No Trinity Here – Jesus, God, Holy Spirit by slaveofone
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ
and the love of God
and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.2 Corinthians 13:13 (14 in some Bibles)
Evidence for the three Persons of the Trinity? Unfortunately, no. Paul was not saying that Yahweh is three persons in one being. He was closing off his letter with a simple form of Hebrew poetry in which parallelism is used to give more detail to a single referent. This type of poetry fills the Old Testament and is scattered throughout the New. In 2 Corinthians, we have three names/titles (Lord Jesus Christ, God, Holy Ghost) referring to a single referent (God) and three circumstances (grace, love, communion) related to that single referent.
We could use a modern example:
The President rules our county
and Bush leads our people.
and the arm of our nation’s head will fight for us.
Neither president
, bush
, nor nation’s head
are meant to be understood as three different persons. They are different words for the same person placed in a poetic parallelism to each other such that what is said in each instance corresponds to and adds detail to what was said before.
Says our protector
the Lord who leads armies is his name
the sovereign king of Israel:Isaiah 47:4
Sovereign king, Lord, and protector do not refer to three different persons. They have the same referent: Yahweh. They are part of a poetic parallelism in which our,
armies,
and Israel
are related to the exact same person—not to a separation or division of persons.
2nd Corinthians 13:13 (or 14) tells us not that Yahweh is three persons, but Yeshua, Yahweh, and Spirit are different ways of referring to the same person—God. The distinction is slight, but it’s significant. The poetry is telling us that when we speak of the person Yeshua, we are speaking of the person Yahweh. When we speak of the person Spirit, we are speaking of the person Yahweh. A Trinity reading of this verse would destroy the parallelism because the person Spirit is not the person Yeshua and the person Yahweh is not the person Yeshua, etc.
I think this misunderstanding is key to the Trinity. These three names/titles appear in many places in the New Testament together, but they are separated in such a way that something meant to give deeper and more unified meaning to a single referent becomes a partitioning and limiting of meaning between multiple referents.