Category: Trinity

The Trinity and the Holy Spirit

Hello everyone and welcome back once again to Deeper Waters where we continue to dive into the ocean of truth. We’ve finished up our Trinitarian Commentary so now we’re just looking at some ramifications of the doctrine of the blessed Trinity. First, my prayer requests. I ask for your continued prayers as I continue along on Christlikeness. Things seem to be going better today, but I am becoming also more aware of how fall short I am falling and need to change. Second, I ask for prayers for my financial situation as I believe I came across an extra hurdle today. Finally, I ask for prayers in a third related area in my life. God knows. Let’s talk about the Holy Spirit now.

I am not a Pentecostal, but it has been said that one thing we can learn from the Pentecostal movement is “don’t forget the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit has often been called the silent person in the Trinity. The Father we all know about all throughout the Old Testament. The Son is there, but he makes a major appearance in a unique way in the New Testament. The Holy Spirit is all throughout, but not in the most prominent way.

We have times where the Spirit is present such as the Spirit filling the leaders of Israel so they can prophecy. Also, we have the Spirit coming and filling the temple so that the priests cannot enter and do their work. This is referred to as the Shekinah glory. The Spirit’s first mention however comes as early as Genesis 1:2 as an active participant in the creation.

In the New Testament, we have the Spirit being treated as God in that Ananias and Sapphira are guilty of lying to the Spirit which is equated with lying to God. We also have him sending out Paul and Barnabas in Acts 13. Jesus warned the Pharisees about blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and Paul told the Jews in Acts 28 that they were resistant to the Holy Spirit. Stephen said the same in Acts 7.

The Holy Spirit then was an understood aspect in Judaism to some extent. This does not mean that they had a full-blown doctrine of the Holy Spirit, but they did understand the concept of such a person as the Holy Spirit even if he didn’t have ontological equality with God. However, it could be easy to say that the Holy Spirit is in a way the manifest presence of God somewhere, though still a person in his own right of course.

Maybe you’re like me and you’re not Pentecostal. That’s okay. You need to learn a lesson from our Pentecostal brothers and sisters as do I. We need a doctrine of the Holy Spirit. This doesn’t mean that you have to start talking about baptism of the Spirit and speaking in tongues, though you should have some stance on that. Before you talk about what the Spirit does however, you need to know who he is and for that, you need the doctrine of the Trinity. Let us not neglect a primary issue, who the Holy Spirit is, over a secondary issue, what he does in the lives of believers in relation to spiritual gifts.

The Trinity and Jesus

Welcome back everyone to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of Truth. We’ve just completed a Trinitarian Commentary and are briefly looking at some ramifications of the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity. Before we get to that, I’d like to mention my prayer requests. First, I ask for your prayers for my Christlikeness. Today and yesterday have been kind of rough for me on my progress, yet I believe I am still maintaining an inner attitude that is keeping me going stronger than I would be before. Two step forward. One step back. The second area I ask for prayer in is my finances. Finally, I ask for prayer in a third related area of my life. For now, let’s get to our topic.

One question that every worldview has to deal with now is what to do with Jesus. Muslims make him the greatest prophet before Muhammad. They affirm that he was sinless, born of a virgin, and the Messiah of Israel, but they deny that he was the Son of God and to say he is fully God as we have been is to commit the sin of shirk.

Jews can have mixed attitudes. Some do see him as a good teacher. Others see him as a great blasphemer. (I would actually consider the latter to be more consistent if one denies the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.)

Hindus can claim him as a great avatar. In Buddhism, he can be a Bodhissatva. In Mormonism, he is the spirit-brother of Lucifer. In Watchtower doctrine, he is the son of God, but he is not God himself and is not the second person of the Trinity. For an atheist, he can be a really great teacher, but in no way deity.

What to do with this figure? It seems every religion now needs to say something about him. Christians have given their answer for centuries. He has full ontological equality with God. He is the second person of the Trinity. He is the Lord and Savior of the world. He is the messiah. We do not deny he was a great teacher and pinnacle of morality, but we see him as so much more. If he was simply a great teacher and a pinnacle of morality, we would honor him of course, but not worship him.

