The Trinity revisited

Okay, let's have some good, polite discussion on this topic.

 

So is is accurate to say the from the first generation of Christians the doctrine of the trinity was well established and accepted? Or did it require refining and defining?

 

At the baptism of Yshua (Matthew 3:13-17; Mark 1: 9-13; Luke 3: 21-22): (1) YHWH (G-d the Father) says, "This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased"; (2) Yshua (G-d the Son) is there in human form; and (3) a dove (G-d the Holy Spirit) alights upon Yshua. So all the elements of the Trinity are there. How long it took for learned doctors of theology to write lengthy disquisitions upon trinitarianism I know not.

 

When one reads the early Church Fathers, the answer is yes.

Jesus' own disciples acknowledged Him as God and Thomas directly called Him God.

The word Trinity was first used by Tertullian so the early Christians didn't get bogged down in such verbage or in the semantics of such.

 

At first, of course, even His closest compatriots had no earthly clue. And before the church had developed into an institution, I'm not sure the early church had a concept of Trinity per se, but they knew full well that Jesus had claimed to be G-d. He usually did it in creative, indirect ways, likely because He knew that making such direct claims too often would hasten His demise before He had a chance to fulfill all that He was sent to do, but He also, on occasion, did it in a quite explicit manner, leaving no doubt as to who He thought He was (and the religious leaders always either attempted to kill Him for it or conspired to kill Him when He did).

Since He did ample things to support this claim (e.g.: raising Himself from the dead, a fair-to-midland feat), they came to believe that He was quite right in this exalted (and warranted, I think) opinion of Himself. The first chapter of the Gospel of John (Jesus' closest friend on earth, by the way) leaves no doubt as to the status of Jesus in the early church as not only the Son of G-d, but G-d Himself.

The New Testament Scriptures also state that G-d is spirit and must be worshiped in spirit. So there you have all elements of the trinity, in addition to Ted's discussion of Jesus' baptism.

 

The early church fathers wrote much about the Trinity even before Tertullian wrote about the doctrine in 212

Theophilus wrote in 180AD, "In like manner also the three days which were before the luminaries, are types of the Trinity, of God, His Word, and His Wisdom." --- This was the earliest use of the word "trinity"

Hippolytus wrote in 187AD, "And by this [speaking of Mt 28:19] He showed that whosoever omitted any one of these, failed in glorifying God perfectly. For it is through this Trinity that the Father is glorified."

There are other examples where the word "trinity" is not used, but established the concept very early. Clement of Rome wrote in 96AD, "Do we not have one God and one Christ? Is there not one Spirit of grace poured out upon us?"

Irenaeus wrote in 180AD, "There is therefore on God, who by His Word and Wisdom created and arranged all things."

Clement of Alexandria wrote in 195AD, "Thank the one only Father and Son, Son and Father. The Son is the instructor and Teacher, along with the Holy Spirit. They are all in ONe, in whom is all, for whom all is One, for whom is eternity."

I for one believe the concept was clearly established even before these guys began to write. Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian -- they all wrote in a manner that seem to suggest that the idea [if not the doctrine] was already clearly established.

 

And of course, there are some tantalizing clues in the Hebrew Scriptures as well. Dr. Osborne, do you know what I'm referring to?

 

True, but I said the first to use the "word" Trinity.

 

little fauss,

"Sh'ma israel adonai elohenu adonai ECHAD".

Trinitarianism is absolutely NOT a Jewish concept.

 

Jimmy,
I believe (as noted in my previous post) that Theophilus was the first to use the term (in reference to a triune God) and he used it 30 years before Tertullian's writings.

 

Hi Michael,

It's not that big of a deal but the word Trinity is derived from the Greek word trias, first used by Theophilus or from the Latin trinitas, first used by Tertullian.

 

It seems to me that while it is evident that some sort of concept of the Trinity existed in the earlier church, it is not at all evident that different writers understood this concept in the same way.

By the third century, there is a healthy defense of this concept being generated in the face of determined Greek intellectual opponents (e.g., Celsus). This led to attempts by certain Christian intellectuals to define this concept more clearly. What is the specific relationship? How can you have three distinct entities but only one God? Some expositors favored a subordinationist line (Origen and later Arius). Others opposed this. The issue, at least in West, is not effectively settled until the dissemination of Augustine's massive De trinitate in the 5th century.

Sometimes, I think it is all too tempting for us to read back into single quotations of authors concepts or understandings which they may not have possessed.

Duo denarii mei

marilynd

 

My own opinion would probably be 'no' to the first and 'yes' to the second.

The first generation of Christians were Jews, or in the case of Paul's churches, sometimes gentiles who had been hanging around diaspora synagogues hearing sermons, studying the scriptures, but reluctant to go that last step and get circumcized. The gospels and letters seem to have been written to people that would recognize all of the countless and often subtle references to the Hebrew scriptures without there being any need to explain them. So I think that it's safe to say that the great majority of these first Christians were very deep in the Jewish thought-world.

So I think that it probably makes most historical sense to interpret the new testament texts in terms of how Jews of the first century would have understood them, rather than in the light of how the more orthodox of the 4'th and 5'th century Christian church councils ultimately did. That means going back and looking at how ideas like 'son of God', 'the word of God', 'the spirit of God' and so on were used by Jews in the intertestamental period.

