Is the doctrine of the Trinity biblical? Why is it important? - GotQuestions.org Podcast Episode 25

Welcome to the Got Questions podcast, your questions, biblical answers. And today on the show, we're going to be discussing perhaps,

I guess, the most controversial issue in the history of Christianity, that is the

Trinity. And today on the show, we've got Kevin, our managing editor. Hello.

And Jeff, the administrator of BibleRef .com. Hello. So many of you may not know this, but the very first question we ever received was, how can

I explain the Trinity to an unbeliever? My first reaction was, don't, because it's too difficult, especially to explain to someone who doesn't have the basic grasp on what

Christianity is all about, what is the Christian faith and why it's important. But ultimately, we gave them an answer, gave them some pointers on how do you explain this in a way that would make some sense.

But ultimately, that's the biggest difficulty with the Trinity, and that the Bible clearly teaches that there is one

God. The Bible also teaches that the Father is God, that Jesus Christ is God, and the

Holy Spirit is God. But there's only one God. So somehow, there's one God, yet there's three persons who are

God, and somehow that does not contradict the fact that there is one God. So over the history of Christianity, many have attempted to explain this.

Over several centuries, they came up with essentially a way to make it official.

Here's what the Christian faith teaches about who God it is and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But since then, even before then, there's been divergent views.

So here's a different way to explain it. Here's a different way to explain it. Label various of those heresies.

Some of them, oh, it's wrong, but I wouldn't say it's necessarily heresy. So it's difficult to explain.

And for me, this is an issue where I am willing to embrace the mystery in the sense of,

I don't fully or perfectly understand this. I believe the Bible's clear in what it teaches, but how exactly it works together,

I'm okay with not understanding that. So rather than trying to figure out a way to explain it and likely ending up in one of the various heresies that's out there,

I just tend to accept, here's what the Bible says, how it all works. I don't know.

So Kevin is going to walk us through some of the more popular illustrations or analogies that are out there to help us understand different methods people have developed to explain it and why they don't work.

So Kevin, keep us away from heresies. Well, you say it's difficult to explain the

Trinity. It might just be impossible to explain the Trinity, but we accept it by faith because Scripture clearly teaches

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God. But through the years, people have come up with various analogies, illustrations to try to help us wrap our heads around this concept of three persons, one

God. And so these first three that I'll share all have a similar shortcoming, but they're useful up to a certain point,

I guess. People have used the egg as an illustration of the Trinity. So you've got three parts to the egg.

You have the shell, the yolk, and the white. And those three parts of that egg comprise an egg.

So you've got a three -in -one kind of thing. Then other people have used the apple, same type of idea.

We've got the skin of the apple, the flesh of the apple, and the seeds of the apple. Those three components of the apple all taken together are one fruit, one apple.

And then there's the shamrock that according to tradition, St. Patrick used in his evangelizing of Ireland, where he was speaking to some tribal chieftain and trying to explain the

Trinity. So he picked a shamrock up off the ground and said, look, we've got three leaves, one stem, and these three leaves comprise one plant.

And it's growing all around you. You've got this illustration of the Trinity everywhere. And so these three illustrations or analogies of what the

Trinity is like are interesting, and they've been used a lot, but they all fall short because of this.

You cannot divide God into parts. God is unified.

He is of one essence, of one nature. And when

I say essence, I'm talking about the intrinsic quality of something that makes it what it is.

So the fundamental nature of a thing, the qualities that make a thing what it is, and the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one in essence. They share the intrinsic qualities of being

God, and they are perfectly united. Three persons sharing one nature, sharing one essence.

So you can't say this about the egg or the apple or the shamrock.

Just to take the egg, look at the shell by itself, just take a look at an eggshell.

That's not the egg. It does not have all of the qualities of an egg.

It's just the shell. It's a part of the egg. But with the Trinity, if you consider one person of the

Trinity individually, so you take a look at God the Son, you have all of the qualities of God in that one person.

He is God. And in Christ, all the fullness of the

Godhead dwelt bodily. And so, same thing with the apple, same thing with the shamrock.

You can divide these parts, but once you divide them or consider them individually, you no longer have the thing that you're talking about.

But with the triune God, each member of that Trinity is fully

God, 100%, and they share an undivided essence, an undivided nature.

So you can't part God out. That's the shortcoming of all those analogies right there.

You can't have parts of God. He is a unified whole existing in three persons.

And then there's one other analogy that's pretty popular, quite common. It has a different shortcoming, but it has to do with the states of matter.

