Simply Trinity (part 19)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Father in Heaven, we thank you this morning for the blessing that it is to have a place to meet, to gather, to worship you,

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Father, Son, and Spirit. Father, we pray for your blessing as we look again to this difficult topic of the

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Trinity and pray that you'd give us help, that your Spirit would illumine our minds, that we would be able to better understand what it means that you are one, yet you are three persons.

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Father, we pray that you would help us, that you would guide us, that you would strengthen us.

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In Jesus' name, Amen. Okay, so we have a quiz, and the only reason

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I know that is because I have this huge stack of papers. I see that hand.

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So, without further ado, we'll go directly to number one. By the way, the thrust of this chapter, if you haven't read it, is to discuss eternal functional subordination, or what some call...

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What is ESS? Eternal subordination of the

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Son, I think. Okay, so it's either eternal functional subordination or eternal subordination of the

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Son. They're both basically the same thing. So, number one. There are not three

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Almightys, but one. I hear it true.

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And let me read the Athanasian Creed part of it.

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The Father is Almighty, the Son Almighty, and the Holy Spirit Almighty. There are not three

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Almightys, but one Almighty. That's a lot of Almightys.

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Four. Okay, so that's kind of a tricky question. If they're all

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Almighty, why is there only one? Because three persons and one

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God. Okay, number two. True or false, EFS means eternal functional subordination, and it has to do with the imminent

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Trinity. True is correct. True is true.

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Barrett says, A novel view has emerged within evangelicalism called EFS, claiming that the

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Son is subordinate to the Father in authority within the imminent Trinity. Now, what does the imminent

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Trinity mean? Okay.

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And you know what? That's how I kind of remember it, too, because I never remember what imminent means.

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So then I think about economic, which is what? Right, how they function, how the persons function.

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So if I think about imminent, it means who they are. They're ontological persons, as it were.

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So, he says, Claiming the Son is subordinate to the Father in authority within the imminent

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Trinity. In other words, the Father is at the top, then the

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Son, then the Spirit. Barrett goes on to say, EFS is not biblical.

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Comes dangerously close to three heresies. Sounds like a car swerving out of control, right?

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And threatens a Christian view of salvation and worship. Other than that, it's pretty good.

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EFS is also a version of social Trinitarianism, which is a departure from biblical and Nicene orthodoxy.

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Okay. Number three. Only the

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Father deserves ultimate glory. Okay.

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All right. Be prepared. All right. This is Matthew Barrett, when he was first entering

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Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and hearing that he should take a lot of Bruce Ware classes.

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So, he says, But as Ware sang the praises of the Trinity, this is in his theology classes, he would sometimes say things that sounded off -key.

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See what he's doing there? Saying the praises, saying off -key. The Father is supreme over the

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Son. The Father stands above the Son. And the Father alone deserves ultimate glory.

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Now, when you hear things like that, what do you think? You think,

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Let's grab the torches, boys. It's time to get busy. No, what are you thinking?

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Charlie. Okay. That's good.

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I think about Revelation, where the occupants are worshipping the slain lamb, the

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Son. Right? Yeah, John 17, where Jesus longs to be restored to the glory that he had before he took on human flesh.

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He says, The Father alone deserves ultimate glory, even over the

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Son, who deserves, quote, penultimate glory. You know, kind of second place.

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And the Father alone should receive, quote, ultimate praise. That's pretty bad.

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And number four, and I'll just, you know, kind of tip my hand a little bit.

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That really sounds sort of Mormon to me. It sounds

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Aryan, like Jesus doesn't deserve ultimate glory.

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Number four, true or false, using the Bible alone, one cannot go wrong in understanding the

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Trinity. That's false.

