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own trinity in God's plural image and likeness.

Just as God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, so is man spirit, soul and body: indivisibly one yet three.

Part of the misunderstanding arises from a mistaken concept of God's Trinity, heretically distorted as Tritheism (belief in three Gods). God is One: No more three Gods than you or I are three people. This misunderstanding partly stems from Latin Vulgate, though which certain erroneous doctrines entered the Church; one such being the term, 'Persons of the Trinity'.

A term foreign to Scripture, God's Trinity is deduced from a reasoned reading of the whole. Invented by Tertullian, it is a convenient contraction of 'Tri-unity', describing God's 'Three-in-Oneness'. In this context, however, 'Person' is unbiblical and inaccurate, deriving from the Latin 'persona', meaning 'mask'.

The reality is more complex than the idea of 'Persons of the Trinity' can convey, distorting our view of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as 'masks' that God adopts, rather than distinct realities of his being Divine, in the same way that the reality of my being as spirit, soul and body are distinct realities of my humanity encapsulated in one being.

Separate them, and I become what is commonly described as dead because they are fundamentally inseparable elements which define me as a human being.

And that, you may be surprised to learn, is how the Bible describes God, because, while the term 'Person' is never used to differentiate God's oneness, the original Greek does employ an unusual and more descriptive word: 'Hypostasis'. This describes the fundamental, undergirding reality or essence of a thing, without which it cannot be.

I apologise for the complexity of that statement, but it pretty much explains what is often called 'the mystery of the Trinity', because the very reason that God is God is that he is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; just as the very reason I am a human being is the summation of my being a human spirit, human soul and human body.

To paraphrase a familiar expression: 'My whole being is great than the sum of my parts'.

As with God, so with man: Neither Father, Son and Holy Spirit, or spirit, soul or body are alternative options from some existential menu, but hypostases of being, without which neither God nor man would not be what they are.

'Hypostasis' occurs twice: in Hebrews.

'Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person (hypostasis), and upholding all things by the word of his power' (Hebrew 1:3),

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