Well, actually, he describes the process whereby the Church discerned the true nature of God in the Trinity over the 300 years following Christ’s death.
Mr. Shea writes in opposition to the common claim that the Church invented the notion of the Trinity out of whole cloth, rather than putting revealed truths together to discern a larger Truth. If one accepts the revealed truths, the larger discerned Truth follows.
Return for a moment to high school math class. Remember triangles? Remember the Pythagorean theorem, frequently used by surveyors from ancient Egypt through to our own times? As a refresher, the theorem states that the square of the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides. It’s usually stated more succinctly with its formula: a2 + b2 = c2. If you take the axioms of mathematics as true, then the truth of the theorem follows through proof. There’s no “invention” involved, merely deeper understanding.
So similarly with the notion of the Trinity.
Do you find news here worth reading? Do you agree (or disagree) with my slant on that news? Buy me a cup of coffee! My recipe for a daily cup: 8 ounces of 2% milk, 2 shots of espresso, 4 shakes of ground cinnamon, 2 teaspoons chocolate syrup, 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and a topping of light whipped cream. Drop a tip in my jar — whatever amount you want, whatever amount you think I've earned.
[...] Kicking Over My Traces — Mark Shea Discovers the Trinity A (very) short reflection, contributed by this week’s host of the Catholic Carnival, on a piece by Mark Shea at Catholic Exchange, on how the doctrine of the Trinity was worked through during the first centuries after Christ, in which I try to show the difference between inventing doctrine from whole cloth against gaining a deeper understanding through analysis of revealed truth — using a mathematical example. [...]