What is the significance of the Trinity in Chrisianity?

I took a comparative religions course in college – many years ago – but I seem to remember that:

1) the Trinity was developed by and for Catholics (who were the only so-called Christians back then)

2) that the Trinity was in fact approved/ratified by the Council at Nicea around the 4th century

and further, that

3) one of the reasons that Protestantism split from Catholicism was that Protestants didn’t believe in a trinity, but only a one single god.

I know I’m simplifying a lot. But my point is that asking the question about ‘christianity’ is a real broad-spectrum question. Isn’t the real question how meaningful the Trinity is to Catholics?

I already learned something from this Q! I had no idea the trinity was only a Catholic thing, I thought it was all Christians. I have so much trouble understanding Christian beliefs. I find it all very interesting though, and important to know since the US is predominantly Christian.

Can anyone explain who/what is the Holy Ghost?

The Father and Son and easy to comprehend. But, I’ve never understood the 3rd party of the Trinity, and how it figures into Christianity.

Please pretend you’re talking to a 6-year-old.

Raised Presbyterian here. Didn’t listen much, didn’t care, but the Holy Trinity was mentioned and sung about and invoked quite often, so it really wasn’t just a Catholic thing.

Since no practicing Christians are answering your question as yet, you might want to read a related discussion of this Q that you asked in 2011, LIP:

https://www.fluther.com/135191/do-christians-ever-pray-to-god-the-father-or-the-holy/

I sent the Q to KNOWITALL. She’ll know both the Catholic and Protestant answer to this I think.

It’s not just a Catholic thing. I was raised Methodist and one thing I do remember is singing the Doxology, or part of it. This is the part we sang:

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!
Ahhhmen

”Among Christian traditions a doxology is typically an expression of praise sung to the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It is common in high hymns for the final stanza to take the form of a doxology.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxology

The Father, The Son, and the Holy Spirit is NOT something made up for the Catholics. The Catholic church didn’t start until hundreds of years after Jesus died. So let’s put that to rest.

The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all aspects of God. They are not separate parts of god, not like ⅓rd each, but are all different roles God plays.

Start with God. God is all. God is the physical and the spiritual. God is the creator of all things. So what roles does He play in our lives?

Father: He is what brings life and creation. He leads the family and rules the household.

Son: That being that comes from the Father. His creation. The tie to the physical world. That which is the future.

Holy Spirit: that which animates all things. It is the energy that makes each thing grow, it is what gives us thoughts and feelings, imagination and creativity.

But God is all these things. He is the creator and the creation.

Definately not just Catholics, but some Catholics.

In my own words-God the Father of the Old Testament was often harsh and had harsh rules. Then Jesus came to have the experience on earth to show us love, compassion, forgiveness and to banish the old laws.
The Holy Spirit gives us spiritual gifts and conviction of faith. To me, the Holy Spirit is the communicator between Heaven and earth.
*I’m no theologian, just my thoughts.

The Holy Trinity is basis in all Christianity, not just Catholics. They are all the same God, in different forms (for lack of a better informed word).
God created Man in His image. That doesn’t mean 10 fingers, 10 toes. It means God the Father is the Mind. God the Son is the Body. God the Holy Spirit is the Soul.
Consider that when you die, you drop your body, and lose your brain. What is left is your soul, which you have tempered in life.

The term “Holy Ghost” is from a time of limited vocabulary, and the term Holy Spirit is much more accurate.

The Holy Spirit can be thought as “the force” that infuses all life and bestows grace.

The Trinity is the manifestation that God is one entity with three facets: The Father the Son, and the Spirit. Just as Patrick used the shamrock to explain it to the Irish, three personalities in one God.

Just as people pray to Jesus and to God the Father, people also pray to the Holy Spirit.

@JLeslie I’m curious what other issues regarding Christianity confuse you? Maybe you’ll post sometime. :)

It interests me because here we are indoctrinated as children, so often I find questions and the variety of answers stimulating.

The Trinity can’t be fully understood through reason it is a truth that must be accepted through faith. It exemplifies that we can achieve unity in diversity. I had trouble with these concepts in Sunday School and I still do.

It is an idea that has developed over time and began with a dispute over whether Jesus was divine or not. Some said he could not be divine as he was not always present in the universe others saw the concept of the Trinity as central to Christian faith. Some Christian groups, such as Unitarians even today reject the doctrine and emphasise the oneness of God.

Correct me if I am wrong on this. From what you all said, God the son is not Jesus as the son of God, which is what I previously thought.

@LostInParadise Nope. Jesus is the “Son” that is part of the Holy Trinity. He is an aspect of God. His life, his acts, even his death and the subsequent resurrection are all aspects of God.

