Anyone know when the early church "fathers" first unequivocally wrote of the Trinity? How about when they first unequivocally wrote of the Unitarian/Arian viewpoint? And when did one view versus the other first become an issue?
When did early church "fathers" first unequivocally write of Trinity?
by True North 21 Replies latest watchtower bible
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Double Edge
I can't specifically answer your question, but here's a great site that can help you research:
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Truth2Me
I was researching that myself recently and found this site :
http://www.angelfire.com/pa/greywlf/trinity.html (Scroll down to "Constantine, the Trinity Process Begins")
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Leolaia
True North.....That is a very tricky question to answer, as there were many conceptions of the Trinity in the second and third centuries and the Nicene Trinity of the fourth century was only one of these. It should be recalled that the Nicene Trinity was simply a formulation of concepts and terminology found politically acceptable at the Nicene Council; most of its conceptual ingrediants were far older. Earlier church fathers such as Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria expressed a Trinity doctrine, but not in the same language and same conception as agreed-upon at the Nicene Council. And other elements, such as the Son being declared to be God and the Son, Father, and Holy Spirit being named in triadic formulae, go back to the late first century. These elements appear to have their origin in liturgy, especially in doxologies and baptismal formulae.
Justin Martyr (A.D. 140-165), for instance, repeatedly declared the Son to be God (cf. Dialogue 36, 38, 58, 61, 124, 127; 1 Apology 61-63), specifically denied that the Son was a created angel (Dialogue 62), and expressed the origin of the Son as not through creation but through a begetting of God's own substance (1 Apology 22; Dialogue 6, 61, 129). Thus the Father and Son were not divided by substance: "For I stated that this power [i.e. the Son] was generated from the Father, by his power and will, but not by abcission, as if the substance of the Father were divided; as all other things, once they are divided and severed, are not the same as they were before the division. To illustrate this point, I cited the example of fires kindled from a fire; the enkindled fires are indeed distinct from the original fire which, though it ignites many other fires, still remains the same undiminished fire" (Dialogue 128). Justin thus believed in a co-equality and unity of the Son and Father, of both being of the same substance and undivided, but did not teach the co-eternity of the Son which was enshrined in the Nicene doctrine; for Justin, there was a point in time before creation when the Son was begotten. Justin also taught that the Son was assigned a second place, and the Holy Spirit a third, but did not explain how the three were related together (1 Apology 13, 60). This vague conception would have been considered heretical two centuries later, but it was an intermediate step in process of formulating a coherent doctrine.
I would say that the earliest theological expression that could be described as trinitarian can be found in the works of Athenagorus of Athens (A.D. 177):
"We are attended only by the knowledge of him who is truly God and of the Word that issues from him--a knowledge as to what is the unity of the Son with the Father, what is the communion of the Father with the Son, what is the Spirit, what is the unity of these powers--the Spirit, the Son, and the Father--and their diversity when thus united" (Legatio 12.3).
Athenagorus did not use such specialized terms as "trinity", "person", "substance," but articulated the central concept of the Trinity: the unity of the three but also their distinction (i.e. as distinct Persons) while being at the same time united. But he did not go as far as label the unity of the three as comprising God, though he did clearly say that the Son was God (Legato 30.6), the Holy Spirit was an "effluence" of God (10.4), and the uncreated Son as co-eternal with the Father: "I do not mean that he [the Son] was created, for since God is eternal Mind, he had the Logos within himself from the beginning, being eternally logical" (10.3).