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Barrett, with strong conviction, where simply listed, when he's proving the Trinity, where simply listed text after text, apart from context, focusing only on select words in each text and concluding with much enthusiasm,

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I just believe the Bible. Ware and Wayne Grudem spoke at churches, colleges, and seminaries, teaching a view known as eternal functional submission or subordination of the

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Son to the Father. EFSers, that's those who subscribe to eternal functional subordination, told an entire generation that the imminent

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Trinity, which is who God is, in and of himself,

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God in himself, apart from the economy of salvation, is defined by eternal relationships of authority and submission.

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Ware, for example, presented his doctrine of the Trinity as a formula. Here's the formula.

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List Bible verses that teach God is one, so you have monotheism. Second, list verses that support the deity of each person.

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I feel like I've done this in Fundamentals of the

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Faith. Appeal to the word homoousius, or same substance, to argue that each person is of the same divine nature.

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That's number three. And then number four, list verses where two or three persons are mentioned. And number five, conclusion,

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God is one in essence, but three persons. So that's how you prove the

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Trinity. Just use the Bible, do those things, boom, boom, boom, Trinity. Number five, true or false, traditionally, what has distinguished...

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Boy, that's a bad question. Oh, there we go. I read it wrong.

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Traditionally, what has distinguished the persons of the Trinity is their roles. Well, when I use the word traditionally,

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I'm using it the way Barrett does, which means throughout church history, not for the last 50 years.

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False is correct. False is true. I just like to say that because it sounds really crazy.

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Okay. Barrett says, only after Ware had put forward his

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Trinity formula, did he identify what distinguishes the persons. It was not the eternal generation and inspiration we see in Scripture and in the

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Nicene Creed, rather, one thing alone distinguished the persons, roles, or relationships.

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Ware presented the Trinity with a strong social emphasis, defining the

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Trinity as triune persons in relational community. Eternal relationality...

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What kind of word is that? Okay, sorry. Eternal relationality calls for and calls forth a created community of persons.

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Now, when I read stuff like that, what do I think? Besides the fact that relationality is just a nonsense word.

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What else do you think? That's pretty much where I was going.

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I mean, it sounds like some kind of government contract or something. I don't know. I'm just reading it going, what?

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Yeah, that's bad. Yeah, Charlie. Yeah, your question,

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I think if I can frame it this way, if the charismatic movement focuses too much on the spirit and loses the fact that his primary biblical function is to point to the sun, then what are we talking about, though?

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We talk about the Holy Spirit pointing to the sun. We're talking about his place in the imminent

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Trinity or his role in the economic Trinity. Okay. So, I mean, that's one of the keys here is to see, to separate those two things.

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Yes, roles within the imminent Trinity. Right. And their mission, if we could put it that way, their mission basically reflects their eternal, what's the word?

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Yeah, eternal relation. Relation of origin. What's that? I've got my eye on you,

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Mr. You might work for the government. I'm not sure.

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Of course, I should talk because, you know, I worked, not to brag, but I worked for two years in a jail that had no inmates.

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You're saying, what did you do? We did all kinds of goofy things. But one of the things we did was we wrote all the procedures for the jail.

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And I wound up like having final say on what was written. So people would write things up and then give it to me to edit and do all that.

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So government verbiage. Oh, yeah, that's me. You know, I know all about that. Okay. Number six, true or false?

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EFS, eternal functional subordination, teaches that there is a rank structure within the

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Trinity. I already said it. So you should know. True. Bear it.

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But then came the million dollar question. What kind of roles and relationships distinguish the persons?

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What kind of society is the Trinity? And should this divine society become the prototype for human society?

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EFS's answer, a society of authority and submission. So, I mean, again, this points to a kind of social trinity, the things that we were talking about several weeks ago, months ago, in chapters two and three.

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Number seven, true or false? Without the submission of the Son, the Trinity cannot exist.

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Without the submission of the Son, the Trinity cannot exist. That's false. For EFS, the position of supremacy within the

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Trinity belongs to the Father alone, not to the Son. Can you kind of already see where the problem is?

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Can anybody kind of spot the problem with this? Okay, that's kind of...