The Trinity gives us our answer. Is Jesus fully God? Well, the texts of Scripture teach us that he is. Yet at the same time, we also know that he is not the Father or the Holy Spirit. To add to the mystery, we know that there is one God. There are three persons who can be called God then and there is one God.

The Trinity is the answer. I am a thinker who does try to examine every idea and the more I examine this, every time I come back to the doctrine of the Trinity. This is something I have to agree that the church got right. I stand by the church fathers in this regard and the creeds. I, as a Protestant, unite with my RCC and EO brothers and sisters. We worship one God in Trinity.

The Trinity and Ethics

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. We’ve talked about the Trinity for awhile and I’d like to look deeper at what that means for us as Christians. I’d also like to break off of this some and then just get into a look at the doctrine of God in classical theism. Thus, for those wondering about how we get our ideas of God and our understanding of him, hopefully you’ll get something out of this. I do ask for my usual prayer requests first. The first is that I will be a more Christlike man and have the rough edges I see in my heart worn away. The second is that I will get the help I need for my finances. Finally, I ask for prayers in the third related area of my life. For now, let’s get to the blog.

How do we treat our fellow human beings? Are they objects or persons in their own right? I do agree with Immanuel Kant on this in that he said that persons should not be treated as means to an end but rather they should be treated as ends themselves. Now someone might say “Well I used the cashier at the grocery store to ring up my purchases.” True, but Kant would say to never forget that that cashier is a person as well and don’t treat them as just an object.

Could we learn that from the doctrine of the Trinity as well?

In the relationship of the Trinity, you see the Father glorifying the Son. You see the Son glorifying the Father. You see the Spirit giving glory to both. All the persons of the Trinity have a selfless love for each and each loves the other for the sake of the other.

The Trinity should teach us that God is relational in his very essence and so ought we to be. We ought to relate to one another the way the persons of the Trinity relate to each other. Yes, each person fulfills certain roles for the other, but they do so out of love for the other.

If we have an arian concept of God, then we can say that God is creating out of  a lack of love in himself. There is no one for him to love and so God creates man fulfilling a lack in himself. In the Trinity however, there is already abundant love and love that is overflowing. Man is not created because God was lonely, but man was created because God is happy and God wishes to spread that happiness and creates man to invite him to join in the dance.

What would it mean if we each sought the good of the other as a person and not as an object? How would employer and employee relationships change? How would student/teacher relationships change? How would parent/child relationships change? How would relationships with the man on the street change?

The observant reader should notice I left one relationship out.

How would husband and wife relationships change?

Cohabitation has proven a problem for people today as marriages tend to not last that have cohabitation before marriage. Now I know there are some that do, but cohabitation is generally an impediment. Why? Each person is being treated as a test object. Consider the analogy of “Well would you buy a car without taking it for a test drive?” No. Most of us wouldn’t. In this case however, there is one question.

Which of you is the car and which of you is the driver?

You see, if you take the car back to the lot, the car won’t be mourning. It won’t be asking what it did wrong. It won’t have a feeling of rejection. The human being is different. What does it mean to say that you rejected another human being because they did not bring about the happiness that you desired? Did you ever consider thinking about their happiness instead?

A true marriage will have each seeking the happiness for the sake of the other. Now there’s nothing wrong with telling your spouse what you desire if they want to know how to please you, which they should, but your main focus should be on the desires of your spouse before your own desires. The husband is to love as Christ loved the church. He gave himself up for her. The wife is to love as the church loves Christ. She submits to him and seeks to serve and please him. Now I know a lot of women balk at the idea of submission, but it is biblical and it is not to be used as a whip by men. If you have a good and godly husband, submission will not be a pain. It will be a pleasure as he will help you in Christlikeness.

Let us then learn to be Trinitarian in our ethics and not Arian in them. We are Trinitarians. We live accordingly.

