Bunyan Conference Houston 2008: Session 2A

Granville-Sharp Construction and the Preservation of the New Testament

Who, at the end of the 18th century, identified a rule of Greek grammar. Basically, what that rule is, is if you have a noun that is not a proper name, and it is preceded by the definite article, so we have the word god right here, and it is preceded by the definite article the, it is connected by the word chi, which means and, right here, with another noun that does not have an article, both of them are describing the same person.

And hence, what you have in modern translations, by the righteousness of our God and Savior, both terms, God and Savior, are in reference to Jesus Christ. Now, I printed this tie so that you can see the entirety of the Granville-Sharp construction on it.

One of the reasons I did so is that you can see it, it is actually readable in this graphic. You see those little lines right there? You see a line there, a line there? In the ancient papyri manuscripts, the early Christians would abbreviate divine names, God, Jesus, Spirit, Lord, and they would abbreviate them and put a line over top of them.

In fact, if you are looking closely, I know it is not uber clear, but you may notice there are no spaces between words. It is all capital letters, there is no punctuation. That is, of course, the form, the original form of the Greek New Testament.

This is called magic school or unsealed text. And the earliest manuscripts up through the 7th, 8th, and to the 9th centuries have this unsealed form of writing. And so, you can actually read the Granville-Sharp construction on this page.

Now, I saw this page, this actual page with my own two eyes underneath a glass box in 1993 in Denver, Colorado. What was it doing there? Well, some of you may recall that in 1993 World Youth Day was held in Denver, Colorado, which is going on right now down in Australia, actually.

And Pope John Paul II came to Denver during that period of time. And I and Richard Pierce, who is still my partner in crime with Albuquerque Ministries, drove up to Colorado and we did two things. We did street witnessing.

We were there amongst the hundreds of thousands of young Roman Catholic folks passing out literature. I can tell you some fascinating stories about that. And we also did two debates, which are still available today.

I debated a man by the name of Jerry Matitix, the first PCA minister to convert to Roman Catholicism. He was a doctoral student at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia when he did so. And Jerry and I have debated at least a dozen times.

And we did, over two nights, about seven, seven and a half hours worth of debate on the subject of the papacy. And so while we were up there, I saw a story in the newspaper about the Papal Treasures Exhibit.

And I'll be perfectly honest with you, not only in that exhibit, but when I was in Rome just a few years ago at the Vatican, I am not impressed by tiaras. I am not impressed by diamonds. I am not impressed by gold statues or anything else.

I don't find that to be overly exciting. But I saw that there would be a page of P72 there, and I said, Rich, we're going. And so we got our tickets. You'd have to get your tickets ahead of time.

There was a certain time that you were supposed to show up.

And it was one of the first things on the exhibit. And I remember walking up to this and looking at this image and starting to translate it. Now, you've got to picture what was going on in this particular situation.

There's all sorts of security all over the place, but they're not really around that funny-looking piece of paper. They're around the tiaras, and they have expensive pieces of art and things like that.

And so I'm looking down at this thing, and I'm going, look, look, there's the Granville Show construction right there. And I'm going along, and people would come up, and they'd look down at the thing, and they'd look up at the description, and they'd look over at me, and they'd lean over and look at Rich,.

And go, can he read that?

He's going, yeah, he's reading it. Look at this. Harold, this man's reading this. And so a crowd starts gathering, and so Rich, watching this and noticing the security is getting close, will drag me off to go look at a crown for a while, and I go back.

And you're supposed to keep going. I didn't want to keep going, but I knew they'd kick me out if they didn't. Because what you're looking at is the writing of someone who risked their lives to possess what everyone in this room probably possesses in multiple copies.

You see, in the year 200, being a Christian was not a legal thing in the Roman Empire. We can't get people to come out to go to Sunday school on a Sunday morning because it's too early. And here you have someone who clearly was not a professional scribe.

I mean, are any first or second grade teachers in here? Look at that handwriting. Didn't do well, okay? This was not a professional scribe. This was probably a businessman, maybe even a member of the Roman army.

