Immanent and Economic Trinity

Immanent and Economic Trinity When you think of God do you think of one divine entity or do you take into account the age old idea of the trinity? For all of time we have understood the three individual person’s in God, the Trinity, to be one in the same. The teaching of the Christian church tells us that God is three unique and separate people’s, but they are at the same time all one person in God. Now people have many different ways to picture or represent the idea of three people as one. The trial of history has come up with many different ideas and images to try and represent the trinity. Like many things that have to do with the unknown nature of religion we put our mental limitations on our ideas. This is only natural because it is the only way we can comprehend things, and we only have earthly definitions and limits for things in the realm of this existence. The Economic Trinity is the doctrine concerning how the Father, son, and Holy Spirit relate to each other and the world. The word economic is used from the Greek oikonomikos, which means relating to arrangement of activities. Each person has different roles within the Godhead and each has different roles in relationship to the world. One way of thinking about the economic Trinity is to think of the Father as creator, Son as redeemer, and Holy Spirit as sustainer. Subordinationism is the position consistently rejected by the ancient church that the Son and/or Spirit are ontologically subordinate to the Father. The Council of Nicaea rejected this position with respect to the Son by employing terms like homoousias of one being and begotten not made. The former refers to the shared substance of divinity between Father and Son, the fact that both are equally eternal and thus equal in glory and power. The latter refers to the fact that, while the Father is indeed the source of the Son’s generation, the Father does not create the Son. Only finite beings are created; the Son is generated, and