Online Trinitarianism: Where the Godhead isn't Greek Enough

Where the Trinity's Language Comes From

Neoplatonism is a school of Greek mysticism developed by the pagan philosopher Plotinus in the third century after Christ, built as a continuation of Plato's work and carrying no knowledge of and no relationship to the God of the Bible. When the councils that produced the creeds set out to describe the nature of God, they reached for this philosophy and applied its categories to Christianity, importing a pagan metaphysical framework to do work the biblical text had not given them vocabulary for. The technical heart of the Nicene formula, the word homoousios or "same substance," is a Greek philosophical term, not a biblical one. The companion essay "A Guess Dressed as a Creed" lays out the scriptural side of this in full; the point here is simply where the machinery came from, and it did not come from scripture.

That origin matters because of what this philosophy says about itself. Neoplatonism is explicit that language cannot capture what ultimate reality is, and the tradition that grew from it, running through Pseudo-Dionysius and into the heart of Catholic theology, says the same thing about God under the name of apophatic theology, the way of negation: God so exceeds human concepts that the truest things you can say about Him are what He is not. So the creedal language does not actually describe the Godhead in any way you could pick up and apply elsewhere, it retreats to deliberately vague, encapsulating language meant to draw a boundary around the mystery rather than to refine or resolve it. The words are built to hold the ambiguity, not to remove it, because the whole premise is that the ambiguity cannot be removed.

Thomas Aquinas, the tradition's most systematic mind, built directly on that premise and made it sharper. For Aquinas, reason can establish that God exists but cannot reach the Trinity at all; the nature of the Godhead is not derivable by argument and can only be received through faith, which supersedes reason. You cannot reason your way to it, on the tradition's own most authoritative account, because the content exceeds what reason can deliver.

The Weapon Violates Its Own Terms

Put those admissions together and the online trinitarian's move collapses. The tradition says its own language about God is approximate and cannot capture the reality, it says God is ultimately unknowable in positive terms, and it says reason cannot reach the Godhead and that the matter rests on faith beyond argument. Hold all three at once, and it becomes impossible to turn around and declare that someone else's formulation of the Godhead is definitively wrong, because that condemnation claims exactly the precise, rational, language-capturing certainty the tradition spent centuries denying it had. To wield the trinity as a sword of correction is to say, in effect, "we cannot know or describe this, and your description is heretical," which answers a question the tradition's own terms say cannot be answered that way. This is the identical error to invoking science as proof, taking a method whose entire power comes from humble, acknowledged limitation and brandishing it as infallible certainty. The weapon, swung, refutes the hand that holds it.

Whose God Is More Biblical

Now look at the specific doctrines actually lobbed against Latter-day Saints, and notice where each one comes from. That God has no body, that God cannot change, that God cannot suffer or be affected, that God stands outside time, that God is of one indivisible substance: every one of these traces to the Neoplatonic conception of an impersonal, immaterial, immutable One, and not to scripture. The Bible, on its face, runs the other way. Its God has a face Moses cannot see and survive, and hands, and a back; He walks in the garden in the cool of the day; He relents over Nineveh, regrets making Saul king, and is talked out of His anger by Moses. Orthodox theology has to reclassify every one of those passages as mere figure of speech precisely because the Neoplatonic commitments were brought to the text from outside rather than drawn out of it.

The Latter-day Saint conception sits closer to the surface of the Bible at nearly every one of these points. A God with a body of flesh and bone is the plain reading of a God with a face and hands. A God who acts within time is the plain reading of a God who responds to prayer and changes course in answer to His prophets. The Father and the Son as distinct beings unified in one divine nature is the plain reading of a Son who prays to His Father and asks that His disciples be one as they are one. The Latter-day Saint is not departing from the Bible on these points, the Latter-day Saint is declining the Greek philosophy laid over it.

Set that against what LDS theology affirms in its place, and the affirmations read straight off the surface of scripture.

So when the accusation is fully unfolded, this is what it amounts to. The Latter-day Saint is charged with worshiping the wrong Jesus, in a debate both sides have framed as a contest over fidelity to scripture, on the basis of doctrines that come from a pagan philosopher who died before the New Testament canon was even settled. The standard being enforced is not the Bible, it is Neoplatonism, and stripped of its borrowed clothing the complaint reduces to: your God is too biblical and not Neoplatonic enough.

Conclusion

The trinity isn't a useless concept, it's an important intellectual examination of the Godhead, but by its very nature is purposefully ambiguous and defies reason and thus must be taken on faith. The language in the trinity is not identifying, it is encapsulating language which draws boundaries around the Godhead without actually describing it in a rational sense that can be applied to anything else in the human experience. Thus, it is going beyond the philosophical bounds of the trinity to wield it as an authoritative sword of correction when that authority by its own admission is effectually saying "We don't know, but here's the language we use for this type of not-knowingness." This is the same error made when people invoke science as proving something.

The formulation of the trinity, as exposed throughout, was generated from sources the tradition itself regards as inspired, landing most heavily on Neoplatonism. It could be the weight of tradition and the erosion of time that has led the common man to misuse and under-identify what the trinity is, but it is clear that it cannot be used to exclude the LDS conception of the Godhead without violating its own terms, and any attempt to do so can only proceed through hubris, ignorance, or a bit of both. The deeper irony, developed in the companion essay "A Guess Dressed as a Creed," is that the LDS conception does not even fail the creed it is accused of failing. It satisfies the Nicene language as originally written and parts company only with the Neoplatonic specification layered on afterward. The Latter-day Saint is thus excluded not for departing from the creed but for declining the philosophy, which is to say, for being too biblical and not Pagan enough.