The Trinity with R. C. Sproul, Lesson 2

As we continue now with our study of the Trinity, we've seen now something of the doctrine as it's found in the Old Testament Scriptures and then the New Testament Scriptures and how the doctrine developed in terms of church history and the early centuries of Christian reflection.

Why the Trinity Is Not a Contradiction

But we've noted along the way that the constant criticism of the Trinity is that it's irrational, that it involves a contradiction. And you recall earlier I responded to that by saying that to call it a contradiction is to misapply the law of non-contradiction to the formula because the formula for the Trinity teaches that God is one in essence and three in person, so that it's one in one thing, three in another, what we would say one in A, three in B, which does not violate the categories of rational thought or the law of non-contradiction.

Nevertheless, people continue persistently to make the charge that the Trinity is irrational. In fact, I just got a letter yesterday from somebody making that charge against historic Christianity. And so I want to take a couple of moments today to say why it is I think that people make this error in accusing Christianity of being irrational or contradictory with respect to our doctrine of the Trinity.

In other classes I have taken the time to explore three distinct categories that we need to understand and differentiate from one another, and those categories are the contradiction, the paradox, and the mystery.

These three words represent three distinct ideas or concepts, but they are so closely related that all three of them are often confused one with the other. A paradox, the prefix para means alongside of, and the root comes from the Greek dokain, which means to seem, to think, or to appear.

A paradox is something that sounds contradictory, maybe the first time you hear it, but upon closer scrutiny the tension is resolved. Jesus, you know, the New Testament says for us to be free we have to become slaves or servants to Christ.

That sounds contradictory, but upon closer examination we're seeing that Jesus is saying to be free in one sense, you have to be a servant in another sense, and so there's no violation here of the rules of logic.

Mystery, Contradiction, and the Limits of Human Understanding

But where we really see the problem and the tension is between the mystery and the contradiction, and here's the reason. In the term mystery, we refer to mysteries as to things that we as yet do not understand.

We believe them to be true, but we don't understand how it is that they are true or why it is that they are true. We know that there is such a thing as gravity, but the whole essence of gravity remains something as of a mystery to us, even something as basic and fundamental as motion, which we notice every day and build our lives upon, defies an acute analysis of its reality when one looks at it philosophically.

We say that there is a mysterious element to that, as well as to many other things that we experience in our everyday lives. And so a mystery is something that we affirm is true, but we don't understand all of the ramifications of it.

Now, biblical Christianity certainly has its share of mysteries. We don't understand how God can be infinite in His being, and yet we affirm that He is, and there are many truths that God reveals to us about Himself that are beyond our capacity to understand.

In fact, some of these truths we may never fully understand, even in heaven, as we get new information and new knowledge, things that formerly were mysterious to us are then unraveled with new insight and new information.

And we have seen real progress in knowledge in the history of science, in the history of theology and other disciplines as we increase our knowledge. But even as we increase our knowledge to the maximal point in human experience, even in heaven we will remain finite creatures who will not have an ability to have a full comprehension of the nature of God.

And so it shouldn't surprise us, given the difference between the character of God and humanness, that there would be mysterious elements of truth with respect to God. But, again, there is a difference between a mystery and a contradiction.

What they have in common, however, is this. Nobody understands a contradiction, and mysteries are not understood either. And so we can rush to judgment and say, if I don't understand something, it must be irrational.

It must be a contradiction. But that's not the case at all. The reason why contradictions are not understood is that because they are inherently unintelligible. Nobody can understand a contradiction because contradictions cannot be understood.

I've told the story before. A seminary professor I had who wrinkled his brow and spoke in hushed terms and made the announcement in our class, he said, God is absolutely immutable in His essence, and God is absolutely mutable in His essence.

And there was a collective sigh by the students. They said, that's deep. I said, no, that's nuts. That's wacky. But if you have enough education and a position of authority in the academic world, you can make nonsense statements and have people walk away impressed by how profound you are.

But that is profoundly nonsensical to say that God is absolutely mutable and absolutely immutable at the same time and in the same relationship. All the degrees in the world can't make sense out of that because it's a nonsense statement.

