Noun

Wikipedia

Singular trinity

Plural trinities

trinity (plural trinities)

1. A group or set of three people or things; triad; trio; trine.
2. The state of being three; threeness.
3. (Christianity) In Christian belief, the three persons (personae) of the Godhead: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Synonyms

• triad, trio, trine
• threeness

Derived terms

• nontrinitarian
• nontrinitarianism
• trinitarian

Related terms

• three
• triad
• triple
• entity
• duality
• trinity

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity teaches the unity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three persons in one Godhead. The concept of personhood in the Trinity does not match the common Western understanding of "person" as used in the English language—it does not imply an "individual, self-actualized center of free will and conscious activity." To the ancients, personhood "was in some sense individual, but always in community as well." The doctrine states that God is the Triune God, existing as three persons, or in the Greek hypostases, but one being. Each of the persons is understood as having the one identical essence or nature, not merely similar natures. Since the beginning of the third century the doctrine of the Trinity has been stated as "the one God exists in three Persons and one substance, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." Trinitarianism, belief in the Trinity, is a mark of Oriental and Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism and all the mainstream traditions arising from the Protestant Reformation, such as Anglicanism, Methodism, Lutheranism and Presbyterianism. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church describes the Trinity as "the central dogma of Christian theology".

This doctrine is in contrast to Nontrinitarian positions which include Binitarianism (one deity/two persons), Unitarianism (one deity/one person), the Oneness belief held by certain Pentecostal groups, Modalism, and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' view of the Godhead as three separate beings who are one in purpose rather than essence.

The New Testament does not have a formal doctrine of the Trinity and nowhere discusses the Trinity as such. However, Southern Baptist Theologian Frank Stagg emphasizes that the New Testament does repeatedly speak of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—in such a way as to "compel a trinitarian understanding of God." The doctrine developed from the biblical language used in New Testament passages such as the baptismal formula in Matthew 28:19 and took substantially its present form by the end of the 4th century as a result of controversies in which some theologians, when speaking of God, used terms such as "person", "nature", "essence", "substance", terms that had never been used by the Apostolic Fathers, in a way that the Church authorities considered to be erroneous.

Some deny that the doctrine that developed in the fourth century was based on Christian ideas, and hold instead that it was a deviation from Early Christian teaching on the nature of God or even that it was borrowed from a pre-Christian conception of a divine trinity held by Plato.