The Holy Trinity

The basis for the doctrine of the Trinity

 
 The central Christian affirmations about God are condensed and focused in the classic
 doctrine of the Trinity, which has its ultimate foundation in the special religious
 experience of the Christians in the first communities. This basis of experience is older
 than the doctrine of the Trinity. It consisted of 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 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 power of the new life, the miraculous potency of the Kingdom of God. The question as to how to reconcile the encounter with God in this threefold figure with faith in the oneness of
 God, which was the Jews' and Christians' characteristic mark of distinction from
 paganism, agitated the piety of ancient Christendom in the deepest way. In the course
 of history, it also provided the strongest impetus for a speculative theology, which
 inspired Western metaphysics for many centuries. In the first two centuries of the
 Christian Era, however, a series of different answers to this question stood in
 juxtaposition. At first none of the Christian theologians had considered them
 speculatively.

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