The invocation "in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," called the "Baptismal Affirmation," is unique in the New Testament, where baptisms are usually in the name of Jesus (Acts 8:16, 10:48, 19:5), and may reflect a baptismal formula from the early church. Or it may be a post-Nicene interpolation, since there is some evidence for a "short ending" without these words. It is a kind of embryonic creed, and it serves as the supreme scriptural basis for the "developed" doctrine—and the mystery—of the Holy Trinity, three Gods in one divine person, with the Son and the Holy Spirit eventually defined as of "one being" or "substance" or "essence" (Greek: ho-moousios; Latin: substantid) with the Father, their mutual indwelling technically known as "circumincession." This is a doctrine better experienced mystically than explained logically, much less cogently. But for early Christians it accounted for the God of the Old Testament, the divinity of Jesus, and their own sense of spiritual empowerment. Still, it has been a difficult doctrine historically since Christianity, like Judaism, distinguished itself from paganism by its uncompromising monotheism, and Scripture even has Jesus admitting that "my Father is greater than I" (John 14:28). But now in addition to God the Creator, there was the fact of Jesus Christ, Lord and Redeemer, Son of the Father, and the problem of God's presence within him, as well as a sense of the inspiring and sanctifying Spirit, the Comforter, who came to be united with Jesus in baptismal formulas and other liturgical invocations.
Although it often alludes to three aspects—word/power, love, spirit—of divinity, the New Testament says nothing of the doctrine of the Trinity as such, and it is odd that so important a concept should appear only in Matthew and so belatedly in Jesus' teachings. This has created problems for Trinitarian Protestants who objected to doctrines not firmly anchored in Scripture, and it has not been a popular subject with their preachers. The problem of defining the relations, particularly of the Father and the Son, among the three equal but distinct realities or "persons" of the Trinity was to preoccupy thinkers of the early church, who had to clarify the Trinitarian references in Scripture and liturgy. It was Tertullian who first used the term in the early third century, although other church fathers had used Trinitarian language, and in the late second century Irenaeus had come close to formulating what would become an orthodox consensus.
They relied heavily on Proverbs 8:22 ("The Lord possessed me [wisdom] in the beginning"), which seemed to distinguish between God's power and wisdom in His creation, and on imperfect analogies of unity and separation, such as the light and heat of the sun ("light from light" came to be enshrined in the Nicene Creed). Wisdom they could identify with Jesus as the pre-existent agent of creation (who by his redemptive act "recreated" a fallen world), since he is named in John 1 as God's creative logos. As for the Holy Spirit, this they saw operating in the inspiration that animated the prophets and apostles and worked within believers for their sanctification. It was first named, though more as power than person, at Genesis 1:2 as moving "upon the face of the waters"; it made a notable appearance at Jesus' baptism (3:16); it was known in the church's creeds as "the Lord" and "giver of Life"; and it would be a prominent force in the inspirational, prophetic, miraculous, and mystical lives of Christians, a constant counterweight to the authority of church and Bible. Such speculations inevitably required definitions and clarification, and they also engendered heresies, versions of which are still held by many who regard themselves as Christians.
Finally, an orthodox doctrine was developed and formulated, largely the creation of Origen and the three Cappadocian Fathers of the fourth century, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. They developed the "one substance/essence" formula, rejecting the subordination implied by the terms "Father" and "Son," and specifying that whereas God "created" the world as something new and different from Himself, He "generated" the Son and the Holy Spirit and eternally "subsists" with them as separate but shared and co-equal parts of Himself, not merely as modes or functions of His being, succeeding Him in time. This was proclaimed at the ecumenical councils of Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381, and finally established by Augustine in the fifth century and endorsed at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). It was a balancing act, trying to reconcile the oneness of God with the lordship of Jesus while avoiding an emphasis on unity that would lead to modal-ism and an emphasis on distinctiveness that would lead to tritheism. For Christians it amounted to nothing less than a definition—if not an explanation—of God; and since the twelfth century, the Trinity has been celebrated on the first Sunday after Pentecost. Its popular understanding is that God is the Creator, Jesus the Redeemer, and the Holy Spirit the Sustainer (Whittier wrote of the Spirit: "A bodiless Divinity, / The still small voice that spake to thee / Was the Holy Spirit's mystery").
