The Trinity

The King James Version of 1 John 5:7-8 reads: "there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." This is the only verse in the Bible that states the doctrine explicitly.

It is not original. Known as the Comma Johanneum, it appears in no Greek manuscript before the 14th century, and in only a handful after. It is absent from every early translation except the Latin, and no Greek father cites it — including during the fourth-century debates, when it would have settled the argument outright.

Erasmus left it out of his first two Greek editions of 1516 and 1519 and added it in 1522 after a manuscript containing it was produced. That edition fed the text underlying the King James Version. Modern translations, including the ESV, NIV, and NRSV, omit it or footnote it as an addition.

It would be, if "person" and "being" meant the same thing. The doctrine states that God is one in one respect and three in a different respect, which is not a contradiction on its face — three is only inconsistent with one when both are counting the same kind of thing.

The real question is whether the two senses can be given content precisely enough to do the work. Contemporary philosophers of religion have proposed several ways: Richard Swinburne and Cornelius Plantinga defend social models, where the persons are distinct centers of consciousness united in other respects; Peter van Inwagen and Peter Geach use relative identity; Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea propose an analogy with material constitution.

Each attracts a standard objection. Social models are pressed on why three centers of consciousness are not three gods, an objection with a name — tritheism — because it was raised in antiquity. Relative identity models are pressed on whether the logic they require is coherent generally. Dale Tuggy has argued at length that none of the proposals succeeds. The dispute is live rather than settled.

This overstates the case. High claims about Christ appear well before 325: Philippians 2:6-11 is generally regarded as an early hymn predating the letter, John 1:1 identifies the Word as God, and Pliny the Younger reported around 112 that Christians sang "to Christ as to a god."

What Nicaea did was choose among positions already in circulation and fix the wording. The doctrine as stated in the creeds is a later formulation; the beliefs it drew on are earlier. Nicaea also did not settle the matter — the Arian position remained widespread for most of the following century.

The doctrine concerns the nature of God, and there is nothing unreasonable in thinking that exceeds full human comprehension.

Used as a response to specific objections, it does less. It gives no way to distinguish a claim that is true but beyond understanding from one that has not been stated clearly enough to evaluate — and the objections above are about the clarity of the statement rather than the depth of the subject.