WHY we believe the TRINITY and WHY you should too

The East, from the fourth century, has held that the person of the Father is the center of divine unity. The main danger of this is a subordinationist tendency. If the Father is the guarantor of unity in the Godhead, it is only a short step to the Son and the Holy Spirit having a derivative status. On the other hand, the West since Augustine has begun with the divine essence. It has had difficulty accounting for the real eternal distinctions between the persons. With the essence prior to the persons, a less than fully personal view of God has resulted. The bias here is in a modalist direction. Seeing this, some in the West, like Moltmann, have argued that the Trinity is a community of three equal persons. However, since they lack a full doctrine of the immanent Trinity and correlate the Trinity with human history and experience, their conclusions veer toward tritheism and pantheism, often being explicitly Panentheistic. On the other hand, T. F Torrance, going back behind the Cappadocians and Augustine and following clues from Athanasius and Gregory Nazianzen, argues that the monarchy is to be seen as the whole Trinity, understood in a homoousial and perichoretic manner. However, he does not give equivalent emphasis to the distinctiveness of the three persons. Connect with me: https://linktr.ee/cyrilpeterson