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There's too much individuality in the Trinity, right? But even just listening to that, for EFS, the position of supremacy within the

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Trinity belongs to the Father alone, not to the Son, and definitely not to the

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Spirit, who has the least authority of all. Okay, the

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Father's never alone, that's another problem. But I guess what I'm driving at is, when we read that, it really does sound like what

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Corey says, like we're getting to the point where we have kind of three different...

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Right, but I think, to put it more theologically precisely, what we're seeing is the pushing of our economic understanding of the

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Trinity into the imminent Trinity. In other words, taking how they function in terms of our salvation and pushing it back into who they are in their persons.

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So, yeah, Charlie. You know,

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I asked a similar question of somebody much smarter than me, and actually I was thinking about writing

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Dr. Barrett and asking him, but ask your question again. Does it dissolve it?

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Yes, and I think, does the unity of operations, and I think the answer is no, but I'm not really sure exactly why.

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So, you know, and I tried to get a clear answer on that and I failed, so I'm going to have to try again.

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But that's something I'll probably address in the future. So, unless somebody's better informed than I am, we'll keep moving.

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He says, the Father alone, this is, again, we're getting back to the teaching of Ware and Grudem, the

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Father alone is, quote, supreme among the persons of the Godhead. He alone has, quote, ultimate supremacy.

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And he alone is, quote, supreme in the Trinity, end quote. It's really hard to reconcile that with an understanding of the

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Nicene Creed, where they're all of the same substance and equal, et cetera.

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The Father, quote, stands above the Son, and the Father is, has absolute and uncontested supremacy, including authority over the

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Son and Spirit. Now, when you hear that, you know, authority over the

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Son and the Spirit, I mean, it really does sound very human, right?

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Disagreement, right? Yep. I can't disagree.

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In fact, we're going to probably repeat that a few hundred times this morning. Those who subscribe to eternal functional subordination, he says, were adamant that these indications of supremacy and subordination tell us who the persons are apart from creation and salvation.

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In other words, it's the essence of the Trinity, this hierarchy here.

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They are even person -defining. Just as subordination distinguishes the Son as Son, so too does supremacy distinguish the

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Father as Father within the Trinity. And I've even read, somebody who's not mentioned here this morning,

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Bruce Ware's son -in -law, what's his name? Somebody should know that. He's like all the rage these days.

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He's speaking in G3, he's got his shopping mall seminary thing.

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I can't think of his name. I'll think of it probably about 950. Okay. Should have put it in my notes.

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Anyway, he says, apart from these rules, there is no

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Trinity, a point Grudem has also stressed repeatedly.

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And again, my love for his systematic theology wanes and wanes and wanes.

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Number eight, true or false, based on 1 Corinthians 15, 28, the

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Eternal Father is superior to the Eternal Son. That's very good.

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It is false. But let's look at 1 Corinthians 15, verses 27 and 28. And we're going to go back to this verse a few times.

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What's the context of 1 Corinthians 15? I need like,

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I don't know, a ping pong gun or something. Yeah, the resurrection is correct.

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I mean, you go to a funeral, you're going to hear something probably from 1 Corinthians 15. 1

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Corinthians 15, 27 through 28. For God has put all things in subjection under his feet.

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Whose feet? Jesus. But when it says all things are put in subjection, it is plain that he is accepted who puts all things in subjection under him.

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When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.

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So they point to that and they say, see, there's this eternal subjection of the

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Son to the Father. EFSers often cited 1

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Corinthians 15, 28, which were paraphrased as follows. At the completion of history, when all things finally and fully are subjected to Jesus Christ the

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Son, then the Son himself will also be subjected to his own Father who is the very one who put all things in subjection under his

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Son, so that God the Father, who is not subjected to anyone, not even to his own

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Son, may be shown to be supreme and over all that is. Then Ware makes a most significant statement.

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Quote, the Father stands above the Son and the Son gladly acknowledges this fact.