There were Christians amongst them. Someone who probably came into a local assembly of Christians. You had to be very careful. But you come in, and someone stood up and started reading something, and he went, I've not heard that.

What is that? These are epistles from Jude and from Peter. Really, we don't have that in my assembly back home. Can I copy that? So here's someone at the risk of their life, finds papyri, and this is not the smoothest writing service that you would ever want to be writing in.

That's one of the reasons it doesn't look quite as good. Who took the time to hand write these epistles and probably carry them back to the church that they originally came from so that everyone would be able to hear the words that Peter wrote at this time.

And so here is someone, 1800 years ago, that had the same faith I have, and the same love for the scriptures, and had to write out that ramble-sharp construction that describes Jesus Christ as my God and Savior.

And by the way, if you notice, that verse also describes faith as something that is a gift of God, by the way. And so I was, I've had an opportunity to see a few really ancient manuscripts. P72, I saw that in 1993 a few years ago.

I was at the British Library in London and stood in front of Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Alexandrinus and wept to think about God's grace in preserving his word for us and the great treasures that we have.

But here is just one of the many treasures that we possess as Christian people. A testimony, a monument to God's preservation of his word over time as well as to the teaching that is found in that. In much of my work with Islam, we are being told that all this stuff about Jesus being God and all the rest of this stuff came much later.

It was a development, it was evolution over time. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And here, in the earliest manuscripts we have of the New Testament, you have plain testimony to the deity of Christ.

It's not something that comes along after the Council of Nicaea and where Constantine made everything up. At least that's what Hollywood would like you to believe. Here, long before that ever happened, you have a simple Christian writing out the scriptures and those scriptures testify to the deity of Christ.

So I wanted to share that with you. You hear so much about the alleged corruption of the scriptures and all the rest of this kind of stuff. It's nice every once in a while to see something that demonstrates that that stuff just simply isn't true.

There's a lot of it out there, but it doesn't get nearly the price that everything that's negative toward the Christian faith does, unfortunately. This evening, we will be looking at challenges, ancient and modern, to the doctrine of the Trinity.

And immediately, I am going to tell you that we are probably some of the only people in the United States today addressing this particular subject on this particular night, because, let's face it, outside of a seminary classroom, there is a tremendous dearth of meaningful discussion about the subject of the doctrine of the Trinity.

I don't know about you, but I find that so odd. We claim that it is the central doctrine of the faith, and we claim that we cannot have fellowship with those who deny this doctrine. I mean, when was the last time any of you opened your door and said to those folks who just woke you up on a Saturday morning, and you stand there, not overly well-dressed, with bad breath, going, Brother, come in!

Let's read the Watchtower together. Probably doesn't happen. In fact, you're probably just a tad bit annoyed when they wake you up, and you don't have fellowship with those Jehovah's Witnesses, because you may not know exactly what they believe, but you know that on this subject, they don't believe what you believe.

Just a warning, they probably pride best that you not invite them in, despite the bad breath, if you're not awake and not ready to be dealing with them. And when you see those two young men in their white shirts and dark pants, they've got the little thing on their legs to keep their pants from getting caught in the chain of the bicycle, pedaling down the road in your neighborhood, Elder Smith and Elder Young, and they don't look very elderly to you, but that's what it says on the name tag, and they come to your door and start talking about how families are forever, and so on and so forth.

Back in the back of your mind, you know that one of the fundamental issues you have is that they don't believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. And yet, if we were to, in honesty, aside from those of you who have been juniors in the pastor's class here at the school, for all the rest of us, if you were to really be honest with me right now, and if there wasn't a definition hanging on the wall right now, would you feel overly confident that you could pass even a basic test on the fundamental elements of what's supposed to be the central doctrine of our day?

In that book that was mentioned this evening, I started off with a statement that caught a lot of people by surprise. I said, I love the Trinity. And then I said, how many times have you heard anyone say that?

Within the Christian church, we hear about loving Jesus, and we hear about loving justification, we hear about loving prophecy, and loving all the rest of this stuff, but the Trinity? When's the last time you heard somebody say that?

And I think one of the reasons you don't hear that, almost ever, is because we rarely express our passion for and our love for something that, in our honest moments, we'll admit we don't understand. We really don't know why we believe what we believe on the subject.

