What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionOne God in three persons, distinct yet undivided.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Shekinah Church are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
Travels across1 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderChristianity · 30 CE
Newest holderShekinah Church · 1994 CE
Turns up as9 tenets · 2 scriptures · 2 figures
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 7 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 7 faiths of this family hold it
God is one being in three persons.
Father, Son, and Spirit — the Trinity is the grammar of Christian speech about God.
held by most
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One person, two natures — or one nature out of two.
Chalcedon, 451: Christ is made known in two natures, without confusion and without division. The Copts, Armenians, Ethiopians and Syriacs refused the wording and have been a separate communion ever since — the oldest surviving split in Christianity, and by the joint statements signed at Chambesy in 1989 and 1990, largely a fight over one Greek noun.
⚖ contested within
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Tewahedo — made one.
The word is Ge'ez for unified, and it is the church's name for itself. In Christ the divine and the human are one nature, one person, one will, without separation and without confusion. It is the same confession the Coptic and Armenian churches make, and the reason all of them refused Chalcedon.
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One incarnate nature of the Word.
The Word did not attach himself to a man — God became one of us without ceasing to be God. Divinity and humanity are united in Christ without mingling, confusion or alteration, out of two natures, one. When Chalcedon said in two natures, Alexandria heard two Christs and refused.
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One nature, and one finger to say it.
Syriac Orthodox Christians cross themselves with a single finger, and are taught from childhood that the finger means the one incarnate nature of the Word. The doctrine is Cyril's and Severus of Antioch's: the humanity is complete, the divinity is complete, and the union is one.
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Two natures, two qnome, one prosopon.
The divine and the human in Christ are each complete and each concrete — that is what qnoma means — and they are united in one person of sonship. The formula is not the two-natures language of Chalcedon and not the one-nature language of Alexandria; it is an older Antiochene vocabulary that both sides eventually stopped speaking.
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Baptism is three times, forward, into running water if there is any.
The candidate kneels in the stream and is pressed face-forward once at the name of each person of the Trinity — forward because a person bows to be baptised rather than falling backward. Then hands are laid on while still kneeling in the water.
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God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The church describes Jesus as God's incarnate Son and sole redeemer, crucified, resurrected, and ascended.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
One person, two natures — or one nature out of two.
Chalcedon, 451: Christ is made known in two natures, without confusion and without division. The Copts, Armenians, Ethiopians and Syriacs refused the wording and have been a separate communion ever since — the oldest surviving split in Christianity, and by the joint statements signed at Chambesy in 1989 and 1990, largely a fight over one Greek noun.
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The Spirit proceeds from the Father — and, says the West, the Son.
One Latin word, filioque, added to a Greek creed. Spain put it in at Toledo in 589, Rome was singing it by 1014, and Constantinople has never accepted it. Formally it is a question about the inner life of God. Practically it was about who is allowed to edit the creed.
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