Teaching the Trinity

There we go. It's good to be with you this morning. I think it's morning. It seemed like a very either long or short night, depending on what happens when you can't get to sleep. So hopefully, we're talking about the Roman Catholic move to have Mary defined as...

No, no, okay, I'm sorry. I get my subjects mixed up. I have a presentation on that, too. But actually, what was requested of me was not so much a full discussion of the doctrine of the Trinity, so much as how to share that truth with others, including those who would be...

See, I did have some animation there. Do you like that? Those who would have confusions concerning the subject, and young people as well. So that's really what I'm going to be focusing upon. Obviously, to share with someone else, you need to have an understanding of the doctrine very clear in your own mind.

One of my church history professors long ago well said, what is a mist in the pulpit is a fog in the pew. That is, if it's a little bit unclear to you as you attempt to present it, it will probably be significantly more unclear to those who are attempting to listen to you.

So the first and foremost requirement for sharing with your Mormon neighbor, or the Jehovah's Witness that comes to your door, or with your young person, the doctrine of the Trinity is that you yourself have to have a clear understanding of the doctrine.

I think that's normally the problem in most churches today. I think the reason you don't hear a whole lot of sermons on the subject of the Trinity, you don't hear a whole lot of mention of the subject of the Trinity, teaching on the subject within the church is because, well, I know that when I did my first master's degree, the students that were with me in that particular seminary program, when they graduated from that program, taking the systematic theology classes, so on and so forth, it would have been very, very easy for them to graduate without a meaningful understanding of what this doctrine is.

And so if that's the case, then there are many, I think, who do stand in the pulpit who are, while they may have at least an orthodox understanding, it's not a confident understanding that would allow them to feel like they can answer questions that are raised against it.

It's one thing to say, well, the doctrine's X, but then we also know that there's all sorts of objections to that that take many, many, many different forms, and therefore it's easier just to focus on other issues.

And so it's important that we understand it first, and then once we understand it, we can communicate it with others. You'll notice that I have underlined and capitalized the biblical doctrine of the Trinity because I'm not going to be discussing the Council of Nicaea or Ephesus or Chalcedon or any other sources of information such as that because, in reality, I am a Trinitarian because I believe all of Scripture.

And I think the best way to communicate this doctrine, for example, when Jehovah's Witnesses come to my door, which actually they're still doing, not with a lot of regularity, but somehow I haven't earned my big black X, maybe I now have, it's been quite some time, but they had been coming the first three years that we lived at our current location.

And when they come to the door and this subject comes up, which it normally comes up fairly quickly, I emphasize that I believe what I believe, not because as a youth I was taught the Nicene symbol or something like that, but I refer to it as the biblical doctrine of the Trinity.

And, of course, they'll immediately say, well, the term Trinity doesn't appear in the Scriptures, to which I respond, well, no, it does not. Now there's the term theocratic, which is a term you all use all the time, but theocratic refers to God's rule, and that is something that is clearly taught in Scripture just as the doctrine of the Trinity refers to the biblical teaching, that there's one true God, three co-equal and co-eternal persons that share the one being that is God.

And so could I show you where the Bible teaches that, just as it teaches the concept of theocracy, for example, among the Israelites, and they're sort of stuck at that point since they're the ones that initially made the objection.

And so I emphasize the biblical nature of it, and as we'll see there are three foundational doctrines that are taught in Scripture, and if you're going to have a discussion about the Trinity, you don't want to be debating issues like Athanasius' role at the Council of Nicaea or something along those lines.

That can go on forever and ever and ever and never find any point of resolution. Instead, if you want to communicate something, you want to communicate something from a biblical perspective. But it's very good to have a basic definition now, and when we give the definition, we've really set the ground of the discussion and realize that when, especially in dealing with, start off with Jehovah's Witnesses, they have been given very purposefully by the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society both a true definition and a false definition of the Trinity.

They used to have a little red book that everyone studied from called You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth. It had lots of pretty pictures in it and things like that. In there, in the famous black page, which was a page that had a picture of Jesus and had a black background.

