TRINITY, The central and characteristic Christian doctrine of God is that He exists in Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ("Holy Ghost" is the traditional English translation of Sanctus Spiritus and means the same as "Holy Spirit.") At the same time, the Christian church insists that God is One in "sub- stance" (Latin substantia, existence or inner essence), and thus combines in it "mystery" (a formula or conception which really transcends human understanding) the truths set forth in the Holy Scriptures. It is probably a mistake to assume that the doctrine resulted from the intrusion of Greek metaphysics or philosophy into Christian thought; for the data upon which the doctrine rests, and also its earliest attempts at formulation, are much older than the church's encounter with Greek philosophy. The earliest development of the doctrine may in fact be viewed its an attempt to preserve the balance between the various statements of Scripture, or their implications, without yielding to views which, though logical enough, would have destroyed or abandoned important areas of Christian belief. The simplest affirmation is that God is "Three in One, and One in Three," without making use of such technical terms, derived from law or philosophy, as "substance" or "person." God is Father, and the Father is God; God is Son, and the Son is God; God is Spirit, and the Spirit is God. The statement is often seen, in Latin, in early stained-glass church windows, with three circles at the corners of it triangle and an inner circle connected with each (Fig. 1). The doctrine thus graphically symbolized might perhaps better be described as that of the divine "Triunity" rather than the "Trinity." At best the terms "substance" and "person" are themselves only symbolic, and point to a mysterious reality which cannot be either literally described or mathematically formulated. Furthermore, these two terms are, in English, only the rough equivalents of their Latin originals, which had far wider connotations than the English words now possess. The term "Trinity" (Greek Trias) was first used by Theophilus of Antioch (fl. c. 180 A.D.), and provide a convenient term of reference, though it did not provide a definition. The scriptural data for the doctrine of God begins in the Old Testament, which lays the greatest emphasis upon pure monotheism: God is One (as in the sacred Sheina, "Hear, 0 Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord"; Deuteronomy 6:4). The prophetic religion of Israel steadily rose high above the polytheistic and often immoral pagan cults of the surrounding world. Hence the attempt to combine the worship of Yahweli, Israel's one and only God, with that of pagan gods, or to introduce or, once introduced, to retain, pagan ideas or religious customs was strongly resisted by the prophets and psalmists. Eventually, Judaism emerged from the long struggle as a religion with one and only one God, the purest monotheism in the ancient world. Such expressions as "Let us make man" (Genesis 1:26) is probably only an echo of the early Hebrew, conception of a divine court, the "company of heaven," supernatural or angelic beings surrounding God in heaven. There was no other God beside Him (Deuteronomy 32:39; Isaiah 46:9). This theistic faith is completely taken for granted in the New Testament and in the early Christian creeds. Instead of a reversion in the direction of polytheism, with a plurality of divine beings, the development of Trinitarian doctrine was guided by the same principle of divine revelation as that reflected in the Old Testament, that is, from plurality to unity. For the early Christian belief that Jesus was divine, the Son of God, and that as the risen, glorified Messiah or Lord, He was now at the right hand of God: required the use of theistic language. The oldest surviving fragment of an early Christian liturgical prayer is probably "Our Lord, come" (Maranatha, I Corinthians 16:22; compare Revelation 22:20); it implies that prayer was addressed to the risen, glorified Christ. The Aramaic title Mar or Lord (Greek Kyrios; I Corinthians 12:3) was a term or title regularly used in religious worship. A similar situation existed in the language used of the Holy Spirit. Though at first impersonal (compare Acts 8:15-16, 10:44), as if the Spirit could be referred to as "it," in time the language of Christian preaching, teaching, and worship clearly involved the conception of a divine person. The Spirit from God, sent by God, was also divine, and therefore was God. Such formulas as Paul's "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit" (11 Corinthians 13:14) are not necessarily theological, that is, metaphysical or philosophical, but they clearly point the direction in which Christian thought was inevitably moving." ... "The Athanasian Creed was the most explicit of the creedal statements of the doctrine of the Trinity. Still later controversies, such as the one which provided the pre-text for division between Eastern and Western Christianity, namely, the debate over the language to be used of the Holy Spirit its "proceeding from the Father and the Son," rather than "through the Son," rest upon variant interpretations of the language of Scripture, and not upon some abstruse metaphysical theory - though metaphysics was often introduced in support of views already adopted. The full development of Trinitarianism took place in the West, in the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, when an explanation was under-taken in terms of philosophy and psychology, especially of the recovered Aristotelianism of the 13th century. The classical exposition is found in the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, whose views on this subject have dominated most of later Christian theology, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. (Encyclopedia Americana, Trinity, p116)

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