In Our Time - Archive: Trinity

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Misha Glenny delves in to the In Our Time archive to select ten episodes for listeners to revisit. His final choice is the Trinity, an episode first released in March 2014. The idea that God is a single entity, but one known in three distinct forms - Father, Son and Holy Spirit - has been a central belief for most Christians since the earliest years of the religion. The doctrine was often controversial in the early years of the Church, until clarified by the Council of Nicaea in the late 4th century. Later thinkers including St Augustine and Thomas Aquinas recognised that this religious mystery posed profound theological questions, such as whether the three persons of the Trinity always acted together, and whether they were of equal status. The Trinity's influence on Christian thought and practice is considerable, although it is interpreted in different ways by different Christian traditions.With:Janet Soskice Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus CollegeMartin Palmer Director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education, and CultureThe Reverend Graham Ward Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and a Canon of Christ Church.Producer: Thomas MorrisReading list:Susan Ashbrook Harvey and David G. Hunter (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010), especially chapter ‘The Doctrine of God’ Lewis Ayres and Andrew Radde-GallwitzLewis Ayres, Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford University Press, 2006)John Behre, The Way to Nicaea: Formation of Christian Theology Vol 1 (St Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2001)Gilles Emery and Matthew Levering (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Trinity (Oxford University Press, 2011)Susan Frank Parsons (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology (Cambridge University Press, 2002), especially chapter ‘Trinity and Feminism’ by Janet SoskiceGeorge Herbert, The Complete English Poems (Penguin Classics, 2004)Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Penguin Classics, 1998)Ben Quash and Michael Ward (eds.), Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe (SPCK, 2007), especially essay on ‘Biblical Trinitarianism’ by Janet SoskicePierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (HarperPerennial, 1976)Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1998)Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)In Our Time is a BBC Studios productionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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Part of why I blew the whistle was I didn't want to lay in bed in 20 years. Having seen another million people die, I know that I could have done something when, when I had a chance. This week on The Interface, we're talking to Francis Howigan. The Facebook whistleblower who leaked the documents that changed how the world saw social media. And now she is the subject of Aaron Sorkin's latest movie, The Social Reckoning. So join me, Thomas Germain. And me, Jess Maddox, or The Interface.

Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of the... more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in this summer special of In Our Time, we're looking at the very heart of Christian theology, the Trinity. Traditionally understood as the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, ever since the death of Jesus Christ and the emergence of Christianity as an organised religion,

Christians have been wondering and arguing about the significance of the Trinity. What is the relationship between the three entities? Is there a hierarchy within the Trinity, and if so, who stands at the summit? And what exactly is the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost? Polemics about the nature of the Trinity were especially intense during the first three centuries of Christianity. Some rejected the idea altogether, while others could not support the idea that the son could be anything other than subordinate to the father. This led to an early split in the church at the Council of Nicaea, but the concept of the equality of the three entities of the Trinity did emerge as dominant.

The issues surrounding the Trinity would reappear periodically, and a dispute about the nature of the Holy Spirit played a role in the arcane debates that led to the the great schism between the Western Roman Catholic Church and the churches of the Eastern Orthodox right. Indeed, as Melvin's guests articulate, the nature of the Trinity almost invariably features in divisions within the Christian Church. Enjoy listening. Hello, one of the beliefs that sets Christianity apart from all other faiths is known as the doctrine of the Trinity. From the early years of religion, Christians believed that God existed in three forms, God the Creator, his son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost. But also central to Christianity is the belief that there's only one God.

How a single God could appear in three forms was a question which preoccupied early theologians and caused disputes and even splits in the church. Since the 4th century, most Christians have accepted the doctrine of the Trinity, the idea of three divine individuals who together make up one God. The doctrine also raises philosophical problems which have occupied some of the greatest religious thinkers of the last 2,000 years. With me to discuss the Trinity are Janet Soskis, Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of Cambridge

and a Fellow of Jesus College. Martin Palmer, director of the International Consultancy on Religion, Education and Culture, and the Reverend Graham Ward, Regis Professor of Divinity at Christchurch, the University of Oxford. Janet Soskis, when did the idea of the Trinity emerge and where did it come from? Well, I'd say it's emergent from the earliest days.

