament, the New Testament contains several Trinitarian formulas, including Matthew 28:19, 2 Corinthians 13:14, Ephesians 4:4–6, 1 Peter 1:2, and Revelation 1:4–6. James Barker argues that important aspects of Trinitarianism are present in the New Testament, with an economic Trinity being present in the Gospel of John. Reflection by early Christians on passages such as the Great Commission: "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" and Paul the Apostle's blessing: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all", lead to attempts to articulate the relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.Eventually, the diverse references to God, Jesus, and the Spirit found in the New Testament were brought together to form the concept of the Trinity—one Godhead subsisting in three persons and one substance. The concept of the Trinity was used to oppose alternative views of how the three are related and to defend the church against charges of worshiping two or three gods.
1 John 5:7
Modern Biblical scholarship largely agrees that 1 John 5:7, which was seen in Latin and Greek texts after the 4th century and found in later translations such as the King James Translation due to its inclusion in the Textus Receptus, cannot be found in the oldest Greek and Latin texts. Verse 7 is known as the Johannine Comma, which most scholars agree to be a later addition by a later copyist or what is termed a textual gloss and not part of the original text. This verse reads:This verse is absent from the Ethiopic, Aramaic, Syriac, early Slavic, early Armenian, Georgian, and Arabic translations of the Greek New Testament. It is primarily found in Latin manuscripts, although a minority of Greek, late Slavonic, and late Armenian manuscripts contain it.
Perhaps the earliest mention of the Johannine Comma comes from the writings of Cyprian of Carthage, although this may have been an allegorical interpretation of the undisputed part of the verse. Nevertheless, the comma was often used in many later Latin-speaking authors such as Priscillian, Contra Varimadum, Donation of Constantine, Peter Lombard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, alongside having found its way into the earliest printed editions of the New Testament such as the Complutensian Polyglot and the Textus Receptus in the 16th century, causing the comma to become a part of most Reformation-era vernacular translations.
Jesus in the New Testament
In the Pauline epistles, the public, collective devotional patterns towards Jesus in the early Christian community are reflective of Paul's perspective on the divine status of Jesus in what scholars have termed a "binitarian" pattern or shape of devotional practice in the New Testament, in which "God" and Jesus are thematized and invoked. Jesus receives prayer, the presence of Jesus is confessionally invoked by believers, people are baptized in Jesus' name, Jesus is the reference in Christian fellowship for a religious ritual meal. Jesus is described as "existing in the very form of God", and having the "fullness of the Deity in bodily form". Jesus is also in some verses directly called God.The Gospels depict Jesus as human through most of their narrative, but "ne eventually discovers that he is a divine being manifest in flesh, and the point of the texts is in part to make his higher nature known in a kind of intellectual epiphany". In the Gospels, Jesus is described as forgiving sins, leading some theologians to believe Jesus is portrayed as God. This is because Jesus forgives sins on behalf of others; people normally only forgive transgressions against themselves. The teachers of the law next to Jesus recognized this and said:
Jesus also receives προσκύνησις in the aftermath of the resurrection, a Greek term that either expresses the contemporary social gesture of bowing to a superior, either on one's knees or in full prostration. The term can also refer to the religious act of devotion towards a deity. While Jesus receives proskynesis a number of times in the synoptic Gospels, only a few can be said to refer to divine worship.
This includes Matthew 28:16–20, an account of the resurrected Jesus receiving worship from his disciples after proclaiming his authority over the cosmos and his ever-continuing presence with the disciples. Whereas some have argued that Matthew 28:19 was an interpolation on account of its absence from the first few centuries of early Christian quotations, scholars largely accept the passage as authentic due to its supporting manuscript evidence and that it does appear to be either quoted in the Didache or at least reflected in the Didache as part of a common tradition from which both Matthew and the Didache emerged. Jesus receiving divine worship in the post-resurrection accounts is further mirrored in Luke 24:52.
In Acts, it is common for individual Christians to "call" upon the name of Jesus, an idea precedented in the Old Testament descriptions of calling on the name of YHWH as a form of prayer. The story of Stephen depicts Stephen invoking and crying out to Jesus in the final moments of his life to receive his spirit. Acts further describes a common ritual practice of inducting new members into the early Jesus sect by baptizing them in Jesus' name. According to Dale Allison, Acts depicts the appearances of Jesus to Paul as a divine theophany, styled on and identified with the God responsible for the theophany of Ezekiel in the Old Testament.
The Gospel of John has been seen as especially aimed at emphasizing Jesus' divinity, presenting Jesus as the Logos, pre-existent and divine, from its first words: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God". The Gospel of John ends with Thomas's declaration that he believed Jesus was God, "My Lord and my God!". Modern scholars agree that John 1:1 and John 20:28 identify Jesus with God. However, in a 1973 Journal of Biblical Literature article, Philip B. Harner, Professor Emeritus of Religion at Heidelberg College, claimed that the traditional translation of John 1:1c is incorrect. He endorses the New English Bible translation of John 1:1c, "and what God was, the Word was". However, other scholars have criticized Harner's claim. In the same article, Harner also noted that, "Perhaps the clause could be translated, 'the Word had the same nature as God'. This would be one way of representing John's thought, which is, as I understand it, that logos, no less than theos, had the nature of theos", which in his case means the Word is as fully God as the person called "God". John also portrays Jesus as the agent of creation of the universe.