And what's worse is we're very afraid of engaging anyone in conversation on the subject because we know they're going to ask us questions and we just don't know how to answer the questions. And we recognize we're not exactly sure why is it so important.

A few years ago, actually a number of years ago, interestingly enough, I was in Chicago speaking in a conference with Marvin Geisler, and this was obviously before about 2000, 2001 or so, and I was writing an article for the CRI journal called Loving Trinity.

And I was reading some documentation that a friend of mine at CRI had sent to me. And I'm sitting here thumbing through some of the articles that he had sent me that were relevant, and I came across one that started talking about the very popular singing group Phillips, Craig and Dean.

And it just so happened that in the CD drive of my laptop computer, I had a CD of Phillips, Craig and Dean playing. And there I sat as I read an article about how the fact that everybody at Phillips, Craig and Dean is not a Trinitarian.

And in fact they come from Oneness churches and do not affirm the doctrine of the Trinity. And I hit that little button and kicked that thing open and sat there and looked at what was on the screen and looked at that CD and pondered the situation that we face in modern Christianity.

One of the earliest errors concerning the nature of God condemned within the Christian church was the same error that is promoted in Oneness Pentecostalism and the Oneness movement, UPCI and all the various offshoots of that.

I had an article just last week about Joel Hemphill, a well-known southern gospel singer, who is not Oneness, he's a direct arian, he denies the deity of Christ, vociferously he's even written a book on the subject and is promoting it.

And yet there would be many who would go, oh, I just love that music. It gets my toes attacking. Of course we could have a long discussion this evening about what worship is and whether a person wants to be led in worship of the Triune God by someone who doesn't believe the Triune God exists, but we won't get into that this evening.

But let's face it, one of the main reasons that most people do not engage this subject, do not find it to be something that stirs their heart, they don't have any particular desire to be accurate in their knowledge of this, is because they don't see, they first of all do not understand the doctrine itself, they don't understand the difference between being in person and it seems confusing to them, and then they don't see how this relates to us, to the gospel, and to worship.

And as a result, I would suggest to you that one of the reasons that worship, whatever name it goes under these days, what's called worship in various Sunday churches, has become more and more centered upon man, more and more centered upon meeting our perceived needs, more and more designed to appeal to the emotions, and has become absolutely vacant, a vacuum of doctrinal truth, has to do with the fact that in essence a lot of Christianity has become paganism, because the essence of paganism is the worship of a God you don't really know.

And you can't, God has not digged it proper for us to worship Him in ignorance, He has made revelation of who He is and how He desires to be worshipped. It's the pagans who get into the worship of the unknown God, and unfortunately that has snuck into a lot of churches, where in reality if we were to have a quiz after next Sunday morning service, how many Christians do you think would be able to give even a definition as brief as the one that I have on the screen right now?

The reality is, even when I as a young person, I was on an outreach visit for a large Southern Baptist church, and I ran into a Mormon lady, and talked about the blind leading the blind. I was a junior in high school, and she and I went at it, and I look back on it now, and it was the two people falling into the pit together.

I mean, it was ugly. Accomplished absolutely positively nothing, other than challenging me and making me go, wow, I really need to know what I believe a whole lot better. But even when I started asking questions of the leaders around me, the answers I was given were not even orthodox answers.

Many of the illustrations of the doctrine of the Trinity are not even semi-orthodox in their origination, and yet I hear them repeated over and over and over again, and this is supposed to be the doctrine that separates us from everybody.

And of course the cults know that we are ignorant of this, and so they know it's our Achilles heel, and they are trained to go after it. They are trained to ask the difficult questions, even if they themselves can't provide meaningful answers in reverse, but they're trained to ask them, to take the offensive.

And many of those people who sit in kingdom halls today, and Mormon ward chapels today, were raised within orthodox Christian churches, but they're raised in such a way that no one ever said, you know what, it might be a good idea, if you spend some time exercising the gray matter, and finding out what you believe, and who you're worshiping.

And of course it seems rather logical to me, that we would want to know this, because is there anyone else in this room, who has at one point in time in your past gone, you know when I pray, how is prayer working?

