Simply Trinity Study (part 8)

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Simply Trinity Study (part 9)

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Our great God, as we come before you, Father, Son, and Spirit, Lord, would you bless our time as we wrestle with these what seem like incomprehensible doctrines that have been handed down to us throughout the centuries, not because you are beyond our ability to grasp completely, but because we cannot fully understand you, because we are the creature and you are infinite, you are everywhere and you know everything, and all these things that are just beyond us, because we are limited.
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Father, would you bless us as we seek to understand you better, as we seek to understand you the best we possibly can.
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Bless each one here. Strengthen us, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, if there's anybody who doesn't have a copy of...
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Well, let's start with the basics. If you don't have a copy of the list of the glossary, the vocabulary list, and you would like one, would you raise your hand and I'll get you one.
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Okay, we have a couple back there, and I think I have... I said that before I checked. I have one.
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If you don't have the double consubstantiality thing and you want that...
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Do you want one? Yes, I only have one of those, yes. So we'll need some copies, please.
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I know it's tough because it's double -sided and all that. I do have more of these, the double consubstantiality.
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So if you don't have that, you want to get that mostly for the diagram. And then quiz number three, we also have those for those who don't have one.
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So if you don't have any of those documents, please raise your hand. And my lovely assistant will help me.
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Quiz number three, probably most people have. To just kind of summarize where we are right now, we just left off two weeks ago with this question, number five, true or false, economic trinity and imminent trinity only differ in their spelling.
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That's false. Anybody remember what the economic trinity and the imminent trinity are?
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We're going to be talking about these things frequently, which is one of the reasons why I handed that sheet of terms out some time ago.
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Imminent trinity. Anybody want to take a shot at that? Lisa. Who God is in himself,
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A+. Who he is from all eternity, right?
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Imminent, not imminent as in close to us, but imminent as in that's who he is in and of himself.
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We might call that the Latin term. Don't get scared. Add a
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D, intra. Who he is in himself, within himself.
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Then there's another term, add extra. Who he is outside of himself, which is what we're talking about when we talk about the economic trinity.
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Economic trinity means what, Lisa? How he acts, what he does.
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If we think about the imminent trinity, we would say father, son, spirit, and we would say the father is what?
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What is unique about the father? He is unbegotten.
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The son is eternally begotten.
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Good. The Holy Spirit is eternally spirated.
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Corey gets bonus points. Number six, just kind of a general review there.
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Not really a review at all. Number six, true or false, God cannot suffer.
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This is going to get to some of the questions that people have after class, some of the murmurings in emails and whatnot.
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True or false, God cannot suffer. I have a false.
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Do I have a true? Going once, going twice. What's that?
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You have a true. Okay, so I have two falses and a true. There look like about 50 or 60 people here, and I have three people willing to vote.
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It reminds me of Holden. Okay, stop. What? He suffered and died and was buried.
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John Zook, the eminent theologian. Just said what? John, what did you say?
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Okay, Jesus is human nature. You know, for just a second, if you have this double consubstantiality page, which rolls off the tongue when you think about it.
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From now on, I want you to think Washington, D .C. means double consubstantiality. Okay.
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If you look at the diagram, which is the main reason I gave this out.
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I mean, if I was any good, I would have just cut the diagram out and stuck that on a page by itself and blown it up, but I'm not.
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So, the point of this diagram is, you see the triangle?
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That's the Trinity. That's the God nature, as it were. And, you know, we didn't put
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God in a box. He's in a triangle. It's just a representation.
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This isn't actually God. Okay, I just want to make that clear. But if we think about that being the divine nature, and then we see down in the lower corner, person.
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Well, that would be the second person of the Trinity. And see below him? That nature?
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That's his human nature. So, when we see that Jesus suffered, died, and was buried, and raised, and ascended into heaven, that refers to what?
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To God? Or to the man Christ Jesus?
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The man Christ Jesus. Two natures, right? One person, two natures.
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So, in his humanity, Jesus suffered. Did the divine
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God suffer? No. You say, well, how can that be?
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Because he's both divine and human. So, help me out.
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Who's the theologian here? Or do I call upon the eminent theologian,
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John Zook, again? How is it possible that Jesus, in his humanity, suffers, but we can say that God cannot suffer?
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The natures are distinct. Okay, so what's true about God? If I say that God is omniscient, what do you say?
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You say, what's omniscience? That means all -knowing, right? If I say God is all -powerful, omnipotent, you say what?
