by Keith Bassham
We don’t hear or think much about the Trinity, and I can think of at least three reasons this is so.
First, the teaching concerning the Trinity is something we don’t understand very well, or at least we don’t think we understand it. It’s like eating something we don’t like, say spinach or broccoli, even though we know we should. In our heads, we know, or at least we’ve been told, believing in the Trinity is important, but we aren’t sure why. Even on one of the pastors’ discussion boards I frequent, most participants assume the doctrine, but there is a collective shoulder shrug when asked to elaborate on it.
Second, since we don’t understand the doctrine all that well, and since we don’t talk about it very much, we don’t see how it matters. When I teach homiletics students, I tell them the question you have to ask at the end of every sermon is “So what?” In other words, as a preacher I am saying, “This is true, and this is true, and this true…so what?” Why does the Trinity matter? Is the teaching of the Bible about the Trinity relevant? Is it vital? Is it essential? If it is, how come I can’t see how it is related to how I live out the gospel and worship God? Those are the questions people are asking.
Third, though it’s probably not as true in our circles as in others (I observe that conservative Baptists tend to take an interest in theology), in much of the Christian world there is a tendency to be anti-theological. Again, relevance is the operative term here. Often, Christians cannot see how it matters much, especially if the main thing we’re about is evangelism. How much theology do you have to know in order to be saved? And if once you’re saved, you can’t get any more saved than you are, what difference does learning theology make? And even if we do decide to take on some theology, is the teaching of the Trinity equal with, say, justification by faith, or the blood atonement on the cross, or the second coming? There are, in fact, large sections of Christianity where the Trinity appears to have zero impact on what those churches are doing in their worship, prayer, or evangelism.
For whatever reason, I think this neglect of the teaching on the Trinity is wrongheaded, and in a parallel fashion, I give three reasons why.
For one thing, loving God is a priority of life. When asked what is the Great Commandment, Jesus responded, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment” (Matthew 22:37-38). To love God, one must know God, and if the God we know is revealed in the Bible as a Trinity, we must deal with that. Growing in grace and the knowledge of God demands that we know God as He really is.
Then, whether we are aware or not, other basic teachings are connected to what the Bible says about the Trinity. For instance, we learn that in salvation the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit all have very specific functions. Our relationships with others, in families, churches, and society, are modeled by the Godhead, and, in fact, our capacity for relationships is based on our creation in God’s image. Moreover, the doctrines concerning creation, sanctification, and other areas are touched in some way by Trinitarian teaching. This fact tells me a sound view of the Trinity will provide a good foundation for all other areas of Christian life and experience.
And finally, regardless of what the cults and anti-Bible cultural icons may tell you, the teaching of the Trinity is not a new doctrine invented by a crabby old church-state to keep its people under control. The idea of the Trinity is as old as the Bible itself. And even though it took Christians a while to formulate it in precise language (anti-Trinitarian detractors are fond of pointing out the word Trinity itself is not in the Bible), the teaching was there in the Bible all along. It was not, as some popular literature (e.g. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code) indicates, a fourth century invention of the Council of Nicea. One of the characters in Brown’s novel says, “…until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet…a great and powerful man, but a man nevertheless. A mortal…establishing Christ’s divinity was critical to the further unification of the Roman empire and to the new Vatican power base…” The truth is the Council gave explicit and unmistakable voice to what Christians had believed for a very long time.
What do we mean by the term Trinity? As I have already intimated, the term is not in the Bible, so getting to a biblical definition will have its challenge, because the precise phrases we would like to see are not there. It is not that the Trinity is not there, but rather it is more a matter of getting at the salt in saltwater. As one writer has said, the doctrine of the Trinity is in the solution within the Scriptures themselves, and lifting it out of the solution is the way we see it more clearly.
Benjamin Breckinridge Warfield, a theologian of the 19th century, says as much when he writes: “The term ‘Trinity’ is not a Biblical term, and we are not using Biblical language when we define what is expressed by it as the doctrine that there is only one and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three coeternal and coequal Persons, the same in substance but distinct in subsistence.”
The older, technical language is avoided by a more contemporary teacher of theology, James White, who defines the Trinity: “Within the one Being that is God, there exist eternally three coequal and coeternal Persons, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
And Wayne Grudem is even more succinct: “God eternally exists as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and each person is fully God, and there is one God.”
Some may balk at the use of the word “person,” but it does actually serve a purpose. For instance, it is useful to think of the being we call God as a “what” while thinking about the persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, Spirit) as a “who.”
But it may help if we take a more inductive approach and see what we find in the Bible. I have an exercise I like to use when I teach on the subject. Read these passages from the Bible, and try thinking about how you would read and interpret them if there were no concept of the Trinity behind them:
Matthew 28:19 – “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Study Note – the word used is “name” and not “names.” Using the singular implies a unity, but three persons are mentioned, showing a trinity.
John 14:16-17 – And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.
John 14:26 – But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.
Study Note – the Holy Spirit, called here the Comforter, translates the Greek word parakletos, which means “one who walks beside another.” Also note Jesus uses the personal pronouns “him” and “he” rather than the impersonal “it,” showing that the Holy Spirit is not an impersonal force, but a person.
John 17:3-5 – And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent. I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was.
