Sacred Mysteries: The Holy Trinity –three persons in one God

Telegraph

14-06-2025

We are surrounded by references to the Trinity. There's a Trinity College in Oxford, Dublin, even Cambridge, which also has a Trinity Hall for good measure. Trinity House is in charge of lighthouses. A triplet of Trinity hospitals founded by Henry Howard, the good Earl of Northampton, four centuries ago, thrive as almshouses at Clun, Castle Rising and Greenwich.
And tomorrow is Trinity Sunday. If you're unlucky a clergyman will say in his sermon that the doctrine of the Trinity is too hard to understand and so he'll talk about something else. I suppose that is better than saying things about the Trinity that are untrue.
Yet Christianity regards the Trinity as the very making of Christians – at Baptism, when water is poured over them with the words: 'I baptise you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.'
There are big differences between Catholics and Orthodox and Anglicans and Lutherans, but they agree about Baptism, and no one who moves from one communion to another has to be baptised anew.
Yet the words are important. There was an incident resolved in 2008 in which people – babies mostly, in Australia – had been baptised 'in the name of the Creator, and of the Liberator, and of the Sustainer'. When asked, the Vatican ruled that the baptisms were invalid and would jolly well have to be done from scratch.
There is a grammatical point about the formula that is meant to throw light on the doctrine of the Trinity. It is the fact that the words say 'in the name' and not 'in the names'. The name is held to refer to the essence of God, not to the three personal names of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The same invocation, 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit' accompanies the Sign of the Cross, at the start of a prayer, at grace before meals, on entering a church or when taking a penalty kick.
I don't think people imagine that God the Father is connected to the forehead, which is touched when his name is spoken, or that the Son is connected to the heart or the Holy Spirit to the shoulders. The form of the devotion marks out the shape of a cross. It feels different making it by touching the right shoulder before the left, as Eastern rite churches do, but one soon gets the hang of it, so often is the gesture used in their worship.
Even without the Sign of the Cross, the Holy Trinity is often invoked in liturgy by the doxology: 'Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.'
Some people apparently got confused by the phrase 'world without end' when we all know that the world will have an end (and pretty soon, the way things are going). It is surprising the confusion wasn't untangled when they were little children, for 'world' here refers to the world of eternity, translating the Latin saecula saeculorum, which itself follows the pattern of Hebrew superlatives such as holy of holies, Song of Songs. Anyway, some English forms of prayer have changed the end of the doxology to 'is now, and will be forever. Amen'. The change must have seemed a good idea at the time.
I'm not suggesting these habitual prayers contain the whole doctrine of the Trinity (any more than does its adumbration in the Sanctus prayer, 'Holy, holy, holy'), but if worshippers follow the way these are employed in the liturgy, they should gain some intuition of God the Holy Trinity.