Evolution of the Trinity – with Bill Schlegel

Back in March of 2020 the One God Report Podcast‘s Bill Schlegel interviewed me about the evolution of mainstream catholic theologies regarding the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You can listen to both parts here:

Here is roughly the same narrative, in short, written form:

First there is speculation about the pre-existence of Jesus, from multiple quarters and for multiple reasons.

Then, there are full-blown Logos theories (around 150), on which the Logos is a second and lesser god, not the one true God himself. These are opposed (late 2nd century on) by “monarchians” – mainstream Christians who objected to Logos theorists’ claims that there are two gods and two creators. Their slogan was “we uphold the monarchy” – the rule of the one God, the Father.

Those whom modern scholars call “modalistic monarchians” seem to have either collapsed the Father and the Son into the same being, or to have construed both of those as mere modes of the one God. The “dynamic monarchians” considered the Logos to be not a god at all, not a being distinct from the Father, but a power or an exercise of a power of God (aka “the Father”) which was in the man Jesus.

This was the scene as of the early 200s, and we see all three types also in the fourth century. But as time went on, the increasingly dominant one-bishop network favored the Logos theory approach, which was endorsed by leading lights like Tertullian and Origen. These two held to a disastrous christology on which in addition to the Logos there is a man in the composite Christ – two selves, a divine one and a human one, appearing as one! Others held to the arguably docetic view that the Logos replaced the human/rational soul, uniting only with a human body (or body plus “animal soul”.)

At first the so-called “Arian” controversy was between older and newer styles of subordinationism, with the Nicene side having stronger ideas about the “divinity” of the Logos, his similarities to God. But as the controversy wore on, the Nicenes constantly had the objection hurled at them that they were unwitting tritheists – after all, they posited three beings/individual things (hypostases) each of which had the divine essence (that because of which the owner is a god). Yeah, that looks like three gods! They would often argue that there is only one god here because there’s only one divine nature or essence – an obviously ineffective reply if the divine nature is supposed to be a universal, a property which can be wholly present in multiple things at once! Basil of Caesarea died without ever giving a good answer to that objection.

But eventually his younger colleagues the Gregories hit on the idea that it was the divine essence (nature) which is the one God – the tripersonal God which “is” each of the “Persons.” (The Greek word ousia could mean an individual being as opposed to a defining essence.) This vague and confusing idea (seen a little earlier in a late work by Athanasius) was made mandatory by the “ecumenical” council of 381 which was pushed and presided over, and then enforced by the emperor Theodosius.

Ever since, Christians have struggled with the meaning of the puzzling Nicene formulas and the new language of the one God as “the Trinity” which we see arising around the same time. I talk about this transition in this recent published paper.

Is there “pagan,” Greek philosophical influence here? Yes – on the Logos theorists, with their transcendent triad of the ultimate source (God) and two lesser principles that emanate from him, and through which he interacts with the cosmos, not being able to do it directly. This mirrors triadic cosmologies found in the “Middle” and “Neo”-Platonists of the 1st-3rd centuries.

But I have not ever endorsed any simple outside corruption theory, the pollution of “pure” Hebraic thought by alien, pagan ideas. It is not true, as some discredited 19th c. sources allege, that the Trinity is a common pagan idea that just infected catholic Christianity. Rather, in my view, the mainstream went off course on its own accord by various steps as above, yes, making use of some current ideas from Platonic and other philosophies. And even in the first century, all Jewish thought was Hellenized – influenced by the Greeks – to some degree. Note the original language of the New Testament books – Greek!