A brief history of trinitarianism
A brief history of trinitarianism
Sunday 15th June 2025
A sermon by Kenneth Padley
Today is Fathers’ Day. Or ‘Fathering Sunday’ – as it might have been called before being modernised.
Unlike Mothering Sunday, Fathers’ Day is essentially a secular celebration and is always marked on the third Sunday of June. This makes today a rare coincidence because this third Sunday of June is indeed the day of the Father – but also the day of the Son, and the day of the Holy Spirit: because today is Trinity Sunday, that great festival on which Christians celebrate the truth and mystery of God as three persons in one being.
September 2025 marks the 800th anniversary of the dedication of an altar at the east end of this Cathedral to the Holy and Undivided Trinity. However, the idea of the Trinity goes back a lot further. Given this, I’d like us tonight to take a whistlestop history of the doctrine of the Trinity which I hope will show why it is both important and enduring.
We’re going to start three thousand years ago, mining deep into the Jewish foundations of Christianity. The ancient Hebrews at the time of David’s kingdom in the tenth-century BC were one tribe among many in the Ancient Near East. They understood their national interest to be bound up with devotion to a god – their god – whom they called Yahweh. These early Yahwists were not monotheists. Their worship was focused on Yahweh, but they knew that their neighbours prayed to other gods and, initially, they didn’t question the existence of these deities. The name which theologians give to this position is ‘henotheism’, the preferencing of one god from within a range of possibilities.
However, the early Hebrew attachment to Yahweh was strong. As a result, over time, Yahwistic henotheism evolved into ‘monolatry’. Monolatry is another theological term, this time meaning ‘one-worship’. Monolatrous Hebrews claimed that Yahweh was the only deity worthy of worship – but they didn’t go so far as to formally deny the existence of others.
But monolatry was just a stepping-stone to something yet more exclusive. The experience of the Jews who went into exile in Babylon two and a half thousand years ago turned them into strict monotheists. Away from their homeland, they came to appreciate that Yahweh was maker of all the nations on earth – even if this was unacknowledged by their polytheistic captors. In this vein, Isaiah chapter 44 derides the pagan carpenter who chops up a log, making half of it into fuel and half into an idol – how foolish, thought the monotheistic prophet.
And so by the middle of the millennium before Jesus, Jewish theology had reached a momentous conclusion which made them stand out from all their neighbours, the realisation that there really is only one God. However, even within the supreme oneness of God, Jewish writers acknowledged multiplicity. For example, there are occasions in the Old Testament when Yahweh refers to himself in the first-person plural. Thus, in Genesis chapter 11, God says of the people at Babel, ‘come let us go down and confuse their language’ [Gen 11.7]. And in Isaiah chapter 6, God summons the prophet, asking ‘whom shall I send, and who will go for… us.’
This complexity took on a whole new twist when the first followers of Jesus concluded that their obscure rabbi was in fact God’s incarnate Son.
- One such Christian wrote tonight’s second lesson about God’s plan of salvation being bound up in his relationships, ‘for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have everlasting life.’ [John 3.16]
- And in the passage preceding this verse, Jesus spoke of Another, enjoining his dialogue partner Nicodemus to enter God’s Kingdom through new birth in water and the Spirit.
- Moving beyond John’s gospel, there are other New Testament passages in which we encounter Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit in a way which implies intimate cooperation and mutuality. The words of the Grace from II Corinthians is one such example.
These novel encounters with the one God invited greater theological precision – but that was a demanding task because the Bible offers no technical definition of deity. And so, within the first Christian communities, there were those at the more ‘Jewish’ end of the spectrum who preferred to stress Jesus’ humanity, and those under stronger Greek influences who preferred to dwell on his divinity. Some sort of doctrinal standardization seemed desirable.
An attempt was made about the year AD200 by a North African Christian called Tertullian. Tertullian was the first to call God ‘trinitas’. And Tertullian was the first to speak of God as ‘tres personae’ in ‘una substantia’, three persons in one substance.
The problem with Tertullian was that he was heretical on other issues and so not everyone was prepared to take up his terminology about the Trinity. This meant that a widely-accepted definition was not hammered out until a century later. Come the early fourth century and the pot was stirred by an Alexandrian priest called Arius. Arius argued that there were gradations within God such that the Son was a ‘creature’ and that there was a time when the Son was not. The opponents of Arius could not permit such tenets which they correctly understood as reducing Jesus to less than God. Their response was to write a statement of faith, which insisted that the Father and Son are ‘of the same substance’, homoousios. This creed was shaped at the first global gathering of Christian leaders, the famous conference of bishops held at Nicaea in AD 325.
Given all this, I strongly suspect that the reason why a chapel was dedicated to the Trinity in Salisbury Cathedral 800 years ago was because our forebears then were celebrating the 900th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. We will be marking in 2025 what is now the 1700th anniversary of this crucial ecumenical council in our summer sermon series and zoom discussion groups by reflecting on the big ideas about God in the Creed. Please visit our website and notice sheet for more information about this series.
The history of the Trinity of course is not static such that, although disputation subsided after the fourth and fifth centuries, it reignited in the sixteenth century through a complex process related to the persecution of Jews and Muslims in southern Europe. The expulsion of religious minorities from a resurgent Roman Catholicism in Spain eventually injected anti-trinitarian ideas into fringe Christian groups in Italy. This fed a further elongated intellectual migration from Italy to Poland and thence to the Netherlands from where unitarianism arrived in England during the disruption of the Civil Wars in the 1640s. Matters were further muddied in the late seventeenth century when some English writers responded to the Unitarian challenge by swinging too far in the opposite direction and articulating fresh expressions of the Trinity which unwittingly asserted tritheism – three Gods.
Disparate ideas on the edges of the Christian tradition have never gone away. However, the doctrine of the Trinity has persisted. This, I believe, is because it offers the best resolution of those two strands of biblical evidence with which we started – the first which says God is supremely one and the second which says that God is dynamic.
Practically, Trinitarianism is a doctrine that matters, because whether the Son and the Spirit are God has a huge impact on our worship, and on fundamental ideas about how we are saved. At a pastoral level, the doctrine of the Trinity engages the longings and needs of people to live in mutual harmony because, while the three persons of the Trinity are not like three individuals in this room, the doctrine reminds us that the internal love of God for God’s self overflows into God’s love for creatures. And that is why this day – like all others – is indeed the day of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, to whom we ascribe all honour, majesty, dominion and power now and forever, Amen.