Yes. Absolutely. The Trinity is the foundation of everything we believe and do.
Orthodox Christians confess one God in three Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Not three gods. Not one God wearing three masks. Three distinct Persons who share one divine essence, co-eternal and co-equal. The Father is unbegotten. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. This isn’t speculation or philosophy, it’s the faith once delivered to the saints, hammered out in the first Ecumenical Councils when the Church had to articulate what she’d always believed.
When you walk into St. Michael’s on a Sunday morning, you’ll hear the Trinity invoked constantly. “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” We begin there. Every prayer, every blessing, every doxology returns to the Triune God. We don’t just believe in the Trinity as an abstract doctrine. We worship the Trinity. We’re baptized into the Trinity. We live in the Trinity.
The Nicene Creed, which we chant at every Divine Liturgy, lays it out. We say the Son is “begotten of the Father before all ages, Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten not made, of one essence with the Father.” That phrase “one essence”, in Greek, homoousios, was the breakthrough at the Council of Nicaea in 325. It means the Son isn’t sort of divine or mostly divine. He’s fully God, sharing the same divine essence as the Father. Same with the Holy Spirit, whom we confess as “the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who together with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified.”
You might notice we say the Spirit proceeds “from the Father,” not “from the Father and the Son.” That’s not an accident. The Western church added “and the Son” (the filioque) to the Creed without an Ecumenical Council, and we never accepted that change. It’s not just about words. The Orthodox understanding preserves the Father as the single source within the Trinity, the monarchy of the Father, as the Fathers called it. The Son is begotten of the Father. The Spirit proceeds from the Father. This keeps the distinct personal relations clear and maintains what the Church believed from the beginning.
If you’re coming from a Baptist or non-denominational background here in Southeast Texas, you probably already believe in the Trinity. Most Protestants do. But you might think of it as one doctrine among many. For us, it’s the doctrine. Everything else flows from it. Salvation isn’t just forgiveness of sins, it’s participation in the life of the Triune God. That’s what we mean by theosis or deification. Through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, we’re being united to the Father. We’re entering into the very life of the Trinity by grace.
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware puts it this way: the goal of the Christian life is to become by grace what God is by nature. Not that we become gods with a small “g,” but that we share in God’s energies, His life, His love. And that life is Trinitarian. The Father loves the Son. The Son loves the Father. The Spirit is the bond of that love. When we’re saved, we’re caught up into that divine love, that eternal communion.
This is why Orthodox worship feels so different from what you might be used to. We’re not just gathering to hear a sermon or sing some songs. We’re entering into the heavenly liturgy, joining the angels and saints in worshipping the Holy Trinity. The incense rises like our prayers. The icons surround us like windows into heaven. And at the center of it all is the Eucharist, where we receive the Body and Blood of Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, so that we might be united to the Father through the Spirit.
The Trinity isn’t a puzzle to solve or a mystery to explain away. It’s the reality we’re invited into. Come to a service sometime and you’ll hear it. Better yet, you’ll feel it in your bones, the Church at prayer, addressing the Father through the Son in the Spirit, the way Christians have prayed since the beginning.
