Some of you are probably wondering what exactly a person learns at seminary. Last night we spent a great deal of time discussing the trinity during History of Christian Thought and Practice. I want to share a bit with you:
The first person to really give us the language for discussing the trinity was
Tertullian at the turn of the third century. He used the word trinitas in his writing “Against Praxaeus”. In short: he developed the idea of three persons possessing one substance.
Growing up in the church I never really had a great deal of clarity about the claim of trinity and I suspect many other people in the church don’t know much about where this ideology comes from.
From where does this all come? The western church (Rome and Carthage) focused on the “oneness” of God and the Eastern Church (Jeruselem, Antioch, Alexandria) focused on the “three-ness” of God. Especially in the Western Church there was a great movement to preserve the one-ness of God and this was called Monarchianism.
One school of thought was called “modalistic monarchianism” that God ‘changed modes’ or ‘wore different hats depending on who / what God needed to be. People with this ideology believed that Jesus was just “God the father” in disguise. The other school of thought was called “dynamic monarchianism” which argued that Jesus was simply human, not divine, and God “adopted” Jesus because he was the first perfect human being. This ideology suggested that Jesus provided salvation to the world by providing an example. These both came to be regarded as heresy by the early church, by the way.
These might seem a little ‘out there’, but Dr. Papandrea reminded our class that we see examples of the modalistic monarchianist heresy in the United Methodist Church when we use creeds that replace the language of the trinity with “Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer”. In this language we assume that God ‘changes roles’. Dr. Papandrea also reminded us that Jesus was a creator, the Old Testament saw Yahweh as one who saves, etc. In other words, God transcends all of these typologies and labels.
I have a lot of trouble personally reconciling the trinity. I have not yet processed my understanding of the trinity, but this lecture helped me immensely in understanding how the early church understood the trinity.