The Trinity in The Bible

Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the Ocean of Truth. We’ve just finished our Trinitarian Commentary so I thought we should go and take a look at how our whole project went overall. First though, I ask for my usual prayer requests. I first off ask that you pray for me for my continued Christlikeness and that I won’t have as much anxiety and worry in my life. Second, I ask for prayers in my financial situation. Third, I ask for prayers in a third related area of my life.  God knows. For now, let’s see what we learned in our look through the Bible.

I certainly hope you learned a lot. I know I did. We’ve been through several verses and seen how they point to the doctrine of the Trinity. Even if a verse did not teach the whole Trinity with great strength, we found that there were several pieces that went together and helped form this doctrine.

That’s something that needs to be remembered in this. We are not talking about a doctrine that is just one verse in the whole of Scripture that settles everything. Too often in our studies of the Bible, we think there ought to be one verse that settles everything. In reality, that is rarely the case and the more important the doctrine, the more Scripture we will need.

However, a comment on a recent blog had the commenter pointing to Col. 1:15 and Rev. 3:14 and saying that Jesus was created. The problem is that those are verses that we have to explain. Sure. Of course, we also saw that those verses can be explained and they form a coherent whole. However, it’s the Arian or the modalist that has to explain several other verses.

The reason is that this is a systematic doctrine. It’s formed not by looking at one verse, but seeing the whole tapestry of Scripture. What does the Bible say about who God is? What does the Bible say about who Jesus is? What does the Bible say about who the Holy Spirit is? When we get through all of these questions, we find the Trinity is there. The church did this right. We can try to re-invent the wheel all we want, but we will end up with the Trinity also.

So what do we do? From here, we learn about what the Trinity means. Does God tell us who he is for no reason? Is the Trinity going to be a doctrine that we just use to beat up Jehovah’s Witnesses regularly? Or rather, is the doctrine of God going to be something dynamic in our lives that changes how we live everyday?

Tomorrow, I would like to start looking at that some in to how the doctrine of the Trinity relates to us. What difference will it make in our lives? After all, if we learn a doctrine, that’s good, but if the doctrine doesn’t make any change in our lives, it’s only a means for increasing our arrogance.

We will start tomorrow.

Errors in Trinitarian Thought: Analogies

Okay. Now I’m going to take a shot at my fellow Trinitarians. I think one of the great dangers we have is when we start using analogies. We don’t often come up with analogies for omniscience or omnipotence, but somehow, when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, we think we have to have analogies.

Now I realize this has gone on in the past, but I don’t think that the early church fathers were trying to show analogies so much as types of trinities. When Augustine uses the mind as an example of the Trinity, I don’t think he’s making an analogy of what the Trinity is like so much as he’s showing that this is a type of Trinity in the created order and that could very well be the case because the God who creates is Trinitarian.

The problem is that so many of our analogies are either completely inadequate and give people the wrong picture, or even worse, they’re heretical. While we want to show people the Trinity that is there, we end up supporting heresies that the church spent centuries dealing with.

I’ve told how over the summer, my roommate and I had Mormons visiting us. At one point, one of them in trying to argue against the Trinity with me went to the baptism of Jesus and I was stunned. This is a passage you’re going to use to argue against the Trinity? That’s interesting….

And so he says, “How can they be three if they’re all one person?” I told him that’s now that the Trinity is. He was stunned now and then said the line that has remained with me and been a major impetus. “I thought all Baptists believed that. That’s what they’ve told me.”

I honestly want to scream at times.

I went back to my hometown shortly after that and was talking to my old associate pastor at the church I used to attend and telling him about that meeting. I told him that since they have a new senior pastor, they really need to get a series of sermons started on the Trinity because the church is woefully unprepared to deal with the cults and then I gave an example of the mistakes they usually make.

I told him how many people use the analogy of a man who is a father, a husband, and a son. That’s not an example of Trinitarianism though, but modalism. It’s one person who is simply fulfilling three different roles. For those who need to know, I’ll state for what comes next that I’m blunt.

