TRINITY. The Christian doctrine of God is distinguished by its emphasis on divine three-in-oneness, that is, the eternal coexistence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the inner personal life of the Godhead. Evangelical theology affirms that the living, speaking, and acting God is a personal divine trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the eternal unity of God Himself, and in His work. The one God, the subject of all divine revelation, is self-disclosed—as the Bible authoritatively teaches—as the invisible Father (from whom all revelation proceeds), the Son (who mediates and objectively incarnates that revelation in a historical manifestation) and the Holy Spirit (who is divinely outpoured and subjectively applies that revelation to men).

It is the Ger. theologian Karl Barth’s special merit that he has reiterated the indissoluble connection of this view with the fact of divine self-revelation. Not only medieval Scholasticism but also modern Protestant theology readily expounded God’s essence and attributes first, and then appended a discussion of God’s triunity, as if the reality of God as personal, and specifically as triune, were irrelevant to man’s knowledge of the divine nature and perfections.

The Bible witnesses to plurality of personality in the self-revealed God; it does not, as neo-Protestant writers prefer to put it, affirm that God is a person or that He has a personality. In his 1918 Gifford Lectures, Clement C. J. Webb emphasized that the historic creeds affirm personality in God rather than the personality of God (God and Personality [1919], 24f.).

The doctrine of the Trinity, or of Divine Triunity, has been at the heart of much theological controversy. The routine objection is that the doctrine sacrifices monotheism to tritheism. But this objection thrives on a misconception of divine personality in the image of disparate individual human selves. A type of rationalistic apologetics, promotive of trinitarianism on speculative rather than revelational grounds, regrettably encourages this misunderstanding. Insisting that divinity must by definition be personal, and presuming to derive the doctrine of the Trinity by formal logic from empirical philosophical considerations rather than from God’s revelational activity, the argument is vulnerable to secular counterattack.

Independently of divine disclosure, man possesses no knowledge of divinity that qualifies him to declare surely who or what God is. No apriori reason can be given why God must be an invisible person (man’s spiritual nature exaggerated to unipersonal infinity), and not the spirit of the universe (regarded as His body), or not rather the eternally triune God—unless God has somehow truly revealed His reality and perfections. Indeed, divine revelation is a matter of sovereign freedom; no advance necessity exists that God should reveal Himself, or reveal Himself intimately.

But the reality and nature of God known in the light of divine disclosure yields the historic Christian conviction, grounded in the NT, that God’s being is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in His self-manifestation. This insistence on three eternal modes of consciousness in the one God has no parallel in religious philosophy. Quite different are the Platonic Ideas and Demiurge, triadic gods of some ancient polytheistic religions, the Stoic Logos and the Neo-Platonic Nous, and Hegel’s exposition of a three-beat movement in the self-manifestation of the Absolute, much as they seek to emphasize vital relationships within the life of the divine.

By its very emphasis on the progressive character of historical revelation, the scriptural record of the self-manifestation of the living God cautions against any notion that the doctrine of the trinity was fully knowable in OT times. First and foremost, the revelation of the Bible presents throughout the truth of monotheism, against the polytheism and the practical atheism of the ancient world. God’s unique transcendent glory is reflected by the OT’s explicit prohibition of all graven images, whether in the similitude of nature or creatures. The Genesis creation narrative emphasizes, however, that God made unfallen man in the divine image. In the NT, God’s glory is manifested in the incarnation of the Logos, bearing the express image of the divine in human nature. Nowhere does the NT emphasis on the deity of Jesus Christ, or in its trinitarian statements, deviate in the slightest from the uncompromising monotheism of the OT; both Testaments deplore polytheism.

However, the possibility of OT intimations of the doctrine of the Trinity is again being discussed. G. A. F. Knight notes that of the two Heb. words for “one” (’ehādh and yahidh) the latter means “unique” (the only one of its kind), whereas the former does not preclude distinguishable entities (as in Gen 2:24, where Adam and Eve are said to be one flesh; cf. A Biblical Approach to the Doctrine of the Trinity [1953]). The Heb. Shema (Deut 6:4, 5) uses ’ehādh. Moreover, Knight contends, to consider the name Elohim a pl. of majesty, rather than as indicative of diversity in unity, is to impute a modern way of thinking to the ancient Hebrews, who addressed all their OT kings in the sing. The pl. vowelling of the word Adonai may witness to the same phenomenon.

Explicit trinitarianism is dependent upon the NT revelation of the sending Father, the sent Son, and the outpoured Spirit. In the experience of the disciples, the disclosure of the deity of Christ may at first have impressed them with an intermediary or temporary binitarianism of Father and Son. Since Jews viewed Jesus’ claim of oneness with the Father as blasphemous, His assertion of the unity of Father and Son clearly implied oneness of essence and was not reducible only to moral and purposive harmony. But God’s revelation in Christ was soon grasped as a revelation not of a part of deity but of complete divinity; Jesus of Nazareth unveiled the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. The revealed presence of God demanded recognition not only of the person of the Son alongside the person of the Father, but the person of the Spirit as well.

