A Trinitarian Theology

“Lose weight, feel great,” says the slogan for one diet regimen. Nothing makes one feel better, so we are told, than losing those extra un-wanted pounds that bog us down. This “heaviness,” we are told, can be lost to welcome in a life of more comfort and satisfaction. But the physical body is not the only place that our modern culture longs to lose some weight. In theology too there is a desire to lose some un-wanted theological pounds, specifically in relation to the doctrine of God.

The ever-increasing religious pluralism in our culture, and inclusivism in the church, indicate that a more generic god is needed. Churches across America are looking for a god with no sovereignty, no moral law, and no confrontational attributes. This cultural trend has been well documented and discussed by David Wells in his book God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams[1]. So Wells comments, “…evangelicals rarely have a functioning view of the transcendence of God”[2]. We find this god, however, not only theologically thin in His holiness, but also in His inner life. The culture has not only abandoned the psychologically hard doctrines of justice and sovereignty but they, along with much of the church, have equally abandoned the intellectually hard doctrine of the trinity. It is the latter of these two losses that concerns me in this paper, for the doctrine of the trinity bears great significance for understanding the God of the Bible. To see the God of the Bible correctly and to understand His uniqueness, His aseity, and His love Christians must see Him as the Triune God.

The God of the Bible is not the god of the Jew, or of the Muslim, and certainly not the same god as that of cultural Christianity. The God of the Bible is distinct in that He is triune: One God, three persons. This is certainly not easy to think about and impossible to uncover completely, yet without wandering too far into speculation we may adequately understand the trinity and then, in turn, grasp the significance of this doctrine. In order to explain this doctrine, however, we will have to turn to the very Word of God.

For any of us, understanding the trinity is impossible without God’s self-revelation. One indicator that the doctrine of the trinity is the truth given to man by God is that it is too complex a doctrine for any man to have conceived of in his own intimations. For us to have such a doctrine it must come from God’s revelation of Himself to man. John Calvin put it very poetically when he wrote, “For, as persons who are old or whose eyes are by any means become dim, if you show them the most beautiful book, though they perceive something written but can scarcely read two words together, yet, by the assistance of spectacles, will begin to read distinctly- so the Scriptures, collecting in our minds the otherwise confused notions of deity, dispels the darkness and gives us a clear view of the true God[3].” It is only by means of Scripture that man goes from deist to Christian.

Christians are monotheists, that is they believe that there is one God. This is, undoubtedly, the clear teaching of Scripture, and is seen most clearly in the Shema of Israel (Deuteronomy 6:4). Deuteronomy 6:4 is known as Israel’s great Confession of Faith; the text reads, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.” The context of the verse gives us some insight.

Deuteronomy details the renewed covenant that God was making with the new generation of Israelites before they entered the Promised Land, and as such it was a covenant that was all of God’s grace and yet contained within it stipulations for Israel. There were conditions, which they had to meet in this renewed covenant. Verse 5 sums up their responsibility: they are to love the LORD their God with all their heart, with all their soul, and with all their might. This condition is based completely on verse 4, which clarifies that God is “one”. The word “one” in this verse can be interpreted in a several ways; I think it is best to see in this word both God’s singularity and His uniqueness. There is no God like Him because He is the only true God, and thus it is to Him alone that the Israelites are to be devoted.

In the gospel of Mark, Jesus echoes this very same verse. When a scribe asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the most important of all?” Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength’” (Mark 12:28b-30). Jesus himself teaches that there is only one God. The New Testament, in pointing to the three persons of the Godhead, does not in anyway intend to undermine the monotheism of the Old Testament. Yet within this same context we have hints of multiple persons within this one Godhead. When Jesus answers the man that the greatest commandment is to love God and love your neighbor the scribe asserts that Jesus has spoken truly. In verse 34 we read, “And when Jesus saw that he [the scribe] answered wisely, he said to him, ‘You are not far from the kingdom of God.’ And after that no one dared to ask Him any more questions.” In seeing that this young scribe understood what Jesus had said He tells him that he is near to the Kingdom of God, but not yet in that kingdom. Why was the man only near? The rest of the New Testament teaches us that it was because he had not at this point repented of his sin and confessed Jesus as Lord. So even in this one verse we see that God is one and yet salvation unto God is by Jesus, a distinct person of the Godhead.

There are other verses that also teach that there is only one God (Isa. 45:5-6; Deut. 32:39; Isa. 44:6-8; Rom. 3:29-30[4]). Robert Letham points out that the Shema of Israel “and the whole law of which it was apart, trenchantly repudiate the polytheism of the pagan world. In the immediate context, Canaanite religions were the challenge to Israel, but this impressive declaration includes in its scope all pagan objects of worship mentioned in the historical and prophetic literature[5].” While it is certainly true that the Old Testament, time after time, drives home the unity and uniqueness of God, there are hints that this unity is complex.
The New Testament bears the most fully developed information concerning the doctrine of the trinity, but all that is said there builds upon what was established in the Old Testament. So Herman Bavinck, in his Doctrine of God, says, “These N.T. facts do not give us something which is absolutely new. The N.T. principles involved in the doctrine of the trinity are contained in the O.T. teaching concerning creation, and in fact in the entire O.T. economy[6].” In fact the Old Testament begins asserting multiple persons within the one God from the very beginning, Genesis 1.