The paradox of unity within multiplicity (and vice versa) is everywhere in life. Imperfect analogies have been St. Patrick's shamrock; the three aisles that lead to the one altar in Gothic churches; the Free Masons' equilateral triangle, a version of which appears on the dollar bill enclosing the "eye of God"; and Dorothy Sayers' example of a book: the author (God the Father), the material book itself (Jesus Christ), and the effect of its message on the reader (Holy Spirit). In Graham Greene's novel Monsignor Quixote (1982), the title character compares it to wine in a bottle, with the taste of the wine serving as "the extra spark of life" that is the Holy Spirit. And Augustine maintained that since we have been created in God's image, we have the Trinity within us in our memory, understanding, and will. But for artists it has been a challenging subject, since three-headed or three-faced figures, though occasionally found, are repulsive, or else they recall Cerberus, the three-headed Underworld dog of classical mythology. The Trinity can also be suggested by such triads as the Holy Family or the three "angels" that visited Abraham at Mamre (Gen. 18:2). In the Trinity done by Masaccio (1401-28) in 1426 for the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, a white dove descends from Father to Son to represent the incarnation. In Albrecht Diirer's Adoration of the Trinity (1508-11; Vienna) the crucified Jesus dominates the composition, with God the Father behind him as a crowned king, and the Holy Spirit above them as a dove.
The Trinity is a difficult concept (Donne: "Bones to philosophy, but milke to faith"), and Reimarus wondered why so important a doctrine should be revealed so late in the gospel and then as only part of a baptismal formula. So as usual, not all have been persuaded or been content to rest in paradox, mystery, or faith. Islam regards it as a species of polytheism (Koran 3.74), and for Jews the wisdom and power that Christians claimed for Jesus and the Holy Spirit were simply attributes of the one God. And why not, they asked, add a fourth or fifth "Person" to account for other attributes? But among other Christians, anti-Trinitarianism probably ranked with Sabbatarianism, infant baptism, and the incarnation as a staple of controversy, schism, and heresy, as the Bible's readers searched the stories of Scripture for the formulas of theology. In the early church some heterodox versions were adoptionism, that God divinized the man Jesus at his baptism and then adopted him into His Godhead; monarchianism, that God is one, and as the Father is dominant; Sabel-lianism, that the Son and Holy Spirit are successive modes of the one God; and, most influentially, Arianism, that the Son was begotten by the Father in time, hence neither eternal nor fully divine, and that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are not co-equal with Him. In the Reformation it was Michael Servetus who argued most forcefully that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were all names for one God, that Jesus was God's word, given divinity when he was made man, while the Holy Spirit was the "activity of God" in the human heart, his divinity a creation of the "philosophers." For this he incurred the wrath of Calvin, who testified against him at a trial in Geneva for gross blasphemy but later pleaded in vain that he be beheaded rather than burned at the stake. On October 28, 1553, he became anti-Trinitarianism's first martyr.
The seventeenth-century Socinians, endorsing Jesus' full humanity, were the first organized anti-Trinitarians, and although precise distinctions are difficult, Arians, Arminians, and deists all rejected the Trinity. In his Christian Doctrine (Bk. I, chs. 5 and 6), Milton noted the persistent disjunction of Father and Son in the New Testament and argued that this formula was meant only to characterize the Father as savior, Jesus as redeemer, and the Holy Spirit as sanctifier. Voltaire simply dismissed it as irrelevant: "What does it matter to human society, morality, and duties that there is one person in God, or three, or four thousand?" When John Locke endorsed "the reasonableness of Christianity" in his 1695 book, he simply ignored the Trinity; Kant thought it of no practical value; and Thomas Jefferson complained about "the hocus-pocus phantasm of a god like another Cerberus with one body and three heads." William Ellery Channing, in his classic exposition of modern Socinianism "Unitarian Christianity" (1819), noted that it was more theological than scriptural and was rejected by "the three greatest and noblest minds of modern times," Milton, Locke, and Newton: "This doctrine, were it true, must, from its difficulty, singularity, and importance, have been laid down with great clearness, guarded with great care, and stated with all possible precision. But where does this statement appear? From the many passages which treat of God, we ask for one, one only, in which we are told, that he is a threefold being." Christian Scientists have also rejected the Trinity, which they see as unscriptural tritheism; and the Mormons, who baptize with this formula, are in fact tritheists, though for them the "great secret" is that God Himself is what they call an "exalted man" who once lived a mortal life. Furthermore, even those denominations that accept the orthodox tradition seem to show little interest in its propagation.
From THE GOSPEL OF Matthew AND ITS READERS
by Howard Clarke
A Historical Introduction to the First Gospel
INDIANA
University Press
Bloomington & Indianapolis
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