Christian Liberals & Progressive People of Faith

Since no historian recorded the transition from Jewish monotheism to early Christian Trinitarianism, we cannot know exactly how or why it happened. But given the vigor of the young church, we can infer that the liturgical expressions recorded in the earliest Christian Scriptures were generated within the Christian community and resonated with that community’s experience. In worship they preached, prayed, and sang the healing that they had received, a healing which came through three persons but led congregants into one body.3 In other words, the early Christian community’s experience of salvation was Trinitarian—one salvation through three persons as one God.

To assert that their experience was Trinitarian is not to assert that their theology was Trinitarian. The earliest Christians did not think the same way about God that later Christians would think. They felt that their lives had been transformed by the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whom they worshiped as one. (Please note: when discussing historical theology, we will use the traditional, gender-specific terminology of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As the book progresses, we will substitute our own, gender-inclusive terminology.)

The early Christians’ liturgy expressed their experience, and their initial, unrecorded theological speculations reflected it. The early church laid the foundations of tripersonal (three person) theism on the experience of tripersonal salvation. By the time the church wrote its new Scriptures, it could not talk about God without talking about Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Euclideans needed three lines to draw a triangle; Christians needed three persons to talk about God. So John writes: “There are three who give testimony in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost. And these three are one” (1 John 5 DRA). (Sydnor, Great Open Dance, 43-44)