The central and decisive affirmation in the Creed is that Jesus Christ is true God from true God, one in essence or consubstantial (homoousios) with God the Father. In other words, Jesus Christ is equal to God the Father; he is God in the same sense that the Father is God, and yet they are not two Gods but one. Developing this teaching, the Greek Fathers of the later fourth century said the same about the Holy Spirit; he is likewise truly God, one in essence with the Faher and the Son. But although Father, Son and Spirit are one single God, yet each of them is from all eternity a person, a distinct centre of conscious selfhood. God the Trinity is thus to be described as three persons in one essence. There is eternally in God true unity, combined with genuinely personal differentiation: the term essence, substance or being (ousia) indicates the unity, and the term person (hypostasis, prosopon) indicates the differentiation. Let us try to understand what is signified by this somewhat baffling language, for the dogma of the Holy Trinity is vital to our own salvation.
Father, Son and Spirit are one in essence, not merely in the sense that all three are examples of the same group or general class, but in the sense that they form a single, unique, specific reality. There is in this respect an important difference between the sense in which the three divine persons are one, and the sense in three human persons may be termed one. Three human persons, Peter, James and John, belong to the same general class man. Yet, however closely they co-operate together, each retains his own will and his own energy, acting by virtue of his own separate power of initiative. In short, they are three men and not one man. But in the case of the three persons of the Trinity, such is not the case. There is distinction, but never separation. Father, Son and Spiritso the saints affirm, following the testimony of Scripturehave only one will and not three, only one energy and not three. None of the three ever acts separately, apart from the other two. They are not three Gods, but one God.
Yet, although the three persons never act apart from each other, there is in God genuine diversity as well as specific unity. In our experience of God at work within our life, while we find that the three are always acting together, yet we know that each is acting within us in a different manner. We experience God as three-in-one, and we believe that this threefold differentiation in Gods outward action reflects a threefold differentiation in his inner life. The distinction between the three persons is to be regarded as an eternal distinction existing within the nature of God himself; it does not apply merely to his exterior activity in the world. Father, Son and Spirit are not just modes or moods of the Divinity, not just masks which God assumes for a time in his dealings with creation and then lays aside. They are on the contrary three coequal and coeternal persons. A human father is older than his child, but when speaking of God as Father and Son we are not to interpret the terms in this literal sense. We affirm of the Son There was never a time when he was not. And the same is said of the Spirit.
. . .Each possesses, not one third of the Godhead, but the entire Godhead in its totality; yet each lives and is this one Godhead in his own distinctive and personal way.
An honorable distinction, IMO.