The Trinity in the New Testament

“Our obligation – asserts the author – is to investigate whether the New Testament writers were aware of the problem, either in the form of the relationship between the Father and the Son, or in that of the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit.” And the conclusion he reaches is that the idea of the Trinity emerged and was answered already in New Testament times. And that it was present in the minds of some of its writers, who tried, in a way, to respond to it, even though it is not specifically mentioned in any of their writings. He states that for apostolic Christians, the issue of the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Spirit was treated more as a problem to be solved than as a doctrine to be defined. And therefore, despite there being no formal declaration of the doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament, there is an answer to the problem; and a doctrine is nothing but the result of the answer to a problem. Although it was not until the second century, and even more so, in the third, that the problem was fully confronted and the doctrine emerged, being the subject of progressive development.

He divides the work into four parts:

The first part, INTRODUCTORY, is dedicated to discussing the origin of the problem, which he considers arose with the affirmation by early Christians that Jesus was God, attributing divine titles to him and assigning him functions that in Hebrew thought were normally reserved for God. He demonstrates with reliable data that the implicit idea of the Trinity was intimately linked from the beginning to Christian worship. And he provides an extensive discussion on the Hebrew antecedents of the doctrine, the Trinity in Hebrew religion, analyzing one by one the indications in the Old Testament of a certain plurality in God and its influence on New Testament Christianity.

In the second part, the most extensive of the work – six complete chapters – he focuses on presenting the evidence of THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST. He analyzes in detail the titles and functions that early Christians applied to Jesus and that, in Jewish thought, were only applicable to God: Lord, Savior, Creator, Judge; and explains how he was the object of worship insofar as he was invoked by these names; as we can see both from the numerous doxologies found in the New Testament addressed to Christ, prayers to Christ, and Old Testament citations that are transferred from God to Christ; and from the use of the Greek equivalents of the word "worship" in connection with Christ. He concludes by discussing the difficult problem of the relationship between the Father and the Son, which he calls the center of the Trinitarian problem: If Jesus could be called God and Lord, if he could act as judge, creator, and savior, if he could be the object of prayer and worship, and be given divine titles, what was his relationship with the God whom he himself worshiped and to whom men had access through him?

The third part – shorter – focuses on THE DIVINITY OF THE HOLY SPIRIT. He acknowledges how the doctrine of the Holy Spirit was for a long time the Cinderella of theology, very much relegated and abandoned, for although very clear in the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed, it did not capture much attention from ancient theologians, who centered theological controversies around the Person of Christ. Wainwright makes a deep analysis of what the Spirit means in both the Old Testament and the New Testament; he examines the relationship between the Spirit and Christ; he studies the passages in which Jesus speaks of the Holy Spirit; and finally determines the functions of the Spirit according to Acts, the Epistles, and especially in the Johannine writings, concluding that it is a personal divine force, distinct from the Father and the Son.

In the fourth – and final – part, he reviews the DEVELOPMENT OF THE TRINITARIAN PROBLEM. He investigates whether the use of the many ternary formulas found in the New Testament, which name the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, indicates that a doctrine of the Trinity had already begun in apostolic times; a very controversial topic due to textual criticism and in which very radical and conflicting positions are held, but which Wainwright addresses in a moderate and healthy way. He speaks of the existence in the first century of a movement oriented towards a triune conception of God. And he finally summarizes all that has been explained, concluding that although the doctrine of the Trinity was not directly addressed or expounded by the New Testament writers as the Church later developed and we know it today, it is demonstrated that it is the result of a search for precision in the doctrine of God that began in the New Testament and that, therefore, its basis is in it.

This extraordinary research work on the biblical evidence of the doctrine of the Trinity, carried out by Wainwright in the 1960s, and embodied in the present work: The Trinity in the New Testament, is the most complete, serious and scholarly work that has been written and published on the subject since the publication of Professor Jules Marie Lebreton's masterful work in 1927. We are, therefore, before a work valued and appreciated by all Christians, without confessional distinction, and which has been – and continues to be – used as a textbook on the subject in many of the most prestigious seminaries and faculties of theology.