The text was reverse color on it. They gave both an accurate definition of the doctrine of the Trinity and an inaccurate definition on the same page. This has been the modus operandi of the Watchtower Society all along.

That is, they want to engender confusion amongst their own people so that when their people then encounter confusion amongst Christians, it only, in essence, reinforces the idea that nobody knows what this doctrine is in the first place.

So being very clear as to what the doctrine is and what it means is very important. Here's a basic definition with the background of a fractal. Those of you who may recognize... You know what a fractal is, of course.

Do you like fractal art? Isn't that pretty? Yeah, wouldn't you like those on ties? I have some fractal ties, actually. This isn't one of them, but I do have fractal ties. And I made that fractal. Anyways, within the one being that is God, there exists eternally three co-equal and co-eternal persons, namely the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Now, that's not a long sentence. That's not a difficult definition to memorize and to repeat. But obviously, almost every single word is filled with a large amount of meaning. The chief thing, the chief problem amongst Christians in understanding the doctrine is the differentiation between the two words that I have outlined, that is, being and person.

Very often when I will go out and, for example, I'll do role-playing with high school students or junior high students. I remember going to a church in Florida once and getting the high school fellow to role-play with me.

He was the intern who was training to be a youth minister. I said, son, you don't train for that. That's what you get stuck in at first, and you slowly get out of it over time as you grow older and can't handle it anymore.

But he was the college-age kid that helped with the youth, in essence. And I role-played with him. And within 60 seconds, I got him to commit to a doctrine of the Trinity. It was completely heretical.

And then once you've got them to commit to a heretical doctrine of the Trinity, it's really easy to just spin them around in circles and tie them up in knots and have all sorts of fun with them. And basically I got him to agree that God is one being that's three beings, or one person that's three persons.

And from that point on, it was pretty simplistic to be able to have my way with him. Those two terms are the two terms that really cause people some level of discomfort. Let's emphasize what we're talking about when we emphasize the terms being and person.

Being and person are different things. And if you want to explain this to someone who's struggling to understand what the distinction is, being is what makes something what it is, and person is what makes someone who they are.

And so we recognize this distinction all the time. I have often shared with individuals who are struggling with this, well, we recognize that everything in this room has being. The chair you're sitting on has being.

If it didn't, you would have a little bit of a difficulty staying where you are. If it exists, it has being. It has existence. There is something to it that defines what it is. But not everything that exists is personal or has personhood.

You can insult that chair you're sitting in all day long, and it will not care. It has no emotions. It has no will. It has no self-awareness. And so we recognize the difference between being and person all the time.

The second thing to recognize is that when we take these terms and we apply them to the doctrine of God and to who God himself is, one of the biggest problems we have is we carry along all the creaturely baggage that the language itself would communicate to us.

When we use the term person, 99 .9 of the time that we use that term, we're referring to a human being. And so it is simply natural for us to automatically start leaning towards some level of tritheism and picturing three human beings and even there using the term human beings as a plural.

And we carry all this baggage into the discussion that shouldn't be brought into the discussion for the simple reason that when talking about God, we are talking about a unique situation. God, by definition, is unlike anything else.

And the God that we worship and serve has very clearly revealed in his word that it is idolatry to connect him to anything in the created order. So every illustration we use, every analogy we use, not only will break down, but can become simply dangerous when we try to take some sort of creaturely or created thing and say, well, it's like this.

The problem is that's how we communicate. When young people start asking us questions at that wonderful young age, why, why, why, why, what's this, what's this, what's this, what's this? When they ask, you know, what does vanilla taste like?

Well, how in the world do you describe that? And when people ask questions like that, generally how we respond is we say, well, it's like this, or it tastes like this, or it looks like this, and we use an analogy and an illustration.

Well, the problem is when you talk about something that's absolutely positively unique, and that is God, how he exists, the fact that he alone is truly eternal, things like that, we can't say, well, it's like this, because as soon as we say it's like this, we have to now be comparing the absolutely unique with that which is no longer absolutely unique, and the analogies will break down.