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Amen, right? If I say God is... give me an attribute.
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Holy. You say, amen. Now, if I say
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God is impassable, you say, huh? What does it mean that he's impassable?
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I'm looking at the eminent theologian. He does not know. Impassable. It's impassable.
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Okay. Unaffected emotionally by things surrounding.
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How about unaffected period?
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He has, I mean in the sense that, you know, when God sustains, let's put it in another sense.
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True or false? God sustains everything that is. Okay. True. True or false?
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God, therefore, loses energy. Well, how is that possible?
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Right? If you have a battery and you use the battery, then what? It loses power.
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So how is it possible that God can sustain everything and not lose any energy? Because he is power.
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Because he is God. He's deity. But getting back to this question,
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God cannot suffer. Let me just read here from the preeminent theologian,
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Matthew Barrett. He says, one of the most influential theologians of the past century, and that is no exaggeration, is
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Huygen Moltzmann, well known for his belief in a
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God who suffers. A God who suffers.
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What would that God look like? A God who suffers.
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Well, kind of, and let's just say, let's just suppose for a moment that God was emotional like we are emotional, and looked at the world today, what would he do?
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He'd be offended. I mean, is he offended? I think he is offended. But if he responded like we do, what would he do?
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I mean, it would take me like half a second to just go laser vision on. That would be it.
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Right? He's not like us, thankfully.
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So Barrett goes on and he says, as it turns out, two Karls, Karl Rahner, by the way,
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Catholic. Karl Barth, nominally Protestant, a lot of holes in his theology, taught
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Moltzmann the Trinity when he was a student. But Moltzmann believed his mentors got the
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Trinity wrong. By starting with the sovereignty of the one God, they were able to then talk about the
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Trinity only as three modes of being, or the three modes of subsistence, or that one
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God. In chapter two, we learn that the modes of subsistence is a phrase that refers to the way the one essence exists in the
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Father as unbegotten, the Son as begotten, just as we said in the beginning, and the
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Spirit as spirated. Moltzmann concludes that the two Karls, Rahner and Barth, much like Schliermacher, who is the father of liberalism in Christianity, much like Schliermacher himself, are in grave danger of Sibelianism due to their focus on the oneness of God.
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So Moltzmann is bad, but Moltzmann is the idea that, or introduces this idea in the modern era that God can suffer.
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And again, we get back to the question, can God suffer? And the answer is no, or the way the quiz has said,
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God cannot suffer, which is true. He cannot suffer. Does God feel pain?
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No. Does God emote? And the answer is, not like we do.
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Right? So what are we to make of things like when we see in Scripture that God repented, or God regretted, or God was sorry?
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Okay, let me just stop you there, and then you can continue in a second. God, through the
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Bible, God often explains things about himself in what
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Corey just rightly said is kind of like baby talk, in ways that we can understand, anthropomorphic language, language of accommodation, where the eternal
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God says, you guys can't possibly understand this, so let me try to explain it to you in a simpler way.
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Okay. And so when we think about getting back to the way the world is, what does the
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Bible say about his wrath? He is wrathful.
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Is he getting more wrathful? I think he's at maximum wrath, right?
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But maximum wrath. It's cranked up.
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But he's holding it back. Why? Because there's a day of judgment coming.
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But anyway, okay, number six. True. God cannot suffer. So what's the apparent paradox?
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We know that Jesus suffered, but he suffered in his little box there of humanity, okay?
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Not in his deity. I mean, if we just think about the deity of Christ, Jesus is,
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I mean, here's a paradox for you. Jesus is a man, and he exists as a man, but he's also everywhere at the same time.
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How does he do that? Because we have to keep in mind the box and the deity.
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Preach. Preach. I mean, because as God, these things, they're not meaningless to him, because he has compassion and empathy and all these things.
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But he doesn't experience them as we do.
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So to experience them as we do, he became a man. So that he could fully empathize with us.
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Good. Okay, number seven. True or false. The Trinity mutually indwell one another.
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If a question sounds too stupid to be true, the answer is obviously false.
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So you're just like, what in the world does that mean? You know, it's like, you know, if it causes your mind to fold into itself, it's probably false.
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I think my mind just collapsed. Okay. Barrett says this.
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I have developed, this is Maltman. I don't want to attribute it to Barrett. Sorry.
