Archive: Trinity

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This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program.

Hello. In this summer special of In Our Time, we're looking at the very heart of Christian theology, the Trinity. Traditionally understood as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, ever since the death of Jesus Christ and the emergence of Christianity as an organized religion, Christians have been wondering and arguing about the significance of the Trinity. What is the relationship between the three entities? Is there a hierarchy within the Trinity? If so, who stands at the summit? What exactly is the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost?

Polemics about the nature of the Trinity were especially intense during the first three centuries of Christianity. Some rejected the idea altogether, while others could not support the idea that the Son could be anything other than subordinate to the Father.

This led to an early split in the Church at the Council of Nicaea, but the concept of the equality of the three entities of the Trinity did emerge as dominant. The issues surrounding the Trinity would reappear periodically, and a dispute about the nature of the Holy Spirit played a role in the arcane debates that led to the great schism between the Western Roman Catholic Church and the Churches of the Eastern Orthodox Rite. Indeed, as Melvins guests articulate, the nature of the Trinity almost invariably features in divisions within the Christian Church. Enjoy listening.

Misha Glenny (1:51)

Hello. One of the beliefs that sets Christianity apart from all other faiths is known as the doctrine of the Trinity. From the early years of the religion, Christians believed that God existed in three forms—God the Creator, His Son Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. But also central to Christianity is the belief that there is only one God. How a single God could appear in three forms was a question which preoccupied early theologians and caused disputes and even splits in the Church. Since the fourth century, most Christians have accepted the doctrine of the Trinity, the idea of three divine individuals who together make up one God. The doctrine also raises philosophical problems which have occupied some of the greatest religious thinkers of the last two thousand years.

With me to discuss the Trinity are Janet Soskice, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College, Martin Palmer, Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture, and Reverend Graham Ward, Regents Professor of Divinity at Christchurch University of Oxford.

Janet Soskice, when did the idea of the Trinity emerge and where did it come from?

Janet Soskice (2:57)

Well, I would say it's emergent from the earliest days. I mean, first of all, the doctrine of the Trinity is about what Christians think about God, and it's not, and Jesus, of course, it's not something extra.

The Christians believe that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and then they don't believe in something extra and they say, and also the Trinity. But where, there's a biblical foundation, of course, because Jesus, and we've got to believe that this was something he was saying, was calling God his Father.

So there's Jesus addressing God as his Father, and then very early on, we find the earliest Christians praying to Jesus as though he were God. We've got a secular report of this from Pliny, who was a governor in what's now Turkey around 115, and he was asked to report on this infidel group, and he said, well, they claim they do nothing wrong, they get together and sing hymns to Jesus as though he were God. So that's a report from about 115 So obviously people are asking, well, who are these people? These people are praying, these early Christians. Well, we know a lot of them were Jews, and Jews worship one God. So what's going on here? I mean, you can understand both pagans and Jews who weren't followers of Jesus saying, well, you say you believe in the one God, but you're praying to this man Jesus. Is he a lesser God? What's the status? So that's all the anchorage. I think it's one of the revolutions in thinking about the Trinity now, is to see that it's really anchored very decidedly in Jewish practice. And you could say that it goes earlier than the first century really, because in the centuries, the three centuries prior to the emergence of Christianity, Jewish believers were quite accustomed to invoking God or speaking of God, using certain titles or names they spoke of. When they were speaking about God acting in the world, they'd speak of God's mighty wisdom or God's mighty word or God's mighty name coming down to act on behalf of the people Israel in times of persecution. And all these ascriptions get assigned to Jesus.