I’ve said before that the term “Trinity” is itself a rather unhelpful term in describing God without further explanation. Though the doctrine fully expounded is entirely correct (there, I don’t want anyone accusing me of being a modalist now), the term taken as it is in mainstream Christianity can – and does – lead to misconstructions of the nature of God.

First, as was discussed in The Nature of Christ, Christ is to be seen as “Eternally begotten” of the Father in the sense that a word is begotten of its speaker, according to Justin Martyr. Christ is preexistent and eternal in the sense that the Word of God is preexistent and eternal (John 1).

However, popular Trinitarian doctrine, especially seizing on the Athenasian terms “coequal” and “coeternal”, has turned this into a dramatic misrepresentation of who God is, and its alleged sacrosanctity effectively stifles discussion of the issue that characterizes most other inferential doctrines. The assumption that God’s threeness is as sacred as His oneness is a dangerous (and often anti-intellectual, as such a contradictory approach usually comes with the explanation “you’ll never understand it”) interpretation. The oneness of God is sacred (Deuteronomy 6:4, the Shema); the threeness of God is incidental to His redemptive work in the world (Matthew 28:19-20, the Great Commission). Now before the Modalist accusations come, let me say that God acts through three persons of the Trinity simultaneously in the world. It would be irresponsible exegesis to say that God shifts from one person to another throughout history, as the Sequential Modalists do. But it is also an improper reading of the entire Old Testament to say that the persons of the Trinity are essentially separate and act independently of one another.

The idea of the separateness and independence of the persons of the Trinity have been particularly insidious in creeping into the Church unquestioned. Christ is certainly divine as can be seen throughout each of the gospels and Paul’s epistles. But it is not a divinity apart from the Father. Likewise with the Holy Spirit: His divinity proceeds from the Father, and is not an essentially separate divinity. Any Christian will be quick to tell you that there are by no means three Gods, but the way Trinity is talked about among mainstream Christian circles, that’s exactly how it’s conceived. The denial of tritheism comes as anti-intellectual doublethink from people who besides the terminology believe exactly that. Such thinking can be seen everywhere the persons of the Trinity are depicted in Heaven talking to each other as separate persons (for example in Paradise Lost).

I believe that God is glorified in correct knowledge of Him, which is not unattainable insofar as He has made it known to us. But if our belief is never open to scrutiny, it is essentially a disparagement to the value of the answer to the question. I hope that the doctrine of the Trinity will in the coming years become less of a sacred cow to the Church and be opened up to the scrutiny to which nearly every other doctrine of inference has been subject, that it may be purged of errors that have crept into our understanding thereof.