The Holy Trinity

Basic Theology of the Trinity

1. In one divine nature, there are three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
2. No one of the persons is either of the others, each is wholly himself. The Father is not the Son, the Son not the Father, the Holy Spirit not the Father or the Son and the Father and the Son, not the Holy Spirit. Each is wholly himself.
3. The Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God.
4. They are not three Gods but one God.

What we are talking about are three persons, one nature. If we ask, “What is God?” We would answer, “One source of divine operation”.

If we ask who is God, we will respond, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And if we ask each one individually who they are, we would respond, God.

How is this possible? We know the Father has a Son from reading the Gospels. The Son is distinct from the Father. There is no way the Father can be his own Son. But though they are distinct persons, they are like in nature. Compared to the son of a man, he inherits the human nature. The son of a lion is a lion. In this solitary case, the Fathers nature is infinite, so the Son must have an infinite nature too. But there cannot be two infinite natures-one would be limited by the other and by not having power over the other. Therefore, since the Son has infinite nature, it must be the same identical nature as the Father’s.

(We know that the Son was not created or made because when you make something, you make something different from yourself. For example, when a bird makes a nest, a beaver makes a dam and a man makes a chair. Begetting is different. A bird begets birds, a beaver begets a beaver and a man begets human babies. So what God begets is God and what God creates is not God. That is why men are not sons of God in the sense that Christ is. We may be like God in certain ways, but we are not things of the same kind.) 

 This would be completely dark to us if St. John had not given us another term for their relation. The second person is the Word of the first. In the first eighteen verses of St. John’s Gospel we learn that that God has uttered a Word, a Word who was with God, a Word who was God; by this all things were made.

(So God uttered a word-not framed by mouth because God does not have a mouth. He is pure Spirit. So it is a word in the mind of God, not sounding outwardly as our words sound but it is rather a thought or an idea. What idea produced in God’s mind could possibly be God? Christian thinking saw early that it could be only the idea God has of Himself.)

We know that the Word is perfect because God is perfect and that God is infinite so the Word must be infinite. The Father knows and loves; so His Word knows and loves.

In other words the Word is a person. The Word became flesh in the person of Jesus Christ, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary and became man.

One immediate difficulty presents itself. We can hardly help thinking of sons as younger than their fathers. But this is not the case with the Father and the Son. They both are infinite and eternal and transcend time. Time is a creation of God and God is not subject to His own creation. So merely by being, he is.

This should bring some new light when we recite the creed referring to the Son and say God from God, light from light true God from true God, begotten or coming from and not made or created like an object.

Then there is a Spirit that Jesus says he is going to ask the father to send and remain with the Church until the end. The Spirit, like the Word is a person.

Father and Son love each other with infinite intensity and what we could not know if it were not revealed to us, is that they, the Father and Son unite to express their love and that expression is a third divine person. In the Son, the Father utters His self knowledge; in the Holy Spirit the Father and Son utter their mutual love. Their love is infinite and its expression cannot be less.

Now go back to the Creed. We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and Son. With the Father and son he is worshipped and glorified.

This is a revelation given to the Church and written implicitly in Sacred Scripture and taught through out via Sacred Tradition. This must have been revealed because no man can make this up!

(Why is the doctrine of the Trinity important?)

An ordinary Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God-that is Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. God is the thing to which he is praying-the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him pushing him on. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole three-personal Being is reaching out to be know by the man praying in his room, on his knees.)

Disclaimer: These are not all entirley my words. This is a complitation of other sources and books that I have read.
They are:
The New American Bible
Catechism of the Catholic Church – Second Edition
Mere Christianity – C.S. Lewis
Theology for Beginners – Frank Sheed