So usually we talk about water when we talk about this analogy. So water can exist as a solid, that would be ice, as a liquid, and then as a gas, the invisible water vapor that's creating humidity everywhere.

But these three states of matter are all still water, whether you're talking about solid ice or the liquid water or the gaseous state, it's still water, it's still

H2O. You haven't changed the chemical composition whatsoever. So a lot of people say, well, that's like God.

God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but He doesn't change the fact that He's God. The problem with this is that in order for water to change its physical aspect to melt from solid to liquid, there has to be a switch.

That same water cannot exist as both a solid and a liquid simultaneously.

And if you were to boil that liquid into a gas, again, there'd be a switch.

You cannot have liquid, the same water cannot be liquid and gas at the same time.

And that's different from God, because God exists simultaneously as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And God does not switch back and forth between the three persons. All three persons are eternally coexistent, sharing that same nature.

There is a heresy out there called modalism that teaches that very thing that sometimes

God appears as the Father, then sometimes when He needed to come into the world, He switched and He became the

Son, and He died on the cross, and then He switches again to become the Spirit to indwell our hearts.

But this is not what the Bible teaches. There's no switching of God into different modes or forms.

He is always Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And how can we explain it?

How can we illustrate it? I don't think we really can, but we accept it as Bible truth.

And Kevin, a related illustration to the water one is the fact that, well,

Kevin, you are a father, you have children, you are a son, then you have parents, and you're also a pastor.

So I've heard that one used as another illustration. So here's one person functioning these three different roles, but that ultimately is the same heresy of modalism, because none of those three roles fully comprise who you are.

So to say that it's basically saying being a pastor is part of who you are, being a father is part of who you are, being a son is part of who you are.

No, each of the members of the Trinity is all God, so not parts of God or not different roles of God.

So that's another one that I've heard used numerous times before. So yeah, stay away from the illustrations.

I mean, just recently we had someone contact us about our article on gqkids .org saying that they didn't like that we shared some of these illustrations and we were teaching them to kids.

And let me first defend the article to say that it clearly said that none of these illustrations accurately describe what the

Trinity is, but we made some revisions to the article just to make that clear. But like you said, anytime we go too far with the illustrations, we run very close of dabbling in heresy, and we definitely don't want to go there.

They break down eventually. One of the things that I think we run into. Yeah, I mean, we do have to remember that, that every analogy at some point in time breaks down.

I know that that's come up on other conversations we've had, even on this podcast, that if two things were completely, perfectly identical in every detail, they wouldn't be different anymore, and it wouldn't be an analogy.

Even Jesus' parables, when he talks about things, there are differences between the tiniest little details of those parables and the situation that he's describing.

So I think it's okay for us to bring up things like water and apples and eggs and so on and so forth, but only if we understand what the limitations are.

And especially as long as we understand that some of those analogies are better than others, and that some of them work more than others.

And that's where we separate the difference between something being difficult to understand versus it being a contradiction.

So the Trinity is not contradictory, but it is transcendent. In other words, the ultimate truth of what the

Trinity is, is something that's just beyond the human mind's ability to comprehend.

That doesn't mean that it's not true, and that's not a cop -out. When we were discussing other topics on other podcasts,

I remember, Shay, we were discussing issues like Molinism, for example. We brought up the idea that just because something goes beyond complete human understanding does not mean that I'm embracing a contradiction.

It just means that there are some things that I can rightly recognize that the human mind just can't fully understand.

We see that with things like numbers. So I can visualize in my mind five of something.

I can visualize ten of something. I've known people who can visualize a number like a 100.

But when we start getting into numbers like a thousand, ten thousand, a million, a billion, the human brain literally cannot comprehend those things in their fullness, in their details.

We can understand them by abstraction. We can grasp them well enough to interact with things like mathematics and so on and so forth.

Those things are real, but there is no way for the human mind to really grasp what a trillion of something is.

We grasp the word, we get the grammar, we understand the basic idea, but we really cannot understand that thing.

And that's okay. So when it comes to the Trinity, there is a huge difference between saying, this is just a contradiction that we're going to accept, which is not what

Christianity does with the Trinity, versus saying, here is what we know is true, and here's our best understanding of this thing.

This is as close as we can get to grasping it. But sooner or later, anything we do to try to grasp it, explain it, define it, codify it, is going to fall apart.

And again, that's not always a bad thing. Another example I can think of are atoms.

A lot of us, when we were going to school, when we learned about atoms that make up matter, we used to see these little diagrams.

And the diagrams kind of look like little raspberries. There's these little clusters in the middle, and then there's all these circles around the outside.