So the language is an issue that we have to be very careful how we use it, and that we recognize that we are using it in a realm that is not its normative. That is, when we use the term person, we're normally referring to a human being, but in this case we are using terms to describe something that's absolutely unique.

About, not so much with your really well-trained apologists in certain areas, but in dealing with just everyday questions about the Trinity, probably about 50 of the confusion will be cleared up if you will be able to clearly communicate the difference between being and person.

Hank Hanegraaff, I think, does a good job in answering questions on this by talking about the what and the who. One what, three whos. One what, which describes the being of God. Three whos, describes the divine persons.

And so with that distinction clearly made, you will note that even your Jehovah's Witness friends will then frequently, in their objections, and the Mormons even more so, flip-flop on these terms. And you have to every time stop and say, no, no, see the question you just asked demonstrates you don't understand what I'm saying.

Mormon missionaries have been taught for a long time to say, well, Trinity, was Jesus a ventriloquist at the baptism? So Jesus is the Father up in heaven and He's the Spirit coming down and He's throwing His voice and stuff like that?

You hear that all the time. Obviously thinking that what we are saying is that there are three persons that are one person. Not recognizing, of course, in Mormonism, God's being is neither eternal nor unlimited.

Hence, they're starting off with such a human view of God to begin with that it's one of the major issues we constantly have to face anyways. But when you're witnessing to someone and you're talking about this subject, you have to listen very carefully to the questions.

And here when the questioner is demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the main point you're trying to communicate and stop them before they get any farther and say, well, wait a minute, I've already said this and so you seem to be misunderstanding this.

Keep pushing to make sure that at least the truth is being clearly presented because I know in talking with former Jehovah's Witnesses, one of the issues that was helpful in their conversion was finally being given an accurate definition that was consistent that could then be brought to the Scriptures and tested.

If you don't even have a definition that you can then bring to the Scriptures and say, is this a consistently biblical teaching? It's no wonder that your average Jehovah's Witness really believes that the doctrine of the Trinity is completely wacky and nobody understands it and you can't even begin to discuss it biblically.

So we need to listen very carefully and define our terms. As I mentioned already, the most common misunderstanding that people present is that, well, you're saying there's three beings, it's one being, or three persons, it's one person.

And when I dialogue, for example, with my students this year and only this year, I'm teaching Christian high school and I'm teaching Bible. And it's fairly easy to get people to commit to the idea of defending the idea that three persons are one person or one being is three beings and so on and so forth.

Even though I was very happy that just a couple weeks ago I got two of my best freshman students to role play with me and they didn't let me get away with it. And we hadn't covered it in class either.

So there were two young men anyways who, as freshmen in high school, actually understood what the doctrine of the Trinity was and defined it properly and didn't let themselves get roped into anything.

So I thought that was rather encouraging anyway. But anyways, when you're hearing someone speaking, you need to be listening. When you're teaching someone, you need to get some feedback from folks and see that they're understanding.

We talk about the one being of God. We're talking about God being eternal and unlimited. And what I frequently will do is use another illustration. I'll say, now this is where we differ from God. My being is limited.

My being is limited to time and space in a specific way. Right now, for my being, it is 10 a .m. on Sunday, the 16th of December. And I am somewhere, I think, in Raleigh, North Carolina. I'm not exactly sure if I'm in a suburb or exactly where I am.

But I am not currently at home in Phoenix, Arizona. I can't be there. I cannot bi-locate. It would be very helpful and useful to do so, but it doesn't work that way. My being is limited in time and space.

And God's being is not. God is truly eternal. He is truly unlimited as to His being. And His being, therefore, can be shared by three divine persons, while mine cannot. Mine is only shared by one person.