Study Note – Jesus the Son of God existed and had a relationship with the Father before the earthly birth in Bethlehem. This helps explain the opening in the first chapter of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”
2 Thessalonians 2:13 – But we are bound to give thanks alway to God for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, because God hath from the beginning chosen you to salvation through sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth:
Study Note – here is evidence that God’s plan for salvation includes the Spirit, and perhaps even a reference to the Spirit’s presence and activity in ages past.
1 Corinthians 12:3-6 – Wherefore I give you to understand, that no man speaking by the Spirit of God calleth Jesus accursed: and that no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost. Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.
Study Note – here is a picture of involvement of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in different facets of Christian living and service.
Philippians 2:5-6 – Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:
Philippians 2:10-11 – That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Study Note – a valid paraphrase of verse 6 is, “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,” or “though equal with God, Jesus gave up the privileges of equality.” Two things are apparent in these verses. One, Jesus was a co-equal in the Godhead as the earlier definitions stated, and two, the Son is to be worshipped. If he was not God, that would be idolatry. This should answer the questions of Islam and others who have a regard for Jesus Christ but who refuse to see him as deity, and even say that Jesus made no such claim. In this they are far behind those who saw and heard Jesus firsthand. In John 5, after Jesus healed a man on the Sabbath and declared that God was his father, we read, “Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18).
There are, of course, many other passages we could turn to, but in just this sample you can see these ideas explicitly expressed.
- Monotheism: there is one God.
- Three distinct Persons, and each are considered deity.
- The Persons are co-equal and co-eternal.
Affirm these three things, and you have enunciated the doctrine of the Trinity.
The bottom line is this:
1. Evangelical Christianity has believed in the doctrine of the Trinity, Triunity, or the Triune Godhead because of the teaching of the Bible as a whole (Old and New Testaments), not because of one or two particular passages.
2. There are many specific passages which teach us there are three distinct Persons who possess deity, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, but the Bible also teaches us with equal emphasis that there is but one true God or one Divine Essence or Substance and Being.
3. Taking the whole of Scripture, one can see there are two ideas stressed on this subject — the unity of God as one Divine Being, and the diversity of God in this unity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
We began this study with the question, “So what?” Why does the Trinity matter?
1. TRUTH – Jesus said in John 4 that those who worship God must worship Him in spirit and in truth. To know and to love God properly, we should know the truth of God, and part of that truth is that He is both One-in-Three and Three-in-One. The question comes up frequently today as to whether Islam’s Allah is the same as Christianity’s God. My answer is both yes and no. Certainly when an Arab Christian addresses God as Allah, they are the same. But Allah as known in Islam can only be God imperfectly known and perceived if He is known at all. Insofar as a Muslim does not and cannot perceive God in a Trinity, he is not worshipping God in truth. And the same goes for any perception of God that fails to take into consideration the true nature of God.
2. SALVATION – The teaching of the Trinity reinforces what we believe and teach concerning salvation. The uniqueness of Jesus as Savior and the drawing of the sinner by the Holy Spirit are but two examples of what the Bible teaches about salvation connecting the process with the Trinity. Fred Sanders has a great story about how as a youngster he came to realize the relationship of the moon and the relative movements of clouds in Earth’s atmosphere. At first puzzled that clouds would not go behind the moon, he then deduced the truth based upon some basic astronomy. He says of that realization, “I had in my mind all the information I needed to draw the right conclusion, but I had never put it together. It was a situation in which I knew something but didn’t know that I knew it. …If you trust Jesus to be your salvation, you already know the Trinity. But it’s a great benefit to know that you know the Trinity. It’s a great benefit to know that you’re a Christian because you’ve received a Spirit of adoption from the Father, a Spirit that lets you call God “Abba, Father.”
3. LOVE – The teaching of the Trinity also helps to explain the personality and the love of God. We read that the Father loves the Son, and that the Son loves the Father, and that this relationship has been eternal. This also goes back to the Truth and having a true conception of God. Our nation’s founders loved to speak of God in terms like Providence and the like, but these are deist descriptions of God, not Christian descriptions. The Bible speaks of God as a person who is capable of relationship. This also has implications for our worship and prayer.
4. THEOLOGY – By going over the Bible’s teaching on the Trinity, we learn how to properly appreciate and to interpret Scripture. We can see how doctrine can be recognized and taught not by any one particular passage, but by several passages in different contexts. You can see how to do it right, and how some have done it badly. And then, once we learn the proper teaching, we can eliminate sloppy perceptions of God. Donald Carson writes about how in public prayers you can hear something like, “Heavenly Father, we just want to thank you for dying on the cross for us,” or someone might end a prayer with, “In your name I pray.” I know what the prayer is trying to say, and I understand the connection, but there are other hearers in the congregation who do not. While the three Persons of the Trinity are God, and their work is interconnected, they do have separate functions, and they are not interchangeable. While Jesus is God in the flesh, the Father did not die on the cross. The Son did. And we don’t pray in the Father’s name, but in the name of and by the authority of the Son. Carson says, and I agree, that good understanding of the Trinity will help keep us from using stock phrases and clichés when we worship and pray.
5. LIVING – Finally, living in light of the Trinity makes us more aware of God and His presence. When a person buys a new car, he or she will often remark on how many of that make or model they notice on the road. The cars were there all the time, but we did not notice. Likewise, alertness to the truth of the Trinity will make us more aware of that truth in everyday life. As Fred Sanders puts it, “The Trinity is lurking in the gospel, just as it is lurking in the life of every believer. This Trinitarian reality is going on in our Christian lives whether we know it or not.”