IB World Religions 3.1.1. the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Logos Notes

3.1.1. The Trinity, the Incarnation and the Logos

One God in three persons

1. Christians describe God as Trinity, one God who exists as three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
2. They present this as a form of monotheism rather than an exception to it. The claim is one God in three persons, not three gods, and not one God appearing under three names in turn.
3. The technical vocabulary settled on one ousia (being or substance) and three hypostases (persons), so the three are distinguished by their relations to one another rather than by being separate beings.
4. The persons are held to be co-equal and co-eternal, which rules out reading the Son or the Spirit as a later or lesser addition to a God who was previously alone.
5. The word Trinity appears nowhere in the Bible. Christians derive it from passages that name the three together, such as the baptism of Jesus and the closing command of Matthew 28.
6. The doctrine is confessed rather than explained. Most churches call it a mystery, meaning something they hold to be true while denying that human language can capture it fully.

Settling the language

1. The wording took four centuries to settle, and it settled through argument about how the Son stands in relation to the Father.
2. Arius, a priest of Alexandria in the early fourth century, taught that the Son was the highest of all created beings and that there was a time when he did not exist.
3. The Council of Nicaea in 325 rejected that, describing the Son as homoousios (of one substance) with the Father, begotten and not made.
4. Athanasius defended the wording for decades, arguing that only God could accomplish what Christians already claimed Jesus had accomplished.
5. The Council of Constantinople in 381 completed the account by affirming the divinity of the Holy Spirit, producing the creed most churches still recite.
6. The Nicene Creed is therefore a living liturgical text and not only a historical document, said aloud in Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican and many Protestant services.

The Logos in John

1. The opening of the Gospel of John supplies the densest statement in the New Testament: in the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God.
2. Logos is Greek for word, and also for reason or ordering principle, so the term already carried philosophical weight for John's Greek speaking readers.
3. Jewish readers heard something else in it, the creative word of Genesis 1 by which God speaks the world into being, and the personified Wisdom of the Hebrew scriptures.
4. The passage then moves from cosmology to a person. All things were made through him, John writes, and the Word became flesh and lived among us.
5. Christians use Logos to name the eternal Son considered as God's self-expression, which is why they say the Son and not the Father is the one who becomes incarnate.
6. Early apologists such as Justin Martyr argued that whatever truth Greek philosophy had reached came from the same Logos, and Christians still use that argument in interfaith discussion.

Incarnation and the two natures

1. Incarnation means enfleshing, and Christians use it for the claim that God the Son took up a complete human life in Jesus of Nazareth.
2. The claim is not that God merely appeared human, nor that God entered a human being temporarily. Christians hold that the Son became human without ceasing to be God.
3. The Council of Chalcedon in 451 fixed the standard formula, one person in two natures, fully divine and fully human, without confusion, change, division or separation.
4. Philippians 2 supplies the language of kenosis (self emptying), describing Christ as not clinging to equality with God but taking the form of a servant.
5. The Virgin Birth, confessed in the creeds and narrated in Matthew and Luke, is where most churches locate the beginning of that human life.
6. Christians read the doctrine as a statement about God's character. A God who takes on a body is being described as willing to share the conditions of the creatures he made.

Where Christians differ

1. These doctrines are shared very widely, and the disagreements concern wording, emphasis and one clause in particular.
2. The filioque clause, added in the Latin West, has the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son. Eastern Orthodox churches reject it as an unauthorized addition and it remains contested since the schism of 1054.
3. Oriental Orthodox churches, among them the Coptic, Armenian and Ethiopian, describe Christ in one united nature from two, a position called miaphysite. Recent dialogues have concluded that much of the old dispute was about terminology.
4. Some liberal Protestant theologians read the Incarnation functionally, saying that God acted decisively in Jesus, while others in the same denominations hold the traditional metaphysical claim.
5. Unitarian churches and Jehovah's Witnesses reject the Trinity outright, and Latter-day Saints hold the three to be distinct beings united in purpose, so all three stand outside the Nicene consensus.
6. Because the Nicene Creed works as the boundary marker, most churches judge one another's place in the Christian mainstream by whether that creed is confessed.

The doctrines in practice

1. The Trinity is met in worship far more often than in argument, and most Christians learn it by repetition rather than by study.
2. Baptism uses the formula from Matthew 28, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, in every major denomination.
3. Catholic and Orthodox Christians trace the sign of the cross while saying those words, so the doctrine is marked on the body several times a day.
4. Prayer is normally offered to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit, which builds the shape of the doctrine into the grammar of collects and liturgies.
5. Trinity Sunday falls a week after Pentecost, and the Gloria Patri closes psalms and daily offices with glory to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
6. The Incarnation has its own season in Christmas and the nativity scene, while Andrei Rublev's icon of the three visitors at Abraham's table is Orthodoxy's best known image of the Trinity.