Is the Trinity an essential doctrine?

IgnatiusOfAntioch said:

Absolutely essential. The incarnation depends on it.

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gopjeff said:

Greetings,

Just a quick question that I wanted to get other people's take on: Is belief in the Trinitarian nature of God an essential Christian doctrine?

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Fr.Bulgakov said:

Faith in Christ, as Son of God, is also faith in the Holy Trinity, in whose name baptism is administered, according to the Christ's commandment (Matt. 28:19). The Trinitarian faith is already implied in faith in the Son, Who is sent by the Father and Who sends the Holy Spirit. Christianity is the religion of the Holy Trinity to such a degree that the concentration of piety on the Christ alone has become a deviation already known by a special term as "Jesusism." It should be noted that, in the liturgical life of Orthodoxy, in the exclamations, the doxologies, the prayers, the name of the Holy Trinity predominates over the name of Jesus, which shows that the knowledge of Christ is inseparably connected with that of the Holy Trinity. God is a Spirit, Which has consciousness threefold and yet one, or equally a unity of life and of substance; and in that one-in-three, the special existence of three divine "hypostases" is reconciled with unity of self-consciousness. God is love. The Trinity possesses such a power of mutual love as to unite the three in one single life.

The dogma of the Holy Trinity is confessed by Orthodoxy in the form in which it was expressed at the time of the ecumenical councils and was fixed in the creed. Retaining these forms is not an archaism, for their supreme verity still imposes itself upon the religious and philosophical conscience of our time. This dogma is incompatible with rationalism, which seeks to attain divine things by means of categories of unity and of plurality; but this does not make the Trinitarian dogma something foreign to theological reasoning. We find in our own consciences, testimony so resplendent to the existence of the unity of the three "hypostases" (I — you — we) that this dogma becomes a necessity for thought and the point of departure of all metaphysics. The dogma of the Holy Trinity is not only a doctrinal form, but a living Christian experience which is constantly developing; it is a fact of the Christian life. For life in Christ unites with the Holy Trinity, gives a knowledge of the Father's love and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. There is no truly Christian life, apart from the knowledge of the Trinity; this is abundantly witnessed in Christian literature. Unitarianism is no longer Christianity and cannot be; and Orthodoxy can have nothing in common with it. As a matter of fact, recent Arianism-Jesusism and Unitarianism are allied and both are equally foreign to the Christianity of the Church.

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