Doesn't the Trinity mean three Gods?
✓Fact-checked & reviewed for Nicene orthodoxyHow we review →No - the Trinity is not three Gods. The observant Jew is right to pray the Shema twice a day - 'Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one' (Deuteronomy 6:4) - and Christians confess that same one God. It is the claim that the one God exists eternally as three coequal, coeternal persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Whatever it is, it is a doctrine of monotheism, not against it.
One popular argument should be set aside: that the Hebrew echad ('one') means a 'compound unity' hinting at plurality. On the lexical merits that overreaches — echad is the ordinary Hebrew word for 'one.' The real case is far stronger, and it comes from a first-century Pharisee.
Writing around AD 53–54, in a chapter against idolatry, Paul takes the Shema's two words for the one God — theos ('God') and kyrios ('Lord,' the Greek Old Testament's rendering of the divine name YHWH) — and distributes them: 'for us there is one God, the Father... and one Lord, Jesus Christ' (1 Corinthians 8:6). He does not add a second deity; he reaches inside Israel's creed and places Jesus within it. Richard Bauckham calls this including Jesus in 'the unique divine identity.'
Critics like James McGrath reply that 'one Lord' is set alongside, not inside, the creed. But kyrios there carries the divine name itself — so a Jesus who is 'Lord' yet not the one God would be a second power, the very thing an anti-idolatry argument forbids. The Trinity does not cancel the Shema; it is the church's own reading of it — monotheism kept: one God, rich enough to be Father, Son, and SpiritOne God in three persons — not one person in three modesIs sayingThe one God exists eternally and simultaneously as three distinct, coequal, coeternal persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — who are not each other.Not sayingNot modalism: God is not one person wearing three masks or playing three roles in turn. The Father is not the Son, and neither is the Spirit..