The dogma of the Trinity: an increasingly better understood truth

Summary:

The Christian faith is strictly monotheistic: there is only one God, and there can only be one God. He who is beyond all things, the one God, is absolutely one and indivisible. This is the only rational position: we cannot conceive of any division whatsoever in the first principle, because it would imply a form of determination and splitting, and would therefore make necessary a prior "first principle" that would be the cause of this determination. This is how monotheism differs radically from polytheism: there is nothing in common between the one God of monotheism and the 'gods' of mythology.

The Hebrews believed in this one and only God. Israel's fundamental profession of faith reads: "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord [is] one" (Deuteronomy 6:4), but the Hebrew word for "one" word “one”, echad, can also be translated as "alone". Indeed, Christian bibles translate Dn 6:4 as follows: "The Lord is our God, the Lord alone". And throughout the Hebrew Bible - the Old Testament - this one God has the characteristics of a certain plurality: verbs conjugated in the plural (as in "Let us make man in our image", Genesis 1:26); Abraham is visited by three angels, but speaks to them in the singular (Genesis 18); and even the monotheistic profession of faith, literally, is at the same time marked by a ternary form; it can be translated literally: "The Lord, our God, the Lord: one." Where can these marks of plurality come from? Either the sacred authors, while seeking to defend monotheism, deliberately added hints of plurality - which does not make sense - or God gave hints of his Trinity - hints whose significance the authors themselves did not perceive. Psalm 45:7-8:"Your throne, O God, stands forever; your royal scepter is a scepter for justice.You love justice and hate wrongdoing; therefore God, your God, has anointed you." The Son is called “O God”.  Again, this clearly states that Jesus is God.

When Jesus came, he expressed with greater clarity that God is Trinity: God is the Father, the Son who is one with the Father ("My Father and I are one ", Jn 10:30; "I am in the Father, and the Father is in me ", Jn 14:11), and the Holy Spirit ("the advocate whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father" Jn 15:26). After his resurrection, Jesus sent his apostles to baptise "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit " (Mt 28:19). And further: John 1:1 "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Two God beings are described here, one called the Word (Jesus).

This is the dogma of the Trinity.

From the outset, this dogma was contested. Stephen was stoned to death because he saw "the Son [...] at the right hand of God" (Acts 7:56). Soon arose Christian heretics called Modalists (who claimed that the Father, the Son and the Spirit were merely different ways of manifesting the one divine person), Arians (who claimed that the Son was not God per se, but a quasi-divine creature, created before the foundation of the world), and so on. At that time, the dogma of the Trinity had not yet received a very precise definition from the Church: it was actually when confronted with new heresies that the Church was led to specify what it believed. But why did she define the Trinity rigorously - three strictly equal divine persons together being the one God - instead of opting for a compromise formula, which would have brought peace between the rival factions and facilitated conversions or the return of heretics to the Church? Why did the Church defend a position that went against her own interests? The only credible explanation is that, from the outset, the faith taught by Jesus Christ and handed down by his apostles was a strictly Trinitarian faith. Where could this Trinitarian faith have come from, if not from Christ's teaching? Could the apostles have invented a dogma that would lead to persecution?

At the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Trinitarian dogma was rejected in favour of the Arian heresy by the majority of the barbarian kings who were beginning to dominate the Western Roman Empire. The historian Michel Rouche, in his book Clovis (Fayard, 1996), explains the political stakes behind the dogmatic question: political power, he points out, is in imitation of divine power; if God is a communion of three persons, political power should preferably be exercised as a communion of many, whereas if God is monolithic, royal power could be absolute and totalitarian. By firmly defending the Trinitarian faith, the Church was implicitely critical of the power of kings (particularly the Goths), and was therefore provoking a great deal of opposition; and, within herself, she was preventing the emergence of an absolute central power. At the time, the Church seemed to be working against her own interests. Today, we have become familiar with the danger of totalitarian regimes, and we can see that the Trinitarian dogma makes much sense from a moral perspective.

Finally, in the thirteenth century, one of the greatest theologians of all time, St Thomas Aquinas, showed that the description of God as Trinity was in fact the most rational way to account for the creation of the world. In the first part of the Summa Theologica, Aquinas compares God to an architect: Just as an architect, in order to build a house, must necessarily have within himself a certain intelligence of his art, which proceeds from him and is inseparable from him (the intelligence of the architect is not the architect himself, but it is one with him and inseparable from him), so "God who is the first principle of things", that is to say the Creator of the universe, and who "is to created things what the architect is to his works", must have in himself an intelligence which proceeds from him" as an intimate term, without diversity, by intellectual mode", which is the way in which Latin theology describes the eternal relationship of the Son to the Father (I^a, q.27, art. 1, ad 3um). And just as the Son is the intelligence of the Father (we say, in theological terms, his "logos", or his "verb"), so the will (the love) of the Father and the Son is the Holy Spirit.

Thus, thirteen centuries later, the dogma of the Trinity, to which the Church has remained unalterably faithful, can be partially - if not totally, for the essence of God remains a mystery beyond the capacity of our reason - explained, in a convincing way.

Beyond reasons to believe:

Because God is already in a relationship with himself, he can also enter into a relationship with his creatures: this is why the dogma of the Trinity is the foundation of the Christian experience of prayer. Christian prayer is neither a purely formal submission to a distant God, nor the dissolution of our individuality into a cosmic "whole", but a person-to-person relationship with God. In this sense, the dogma of the Trinity can be experienced, even before being understood intellectually: it is a practical truth, not just a theoretical one.

Going further:

Video The Trinity Explained in under 3 minutes

More information:

• Video "How Augustine Proved the Trinity"
• Video "How to Properly Understand the Trinity"

• The Trinity: An Introduction to Catholic Doctrine on the Triune God (Thomistic Ressourcement) by Gilles Emery (Author), Matthew Levering (Translator), The Catholic University of America Press (June 7, 2011)