I don’t know about your experiences, but from what I’ve seen and heard, there are many Christian circles out there where the trinity is some sort of embarrassment...when introduced it causes some surprised backpedaling, or the conversation is quickly moved onto something a little easier...like the weather.
Why?..the question may come, “Why bother with complicated non-essential things like the trinity? We want a practical faith, something everyone can understand,” there’s so much wrong with that sentence it’s untrue....I hope to show in some ways how it’s understandable, foundational and so, so practical.....
So Why Study the Trinity?
1. THE most compelling reason, the one that should push us all into the study of the Trinity whole heartedly with brain engaged is that God has chosen to reveal it to us...the fact that he is a Triune God. Granted the word Trinity isn’t in the bible at any point (so don’t look it up in your concordance)....but nor is the word bible it’s just a summary of what it is, just like the word ‘bible’ describes what I have in my hand...bible means books, or library. Trinity, is a merging of Tri- (as in three) and unity, three-in-one-ness, it is a summary word for what is found in the scriptures (Father-Son-Spirit-ness isn’t so catchy). As B.B. Warfield points out, Trinity as a word is never used in the bible but the fact that God is Triune is an assumption that undergirds everything that is written in the New testament, and all their (and our) subsequent understanding of the old testament.
God has chosen to reveal himself how he is, and he wouldn’t do this if it wasn’t important for our understanding of him and for the enriching of our faith. It’s just like someone you care about, say a Sister, Girlfriend or Wife comes up to you and says ‘I’ve got something to tell you that is crucial to understand who I really am. It’s not easy to understand....but will abundantly, deepen and enrich our relationship,”.....would you tell them to shut up and give you something simpler? It’s not that God ‘chose’ to be three persons in one to make himself more complex. Nor did scholars and theologians make it up further down the line. He is 3 in 1 and wants us to be in relationship with him and is deepening that by revealing who he eternally is.
2. It is the distinctive of the God who is, against false gods. You might have heard it said that all the monotheistic faiths are pretty much the same, and in some respects we do have our similarities as people. But what crucially matters is who their God is, are they serving the true God? As Carson noted when he came to Platt, Allah is never (or rarely) said to be loving. He is powerful, mighty, glorious etc...but never loving, because in eternity past , he was alone. To love requires a beloved. God in the perfection of the Trinity always, for eternity loved and knew love in return, Jesus says: 'you [the Father] loved me [The Son] before the foundation of the world' (John 17:24)...so we can even say that ‘God is Love’ (1 John 4:8)...the trinity is where we get the definition of Love from....There are many more aspect that could be explored on top of this. (We’ll return to this later)
3. Without the trinity, to put it bluntly, you do not have true Christianity. The denial of the Trinity leads to cults, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, Unitarians etc. Sound Christian but don’t represent true Christians because if the trinity is denied, they are worshiping a false god. Without the Trinity, Christianity collapses, and to disregard the trinity undermines all hope of salvation.
4. Trinitarian Perspective is being lost and is behind a lot of the schisms in the church today.
We as Christians should understand that all other study of the Bible should be underpinned by the background truth of who God is in and of himself. It should be the lens that informs all our reading of scripture and articulations of Theology. The theo part of theology means God after all (which gives us higher expectations of how well Theo Wallcot should be playing football) he is the core of it all...and to know him better is the chief purpose of this life.....not to mention eternity.
I don’t just mean the Trinitarian aspect of God, but the Trinity is enough to be getting along with on one sitting.
One Final point before we hit the topic, a brief warning (or even a promise). You will not fully understand the Trinity. Don’t get me wrong, you may understand a decent amount of it and get a grasp of the truth, and rejoice at what you find.....But you won’t get a comprehensive understanding, a totality of knowledge. If we did, simply speaking we would be God, and any desire to simplify God by stripping him of the things we can’t understand or don’t like is an attempt to make him in our own image......Idolatry alert.
Only God can search the full depths of God (1 Cor 2:10-11), we simply understand what the Spirit enables us to and accept what is revealed with a hunger to know him better and get rid of that fear to ‘think’ as Christians.
Can someone simply describe the trinity to me? Give it a go......
Part 1:The Trinity...A Walk Through
So here’s the Formula of the trinity:
1. There is one God
2. God is in Three persons
3. Each person is fully God
Point 1:
Both Judaism and Christianity are firmly monotheistic religions. For the Jewish Christians of the early church it would have been damnable blasphemy to say that there are multiple gods.
