In my last blog, I addressed the question of whether or not the earliest Christians believed in the Trinity. Referencing the second person of what I’m calling my “Trinity of Scholars”, Raymond Brown, I showed that, given the developments we find in the New Testament, they must have. The time required for them to take their earlier, shared understanding of the Holy Spirit—and His relationship to the Father and the Son—in the very different directions that we find clearly evident in the New Testament means that this understanding had to be alive and well in the Early Church prior to the writing of the New Testament.
In this blog, I’m going to refer to the third person in my “Trinity of Scholars”, N. T. Wright, in order to show how this early understanding didn’t just exist in certain pockets or quarters of the earliest church, but that it had to be widespread, even practically universal, to produce something we find in one of the earliest New Testament writings, First Corinthians, which is written in the early to mid-50’s AD, roughly twenty to twenty-five years after the life of Jesus.
Decades ago, news magazines like Time or Newsweek would frequently run articles around Christmas and Easter presenting the latest scholarly take on some tenet of Christian faith. Raymond Brown was often the featured scholar in these popular news magazines anytime they ran articles about Jesus or the Bible.
With Brown’s passing over two decades ago, N. T. Wright has emerged as the “go to” scholar. With the decline in popularity of news magazines, however, he appears more frequently on TV specials or documentaries shown on outlets like the History Channel or PBS. Many, including many of his colleagues, regard Wright to be the leading Biblical scholar of his generation.
In his massive two volume commentary on Paul, Wright makes a sustained argument for what he calls a “nascent trinitarian monotheism”—with “nascent” meaning: coming or having recently come into existence—stemming from the earliest Christianity. One of the central texts he uses to make this argument is 1 Corinthians 12:4-6. (see N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God: Volume II, pp. 709-728, esp. 723 for more detail)
One of the major issues driving Paul to write this letter is to address the “spiritual elitism” that is threatening to tear this beloved community of his apart. A certain faction is claiming superiority over the rest of its members because they possess what—at least in their minds—are the superior spiritual gifts, like, for example, speaking in tongues. So Paul writes the Corinthians to, among other things, exhort them to unity; to exhort the “spiritually elite” in Corinth to stop being so divisive; to exhort them to treat the wide range of different spiritual gits, and thus, the diverse mix of members in the community, as fully coequal.
Chapter 12 is where Paul takes on this issue. Much of the chapter is devoted to his well-known exposition of the different gifts and the unique dignity each has. Using the memorable—and at times humorous—image of the relationship the different members of the human body, like an eye or hand, have to one another, he emphasizes how indispensable each member is to the whole—how ridiculous would it be for the eye to say to the hand I don’t need you, or vice versa?
He then goes on to stress how vital even the “weaker members” are to the body. In fact, he argues, the way we give the “less honorable members” greater honor by clothing them betrays how valuable they are to the whole. Thus, he concludes with rhetorical flourish, those who believe themselves to be the spiritually stronger members should elevate the “less honorable” members of “the body of Christ” in the same way, to a place of full equality which, in turn, will restore the unity of the community.
Because Paul expects to get some pushback from the spiritually elite in Corinth, because he anticipates that what he is telling them about spiritual gifts will be controversial, he wants to start in a place of shared conviction, with a premise they will heartily affirm, one that is completely uncontroversial and will elicit no pushback.
Verses 4 through 6 are meant to do just this, to set the tone for this beautiful exposition of the equal status and dignity that exists among members of the Body of Christ—and therefore, should exist among the Corinthians. These two verses are meant to successfully launch and effectively frame the exhortation to unity that follows. They are meant to establish the major premise no Christian in the Early Church would dispute so that Paul can make the difficult argument that follows. They are meant to provide the rationale for why any authentic Christian community must treat all its members as fully coequal.
And so, this is how Paul frames verses 4 though 6: “There are different gifts, but the same Spirit. There are different ministries, but the same Lord. There are different works, but the same God who accomplishes all of them in everyone.”
Wait, what?! As Wright points out, Paul is making “entirely the wrong point”!
If Paul wants to exhort the Corinthians to unity, if he wants to put the accent on unity, his opening salvo should go more like this: “All (spiritual) gifts come from the one God”. Period! With the emphasis on God as one. With the premise grounded in the unicity, the Oneness, of the God they share their Christian belief in.