I mean, first of all, the doctrine of the Trinity is about what Christians think about God, and it's not, and Jesus, of course. It's not something extra. Christians believe that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And then they don't believe in something extra, and they say, and also the Trinity. But there's a biblical foundation, of course, because Jesus, and we've got to believe that this was something he was saying, was calling God his father. So there's Jesus addressing God as his father. and then very early on, we find the earliest Christians praying to Jesus as though he were God. We've got a secular report of this from Pliny, who is a governor in what's now Turkey, around 115, and he was asked to report on this infidel group, and he said, well, they claim they do nothing wrong,

they get together and sing hymns to Jesus as though he were God. So that's a report from about 115. So obviously people are asking, well, who are these people? These people are praying these early Christians. Well, we know a lot of them were Jews, and Jews worship one God. So what's going on here? I mean, you can understand both pagans and Jews who weren't followers of Jesus, saying, well, you say you believe in the one God, but you're praying to this man, Jesus.

Is he a lesser God? What's the status? So that's all the anchorage. I think it's one of the revolutions in thinking about the Trinity now, is to see that it's really anchored very decidedly in Jewish practice. And you could say that it goes earlier than the first century, really, because in the centuries, the three centuries prior to the emergence of Christianity, Jewish believers were quite accustomed to invoking God or speaking of God using certain titles or names.

They spoke of, when they were speaking about God acting in the world, they'd speak about God's mighty wisdom or God's mighty word or God's mighty name coming down to act on behalf of the people Israel in times of persecution. And all these ascriptions get assigned to Jesus. You brought, you know, obviously, because it's the whole basis of it, brought in the monotheism of the Jews. Why did the Christians feel it necessary to have a Trinity?

Well, I think at first, it seems they felt it necessary to have abinity, that they were praying to Jesus as though he were God. So this forces the question. Either this is somehow this man, Jesus is the same as God, which of course many of the gospel writing suggests the gospel of John somehow Jesus says I and the Father are one or they're different but it was a murky story and that's why there were so many disputes

that had to be hammered out later at councils. But then the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost comes in so you've got two but why do you need the third? Well I don't think you strictly need it but you do get very early on already in for instance the account of Jesus' baptism by John You get this voice coming from heaven saying, this is my beloved son and a dove, you know,

this idea of spirit-formed dove, which is obviously a symbol of some kind of spiritual gifting to Jesus. So you get this idea, and then Jesus apparently promised his followers that he would give them the spirit. And we get very early on, for instance, in the Book of Acts, Trinitarian invocations, the idea that the early Christians are calling upon God, father, son and spirit.

But the word Trinity, the idea, real idea, Trinity, Janet, is not mentioned in the New Testament? It isn't a foundational belief, is it? And yet it's become an essential part of Christianity. So when did that happen? Isn't there? It's been made to be there by persons, like yourself

2000 years ago, everyone. So I think we can explore for one more question. Why did they think they needed it? I think they felt it's a regulative teaching. That's why I say it isn't, it isn't a foundational doctrine, but it's a teaching that regulates the other foundational confessions of Christian truth about believing that God's the Father, that he's one with the son and the

Holy Spirit. And so because there were different ways of interpreting the New Testament material, it was very important in the, and people were debating this. They were arguing in the marketplaces, women were arguing at home. It wasn't just theologians with this job creation scheme, said, oh, we're nothing to do. Let's come up with a new doctrine. I think there's a nice one here in the Trinity. No, it was what actual people were really concerned about, and that's what drove it. Martin Palmer, as Janet said quite true, this occupied people in disputes and in the marketplace we're told, as well as in the libraries of the time. Let's move to the Council of Nicaea in 325A.D., which was a defining council.

Can you tell us what it defined? Well, it tried to sort out some of the questions that you've just fired at Janet, which is essentially what on earth is this all about. And essentially Christianity and those around Christianity because, of course, much of this dialogue took place in debate with Jews, in debate with the Greek philosophical world within which early Christianity emerged. And nobody really had a problem with the idea that there was God. The problem comes with, well, quite who is this figure Christ?

And how on earth do you have two natures in one body, a divine nature and a human nature? And essentially, various answers came forward in the sort of two or three hundred years that Janet's referred to in the early church. One was adoptionism that Christ was, or Jesus was such a good person, that God looked down and said, well, now this is the embodiment of everything I want human beings to be. And that at the baptism, the Holy Spirit descends, and in a sense, God takes on Jesus as his exemplar, his messenger, if one was to speak in Islamic terms, and gives him a divine status by adoption.