We can demonstrate this belief in both New and Old Testament. First check out the Shemmah: ‘Hear O Israel ; the LORD our God, The Lord is one.’ Deut 6: 4-5, which is reiterated in Kings 8:60 where is says ‘The Lord is God there is no other,’ and in Isaiah 45: 21-22 ‘There is no other god besides me, righteous God and Saviour, there is none besides me’
Then thousands of years later the New Testament authors hold to this as well. Paul, and committed student of the Old testament saying in 1 Timothy 2:5 ‘For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and man, the man Jesus Christ' (more on that later), he also affirms in Romans 3:30 that ‘God is one’ and another New Testament author James in Chapter 2 verse 19 says ‘You believe God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe and shudder.’
Christianity is monotheistic. We believe in one God. This was sustained from one end of the bible to the other....to deviate from this is to deviate from Christianity.
So what about 2 and 3?
There has been very little controversy over the fact that the Father is God, that pretty much went as read....But then came along the Early Church issue of who or what is Jesus? What does being the Son mean? It was accepted right from NT onwards; but frequently challenged since. So divinity of Jesus is the first place we go.....
Jesus is God
There are explicit statements littered across the New Testament. The gospel of John records the greatest number of Jesus’s verbal claims to divinity and Trinitarian statements. The gospel is bookended by claims to Jesus’ divinity John 1:1 ‘in the beginning was the Word....and the Word was God,” Through to John 21:20 ‘Thomas answered him ‘my Lord and My God’’
Paul states Jesus’ divinity directly in his letter to the Romans 9:5 ‘...Christ who is God over all....’, Phil 2:5-6 ‘..Christ Jesus who, though he was in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped...’ and Titus 2:13 ‘....our great God and saviour Jesus Christ...’
The apostle John again explicitly states in his letter 1 John 5:18 ‘...his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life.’
In addition to this there are the implicit claims to Jesus’ divinity, that the New Testament is riddled with, but take a bit of Old Testament background to fully appreciate..... A great example of a passage to work through is Hebrews 1...it pretty much reads as a list of divine claims. (turn to Hebrews)
Hebrews 1: 1-2 ‘his Son...through whom he also created the world.’
This is a massive deal; Who created the world? Genesis 1:1 says God, Hebrews says Christ.....So logically Christ must be God...See also John 1:3, 1 Corinthians 8:6 and Colossians 1:16.
Hebrews 1:3 ‘He is the radiance of the glory of God, the exact imprint of his nature,’ Jesus exhibits the very nature and glory of God, looking back to the prophets, God says in Isaiah ‘I am the LORD; that is my name; my glory I will give to no other, not my praise to carved idols,’ nobody, but nobody shares his glory, ever. Full-stop. But here Jesus does, and he has Gods exact nature, how? Because he is God.
Hebrews 1:3b: states that he is the sustainer of all things, he ‘upholds the universe by the word of his power,’ Providential upholding of everything is only ever said to be the work of God.
Hebrews 1: 6 says ‘Let all of God’s angels worship him,’ commanded by whom? God...and we have a record of this happening in Luke 2:13-14 but as Jesus himself quoted as he was tempted in the wilderness ‘you shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve’ (Deut 6:13, Lk 4:8)
Who else does God ever demand worship of, but God?...therefore surely Jesus must be God.
Hebrews 1:8: we have the Father actually referring to the Son as God and in verse 10, Psalm 102:25-27 is applied to Jesus, a Psalm that sings of the God of Israel...it says that this is actually a description of the Son.
More than that, in the Gospels every act of Authority over sickness, Nature and the spiritual world is a sign of divinity. For example, he forgives sins in Mark 2:7-10 something that only God can do....see Isaiah 43:25.....and take a look at his gigantic claims like: ‘Truly, truly I say to you before Abraham was, I am.’ (John 8:58) He’s not just saying he’s out done Methusaleth in the age stakes....this would make him 2000 years old...but he’s using the title ‘I am’ from Exodus 2:14 where God refers to himself as ‘I am’.....when they pick up stones to kill him, they weren’t trying to stone him because of his age claims and bad grammar... They were trying to stone him because He was claiming to be God.
The Spirit is God
The Holy Spirit was a latecomer to the discussion on the Trinity, but on the weight of the compiled evidence, the church fathers agreed that he also was God.....and I say He to highlight the fact that the Spirit is referred to as a person (denied by some early Cults e.g. the Monarchians and by modern day Unitarians).