But instead, Paul puts the accent on division. Paul begins his exhortation for unity by highlighting the division of Persons within the Godhead. Paul splits the One God into Three.
While we can plainly see that Paul is grounding his premise in their shared belief in God—he explicitly mentions God, after all—and that this is what carries the most weight with true believers like those in Corinth—with nothing being more central or important to a believer than the very nature of the God they believe in—the repetition Paul employs in these verses tends to dull modern ears to the explosive nature of what he is saying. It tends to dull modern ears to the fact that he is, in fact, splitting the one God into Three: Spirit, Lord, God.
The reason this usually goes right over our heads is that we miss what couldn’t be any clearer to the Corinthians, or any early Christian for that matter. When Paul refers to “the same Lord”, we tend to think of “Lord” as another way to say “God”, as if Paul is repeating himself simply for poetic effect. And thus, we tend to understand the Spirit likewise, simply as the spirit of the one God.
But when they heard “Lord”, the early Christians would immediately think of Jesus, God’s Son. “Lord” is how the Divine Name came to be translated in Greek. And, as there is abundant evidence to attest, when the Early Church used this divine name, they primarily used it in reference to Jesus, as “the Lord Jesus” or even just “the Lord”. In fact, they far more often refer to Jesus as Lord and the Father as “God”. “God” was the generic version of the Divine Name; “Lord” was the actual, or proper, name of God. In other words, the Early Church gave Jesus the more exalted title, which clearly signaled that they saw Him as being fully coequal with the Father. So, when the Corinthians heard Paul’s words, they would immediately recognize that “the same God” is referring to the Father and “the same Lord” is none other than Jesus, His Son.
Because, as numerous New Testament texts attest, the Early Church already understood God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ to be on the same level, to possess, in other words, the same dignity and divine status; because the Son was already being viewed as fully divine and thus coequal with the Father; because it was already widely accepted that the Divine Identity included both Father and Son, placing the Spirit right alongside the Father and the Son in this listing of the same divine and exclusive source of the full range of different spiritual gifts, would clearly indicate that Paul understood the Holy Spirit to be coequal the Father and the Son.
Placing the Spirit first in the list, with the same connecting word linking Spirit, Lord, and God together, would drive the point home: Spirit, Lord, and God (the Father), are one and “the same” God from whom all spiritual gifts derive. To Corinthian ears, Paul would clearly be including the Holy Spirit in the Divine Identity—One God in Three Persons—which the Early Church had already accepted as including the Father and the Son.
After all, only a few chapters earlier, in 1 Corinthians 8:6, belief in Jesus as Lord was so well established in the Early Church that Paul felt free to rework the Shema Israel, the great Jewish prayer pledging total devotion to the One God of Jewish monotheism, to include Jesus alongside the Father as the Lord Alone, as together being the One True God to Whom we owe all our love and devotion. Here in 12:4-6, just a few chapters later, in the context of including Jesus in the Shema and by placing “the same Spirit” on the same level as the Lord Jesus and God the Father, it is unmistakable that Paul intends to include Holy Spirit in the Divine Identity just as he had done with Jesus the Son in 8:6.
To Corinthian ears, actually to anyone who confessed Jesus as Lord—i.e., everyone in the Early Church—Paul’s meaning couldn’t be any clearer: the One True God consists of Three Divine Persons: Father, Son, and Spirit. This is Paul’s major premise. A premise to which, he simply presumes, no one would object. A premise to which, he has to have presumed—otherwise his argument would falter before it even began—no one would blink an eye.
Because, if they did blink an eye to this, if there was any question whatsoever about God being Father, Son, and Spirit, if Paul couldn’t simply presume that this was the God the Corinthians had come to wholeheartedly accept and enthusiastically believe in, that this was the God they knew and loved with all their heart, mind, strength and soul, he never could have begun with this premise. In other words, if Paul didn’t know for certain, couldn’t simply expect as a matter of course, that the Corinthians enthusiastically shared this understanding of God, it would have blown up his entire argument before he even began.
