Ask Pastor Dave: Did the Early Church Believe in the Trinity?

The doctrine of the trinity is not a late development in Christianity. In fact one of the earliest theological problems to arise in the church was the defense of the deity of Christ within a system of monotheism. These two doctrines are essentials of the faith: there is one God, Jesus (the Son) is God. It is impossible to understand the early church without acknowledging that this conversation dominated nearly its first 500 years. That is to say, the doctrine of the Trinity was an extremely important belief for the early church.

The Trinitarian and Christological debates of the early church are important to discuss in attempting to answer this question. They are important because they reveal that while much of the early church embraced Trinitarianism, there were many who did not. So we may say yes the early church believed in the doctrine of the Trinity, but they came to define it more clearly in light of false teaching against the doctrine. The Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople give the first formal articulations of a trinitarian doctrine. Each made great contributions to further clarifying the doctrine, as theologians gathered together to wrestle with the testimony of Scripture and formulate an understanding of God that was consistent with the written Word of God. So the Nicaean Creed states that the Son is “very God of very God,” and that Christ was of “one substance with the Father”. The 2nd Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381 echoed these sentiments about the Son and further clarified that the Spirit “proceedeth from the Father and the Son,” and was to be “with the Father and the Son together…worshiped and glorified.” The Creeds are important because they testify to the major consensus of the early church that the Scriptures did indeed teach that God was “one essence in three persons.”

The belief in a tri-personal God, however, predates even these 4th century councils. At the close of the New Testament, by the 2nd century even, we have the trinity being fully asserted. “Asserted” is a key word there too, for there was not much disagreement in the early postapostolic era. The doctrine was often simply stated as fact. One of the earliest examples is the Bishop Ignatius of Loyola, who spoke of believers as stones lifted into place in God’s temple by the crane of Christ’s cross and the rope of the Holy Spirit (see To the Ephesians 9, and To the Magnesians 13). Early apologists such as Justin Martyr, Tatian, Athenagoras, and Theophilus of Antioch explored the idea of the pre-existent Son and His relation to the Father from eternity past. Tertullian in the third century defended classic Trinitarianism against the heresy of modalism in his treatise Against Praxeas. In particular he argued for the distinctions of the three persons of the one God. The great Princeton theologian B.B. Warfield has argued that while Tertullian’s work  clearly builds off of and borrows from the conceptions of his predecessors and his contemporaries, it is his own formulation of the doctrine which advances our understanding of the Trinity to date. This, he did, by the start of the third century.  We might note too that Origen in the early part of the third century was defending the eternal generation of the son (see On First Principles).

There are many examples of a firm belief in the doctrine of the Trinity flowing out of the early church fathers. They are not all full-blown, they are not all as detailed or specific as present day conceptions, nor do they say all that we might want them to say. But they are present among the early and later church fathers. Perhaps one of my favorite such statements comes from the Cappadocian theologian Gregory of Nazianzus. He writes:

This then is my position, with regard to these things, and I hope it may be always  my position, and that of whosoever is dear to me; to worship God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, Three Persons, One Godhead, undivided in honor and glory and substance and kingdom. (“The Fifth Theological Oration – On the Spirit” in Christology of the Later Fathers, ed. Edward R. Hardy, 210-211).

The answer, then, is a resounding yes. The early church affirmed the doctrine of the trinity. Not without quarrel and council, but they affirmed it nonetheless and from the very start. It is a doctrine with a long-standing history in the church, may it have an ever longer future.