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created: 2025-11-06T02:51:46.190Z
updated: 2025-11-15T20:19:55.496Z
---# Eerdmans’ Handbook to the History of Christianity | trinity

**URL:** [https://www.missiontools.org/resources/eerdmans-handbook-history-christianity/#:~:text=Authors,came%20out%20in%20the%20'70s.](https://www.missiontools.org/resources/eerdmans-handbook-history-christianity/#:~:text=Authors,came%20out%20in%20the%20'70s.)

Eerdmans’ Handbook to the History of Christianity | trinity Eerdmans’ Handbook to the History of Christianity tells us, “In Against Praxeas, Tertullian developed the doctrine of the Trinity” (ed. Tim Dowley, p. 111, 1977). Tertullian gave the Latin West a theological vocabulary that has hardly yet been bettered. He drew upon Stoicism and Roman law for his language, and taught that God was one being (substantia) but three concrete individuals (personae).… Origen’s teaching dominated the East in the third and fourth centuries... he insisted that Father, Son and Spirit were three eternally distinct persons (Greek hypostaseis–roughly the same as personae).… Origen’s ideas were deeply coloured by Middle Platonism, which graded existence into different levels (p. 112, emphasis added). the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy regarding the Trinity: “One-self Theories,” “Three-self Theories,” “Selves, gods, and modes,” “What is a mode?”, “Relative Identity Theories,” “20th Century Theologians and ‘Social’ Theories,” “Functional Monotheism,” “Perichoretic Monotheism,” “Material Monotheism,” “Concept-relative Monotheism,” “Mysterianism,” “Negative Mysterianism,” “Positive Mysterianism.” You obviously have plenty of company if you do not understand the Trinity! from the Hebrew Elohim, a plural word. The plurality of God is affirmed in verse 26: “Then God [Elohim] said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness.… ’” The terms Us and Our indicate more than one member in the God Family, but how can one reconcile humankind being made in the image and likeness of a Trinitarian god? Think about it. If God is a Trinity, with all that this means and implies, how could we human beings truthfully be said to have been made in His image and likeness? The doctrine of the Trinity is known as a strict mystery, which is defined as “a revealed truth that so far exceeds the capacity of a created intellect that its full meaning cannot be comprehended except by God alone. Yet strict mysteries, such as the Trinity and the Incarnation, can be partially understood, with varying degrees of insight, depending on God’s grace or the believer’s own effort and experience” (“Catholic Dictionary,” CatholicCulture.org).


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