The Christian doctrine of the Trinity (from the Latin trinitas, meaning ‘three’) is the central doctrine concerning the nature of God in the Christian faith. It defines one God existing in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial divine persons: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus Christ) and God the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons sharing one nature. In this context, one nature defines what God is, while the three persons define who God is. The entire process of creation is viewed as a single shared action of the three divine persons, in which each person reveals 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 was not established until the Council of Nicaea during the fourth century CE (Common Era).
In 312 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, and following his reunification of the Roman Empire in 324 CE, he designated Christianity to be the official religion of his empire. When a significant dispute arose within the church regarding the nature of Jesus’ relationship to God, it threatened the stability of Constantine’s recently reunited empire. So in 325 CE, he convened a meeting of the bishops of the church to resolve the issue and agree on a unified position. The outcome of the meeting (the Council of Nicaea) was the establishment of the Nicene Creed, which declared that Jesus and God were one, together with the Holy Spirit. The creed sought to describe the nature of the relationship between God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. A failure of the original creed was that it did not fully explain the role of the Holy Spirit within the Trinity. That omission was addressed at a subsequent church council in 381 CE, which was the Council of Constantinople. It is from that council that the words of the Nicene Creed as we know them came to be agreed.
Like many of the doctrines of the church, the doctrine of the Trinity has been challenged by the advances of science, particularly in the areas of astronomy and cosmology. In the fourth century CE, the belief was that Earth was the centre of the universe and that the other planets, including the sun, revolved around Earth. As we now know, this is not the case. We also now know that the observable universe is estimated to contain at least 100 billion galaxies, each of which contains billions of stars! The scale and magnitude of the universe is perhaps too immense to get our heads around, but we can clearly see how such information challenges the traditional Christian understanding of God, and the doctrines used to describe and/or explain God.
Bishop John Spong, a bishop in the Episcopalian (Anglican) Church in America, who died in 2021, once wrote, “the doctrine of the Trinity is not a description of God, rather it’s a description of the human experience of God framed in the language of 4th century, Greek-speaking Europe.” Spong was considered very controversial for his outspoken beliefs that were deemed as heresy by many within the organised church.
Much of what Bishop Spong has written resonates strongly with my own belief and understanding of God. A further example, which relates to the doctrine of the Trinity is this: “We experience God as the source of life beyond any limit that the human imagination can impose on anything, and we call that God the Father. We experience God as the ultimate depth of life, deeper than our own breath and we call that dimension of life Spirit. We experience God coming to us through the lives of others, and, for those of us who are Christians, coming to us uniquely through the life of one called Jesus of Nazareth, and we name him Son, offspring of the the Father. Have we in this manner defined God? No, of course not. We have defined only what we believe is our experience of God.”
As I continue to grapple with my own understanding of God, I find this quote “we have defined only what we believe is our experience of God” to be very helpful. For I believe that our journey of faith is ultimately shaped by our ongoing experiences of God and what we come to learn and understand of God from those experiences.