I'm James. And while you all are human beings, your being is shared by only one person. And that's what makes you you. That's where we differ. We're creatures. God is not a creature. And so the difference being His being is unlimited and hence can be shared by three divine and eternal persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Many of these groups think that we're modalists. Many of these groups think that we believe the Father is the Son, the Son is the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is the Father. And it doesn't help that on certain broadcasting networks, which broadcast on a channel in Phoenix that I never mention directly, but it's between 20 and 22, that uses the name Trinity Network and Broadcasting in its name, that you have all sorts of folks on there that have decided that the doctrine of the Trinity is, in point of fact, a negotiable issue.

You have modalists, those who do teach the Father is the Son and the Son is the Spirit, on these broadcast networks. And so it doesn't exactly help that that is the case and that there is a level of confusion even there.

But we press on despite the prevalence of heresy all around us, shall we say. Now, I mentioned before that if you really want to keep a discussion on the Trinity within the context of the Bible, then you need to define why it is the Bible forces you into a belief on the doctrine of the Trinity.

I never asked you when we wrap up. 20 after. Okay. I try to very strongly emphasize to anyone these three foundations, and then once they start voicing objections to the doctrine of the Trinity, identify which of these foundations they're objecting to, and then go to the Scriptures on that issue.

Very many Christians find it frustrating to discuss the Trinity because it doesn't generally take place within the context of the Bible. It should, and it can, if we take this approach. The first and most fundamental foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity is, of course, monotheism, the biblical teaching there's only one true God.

This is, of course, the point of departure for the Mormon Church, which believes in a plurality of gods, and hence becomes the key apologetic issue in dealing with them. All the other discussions about the relationships of divine persons and co-equality and co-eternality and stuff are really irrelevant because the thing, the most fundamental assertion of the Christian faith, and what defines it on a religious basis, is it is a monotheistic faith, believing there's one true and eternal God, and once, as Joseph Smith put it, once he said, we have imagined and supposed that God has been God from all eternity, I'll refute that idea and take away the veil so that you might see.

By making that statement, he forever separated his followers and himself from biblical Christianity. And so, that's the key issue there. That's the issue, for example, interestingly enough, that one is Pentecostals and Muslims will both throw back at us because they will assert that we are violating, the Trinitarians are violating biblical monotheism.

It is their assertion, and Jews as well, those who engage in an apologetic defense of Judaism against Christianity, will assert that the doctrine of the Trinity involves a fundamental denial of monotheism.

In fact, I've even found Mormons utilizing the same type of argumentation drawn from Jewish sources and things like that. So, that's the first key issue. That's what separates Christianity, Islam, and Judaism from the majority of the rest of the world's religions.

The nature of that monotheism differs, of course. The Islamic perspective of God's utter transcendence, in essence, strips him of his personality and his ability to relate on a level with his creation.

But, we're not talking about Islam today, though everybody is. So, the first foundation is monotheism. The second foundation is the existence of three divine persons. This is where we would differ with the Jesus-only, Oneness Pentecostal.

Most of your smaller groups that have the term apostolic somewhere in the title are frequently involved in a Oneness Pentecostal perspective, which, in essence, there are all sorts of variations on the theme, but the most popular one with the UPCI is that what you've got going on is you have one divine person who is known as the Father in the Old Testament, and then when he becomes incarnate, he's two persons.

You have the Father as the divine aspect and the Son as the human person who came into existence in Bethlehem, and that means that Jesus was bi-personal, that his prayer life was actually internal. So, when the Son is praying, he's praying to himself, but to the divine part of himself, and that the Son is not eternal.

In UPCI theology at that point, the Son came into existence at a point in time because the Son would be the human nature, and the human nature has not always had actual existence. So, there's all sorts of different variations on that theme, even amongst folks who will call themselves Jesus-only.

Many of them, all the UPCI and some of the offshoot groups, will also have other interesting quirks, such as baptizing in the name of Jesus-only, the necessity of speaking in tongues for justification, and a few other interesting things go along with it.

But this foundation would be those passages of Scripture that teach us very clearly the existence of three divine persons, and this would include Jesus' conversations with the Father, where Jesus identifies himself using personal pronouns, and then the Father as someone else using personal pronouns.