He first told me that he thinks Billy Graham has used that illustration to which I said “Then Billy Graham needs to stop using that illustration.” Then he said “I think I’ve used that illustration,” and he got told “Then you need to stop using that illustration.” (Note: The same problem comes with the idea of water being liquid, steam, and ice.)

Why not simply go with what the Scriptures say instead of using analogies because if we’re dealing with God, we’re not going to find an analogy of the Trinity. It’s totally unique. Now we might find types of trinities here, but none of them can really be like the Trinity that is God himself. Analogies have tended to get people off of Scripture and focusing them on a false idea. I recommend simply sticking with Scripture.

Errors in Anti-Trinitarian Thought: Equivocation

I believe that as Trinitarians, we need to be precise with our language and one area that gets us in hang-ups a lot is that other people don’t understand the language that we use. It often leads to fallacies of equivocation. Now I don’t believe this is our fault individually. I do believe the church as a whole has some blame for not even articulating its positions enough and not being a witness to the world. I believe those of us though who have studied the Trinity cannot be held responsible if those we are arguing with on the doctrine have not and yet still wish to argue against that which they do not understand?

One I’d like to speak on tonight is when we say Jesus is God. So often when we get into arguments with Jehovah’s Witnesses, we will be arguing that Jesus is God. If you’re arguing for the content of that belief, that’s fine. If you use those words, you are only making the problem worse. Here’s why:

When you meet a Jehovah’s Witness, they think of God as Jehovah, the Father. When you say Jesus is God, they do not understand you to be meaning the second person of the Trinity. Instead, they understand you to be saying that you believe Jesus is God the Father, making you a modalist.

A number of people have gone after the Trinity using a syllogism and if you’re not prepared in Trinitarian thought, it really can throw you and if you are thrown by this, you might really want to look and see how well you know the Trinity.

Jesus is God.

God is a Trinity.

Jesus is a Trinity.

The problem is equivocation. When we say Jesus is God, we are using theological shorthand. It’s just a whole lot easier to say “Jesus is God” than to quote the Nicene, Athanasian, and Chalcedonian creeds all the time. We are assuming that most people understand that we have a Trinitarian framework in mind and that we are saying that Jesus is a person who fully partakes of the nature of God.

We are talking about the Godhead in the second premise. We are talking about a nature in the first. The terms are not being used the same way and at that point, the syllogism breaks down. That is essential in dismantling a syllogism. It must be shown that either one of the premises is false or that there is some fallacy and in this case, we have a fallacy.

This is also why I say that when we talk about the Trinity, we absolutely must define our terms. (Actually, that’s what we must do when we talk about anything.) The cultists that come to our door are too valuable for us to use bad terminology on. It’s not enough that we understand what we are saying, it must be that our opponents do as well.

Thus, when you debate the Anti-Trinitarian, watch for equivocating. Make sure they are not using the terms falsely and it’s okay to ask “What do you mean by that?” In fact, I would encourage you to do so. It could help you to stop a false presupposition at the start instead of having to deal with it after much time of argument.

Errors in Anti-Trinitarian Thought: Ontology Vs. Function

Unipersonalism is always the big mistake anti-Trinitarians make, but I believe this one would be right behind it. In the gospels, you see Jesus submitting to the will of the Father and the objection is that if Jesus submits to the will of the Father, then he can’t be fully God.

Other passages that will be used will be passages such as Jesus being given the revelation by God in Revelation 1:1. Jesus does what he sees the Father doing in John 5:19 and in John 6:57, Jesus says that he lives because of the Father.

As an orthodox Trinitarian, I can say amen to all of those easily and not blink with my Trinitarian thought.

This gets into the topic mentioned in the title that might be a word some people don’t recognize so I’ll explain it. Ontology is the study of being. The ontological status of a thing is what that thing is. My ontology is human. The ontology of a cat is that it fully possesses the nature of a cat. A horse fully possesses the nature of a horse. Etc.

