Although a full explanation of the nature of the Trinity is not given in the New Testament, it does contain what some call “Trinitarian formulas,” where the Father, the Spirit, and Jesus are all mentioned together, as if they were all God. For example, there is one such listing found in Matthew’s great commission (28:19), where they are given the names by which they are to baptize. Another is found in Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (13:14). Also see Ephesians 4:4-6 and 1 Peter 1:2. There are many other references to these three individuals by themselves, or two are mentioned together.
The New Testament often says many different things about these three individuals. We’ve already noted many about Jesus. Regarding the Spirit of God, the Hebrew Bible seems to present it as simply God’s presence; only in the New Testament are they listed out separately, as if they were somehow different entities. However, some New Testament passages still seem to speak of God and the Spirit interchangeably, such as Acts 5:3-4.
Sometimes the New Testament says things that you might not expect it to say if its authors believed that the Trinity was a necessary explanation of the godhead. For instance, in 1 Corinthians 8:4-6, Paul contrasts idolatry with the one true God, emphasis on “one.” He says that that one true God is the Father; it is “from” the Father that all things, including us, exist. Then he adds in a curiously unexplained parallel addition that there is only one Lord, Jesus Christ, “through” whom are all things exist, including us. Not only does he leave this unexplained, but he does not even mention the Spirit in this expansion on the oneness of God, though he does mention God’s spirit elsewhere.
Since the New Testament writers did not provide any systematic theology regarding the nature of these three individuals, and since some doctrines regarding the nature of God were so crucial to being among the elect, some of the largest debates for the next few centuries would be about this very topic. And I think it is instructive to see how beliefs about the nature of God evolved over time, and how “consensus” was finally forced, although there would still be “heretics” who did not accept the Trinity.
For the purposes of this section, I will simply refer to the Trinity by that name, or as the godhead. By doing so, I am neither arguing for or against any understanding of it. I am simply exploring the way influential individuals understood it in the first few centuries of Christianity.
References to the three persons of the godhead occur among the earliest so-called church fathers. But the earliest ones are no more explanatory than the New Testament itself; in fact, they often seem to be merely alluding to biblical passages. Toward the end of the first century, Clement of Rome asks “Do we not have one God, and one Christ, and one gracious Spirit that has been poured out upon us, and one calling in Christ?”[1] This sounds a lot like Ephesians 4. Around the same time as Clement, or in the early second century, The Didache (aka, the Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles), says that Christians should “baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” just as Jesus says in Matthew 28. Ignatius of Antioch mentions the three names of the godhead around 110 CE.[2] Some see the Ascension of Isaiah (c. 2nd century) as containing trinitarian doctrine when it extols the “primal Father and his beloved Christ, and the Holy Spirit.”[3] However, none of these attempt explanations for how they can somehow be one, or what their nature even is: this is merely detail already found in the Bible.
Justin Martyr, around the mid second century, begins to give us at least a hint of the explanations that eventually become established orthodoxy at the council of Nicaea in the fourth century. He was influential in Rome, where he set up a philosophical school, but was killed in 165 for refusing to submit to Roman requirements for worship of their gods and emperor. Justin saw the Son as distinct from but part of the Father, just as a flame derives from an ignition source, but is still part of the same fire.[4] He saw the Son as deserving of worship, as in “second” place, and the Spirit third.[5] But he also adds Angels to the end of that list. He says that the Son and the Father are the same being, yet are distinct “faces”. (Tertullian, c. 155-200 CE, also spoke of the three “hypostases”). Justin sees the Angel of the Lord in Moses’ burning bush episode and in Genesis 18 as Jesus; the great Father would never himself appear to man: it required an intermediary.[6] Justin takes John’s hypostasis of the Logos to a whole new level, adding that the Logos has been in man since creation, even calling Socrates a pre-Christian Christian.[7]
The first of the patristics to use the term “Trinity” was Theophilus from Antioch, in the late 2nd century. He defines it as God, the Logos (Jesus), and Wisdom, which he associates with the Spirit, a common association among early Christians.[8] Notice that he is using two hypostases. However, the full explanation of the Trinity as we now have it did not appear until over a century later.