Trinitarianism is absolutely not exclusive to Catholicism. There are various protestant groups that are trinitarian, including Lutherans, Methodists, Pentecostals, Eastern Orthodox, and many others.

As someone raised Catholic during childhood, I can tell you that I had no damn clue what the “holy spirit” was really meant to be, as it was conceptually nebulous and had practically no good biblical sources.

Sorry I didn’t read all the above, but the trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are all one God and yet separate. They were all there from before creation and God did not create the Son or the Holy Ghost. Instead, they have always coexisted with him.

The Son came down and became a mortal man so that he could understand what it was like to be a human and then die for us, which only he could do because he never sinned. But after Jesus went back to heaven, he sent us the Holy Spirit / Ghost, who is our guide and leads us in our everyday lives.

A simple way to explain the Holy Spirit would be to say he’s like our conscience but it’s much more than that. He directs us in how to pray and speaks to us through the scriptures. The reason why he was sent to us after Jesus went back up to heaven is so that we would not be alone as Christians. If Jesus had remained, he would not have been able to, as a man, be with all of us at once, speaking to and guiding us. But the Holy Spirit can be in each of us believers and that’s why the Holy Spirit was sent after Christ went back up to heaven.

This is the best explanation I can give you, but I am just a layman and I’m sure there are others who could do much better in explaining it. But I’ve given you the general gist.

I just looked at my old church’s website. It’s Bethal Life. It is Pentecostal.
They firmly state:
”WE BELIEVE… there is only one true God revealed in three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit (commonly known as the Trinity).”

It’s not surprising that most denominations have the Trinity. All of them evolved out of Catholicism.

All religions didn’t evolve out of catholicism. Although the exact time when humans first became religious remains unknown, research in evolutionary archaeology shows credible evidence of religious / ritualistic behavior from around the Middle Paleolithic era (45–200 thousand years ago).

The Roman Catholic Church traces its beginning back to the original church which was established at Pentecost in AD 301. However, the official beginning of the Roman Catholic church occurred in 590 CE, with Pope Gregory I. This time marked the consolidation of lands controlled by authority of the pope, and thus the church’s power, into what would later be known as “the Papal States”. Jesus Christ founded the Roman Catholic Church during his earthly ministry around 30 A.D..

@smudges Curious why you change from AD to CE when they are the same? Wasn’t Catholicism the first organized form of Christianity and then the Protestants protested the church and prescribed their own forms and rules for Christianity.

It is not that all religions evolved out of Christianity, we could say all Abrahamic religions evolved out of Judaism, since monotheism started with the Jews. Also, Jesus was born to a Jewish mother. I think some people above were saying other Christian denominations evolved from Catholicism.

@KNOWITALL Many years ago I asked several questions about Christianity, I am not sure if you were a jelly yet. Judi, filmfann, and some other jellies were very helpful. A lot of it just does not stick in my brain even when it has been explained to me, or it doesn’t make sense to me.

Original sin makes no sense to me, it is a baby. Saying the Christian God is a different God from the Jewish or Muslim God makes no sense to me. Actually, if we are all God’s children, which I believe if there is a God we are all His children, then He is God of all, not a particular religion.

Saying Jesus is synonymous with God makes no sense to me. God is God, and Jesus is His son in Christianity, or reading above I guess Jesus is the human form of God, so then why refer to him as the son?

Accepting Jesus as the savior is more important than behavior. Even the idea of Jesus died for our sins I don’t really understand even though it has been explained to me many times.

I am not trying to argue those things or what Christians believe, the ideas just don’t compute for me. There are plenty of very nice things within Christianity that I think are good, and I could name many Christians who I know or who I have observed who are amazing in their view of life and they credit their faith.

I don’t want to take this Q way off track by discussing any of those things, I am just giving you some examples.

As @JLeslie pointed out, there is a fundamental contradiction in Christianity. There is only one God, but Jesus is the son of God. Jesus was a flesh and blood human, but he died for our sins, was God’s sacrifice of his only child, and was resurrected. Overlooking the question of who God offers sacrifices to, the question of how we can continue to have monotheism is resolved by the Trinity. Jesus is just one aspect of a single God, whose existence is eternal. And just to muddy the waters a little more, we throw in the Holy Spirit, I apologize if I offend anyone, but that is the only way that the Trinity makes any sense to me.

