Three Persons, Three Gifts

The Grace closes Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, one of the New Testament's most theologically loaded closing lines, naming all three persons later Christian doctrine would formalize as the Trinity within a single sentence and pairing each with a distinct gift: grace from Jesus Christ, love from God, and fellowship, or communion, from the Holy Spirit.

Because the letter itself predates formal Trinitarian doctrine by several centuries, historians of Christian theology treat this verse cautiously as evidence for how early the building blocks of that later doctrine were already present in devotional and epistolary language, even before councils such as Nicaea gave the relationship between the three persons formal definition. Its structure, distinguishing three persons by three different kinds of gift rather than presenting them as interchangeable, has made it a frequently cited proof text in later doctrinal writing about the distinct roles the three persons of the Trinity are understood to play even within a single divine action. Unlike many other New Testament doxologies embedded within longer arguments, this verse stands as a self-contained closing formula, which is part of why it detached so easily from its epistolary context to become an independent liturgical blessing.