TRINITY, in Christian theology, doctrine that God exists as three persons-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-who are united in one substance or being. The doctrine is not taught explicitly in the New Testament, where the word God almost invariably refers to the Father; but already Jesus Christ, the Son, is seen as standing in a unique relation to the Father, while the Holy Spirit is also emerging as a distinct divine person.

The term trinitas was first used in the 2d century, by the Latin theologian Tertullian, but the concept was developed in the course of the debates on the nature of Christ. In the 4th century, the doctrine was finally formulated; using terminology still employed by Christian theologians, the doctrine taught the coequality of the persons of the Godhead. In the West, the 4th-century theologian St. Augustine's influential work De Trinitate (On the Trinity, 400-16) compared the three-in-oneness of God with analogous structures in the human mind and suggested that the Holy Spirit may be understood as the mutual love between Father and Son (although this second point seems difficult to reconcile with the belief that the Spirit is a distinct, coequal member of the Trinity). The stress on equality, however, was never understood as detracting from a certain primacy of the Father-from whom the other two persons derive, even if they do so eternally. For an adequate understanding of the trinitarian conception of God, the distinctions among the persons of the Trinity must not become so sharp that there seems to be a plurality of gods, nor may these distinctions be swallowed up in an undifferentiated monism.

The doctrine of the Trinity may be understood on different levels. On one level, it is a means of construing the word God in Christian discourse. God is not a uniquely Christian word, and it needs specific definition in Christian theology. This need for a specifically Christian definition is already apparent in the New Testament, where Paul says, "there are many 'gods' and many 'lords'-yet for us there is one God, the Father . . . , and one Lord, Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 8:5-6). These words constitute the beginning of a process of clarification and definition, of which the end product is the doctrine of the Trinity. At another level, the doctrine may be seen as a transcript of Christian experience: The God of the Hebrew tradition had become known in a new way, first in the person of Christ, and then in the Spirit that moved in the church. On a third, speculative level of understanding, the doctrine reveals the dynamism of the Christian conception of God-involving notions of a source, a coming forth, and a return (primordial, expressive, and unitive Being). In this sense, the Christian doctrine has parallels both in philosophy (the 19th-cent. German philosopher G. W. F. Hengel's Absolute) and in other religions (the Trimurti of Hinduism). J.Ma.

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"We must appreciate that our Christian forefathers understood this very well in A.D. 325, when they stressed the three Persons in the Trinity, as the Bible had clearly set this forth. Let us notice that it is not that they invented the Trinity in order to give an answer to the philosophical questions which the Greeks of that time understood. It is quite the contrary. The unity and diversity problem was there, and the Christians realised that in the Trinity, as it had been taught in the Bible, they had an answer that no one else had. They did not invent the Trinity to meet the need; the Trinity was already there and it MET the need. They realised that in the Trinity we have what all these people are arguing about and defining but for which they have no answer.

Let us notice again that this is not the BEST answer; it is the ONLY answer. Nobody else, no philosophy, has ever given us an answer for unity and diversity. So when people ask whether we are embarrassed intellectually by the Trinity, I always switch it over into their own terminology -- unity and diversity. Every philosophy has this problem, and no philosophy has an answer. Christianity does have an answer in the existence of the Trinity. The only answer to what exists is that He, the triune God, is there." - F A Schaeffer He Is There And He Is Not Silent