In c. A.D. 180, Theophilis of Antioch expressed a similar view, of the Son and the Spirit being begotten eternally within God as his Mind and Word (Ad Autolycum 2.10, 2.22), a concept derived from Plato and Philo of Alexandria (which was also influential to Justin Martyr and even the author of the Gospel of John), and he was the first to use the word "trinity" (Gk. trias) to denote the unity of "God, his Word, and his Wisdom" (Ad Autolycum 2.15). Note that the unity of the three was itself not yet called "God". Irenaeus (c. A.D. 180-200) similarly taught that the Son was God (cf. Adversus Haereses 1.10.1, 2.13.8; Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, 43, 54, 96), and characterized the unity between the Son and Father in Johannine terms: the Father is in the Son and the Son is in the Father: "The immeasurable Father is measured in the Son; for the Son is the measure of the Father, since he contains the Father" (Adversus Haereses 4.4.2). The Son and Holy Spirit were also co-eternal and united with the Father, so that the Father "has always had at his side his Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit" (4.20.1). Irenaeus also for the first time expressed the unity of the Son and the Father as comprising God:
"Therefore the Father is Lord, and the Son is Lord, and the Father is God and the Son is God; for he who is born from God is God. And thus God (i.e. the Godhead) is shown to be one according to the essence of his being and power; but at the same time, as the administrator of the economy of our redemption, He is both Father and Son: since the Father of all is invisible and inaccessible to creatures, it is through the Son that those who are to approach God must have access to the Father" (Proof of the Apostolic Preaching, 47).
This declaration comes quite close to the later Trinity doctrine but note how the focus is only on the relationship between the Father and the Son. But Irenaeus also conceived of the Son and Spirit as having a more-or-less equal role in redemptive theology: "The Spirit prepares man for the Son of God, the Son leads man to the Father, the Father gives man immortality.... Thus God was revealed: for in all these ways God the Father is displayed: The Spirit works, the Son fulfills his ministry, the Father approves" (Adversus Haereses, 4.20.4-6).
I think Tertullian (A.D. 180-220) probably was the first to fully articulate a doctrine close to the later Trinity doctrine. He conceived of the generation of the Son and Spirit with God the Father before creation, and always being God:
"Before all things existed God was alone (ante omnia deus erat solus). He was himself his own universe, his own place, everything. He was alone in the sense that there was nothing external to him, nothing outside his own being. Yet even then he was not alone; for he had with him something which was part of his own being, namely, his Reason. For God is rational and Reason existed first with him, and from him extended to all things. That Reason is his own consciousness of himself. The Greeks call it Logos, which is the term we use for discourse..... God also had his Power, by which we said that God devised all things, and we would ascribe Spirit as its proper nature; and in Spirit, giving utterance, we should find Word; with Spirit, ordering and disposing all things, Reason; and over Spirit, achieving all things, Power. This, we have been taught, proceeds from God, begotten in this proceeding from God, and therefore called 'Son of God' and 'God' because of unity of nature. For God too is spirit. When a ray is projected from the sun, it is a portion of the whole; but the sun will be in the ray, because it is the sun's ray, nor is it a division of nature, but an extension. Spirit from Spirit, God from God, as light is lit from light. The source of the substance remains whole and undiminished even if you borrow many offshoots of its quality from it. Thus what has proceeded from God is God and God's Son, and both are one" (Adversus Praxean 5; Apologeticus 21.10-14).
In my opinion, this is probably thus far the clearest, most explicit description of the relationship and history of the Three within God. But the co-eternity of the Son with the Father was not always fully conceived; although Athenagorus described the Father as "eternally logical" and thus always having the Son at his side, Tertullian claimed that "there was a time when the Son was not" (Adversus Hermogenum 3.4), and described the Son's "nativity" as occurring when the Father first uttered his Word. The difference between the two concepts of begetting lay in two different understandings of the Greek word logos: as reason and logical thought (thus being analogous to Nous "Mind" and eternally part of God) or as spoken utterance (which occurs subsequently to rational thought). Depending on how the Logos was conceived, the Word existed either from eternity as God's reason or came into being when God uttered his first command, "Let there be light" (Adversus Praxean, 7). Since both meanings were part of the word logos, Tertullian conceived of both the eternity of the Word and his begetting as the Son at the moment of creation. The Watchtower Society, incidentally, fails to note this distinction when quoting from Tertullian. As for the unity of the Father and Son as being God and not two gods, please note the following statement:
"The Father and Son are two, and this not as a result of seperation of substance, but as a result of ordinance (dispositio), while we declare the Son indivisible and inseperable from the Father, another not in quality but in sequence, who, although he is called God when he is named by himself, yet does not for that reason make a duality of gods, but one God, by the very fact that he has to be called God as a result of his unity with the Father" (Adversus Praxean, 19).