One of the earliest popular views of the godhead was modalism, which held that the members of the godhead were not distinct entities; rather, they were of one essence. Passages used to argue for this view include Isaiah 44:6, where God said he is Israel’s king and redeemer, the first and the last. If this is about Jesus, as the author of Revelation 1 indicates, then how could it not also be about God the Father as the same individual? Romans 9:5 says that Christ is God over all, and was also used to argue for modalism; it’s interesting though that this passage was not interpreted in light of Paul’s other writings that suggest that Jesus was subordinate to the Father. Modalism was the accepted view of the bishops of Rome in the first half of the third century.[9] Hippolytus and Tertullian[10] argued against it; their alternative view was a sort of “divine economy”[11]. Hippolytus spoke of the divine “triad.”[12] The members of the godhead were thus “susceptible of number without division.” But this is still not what the Trinity would become, because they still believed that they were distinct entities, both in their hierarchy and in the fact that Jesus was begotten by the Father.[13] This would later be declared heresy. In fact, Tertullian tells us that his views on the matter were not well received in his own day.[14]
The very influential Origen of Alexandria (c. 185-253) also believed that all three members of the godhead where divine, but they were not so equally. This view is sometimes called subordinationist, though Origen’s views on the matter are debated.[15] He would become the founder of the Christian School of Caesarea, and would be very influential in the shaping of Christian thought in the East, as we will see further hints of below.
Novatian in the mid third century was the leader of the Roman church, and became head of a schism that occurred at that time. His views of the godhead were widely accepted in his day. He followed Paul, seeing Christ as subordinate to the Father. Novatian believed that Christ is completely God but not the same entity. He argued against opposing views of his time which would eventually be (mostly) stamped our as heresies, such as modalism, and the exaltation view of adoptionism, which held that Jesus became God. The irony was that both these views that failed to become orthodoxy were also attempts to understand and to accept Christ while still respecting the Bible’s strict monotheism. More on this logical quandary below.
Around 260 CE, we have a letter written by the bishop of Rome, Dionysius, who wrote a letter to the bishop of Alexandria, who also had the same name. Note that both of these places, along with Caesaria, were major centers of intellectual thought. Dionysius of Alexandria had gone too far in opposing modalism, claiming that there were three Gods. So Dionysius, bishop of Rome, corrected him, saying that though Jesus and the Father formed a unity, they were still separate beings. Like Hippolytus, he used the term “triad.” Interestingly, he also maintained that Jesus could not have been begotten by the Father.
The Council of Nicaea
Heresies came and went, and, as throughout all history, each new generation had at least some new debate, debates which in other generations were often not an issue at all. By the time of the first council of Nicaea in 325, the big heresy of the day was Arianism, which taught that the Father was eternal, but not the son, who was exalted to divinity. But far from nailing down consensus, the initial Nicene Creed did not fully stamp out Arianism or any other opposed views of the Trinity. It didn’t even give us the Trinity that we now have. In fact, when it used the term homoousios (of one substance) which would become the standard of orthodoxy (mostly) going forward, it did not even establish this connection with the Spirit. The lack of consensus and continued debates were the impetus for so many subsequent councils.
Nor were the opposing views of the debates of their day, as is often the case, all that different. For example, Arians still accepted the divinity of Christ and that he should be worshipped.
The Nicene Creed itself was not even static, though it is often taught as the first creedal consensus even till today; it too would be revised. Apart from later development of the Trinity, one of the most glaring differences in the original creed were the curses of those who rejected it, in an echo of Deuteronomy 27:11-27; these curses would later be removed.
Nor was the Council of Nicaea some sort of organic, Christian attempt to spread an existing, settled orthodoxy. In fact, it was precipitated by a Roman Emperor who wanted to use the unifying force of Christianity to strengthen the empire. But this was not possible as long as core Christian doctrines themselves were not unified. Though Constantine was not as concerned with which doctrines they settled on as much as consensus itself,[16] one of the men Constantine backed, the influential and learned Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, did in fact have views about what orthodoxy was, though he was one of the more moderate men present: one of his drafts was rejected as failing to deny Arianism sufficiently. Nor was the Council of Nicaea the first to debate the questions of the godhead; Constantine’s letter calling for unity had already precipitated one in Antioch (another key center of Christian thought) which produced a creedal statement, but the lack of agreement on this led to the next council at Nicaea.