In view of the interdependence of trinitarianism and progressive divine disclosure, a question might be raised whether God may not yet show Himself to be other than we now know? The query has the merit of emphasizing that authentic religious knowledge turns on God’s self-revelation. Christian theology has no other reason for asserting the finality of trinitarian monotheism than the fact of God’s self-disclosure attested in Holy Scripture. The content of the Christian doctrine is given by the divine affirmation of Jesus of Nazareth as the supreme and final revelation of the Father, and the Holy Spirit’s witness to the Son, and not to another. Whoever takes his stand beneath the reality of the NT revelation—rather than behind it or outside it—is driven to trinitarian theology.

C. K. Barrett remarks that more than any other NT source, the writer of the fourth gospel “lays the foundations for a doctrine of a co-equal Trinity” (The Gospel According to John [1955], 159). But the threefold formula is found also in the Great Commission (Matt 28:19), and the unitarian attempt to dismiss this as a late interpolation has failed; the formula is now widely viewed as integral to the original text and anticipative of the Didaché (vii:1-4). It occurs also in Paul’s early writings (2 Cor 13:14).

The term “trinity” is not a Biblical term, and Scripture gives the doctrine not in formulated definition but in fragmentary units similar to many other elements of the Christian system of truth. R. B. Crawford insists rightly that there are “good grounds for believing that the doctrine of the Trinity is scriptural” (Scottish Journal of Theology, Vol. 20, No. 3 [Sept. 1967], 286ff.). It is the unifying presupposition of the NT revelation of God. B. B. Warfield remarked that the entire NT “is Trinitarian to the core; all its teaching is built on the assumption of the Trinity; and its allusions to the Trinity are frequent, cursory, easy and confident” (ISBE, V, 3014d). There is in the NT, as in the OT, only one true and living God; and in its view, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are each God in the fullest sense; and Father, Son, and Spirit stand related to each other as I, Thou, and He.

Many passages in the gospels teach Jesus’ divinity and the Son’s unity with the Father, and in the context of such passages it is emphasized that the same essential interrelationship extends to the Holy Spirit (cf. John 14:16-26; 15:26; 16:5ff.). The importance of the baptismal formula (Matt 28:19) lies in the fact that it most nearly approaches the doctrine in the words enunciated by the Lord Himself, preserved, moreover, by one of the synoptic writers. This formula impressively asserts the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by embracing them as a single name, yet emphasizes the distinctiveness of each person by repeating the prefatory article: “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” The Pauline letters likewise not only repeatedly refer to God the Father and to Jesus Christ in juxtaposition, as joint objects of adoration, but the Holy Spirit appears with them as a personal source of all divine blessing. In the early as well as the later writings of Paul, all three persons are mentioned together as co-sources of the blessings of salvation (1 Thess 1:2-5; 2 Thess 2:13f.; 1 Cor 12:4f.; 2 Cor 13:14; Eph 2:18; 3:2ff.; 4:4ff.; 5:18ff.; Titus 3:4f.; 2 Tim 1:3, 13f.). The other NT writings repeat the same pattern (Heb 2:3f.; 6:4f.; 10:29ff.; 1 Pet 1:2; 2:3ff.; 4:13ff.; 1 John 5:4; Jude 20f.; Rev 1:4ff.).

Crawford notes that unitarian views have invariably tended toward deism or toward pantheism, whereas trinitarianism has preserved the unity of God. The inner life and outer work of God were soon conformed to unitarian prejudices to avoid tritheism once the term “persona” was detached from a Biblical witness to God’s self-revelation, and speculatively expounded in the context of the modern understanding of the finite self as a disparate psychic entity. Modern philosophy then regarded the absoluteness and infinity of God as incompatible not only with a doctrine of the Trinity, but with divine personality as well (misunderstood in this speculative way), and idealistic philosophy soon revived the pagan Gr. antithesis of sovereignty or personality. This antitrinitarian claim that God’s uniqueness precludes His inclusion in the highest values of human nature, e.g., personality, was unfortunately countered by the wrong reasons for personality in God, e.g., that man’s highest perfection must be like God (so that transcendent personality could be projected from the finite). The door was now open to every variety of postulatory theism in the name of Christianity. An ingenious “theology” of that kind—based on the longing of the human heart, the will to believe, the supposed infinite value of human personality, or the significance of personality in world culture, etc.—was readily inverted and dismissed as “higher anthropology.” Leonard Hodgson argues in defense of the Trinity that organic unity is more complex than mathematical unity; that psychological unity (thinking, feeling, and willing) is more complex still; and that the nature of God is even more complex than human nature (The Doctrine of the Trinity [1943]).

Evangelical Christianity needs to heed every warning against a speculative derivation of divine personality simply by examination of fallen man’s consciousness apart from reliance on supernatural revelation, for this requires different presuppositions about God than does the view of divine nature and activity predicated upon the living God who speaks and acts and is present in His self-disclosure. For the very reason that the scriptural revelation is the decisive center of God’s self-disclosure, first given in deed and then authoritatively interpreted in word, neo-Protestant speculation is doubly arbitrary in its dismissal of trinitarian theology as a reflex of pagan philosophy, while it proceeds to recreate the God image along the lines of fashionable contemporary thought.

Bibliography K. Barth, Church Dogmatics; A. Kuyper, The Work of the Holy Spirit (1941); L. Hodgson, The Doctrine of the Trinity (1944); C. W. Lowry, The Trinity and Christian Devotion (1946); H. B. Swete, The Holy Spirit in the New Testament (1964).