I’ve been enjoying a nice discussion with one Mr. Richard W. Wilson about Trinitarianism among other things, well, really just Trinitarianism (in the comments to this post).  But something that underlies his comments, and I suspect a majority of people’s thinking, is that Trinitarianism is something that occurs in the 4th century and afterward.  This is true so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.  Trinitarianism occurs prior to the 4th century as well, in fact I’d suggest that it occurs in the NT itself.  That it isn’t 4th century Trinitarianism goes without saying.  Gordon Fee’s comment makes this point in God’s Empowering Presence:

By the very nature of things, the Pauline letters serve chiefly not as theological, but as pragmatic, documents; nonetheless, they are fill of theological presuppositions, assertions, and reflections of a kind that allow us to describe them theologically. At the heart of these descriptions lies the mystery of the Trinity, but it does so in a presuppositional, experiential way, not by reflective theologizing. By that I mean that Paul expresses his experience of God in a fundamentally Trinitarian way, but never grapples with the theological issues that this experience raises. It is common among scholars, therefore, to deny that Paul was a Trinitarian at all and to contend that such an understanding belongs to a later time, when the influences of Hellenistic philosophy began to predominate among those who were doing the theologizing.

Part of the demurrers here are semantic. Trinity itself is the language of a later time, which landed on this word to express the church’s faith in the One God, whom they knew to be in a unity of three divine Persons. But part of the objection also stems, I have come to believe, from the early reaction on the part of biblical theology as it struggled to free itself from what it perceived as the heavy-handedness of dogmatics. One way to do that was to assert, on a regular basis, that if the New Testament reflected Trinitarianism, it did so in an incipient, nonreflective way, so that, whatever else, “it was not the Trinitarianism of a later day such as Chalcedon.” but that seems so self-evident that one wonders why it needed to be repeated so often. (p. 827, bold mine)

B”H