The Apostles understood the Trinity

Faith & Science Conversation
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I approach this topic with caution and humility. I may be wrong, but I have come to believe that the modern Church does not seem to understand the Trinity as the Apostles clearly did.

One God and three persons is true, but I believe the Trinity was not meant to seem paradoxical.

On the contrary, I think the Apostles who walked with Jesus, spoke of it as if it was something one could reasonably understand. And the word “trinity” does not appear in scripture for this reason; there was little confusion about the subject and thus no need for special definitions.

Further, the culprit to the current lack of understanding about the trinity is the inclusion of pagan Greek philosophy into the church, partly by Augustine, and at the ultimate cost of the Great Schism, though that is a broader topic for another time.

I think we can understand the Trinity if we listen to the apostles and Jesus. Here is what they say about the trinity:

1 Corinthians 2:11

“For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.”

In this verse Paul directly compares the human spirit to the Spirit of God. What if this is just as straightforward as it sounds? Jesus backs this up:

Mark 13:32

“But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”

Jesus is explicitly saying here that he does not know the inner thoughts of God. Why is this? John understood well. Jesus God’s Word. The Word of God does not know that which God has not yet spoken.

John 1:1-3:

”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.”

The Word. (Logos. Logic, Information) That is not an honorary title for Jesus, it is a description. Jesus is all that which God speaks. In this way, he is begotten of God, in the same way your words are begotten of you. Except that your words are dead, whereas Jesus is alive.

This is a key point. Jesus is the Word of the Father, and it is through his Word that the Father creates and reveals himself.

Psalm 33:9

“For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm”

Romans 1:20

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse”

Hebrews 11:3

“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible”

Jesus is the only “begotten” Son of God because he IS the words of God in their totality: “without him nothing was made that has been made.”

Colossians 1:15

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation”

Jesus is God since he is God’s word. He does what God would want. They are perfectly aligned as your words are (usually) aligned with you. As Jesus says:

John 8:28

“I do nothing on my own authority, but speak just as the Father taught me”

John 10:30

I and the Father are one.

And so, we come to an understanding of the Trinity that even a child could understand.

  1. God the Father is God.
  2. God the Spirit is God’s Spirit.
  3. God the Son is God’s Word.

We are created in God’s image. We can understand this.

  1. We have a mind and body.
  2. We have a spirit within us that knows our own mind (sort of).
  3. We speak and act in the world, and by this we are known to others. It is our “word”.

The confusing part perhaps is that God’s Word is a person, whereas our word is not. Our own subconscious has a sort of mind of its own, however, so we can intuit the personhood of the Father and the Spirit.

But as for our words, I think we can understand this better now, in the age of AI, that words and information, need not be static and dead. Even by our merely human power to build and program computers, code (logos) and words can take on a sort of life of their own.

How much more then must the words of God be truly Alive, and in being alive have their own personhood, that being the person of Jesus, the Word:

John 1: 4-5:

In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

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While I don’t think they possessed a fully conscious or developed understanding of the Trinity, I do think that—at the very least—after the Resurrection they believed Jesus was God: distinct from the Father, yet not a ‘different’ God, much less an inferior one. In other words: they had a fundamental grasp of the Trinitarian and relational nature of the one God, even if they lacked the theological framework and precise language to articulate it.

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I appreciate the reply! You hit on a key point: did the Apostles have a ‘primitive’ grasp or did we confound their meaning with “human wisdom”?

I would argue that the ‘precise language’ developed later at Nicaea didn’t clarify the Trinity; it actually introduced the pagan Greek Error of ‘Substance’ (Ousia).

By defining God as a ‘Substance’, we validated the idea of a world made of ‘Independent Matter.’ This is the source of the very “Materialist Death Cult” I saw you mention elsewhere.

The Apostles didn’t need the word ‘Consubstantial’ because they understood the Logos. If Jesus is the Word of the Father, He is ‘One’ with the Father by nature and ‘True God,’ yet the Father remains ‘Greater’ as the Source, the speaker of the Word.

Consider what it would mean if the ‘development’ of doctrine was actually a confounding of what the Apostles already knew? We failed (and still fail) to heed the warning:

Colossians 2:8

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ”