The Most Misunderstood and Poorly Taught Christian Theological Idea

I'm talking about the Trinity. This is the one point where I hear people discussing from a fundamentally flawed idea because of ignorance. Here it is, as I have been taught, and its justification in Church history:

The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity states that God is a unified, but essentially differentiated being that has three distinct persons that cannot be separated, that work from the same divine power, are equal in their being and have eternally mutually existed. This doctrine has grown out of experiential and theological understandings of who God is and how he has worked in the world as characterized in the Bible. The Bible never specifically uses the word trinity, but implicitly and indirectly supports this doctrine. This doctrine is vital to a Christian understanding of who God is as a being and how the Father, Son and Holy Spirit can all be God in a monotheistic understanding of God.

Some people, before the time of Irenaeus (a Christian Apologist and Theologian c180 AD), believed in a strict, monotheistic deity that had one personality. Irenaeus wrote against these people using a metaphor that is known as the Two Hands of God Model. He talked about how every time we see, in Scripture, God working in the world - he is working by his divine Word and divine Wisdom. He related these to a person's two hands. Each works on behalf of the person, but in practice is different than the other, but they are all unified. Christians understand the Word to be the pre-incarnate Son and God's wisdom as being the Holy Spirit. He argued that God was always the one working, but that he also worked in parts and that he had differentiation in himself.

The problem with this analogy was that some people (the Sebellians) misinterpreted this to mean that there is one God with one Person and three different roles that he took on. Tertullian corrected this error by creating the Tri-Unity (or Trinity) Theory. Tertullian argued that God was not only differentiated, but essentially differentiated. That God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were essentially different in their purposes and functions, but could coexist at the same time towards the same people. Where the Sebellians understood God to function as only one role to each group of people.

As this theology was, in turn, misinterpreted, a group called the Modalists arose believing that God changed forms or beings as time progressed. The Father became the Son in the incarnation, and the Son became the Holy Spirit after the Ascension. This is fundamentally flawed when we look at the times in Scripture where all three personages of God are present in a situation simultaneously (I.e.: Jesus' Baptism in water). The modalists believed that once God had changed modes, he would no longer exist as the prior mode and would not return to it. Origen argued against this view of God with the Eternal Generation Theory. That God, in his divine nature, cannot exist alone and that at the beginning of eternity, the Father had to coexist with the Son so that the character and nature of God, exemplified in love, could always exist. Thus, the Father, from himself generated something of the same substance and form (not created, which would imply lesser form), which was, by nature, the Son. From this we understand that God has always been and is eternal by nature, thus there is no time that God existed without the Son or the Father.

Sadly, a group known as the Arians misinterpreted generation to be creation and developed a perspectival theology that put the Son not as a pre-existent being, but the first in creation. They believed that from our perspective, the Son looks like God, but from the Father's perspective, the Son is the highest of all creation. Athanasius argued against this theology by establishing the equal, eternal, essentially differentiated theory of God through the Homoousial Theology. Homoousios means that each personage of the Trinity is of the same substance. The Father is everything it means to be God, the Son is everything it means to be God and the Holy Spirit is everything it means to be God. The only stipulation of this idea is that the Son is not the Father or the Spirit, the Father is not the Spirit or the Son, and the Spirit is not the Father or the Son. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not ranked or of unequal power or position, all of them are equally God.

From this, people went to an extreme and argued that God was not monotheistic, but tritheistic. They believed three Gods worked according to a unified will. Gregory of Nyssa argued against this saying that God is one, and they are all working according to Common Operations: all three personages of the trinity work according to the same divine power and it is not the issue of will. This was in turn misinterpreted that the Holy Spirit was our name for God's power, but Gregory did not mean this and was supported in Augustine's rebuttal.

Augustine created the Mutual Love Theory, which states that the Father's love for the Son and the Son's love for the Father are simultaneous and mutual. This is so powerful and perfect in all eternity that it is person-generating. God's mutual love within himself generated the Holy Spirit, which is not a power, but a personage and these personages work not from separate power, but from divine power which is common to all of them.

From this, a new issue of Tritheism grew. The argument was if the Holy Spirit is generated form the relationship of the Father and the Son, than there must be three gods that coexist because there is no disunity in a monotheistic God and this God seems to be three separate beings working together in mediation. John of Damascus finalized our understanding of the Trinity when he coined the Perichoresis Theory. Perichoresis is the greek word for dance. He argued that without all the members of a dance, you do not have a dance. In the same way, without all the members of God, you do not have God. He argued that God had distinct differentiation, but they are inseparable, because the Father cannot exist without the Son and the Spirit, and neither can exist without the first or the other. Thus, when all of these theologian's ideas are added together, (because they were continually building upon one another) we have a God that is one being, has three different persons that are inseparable from each other, but are still distinct. These persons have also existed eternally and equally, and they work from the same divine nature and power.

If you need any points of clarification, leave a comment and I will attempt to answer your questions in a timely manner.