THE IRONY OF THE TRINITY

British philosopher Christopher Stead writes,

Christian writers naturally turned to the Bible for their teaching on the nature of God. But the use of it was often influenced by the philosophical thought of their own day. The Hebrews...pictured the God whom they worshipped as having a body and mind like our own, though trascending humanity in the splendour of his appearance, in his power, his wisdom, and the constancy of his care for his creatures. Such a conception, set out in the earlier books of the Old Testament, retained its authority despite some later changes of emphasis. But this biblical view...was radically modified in the teaching of Philo of Alexandria...[who] presents him as the metaphysical first principal of the universe, without bodily form or human passions, indeed without any sensible qualities: a perfectly simple, unchangeable, unfathomable being...Christian writers developed a broadly similar view, partly because they were influenced by the same philosophical authorities, partly through direct imitation of Philo himself. To this they added their doctrine of the Trinity... [1].

Jewish theologians didn't completely rid themselves of the concept of an anthropomorphic God until the 12th-13th century [2]. Even the anti-anthropomorphism of certain Christian philosophers provide evidence that early Christians believed in an anthropomorphic God [3]. Humans were the literal image of God and therefore partook (or at least had the potential to partake) in His divinity [4]. David Bentley Hart, an Eastern Orthodox philosopher (and, consequently, a Trinitarian), recognizes that the earliest Christians would have understood the cosmos to consist of a hierarchy of divine beings, with the Father being at the top as the Most High. Christ was therefore understood as a subordinate, second god:

[T]his secondary divine principle could be called God's "Son" or "Wisdom" or "Logos." The term "Logos" came to enjoy a special favor among Christians, as it had been adopted by the author of the prologue of John's Gospel to identify the pre-incarnate Christ...As a general rule, the "articular" form ho Theos-literally, "the God"-was a title reserved for God Most High or God the Father, while only the "inarticular" form theos was used to designate this secondary divinity. This distinction, in fact, is preserved in the prologue of John, whose first verse could justly be translated as: "In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was a god." It was entirely natural, therefore, for many Christians...to think of Christ as the incarnation of this derivative divine being who, though he functions in all respects as God for us, is still a lesser being than the Father [5].

The Trinity, therefore, was not an original belief of Christianity. He goes on to explain the position of Arius (c. 250-336), who believed Jesus to be a created being, subordinate to the Father. It must be remembered that by this time, Christian philosophy and theology divided ontologically between God and the created order (and by created, they meant creatio ex nihilo or "creation out of nothing" - something that neither Mormonism or the Bible teaches). As Blake Ostler put it,

When we talk about one God in modern Christianity we begin with a basic fundamental assumption in all of Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought: it is that there is God and then there is everything else. I call this the assumption of metaphysical monotheism and this is the very fundamental point from which [other Christians] begin...and it is this assumption: There exists a simple, immaterial substance that is necessarily the sole instance of the kind "divine" and utterly unique in the sense that there are no other members in the class of being occupied by this simple substance; alone has ontologically necessary actuality; (that means God is the only one that can't fail to exist) and everything else that is actual in any way depends upon this simple substance for its actuality. What that means in shorthand term is, God created and everything else is created. It's that simple [6].

Therefore, to Arius, Jesus could not be divine in the same way the Father is. Hart explains why this was opposed, leading to the formulation of the Trinity:

Ultimately, though, the Arian position was untenable simply because it reduced to incoherence the Christian story of redemption as it had been understood, proclaimed, prayed, and lived for generations...For Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, and many others, it was first and foremost the question of salvation that must determine how the identity of Christ is to be conceived. And they understood salvation, it must be appreciated, not in the rather impoverished way of many modern Christians, as a kind of extrinsic legal transaction between the divine and human by which a debt is canceled and the redeemed soul issued a certificate of entry into the afterlife; rather they saw salvation as nothing less than a real and living union between God and his creatures. To be saved was to be joined to God himself in Christ, to be in fact "divinized"-which is to say, in the words of 2 Peter 1:4, to become "partakers of the divine nature." In a lapidary phrase favored, in one form or another, by a number of the church fathers, "God became man that man might become god." In Christ, the Nicene party believed, the human and divine had been joined together in a perfect and indissoluble unity, by participation in which human beings might be admitted to share in his divinity...Only God can join us to God. And so, if it is Christ who joins us to the Father, then Christ must himself be no less than God, and must be equal to the Father in divinity [7].

Another scholar writes, "A fully divine Saviour was needed to ensure the salvation of mankind, which was understood on both sides as an actual divinization, or exaltation to the level of Deity" [8]. He continues:

To assert that deification is incompatible with the Bible on the basis of the differentiation between the divine and human found therein is to impose an ontological standard on the text which was not there originally. Stauffer asserts that the Semitic concept of God has to do primarily with power, not metaphysical being. Immortality "is simply a presupposition of this lordship," so that "the emphasis is on the dynamic definition rather than the metaphysical." Although the Septuagint had greatly subdued the anthropomorphisms of the Hebrew Scriptures, "the personal nature of God" was very much "a living reality" to the earliest Christians. Matthew 5:48 calls God τελειος "not in the sense of metaphysical speculation, but in terms of moral perfection." God is "faithful," meaning that his goodness is unfailing, but nowhere is he described as "unchangeable" in an ontological sense. The glib assumption that the Bible's "sharp distinction" between God and man precludes deification is ill-conceived; in fact, this is an example of Greek philosophical metaphysics read into the text. The irony is that it was the Church Fathers themselves who worked at reconciling such philosophical principles with the biblical revelation, while at the same time they were expounding a soteriology of deification [9].