If there is any remaining question that this is really what Paul intended to say, and that this is what the Corinthians would have heard him saying, look at Paul’s rhetoric, the way he sets up his premise. He uses the linking word “different” to talk about the different spiritual gifts and juxtaposes it with “the same” in talking about the God from whom all spiritual gifts come, the divine side of his “different/the same” refrain, spiritual gifts on one side, the God from whom they come on the other. But instead of repeating three times that the different gifts, ministries, and works come from “the same God” as we would expect, he attributes them to—and distributes them among—the same Spirit, Lord, and God, respectively.
The effect is to have that linking word “same” ringing in our heads—same Spirit, same Lord, same God—linking Spirit, Lord, and God together and underscoring the connection between the Spirit, the Lord (Jesus), and God (the Father) as being the same, together, in other words, one and the same God. Thus, Paul’s intended result in using this juxtaposition is to signal that the three differently named Divine Persons responsible for the full range of different spiritual gifts are the same God from whom all supernatural gifts come. Paul’s “different but the same” refrain underscores how all spiritual gifts have their source in the same God who is Spirit, Lord, God (the Father).
Don’t miss this: Paul sets it up so that what can only come from God—the “different” (spiritual) gifts, (church) ministries, and works (i.e., mighty works of God) which would have been understood by the Corinthians as supernatural blessings only God can bestow and/or enable—comes from all Three, the Holy Spirit, the Lord Jesus, and God the Father. The Three are “the same” God. In this way that Paul brings the many different spiritual gifts back to the same, threefold divine source, he makes an unmistakable equivalence between Spirit, Lord, and God.
In fact, there would be no other reason for Paul to repeat himself this way, to enumerate the spiritual gifts three ways. Elsewhere, Paul refers to spiritual gifts in the singular, as a single set. But here, he splits them into three sets: gifts, ministries, works. Clearly, the only reason he does so is to make room to enumerate what, in his mind, is the parallel “threefoldness” that lies at the heart of the Divine Identity so he can distribute what can only come from “the same” God across the Three Persons. This enumeration of spiritual gifts would have been totally unnecessary—unless Paul thought it absolutely necessary, because he cannot conceive of the one and same God as being anything other than Spirit, Lord, God.
And if there is any lingering doubt that this is what Paul is up to, consider this: The only way these verses make sense as the premise for an exhortation to unity is if they are grounded in the threefold unity, the coequal relationship he finds in the Godhead. This is the only way versus 4 to 6 will work as a premise for the argument we know Paul wants to make: Because you wholeheartedly believe that this is who God is; because you have already enthusiastically accepted that God is Tri-Personal; because you know it to be true, then act like it! With all the different spiritual giftedness you have in Corinth, have the same unity among yourselves that you find among the three different Divine Persons who you believe to be one and the same God. Relate to one another in the same way the Father, Son, and Spirit do—as coequals, perfectly united in love.
In order for set up all that follows, Paul had to believe that the Corinthians would wholeheartedly agree with and gladly affirm his premise to be true.
Paul is banking everything on his expectation that the Corinthians will naturally want to emulate the kind of unity they find in God, that this is the kind of unity they find in God, that this is their firm belief. This is the only way his mentioning Spirit, Lord, and God in functionally the same divine role would be effective and not completely backfire.
Wright argues that this passage is one of a number of striking ways Paul seems to have presumed, as a matter of course, that there is an “irreducible threefoldness” in the Divine Identity.
And here’s why this is so massively significant: Paul was Jewish by background, a self-described “zealous Pharisee”, as solid a monotheistic Jew as they come. But most of his Corinthian converts came to Christianity from Paganism. The polytheistic religion of their background delighted in nothing more than finding more gods to add to its ever-expanding pantheon of deities, a pantheon ripe with fierce rivalries, riddled with narcissistic-fueled divisions, and characterized by divine dysfunction.
While the Corinthians and other Gentile Christians like them had embraced monotheism, the ever-present danger that they might naturally gravitate back to pagan ideas and morality remained. For them, the way Paul begins would at best be confusing. At worst, it would sow the seeds for greater disunity. It would give permission to, even ammunition and justification for the “stronger members” to cling to their spiritual elitism. It would totally defeat Paul’s point.