Who am I addressing? How does this, when I address the Father, and the name of the Son, can I pray to the Son? And what about the Spirit?

And how does all of that work? And how does it, what we mean,.

We say we believe in only one true God, and yet we can address three persons, and what does all of this mean? And does it really have, does it really mean anything? I mean, can't a one that's Pentecostal, preach the Gospel just as well as a Trinitarian?

If I stopped right now, and asked you, called you out right now, and pointed at you, and said,.

Where is the difference,.

In the Gospel presentation of a Trinitarian, and that of a one that's Pentecostal? Would you know how to answer?

Or would you at least agree with me,.

You should know how to answer?

This isn't just about theologians. One of the fundamental issues, of the process of Reformation, was the emphasis upon the individual responsibility.

Of the person before God.

God has given to us His Word. And it's amazing to me how many Christians have jobs where you have to bring home a computer manual this thick, and master that thing. And yet when it comes to the Bible, and to fundamental issues like this, we're like, oh, well, you know, there's such a deep stream of anti-intellectualism within evangelicalism that basically, you just get zapped by the Spirit, see?

And you're not being very spiritual to study stuff. And that really sounds... I remember flying down to Dallas when I was... I might have been 20. Might have still been 19. Does anyone remember a guy named Milt Green?

Milton Green, does anyone remember that name? He was a splash for a while among Southern Baptists, sort of introducing some charismatic tendencies among Southern Baptists. And he was doing seminars down here.

And so I was actually sent down here to sort of report on him for the church. I was a member of it at the time. And he was a carpet cleaner from Memphis. And that was what he considered to be his greatest qualification to address these issues, was that he was a carpet cleaner from Memphis.

And don't get me wrong, you can be a very godly carpet cleaner, and there are some carpet cleaners who know more about church history and theology than some people standing behind bullets. But when you make that your claim to fame, in essence, and stand in front of people and hold up systematic theologies and say, don't give me theology, give me Jesus, that sounds so spiritual.

But what on earth does it mean?

Wednesday night,.

We're going to hear someone here locally who made the assertion, salvation awes us, doctrine confuses us.

Well, how can you say Jesus.

Without making a theological statement?

What Jesus? Who's Jesus?

Who is Jesus? Why is He important? As soon as you answer any of those questions, guess what you're doing? You're giving theology. And when you say salvation awes us and doctrine confuses us, what's salvation?

Why is it awe you? What is awesome about salvation? As soon as you open your mouth to answer, what are you doing? You're giving doctrine. And so it's an amazing claim that gets a lot of mileage, but it doesn't make any sense.

And so, especially the doctrine of the Trinity has come under this attack. And when you start dealing with issues like being in person, people's eyes glaze over and it's like, well, I just, I can't be bothered with that level,.

So I'll leave that to the pastor.

That's a good medieval Roman Catholic attitude, but it shouldn't be the attitude of someone who believes in the Bible. And so we need to know what we're talking about this evening. And so before I jump into ancient heresies that have long names that may not stick with you through the door unless you write them down, I think it's far more important that we start to make sure that we're all on the same page as to what the doctrine of the Trinity is.

I've been informed that this is an area where there's a lot of Oneness Pentecostals. There's a lot of Jesus-only folks that say we should be baptized only in the name of Jesus. And this idea of the Trinity is some pagan idea that came along to Council Messiaen, Constantine, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

And so we need to be ready to give an answer for the hope that's within us. Is that true? Why do we say that the Son has eternally existed as the Son, as a divine person who became in flesh and person of Jesus Christ?

And that that is not the Father. That the Father and the Son have communication with one another. That they are distinguishable individuals that use personal pronouns of one another. And that the Spirit is sent by the Father and the Son.

Why is it wrong to say, well, you know, the Trinity's.

Sort of like an actor on a stage?

And I was actually told this when I first started asking my leaders about, well, what is the doctrine of the Trinity? How do I understand this? Well, sometimes it's like an actor on a stage.

And sometimes he has the mask.

Of the Father on. And then sometimes he has the mask of the Son on.

And then sometimes he has the mask.