Now, no human being has the capacity to understand a contradiction because, as I say, they're inherently unintelligible. And not only God can understand a contradiction. Some people say, well, that's the difference between God and man, where our minds are limited by the laws of logic.

In God's mind, God can transcend the laws of logic, and God can understand something as A and not A at the same time in the same relationship. Now, you may think that you're exalting God by saying that He is so wonderful in His intelligence and so transcendent in His wisdom that He's able to understand contradictions.

Now, what you've done is you've just slandered the deity because you have said that in the mind of God resides nonsense and chaos, which is not the case. But what we mean is that there are things we don't understand that are mysterious to us that God, from His perspective and with His omniscience, His knowledge, can readily understand.

That is, for God, there is no mystery. There's also no contradictions because He doesn't think in those categories. But again, the point of contact is we cannot understand a mystery, but it may be that at some point, with more information and a higher perspective, that mystery will be unraveled.

And again, God can understand it. God understands gravity. God understands motion. God understands ultimate reality and being, where we have not been able to penetrate to these things completely. So, I hope you understand that we need to be careful when we say the Trinity is something I don't understand.

I don't know how a person can be one person and have two natures, a divine nature and a human nature. I have no reference point for that in my human experience, and every person that I've ever met, that person has only had one nature.

It's like one to a customer, and yet when we affirm the dual nature of Christ, we are affirming something that is unique to Him that differs from normal experience of humanity, and so it's mysterious.

As we said when we looked at the Council of Chalcedon, we can affirm the negatives, that the two natures are without confusion and mixture, division, separation, and so on, but that pretty much limits our understanding by saying what it isn't.

We don't know how it really functions in the two natures of Christ. And likewise, when we come to the Trinity, we say, because we have to say based on the revelation of Scripture, that there is one sense in which God is one and another sense in which He is three, and we must be careful to point out that those two senses are not the same.

If they were the same, then we would have a contradiction unworthy of our faith. But we point to the mystery of the nature of God who is one in essence and three in person. Now, a second objection that is raised constantly against the doctrine of the Trinity is linguistic in this degree.

Why the Word Trinity Was Needed in Church History

The argument is that the Bible, and particularly the New Testament, never uses the term Trinity. And so, the term Trinity is an extra-biblical word imposed upon the text of Scripture. And therefore, it involves an intrusion into the Hebraic mind of the Scriptures from outside the biblical framework.

It's an invasion of abstract Greek categories into New Testament Christianity. We hear this all the time, as if the Holy Spirit could not justly ever use the Greek language as a medium of communicating truth, which in fact we know is not the case since the New Testament was written in the Greek language.

And so sometimes today, theologians and philosophers have more trouble with Greek than God does. But in any case, the idea that the term Trinity doesn't occur in the Scriptures has caused some people to raise eyebrows.

But the question is, does what this word mean, does the concept appear in the Bible? All the word Trinity does is focus linguistically as a word to capture within it the content of the Scriptures that teach, as we have seen already, the unity of God and the tri-personality of God.

And so we search for a word that will accurately communicate those two assertions, unity and tri-personality. And we come up with the idea of tri-unity, three in oneness, and we get this word Trinity.

And so really it's naive to object that the word itself isn't found in the Scripture, as long as we can demonstrate that the concept is found in the Scripture and is taught by the Scripture. Now let me just say something at this point about these theological terms that arise in church history, and why they arise in church history.

They arise principally because of the church's commitment to theological precision. John Calvin made the observation in his Institutes that words like Trinity have arisen in church history because of what he described as the slippery snakes that try to distort the teaching of Scripture by heresy.

I mean you have somebody, as we've already seen, like Arius, who didn't hesitate to call Jesus the Son of God, who didn't hesitate to give personal devotion and worship to Jesus as the Son of God, who didn't hesitate in saying that Jesus was like God, yet he argued that Jesus was a creature, so that he used the language of the church, such as at the Council of Synod, or the Synod of Antioch in 267, where the term homoousios was introduced as opposed to homoousios, Arius didn't hesitate to use the language of previous councils, but he filled that language with a different content, and that's what heretics do all the time.

