God The Trinity

Abstract

Abstract According to orthodox Christianity, God is a Trinity of persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Traditionally, the Father is in some sense the source of the other two persons; the Son and the Holy Spirit are said to proceed from him. Central to all understandings of this doctrine is that the claim that there are three divine persons does not entail the further claim that there are three Gods. Not surprisingly, this doctrine has caused theologians some difficulty. Eastern Christianity, taking its cue from the great Cappadocian fathers (Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and Gregory of Nazianzus), has tended to emphasize what are sometimes known as ‘‘social’’ models of the Trinity. The divine persons on this view are something like three individuals living in indivisible community with each other. The West, following Augustine, has tended to see the three persons as something like three ways in which the one divine essence exists. On this admittedly rough analysis, the difficulty faced by those theologians who prefer social models of the Trinity is avoiding tritheism; the problem for the more ‘‘Augustinian’’ theologians is avoiding modalism, the belief that the three persons are just modes of divine self-presentation to us.