On “The Triune God” by Edmund J. Fortman *****

This work provides a quick synopsis of trinitarian thinking from the beginning of the Christian faith to the twentieth century. My interest was primarily in the first half of the book—really from the foundation of the church through the first couple of centuries—and these are the book's clearest passage. In fact, as Fortman lays out, the Trinity teaching doesn't really find full form until the time of Augustine, in the fourth/fifth century, with some major “clarifications” happening in the Middle Ages, with Thomas Aquinas.

Fortman, himself a trinitarian, does a good job providing a framework and even denoting—or admitting—that trinitarian teaching is only implied among thinkers in the first one hundred years or so. He runs through pertinent scriptures and also through pertinent passages in early writers. The doctrine would not begin to find substantial form until the beginnings of the third century, and even in that, there would be plenty to argue over for the next hundred to two hundred years. Earliest thinkers didn't spend much time trying to figure out the place of the Holy Spirit; incorporation of the spirit as a “person” within the godhead would only begin really near the end of the second century. Instead, the arguments were over how Jesus was God and how he was related to, or positioned against, the Father.

Many of the arguments seem heavily tinged in philosophy, and after Augustine, even more so. As later Catholics would affirm, the trinity is a mystery. In that sense, I'm left wondering why there's been so much attempt to explain it. As becomes clear, as the centuries go on, there really isn't a good way to explain it; the second half of the book is full of seeming nonsense speak. Our terminology doesn't have the words to express what is attempting to be said; and even some of the terminology used, such as person(a), has changed over the years such that that that older terminology is no longer even as meaningful apparently as it once was (even though no better terms have arisen). Fortman, as he discusses later thinkers, seems to affirm much of what Augustine and certain other thinkers said on the subject, but over and over I'm left wondering why so many insist on this view of God (or insist Christians hold to it), when the earliest Christian writers did not conceive of God in the same way (and thus wouldn't be Christians in the view of contemporaries). The assumption is, of course, that later writers were led to greater truths that go beyond those earlier writers—but if the doctrine is so essential, why did the early writers not have it? Are Christians perhaps arguing over and hypothesizing about the wrong thing?