This would even include, for example, John 10 .30. It's interesting that one of the favorite verses of those who would argue against the existence of three divine persons, I and the Father are one, is actually a proof text against them, when you understand the language.

That is, Jesus did not say, I and the Father is one, he used a plural form of the verb, I and the Father, we are one. And even in the use of the verb, he distinguishes between himself and the Father. So, all of those passages that distinguish between the divine persons would fall into this category.

And then the third foundation is the co-equality and co-eternality of the divine persons. And this is where you have most of the discussion, with Jehovah's Witnesses, who of course deny even the existence of the Holy Spirit as a divine person to begin with.

As a person to begin with, the Holy Spirit is God's impersonal active force, like electricity or running water. And so, they're not even as orthodox as Arius was on that kind of thing. But obviously, this is where the deity of Christ comes into play.

This is where all the questions about the fact that Christ became incarnate, that he submitted himself to the Father, that the Son does things that are different than the Father. The Father did not become flesh, it's the Son who became flesh.

Ninety-eight percent of the objections to the deity of Christ are based upon the assumption that Jesus has to be identical with the Father. And once we realize that, and once we recognize that's not an objection to the deity of Christ at all, or the doctrine of the Trinity, then we can handle those things real easily.

But this is the major area of discussion, unless you happen to travel up to Utah on a regular basis, when Foundation One becomes the major area. Now, you might want to... I don't know, I got this a long time ago, and I think it's a very useful graphic.

And it can help you to explain the errors that one can fall into. You've probably seen, and this is not the is-is-is, is-not-is-not-is-not thing. If you take those three foundations, the most basic and fundamental foundation being monotheism, the biblical truth there is one true and eternal God, the existence of the three divine persons, you see how it's flying in there?

It's animated and stuff. I just want to make sure that you saw that I... And I did this myself. Anyways, and then the equality of those divine persons. You have the three biblical foundations that we have just defined in regards to the doctrine of the Trinity.

Then what you can do is... And you don't even need to have graphics capabilities and stuff to do this. You can actually write this on a piece of paper with a pen or a pencil. Now, I know that's very low-tech, but you know it's worked for about 2 ,000 years.

So we don't need to put that particular process down. If you get rid of monotheism, if you remove this foundation, you're left with these two sides of the triangle pointing to a resultant error. And so if you deny monotheism, you're left with three divine persons, and then you're left with the equality of those persons.

And so if you have three divine persons who are equal, but you don't have the assertion that there's only one true god, then the result is polytheism, a belief in a plurality of gods. It can be three gods.

It can be billions of gods. It can be, as Mormon apostle Orson Pratt put it back in the middle of the 19th century, he said, if you take a million worlds like this world and number the particle of matter in those worlds, you'll discover there are more gods than there are particles of matter in those worlds.

Now, that's pretty extreme polytheism. Now, modern Mormons would say, yeah, but those gods don't have anything to do with this earth. They're out there, but we don't worship them. We don't know who they are, so on and so forth.

Well, that may be, but they still exist. And in fact, a large portion of them existed before our god was a god. So that causes just a tad bit of a problem. So, you get rid of monotheism, the other two sides point to polytheism.

But if you deny the existence of three divine persons, you take out that leg, then the other two form an arrow pointing to modalism or oneness. Modalism being the idea that God exists in different modes.

In fact, the very term used in the Statement of Faith by a very well-known, not sure exactly what to call him, but he's well-known today, T .D. Jakes, is three manifestations, modes of being, that God has manifested himself as Father, and he's manifested himself as Son, and he's manifested himself as Holy Spirit.

But that's one person manifesting himself in three different modes, and that's the oneness position or the ancient heresy of modalism, which, by the way, if you would like to know much more about modalism and all of the early church fathers who had a problem with this, Pastor Smith will be able to discuss all those things with you, having just finished a major scholarly work that includes full discussions of these things.

