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Faith of the Church: Trinity

Trinity - Father, Son and Holy Spirit

The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity - Orthodox Church

The Holy Trinity in Christian Life

The new commandment of Christian life is "to be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Mt 5:48). It is to love as Christ himself has loved. "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you" (Jn 15:12). Men cannot live the Christian life of divine love in imitation of God's perfection without the grace of the Holy Spirit. With the power of God, however, what is impossible to men becomes possible. "For with God all things are possible." (Mk 10:27)

The Christian life is the life of God accomplished in men by the Spirit of Christ. Men can live as Christ has lived, doing the things that he did and becoming sons of God in Him by the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus, once more, the Christian life is a Trinitarian life.

By the Holy Spirit given by God through Christ, men can share the life, the love, the truth, the freedom, the goodness, the holiness, the wisdom, the knowledge of God Himself. It is this conviction and experience which has caused the development in the Orthodox Church of the affirmation of the fact that the essence of Christianity is "the acquisition of the Holy Spirit" and the "deification" of man by the grace of God, the so-called theosis.

The saints of the Church are unanimous in their claim that Christian life is the participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity in the most genuine and realistic way. It is the life of men becoming divine. In the smallest aspects of everyday life Christians are called to live the life of God the Father, which is communicated to them by Christ, the Son of God, and made possible for them by the Holy Spirit who lives and acts within them.

The Holy Trinity in Eternal Life

At the end of the ages Christ will come in the glory of God the Father, He will make the Father known throughout all creation. The Holy Spirit will fill all things and enable all to be in union with God through Christ for eternity. Again we have the presence and action of the Holy Trinity.

What we know and experience now in the world as members of the Church will be manifested in power in the life of the kingdom to come. The essence of life everlasting is the life of the Holy Trinity, the same eternal life given to us already in the mystery of faith.

And I saw no temple in the city, for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb (Christ) are the temple of it. And the city had no need of the sun … for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb (Christ) is the light thereof…

And the throne of God and the Lamb (Christ) shall be in it, and his servants shall see him … and they shall see his face…

And the Spirit and the Bride (the Church) say Come!
(Rev 21:22; 22:3, 17)

In the eternal life of the Kingdom of God, the Holy Trinity will fill all creation: the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. Every man enlightened by Christ in the Spirit will know the invisible Father.

"And this is eternal life, that they may know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent" (Jn 17:3).

Such knowledge is possible only by the indwelling of the Spirit of God, "the fullness of Him who fills all in all" (Eph 1:23; 2:22).

Come O Ye People! Let us adore the Three-Personal Godhead, the Son in the Father with the Holy Spirit.

For before all time the Father gave birth to the Son, co-eternal and co-enthroned with Himself.

And the Holy Spirit was in the Father, glorified with the Son.

Adoring One Power, One Essence, One Divinity, let us cry:

O Holy God who made all things by the Son through the cooperation of the Holy Spirit!

O Holy Mighty through whom we know the Father and through whom the Holy Spirit comes into the world!

O Holy Immortal, the Spirit, the Comforter, who proceeds from the Father and rests in the Son!

O Most Holy Trinity! Glory to Thee!
(The Vespers of Pentecost)

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Source: OCA

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