Later on in the same work, Tertullian explains that the duality is not between two gods but between two persons (personae): "Thus there are two persons, two and at the same time inseparable. In fact, the whole of his teaching was this, that there are two inseparable" (22). As for the Holy Spirit, Tertullian declared that "the Spirit of God is God (esti spiritus dei deus)," but did not generate from the Father in quite the same way as the Son, for "the Spirit is the substance of the Word, and the Word is the activity of the Spirit, and the two are a unity (unum)" (Adversus Praxean, 26), and the "Spirit comes from no other source as from the Father through the Son" (4). Thus the Son mediates in the generation of the Spirit, and the relation between the three is not in the perfect symmetry we find in the later Nicene Trinity. But an explicit Trinity doctrine was indeed expressed by Tertullian:
"The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit ... are all of one (ex uno omnia), that is through unity of substance (per substantiae unitatem); while this still safeguards the mystery of the economy, which disposes the unity into a Trinity (trinitas), arranging in order the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, though these are three not in quality (status), but in degree, not in substance but in form, not in power but in manifestation (species); of one substance, one quality, one power, because God is one and from him those degrees and forms are assigned in the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. How they admit of plurality without division (numerum sine divisione) the following discussions will show" (Adversus Praxean, 2).
"[The heretics] assume that the plurality and distribution of the Trinity implies a division of the unity; but the truth is that the unity in deriving the Trinity from itself is not destroyed thereby, but dispensed. And so they make a to-do about our preaching of two or three gods, and claim that they are worshippers of One God: not seeing that a unity unreasonably contracted produces heresy, while a Trinity reasonably distributed constitutes the truth" (Adversus Praxean, 3)
"Everything that proceeds from anything must needs be another thing, but it is not therefore separate. When there is one other, there are two; when there is a third, there are three. The Spirit makes the third from God and the Son, as the fruit from the shoot is the third from the tree, the canal from the river is the third from the source, the point of focus of a ray third from the sun. But none of those is divorced from the origin from which it derives its own qualities. Thus the Trinity derives from the Father by continuous and connected steps; at it in no way impugns the monarchy while it preserves the reality of the economy" (Adversus Praxean, 8).
"So the close series of the Father in the Son and the Son in the Paraclete makes three who cohere (tres cohaerentes), the one attached to the other. And these three are one thing, not one person, in the sense in which it is said 'I and the Father are one' in respect of unity of substance, not singularity of number." (Adversus Praxean, 25)
"God willed to make a new revelation so that his unity might be believed in a new way, through the Son and Spirit; so that God, who had in the past been proclaimed through the Son and Spirit, without being thus understood, might now be openly recognized in his own proper names and persons" (Adversus Praxean, 31).
"For the Church is itself, properly and principally, the Spirit Himself, in whom there is a Trinity of one divinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He unites in one congregation that Church which the Lord said consists of three persons" (De pudicitia, 21).
Here we have a clear, unambiguous Trinity doctrine, but it is clearly distinct from the later Nicene Trinity, for Tertullian claims that "the Trinity derives from the Father by continuous and connected steps" (Adversus Praxeas, 8) while the Nicene Trinity claims that the three persons co-exist within the Godhead in perfect symmetry.
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Leolaia
Truth2Me: That webpage does not present the facts fairly or accurately. For instance, as my post above just demonstrated, the "Trinity Process" definitely did not begin with Constantine (!!).
