The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen. (2 Corinthians 13:14)
There are several references in the New Testament which support the revelation that God is Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is a theology that challenges both a strict monotheism sometimes attributed to Judaism and the polytheism of the Hellenistic world. St Ireneaus (d. 292AD) comments:
… it is demonstrated in [that there is] One God, [the] Father, uncreated, invisible, Creator of all, above whom there is no other God, and after whom there is no other God. And as God is verbal (logikos), Therefore He made created things by the Word; and God is Spirit, so that He adorned all things by the Spirit, as the prophet also says, ‘By the Word of the Lord, were the heavens established, and all their power by His Spirit‘ (Psalm 32:6). Thus, since the Word ‘establishes’, that is, works bodily and confers existence (hyparxis), while the Spirit arranges and forms the various ‘powers’, so rightly is the Son called Word and the Spirit the Wisdom of God. (ON THE APOSTOLIC PREACHING, pp 42-43)
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware writing almost 1800 years after Irenaeus, says:
I believe… in one God who is at the same time three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. There is in God genuine diversity as well as true unity. The Christian God is not just a unit but a union, not just unity but community. There is in God genuine diversity as well as true unity. The Christian God is not just a unit but a union, not just unity but community. There is in God something analogous to ‘society’. He is not a single person, loving himself alone, not a self-contained monad or ‘The One’. He is triunity: three equal persons, each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing movement of mutual love. (THE ORTHODOX WAY, p 3)
