Roads to Nowhere - Studying the Trinity With Your Head in the Sand

Read the series so far.

You Must Care About the Trinity

If you’re a Christian, you should want to know as much about your God as possible. He is the God who decided to save you before the world even began. He knows who you are. He knows every sin you have committed, are committing right now, and will ever commit in the future.

If you are a Christian, then He still specifically chose and elected you for eternal life. He sent His only Son, who lived the perfect, righteous, holy and sinless life you cannot ever live, and who died the sacrificial and substitutionary death you deserve to die—and He did it for you, in your place, as your substitute. And, at a particular moment in time, He sent the Holy Spirit to remove the veil of darkness from your heart and mind which blotted out the gospel light, so that you would repent and believe the gospel.

Don’t you want to know more about this God you serve? The activities I just mentioned are Trinitarian; each Divine Person plays a very specific and unique role in a believer’s life. So, basically, understanding the Trinity matters. If this isn’t important to you, then God isn’t important to you. This is not a doctrine only for ivory-tower academics in smoking jackets who puff cigars, cradle brandy snifters and discuss the latest trends in Koine Greek verbal aspect theory.¹ No, the Trinity is a doctrine for you, and it can be understood.

Here is our working definition of the Trinity once again, along with the five facts we must always keep in mind:

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. ²

1. Each Person is fully and completely divine³
2. Each Person has always been co-equal,⁴
3. Each Person has been around forever,⁵
4. Each Person is, in some way, distinct from the others, and yet
5. Each Person is, in some way, one with the others⁶

Roads to Nowhere

While seeking to understand the Bible’s teachings about God, there are several ways people have run aground throughout the centuries.⁷ Here are some of them:

• Adoptionism. This includes several variations on the idea that Jesus was a normal man who was “adopted” by the Spirit of God at a point in time and used for His purposes. You see incipient traces of this heresy in, for example, the Apostle John’s warnings against the proto-gnostics in 1 John. He warned, “every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist,” (1 John 4:3).

• Modalism. There are different shades of modalism,⁸ but the general idea is that Father, Son and Spirit are the same Person. They have not each existed eternally as distinct, Divine Persons within the One Being that is God. Instead, it is the same Person playing different roles at different times, just as a man is a father to his children, a lowly employee at work, and a husband who lovingly rules his own household at home—one person playing three distinct roles and manifesting Himself in different ways in different contexts. The most prominent modalists in the United States today are so-called “Oneness” or “Jesus-only” Pentecostals, otherwise known as the United Pentecostal Church International. We will see more from them shortly.

• Arianism. The idea that Jesus is a created being—the highest created being under the sun. As Arius himself said, “We are persecuted, because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning. This is the cause of our persecution, and likewise, because we say that He is of the non-existent. And this we say, because He is neither part of God, nor of any essential being.” ⁹ The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society are the most common proponents of this Christology today.

Now, each of these theories is much more complex than I just presented them to be. But, the point is that none of these Christologies square with all the Biblical facts. Each heresy takes the idea of God being one (Deut 6:4-5) very, very seriously—and that means they struggle to figure out how to add all the other data about Jesus and the Holy Spirit to that mix.

Bad Detective Work

Those who believe these damnable heresies do not act like good Biblical detectives. Instead, they cling onto one precious truth with a death-grip, while downplaying what the rest of Scripture says about Jesus and the Holy Spirit to make everything still fit. See, for example, this brief excerpt from a conservative Unitarian, Sir Anthony Buzzard (be a trooper and watch it—it’s only four minutes!):¹⁰

I hope you noticed that Sir Anthony continually referenced Deuteronomy 6:4-5. He always will. It’s all he has to go on. It’s his overriding assumption; God is one, so Jesus cannot be a distinct, divine Person. This is a fork in the road—what to do with Jesus Christ, then? Sir Anthony chose to side with the Arians and make Him a creation of God.

Other folks go the other route, collapse the distinctions between Jesus, the Father and the Spirit into one, and deny each has ever eternally existed as a distinct Divine Person. But, don’t take my word for it! Watch a representative from the UPCI explain:¹¹

As an investigator, I’m negligent if I don’t look at all the evidence. I vividly recall a case from my military days. A woman contacted Security Forces with a sad and horrifying tale of woe. Her husband was an alcoholic. He came home late that Friday, drunk and seeking “companionship.” She resisted. He hit her and tried to force himself upon her. She fled. I was on duty, and was called in.

Her story was reasonable, and she had obviously been assaulted that evening. The husband admitted striking her, but denied everything else. His wife was “crazy,” he said. “You don’t understand her,” he told us. I believed her … until I searched their house and realized that she’d chased him throughout the home with a butcher knife. He’d barricaded himself into their bedroom while she stabbed the door 20 times. He escaped from the upstairs bedroom window by tying bedsheets together. She impaled the knife into his pillow, like something out of a bad horror film, and left to report a fake story to Security Forces to get him arrested. I could have ignored all this evidence, but I didn’t. I gathered the facts and let them lead me to the inevitable conclusion - she actually was crazy!

These unbelievers are not being good detectives because they’re ignoring some of the evidence. The New Testament gives us additional revelation to complement (not contradict) what we already knew about God. These heretics deliberately ignore or downplay that evidence, rather than fairly deal with it.

We didn’t have explicit revelation of Jesus Christ as a co-eternal, co-equal, distinct Divine Person before the New Testament. We weren’t told that God planned creation, but Christ actually created it (Heb 1:1-3; Col 1:15-17). We didn’t have revelation about the details of the incarnation and the hypostatic union before the New Testament (Phil 2:6-11). In the Old Covenant, we were not told specific details about the New Jerusalem, Jesus as the literal light of the world, the total absence of night, and the re-appearance of the Tree of Life. I could go on. James White has a good analogy to explain progressive revelation and the Trinity:

God’s revelation has always been progressive and cumulative. It builds and elaborates on what came before. It reveals. It augments. It is finished and complete in the 66 books of the Old and New Testament. Heresies about Christ exist because people refuse to account for progressive revelation.

If you’re a Christian, you’re responsible for knowing and seeking to understand these books. You have the Holy Spirit. You have the Bible. You have the Pastors in your local church. You also have the fellowship of the saints of God in your local church. You can understand this doctrine. You must understand it. If you don’t, then you’re plotting a course for a Christological dead end. You’re prey for antichrists who seek to deceive you. Commit to study your Bible and know who your Lord is, and isn’t.