Growth of the Trinity Concept

104:2.1Mono­the­ism arose as a philo­sophic protest against the in­con­sis­tency of poly­the­ism. It de­vel­oped first through pan­theon or­ga­ni­za­tions with the de­part­men­tal­iza­tion of super­nat­u­ral ac­tiv­i­ties, then through the henothe­is­tic ex­al­ta­tion of one god above the many, and fi­nally through the ex­clu­sion of all but the One God of fi­nal value.

104:2.2Trini­tar­i­an­ism grows out of the ex­pe­ri­en­tial protest against the im­pos­si­bil­ity of con­ceiv­ing the one­ness of a dean­thro­po­mor­phized soli­tary De­ity of un­re­lated uni­verse sig­nif­i­cance. Given a suf­fi­cient time, phi­los­o­phy tends to ab­stract the per­sonal qual­i­ties from the De­ity con­cept of pure mono­the­ism, thus re­duc­ing this idea of an un­re­lated God to the sta­tus of a pan­the­is­tic Ab­so­lute. It has al­ways been dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand the per­sonal na­ture of a God who has no per­sonal re­la­tion­ships in equal­ity with other and co-or­di­nate per­sonal be­ings. Per­son­al­ity in De­ity de­mands that such De­ity ex­ist in re­la­tion to other and equal per­sonal De­ity.

104:2.3Through the rec­og­ni­tion of the Trin­ity con­cept the mind of man can hope to grasp some­thing of the in­ter­re­la­tion­ship of love and law in the time-space cre­ations. Through spir­i­tual faith man gains in­sight into the love of God but soon dis­cov­ers that this spir­i­tual faith has no in­flu­ence on the or­dained laws of the ma­te­rial uni­verse. Ir­re­spec­tive of the firm­ness of man’s be­lief in God as his Par­a­dise Fa­ther, ex­pand­ing cos­mic hori­zons de­mand that he also give rec­og­ni­tion to the re­al­ity of Par­a­dise De­ity as uni­ver­sal law, that he rec­og­nize the Trin­ity sov­er­eignty ex­tend­ing out­ward from Par­a­dise and over­shad­ow­ing even the evolv­ing lo­cal uni­verses of the Cre­ator Sons and Cre­ative Daugh­ters of the three eter­nal per­sons whose de­ity union is the fact and re­al­ity and eter­nal in­di­vis­i­bil­ity of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity.

104:2.4And this self­same Par­a­dise Trin­ity is a real en­tity—not a per­son­al­ity but nonethe­less a true and ab­so­lute re­al­ity; not a per­son­al­ity but nonethe­less com­pat­i­ble with co­ex­is­tent per­son­al­i­ties—the per­son­al­i­ties of the Fa­ther, the Son, and the Spirit. The Trin­ity is a super­sum­ma­tive De­ity re­al­ity even­tu­at­ing out of the con­join­ing of the three Par­a­dise De­i­ties. The qual­i­ties, char­ac­ter­is­tics, and func­tions of the Trin­ity are not the sim­ple sum of the at­tri­butes of the three Par­a­dise De­i­ties; Trin­ity func­tions are some­thing unique, orig­i­nal, and not wholly pre­dictable from an anal­y­sis of the at­tri­butes of Fa­ther, Son, and Spirit.

104:2.5For ex­am­ple: The Mas­ter, when on earth, ad­mon­ished his fol­low­ers that jus­tice is never a per­sonal act; it is al­ways a group func­tion. Nei­ther do the Gods, as per­sons, ad­min­is­ter jus­tice. But they per­form this very func­tion as a col­lec­tive whole, as the Par­a­dise Trin­ity.

104:2.6The con­cep­tual grasp of the Trin­ity as­so­ci­a­tion of Fa­ther, Son, and Spirit pre­pares the hu­man mind for the fur­ther pre­sen­ta­tion of cer­tain other three­fold re­la­tion­ships. The­o­log­i­cal rea­son may be fully sat­is­fied by the con­cept of the Par­a­dise Trin­ity, but phil­o­soph­i­cal and cos­mo­log­i­cal rea­son de­mand the rec­og­ni­tion of the other tri­une as­so­ci­a­tions of the First Source and Cen­ter, those tri­uni­ties in which the In­fi­nite func­tions in var­i­ous non-Fa­ther ca­pac­i­ties of uni­ver­sal man­i­fes­ta­tion—the re­la­tion­ships of the God of force, en­ergy, power, cau­sa­tion, re­ac­tion, po­ten­tial­ity, ac­tu­al­ity, grav­ity, ten­sion, pat­tern, prin­ci­ple, and unity.