My own layman's impression is that it was all rather unsystematic and inchaoate. Obviously the first Christians thought that God was acting through Jesus somehow, that Jesus' acts were in some sense God's acts, that it was all part of the promised last days when the gentiles would finally acknowledge the Hebrew God and turn their faces towards Jerusalem (hence Paul taking his liberties with the law), and that Jesus was the promised messiah who was doing something very unexpected.

But I think that it took a while for the gradually institutionalizing church's intellectuals to clean up that mix and turn it into a smooth theological doctrine about the nature of the Godhead itself. (Not without loud internal disputes among themselves.) And by the time that process was completed, the finished product was rather remote from anything that a Jew of Jesus' time would have recognized.

 

Reverend friends (and little fauss, too)

Thank you for your posts here. I am drawing some tentative conclusions but would be grateful for any corrections:

-The doctrine of the divinity of Jesus is apparently as old as Christianity and was known and accepted byt the first generation of Christians.

-The exact nature of Jesus' divinity and humanity remained a subject for vigorous debate for about three centuries.

-The doctrine of the third member of the triune God was much less well defined until some time after the First Century C.E.

Now, has anyone researched the roots of the doctrine itself? I realize that this is a risky enterprise because the "correct" answer must be that the doctrine comes from the Bible but Jewish history, at any rate, is FULL of borrowings from pre existing religious, legal, and cultural beliefs and practices. (i.e. the passover)

So does anyone know whether there were religions in the ancient near east that had multifacted godheads?

 

I'm not entirely convinced of that one.

The first Christians apparently identified Jesus as the promised Messiah. But what did the Jews of the period really expect their Messiah to be? Yahweh himself, walking around in human flesh? Or did they expect the Messiah to be some kind of divine instrument in human form? If so, what kind of instrument? A human being of proper Davidic lineage chosen for the role? God's own powers and energies personified? An archtypical man untainted by the fall?

I think that if you can untangle the knot of first century Jewish messianic expectations, then you probably will have insight into what the first Christians were thinking, because they embodied those expectations.

My own impression is that it was still kind of unsystematic, that the first Christians might not have been any more clear than the rest of the Jews what their precise philosophical theology was on the Messiah. The New Testament seems to me to contain hints of several different conceptions.

 

The chief influence on the earlier Trinitarian apologies, and later intra-Christian debates, seems to have been the emanationist philosophizing of the Middle Platonists; chiefly, Plutarch of Chaeronea and Numenius of Apamea. Plotinus' emanationism, of course, exercised profound influence on the later debates. Alexandria seems to be the epicenter of the early Trinitarian apologies; chiefly Clement and Origen. There is still disagreement in the scholarship about whether Origen studied along side of or under Plotinus, or was simply infuenced by the same writers that influenced Plotinus. Nevertheless, there's hardly any doubt that the religious dimensions of Middle Platonism, particularly emanationist thinking in this case, had a profound influence on the Christian thinkers of the 2nd and 3rd centuries, as it did on non-Christians, such as Philo and the Alexandrian gnostics.

If we're talking about earliest concept of the triune God in Christianity, I think that Bill is right: these ideas are quite inchoate. They seem to rise out of attempts to explain who and what Jesus was, and I don't see much evidence of modeling. Of course, the multi-faced Janus is well known in the Mediterranean by this point. Certainly, the idea of a God with many faces, so to speak, would not have been an alien or unimaginable concept.

marilynd

 

BillDayson,

That one at least I can give some half-assed answer to.

The Jews did not then, nor do we now, expect any sort of divine messiah. Messiah or moshiach, merely means "one who is annointed of God". King Saul was a moshiach. King David was, too. That, I suspect, is the reason the Christians included the scene of Jesus being annointed with oil in the Christian bible.

There is but one God without shape, division, form, or physical attribute. This is the absolute bedrock belief of Judaism. It is also just about the limit of what passes for Jewish theology.

Establishing this doctrine is thought by some Jewish history scholars to be the most important achievement of the entire prophetic period. It had to be so; any other sort of God would simply have become yet another of the pantheon of pagan dieties.

Indeed, our view of the aloneness of God itself developed AFTER the Exodus and the Giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai; "you will have no strange gods before me" not "there are no other gods". Adonai began as a tribal diety and grew to his present stature over thousands of years.

I admit that I don't see how the early Christian church could really have included very many Jews. The Christian idea of a human/devine person is utterly foreign to Jewish thought, then and now. But I understand that the idea DID exist in the ancient world among various other religious communitites.

It is to confirm or deny THAT impression that I ask my question here. I realize that it is dynamite but everyone here seems willing to help me understand for which I am most grateful.

 

I seem to remember that Martin Hengel wrote on the different meanings that phrases such as "son of God" and "son of Man" could have in Hebrew/Aramaic on the one hand and Greek on the other.

marilynd

 

marylind,

So are you suggesting that the idea of a triune god originated in one or another of the pagan religions and/or is a consequence of Platonic reasoning?

 

"Hear o, Israel, the L-rd our G-d, the L-rd is One." (and I didn't google that). You're right about the Sh'ma--in fact, we sing it on Shabbat. We believe it 100%.

I didn't call trinitarianism a full-blown concept pre-Jesus, it was as yet a mystery. But do you know that to which I refer? There are a few tantalizing clues, right there in the Hebrew Scriptures.