The doctrine of theosis can be found in the writings of early Christians such as St. Justin Martyr, St. Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, etc. Granted, it isn't exactly the same as Mormonism, mainly due to the differences between the concept of the Trinity and the concept of the Godhead:

The most profound difference between the doctrines of theosis and exaltation revolves around the way in which humans become divinized, or become gods. In the doctrine of theosis, divinization comes about through participation in the divine energies of the one divine nature, which divine nature is fully possessed by each of the three divine persons who comprise the Trinity—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In the doctrine of exaltation, divinization comes about through growth of a capacity which is innate to the children born of Heavenly Parents—the Father and his eternal companion. This difference—the difference between participation and growth—can be rooted in two very different ontological understandings of divine nature and human nature [10].

In short,

[T]he doctrines of theosis and exaltation are functionally equivalent while being ontologically distinct. In other words, in both cases the results of human divinization are equivalent—humans come to possess divine qualities and attributes, a new manner of life, which they did not possess before and which they could not attain of their own volition. Yet the ways in which human divinization take place—in the case of theosis, through participation, and in the case of exaltation, through growth—are grounded in profoundly different ontological visions of human and divine nature [11].

Nevertheless, as Daniel Peterson said, "Now people have told me, 'Well your doctrine of deification is not exactly like that of the Early Christians.' To which I usually respond, 'Well your non-existent doctrine of deification is utterly unlike that of the Early Christians!'" [12] Vajda lists the following similarities between theosis and LDS exaltation: (1) terminology and attributes, (2) the centrality of Christ, (3) role of human works, (4) role of ritual, and (5) eternal progression. He concludes,

[T]he Mormons are truly "godmakers": as the doctrine of exaltation explains, the fullness of human salvation means "becoming a god." Yet what was meant to be a term of ridicule has turned out to be a term of approbation, for the witness of the Greek Fathers of the Church...is that they also believed that salvation meant "becoming a god." It seems that if one's soteriology cannot accommodate a doctrine of human divinization, then it has at least implicitly, if not explicitly, rejected the heritage of the early Christian church and departed from the faith of first millennium Christianity. However, if that is the case, those who would espouse such a soteriology also believe, in fact, that Christianity, from about the second century on, has apostatized and "gotten it wrong" on this core issue of human salvation. Thus, ironically, those who would excoriate Mormons for believing in the doctrine of exaltation actually agree with them that the early church experienced a "great apostasy" on fundamental doctrinal questions. And the supreme irony is that such persons should probably investigate the claims of the LDS Church, which proclaims that within itself is to be found the "restoration of all things" [13].

It is worth pointing out that Vajda wrote this while a Dominican priest. He has since joined the Church. So, next time you hear "but you believe you can become a god!!", remember that so did the earliest Christians. Ironically, it was this very belief that led to the finalization of the Trinity in the 4th century: the primary orthodoxy that defines supposed "true Christians."

UPDATE: William Hamblin provides this commentary on the Incarnation of the Word: "This is a fundamental concept: that Jesus, the preexistent divine Word, has become flesh (sarx), that is, a human being. The Greek term sarx means literally the meat, or fleshy part of a body, and hence, the body as a whole. It is sometimes used in the New Testament in opposition to spirit (pneuma), especially in Paul. This spirit-flesh duality is occasionally found in John (3:6, 6:63). Jesus' incarnation allows the complete fusion of the two. All of us, like Jesus, are born of the flesh, and all of us, through Jesus, can become born of the spirit (3:6). In a sense, the spirit becomes flesh so the flesh can become spirit." This last part reminds me of the Patristic "God became man that man might become god" as well as 3 Nephi 1:12-14 and Mosiah 15:1-4.


1. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 1994): pg. 120.

2. See Shamma Friedman, "Anthropomorphism and Its Eradication" in Iconoclasm and Iconoclash: Struggle for Religious Identity, ed. W.J. van Asselt, Paul van Geest, Daniela Muller, Theo Salemink (Brill, 2007).

3. See David L. Paulsen, "Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses," Harvard Theological Review 83:2 (1990); Carl W. Griffin and David L. Paulsen, "Augustine and the Corporeality of God," Harvard Theological Review 95:1 (2002); Paulsen, "The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives," BYU Studies 35:4 (1995-1996); Paulsen, "Divine Embodiment: The Earliest Christian Understanding of God," in Early Christians in Disarray: Contemporary LDS Perspectives on the Christian Apostasy, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (FARMS, 2005).

4. See David Bokovoy's enduring "'Ye Really Are Gods': A Response to Michael Heiser concerning the LDS Use of Psalm 82 and the Gospel of John," FARMS Review 19:1 (2007).

5. Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale University Press, 2009): pg. 204.

6. Ostler, "The Fallacy of Fundamentalist Assumptions," Transcript of a presentation given at the 2005 FAIR Conference.

7. Hart, 2009: pgs. 205-206.

8. Keith Edward Norman, "Deification: The Context of Athanasian Soteriology," PhD dissertation, Duke University (1980).

9. Ibid. Deification (and thus a lack of metaphysical monotheism) can be found within Judaism as well. For example, after reviewing the "claims of the Hekhalot literature that a man, Enoch, ascended to heaven and was metamorphosed into Metatron, the 'little Yahweh'," Peter Hayman asks, "But how does this material square with the supposed transcendental monotheism of Judaism from the post-exilic period on? Not at all, as far as I can see!" (Hayman, "Monotheism: A Misused Word in Jewish Studies?" Journal of Jewish Studies 42:1, 1991: pg. 5).

10. Jordan Vajda, "'Partakers of the Divine Nature': A Comparative Analysis of Patristic and Mormon Doctrines of Divinization," Master's thesis, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology (1998).

11. Ibid.

12. Peterson, "Autobiographical Notes on My Testimony," Transcript of a presentation given at the 2004 FAIR Conference.

13. Vajda, 1998.