And that's supposed to represent the nucleus and then the electrons that are around the outside. Well, that's not what atoms actually look like.

There's randomness, there's probability, there's chaos. The electrons are actually in a cloud, not a ring.

Well, that's all well and good. But literally seeing what an atom looks like, that almost doesn't even make sense, just because of the nature of what it is.

We can understand it close enough, we can get a pretty good approximation, at least a good enough one to have a conversation about.

I can talk about the nucleus and I can talk about orbital spheres and everything else like that without having that perfect understanding.

And with the Trinity, it's okay to be in that same mode, that I can understand it well enough to have a meaningful conversation and to grasp the things that the

Bible says, and then move on from there. The second thing that we move on to after that is the concept of explanatory power.

And the Trinity, once we get to the point of understanding that there's going to be aspects that are difficult to understand, we can actually start to see how the

Trinity becomes explanatory. It actually provides positive aspects to our understanding of the universe and faith and the

Bible. One of the things we see in nature is there's this unified sense where we have separate but interlinked things, the different fundamental forces, the way things at large scale and small scale work together.

Now that fits again into the analogy concept, but there's this broad sense in nature where we have this unity in diversity.

We have things that are of one essence, but a separate specificity that work together in certain ways.

It's difficult to understand how you could wind up with that from randomness. How could you come up with that unless unity and diversity come somehow from whatever created or instigated the universe?

We see the same thing in theological concepts. The Trinity gives us the ability to say, here is a

God who, without creating, we can even use prior to creating, in quotation marks, prior to creating, we have a

God who can experience and understand things like communication, community, love, submission, authority, speech, all those things

God is perfectly capable of doing without contradiction as a Trinity, a monad deity.

So for example, Islam's concept of Allah, where there is absolutely no analogy to a

Trinity whatsoever, now we're getting beyond the concept of mystery to flat -out contradiction.

That's a deity who cannot communicate because if there is absolutely no other person, there is nothing with which to communicate.

So that's one of the examples of how understanding the Trinity actually makes some of these questions that we have as human beings about how can

God be really exist. The third thing that I see when I talk to people about the Trinity is that we can see places in the

Bible where we see these things are clearly taught, and some of those are in unexpected places.

Clearly in the New Testament, we see Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Even in the Old Testament, we see the same thing.

Two good examples I can think of. One is Psalm 110 .1. Jesus brings this up where he talks about the

Lord said to my Lord, and he brings this up in a context where Jesus is talking about God possessing more than one person in his essence.

The other one is Psalm 45, 6, and 7, where the person being spoken to in that Psalm is

God, and God has an everlasting throne. And then without changing the subject of the conversation, the same voice in Scripture says, your

God will honor you. So here again, even in the Old Testament, we have these ideas of this three persons, one being that comes together.

The Trinity is complicated. It's difficult. It's something that we're never going to fully understand, but we can say the same thing about Adams and string theory and black holes and women.

We're never going to fully understand all these things, but we can understand well enough to make right decisions and to understand and communicate and discuss.

Now, should I say, you're shaking your head at me. So I'm not being heretical. I'm just getting in trouble. That was hilariously unexpected, but I should have come to expect that from you by now.

So in the Old Testament, there's other examples like the very fact that the name, the word for God, Elohim, is plural.

While it does not teach the Trinity, it definitely allows for it. There's other things in the

Old Testament where God is creating and the Holy Spirit is hovering over the waters in Genesis 1.

There's other examples like in Proverbs 30 or 31 where the author is asking, tell me the name of God's son.

So there's hints of it here and there. In the New Testament, there's more explicit references. So at the

Jesus baptism, you have the father speaking, this is my beloved son. Listen to him.

You have the son being baptized and you have the Holy Spirit descending on him as a dove. So if this is not three separate persons in God, well,

God, in a sense, would have to be putting on a show for the three of them to be interacting like they were at Jesus' baptism.

And then there's countless references throughout the New Testament to Jesus being God, the Father being God, the

Holy Spirit being God, and get there only being one God. So difficult to discern, is the

Trinity explicitly taught in Scripture or just implicitly taught? And probably the answer is both.

But my question for the two of you, I'd like maybe both of you to address this. How important is the doctrine of the

Trinity? And I guess maybe the question that we seem to get most often is something related to do you actually have to fully believe in the

Trinity as it's been accepted as the orthodox view of the Trinity in order to be saved?

And how would you guys respond to that question? But Kevin, you go first. Well, I think it's a very important doctrine because it's important for us to have a right concept of God, a biblical concept of God.