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Dr. Barrett, sorry if you ever listen to this. Sorry. This is Maltman. I've developed a social doctrine of the
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Trinity, according to which God is a community of father, son, and spirit, whose unity is constituted by mutual indwelling and reciprocal interpenetration.
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Now, that's certainly incomprehensible. You know, what are the, you know, where should your alarm bells be ringing?
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At what moment should you just be going, okay, this is crazy talk. I have developed, right?
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As soon as you see those words, because what's he saying? Look at me,
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I'm the innovator. I have discovered something new. I've told this story several times, but I just remember going,
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I was told to go to a Christian bookstore and pick up a particular translation of the
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Bible, brand new. And it said, just read the preface. So I did. And it said, this man who did it said that he had discovered many nuances of the
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Greek that no one had ever seen before. I closed the book, put it back on the shelf, and ran for the exit.
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New is not good, right? God has not hidden the truth from his church for 2 ,000 years.
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Preach. So Barrett goes on, or Moltman goes on,
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Moltman. The Trinity is a community or society, a cooperation of divine persons, each with his own center of consciousness and will.
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This is Barrett. Since each person in this society is equal to the next, equality is distributed and hierarchy eliminated.
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There is no hierarchy within the Trinity. People say, well, isn't the father in charge?
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No. Why is that? Why do we have to keep repeating that? What's the problem with the father being in charge, the son being the lieutenant, and the
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Holy Spirit being the sergeant, as it were? Okay.
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It's couched, but I mean more explicit or more plain, maybe, what
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Jonathan. It implies disunity, like the father is barking orders and the son and the spirit are aye -aye captain, right?
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How many wills are there in the Trinity? One. It's not, you know, and so I just want to be plain about that.
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Barrett goes on to say the Trinity is a cooperative. Well, this is actually not quite right.
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Let me just go back to Barrett for a second. He says, by redefining the
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Trinity as social, Maltman now has the solution for the evils that plague society.
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This is Maltman. It is only when the doctrine of the Trinity vanquishes the monotheistic notion of the great universal monarch in heaven and his divine patriarchs in the world, that earthly rulers, dictators, and tyrants cease to find any justifying religious archetypes anymore.
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In other words, if we could just get rid of the idea that God is sovereign and that God is in control and that, you know, what he really wants us to understand, and that's not the model because that leads to tyranny down here on earth.
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The model really is of three persons intertwined and sharing everything and loving and fully cooperating despite their differences kind of thing.
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You know, they're just wholly submitted to each other and, you know, all this other kind of stuff. No, that's not the
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Trinity. That's a construct of Maltman to kind of justify what he wants to see here on earth.
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And this is a pretty consistent theme in Barrett where he's, you know, people want to adjust the
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Trinity. They want to adjust their understanding of God to justify what they want to do on planet earth.
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Comments, questions? Maltman fans who want to defend him? Okay. Number eight.
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True or false? One of the errors of S .T. S .T.
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See, sometimes you get so clever that you... Oh, social Trinitarianism.
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I knew I'd remember it. Yeah, sometimes you get so clever that you forget what your cleverness is.
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I got tired of... Yeah, see, it's in number four. True or false? Social Trinity. S .T. is an updated version of the
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Orthodox. Okay. So, number eight. One of the errors of social Trinitarianism because I get tired of typing the same words over and over again.
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Social Trinitarianism is the notion of the Trinity being both male and female.
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I agree.
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Barrett says about Maltman, if his social Trinity is the way to go, then, quote, we find the earthly reflect on this, on of this, that makes no sense, of this divine sociality, not in the autocracy of a single ruler, but in the democratic community of free people.
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Again, keep in mind what he's doing is reshaping the Trinity so that he can reshape the earth and the way we run things down here.
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Not in the lordship of the man over the woman, but in their equal mutuality.
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Not in an ecclesiastical hierarchy, in other words, you know, like in the
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Catholic Church, but in a fellowship church. Maltman rejoices that feminist theologians can now fight for the equality of the sexes thanks to the
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Trinity being an equal society of persons. God himself is no longer patriarchal, but bisexual, giving matriarchy a divine voice.
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This is what happens when you let your understanding of what you want society to be affect your interpretation of the
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Trinity and then take that affected interpretation of the Trinity and transport it back to earth.
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So, this is just kind of, this is crazy jabbering here. So, the answer to the question, one of the errors of social
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Trinitarianism is the notion of the Trinity being both male and female. While that is true, it's an error.