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Leolaia
Let me put this early conception of the Trinity by Tertullian in simple terms. Those who criticize the Trinity as assuming three gods and lampoon it mathematically as 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 fail to understand what the doctrine is claiming. Addition makes the a priori assumption that what is being added is already divided. But Tertullian says there is no division within God; the Son is one with the Father. Rather the Son is extended from the Father, just as the Holy Spirit is extended as well. Imagine an amoeba. It is a single entity, all of the same organic substance. Then it extends forth two legs. There is no division and the extensions have the same substance as the rest of the amoeba. But at the same time, the two extensions are recognizable as parts of the amoeba and they each have a distinctive function. We can think of the same thing regarding our own body. Our arms are extensions that allow us to interact with the world in a certain way, by holding onto things, pressing on things, removing things, etc. Our legs are different extensions that have a different function, they allow the body to move from place to place, to dance, etc. Our arms and legs are equally parts of our body, they are just as much our "body" as any other body part, and they are not external to our body. No one would say that our arms and legs make up four different bodies! They are united in one body. This is the point Tertullian was making. God has eternally had both Power and Reason (Logos); these were always attributes of God. These are uncreated attributes but without an external universe, God and his attributes were all there was; there was nothing for his Power to act on and nothing for his Reason to produce. But it was when God created the universe that Power and Reason extended from the Father to interact with the external universe. Tertullian observed that the Gospel of John claimed that the Logos made all things, and according to Genesis, creation occurred through God's utterance. Thus the Logos was emitted from the Father, just as an utterance is emitted from one's mind, and it was this newly-begotten and extended Logos that also extended God's Power and created the universe. Thus the Holy Spirit was extended from the Father through the Son, and the Son was extended from the Father through his utterance. And once the world was created, the Holy Spirit and the Son remained the means through which the Father interacted with the world. Thus the Son was incarnated and revealed the Father. And it is through having the Spirit that Christians can "be in the Father". In no sense was there any division of substance in all of this.
As you can see, this conception draws heavily on Platonic philosophy but to be fair, the concept of the Logos in John and the Wisdom-derived conceptions of the Son in Colossians and Hebrews draw on such philosophy as well. Later trinitarian theology abandoned such a naturalistic and even anthropomorphic conception of the Trinity in favor of more abstract esoteric formulazations, but these later theologians were building on, tinkering with, and revising what Tertullian and Irenaeus had already conceptualized (e.g. by rejected generation at creation and positing eternal generation). To be sure, these formulations can be justly criticized as extrabiblical and even reinterpreting what NT writers meant. But misrepresenting the Trinity as equivalent to 1 + 1 + 1 = 3 is doing nothing more than setting up a straw man entirely irrelevant to the doctrine itself, as Tertullian deftly refuted this thinking 1,800 years ago!!
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ThiChi
Many of your viewpoints and quotes are open to interpretation by many Scholars and is not conclusive proof of the early dates you claim. You fail to mention that this formulation was not solidly established in the Christian?s statement of faith prior to the forth century (NCE vol. xiv, p 299.). Notwithstanding, many other quotes from the Nicene Fathers point to other views on Christ?s Divinity.
When I have time I will post these.
Trinitarians like to create the impression that for about three hundred years after the death of the apostles all was well. The Church held the true faith , apostasy was kept at bay, and heresies were held in check. This is the picture they paint for us, but an examination of their writings reveals the exact opposite. One can find a cornucopia of strange and mutually contradictory doctrines nestled among their writings. The seeds of every latent heresy were sown in the fertile furrows of their manuscripts.
We do not know exactly what the Nicene Fathers originally wrote, seeing the first autographs have been lost to history. We have only copies of copies. The manuscripts that we possess have been altered, reworked, amended, interpolated, redacts, rescinded, and outrightly forged. The Catholic Church is a past master at forging and "reworking" historical documents. The greatest forgery of all time (and believed genuine for centuries) was the so-called "Donation of Constantine." This was a product of the Catholic Church, as were the Isodorian Decretals and a host of other false documents. So it should not surprise us if these writings were "fixed up" by scribes "here a little, there a little," in order to bolster the Trinitarian concept.
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Leolaia
ThiChi.....True North was asking when the church fathers first expressed such a doctrine, not when it was "solidly established" as a creed which was of course much later. And it is absolutely true that other Ante-Nicene and Nicene Fathers had "other views" on Christ's deity.... I especially noted at the outset how complex the situation was, with many different trinitarian conceptions, and of course many other non-trinitarian conceptions as well. I nowhere implied that the views of the few Fathers I mentioned were generally held by Christians, and while the precise interpretation of the Fathers has been a matter of debate for hundreds of years, the samples I quoted show sufficiently that the views of Irenaeus, Tertullian, and others were intermediate in the developments that led to the later Trinity doctrine, and I hope I have given a fair, if not rough, characterization of them.