A second response, named after an extremely remote person called Sibelius, was to say that actually there is no difference. This is, you know, we're really, we're just looking at different aspects of the same phenomenon. There is God, and God has different aspects, but to go too much into what they are, whether they're persons, whether their entities in their own right, that gets us confused. And this was sort of attacked by the Orthodox Christians, or what emerged to be Orthodox Christians, and saying, well, if you say that, then it wasn't Christ who was crucified on the cross.

It was God who was crucified on the cross. And then the third approach, and this is really why the Council of Nicaea was hosted by an exceedingly triumphalist Constantine the Great. And that was to deal with the Arian controversy, and that was a very fine point, which was essentially Arias, who was a priest in Alexandria, said, there is God.

And then God created before creation, the Son in order to be his instrument of creation. And he creates Christ out of nothing, not out of himself. And therefore you have a sense that Christ is lesser than God is a later derivative from God. And that was challenged. And the Council of Nicaea was called essentially by Constantine, desperate to have a united empire.

He just united the empire and of himself, a united faith as part of the panoply of faiths. Constantine didn't make Christianity the official religion, but he did to give it recognition. And he finds this church rhythm with debates about the nature of Christ. And then when we come to the Holy Spirit, in the Nicene Creed, he's kind of, or she is a kind of add-on. It's, and the Holy Spirit.

We believe in and the Holy Spirit. So I think really, by the time we get to Nicaea, the issue is who or what is Christ, and how can Christ be both God? and man, how can he be the pre-existent elements of creation, or that creates creation, as well as someone who walked in Nazareth and Bethlehem and Jerusalem? Are we approaching a stage where this discussion, not our discussion, but the discussion that's gone on, perhaps our discussion is going on for the last year,

is considered to be or accepted as being beyond words? Yes, sort of. I think one of the dilemmas is that this debate takes place within a Greek, speaking context, not Latin. And I've had it said to me by Orthodox, patriarchs and bishops, that wasn't it fantastic that Christian theology had to be developed in a Greek-speaking world because they had the philosophical tools from Platonism and Neoplatonism with which to deal with it. So at one level, you have a group that actually do think that if you keep at it long enough, you'll pin this down. But I think over against that, one has to put, for example, St. Augustine,

who is later than Nicaea, he's at the beginning of the fifth century, but is very influential in the interpretation of the Nisian Creed, who says when we speak of three persons, it's not because we believe that's true in the sense of absolutely accurate, it's simply we've got to say something. So the limitations of language are recognised, but there is a dialectic between,

if you like the mystery, which you were talking about earlier, and the desire of some to try and to try and, and pin it down so that you can say, aha, Melvin, you're not actually a proper Christian. Graham Ward, can you tell us the main points of the Nicene Creed then, which established quite a strong bridgehead, didn't it? It did. In fact, it's interesting with the whole kind of relationship

between the different creeds. And in fact, the Nicene Creed in many ways is a sort of shortened, reaffirian version of the Athanasian Creed. and the Athanasian creed coming out in the kind of fourth century. And the shortened part of it means that you have certain kinds of, not just three relationships, as in the Apostles' Creed, you've just got God the Father, and then you've got God the Son, and then you've got God the Holy Spirit.

But you're not really going into the relations between them. In the Nicene Creed, you start to get a language about the relations, so you get the language of begotten, for example. So Jesus is the begotten. of God. And then you've got the relation with the Holy Spirit, that the Holy Spirit is the procession of God that relates the nature of the Son to the nature of the Father. So you've got a kind of expression of the relations between them. Why I think it's difficult is because the way in which if you take that to literally, you get some kind of hierarchical notion. I mean, Martin's

talked about the Aryan difficulty that Jesus or Christ was the kind of afterthought created out of nothing from God the Father, which already gets you a sense of the kind of notion that therefore this is a lesser being in some kind of way. And in some ways, the Nicene Creed actually opens up some of that kind of possibility, because it doesn't, in using this language of the begotten and the one that then proceeds from this,

you've got almost this sense of, then you've got a kind of declension, if you like, or a hierarchy within the Trinity. And why I think that that's probably, is if you go back to the Athanasian creed, which is a much longer creed, and it's still actually authorised by the Book of Common Prayer to be used on certain occasions, what the Athanasian creed does is it also wants to talk about Jesus Christ as the begotten son. It also wants to talk about the Holy Spirit as proceeding from the father and the son. But the first third of it