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Keep that in mind. You know, underscore that. I mean, you'll hear, how many of you have ever seen like a video or something of saying, you know, some usually liberal
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Methodist or something praying to Heavenly Mother? You know,
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I mean, there could not be anything more blasphemous. If God wanted to reveal himself as male and female or as father and mother, then guess what?
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He would, but he doesn't. Number nine, true or false, the words ontological and metaphysical are synonyms.
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Well, you got a 50 -50 shot, you know. Sorry though, that was false.
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I mean, again, I think if the question makes you go, huh, what? It's probably false.
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Well, see there? Okay. Right. In this book, we will use the terms ontology, ontological, and metaphysics, metaphysical as synonyms.
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So, what does that mean? It means the highlighter is no longer without error.
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So Lisa's right. Okay. That's good.
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So it is true in spite of what the indelible marker says. Okay. So these words refer to the wetness of something or someone.
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In theology, these words refer to God's essence and how his essence exists or subsists in three persons.
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Barrett says, for all kinds of weird reasons, Christians today have been taught to assume that these words are swear words.
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But the great tradition disagrees. These words fight against domesticating God. What does it mean to domesticate
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God? Make him like us. And you know what? Almost every cult or weird idea comes down to that, trying to make
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God more like us or trying to make us more like God. The great tradition disagrees.
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These words fight against domesticating God and imposing our social experience on the creator, which is what
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Maltman does in a major way. Okay. Now being somewhat chastened by the faultiness of the highlighter.
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Number 10. True or false? Agreeing with the Apostles' Creed is unnecessary.
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I have confidence in the highlighter on this one. False. Why? It's a good summary of Orthodox Christianity.
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Barrett notes, Maltman's first step to freedom is a rejection of the opening line in the
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Apostles' Creed. I believe in God the Father Almighty. Barrett says, here's the problem wrapped up in one phrase.
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The way forward is not to think of God or the Trinity in terms of power, but love, self -communicating, suffering, passable love, changing love.
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That's Maltman's idea. That's wrong. He goes on to say, basically, so the
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Trinity is supposed to be a socialist community. It's the ideal socialism. This is a quote from Maltman again.
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He says, the three divine persons have everything in common except for their personal characteristics. So the
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Trinity corresponds to a community in which people are defined through their relations with one another and in their significance for one another.
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Not in opposition to one another in terms of power and possession. I mean,
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I could almost say, what's the appropriate song response to this? Sounds like John Lennon's Imagine.
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Imagine there's no possession and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maltman sounds like an atheist, in other words.
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Number 11, true or false? The word being can refer to the inter -Trinitarian communications.
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Yeah, that sounds false, and it is false. Maltman is not the only influential liberal theologian.
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There's also Miroslav Vuruf. Vurufi, from Croatia, one of today's most popular thinkers.
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Vuruf is as convinced that the historic doctrine of the Trinity must be modified or even rejected, at least if the
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Trinity is to serve as a model for church and society. Okay. What's the problem with that statement?
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Yeah, I mean, that's a major presumption. And he says, Vuruf says,
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I just like saying Vuruf. Vuruf says it must, the
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Trinity must serve as a model for society. The Trinity, in some sense at least, is to be our social program.
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Other social theologians, rather than the defining of being of the
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Trinity as the great tradition did, as an essence with three modes of subsistence, it is argued that being refers to the interpersonal love, relationships, or communion that the persons have with one another, except this society of love has the
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Father at the very top of it. Then he goes on to say, imagine drawing a straight line from the
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Trinity to church and society. Just as there is hierarchy in the Trinity, the Father at the top, so too this group argues there is hierarchy in the church, the bishop at the top.
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Anyway, this is all wrong. So, moving on. Social theology, all the comparisons, all the insistence that the
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Trinity must be imposed on society, imposed on the church, no. Just no.
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Number 12, true or false, social Trinitarian theologians are often inconsistent.
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True, with all this talk about church, don't miss the real issue to meet the agenda of the church, the
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Trinity has been redefined. He says, but don't miss any of the irony either.
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Social Trinitarians are coming to opposite conclusions. Some want hierarchy. Others want equality.
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And anytime you're using the Trinity to justify some kind of social construct here on earth, you're losing.
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Number 13, true or false, Jesus' death was in no way a protest against slavery.
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Yes. Okay, excellent.
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You know, if I was to say, you know, slavery is a sin, would that be true or false? True. Did Jesus die to protest the sin of slavery and to pay for the sin of slavery for those who become believers?