Of the Spirit. It's just one person.

And three different manifestations.

That's modalism.

That's the oneness doctrine being presented to us in one of its earliest forms. And that's not the doctrine of the Trinity in any way, shape, or form. So we need to know what we're talking about. So let's look at this.

Now, for those of you gentlemen who are colorblind, many of my presentations will be very boring too, I would imagine. But I sort of like colors,.

If you notice. And.

So please notice that there are two words here that are a different color than the others. I will note them. 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.

The words being and person are highlighted so that we may be able to differentiate between them. We say that there is one being, that is God, and within that one being there exists eternally, not just for a period of time, not just in manifestation.

During creation, there exists eternally three co-equal and co-eternal.

Persons, namely.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Being and person are different.

Things.

Being is what makes something what it is. Person is what makes someone who they are. This is a distinction we use every day.

We recognize.

That there are things that have.

Being, but they're not personal. I happen to note over in the corner, for some reason it's distracting to me and I'm not sure why, there's a basketball just sitting there. I don't know, maybe it's an insatiable desire to go get it and shoot it over.

I'm not sure, but there is a basketball sitting over there, and if you question that that basketball has.

Being, I would just.

Suggest you get into a pickup game and not keep your eye on the ball. And as it comes sailing into your nose, you will discover that the basketball has being. Now, some of you may speak to basketballs, but I assure you, speaking to basketball has no effect.

You may insult it,.

You may compliment it, you may ask it to go in, or you may curse its name, it matters not. You could be Tom Hanks and call it Wilson. It does not matter.

Because the basketball,.

While it has being, lacks.

Personhood.

It is not personal enough. Despite the craze back in the 1970s when we had.

Pet rocks.

Remember those? They're actually people selling pet rocks. And you would name your pet rock and you would take care of your pet rock. It's a low-maintenance pet, anyways.

Now,.

Again, it has being. It might be a good thing in the middle of the night, someone's coming through the window, to utilize your pet rock in a certain fashion as a projectile. It had being, and would function that way, but it didn't really matter how much care, how much caressing, how much speaking you did to your pet rock.

They would not grow, and they would not respond to you, because they are not a person. We recognize this, and we recognize that we are human beings.

We share.

The same kind of being, and yet each one of us is individual. My human being is shared by one person, and if you try to share that by multiple people, and they put you into the room with those padded walls all the way around, it is unnatural, because my being is finite and limited.

It is limited to one place, one time, as much as that sometimes I wish I could bilocate, get more work done. It doesn't work that way. I am limited. I am finite in my being. My being came into existence at a point in time, and is not eternal in any way, shape, or form, and is shared by one person.

That's me, myself, and I, and we share our humanity, but we are distinguished on the level of personhood. Now, the danger, of course, is when we take human language and we try to project this upon God.

We share.

With historic Orthodox Judaism and with historic Orthodox Islam the belief that there is only one true God, who is not in need of anything else, who is the creator of all things, and that this being of God is not limited by time and space.

Now, at that point, I am only speaking of Christianity because at that point you start getting all sorts of different viewpoints amongst the other religions, but in Christianity, we believe that God is not limited by His creation.

He is not limited by time and space. In fact, time and space are a part of His creative activity. He brought them into existence. There is nothing that exists outside of God. Everything else is dependent upon Him for its existence.

And that being of God, being unlimited, is shared by three divine persons according to Biblical revelation, not simply according to sitting around doing philosophical diagrams and examining this idea and that idea.

I believe the doctrine of the Trinity because the Bible forces me to. I will show you why that is in just a moment. I call myself a Biblical Trinitarian. If you believe.

In.

Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura. Sola Scriptura, the Scriptures, are the sole infallible rule of faith.

In the Church. Tota.

Scriptura, you must believe all that the Scriptures said. You cannot pick and choose. You cannot decide that, well, there are some things in the Scriptures I believe and in the Scriptures I am not going to believe.

If you believe in Sola Scriptura and Tota Scriptura, you will be a Biblical Trinitarian. Anyone who denies the doctrine of the Trinity, I can show you which passages of Scripture they are simply rejecting.