On second edit: I'm not sure if this is quite what you mean, but viewing the whole lot of Ante-Nicene and Nicene literature as hopelessly forged is a highly extreme position and a rather untenable one in my opinion. Why forge writings from esteemed Fathers that would be considered practically heretical in the fourth century....why not put current Nicene doctrine in their mouths? Why make them teach mongrel, proto-Trinitarian doctrine that reeks of monarchism and other heresies? Why not make earlier writers like Justin Martyr at least use terms like "trinity" and "person"? While some interpolation and forgery is possible and even likely, one would have to invalidate a vast body of literature covering at least two centuries involving many different writers, expressing their own distinctive, individual points of view, in order to maintain that the Trinity doctrine of the fourth century was not preceded by a long period of gradual theological development, and was foisted on Christianity at a late date. It's not just a matter of "here a little, there a little". What a terrible job of forgery they did anyway -- they couldn't even put the Nicene creed or a similar formulation in these purportedly early works at all! And that runs counter to the normal development of religious doctrines; ideas like that do not suddenly come out of nowhere and take hold. I see no reason to throw out the window 250 years of theological history on the account of a few forged works of the fourth and fifth centuries.....where there's smoke there's usually fire.... And all autographs to all writings have been lost to history....everything is copies of copies, and so the Ante-Nicene writings are not different in this regard from any other ancient writing.
And while some modern trinitarians may claim that "all was well" and the apostolic teaching continued unchanged, this is not at all what we find in the Ante-Nicene writings which attest a gradual change in doctrine as orthodox Christians attempted to define and redefine their faith and assert their belief as "truth" in the face of competing christologies and theologies from Gnostics, Jews, and even fellow orthodox. They attest just the sort of drift and doctrinal change which you argue took place.
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Yerusalyim
It's hard to nail down when "Trinitarian" formats began...but the earliest church Fathers had a high chistiology early on...in other words...many or most of the early Church Fathers thought of Jesus as Son of God and God.
Here's an example from the Didache:
We thank Thee, holy Father, for Thy holy name which You didst cause to tabernacle in our hearts, and for the knowledge and faith and immortality, which You modest known to us through Jesus Thy Servant; to Thee be the glory for ever. Thou, Master almighty, didst create all things for Thy name's sake; You gavest food and drink to men for enjoyment, that they might give thanks to Thee; but to us You didst freely give spiritual food and drink and life eternal through Thy Servant. Before all things we thank Thee that You are mighty; to Thee be the glory for ever. Remember, Lord, Thy Church, to deliver it from all evil and to make it perfect in Thy love, and gather it from the four winds, sanctified for Thy kingdom which Thou have prepared for it; for Thine is the power and the glory for ever. Let grace come, and let this world pass away. Hosanna to the God (Son) of David! If any one is holy, let him come; if any one is not so, let him repent. Maranatha. Amen.
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Narkissos
What strikes me in the earliest "trinity" discussions is that they mostly refer to unpersonal, even abstract notions such as the logos ("word" or "ratio"), sophia ("wisdom") or even pneuma ("spirit"). Of course there is personification, but only something unpersonal can be personified -- a person cannot. The only person distinguished and related to God the Father is the man Jesus Christ which can be described as something (logos, sophia or pneuma) incarnate. There is no mention of three preexisting persons (and this suits very well Leolaia's illustration of arms and legs, which are not persons). The big shift IMO is when philosophical thinking gets back to mythological thinking and there suddenly are three co-eternal and co-equal persons in the one deity. In theological words, when an ontological trinity is inferred from the economical trinity implying the man Jesus. This ontological trinity is correlative to the two-natures christology (where God the Son and the man Jesus are distinguished) and AFAIK it seems to be a 4th-century development.