And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:...Gen.1:26
And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul...Gen 2:7
Man is three in one just as God...body, soul and spirit...We will take off this corruptible body and put on incorruptible body... when we die, we give up the ghost and the body rots but the soul is waiting for the resurrection to put on the incorruptible body and receive the breath of God again...
This view, popular in some modern circles, is known as Trichotomism. I have some problems with it, especially when used in regard to the Trinity, here's why:
There's nothing in Scripture which offers a very clear "complex anthropology", man is largely described simply as being human. If we rely on Scripture rather intently to understand how the ancients who wrote the Bible viewed things we come out with a picture more like this: In Hebrew the usual word translated as "soul" is nephesh, it means breath. A fairly clear picture here is in Genesis 2 where God takes dirt from the earth and fashions Adam then breathes into the lifeless lump and Adam becomes a "living soul". The nephesh is the breath of life, it is that essential
something that makes the difference between a living thing and a corpse. In some sense this makes sense observationally, living things breathe, corpses don't breathe. That's nephesh means,
breath. God "breathed" and Adam became a living, breathing thing.
The Greek word psuche means the same, breath.
Both Hebrew and Greek also have other words, often translated as "spirit"/"ghost" and these are ruach and pneuma. The thing is that these also can mean "breath" or even "wind". So in Genesis 1 where it says the Spirit of God hovered over the waters it can just as well be translated as "God's breath" or "Divine wind" etc.
The language of "soul" and "spirit" in Scripture largely seem to be not terribly well defined, but are instead somewhat nebulous ideas intended to speak of
life. It's important that we understand things, such as that when in John's Gospel we read "God is Spirit" we do not interpret this to mean that God is some sort of very prestigious phantom. But instead to understand the vastness of God in that true worship of God is to be in spirit and truth rather than "stuck" at either the Temple Mount or Mt. Gerizim. The obvious meaning here is, if I were to argue it, that the Spirit would be poured out on Pentecost upon all flesh and thus true worship--in the Christian Church--wouldn't be centered at any temple or specific locality but is universal as a theme in much of the New Testament is that the function and language of
temple is rendered to Christ and the Church.
What Scripture doesn't do is present man as a complex composition of parts made of body, soul, and spirit. Man is treated as a unified creature, man is a living, breathing, spiritual, physical animal or creature. I don't have parts, I'm just
me. Now talking about me I can say things like I have a body and I have a mind, but I am all those various things I could say about me not as a piecemeal thing, but just as a thing. I'm not a soul in a body, I'm a body with soul--I breathe, I'm thinking, I'm feeling. The ideas of spirit and soul seem to be ways of expressing this fact that I'm here right now with a thinking mind aware of myself thinking--what we today call
sapience. There's something seemingly missing when once a person was right here with me and, a lifetime or tragedy later, I can see them, see them physically and yet they seem fundamentally missing from the world. That quintessential difference between life and death is what we might call the soul, or the spirit.
Having said all this, even if for a moment we embrace a trichotomist view of man, this has nothing to do with the Trinity. God doesn't have parts, God is One: "Hear O Israel the Lord your God, the Lord is one." The doctrine of the Trinity doesn't a God in three parts, but the mystery of God's Essential Oneness and Hypostatic Threeness. God is the One-and-Three, or
Trinity.
When Jesus died, so did the Father and the Holy Ghost...death is separation from God. Jesus gave up the ghost and laid in the grave till he was resurrected...
That heresy was already done and dealt with nearly 1800 years ago, known as Patripassionism the teaching that the Father suffered on the cross, it was associated with the heretical teachings of Modalistic Monarchians such as Sabellius and Praxeas. It is the Son who suffered, not the Father or the Holy Spirit.
For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one...1John 5:7 Just like us, body, soul and spirit.
As noted already, no. Further the Comma Johanneum is a known late (very, very late) interpolation into the text. Late medieval versions of the Vulgate contained it, and it is largely thought to have come about through scribal error, namely that it was originally a scribal note in the margins that through a scribal mistake entered into the text proper. It simply did not exist in any Greek texts, as such when in the 16th century Erasmus put together his critical edition of the Greek New Testament his first two editions did not contain the Comma, but some of his superiors put pressure on him to add it--he refused because he could not find any Greek manuscripts that contained it and unless he had a Greek manuscript to support it he could not in good conscious include it in his critical text. Eventually a Greek text was provided him, though it was either incredibly late (14th or 15th century) or possibly forged specifically in order to convince Erasmus to include it. Nevertheless in his third, fourth, and fifth editions it was included, and given that these were the editions of Erasmus critical text that later English translators used it was included in Tyndale's and Coverdale's translations, which were largely borrowed from by the translators of the King James Version, and they too relied on these editions of Erasmus critical text for their own work. Which is the entire reason why the KJV contained the Comma, and is also why revisions to the "standard text" such as the RSV, the ASV, the NRSV, and the ESV as well as unrelated and completely new translations such as the NIV do not include the Comma. It simply doesn't belong, it was an error to include it in the first place.
-CryptoLutheran