Trinity Sunday
(May 26, 2013)
Trinity Sunday, also known as Holy Trinity Sunday, is celebrated a week after Pentecost (Whitsunday) in honor of the most fundamental of Christian beliefs—belief in the Holy Trinity.
We can never fully understand the mystery of the Trinity, but we can sum it up in the following formula: God is three Persons in one Nature. The three Persons of God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are all equally God, and They cannot be divided.
The origins of the celebration of Trinity Sunday go all they way back to the Arian heresy of the fourth century. Arius believed that Christ was a created being, and in denying the divinity of Christ, he denied that there are three Persons in God. Arius' chief opponent, Athanasius, upheld the orthodox doctrine that there are three Persons in one God, and the orthodox view prevailed at the Council of Nicaea, from which we get the Nicene Creed, recited in most Christian churches every Sunday.
To stress the doctrine of the Trinity, other Fathers of the Church, such as St. Ephrem the Syrian, composed prayers and hymns that were recited in the Church's liturgies and on Sundays as part of the Divine Office, the official prayer of the Church. Eventually, a special version of this office began to be celebrated on the Sunday after Pentecost, and the Church in England, at the request of St. Thomas à Becket (1118-1170), was granted permission to celebrate Trinity Sunday.
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