The Evolution of God, Part II
The Development of The Trinity
(This is the second post in a series on the Evolution of the God. Part one analyzed the emergence of Jewish monotheism from Canaanite polytheism. This post analyzes the emergence of the Holy Trinity from Jewish monotheism. The post does not suggest that God Himself evolves, but that the human understanding of Him does.)
“We believe in one God the Father…one Lord Jesus Christ…and the Holy Spirit.” Do these words from the fourth century Nicene Creed describe one single God or three separate Gods? Christian theologians reject the suggestion that the Trinity is in any way polytheistic. Much of the jargon describing the Holy Trinity as “one God” is specifically written to counter accusations of polytheism. Yet popularly, many Christians see the Holy Trinity as three separate Gods and find it difficult to conceptualize it in any other way. In this post, I will argue that culturally (if not theologically), the Holy Trinity represents a mystical fusion of monotheism and polytheism and combines the best of both views. I will then discuss how 4th century Trinitarian theology gradually emerged out of the chaos of first century philosophies and religious ideas.
Polytheistic Immanence vs Monotheistic Transcendence
Both monotheism and polytheism have certain advantages and disadvantages. A polytheistic belief in many gods scattered throughout creation allows people to experience divine immanence within an “enchanted world,” as philosopher Charles Taylor has called it. Polytheistic peoples are untroubled by the oppressive idealism and judgmental guilt associated with monotheism. The gods are fickle and humans are subject to their arbitrary whims. The world is animated with divine but inscrutable meaning. The disadvantage of polytheistic beliefs is that it cannot create a unifying understanding, ideal, or goal within the diverse and divided world. Thus polytheistic peoples experience relatively little progress. Monotheism on the other hand posits a single God: universal, absolute, and transcendent. This belief enables monotheistic religions to pursue moral absolutes and ideals. These ideals become the motor for human progress. The drawback of monotheism is that it can become oppressively totalitarian in its pursuit of moral universality.
The emergence of the idea of a Holy Trinity enabled Christians to experience both monotheistic transcendence and polytheistic immanence. A single deity divided into three persons can reign supreme in the realm of abstract ideals while also taking on human flesh in the form of the suffering and dying Christ. This division allows an all-powerful monotheistic deity to be experienced as empathetic and intimate. Additionally, the third member of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, is distributed throughout creation, acting as a “comforter” that can dwell within the human heart. This limited form of polytheism allows human beings to continue to experience enchantment and participation with the divine while retaining universal morals, ideals, and goals as a collective society. (I don’t mean to suggest that Christianity is the only way that the fusion of immanence and transcendence can occur. I would however like to suggest that Christianity’s blend is particularly unique and culturally transformative.)
The First Century: The Hellenistic World
The beliefs that led to the formation of the Holy Trinity first emerged during the Hellenistic period of the first century: a melting pot monotheistic and polytheistic religious beliefs. In the chart above, I’ve illustrated the period with four bubbles representing four major Hellenistic worldviews: Apocalyptic Judaism, Rabbinic Judaism, Middle Platonism, and Gnosticism. The bubbles are color coded in shades from red to blue, illustrating their respective monotheistic (red) vs. polytheistic (blue) outlooks. For example, Apocalyptic Judaism was fiercely monotheistic (red), while Gnosticism (blue) was unapologetically polytheistic. In between, the Middle Platonist philosophers believed in one main God, but that there was also a second God, called Logos. Rabbinical Judaism was monotheistic but had begun to hypothesize various emanations coming from the divine, constituting lower forms of divinity such as “Wisdom,” “Word,” or “Spirit.”
After Jesus Christ was crucified, stories about his death and resurrection spread to the four groups, each of which had radically different ways of interpreting the stories. Apocalyptic Jews saw Jesus as a prophet or Messiah. When they confessed his divinity, it was usually a divinity that had been bestowed on him by God either at the time of his resurrection, his baptism or his virgin birth. The Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke/Acts) emerged largely from this Apocalyptic Jewish tradition. Jews fluent in the Rabbinical literature sometimes saw Jesus as the embodiment of God’s “Wisdom” or “Spirit.” There is evidence of Rabbinical influence in both the writings of the Apostle Paul as well as the Synoptic Gospels.