In the history of logic and rhetoric, Paul could not have found a worse premise on which to base his exhortation for unity. Not only would it be totally superfluous, unnecessary, and counterproductive to split God into Three. It would be extremely dangerous as well. Dividing the One God into Three Persons, putting this idea into the Corinthian’s head, had the potential to destroy the Corinthian Church.
Unless…unless, the Corinthians already believed in the “irreducible threefoldness” of the One True God. Unless this was such a firmly established belief of theirs that it was beyond doubt. Beyond question. Utterly foundational. The unshakable conviction upon which their worldview rested. Unless the unity of the Three Persons as the One True God was the Premise upon which everything else rested. Was what defined their Christianity, what they all held most in common. Was what they knew and accepted to be most true. Unless this had already long ago been firmly established the bedrock of their shared faith in Jesus.
And not just for Paul and the Corinthians, but the rest of the Early Church as well.
Paul isn’t just throwing this idea out here, as some kind of clever rhetorical device. This is an idea he staked—and would ultimately give—his life for. As a diehard Jew, a zealous Pharisee who, before converting, persecuted Christians for elevating Jesus to divine status, monotheism was the foundational belief in his worldview. We can be sure that he would never dare entertain such an outrageous, blasphemous, and insane idea as the One God being split into Three Persons would sound to Jewish ears unless, in accepting Jesus, he had come to believe with every fiber of his being that this is exactly Who God has revealed Himself to be. We can be sure that he would never take such a radical reconfiguration of the divine identity so lightly as to use it for rhetorical purposes without wholeheartedly being convinced of it himself.
And we also know how influential Paul was in the Early Church. As the so-called apostle to the Gentiles, it is almost certain that Paul had contact with more Christians in the earliest church than any other person. And one of the things we can be most certain he taught about is the nature of God, this “irreducible threefoldness” of the Divine Identity. We have abundant evidence that he passionately proclaimed the Lordship of Jesus, that this was absolutely central to his preaching. Proclaiming God as Father, Son, and Spirit, would not be that much of a leap from proclaiming Him as Father and Son. Indeed, there a number of “triadic” (as scholars call them) formulas found in Paul’s writings that indicate this is precisely what he was doing.
Beyond Paul and his influence, we have solid reason to think that the rest of the Early Church shared this “nascent trinitarian monotheism”. We know that, when it came to essential matters—and nothing was more essential than the nature, person, and identity of God—Paul was in full alignment with the “pillars” of the Church, the Jerusalem leadership, especially Peter and James the brother of the Lord, who exercised wide ranging authority over the carefully controlled passing along of creedal traditions (i.e., the basic beliefs, the “faith statement” if you will) of the growing church. In other words, when it came to essential beliefs, they were careful to hand on the tradition in a way which insured that all the churches were on the same page.
So we know that Paul is not out on a limb here, a voice crying out in the wilderness, inventing a strange new idea of his own making. Too much is at stake. It strikes at the heart of monotheism, particularly the specific and astounding way Christianity was reconfiguring it. If the Corinthians suspected or even had the slightest doubt that this most critical belief wasn’t universally held throughout the Early Church, they never would have listened to Paul here.
And this is stunning: Paul is using this “irreducible threefoldness” of God in a way that he presumes no one will even bat an eye. Even as he anticipates getting pushback on his exhortation to unity, he can simply presume that no one will challenge him on this premise.
Since most scholars date 1 Corinthians to the early- to mid-50’s AD, only a little over two decades after Jesus, and since this understanding of God had to be firmly established in Corinth by this point for Paul to presume that no one will bat an eye at his premise, it must go back to the 40’s AD at least, during the earliest Christian generation.
And given Paul’s prominence in the earliest church, given the influence he had on the majority of Christians at the time, given the unity he shared with the other prominent leaders in the church, given the way he can simply appeal to the “irreducible threefoldness” of God as the unquestioned premise for an exhortation on unity, this understanding of God as Three Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, had to be pervasive in the earliest church.
I would love to hear your thoughts on these blogs I’m doing about the Trinity. You can go to the “Contact E. J.” page of the Raising Jesus website and leave your comments there. I pray you have a most blessed Easter!