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I mean, I think about John Newton, right, who trafficked in slaves and then came to realize it was wrong when he gets saved and spends the rest of his life repenting.
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Okay, Barrett, liberation theologians, and by the way, there are a lot of them, liberation theologians are, liberation theology, where do you suppose that liberation theology would be very popular?
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Okay, South America is one place. What is liberation theology? It's basically this, that Jesus died, and you'll even,
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Jesus died for sins, yes, but also for something else.
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And it's this idea that people could be free. So, yeah, in this country, too, mostly in the black church, in South America, especially in Catholic churches and other places,
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Catholic churches are very big on this, because the death of Jesus becomes symbolic of something that it really isn't, this protest against slavery.
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No, no. Barrett says, liberation theologians read the
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Bible and conclude that its main message is as the promise, or is the promise and hope that the oppressed in society will be set free from their oppressors.
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Yeah, so social justice, right? Should we want justice?
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Yes. Should we want the equality of all men? Yes. Is that the purpose for which
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Jesus came to the earth? No. The gospel is not the triune
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God's plan to send his son as if Jesus substituted himself for us, taking the penalty for our sins so that we can be forgiven and receive eternal life.
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What? That is the gospel. Triune is not the, as if, oh, oh, that's what the social theologians say.
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Sorry. I was like, what? Okay. This is what they say. They say it's not that.
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They say rather the gospel is social and political liberation, setting free those pushed down in society from those in power or by those in power.
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So why did Jesus die? They say the incarnate son died as a protest against the slaveries imposed on God's sons and daughters.
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Can you think of another problem with that? He died because of the slavery imposed on God's sons and daughters.
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Okay. Some of God's sons and daughters are not slaves, and some of those who are slaves are not
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God's sons and daughters. It's not by just virtue of being human that we are in God's family.
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People like to say that. Right. But that's not necessarily true.
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We come into the world as sons and daughters of whom? The shocking truth,
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Satan. Right. And then God redeems us and adopts us. Number 14, true or false?
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Some versions of social theology necessarily end up with tritheism.
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True. True. This is some bogus theologian.
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Oh, yeah. Here we go. His name is Boff. I knew I'd find it.
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The modern notion of person is basically that of being. In relationship, a person is subject, existing as a center of autonomy, gifted with consciousness and freedom, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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In one sentence, Boff sums up social Trinitarianism. Boff anticipates an objection.
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If this modern redefinition of person is applied to the Trinity, how can it not result in tritheism?
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Boff is convinced he escapes this heresy because the, quote, stress is laid on relationship, the complete openness of one person to another.
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So because they're completely open to one another, the fact that he's teaching tritheism doesn't really matter.
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When classical theology used the term person, it did not understand it in the same way that we do now.
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You can already see what the problem with that is. Right. In other words, our modern understanding of personhood then should be transported back into our understanding of the persons of the
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Trinity. So it changes the nature of the Trinity. Wrong.
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Boff, Leonardo, to his friends, says this. He says, the modern notion of person is basically that of being in relationship.
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A person is subject, existing as a center of autonomy, gifted with consciousness and freedom.
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So, redefining person as one who's in relationship with others, Boff then redefines the
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Trinity as a society and a community. He looks to the human society for help, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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The persons are not embodiments of one, the true
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God, as many in the great tradition said, but, quote, three subjects in eternal and therefore essential communion.
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Always united and, listen, interpenetrating one another. It's this whole thing of really confusing the persons.
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The eternal communion of love makes these three one God. False. Number 15.
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True or false? The Trinity is good news for the oppressed peoples of the world. We already kind of gave this away.
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It's false. Boff goes on to say this. He says, society is not ultimately set in its unjust and unequal relationships, but summoned to transform itself in light of the open and egalitarian relationships that obtain in the community of the
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Trinity. In other words, because the Trinity are equal persons, completely sharing everything, again, the idea that society is to transform itself to reflect the
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Trinity. So he says the Trinity is good news or the Trinity is the gospel.
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False. Number 16. Which of the following is not a mark of social
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Trinitarianism? A. De -emphasis on simplicity. B.
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Redefining personhood, which I think we've heard multiple times. C. Over -emphasis on the humanity of Jesus.
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D. Emphasizing the Eastern Church Fathers over the
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West. So what's the reality here? Well, actually, according to Barrett, the answer would be
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C. Over -emphasis. I mean, can you...