Christian Platonists interpreted Jesus as a pre-existent “Logos” or “Word.” This belief was influenced by the writings of a Jewish Platonist named Philo of Alexandria, who argued that Judaism was compatible with Plato’s philosophy. This belief influenced the author of the Gospel of John, which specifically refers to Jesus as the “Word (logos in Greek) made flesh.” The Gospel of John also emerged from a culture saturated in gnostic influences. While the Gospel of John is not gnostic per se, John was articulating his own version of Christianity within this culture and drawing both comparisons and distinctions. April de Connick has done interesting work on the gnostic influence in the Gospel of John here.
Each of the four bubbles in my chart are oriented on an upward slant to suggest that there was a chronological progression in the Hellenistic beliefs about Jesus Christ’s divinity. The progression begins with the Jewish Apocalpyticists, who saw Christ as a Messianic figure operating within a purely monotheistic cosmology. This view evolved by degrees into a more polytheistic and gnostic vision which saw Christ as a good God flighting other evil gods. The clearest example of this progression is the dating of the Synoptic Gospels, which were written sometime after 66AD, and the dating of the Gospel of John which was written sometime after AD90. Given the stark difference between the content of the Gospel of John and the Synoptic Gospels, most historians consider the Gospel of John to be a theological meditation on Christ as the divine Logos, influenced by the platonic and gnostic cultures of its day. On the other hand, they consider the Synoptics to present a more accurate version of the historic figure of Christ and his teachings. The study of this evolving perspective on Christ is called christology and was the subject of a landmark book by James Dunn called Christology in the Making. Dunn had this to say about christology during the first century:
It is a very striking fact that when we set out the New Testament traditions and documents on the best chronological scale available to us a clear development in first-century christology can be traced: where in the beginning the dominant (and only) conception was of an eschatological sonship, already enjoyed by Jesus during his ministry but greatly enhanced by his resurrection, at the end of the first century a clear concept of pre-existent divine sonship has emerged, to become the dominant (and often the only) emphasis in subsequent centuries.
James G. D. Dunn
The Second and Third Century: Irenaeus and the Trinitarian Fathers
In spite of the progression from monotheistic to polytheistic views about Christ and his relationship with God, by the time we reach the second century, the Christian movement was swarming with dozens of sects spanning the entire spectrum of belief. A Christian writer named Irenaeus developed a standard by which to judge these different sects and limited the canon to just four gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. By including the Gospel of John in his canon, Irenaeus authorized John’s “high christology” which interpreted Christ as the pre-existent Logos. Theologians going forward would now interpret the earlier gospels Matthew, Mark, and Luke according to the christology written in the Gospel of John, reinterpreting phrases such as the Gospel of Matthew’s “Son of God” to refer to the literal incarnation of a pre-existent God, rather than Matthew’s original conception of Jesus as the “Son of God” in an adoptionist sense. Irenaeus also began systematically attacking beliefs he saw as heresies. These heresies all have the distinction of being either too monotheistic or too polytheistic. Heresy #1, the Judiazers, were rejected because they were too monotheistic and did not accept Christ’s divinity. Heresy #2, the Gnostics, were too polytheistic, retaining a complicated mythology of many gods.
Later in the 2nd century, three important Christian philosophers built upon Irenaeus’s limited orthodoxy to create proto-versions of the Trinity. Justin Martyr (100–165AD) merged Philo’s Jewish Platonism with John’s Gospel to create a uniquely Christian Logos Theology. According to Justin Martyr, Jesus had been created at the beginning of time by God as the “Logos.” Origen (185–253AD) built on Justin Martyr’s ideas, suggesting that Christ had indeed been pre-existent with God, but that He not been created at a specific time and place, rather being “eternally begotten.” Tertullian (155–220AD) then introduced the word “Trinity” and suggested it was a godhead made up of three separate persons.
Each of these church fathers refined the Platonic model of Christ which had first been suggested in the Gospel of John and the writings of Philo of Alexandria. However, each one of them saw the members of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as separate Gods in and of themselves. This polytheistic perspective created a monotheistic backlash by group of theologians called “modalists.”
The Third and Fourth Centuries: Arians vs Modalists
Modalists taught that there was only one God, but that from time to time he claimed different titles or “modes,” sometimes acting as Father, sometimes as Son, and sometimes as Holy Spirit. Shortly thereafter, another group of theologians called Arians claimed that the three members of the Trinity were wholly distinct from each other, and that Christ was not an eternal God, but had been created by the Father, making Arianism distinctly polytheistic. Both these groups of theologians were soon to become heretics. (In the chart above I’ve labeled Arians and modalists Heresy #3 and #4, and placed them on the respective polytheistic or monotheistic sides of the chart.)
