What the Early Church Believed: The Trinity

The biblical basis

Jesus told the apostles to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). This parallelism of Father, Son and Spirit appears elsewhere in the New Testament too (2 Corinthians 13:14; Hebrews 9:14). The earliest Christians understood it as we do today: three divine persons who are one divine being, God.

The witness of the early Church

• The Didache (A.D. 70) prescribes baptism in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, pouring water three times if necessary.
• Ignatius of Antioch (110) calls Jesus Christ "our God," conceived by Mary of David's seed and of the Holy Spirit.
• Justin Martyr (151) says Christians worship the Son of the true God in the second place and the Spirit of prophecy in the third.
• Theophilus of Antioch (181) is the first on record to use the word "Trinity": God, his Word and his Wisdom.
• Irenaeus (189) says the Church received from the apostles faith in one God the Father, in one Jesus Christ the Son, and in the Holy Spirit.
• Tertullian (216) teaches that the one God has a Son, his Word, and the Spirit; the unity is "distributed in a Trinity," the three being distinct but of one being, one condition and one power. Citing "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30), he says the three are one essence, not one person.
• Origen (225) denies there was ever a time when the Son did not exist, and says the Trinity alone exceeds every measure of time.
• Hippolytus (228) says the Word alone is from God himself and therefore is God.
• Pope Dionysius (262) condemns those who divide the Trinity into three separate substances or three godheads, and calls it the worst blasphemy to say the Son is a creature.
• Gregory the Wonderworker (265) confesses a perfect Trinity, undivided, with nothing created in it, the Son never lacking to the Father nor the Spirit to the Son.
• Sechnall (444) and Patrick of Ireland (447, 452) confess one being in three persons and one God in the Trinity of the sacred Name.
• Augustine (408) says all Catholic interpreters before him taught that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are of one substance, so that there are not three gods but one God, while the Father is not the Son and the Spirit is neither.
• Fulgence of Ruspe (c. 515–523) explains that the Father, Son and Spirit are each other in person but not in nature, citing John 10:30 and 1 John 5:7, and that none precedes or exceeds another.