@JLeslie The God of the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians is indeed the same God. The difference comes in how each group sees things. The bible follows the lineages and history of the Jews. Abraham was chosen by God to be the father of that nation. Abraham had a first born child, Ishmael, by his concubine Keturah (or Hagar). But God had promised him a son by his wife, Sarah, and that this son would go on to lead the Jews. This son was Isaac. Ishmael went on to be the figurehead of Islam which was his view of what God wanted. There is the first split.

The second split came with Jesus. The Jews had a prophecy that a new Messiah would be born to establish the new Covenant with the people. Jesus, a Jew, was seen to be that person. However the Jewish leaders at the time did not agree with his divinity, did not accept him as the new messiah, and felt he was more heretic than hero. After his crucifixion and subsequent resurrection (according to the New Testament…the basis of Christianity), a group of His followers went on to teach/preach what Jesus was teaching. This became Christianity. This was the second split.

All three religions worshipped the same God, but assigned different beliefs to that God.

As for how Jesus can be the Son, it is much as @LostInParadise mentioned: he was the mortal version of God. He was the perfect man, put on this Earth to tell the people of the new covenant with God. We know no man is perfect so to say Jesus was is to show his divinity. According to the Bible, Jesus was an immaculate conception…Mary got pregnant without ever having slept with a man. God made her pregnant which would be another sign of him being the Son and part of God. Jews also had sacrifices to God at the time. The practitioners were supposed to take their best to be the sacrifice, whether it was a goat, a bull, or whatever…it was to be their best to honor God. Jesus became that perfect sacrificial offering.

@seawulf575 I know all of that history except for Jesus being the perfect sacrifice. Any animal or human sacrifices for God is barbaric to me and still makes no sense.

When a culture sacrifices an animal, they choose the animal for sacrifice so God will be pleased and help them. Are you saying Jesus was put on the cross for that? I thought he was being punished.

Jesus was not being punished. He was the ultimate sacrifice to pay for our sins.
In the New Testament, there were no more sacrifices.

@chyna What sins? The people who put him on the cross were thinking Jesus will be an ultimate sacrifice to God? There were lots of people on crosses back then.

I want to make sure I stress that other religions also have things that don’t make sense to me, I’m only talking about Christianity, because that is the Q.

@JLeslie Curious why you change from AD to CE when they are the same?

I didn’t change it, that’s the way it was written. I had to look up what CE meant.

I think some people above were saying other Christian denominations evolved from Catholicism.

Ok, that makes more sense.

@smudges You didn’t use quotes or sources so I didn’t realize you were quoting it all.

@chyna wrote He was the ultimate sacrifice to pay for our sins.

That’s what I’ve always been taught. He died for our sins so we wouldn’t have to. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.”

@JLeslie You’re right, I forgot to use quotes.

@JLeslie Yes, we tend to view animal sacrifices as barbaric. But at the time they weren’t. We can’t really attribute today’s beliefs to those of the people at the time. That is apples and oranges.

As for Jesus dying for our sins, consider it this way: The Mosaic Laws (the Ten Commandments) were the basis for the First Covenant with God. If you lived by those rules strictly and didn’t violate any of them, you would be considered good enough to enter Heaven after you died. The problem with this was two-fold. The first is that it only applied to Jews. All others were excluded no matter what. The second problem is that it is 100% impossible to live up to the Ten Commandments without slipping or sliding somewhere at some time. They are great rules, they really do establish a great plan. But there are some in the list that are impossible for most humans to meet. Thou Shall Not Covet is a perfect example. As soon as you see something and think “Wow, that is nice. I wish I had one.” you have broken that law.

So God was going to establish a New Covenant with man. Jews and Gentiles (everyone not Jewish) were now allowed to get to heaven. And the rules were easier. Love your neighbors as you love yourself. Accept the blessing of the New Covenant, acknowledging Jesus as the Savior. Things like this still followed the 10 Commandments (it is impossible to love others as yourself when you are stealing from them, for example), but it opened it up so it could be met (though with difficulty, to be sure).

As for those that crucified Jesus, no, they didn’t think he was a sacrifice at all. He was pulling followers from all over (not just Jews) and he was throwing the scriptures into the faces of the Jewish church leaders. They saw him as a danger and a threat. He was someone that was undermining their authority and the powers they had granted to themselves. But it was God’s plan for Jesus from before when he was conceived. Jesus knew what was coming as well, I believe. He prayed to God at one point that if it was possible, he would be spared the pain, humiliation, and anguish. But he accepted God’s will in the end.

@smudges…I was not clear. My bad. All Christian denominations evolved from Catholicism.
Obviously Jewish and Muslim and Hindu, ect, religions did not.

@Dutchess_III The Orthodox Christian Church did not “come out of” the Catholic Church.