is a complete emphasis upon how these things are in fact equal. and that equality is and repetition that he uses to demonstrate that equality which balances then, or at least kind of raises a question, then how can this be equal when you're suddenly getting into a notion of the hierarchy? Yeah, and in a simple, if you said my question really, how can people accept that it could be equal when God is, as it were, the entity in charge? And I think that that is part of coming back to what Janet was saying. it's part of the difficulty of how you understand the relationship between the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, which quite early on, I mean, you find it in the Epistle to the Hebrews, for example. The Episal to the Hebrews is probably first century, and although not written by Paul,

and it quite demonstrously is there to say to the Jewish people that this person, Jesus Christ, was God. So you've got the revelation of Jesus Christ then as God. How does that then relate back to the monotheistic God as creator? And so you're having to find a way in which you're actually doing this without being hierarchical. Was this, you think, a way in which Christians wish to define themselves against the Judaism? It could be taken as that. I mean, I don't take it as that. There's a politics involved in all kind of theologising.

There's no way of getting around that. And there is a politics. We've seen this quite recently in the way in which you define yourself by your doctrine to who you belong, what kind of church you belong to. But in fact, as a theologian, I don't see it in those particular ways. I do see this more as a real wrestling attempt to how do we understand them, this relationship. Insofar as we don't know what God is in God's self, all we are treating is the operations of God in the world.

The coming of Jesus Christ is the operation of God most visible in the world in it becoming historical. How therefore do we understand this manifestation of God in the world in relation to the Creator God, the Father God before that? So that's where that language then, which can lead to notions of hierarchy comes in. But that's what I mean. You balance that off again. the way in which Athanasius emphatically keeps telling you this isn't about hierarchy. These relations are equal. They are one and the same. Growing businesses deal with the same problem.

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It's O'D-O-O-O-D-O-com. Part of why I blew the whistle was I didn't want to lay in bed in 20 years. Having seen another million people die, and know that I could have done something when I had a chance. This week on the interface, we're talking to Francis Howigan. The Facebook whistleblower who leaked the documents that changed how the world saw social media. And now she is the subject of Aaron Sorkin's latest,

movie, The Social Reckoning. So join me, Thomas Germain. And me, Jess Maddox, or the Interface. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Jenna, Jonas Suskis, can we explore this a little more? The idea of three, which is so rifted through culture in very many ways, and the idea is three in one, I wondered if it makes any sense at all. That one way to understand the notion of reaching up three is at the moment of conception,

when you have a man, a woman and a child, and the moment that the child is conceived, Christians think this is a living person, and that you have one in three there, you could say. Do you think that might be some sort of root to the people's understanding of it? Well, that was certainly one that was explored, not least in the Syrac Church.

In the Syriac Church? Yes, but I think it was generally thought to have, as Martin said, subordinationist implications to make the spirit somehow lesser than the two principles. I think one thing that's important, and here's something the Islamic tradition brings up, is when Jews and Christians and Muslims say God is one, that's not one of a cardinal series. In fact, in Arabic, I think they have an entirely different word to describe the oneness that is God from the one of cardinality.

So it's not as though there's one God. There might have been seven, but there's actually one. And this God, here's another difference with the father, mother, child. Those are all creatures. we're talking about God who is God the creator here is not a creature at all who can't be lumped in in any cardinal series with creaturely reality but I want to come back to something Graham said about and your question to Graham about is this something defining oneself against the Christians

against the Jews against or either way I've got to remember that the first Christians were Jews and for instance if we look at Paul already Paul in his writings and the author of Hebrews is almost certainly Jewish but Paul definitely is Paul is already singing out these hymns of praise to Jesus as though he were God. And he's citing, there's a wonderful hymn in Christ's hymn in Philippians, which is very early, about 50 or 60,

Paul is apparently citing a hymn that he expects his Philippian audience to know and he says that the name of Jesus, every knee should bow on every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. Well, what's bombastic, what's startling about this is, it's almost a direct quote. It's clearly intended as a direct quote of part of Isaiah, where the Lord Yahweh speaks and says, turn to me for at my name, every knee, shall bow, and every tongue confess. So Paul, the Jewish Christians are already making this identification. As I say, it's bombastic. What does it mean? They're claiming to worship one God. It's not something that comes, historians of late antiquity now think the division between Jews and Christians came much, much later,

maybe a couple of centuries later, and the same people could self-identify as Jews and Christians for a long period. Indeed, from very early on, people to think that these three entities, or these three, whatever they are, had different. I wonder why you say yourself those problems, but never mind. It had specific different functions. That was also tried. Many things were tried, and the whole history of Trinitarian theology is almost like

saying, not what's saying what works, because as Graham has alluded, what God isn't God's self, we don't know, but saying what can't be said. And a lot of it is about saying what can't be said. So what can't be said that you're saying? Well, you can't say, you can't divide the functions of God off, say God the Father's Creator and God the Son is the Redeemer and God the Spirit is love.