It's very important. So we stick with what the Bible says, and the Bible clearly presents

God as three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So it's important for us to understand that that's what the

Bible teaches and that we accept that by faith. Now, as being part of salvation,

I wouldn't go that far. I would say that if you have faith that Jesus is the

Son of God and that He was God in the flesh and that He died on the cross for our sins and rose again the third day, we are saved.

We repent. We put our faith in Christ and His finished work, and we're saved.

And we don't have to have a full understanding of other doctrines in order to be saved, and that would include the

Trinity. You don't have to have a full understanding of that, or it doesn't really even have to be presented to us, I don't think, in order for us to be saved initially, and that comes later.

As we grow, as we learn, as we steady to show ourselves approved, we'll come to those conclusions about the

Trinity. And I think that's well said that there's a difference between sincere faith in the things that the

Bible presents to us and the way we respond to God versus a deeper understanding of something that really is ultimately a little on the esoteric side.

That's a word that just means it's obscure. It's something that's difficult for us to fully grasp.

When Christ talks about childlike faith, He's not talking about being naive or being blind, but He is talking about a simplicity of trust.

And a person doesn't have to have a Ph .D. in philosophy in order to be a born -again

Christian. From my perspective, I think that there's a marked difference between somebody who has a sincere misunderstanding or ignorance about a topic versus a person who has some level of active resistance.

So I think there's a difference between a person who does not believe in or does not understand the

Trinity as driven by that versus a person who is in a position where what they are doing is they are twisting

Scripture or they are resisting something philosophically or for doctrinal reasons.

And that, I think, puts a person's spiritual status more reasonably into question because there is a difference between somebody making a sincere mistake and somebody being stubborn or hard -headed or resistant to what

Scripture says. And I think you see the same thing from a denominational or religious standpoint.

I think there is a difference between a group teaching something about the Trinity, making a sincere mistake or making a sincere error versus a group who is spinning off into doctrinal errors driven by their particular views of the

Trinity, or vice versa, where there's a doctrinal view that's not compatible with the idea of the

Trinity. And so that is back translated into faith, Jehovah's Witnesses being an example.

I think there is a difference between somebody who reads the Scriptures and is told certain things about Christ versus a person who is given that information.

Jesus criticized the Pharisees much more stridently than prostitutes and tax collectors.

And one of the reasons He did that was because they were in a position to be able to know these things better.

So from my perspective, I think it makes a big difference as to what level of sophistication a person is working with.

If I encounter somebody who disbelieves in the Trinity or doesn't understand it or doesn't accept it, and that's driven more by this lack of understanding or just unfamiliarity,

I don't think that really has any particular bearing on their relationship with Christ.

But persons who are a little more sophisticated and seem to be more resistant to the idea despite what we see in Scripture, that gives me reasons to question whether this person is being sincere about this issue or whether they're just being hard -headed.

And even the hard heads, I don't think, have to believe in the Trinity in order to be saved.

But it does raise more questions when the well -informed, intelligent person is looking at all the information and just seems like they're refusing to come to the conclusion that Scripture offers.

Jeff, you're exactly right. And Kevin, to you as well. There's a difference between being ignorant of the truth or not understanding the truth versus actually denying it.

I've discussed earlier, Modalist believes that there's one God who appeared in three different modes,

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They're not actually different persons. For this time period, God's the

Father. This time period, He's the Son. Now He's the Holy Spirit. And my answer to the person is yes, because as Kevin outlined, what's most important is to understand that Jesus was

God in the flesh, and that's why He could pay the penalty for our sins. So the

Modalist can believe that. Now, don't get me wrong. I believe Modalism is wrong. I believe it is unbiblical, and I believe it leads down a very—it'll cause far more problems than it could possibly solve.

But at the same time, can a person hold a faulty view of the Trinity and be saved? I think the answer has to be yes.

But again, let's be careful about someone who's just seeking, learning, exploring, trying to figure it out versus someone who's actively denying the historic truth of the

Christian faith and that which is taught in the Bible. So as we discussed before we even launched the show, the more you talk about the

Trinity, the more likely you're accidentally going to delve into heresy. So let's go ahead and cut this one right here while it still has hopefully the 100 % heresy -free stamp of approval.

So this has been the Got Questions podcast. Hope you found it beneficial. Hope it maybe gives you a little bit more of an understanding of the

Trinity and why it's important. Ask you to visit the website, several articles on the

Trinity and also on the different heresies, the different alternate explanations for the Trinity if you would like to learn more.

So again, our goal here is to help you understand God's Word better, to be encouraged by our discussion.

So we hope that's what has occurred here today. So Got Questions? Bible as Answers.