One sentence, one beautiful sentence at the end of Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians (13:13) and it is clear that the notion of God has been transformed in the life and worship of the early Church:

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,

the love of God,

and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Ben F. Meyer wrote that the idea of the Trinity “imposed” itself on the early Church, in this case Paul, not through carefully worded dogmatic statements or philosophical treatises but through the lived reality of God in the lives of the believers. It would be centuries before the Councils of the 4th and 5th centuries could “define” the Trinitarian nature of God, but it had been experienced for centuries prior to that. It is clear when you read the Scriptures with Trinitarian eyes that you see the relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that the definition itself begins to emerge from the descriptions of God, specifically in the pages of the New Testament.

What is often lost today is the radical nature of speaking of this relationship in light of Jewish understanding of God’s Oneness. Paul, schooled as a Pharisee, would have been able to cite verse after verse from Israel’s Scripture regarding the Oneness of God, just as Jesus himself did in reciting the Shema from Deuteronomy 6:4 (see Matthew 22:37 and parr.): God is One. It was the overwhelming sense of the love of God, felt in the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and poured out in the fellowship, the koinonia, or communion, of the Holy Spirit that lead to this transformed understanding of God. God’s Oneness was lived in three “persons” (or hypostases). This itself was realized in the life of the earliest Christians as they experienced the grace, love and communion of the living God in their midst. We need to pay attention to Paul’s final phrase, which does not focus on the definition so much as the abiding presence of God in the life of the believers: may this grace, love and fellowship “be with all of you.” It defines not only the reality of God, but it ought to describe also the life of the Church together.

John W. Martens

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John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.