All of the developed faith of the Christian Church is that all God's actions, in the world are the actions of the triune God. So it's not a job creation scheme for three different bits of God. And I think this has come up recently when there's been trouble in feminist language with wanting to get away from Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, move over to rubrics such as Creator, sustain, and Redeemer. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it can lead to a kind of real triathism where you're saying,

oh, this is a bit of God that does this, and not the bit of God that is that. And that's been shunned. Okay, Martin Palmer, I think following on from that, one of the bitter disagreements at Nicaea concerned the single word filioque, can you tell us why that was such a problem then and appears to be quite a problem now? Well, it wasn't so much at Nicaea,

it creeps in much later. And this is a phrase which means that the Holy Spirit descends from the father and the son. and Flopje is of the sun. And this does not appear in the Nicene Creed, neither in 325 nor at Constantinople and 381 nor at Calcedian at 451. It starts coming in from the West, from probably the 6th century, probably in Spain.

And really the problem with it is that the Eastern Church, the Orthodox churches, will not accept this phrase. And it has crept, I think that's the right way of describing it, into the Western Church, Catholic and Protestant, as Graham's alluded to, if you look in the Book of Common Prayer, you'll find the Athanasian Creed, you'll find the Athanasian Creed,

and you will find that the Holy Spirit in the Book of Common Prayer of the Anglican Church says proceeds from the Father and the Son. Now what this does, as far as the Eastern Church is concerned, the Orthodox Church is concerned, is that it brings in this issue of a hierarchy. Because if the Holy Spirit is not of God direct in the same sense that Christ is,

then you've got a derivative Holy Spirit. Are we talking about two personalities, God the Father and God the Son, and then some sort of force, force feel, like a lifesaver that sort of spins off out of them? And that's in a sense what the filibre clause does at one level. It produces a subservient Holy Spirit.

I just wanted to actually kind of come in and give you an example of that because the West has got itself into one or two kinds of descriptive problems so that you have got these two persons and a relationship, which doesn't actually suggest that, in fact, the three are equal and one. So you get someone like Bernard of Claervaux, for example, who will image the Trinity in terms of God who gives the kiss, and then Christ who is given the kiss, and then the Holy Spirit as the kiss. Or you get notions like God is the lover, Jesus is the beloved

and the Holy Spirit is the love that's actually... And it's those kind of descriptions which tend towards this difficulty and how then are you defining it and I don't think the iconography of the bird helps here because, you know, again, it's something that is smaller than the two other things between. But the way you were talking about it suggests

it's an open door for poetic interpretation, isn't it? It is an open door for poetic interpretation But, I mean, if you want a poetic interpretation that would be more accurate, then go to not Bernard of Claver, but Dante at the end of the Comedia, where he has the vision of the divine. And the division of the divine is three intersecting circles, the Baramean circles, if you like, or rainbows, as he actually puts it. And that figuratively becomes, is much more the kind of sense,

certainly that you get the opening of the Athanasian creed, that in fact this is about oneness and it is about unity. I mean, the same thing could be said with André Rublev, when he painted the Trinity, it's three persons. I mean, he goes back to the tradition in the Old Testament about the three angels coming to Abraham at Marmra, and he paints the three persons around a single round table, and all three are bending in towards each other.

So announcing a kind of doctrine that the pericurises, or what came to be known as pericreasis. John and Suskees, the true I believe seems to have been influenced by Greek philosophy. Can you take us there? It was fairly common amongst philosophical circles to know there is one God, but to combine that with a kind of polytheism,

so there might be also many gods or many powers of God, so that the one God who is beyond being or whatever, but the many powers that actually acted in our creation. And certainly we sometimes see in Greek-speaking Jews like Philo, the Jew of the first century, he'll talk about the one God, and then he'll talk about the logos of that God through whom the world is made. This logos sounds a lot like John's gospel, the prologue, the world in the beginning was the word, and it was with God, and through this word, everything was made.