· The word used for Spirit is Pneuma, a neuter word, but the masculine pronoun is used for him (ekeinos) in John 16:14 and Ephesians 1:14.
· He is also given the name comforter (parakletos) see 1 John 2:1 for that, where Jesus is said to be the first comforter and the Spirit the second. He acts personally to comfort is just the same was Jesus acts personally to comfort.
· He is also given personal characteristics for example, he will teach you all things, and bring them to mind (John 14:26) and can be grieved (Ephesians 4:30)
· He has other activities too. He searches, Speaks, testifies, commands, reveals, strives, creates, makes intercession, raises the dead, etc. (Gen 1:2, 6:3; LK 12:12; John 14:26; 15:8, Acts 8;29, 13:2; Rom 8:11; 1 Cor 2: 10,11)
· He can’t just be downgraded to the power of God. Have a look at Luke 4:14 where he is distinguished from his power (Get someone to look up)...what sense would this make if you substitute in the word power for spirit?...see also Rom 15:3.
·
So He’s not an ‘it’, but is he God?
He’s equated with God in Acts 5: 3-4.....it reads that if, like Ananias and Sapphira, you lie to the Holy spirit you are lying to God. And Matthew 28:19 he’s given top billing alongside the Father and the Son. Read it, would it be conceivable to put these names together if they weren’t all fully God?.....the difference between ‘being God’ and ‘not being God’ is so vast is would be like saying: in the name of the Father, Steve James and that bloke who delivered a curry house leaflet through your door yesterday.
He also demonstrates divine attributes that can only be God’s. For instance the Spirit 'searches the depths of God’ in 1 Cor 2:10, unfathomable to all but God himself.
He’s referred to as eternal in Hebrews 9:14
He also is said to create (Gen 1:2; Job 26:13;33;4), Regeneration comes through him ( John 3:5;6 and Titus 3:5) and he causes resurrection from the dead (Rom 8:11). He doesn’t appear on the radar as much as the Father and the Son, but that’s the nature of the Spirit.
Here’s where the issues begin. So on one hand we have the Father who is God and on the other we have Jesus who is also God....how does that work? Cue the heretics.
We have the Modalists (their original poster boy being Sabellius) who said there is one God...good so far...and the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are God....also good...but they’re different modes or ‘Masks’ and God is sequentially one then the other....so there is only ever one person....Heresy alert.
This denial although easier to grasp, makes complete nonsense of Jesus’ baptism (Matt 3:16,17) where they all appear at the same time....is God doing some kind of reduced Shakespeare company farce? No. And the atonement is out the window...God sent his son who bore his wrath and the Father was satisfied (Isaiah 53:11)...This is absurd masochism if there isn’t more than one person.
Plus this rips the heart from the beauty of unity and diversity found in the Trinity.
It’s telling that no council needed to be held to reject this one.
Next up the Arians (Not the WWII blue eyed, blond haired type...this is named after Arius their front man in this particular misguided stab) who tried to solve it all by down grading the Son to the first Creature of the Father (as in, his first creation, with the Spirit then being the first ‘creature’ of the Son). Thereby denying the eternality of the Son, and (or so he thought) nobly maintaining that there was one God.
This is why the Council of Nicea was called in A.D. 325, Arius was an enigmatic guy and people began subscribing to his ideas, so the bishops had a get together to sort things out. The Arians took to the podium and presented their case to the gathering, and then the hero of the classic position, Athanasius took up the argument against.
You’ve probably heard the saying ‘it matters not one iota’....well here the exact opposite was true, they ended up fighting over the description of the relationship between the nature of the Father and Son. The words being homoousious ( homo-the same and ousious-nature) and homoiousious (homoi- similar).....just one iota difference. The new testament evidence and Athanasius’s gift for arguing meant that the position of homoousious was affirmed. The Nicene Creed was drawn up confirming that The Son is of one nature as the Father.
The Creed was later expanded to affirm that the Holy Spirit was God and of one nature also, this was at the council of Constantinople in 381 AD....This was done not because no one believed it before, but because people had begun publicly denying it, but as we've seen it's clearly taught in the bible.
These unlike the mythological conspiracies that Dan Brown cooked up to sell air-port novels, were councils held because of controversies against the orthodox long-held beliefs that were already recognised in scripture, it took someone coming along and denying them for the Church to make a clear public statement if what the Bible truly teaches.
Creeds were formed and Councils formed to chop heresies down at the roots....evidence was re-examined and bishops voted....they affirmed what was already in the bible and recorded it for posterity, just in case heresies became popular again...and they have, look at the JWs for some modern day Arians...