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Barrett, and then we'll have some conversation here. The subjugation of the Son is not just an economic reality either, limited to salvation or the incarnation.

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The subordination of the Son is ingrained within the very DNA of the Trinity, apart from creation, within the imminent

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Trinity itself, which EFSers assume is synonymous with what they label eternity past and future.

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There is a split level hierarchy of authority and subordination inside the

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Trinity. Now when you read 1 Corinthians 15, and again, what's the overall context of 1

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Corinthians 15? Resurrection, which would be part of creation, and also part of redemption, right?

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When you read that, and then you think, okay, if you read the text carefully, you'd think, does this have anything to do with before time began?

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Could we take this and somehow say, well, obviously, this is the way things always were.

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The Son was always subjected to the Father.

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He was always submitting himself to the Father. Could we see that from here? And I think the answer is no.

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You know, and especially if we just think about what Paul's writing about, in terms of he's trying to emphasize the resurrection and the power of the death and resurrection, resurrection of the man

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Christ Jesus, that seems a stretch to say that we can then use those verses and import them back into eternity past and say this is the way the

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Trinity is. But that's what they do. Thoughts, questions, concerns?

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Heresies? Yes, Jonathan? Yeah, my only yellow flag there is the idea that the humanity of Jesus has been added to the

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Trinity, because I don't think that's quite right. But the rest of it

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I totally sign on to. Right. It's okay, because if you talk for more than 15, 20 seconds, and I don't mean you,

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I mean anybody, you're going to swerve perilously close to some arrow or another.

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Yeah, yeah.

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A bit of creation is now in charge of all creation. Above all creation, yeah.

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Okay, so number nine. True or false, Bruce Ware teaches that the Father chooses to include the

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Son in salvation. It is true, and you know, this is really mind -blowing.

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Okay. I mean, I just want to go, if I have any Bruce Ware books, I want to, you know, left.

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I want to burn them now. Okay. Because the Father alone has such authority by virtue of his paternity, the

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Father could, if he wanted, act all by himself, alone. The Son and Spirit could be, hypothetically at least, sidelined, since the

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Father is supreme. Nevertheless, the Father chooses, this is a quote, quote, chooses not to work in such a way.

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And then this is Barrett again. Well, most of the time. Grudem said, sometimes the

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Father does do without the Son. For example, when the Father plans salvation, he acts alone.

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Now, could you maybe make that point? Like, if you just think for a moment about Ephesians 1, you know, how many times have you heard, even from the pulpit, this statement?

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The Father chooses, the Son dies, redeems on behalf of, you know, dies on behalf of the elect, and then the

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Spirit seals them. Right? So from that, you could say, well, if the Father chooses, if he chose an eternity past, then you could look at this and go, okay.

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You know, maybe the Father does plan salvation. I mean, are there indications that maybe

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Jesus elects to? I think there are. I won't go into that at the moment. But Barrett goes on to say this.

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Where went so far as to compare the Son to creation? Listen. He says, in many ways, what we see here of the

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Father choosing not to work unilaterally, not to work alone, but to accomplish his work through the

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Son or through the Spirit, extends into his relationship to us.

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Does God need us to do his work? The answer is no. And this is

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Barrett again. But for EFSers, the reason why stems from the

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Trinity. The Son's involvement is optional. The Son is not involved because he is the

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Son. He is only involved because the Father chooses to include him. The Father could have asked the

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Son to stand aside and watch him do all the work. Likewise with the work of creation.

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And I just, you know, the picture I have because we're in NBA playoff season, you know, is of like an isolation play.

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You know, like they're going to clear the floor. They're going to let Jason Tatum go one -on -one. And so the other four guys have to get on the other side of the floor.

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And the Father says, OK, boys, stand aside. Let me break this down for you.

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This is so bad. It is even an act of generosity for the Father to include the

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Son in the first place. Listen. Quote. The Father does his work through the Son and through the

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Spirit. And that generosity in sharing his work with others spills over into how he relates to us.