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Yeah, that's not one of the problems of social Trinitarianism because they're not really interested in that.
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They're more interested in the persons of the Trinity and redefining that. Okay. That was kind of a hard question,
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Steve. Okay, sorry. Okay, so he lists the marks of social
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Trinity this way. And it's diverse. There are a multitude of problems with it.
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But he says, starting point is not simplicity but the three persons. Some reject simplicity altogether.
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And what's simplicity? That God is not made up of parts.
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You know, you can't say, if I take all the attributes of God and write them all down...
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What's the problem with that, by the way? Can you write down all the attributes of God? I'll wait while you do it.
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We'll be learning attributes of God for eternity. He has an infinite number of attributes.
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But if you could add them all up, you still wouldn't grasp God. Trinity is redefined.
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This is the second one. Trinity is redefined as a society and community analogous to human society.
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We heard that multiple times, how it's supposed to model what's supposed to be going on here. Third point.
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Persons are redefined as three centers of consciousness and will. And of course, what's the problem with that? How many wills are there in the
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Trinity? One. So if you have three wills in the Trinity, you have three persons in the
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Trinity, and therefore three wills, then you are thinking wrongly because there's one will of God in three persons.
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I think that's right. Jonathan says, any effort to do what they're doing, to take the
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Trinity and make the Trinity useful for us, in a sense that it should change our understanding of how we relate to our fellow men and women, how we operate within society, you would necessarily have to have three persons to model.
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Right? Yeah. So I think that's true. And I think there, you know, right off the bat, you could see that there's a major problem there.
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They redefined personhood. They redefined unity.
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Unity is redefined as interpersonal relationships of love between persons.
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Then they say that there is a, or he says that there's a large overlaps, overlap of eminence and economic
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Trinity. In other words, who God is and what God does get merged.
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And that's a problem because he's not what he does. He does what he does and he is who he is.
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Those things are separate. And then also number seven, liberal theologians set the
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East over, over against the West appealing to the Eastern fathers. In other words, they do that very thing that was in my question.
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And eighth, social Trinity is a paradigm for social theory, which we've said on multiple occasions here, not just within the church ecclesiology, but also politics, gender, et cetera.
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And number nine, social Trinitarianism is often accused of tri -theism because of the reasons
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Jonathan was saying. So questions about that before we move on from social
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Trinitarianism, which won't, you know, warm your soul, but it is what is often taught in schools about the
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Trinity. Yes. Yes. So let me just kind of summarize. They have their political theories.
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They then impose them on the Trinity, altering the Trinity, and then take that altered Trinity and say, we're going to impose it even back further on.
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You know, this is the justification for bringing about the political change that we think should happen.
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No, no. I mean, they will pick and choose versus, but predominantly their goal here.
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And, you know, here's the problem, and we have to close. And we'll talk a little bit about this next week before we move on.
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And by the way, next week I'm going to have some really skippy handouts. I was working on things while we were on vacation and just thinking through some,
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I think, some skippy. I just wanted to say that. Now it's on tape. Some handouts with some charts that I think will be helpful, not about social
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Trinitarianism so much as about the Trinity in general. I forgot where I was going.
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Yeah, but I think essentially if we just think about social Trinitarianism, they take, they say we have to disregard what the church has taught for 2 ,000 years because they've gotten it wrong.
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And it's because of their political beliefs. And then they take their political beliefs, impose them on the
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Trinity, reformulate the Trinity, and then take that and say, well, if we're going to live up to what the
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Trinity is, this redefined Trinity, then we need to change society. So it's entirely about politics and using theology to sort of impose itself or to force a social change.
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But we have to close. Father, thank you for this time and thank you for Dr. Barrett for his work.
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Lord, even as we talk about things that, for the most part, things that we don't interact with, we don't need to know all these things about the social
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Trinity except that it's so infected, so -called
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Christianity. When we meet people who claim to be Christians, a lot of them go to churches that believe these very things.
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And therefore, they don't believe the gospel because they think the gospel is all about imposing social change and about these different versions of the
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Trinity that they want to see implemented in society. Father, give us discernment when we talk to people who profess
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Christ to just give them the gospel. If they agree with us, Lord, I'm certain that they're already yours.
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If they disagree with us, then there's a need for them to hear and to believe the truth.
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Lord, let us be gracious, loving, and kind enough to preach the gospel fearlessly to those that we meet and interact with.