When Christ revealed the identity of the Father and of God, he placed this revelation within another, still more inaccessible mystery, that of the Trinity. God is Father because he has a Son who is God, Jesus Christ. The basic principle of divine fatherhood was thereby transposed to a level which surpasses merely human thought.

Again the Church, in Her understanding of Who Jesus is, had to come to a new understanding of Who God is. The result of the Church’s belief that Jesus is both Divine and human was the development of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity – a doctrine that says that God, while He is one God, is comprised of Three distinct Persons.

The divine Trinity is the fundamental mystery of the Christian faith. It is the one starting-point from which the other elements of the Christian faith can be understood. This doctrine could not have been truly formulated without the help of Greek Philosophy.

For the Greeks, the perfection of knowledge consisted of theology, that is the knowledge that results from the study of God. For the Greeks, the aim of theology is knowledge of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In the opinion of Gregory Nazianzen the grace of the kingdom of heaven consists in the Holy Trinity uniting itself wholly to the whole soul.

It seems that two different ideas are found in the theology – the knowledge – that has developed about the Trinity. There is the “Alexandrian-Latin” view and the so-called “Greek” view. The teaching of the Western Church goes back to Augustine and Boethius who assert that in God everything is one to the extent that there is no opposition of relations. Therefore, God is the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. By contrast the Greek Fathers of the Church seem to remain more faithful to the terminology of the New Testament. The Father Almighty is the creator of heaven and earth, and hence the principle of cosmic unity in the extra-divine universe. This Father, however, is also the source of intra-divine unity. The Son and the Spirit are one in the Father. And since the function of the divine Persons corresponds to the place each occupies in the bosom of the Trinity, the salvific value of the mystery of the Trinity is manifested. It is the Father who is the ground of human divinization.

Trying to put words to this Mystery, seems to boggle human thinking. One of the important ideas that emerged in the struggle to understand God is the fact that the Son is the Word of God – that Person Who gives expression to the Father’s thoughts.       Christ IS Risen!