Just to make some finer distinctions:
There is one God. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all fully God. They are not 3 different ‘aspects of the same God. They are not like one God divided like a pie into three equal chunks, each has the fullness of Deity....and yet they are fully distinct in regards to their personhood, so as not to be one person putting on an act or a role. They are three persons and they are all God.
So....Any questions so far?
Part 2: The Taxis of the Trinity
That’s a rough outline of what you might call the ontological trinity, referring to the ontology of God...the fancy word for being. But there’s another way in which the trinity is described.
Think of it like this ....if all the members of the trinity are fully God in one divided nature, what is it then that distinguishes between the members of the Trinity....their attributes, like power, and omnipresence are the same...The persons of the Godhead don’t have differing traits like hair colour or height that don’t affect their essential being but make them different.
No... as St Augustine reasoned, what makes them significantly different is their roles and their relationships to each other. Because God the Father is the Father in his relationship to the Son....and the Son is the Son and not the Father in his relationship to the Father. The Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Father.....I think you get it...
This is sometimes called the economic Trinity, not because it has anything to do with money and the FTSE index but because the traditional sense of the word comes from the Greek words ‘oikos’ meaning house and ‘nomos’ meaning law. So it means ‘house rules’ or the ordering within God. If we ignore this revealed ordering and difference of relationship we are at a loss to distinguish between the members of the trinity and they become a homogenised mix of vague persons.
The Father:
Is Supreme amongst the persons of the Godhead.
He is supreme over the nations and their King that he sets over them. In Psalm 2:7-9 God [the Father] says ‘you are my Son; today I have begotten you, ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession’....remember in Hebrews that this King and Son is Jesus. The rulership belongs to the Father and he gives it to his Son. The Father sends the Son and gives the nations and all things to him.
Matt 6: 9-10: we are told to pray to ‘our father in heaven', saying ' your will be done and your kingdom come’.....Jesus is acknowledging this is his prayer as well.
Jesus repeatedly throughout Johns gospel says he’s doing the father’s will first and foremost, not his own e.g. John 6:38.
1 Corinthians 15:28 says ‘when all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all’ ....even at the end of days the Son will be in subjection to the father.
Phil 2:9-11 says ‘Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.’ Who has given Jesus his status? God the Father. All peoples and creatures exalt Christ. But what is the ultimate ends? The Glory of God the father...the ultimate, supreme Glory is his. He loves to see his Son honoured but the final Glory is his.
All spiritual blessings of every kind come from him, see Eph 1:3.....here you get a Trinitarian vibe....All blessings are from the Father, through the work of the Son and mediated by the Spirit.
The Son
Is equal to the Father in worth...He’s God after all....but is in submission to the Father.
In his earthly ministry, he shows this through statements like ‘when you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am he, and that I do nothing on my own authority but speak just as the Father taught me. And He who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, for I always do the things that are pleasing to him.’ John 8:28-29
So he’s fully divine, we’ve seen that already, and at the same time he only does the will of their father....perfect obedience, leading the sinless life (2 Cor 5:21).
But then he has the audacity to say in John 8:31-32 ‘If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’ But was Jesus free himself? Wasn’t he in complete submission and obedience? And yet he claims that he can set us free. Is this just Divine hypocrisy?
But Jesus has a true understanding of what it is to be free. As Bruce A Ware says: ‘Freedom is not my deciding, from the urges and longings of my sinful nature, to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, how I want to do it.’ This isn’t freedom, its bondage to my sinful nature.
Jesus is the only person to ever live in complete freedom, because he really fulfilled who he was, by living in full submission to the will of God. Like we should.
But wait...isn’t this only when he was a man,
No. It was the Father who sent the Son in John 3: 16-17 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son’ this was an act that occurred before the incarnation.
See also 1 Peter 1:18-21 ‘...He(Christ) was foreknown before the foundation of the world....’ and the biblical sense of knowing is more synonymous with choosing for a purpose, that just being aware of a fact.
And 1 Corinthians 11:3 states ' I want you to understand that the head of every man is Christ, the head of a wife is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.' the Son's relationship of submission to the Father is an eternal truth.
And then there’s the future: We’ve already seen 1 Cor 15:24-28 the bowing of every knee to Christ at the end of days, with the punch-line ‘that God [the Father] may be all-in-all’ this will be a state of affairs that continues into eternity.