And often, for example, Jehovah's Witnesses mistranslate it in the process as well.

But,.

I come to that from the Scriptures. I'll show that to you in a moment. But, it is important to recognize that we distinguish between being in person. How many times I have heard a person objecting to the doctrine of the Trinity saying, you think there are three beings that are one being.

No, we don't.

You think one plus one plus one.

Equals one. No, we don't.

One being.

Three persons.

One plus one plus one doesn't.

Equal three. No one's ever said that it does.

In almost all the alleged illustrations,.

You know,.

The shamrock.

And, well, I'm a father, and I'm a brother, and I'm a son. I rightly saw a Muslim sort of mocking that going, yes, but I'm also a cousin and a nephew too, so I guess that makes five.

Most of these.

Just, they're not really necessary if we were actually starting where we need to start, that is within the pages of Scripture.

As I'll show in a moment.

But, one being, being is what makes something what it is.

Three persons,.

Or as Hank Hanegraaff has rightly said, one what and three who's. One what and three.

Who's.

Now,.

When Jehovah's Witnesses and I get together and I have that opportunity, the way that I present the Trinity to them is I present them texts, and we'll see if we have time for me to get into this this evening.

It might be of some use to some of you, but time is always our enemy. I present.

Them texts that.

Demonstrate that the name Jehovah and, at least when I'm talking about Jehovah's Witnesses, I don't spend too much time arguing about the fact that it's better to say Yahweh, that's much more likely the pronunciation of my name, the Tetragrammaton, Yod-Heh-Wau-Heh in the Old Testament than Jehovah is.

But, that's only rarely something that I get into with Jehovah's Witnesses about, but I demonstrate to them that that one divine name and, believe me, once you say Jehovah to a Jehovah's Witness, you've got their attention.

Because they're not accustomed to Christians utilizing that, and many of them think.

They're the only ones who know it.

And so, when you use the name, they're like, are you a former Jehovah's Witness? No, I am not. I've never been associated with Osharo, Traxcite, in any way, shape, or form. Hmm, okay. But, even though I did have Witnesses once, storm out of the house because it has absolutely existed that I was some apostate Jehovah's Witness named Chuck Love.

Chuck Love. Sounds like somebody from the 70s.

Not me.

You want to see my driver's license?

You had that faked. I was like, wow, okay, that's an amazing thing. Anyways, what I do is I demonstrate to them that that one divine name is used of three persons in the New Testament.

And,.

When they see that,.

For a Jehovah's Witness especially, they can argue until the cows come home whether Jesus is called God or Agon. If Jesus identifies as Jehovah, that's it.

And,.

I cannot tell you how many times I've had elders of the Watchtower Society just sitting there staring at their Bibles going, where did this come from? I never saw this before. That is one of the mechanisms, one of the means by which you can demonstrate to them this wonderful truth.

One divine name used of three persons in the New Testament. Clearly, the Father is identified as.

Jehovah.

That's a shock to Mormons who, by the way, believe that the Father is Elohim and Jesus is Jehovah. I got kicked out of the Mesa Visitor's Center of the Mormon Temple back when I had lots of hair and a skinny.

Many, many moons ago.

Because I kept showing them verses I did around 435 to show them that Jehovah, he is Elohim. Besides him, there is none else. And, I was shown the door rather quickly by.

Large missionaries.

Very large missionaries.

I think they were from the BYU front line. One, the Father.

Is identified as Jehovah.

The Son, then, is identified as Jehovah. You really need to know which text to use to demonstrate that.

There are some excellent ones to do that.

And, of course, the Spirit is the Spirit of Jehovah. And so, if you have one divine name who is the one true God creator of all things in the Old Testament being used of three divine persons who are clearly distinguished from one another and that's where you get into the one that's been costly to you.

Here you have some of the biblical evidence that has forced, literally forced the church to.

Recognize that.

This is divine revelation.

Now, biblically,.

Let me please.

Exhort you.

Even though I haven't done it this way.

This evening, it's because of the topic of our conference. I have always felt that the most effective means of presenting this doctrine to someone to a believing Christian is to appeal to our common belief in the Lord God.