In 325 Emperor Constantine convened a council at Nicaea to clear up the disagreements. The Nicene Creed represents a compromise between the modalists and the Arians. It suggests that the Trinity, in some mysterious way, is neither three separate Gods, nor one Single God. Rather, the Trinity consists of three persons in one God. (In reality the Council of Nicaea was primarily a debate between Arians and what would become the Orthodox. The modalists had been excommunicated decades before. Nevertheless, objections to the modalist view survived in the Nicene Creed, notably the phrase “God from God,” which was language Tertullian had used to attack the modalists.)
To get an idea of just how subtle the arguments at the Council of Nicaea actually were, consider the debate the council had over the interpretation of the word essence. Council members wanted to say that Christ had the same essence as the Father. However, in Greek, the word essence (homoousios) can be modified by a single letter to change its meaning to similar essence (homoiousios). A vital difference between heretical Arians and the orthodox view boiled down to this single Greek letter.
The Nicene Creed at the Crossroads of the West
It’s impossible to overstate the importance of the Council of Nicaea in the history of the West. Before Nicaea, beliefs about the divine had been in a state of constant flux. Myths about the gods evolved and devolved in a syncretic fashion (See The Evolution of God Part 1). Emperors had a promiscuous relationship with their gods, throwing off one for another according to political necessity. Early Christian and Jewish beliefs vacillated wildly in their interpretations of sacred texts. Nicaea changed all that. Today, Catholics, Orthodox, and most mainline Protestants still recite the Nicene Creed almost exactly as it was written in the 4th century. This religious unity has had profound implications for the development of the West. Nicaea set the precedent for the Western project of centralized scientific, judicial, and political institutions. The hair splitting theological debates at Nicaea were not unlike those of Enlightenment scientists attempting to pare down their theories to their parsimonious essentials.
The Council of Nicaea also represents the beginning of a new relationship between church and state, a relationship that would come to have important implications for Western political development. Emperor Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea without any ecclesiastical authority to do so. But even without religious authority, his political authority as emperor gave him a certain degree of ambiguous power over the proceedings. We can be grateful that Constantine was deferential to the authority of the church during the Council (although he did weigh in to suggest compromises during the debates). His deference set a precedent for state leaders going forward and was later codified in a document called “The Donation of Constantine” (later discovered to have been a forgery, but which nevertheless reflected Constantine’s deference to the church’s ecclesiastical authority.) The independence of the church from the state would eventually evolve into our modern notion of the “separation of powers,” a central principle of good governance today.
Above all, the Holy Trinity constituted a mystical fusion of polytheism with monotheism, giving the West its unique blend of transcendent and immanent religious beliefs. The figure of the divine Christ, walking among men on earth, humanizes and softens the idealism inherent in a monotheistic deity. The Trinity invites believers to balance the Father’s idealism for His creation with the Son’s empathy for individuals within that creation. This balance can be seen in modern political institutions wherein the good of the whole is balanced against the good of the individual (universal rights vs. individual rights). While a perfect balance between these two perspectives is impossible, our modern-day political attempts are reflected in the ancient attempt the Nicene church fathers first made trying to conceptualize the Father and the Son as a single unit.
Finally, the Council of Nicaea illustrates the importance of the principle of compromise. The compromise embodied by the Holy Trinity is facilitated by the notion of “mystery.” The church fathers recognized that both Arianism and modalism were mutually exclusive and incompatible. But they also recognized that both sides had elements of the truth which had to be reconciled. By suggesting that the Trinity is “a mystery,” they created a space where both Arianism and modalism could be harmoniously accommodated, as long as neither side categorically rejected the other. This commitment to compromise is not the wishy-washy “have your cake and eat it too,” kind of thing that compromise is often portrayed to be. Rather this compromise represents the acknowledgment that paradoxes and contradictions are built into the fabric of reality. It’s a principal Aristotle had articulated with his theory of the Golden Mean. Aristotle noted that virtues like courage could never be maximized into absolute ideals. Courage extended too far becomes “fool-hardiness,” and courage diluted too much becomes “cowardice.” All virtues have this characteristic. They cannot be maximized. The threat of a purely monotheistic worldview is that God will demand that virtues be maximized in the pursuit of perfection. And every virtue taken too far becomes a vice.
The Council of Nicaea and its resultant Holy Trinity represent a historic cultural and religious crossroads, the central balance point upon which the entire West has been built, and upon which we are still perched, struggling mightily not to crash back into either monotheistic totalitarianism or polytheistic amorality.