In fact, we'd love to sit down with you and have you read his major scholarly work and discuss it with you. I'm sure that's... You did say that prior to... No? No, you didn't? Oh. All right, well, anyways.

And obviously, therefore, if you deny the equality of the persons, the last two legs of the triangle, you have monotheism, you have only one true God, but you have three divine persons, and so if you don't have equality amongst them, the result then becomes subordinationism, where one or more of, well, all the divine persons, however many you've got, here you have three, will be subordinated in some way to a major divine person.

That frequently results in something called henotheism, henotheism, the idea of one major deity with lesser deities below that. But you have subordinationism, to where in Jehovah's Witnesses, the Holy Spirit's not even a person, but Holy Spirit is subordinate to God, and in Jesus Christ, being Michael the Archangel in Watchtower Theology, is also subordinate to Jehovah God, who is the Father.

And so, through the use of a graphic like this, you can sort of, in essence, we're defining the boundaries of error, and helping a person to understand where that's coming from, and we'll just stop that right there.

Now, I'm frequently asked, while you all zone out looking at the pretty picture of the snow, I'm frequently asked, well, how do I communicate this to my children? Because you've been using a lot of terms here that, you know, let's be honest with ourselves, are beyond the standard vocabulary level of a young child.

Well, I think until there is a sufficient intellectual development to understand what the categories are, certainly the use of the catechism and the memorization of the proper understanding is a good thing to do, but when the inevitable question, well, how does that work, or why, or so on and so forth comes up, then I think it's best until the intellectual capacity is there to begin grasping, for example, the difference between being in person, which is not something that is necessarily there early on.

The important thing to do is to lay the biblical foundation, is to say, well, God's Word teaches us these things, and when you get to the point where the glazed look hits, then that's the point where you can properly say, and be very careful how you do this, because I think Christians somewhat abuse this, there is a proper use of the term, of the phraseology, that God is beyond our comprehension.

In fact, I like to differentiate between comprehension and understanding. I believe that we can understand the doctrine of the Trinity, but if we say that we can comprehend God in His eternal nature and in His triune existence in the sense of wrapping our finite little created minds around all of that, that's where I would say, no, now we're becoming arrogant.

There's a difference. A lot of Christians utilize that truth to excuse not understanding the doctrine in the first place, and that's not a proper use. And so when speaking with a young child, when you detect that you've now gone beyond what that child is currently capable of understanding, then you can discuss the fact that, well, honey, for example, we don't really understand how God is eternal.

That is, that God never had a beginning, and He'll never have an end. In fact, it's not really like God even exists within time itself, that He exists in a wholly different way. It's not like He sits there with a wristwatch on His arm, and He sees time passing the way you and I do.

We can't even begin to comprehend that, and that's a basic truth about His existence. How then can we wrap ourselves around the higher elements of God's revelation of Himself? And only you as the parent or the teacher can know them well enough to know when you've encountered that particular issue.

But like I said, the biblical foundations, the biblical passages that teach the deity of Christ, or monotheism, things like that, that's the material to emphasize, and then look for that ability to make the differentiations to understand the other elements of the doctrine.

Teaching the Trinity from the Bible, Not Church Councils

So, with that, I happen to notice that it's almost exactly 20 minutes past the hour, and so let's close our time with a word of prayer. Father, we do thank You for Your Word and for Your revelation. We know that we are undeserving of the richness of Your revelation to us, that You have revealed Yourself to exist as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we recognize that the fullest revelation of this truth took place when the Son came into flesh and the Spirit was poured out.

Lord, we thank You for what You've done in condescending in the person of Jesus Christ to be our Savior and to love us. And Lord, we thank You for this opportunity. We thank You for the plan that has been so clearly revealed in Scripture, the Father having eternally decreed that these things would be so, the Son in humility and in love entering into flesh, the Spirit then coming and indwelling and sanctifying and pointing us toward Christ, all to the glory of the Father.

We thank You for this tremendous gospel that is ours, and we ask that You would help us to communicate it to others. We pray in Christ's name, amen.