Nor was the Council at Nicaea ecumenical, though it is still called the first of the seven “ecumenical” councils to this day. The vast majority of the bishops in attendance were from the East; the bishop of Rome sent legates in his stead.[17] (Even just a brief perusal of church history will show just how critical geography is to a group’s doctrines; in the case at hand, Arianism was primarily an African phenomenon, and differences between the East and West went back much further than the Great Schism of 1054.) Since it was so skewed toward non-Arian views, the council was also not a “close vote”, another misconception that is still repeated. Only about 6 percent (20) of the bishops present dissented from the council’s creed, but Constantine was able to force 17 of them to sign. The only three remaining were Arius himself and two other bishops from his home Libya. It is not logical to call something a “vote” or even “consensus” when strongarming is the method to reach it. That’s called coercion by those in power. It’s probably a hard pill to swallow for modern Christians to see the council of Nicaea not only as a lack of broad consensus on the Trinity, but also having its decision on what is perhaps one of the most core doctrines of Christianity influenced by political forces.
The further irony is that the Nicene Creed, though at least formally respected today almost universally among all stripes of Christians, was against heresies that almost completely do not exist anymore. Many Christians today do not even understand why it makes statements that it does: for instance, why does it say that God is one, or that God made Heaven and Earth? Who is disputing that? Almost no one claiming to be a Christian today thinks that there is more than one God, or even know that there were significant Christian groups in the fourth century who not only claimed that there was more than one god, but that a different god had a hand in Creation.[18]
Exponentially more ironic, I believe, is that some of the statements of the Creed are no longer believed, even among groups that still keep it formally as a core statement of faith. This may sound surprising, even scandalous and heretical; nevertheless, it is quite true. One of the main issues with the creed among moderns, if they think it out fully, is what it makes as matters of faith, the essence of what a Christian should believe. For instance, the creed states that Jesus was “begotten of the Father before all worlds.” Most moderns would probably be fine accepting as orthodox any Christians who believe in Christ’s pre-existence, but that he was begotten of the Father while performing the will of the Father while on Earth, as Luke seems to say. Some Christians I know would even argue that the timing of when he was “begotten” is not even the important part, also in disagreement with the creed. Some today would also take issue with some of the statements about what Christ will accomplish when he comes back: as I’ve covered elsewhere, many believe that Christ’s kingdom is already here, and that he is already judging mankind from his throne. And I have never seen a baptism performed by Baptists (the irony) where they did not precede it with a statement denying one of the final statements of the Nicene Creed: “I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins.”[19]
There are myriad more ironies about the way moderns understand—or fail to understand—these ancient debates, but I’d like to cite just one more. I have often heard the godhead explained by diverse individuals—coming from diverse denominations—with an analogy as simple as the way that a man can be both a father, a son, and brother at the same time. In other words, God is one while still being all three roles of the godhead, not separate entities. This is in essence modalism, and many of the most influential theologians of the second and third centuries would have and did vehemently oppose such a view. And the idea that the Father was chief of the godhead, and at least the Son subordinate to him, one of the most popular earliest views, is rarely mentioned in churches today. It is now with great restraint that I do not continue to examine ways that moderns do not believe in much that the ancients did, including and especially what the New Testament writers believed.
[1] 1 Clement 46:6
[2] “Ignatius’ Letter to the Magnesians”
[3] Lord Jesus Christ, 2005, ch. 10, by Larry Hurtado
[4] Ibid.
[5] 1 Apology 13
[6] Dialogue 59, 60
[7] Ibid. 46
[8] To Autolycus, Book 2, ch. 15
[9] E.g., See Refutation 7, by Hippolytus, where he records that Callistus held the belief. See also Against Noetus 2.
[10] E.g., Against Praxeas 3.
[11] Against Noetus 14
[12] Against Parxeas 2
[13] Against Praxeas 9
[14] Against Praxeas, ch. 2
[15] E.g., see “The Antecedents of Arius,” by L.W. Barnard, Vigiliae Christianae 24 (1970) pp. 172-188.
[16] E.g., see Eusebius’ quote of Constantine in Life of Constantine, 2.68.
[17] For a more thorough account, see Ehrman’s How Jesus Became God, ch. 9; I am heavily indebted to him for his analysis.
[18] This was partly due to a view that the world was corrupt and could not have been created by a good and perfect God, a problem which modern Christians find different paradigms to explain or to ignore.
[19] This is not to say, however, that some Baptists do not agree with the statement in the Creed, as I have seen some Baptists profess it. But I can say without a doubt what was voiced at the beginning of the half dozen or so Baptist baptisms that I’ve witnessed. I cannot say whether that is a majority view, however.