The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, describes a stage in the evolution of human experience. It was certainly not a revealed truth, nor was it the way the earliest Christians understood God. Paul, for example, was clearly not a Trinitarian. For the Jewish Paul, God was “one” and nothing approached or modified that “oneness.” Paul says in Romans that God “designated” Jesus as “Son of God with power according to the spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead” (Rom. 1:4). God is the designator, Jesus is the one designated; that is not co-equality or Trinitarianism.
