Trinity
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In the Christian religion the Trinity is the name given to God who is seen as three persons: God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit (sometimes called Holy Ghost in English). The word “Trinity” comes from the Greek word for “three”.
Most Christians worship God in the form of the Trinity. The Trinity is not mentioned in the New Testament. Jesus never talked about it in his teaching. In the Old Testament there are several places where there seems to be evidence for a Trinity. In Genesis we find that God said "Let us make man in our image". Note the plural "our". Later we read that “The Lord our God is one Lord” (Deuteronomy 6:4).
When Jesus came the early Christians had to make sense of the fact that God had come among them through the power of the Holy Spirit. Matthew wrote in his gospel: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). Several things in the gospel of John are often thought to point to a God who is more than just one being. The three persons of God are also mentioned in the second book of Corinthians.
It was several hundred years after the life of Jesus before Christians generally accepted the idea that God was a Trinity. It was a difficult idea, because the Hebrew scriptures talk about God being One. The Greeks and the Romans could only understand Christ as a person who was bringing God’s Word. It was not until the 4th century that the three were thought of as being the three parts of one whole God. This was decided by the Council of Nicaea in 325. By the end of the century all Christians had come to believe in God as a Trinity.
In the 5th century Saint Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland. There is an old Irish legend which says that Patrick used the shamrock to explain the idea of the Trinity. The shamrock has three small leaves. Patrick told the people that the three leaves represented God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. He said that the whole plant represented God.
In Christian churches the Sunday after Pentecost (the 50th day after Easter) is called the “Feast of the Holy Trinity”. This feast probably started in the 10th century. In 1334 Pope John XXII made it official for the whole church. In the Anglican and Lutheran churches the weeks that follow The Feast of the Trinity are dated according to how many weeks after Trinity they are (e.g. the 20th Sunday after Trinity). In the Roman liturgy these Sundays are dated “after Pentecoste” (e.g. the 21st Sunday after Pentecoste).