And Phil 2:11 where we’ve seen that every tongue confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord is to the ‘Glory of God the Father’
Not to mention in Rev.5:13 were ’him who sits on the throne’ is given primacy of rule and ‘the lamb’ rules alongside him, representing Christ who is worshiped also, but the Father is supreme....Jesus is likewise pictured as being at the Right hand of the Father.... like in Acts 2:33.
Let’s not forget that all of this is fuelled by love....John 14:31 clearly states this...’I do as the Father has commanded me so that the world may know that I love the Father’ and he calls obedience his ‘food’ in the same verse, it nurtures and sustains him.
John 15: 9-10 : ’As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you....I have kept my father’s commandments and abide in his love’
Love, authority and submission are not exclusive....they all exist in the trinity.
The Spirit
The Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son.
The Son and the Spirit....On earth in order to be fully human, it seems that Jesus was empowered by the Spirit rather than using his own divine nature. Serving as an example of how to live as a Spiritual man and to complete the perfect obedience in a human way that Adam failed to do.
But this was only for his earthly ministry...the eternal reality is actually the reverse...see John 16:12-14 where is says that the purpose of the Spirit coming is to glorify the Son, and it is the Son and the Father who send the Spirit, John 15:26 ‘But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me’....Who is sent? The Spirit. Who sends? The Son. Who from? The Father. For what purpose? To increase the knowledge and Glory of the Son.
The Spirit always leads people to glorify Christ....never the other way around...see 1 Cor 12:3.
The Spirit is under the authority of both the Father and the Son, his work being to carry out the work of the Father such as creation (Gen 1:2, Psalm 33:6) , to glorify the Son (John 16:12-14) and other roles especially in the application of sanctification to the Christian.
He delights to forever point towards the other members of the trinity working to see them Glorified and achieve their purposes. Not as a lackey but as an equal. Fulfilling who he is through his role.
Tim Keller likes the imagery of the Trinity being like an eternal dance of love and mutual respect...this is a great image. But this dance has a leader, not because they are superior in being and worth, but because all great dances have a lead and the dance only flows if the other follow.
This is the briefest of introductions, and I think now would make a great moment to look at some of the philosophical aspects of the Trinity.
Confusion!
So God is three persons, but isn't he one God? that sound all rather absurd to me.
C.S.Lewis uses an analogy similar to this as an introduction to thinking about the Trinity in his book mere Christianity. Imagine you are a two dimensional being in a two dimensional world. In this world you have shapes and one of the shapes is a square, you’re familiar with squares in all their squary-ness. Then someone comes and tells you about another shape, the cube, that’s made up of multiple squares and yet is a single shape. It seems confusing to you, because it’s a dimension that you’re not used to. But cubes do exist......this is similar to our situation, there’s a different dimension...an otherness to God, that we feel unfamiliar with; but it's none the less true.
So are we speaking in contradictions? That 1+1+1=1?
No....this is what is called a category error. There is only one God in Three persons. For this to be a contradiction you’d have to say ‘there is only one God and three Gods.’ Which we don’t. Or there is 'just one person and there are three persons.’ Which likewise isn’t what we’re saying.
There is one God in regards to essence of being. He is essentially, undividedly one. Whereas there are three distinct persons, marked out by their relationship to each other
We are used to one essence and one person per human. In regards to my essence I am human and as a human I have certain attributes and abilities that determine, what I am, but not who I am. In regards to my person I am Tom: A Son to Debbie and Gary, A Brother to Jo, a Christian loved by God, these define who I am.
Just because God doesn't fit into the categories that we're used to, doesn't make him ridiculous. It simply means that most of us wouldn’t reason from what we know to the point of thinking that God is as he is, the truly personal nature of the trinity isn’t something we’d ever come up with ourselves. This is because it’s a mystery, something that is known by man only once it is revealed to us.
Considerations in the practical life of the Christian the beauty of the Christian life is that we get into the vibrant relationships that exist within the Trinity. That God complete within himself including complete loving relationships lacking nothing chose to make us and redeem us to enjoy this relationship is one of the staggering truths of the gospel.
E.g. Theological roles
What are the roles of each member of the trinity in....
Creation
Salvation
Sanctification
Prayer
The Scriptures
What then about the relational impacts of knowing that the persons of the Godhead are equal in worth and being, but that naturally ingrained into the fabric of reality is the eternal truth of authority and leadership.
Marriage, Church leadership, Society, Congregation, Fashion, Culture, Attitudes, Heaven......