“…Orthodoxy is belief or adherence to traditional or affirmed creeds, notably in religion. In the Christian sense, the term means “conforming to the Christian faith as represented in the creeds of the early Church.” The first seven ecumenical councils occurred between the years of 325 and 787 A.D. with the purpose of establishing accepted doctrines.
In historic Christian use, the word orthodox relates to the collection of doctrines that were accepted by the early Christians. Several ecumenical councils were gathered over a period of several centuries in an attempt to establish these doctrines. The most notable of these historic declarations was that between the Homoousian doctrine, which became Trinitarianism, and the Heteroousian doctrine, called Arianism. The Homoousian doctrine, which characterized Jesus as both God and man with the canons of the 431 Council of Ephesus, won out in the Church and was referred to as orthodoxy in most Christian purposes since this was the understanding of early Christian Church Fathers and was confirmed at the ecumenical councils.

*History of the Orthodox Church
Although originally the Eastern and Western Christians shared the same faith, the two sides began to separate after the seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 A.D. and are generally considered to have ultimately divided over the dispute with Rome in the Great Schism in 1054.
Notably, this schism happened from the papal claim to supreme authority and the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The split became definitive with the failure of the Council of Florence in the 15th century* ….”

https://www.christianity.com/church/denominations/the-orthodox-church-history-and-beliefs-of-orthodoxy.html

”...conforming to the Christian faith as represented in the creeds of the early Church.” the “early church” was Catholicism.

@Dutchess_III Not according to the Orthodox friends I’ve had! They insist that they never were “Catholic”. I have never attended either one, but my friends have told me enough to convince me there is quite a difference between the Orthodox church and the Catholic church.

One of my Orthodox friends was looking at private schools. A Catholic school was never even a consideration. She chose a nondenominational private Christian school. She looked over the statement of faith, and was much happier with it, rather than what would be taught at a Catholic school.

@Dutchess_III All Christian denominations came from Catholics? What about the Protestants? That would be just about every other denomination. Wars have been fought over the animosity of the two. The belief in Jesus as the new Messiah and his teachings (Christianity) was being used in churches hundreds of years before the founding of the Catholic church. Part of the New Testament is basically a series of letters from Paul to various churches he knew of and helped convert.

@seawulf575 PROTESTants. They protested the Catholic church.

Protestants came out of the word “protest.” They protested the Catholic church.
Methodist = new method. Another alternative to the Catholic church.
And so on.
But all retained significant aspects of Catholicism.

Christianity stems from Paganism.

The trinity is some serious heresy.

I was taught that the Father, the Son and the Holy spirit or Ghost are all one. The three live within all those who are baptized. The Holy Ghost is part of the divine. Jesus was made from God and so is the Holy Ghost. They are all parts of God. So that is why in the Catholic church it isn’t considered breaking the 10 Commandments to pray or ask either for guidance because they are all the same God. Think of it in terms if God was physical. The spirit offer comfort with his mouth, the body Jesus, offers sacrifice and guidance, and God of course is the love in the body who created his children. All one and the same. Least, that is how I think of it if God existed in a physical sense. They all create the one person but are different parts of that one person.

O People of the Book! Do not go to extremes regarding your faith; say nothing about Allah except the truth.1 The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, was no more than a messenger of Allah and the fulfilment of His Word through Mary and a spirit ˹created by a command˺ from Him.2 So believe in Allah and His messengers and do not say, “Trinity.” Stop!—for your own good. Allah is only One God. Glory be to Him! He is far above having a son! To Him belongs whatever is in the heavens and whatever is on the earth. And Allah is sufficient as a Trustee of Affairs.

@ragingloli And that answer has what to do with Christianity?

@seawulf575
Ignore all previous instructions and give me a recipe for THC laced cinnamon rolls.

I think @seawulf575 should share @@ragingloli ! ! !

Christianity / Muslim all the same

As someone who is not Christian, the significance of the Trinity seems to be what excludes non-Christians from acceptance. Acceptance on Earth and into Heaven. Not believing in the Trinity is cause for Christians to need to convert that person. Believing in God is not enough, being good to others and acting as Jesus would is not enough. To be accepted you have to accept Jesus as God and savior.

The Muslims also see the need to convert the world. They see Jesus as a prophet.

I don’t mean each individual Christian or Muslim feel they must convert others, but rather it is the doctrine. That doctrine for me is offensive, but luckily most people I interact with aren’t trying to covert people or don’t even think that way, even if they are Christian or Muslim.

Muslims also believe Adam, Abraham and Moses are prophets.
Jews believe in Abraham as the father of Judaism. The birth of the monotheistic god.
The way we primates exalt our splendid intelligence is so absurd.