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I mean, this is, yeah, this is, I don't know how this isn't

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Arian. You know, God doesn't need us. Right. Right. I wish

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I was smarter because I would have condensed all this chapter into stuff we could talk about this morning.

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Because we're going to eventually see how this impacts the Gospel. And it's just amazing.

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And some of what that idea of language of accommodation we're going to talk about again in this chapter.

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And I'll just give you a little spoiler because we won't talk about it yet this morning. If we just think about it this way.

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Is it possible using English only to describe

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God comprehensively? So what does that tell us about the

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Bible that we have? Okay, some concepts will never be exhaustively conveyed to us.

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So in other words, let me try to spin this around. Scripture, though true, is an accommodation.

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Okay. And like I said, you know, a few weeks ago, it is ultimately, it's

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God speaking. But it's like us speaking to a toddler. Very limited language.

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Right. If you're talking to a four -year -old, you don't say, well, I'm going to present before you a binary choice.

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On the one hand, blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, da, da, da, da. Now some of the factors you might want to take into consideration.

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You don't talk like that to a little baby. Why? Because they, you know, you're, I'm going to say it, you're lucky if they can understand yes and no.

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So don't pressure luck. You know, mama, dada, fine.

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No, no, it's sufficient. Yes, it's sufficient.

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And getting back to, you know, what we need to be saved, how we ought to live, etc., etc. It's not exhaustive.

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You know, that's, it's sufficient, not exhaustive. Yeah. Okay.

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Generosity is key to the eternal functional subordination view.

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Otherwise, the son, listen to this. The son might be ungrateful. Buck his place of submission and attempt to exalt himself to the father's position of authority within the

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Trinity. No, it's not a quote. This is a summary. So, but, and then he says, but EFSers say the son won't do that.

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Now here's, here's a quote. He won't do that because he, quote, accepts his role, end quote, and minds his place below the father.

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Okay, well, this, this gets, this rolls right into number 10. So without further ado, number 10, true or false.

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The Trinity has three wills, one for each person. Then he says,

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Barrett says, Ware's presentation has taken to a whole new level, or was taken to a whole new level in more advanced lectures on the

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Trinity, where he openly rejected the Orthodox creeds and the great tradition and did so with confidence.

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Consider two examples. First, on a number of occasions, Ware, following the lead of Grudem, criticized and rejected eternal generation as speculative and unbiblical.

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And Barrett notes, there's no chapter and verse. The doctrine itself just doesn't make sense.

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Generation cannot be eternal. Now, what's the problem with that? If I say, oh, that doesn't make sense to me.

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Generation can't be eternal. Why does something have to make sense to you to be true?

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I mean, if I say the father, the father has no origin. Well, that doesn't make any sense to me.

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I reject it. Okay, well,

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I stand in judgment. So when students asked

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Ware about the Nicene Creed. Hey, I have a question, Professor. Nicene Creed says, which affirms eternal generation and does so to defend the deity of Christ.

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Ware would shake his head and say with a laugh. Well, I guess I'm a heretic. Oh, boy.

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I can only imagine how much whiskey went down in that glass. That's terrible.

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Second, roles and relationships of hierarchy within the imminent Trinity were so essential, defining and differentiating the persons that Ware asserted, even insisted on multiple wills in the

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Trinity over against Orthodox creeds that say there is but one will in the Trinity. If the father, quote, stands above the son and is, quote, supreme within the

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Godhead, then the father must exercise his own will over the son, and the son must submit his will to the fathers.

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And that is a quote. I mean, there's a certain rationality there, right?

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If these things are true, if there is this level of hierarchy within the

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Trinity, then the reason there's hierarchy, the reason that the father is in charge and the son submits and the spirit submits and the spirit submits to the son, et cetera, is because there are different wills.

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But the problem is, I mean, it gets back to what you were saying before,

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Corey, how could there be three wills in God, and we're perilously close now to tritheism, where essentially maybe there's a chairman of the board and two advisors, but the chairman of the board has the ultimate say.