And the favorite trick of the heretic is what we call the studied ambiguity. The studied ambiguity. The studied ambiguity is that means of communication whereby something, a word is used to leave the concept intentionally ambiguous.

Justification, Imputation, and the Church’s Need for Precision

In the sixteenth century, the greatest theological controversy in the history of the church broke out at the time of the Reformation over the doctrine of justification, and the basic issue was what was the grounds of our justification.

Is our justification grounded in a righteousness that inheres within us, or is it grounded in a righteousness that is achieved apart from us, outside of us, extra nos? That is, is our righteousness from within, or is it from Christ in terms of His perfect act of righteousness where His righteousness is imputed to us or counted to us?

The whole controversy came down to one word, imputation, where the Reformers were saying the only way any person can be justified is to have the righteousness of Jesus Christ transferred to their account.

Now, in efforts to resolve the dispute, many people said, well, let's just write up the let's write it this way, that we're justified by Christ. We both agree that we're justified by Christ. So, let's hold hands, sing hymns, pray together, and stay together by just having a common formula that we're justified by Christ.

And that's ambiguous enough that people who believe you're justified by the infusion of the righteousness of Jesus that you cooperate with to become inherently righteous, you can hold on to that, and you who believe that you're justified by Christ by virtue of the imputation of His righteousness where these two views of justification are as far from each other as the East is from the West, we can avoid the controversy, we can avoid the dispute, we can maintain Christian unity by using a formula that is intentionally ambiguous that you can interpret your way, and you can interpret your way.

That's what happens with the studied ambiguity. And historically, again, Colin was right in saying that the studied ambiguity is the hiding place for the heretic. And so the reason why the church insisted upon this term historically was again to stop the mouths of the heretics, to stop the monophysites I mean the modalists, to stop the dynamics monarchians, to stop those who were teaching tritheism, that is that there are three gods, and also to stop the mouths of those who were denying the tri-personality of God by insisting on some view of Unitarianism.

And therefore, we see the church coming down on a concept that in a very real sense functions as a shibboleth. Remember what the purpose of the shibboleth was, that the purpose of the shibboleth was as a password to get by a century when the enemies of Israel were trying to send their undercover agents and spies into the land.

Anybody who came in was asked to pronounce the word shibboleth, and their neighbors were not able to pronounce that word, and so their stumbling with the language gave them away. And so that's what we say a shibboleth is.

It's a test word to find out if someone is authentic. In Holland during the period of the occupation, when Holland was under domination of Germany for several years during World War II, they had their shibboleth.

They have a seaport, a seacoast resort town in Holland called see if I can do it and make it past the century, because you almost have to have post-nasal drip to be able to speak it. The name of this seacoast was Scheveningen.

Did you hear that, Scheveningen? And the Germans, just for the life of them, couldn't do it. They could speak Dutch and get by and pass as Dutch under most cases, but you asked them to say Scheveningen, they stumbled all over themselves just like I am right now.

And so that became a shibboleth, and that's what the church has had to do. You take words like inerrancy when it comes to the Scripture. J .I. Packer once said, yes, inerrancy is a shibboleth. You want to find out real quick where a person stands with respect to their view of sacred Scripture, you don't ask them if you believe in the Scripture's inspiration.

You ask them do you believe in the Scripture's inerrancy, because people will choke on that word before they'll affirm it. Now, granted, there's never been a confession written, there's never been a formula expressed in all of its precision that dishonest people can't fudge on.

Weasel words happen all the time, and my own ordination, I remember a fellow who asked me before his ordination exams, he said to me, should I go with the resurrection or not? I said, what do you mean?

And I said, do you believe in the resurrection? He said, well, of course not. I said, well, then that's what you have to say. But he didn't want to be disqualified from ordination, so he fudged, he crossed his fingers when he was under examination.

That happens all the time. And again, the reason why the church has come back to words like Trinity is to set the standard as precisely as we possibly can. And what drives the church to precision in every generation has been the assault on the truth of God from the heretic.

That's what heresy does. It forces the church to be careful and clear and precise in her confession. Well, in our next session, we will look again at this formula, one in essence, three in person, and see if we can at least unravel the theological content of what is meant by those terms that are used.