But Philo will describe this logos as a Duthoros theos. the second God. I think it's pretty clear Fyla was a monotheist and he was what he was doing was inflecting Greek philosophical terms towards his own Jewish thought. He's pretty clear elsewhere. There's only one creator and so on. And this happens again

and again when we get to the idea of the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity because there's some pretty fine tuning was needed. These people, especially in the East, but in Rome as well, were Greek speaking. And it was quite natural there to try

to refine what they were getting at in Greek terms. But if it was totally Greek in a certain sense, then the mystery of the Trinity is why these early Greek fathers just didn't go for the more obvious and easy to explain an option of saying, well, yeah, there were actually three gods, or there are lots of gods. That was a perfectly acceptable idea in the Greek milieu, but they didn't. They kept insisting perversely, you might say,

no, there's only one God and using Greek philosophy to try to articulate this. So I think one can overestimate the sense in which this is driven by the Greek philosophies. I think the Greek philosophy is instrumental in helping these Jewish Christian Christian Jews to try to get across what they believe. There does seem a split of Martin Pound between the Orthodox Church and the Western Church. Can you tell us what that, on this subject? Can you tell us what that consists of? At the heart of it is an understanding of what human beings are.

The Orthodox Church does not believe in original sense. And therefore the role of the Holy Trinity or the role of Christ as saviour in the Orthodox Church is not to rescue us and wrestle us out of the morass of evil and sin that we are in, which is very much what Augustine presents us with, but to fulfil us. And so their understanding of the Holy Trinity, taking that phrase at the beginning of the Bible in Genesis that we are created in the image of God, is to bring out the best within us. The Holy Spirit comes as a light into our lives, into our mind, into our body, and illuminates the best within us. There's a wonderful phrase in John the venerable, a fourth century mystic who talks about this being like a pearl that we take into ourselves. And the Trinity is a pearl that sheds light and illuminates us from within. And it's very much this notion that our relationship with God is a fulfilling relationship. And it goes back to the problem that Graham was touching on.

Is this a set of philosophical notions that work in a hierarchical or quasi-hierarchical way and you work your way through them and they affect salvation on you? Or is this actually something that you are invited into? So the Rubeliff fantastic icon of the Trinity, which is the three angels that met Abraham and Sarah, is recorded in Genesis, they're seated around a table on which there is food. And Russian icons, but all Orthodox icons, there are no shadows because you are not looking at the picture.

You are being observed by the Trinity. And the table is not complete. There is a fourth side to the table. That's where you join the feast. And therefore, the orthodox understanding is that you are invited into this relationship, not, as the West would have you, in a sense, you approach on your knees in a position of petition and hope that they'll come to your rescue.

Graham Ward, I want to come to St. Augustine now, but before that, can you give us some idea what you think that the faithful people, the masses who went to the churches, what they were getting out of this? Were they getting confusion? Were they getting a mystery that they basked in? Were they feeling cut off?

Well, I'm not sure what most of the people, as most of the congregations today, make of the various controversies about these positions. In many ways, I often think that, first of all, the Trinity is written into the liturages. In various forms, it's written into liturages even today. I mean, if you go to a communion service, it starts within the name of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit.

And it'll end with a blessing in which, again, the Trinity is invoked, and it may even have a creed or the Gloria in which the Trinity is actually spoken. But in some ways, it always comes to me a Christian. as like gravity. We don't understand gravity, most of us, and we certainly probably most of us

don't understand the mathematics, which actually helps to explain gravity. But nevertheless, we live within that world which has got gravity in it. And I'd say the same thing. To most of the people at that particular time, it didn't mean in the same kind of way. Why do you think the theologians

from St. Augustine onwards, St. Augustine mentioned by Martin, why do you think they have grappled with the philosophical implications of the genuity so consistently? I think so consistently because of the way that it is something which is abstract.

So you're dealing with abstractions 1, 3, 1, many, abstractions that's written into Hellenistic philosophy about how you actually relate the 1 to the many. Whether you're talking about Plato or you're talking about Plotinus. It's all about how does the 1 relate to the many. So you can see,

the way in which then it can get taken up into philosophical abstractions about the nature of persons, for example, or the nature of economy and the nature of action and God's action in the world. So you can see how it does that. And mathematics related to mysticism in something like Pythagoras, the three was the perfect number because it had a beginning and a middle and an end. Absolutely. And you still get people who are quite fascinated in trying to relate into faith ways, how triads and threanus might actually relate across Christianity to other faiths entirely.

