Mary Beth Jenkins, age 17, of Billings, Mont. for her question:
JUST WHAT IS THE TRINITY?
In Christian theology, the Trinity is the doctrine that God exists as three aspects: the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The three are united in one substance or being.
The term "trinitas" was first used in the second century by the Latin theologian Tertullian, but the concept was developed in the course of the debates on the nature of Christ.
The doctrine of the Trinity is not taught explicitly in the New Testament, where the word God almost invariably refers to the Father. But already Jesus Christ, the Son, is seen as standing in a unique relationship to the Father, while the Holy Spirit is also emerging as a distinct divine person.
In the fourth century, the doctrine was finally formulated. Using terminology still used by Christian theologians today, the doctrine taught the coequality of the persons of the Godhead.
In the West, the fourth century theologian St. Augustine's influential work called "De Trinitate" compared the three in oneness of God with analogous structures in the human mind and suggested that the Holy Spirit may be understood as the mutual love between Father and Son.
The doctrine of the Trinity may be understood on different levels. On one level, it is a means of constructing the word God in Christian discourse. God is not a uniquely Christian word and it needs specific definition in Christian theology.
This need for a specifically Christian definition is already apparent in the New Testament, where Paul says: "There are many 'gods' and many 'lords' yet for us there is one God, the Father, and one Lord, Jesus Christ" (1 Cor. 8.5 6).
These words constitute the beginning of a process of clarification and definition, of which the end product is the doctrine of the Trinity.
At another level, the doctrine of the Trinity may be seen as a transcript of Christian experience: The God of the Hebrew tradition had become known in a new way, first in the person of Christ, and then in the Spirit that moved in the church.
On a third, speculative level of understanding, the doctrine reveals the dynamism of the Christian conception of God involving notions of a source, a coming forth and a return (primordial, expressive and unitive Being.)
In this sense, the Christian doctrine has parallels in both philosophy (the 19th century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel's Absolute) and in other religions (the Trimurti of Hinduism).
Theology is a discipline that attempts to express the content of a religious faith as a coherent body of propositions. Theology is narrower in scope than faith, for whereas faith is a total attitude of the individual, including will and feeling, theology attempts to bring to expression in words the elements of belief that are explicitly or implicitly contained in faith.