Because the Lord manifests,
John 1:10
John 1:1
John 1:10
•
Matthew 1:20
If you are reading your Bible, the Lord manifests as Jesus, He's God.
Type of Triune, I don't believe the Spirit to be a separate person, nor a person, nor the aspects of God, to be distinct as described by some theologians.
Trinity | Definition, Theology, & History
Trinity, in Christian
doctrine, the unity of Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead. The doctrine of the Trinity is considered to be one of the central Christian affirmations about God. It is rooted in the fact that God came to meet Christians in a threefold figure: (1) as Creator, Lord of the history of
salvation, Father, and Judge, as revealed in the
Old Testament; (2) as the Lord who, in the incarnated figure of
Jesus Christ, lived among human beings and was present in their midst as the “Resurrected One”; and (3) as the Holy Spirit, whom they experienced as the helper or intercessor in the power of the new life.
Neither the word “Trinity” nor the explicit doctrine appears in the New Testament, nor did Jesus and his followers intend to contradict the Shema in the Hebrew Scriptures: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4). The earliest Christians, however, had to cope with the
implications of the coming of Jesus Christ and of the presumed presence and power of God among them—i.e., the
Holy Spirit, whose coming was connected with the celebration of
Pentecost. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were associated in such
New Testament passages as the Great Commission: “Go therefore and make
disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (
Matthew 28:19); and in the apostolic benediction: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:13). Thus, the New Testament established the basis for the doctrine of the Trinity.
TrinityThe Trinity, tempera and gold on parchment by Taddeo Crivelli, from a manuscript from 1460–70; in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. God the Father holds the crucified Christ, with the dove—as the Holy Spirit—between the two.J. Paul Getty Museum (object no. 2005.2.recto); digital image courtesy of the Getty's Open Content Program
The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies. Initially, both the requirements of
monotheism inherited from the Hebrew Scriptures and the implications of the need to interpret the biblical teaching to Greco-Roman religions seemed to demand that the divine in Christ as the Word, or
Logos, be interpreted as subordinate to the Supreme Being. An
alternative solution was to interpret Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three modes of the self-disclosure of the one God but not as distinct within the being of God itself. The first tendency recognized the distinctness among the three, but at the cost of their equality and hence of their unity (subordinationism). The second came to terms with their unity, but at the cost of their distinctness as “persons” (modalism). The high point of these conflicts was the so-called
Arian controversy in the early 4th century. In his interpretation of the idea of God,
Arius sought to maintain a formal understanding of the oneness of God. In defense of that oneness, he was obliged to dispute the sameness of essence of the Son and the Holy Spirit with God the Father. It was not until later in the 4th century that the distinctness of the three and their unity were brought together in a single orthodox doctrine of one essence and three persons.
The Council of Nicaea in 325 stated the crucial formula for that doctrine in its confession that the Son is “of the same substance [homoousios] as the Father,” even though it said very little about the Holy Spirit. Over the next half century,
St. Athanasius defended and refined the Nicene formula, and, by the end of the 4th century, under the leadership of
St. Basil of Caesarea,
St. Gregory of Nyssa, and
St. Gregory of Nazianzus (the Cappadocian Fathers), the doctrine of the Trinity took substantially the form it has maintained ever since. It is accepted in all of the historic confessions of
Christianity, even though the impact of the
Enlightenment decreased its importance in some traditions.