Janet Tuskis, one thinker was the medieval theologian Julian of Norwich. I'm curious. Anyway, Julian of Norwich, can you talk about her approach? Well, Julian claimed she was an unlettered woman, but wrote this marvellous book, which is the first book of any sort we have in English. She may have dictated it. She may have just meant she didn't know Latin, but she knew a lot of theology in this book, her showings.

It's an unfolding of a kind of deathbed. She nearly died when she was about 33. The priest came to her with a crucifix and looking at it. She had this kind of vision and unfolded it. But what's very interesting is the unfolding is so thoroughly Trinitarian and in a very, very sophisticated way because she doesn't make any mistakes. Now, she's famous for speaking about Christ as our mother,

and that's one thing that people have picked up, especially in modern times. He has a strong vision of Christ as our mother, even bearing us in his body and giving birth to us on the cross. But she also describes all three persons of the Trinity as our mother. She describes the father. She said the father is truly our mother, and Christ is truly our mother, and the spirit is truly our mother. And she's rotating us around these three persons continually,

and it's quite a good example of what you ask Graham to sort of articulate. what were ordinary people thinking because although she is a kind of anchorite and dedicated, she's not a person of official theological formation but this triune understanding of God is informing her whole religious life

and the one she wants to get across to her ordinary. She says she's writing for ordinary, even Christians. She said just ordinary Christians and it's this beautiful rhythm of the love between the father and son of spirit embracing her described in this maternal imagery

and I think it shows some of the flexibility and also that for ordinary Christians say it isn't as though they can articulate and say, well, I believe in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and then also the Trinity. You don't need an also. If you believe in Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you have a Trinitarian faith. The Trinity is just a name officially theologians lob onto it.

Graham, how does this doctrine affect the religious practice both for the church and for the individuals? What, today. Yes. I think that we live it rather than it's necessarily something that we keep coming back to an explanation. I'm sorry to interrupt, but what does we live it mean? Well, as in, within the liturgical setting, any act of worship is an act of worship of God and that God is trying.

And that that is signalled in the litigies and in the worship in various kind of formulas that are actually used. So would it be impertinent? to say it's an act of faith rather than an act of logical thought? I wouldn't want to separate an act of faith as something that seemed to be illogical. No, that's right, a different sort of. I wasn't saying it was illogical. I'd say it might be a parallel way of experiencing. Parallel? I could go along with.

Parallel I could go along with. In other words, that when you enter the faith, however you enter the faith, or you come to believe, then you want to understand what it is you're believing, and that this is what ways in which, right from the very beginning, as we've explored, we've tried to understand what it is we believe about the coming of Jesus Christ in relation to God as Father and Spirit. Martin Palmer, the Trinity is one of the things that sets Christianity apart from other Abrahamic faiths. Have Judaism and Islam seen anything in this doctrine to accept?

No. I mean, Islam is absolutely absolute about it. There is a verse in the Quran which says, you know, those who believe in the Trinity are wrong and they've got it wrong and God has no son. And this was considered so important that when they captured Jerusalem and started to build on the site of the temple in Jerusalem and they built the dome of the rock,

it's one of the few texts that's actually written up on there to sort of say to the Christians in that city, you're wrong. And particularly within Judaism, you have this notion that the Torah was created before the creation. But it's this sense that here is this teaching, here is this voice of God, which is, in a sense, an emanation. And Philo, who Janet was referring to in the first century AD,

refers to it as the firstborn of God, the first child, the first daughter, in fact, in certain times. And then sees the wisdom, this very strong tradition of wisdom, which is feminine, and particularly in the Orthodox Church, is kept as a feminine notion, this idea that you can be in,

your life can be transformed and changed by the wisdom coming into you. So you almost have a Trinity in Judaism. In Islam, in the Sufi tradition, you have this notion of the love of God, which is an emanation, a manifestation of God's compassion for you. But how can an unmoving, unchangeable God be passionate? So the struggle, I think, for Judaism and for Islam is how do we maintain a monotheistic belief, but not make God so remote that I as an ordinary troubled human being

cannot have a relationship, and in many ways, I think that reflects, going back to your question, I think that reflects where an awful lot of Christians find themselves as well. They want a personal relationship. Janet Soskis, it's frequently been, the Trinity, frequently been a subject for religious art. How is the, in your view, how is the art reflected the philosophy.