Too often, Anti-Trinitarians believe that because one is a superior in a relationship functionally, then that must mean they must be superior in ontology. Anyone who is married and anyone who has experience in the work force or anyone raised by parents can see this. (That should cover all of us unless you were somehow raised by wolves and strayed onto a laptop at a campsite in the wild and you’re reading this post to which I say “Welcome to civilization!”)

In a marriage commitment biblically, the man is to be the head of the woman. Does that mean the woman is less human? No. She is to be subordinate to her husband yes, but that does not mean that he treats her as if she’s less human. She is fuly human. In fact, in Christian thought, she bears the image of God just as much as her husband does.

When you go to work, you probably have a boss that is your superior over you or maybe you’re one of those people that is actually the superior. Does that mean though that you are inferior to your boss in humanity or that you are superior to your staff in humanity? No. You serve different functions, but your ontology is the same.

When you were growing up, you listened to what your parents said hopefully and you had to do what they told you to. (Well, you were usually supposed to at least.) However, this doesn’t mean that you were less human. It just meant that functionally, you’re in a subordinate position. The position that you are in functionally tells nothing about your ontology.

In each of the passages going on, we see an interaction between the Father and the Son and when people interpret these in a position where Jesus is functionally subordinate, they think they’ve disproven the Trinity. (And statements like John 5:19 being used to disprove the Trinity just really blow my mind.)

Now some of you might be wondering about specific texts that I cited above. That is for later on. Before we get into the interpretation of the text, we’re going to look at the thinking that takes place and the assumptions that are brought to the text. I also intend to show errors in Trinitarian thought where some Christians make mistaken assumptions that they shouldn’t. That’s it for today!

Errors In Anti-Trinitarian Thought: Unipersonalism

One of the doctrines I love talking about is the Trinity. Get me going on that one and stay out of the way. When we had Mormons visiting us a few months ago, we came once to the discussion of the Trinity and helping these Mormons understand the Christian view of it. It was the time I came alive and the Mormon I was dialoguing with was excited. I’m not sure if it was because he was getting it, which he said he was, or if it was because my excitement was contagious.

Thus, I’d like to talk about some errors people make in approaching the doctrine of the Trinity. These are ones that usually when I sit down and discuss the doctrine with someone who disagrees, I can easily expect one of them will show up and the one I discuss tonight is the one that has never failed to come up.

I’d like to show the usual kind of way this shows up and really, it disappoints me when Christians get stumped by such a question. It also angers me when people who are actually thinking they’re refuting the Trinity put this forward as if it was a serious argument. They will ask, “If Jesus is God, who was he praying to?”

Such is the error of unipersonalism.

Unipersonalism is the assumption modalists and arians alike make when they come to the text and they assume that God must be one person. Now let me be clear I am not wanting to beg the question in favor of Trinitarianism. For the sake of argument, it could be that God is one person. My contention is that we can’t go to the text and assume that immediately. If he is one person, we’ll find that in the Scripture. If he is not though, then we will have to ditch our preconceived notion of God and accept that maybe the Trinitarian is right in his claim.

What is going on in the above question of “If Jesus is God, who is he praying to?” is this assumption. It follows this way:

Jesus is praying to God.

God is one person.

Jesus is not that one person.

Therefore, Jesus can’t be God.

If the second sentence is true, then yes, it would follow that two persons cannot be God if only one is God. However, that is what is being assumed and it is not being backed. If the case is that there can be at least two persons, although Trinitarianism of course says there are three, that fully possess the nature of God, then there is no problem this verse poses for Trinitarianism. 

If there is a problem in the Trinitarian defense, the problem is that the Trinitarian often does not know the doctrine of the Trinity. That is something that will take more training and really, we Christians should be studying this doctrine a lot more. This is a doctrine that separates us from every other faith in the world and is one of the strongest reasons I find in believing the Christian claim.

When you are in a debate next time with someone, watch and see if they are coming out assuming that God is one person. If they are, ask them upon what basis they are making that claim. As time goes on, we will look at other arguments that can be brought forward by other anti-Trinitarians. Many will be rooted in this assumption.