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You said it, I didn't. Yeah, if there are three wills, but two of them are negated by the first one, then essentially those two aren't sovereign, and they are therefore not

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God. Okay, Dr. Ware. Right, right, we don't, but I think the question and the premise of that is the idea that there is some, okay,

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Janet and I agree on almost everything, so would it be fair to say that we have one will?

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No, and don't even ask her about that. So, I mean, that's just a human analogy.

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And, you know, let's go with your example here. If it were possible that there were three wills, and that they're, you know, in some mysterious way harmonious, well, then what does that mean?

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Unless there's submission of the wills, then there really aren't three wills, right?

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I mean, if they always agree on everything, then are there three wills, or is there one will? Hmm, hmm.

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Okay, well, let's move on and see. Number 11, true or false, what is of utmost importance is that there be one purpose of God.

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That's false, by the way. So, Barrett says, do multiple wills forfeit unity?

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I think this kind of gets to your question. Do multiple wills forfeit unity? Ware dismissed the question because he said the persons cooperate like a society.

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Each divine person accepts his role, each in proper relation to the others, and each works together with the others for one unified common purpose.

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Ware denied a singularity of will, singularity of purpose was sufficient.

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I mean, this takes me way back. I and the Father are one.

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And you know what, if you talk to a Mormon and you say, look, I and the Father are one, that demonstrates the

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Trinity. They will say what? They're not one person, they're one in purpose.

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One in mission. And that's what Ware's saying. And I go, oh man, I don't like where this is going.

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So again, I think the danger lights are blaring here. Number 12.

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You know, that is a good question. Well, what's their motivation?

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That I can't tell you. I can give you another M though.

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Method. What's their method for getting here? And we talked about it earlier.

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What is their method? Proof texting. The Bible alone.

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You know, me, myself, and the Holy Spirit. And you know, when you isolate yourself, well, let me frame it slightly differently.

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If you not just isolate yourself from historical teaching, but you ignore historical teaching so that you can't see, well, wait a minute, this is really close to what the

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Arians used to say. And they came to the conclusion that Jesus was a created being, that he wasn't eternal.

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So maybe I ought not to go down this road. So I don't want to ascribe bad motives, but I can't ascribe bad methods.

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I can say that. Yeah, let me just tweak that a little bit and say this, that one of the dangers, and I've mentioned this already, is cutting ourselves off basically from teaching of the past.

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But it goes both ways. And let me just kind of say it a little different way. If we look back at the past, and some people today are just like, you can't read

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Aquinas, Aquinas is poisonous, this person was approved of the papacy, or this, that, the other thing.

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You can do that with everybody in the past and go, well, he made this error, he made that error, etc.,

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etc., etc. What we do is we look back at the past and we go, well, where did they get it right?

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And where they got it right is typically where there were more people involved or less people involved.

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And it's typically more. So when we look at the councils, like the Council of Nicaea, and we see that they get together and they hash out all these issues.

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And sometimes, if you ever had this experience, you're in the midst of a discussion,

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I'll call it, an argument. And you hear the argument you're making, and while you're saying it you go, that's really a bad argument.

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Excuse me, can I just withdraw that for a moment? Like a retraction.

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And I think that if iron sharpens iron, I think the idea that sometimes more people coming together and thinking through things and talking about things helps.

41:37

And I think that's what we see as we look back through church history. And we'll see where we are.

41:43

Okay, we're at 11. We have to close. So good discussion this morning.

41:49

Let's close in prayer. Father, thank you for this morning. Father, help us as we read, as we listen to sermons, as we see things posted online or listen to podcasts, whatever we're doing, to be discerning and to think to ourselves, are there areas where we have strayed from orthodoxy, or can we even hear unorthodox teaching when we hear it?

42:19

Something just strike our ears as out of tune, as discordant, as not in keeping with truth.