Well, it's quite interesting because you might say it's only recently that it's been a strong figure for religious art. In the earliest iconography, the Eastern icons, there's a prohibition on representing the father. And this was tied up with the valorization of icons in general, which are icons of Christ and saints. Why can you represent Christ? Because in Jesus, the word became flesh and dwelt amongst, and we beheld his glory. That was the apology, the pro-Icon group used. But the father, there was a big prohibition in the Eastern Church against representing the Father.

Now, we do get this coming in, and particularly in the Western Church. The Rubloff icon has been mentioned already. But I think amongst purists in orthodoxy, the Rubloff icon, which is 15th century, is slightly controversial if it's regarded as representing the Trinity. But if we look in an early representation, we get a wonderful apseic in Rome in San Clemente, which is Byzantine.

It's 1125 where Christ is on the cross, water is coming from his side going down to a fountain which is nourishing a vine whose tendrils fill the whole space. But at the top of the cross is a hand holding the cross in place. And that hand represents the father. Now, is this a representation of the Trinity? It's probably a representation of that God the Father is present, even at this darkest moment, which is almost always the moment of new birth too.

So later we do get, in Renaissance paintings, then we get, to my mind, some rather creepy paintings of the Trinity, although I'm culturally biased, where you get a man wearing a papal tiara holding up a cross or holding the body of the crucified one. Usually there's a bird in between them.

A lot of these paintings are Spanish and Italian. And these are depictions, but I think they're a rather degradation of the tradition to my sense. The earliest British tradition, I think Martin could correct me, are simple things like in stone on cathedrals, with three intersecting circles or something like that. Graham Ward, why do you think the Trinity has been a particularly important

subject for 20th century theologians? It became an important turning point for Protestant theology with Carl Bart, because in many ways before this, the Trinity had either been kind of made into an appendix, which is what Schleimacher does in the 19th. century or it was demythologised. So he comes back with a very strong doctrine and his whole kind of church stigmatics had been central to that. To me why it's become more important was actually as a post-war phenomena really in theology and that was the way in which it figured forth

communion or communio. One of the notions of the Trinity as perichoresis was that they interpenetrated, we've done that rings business, they interpenetrated one another. And this then offered a kind of notion of democratic relations, justice, equality. And so in the rebuilding of, well, not just Europe, but the world really after the Second World War, a lot of these kind of theologians were actually drawing upon these kind of images in terms of what came to be known as a kind of social Trinitarianism. You find it in liberation theology, for example,

that with Boff, where the image of the Trinity becomes an, image of the kind of society that we actually want to move towards. Finally, let's start with Jan. If we go around the table, not all Christians subscribe to the Trinity. Why does some denominations directed, some person's directed, most outstandingly Newton, who was a Unitarian and wouldn't have the Trinity at all, Isaac Newton. Well, for the same reason that Muslims and Jews do, if you don't believe that Jesus is God incarnate, you don't need the doctrine of the Trinity.

and not all people who call themselves Christians do believe that. If you do believe that Jesus and God incarnate, you've got to have something like the Trinity. Martin? I very much go with Janet. I think it's a lot easier to actually just maintain the unity of God. It does get extremely complicated and confusing to explain, and yet I think what is intriguing is that even those who are unitarians

end up, in my experience, are working with them, still with the sense that God manifests himself, herself, in different ways to the individual. And so, yes, you maintain, I believe in one, God only, but I experience that God. And this is a phenomenon right through the major religions. Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism do the same thing. That, yes, there is the unity,

but to experience that unity, you experience it in diversity. And finally, Graham. I would go along very much, with what Martin was trying to say, what is going on here is trying to get a conception of the divine which is transcendent and therefore other than the world. And yet also that this transcendence is experience within the world, imminently within the world, within our experience.

And so how do you relate these two things? And so, yes, I can see exactly if you don't want to believe in Jesus as being the Christ, upon which this might be formulated, then you could do without that, but you're still going to be living this kind of tension between the imminent and the transcendent and finding a way in which you can actually understand that.

Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Janet Soskis, Graham Ward and Martin Palmer. Next week we'll be talking about the 17th century empiric philosopher Bishop Barkley. And thank you for listening. I'm Kate Lamble, and from Understand from BBC Radio 4, this is rinsed. Last time I was here,

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