In Genesis chapter 1 we read of God’s creating the world, and as we come to verse 26a we read, “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’” Who is this “us” that God is referring to? All throughout His creating of the world God has been identified in the singular (“He”). Many have defended a number of varying interpretations to try and clarify the change in voice. Peter Lewis, quoting Gordon J. Wenham, states that this change in voice is “a divine announcement to the heavenly host, drawing the angelic host’s attention to the masterstroke of creation, man[7].” The problem with this claim, however, is that the text does not merely say God called others to watch Him work, but that He called upon them to work with Him: “Let us make…” Is it, then, to be assumed that God called upon the angels to help Him make man? To this interpretation the early church father Iraneaus points out that God needs no help, “as if He did not possess His own hands. For with Him were always present the Word and Wisdom, the Son and the Spirit, by whom and in whom, freely and spontaneously, He made all things, to whom also He speaks, saying, ‘Let us make man after our image and likeness[8].’”

Others have turned to issues of language and stated that the Hebrew word for God in this context (elohim, which is plural in verse 26) could easily be used as a form of royal address. God, like earthly kings, may be, here, referring to Himself in the plural form, which would explain the “us” and the “our”. This would be an acceptable answer if it were not for the lack of evidence of such usage within Hebrew literature. Nowhere else in Hebrew writing is a “plural of royalty” used.

The most fitting answer seems to be that God the Father, the creator, is referring to the other two persons of the trinity, the Son and the Spirit. Such an interpretation is supported by the apostle John’s words that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made” (John 1:1-3). Jesus is the “Word,” and this passage testifies that He was with God in the beginning, that He is the means by which the whole world was created, and that He is God. Note, also, that while this passage teaches that the Word is God it also makes a distinction between the Word and the Creator (i.e. the Son and the Father): the Word was with God. He is not only God, but He is with God. The two are one, and yet the two are distinct.

In a like manner we find the Holy Spirit is present in the work of creation as well. In Genesis 1:2b we read that God had created the earth and that the “Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.” Here we find the third person of the trinity. He is God and yet He is distinct from the Father, who speaks, and the Son, who is the Father’s Word. All three are present, and once we turn to the New Testament it sheds the needed light on these Old Testament shadows of the trinity.

Among other places in the Old Testament that point to the Trinitarian existence of God are the numerous Messianic texts. One such text is Psalm 110:1, which Jesus quotes in Matthew 22:42-43. In the Psalm David says, “The Lord said to my Lord: ‘Sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.’” The verse should raise eyebrows, as Jesus assumes it should in the context of Matthew 22. There we read, “Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, ‘What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?’ They said to Him, ‘The son of David.’ He said to them, ‘How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet?” If David calls him Lord, how is he his son?’ And no one was able to answer Him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask Him any more questions” (Matthew 22:41-46). The verse from Psalm 110 is clearly pointing to Jesus himself, the Christ, the Messiah, who is both with God and is God. “The LORD”, that is Yahweh, “says to my Lord,” this is someone who is both God and is yet distinct from God. Jesus’ words indicate that the Pharisees missed the truth of this Psalm: that their messiah is divine. Other verses confirm a Trinitarian God; they can be found stretching across the whole canon of scripture (Psalm 33:6; Isa. 11:1-2; Isa. 42:1; Gen. 11:7; Isa. 6:8; Ezek. 34:21; Psalm 45:6-7; Isa. 63:9-11; Isa. 9:6-7; Jn. 5:21-23; Jn. 17:5; Mt. 3:16-17; 2 Cor. 13:14; and Eph. 1:1-14).

The Bible teaches that there is one God, and yet there is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit[9], the exact persons whom Jesus commands His disciples to baptize new believers in the name of (Matthew 28:19). The evidence of Scripture, then, gives us firm ground to stand upon in proclaiming the truthfulness of the doctrine of the trinity. The question now to ask, however, is “why should we care.” It is sad that many today do not. If Wells is correct that most evangelicals do not have a functioning view of God’s transcendence, then how much more true is it that they do not have a functioning view of His Trinitarian life. Many may profess agreement and adherence to the orthodox creeds of the Christian faith, they may espouse belief in the trinity, but they rarely think about it, rarely worship it, and undermine its significance. Robert Letham has described this sad truth in his work The Holy Trinity. He writes, “Prominent aspects of the church’s doctrine of the trinity have often been derided or neglected as unbiblical speculation…Today most Western Christians are practical modalists[10]. The usual way of referring to God is ‘God’ or, particularly at the popular level, ‘the Lord’. It is worth contrasting this with Gregory Nazianzen, the great Cappadocian of the fourth century, who spoke of ‘my trinity,’ saying, ‘When I say “God,” I mean Father, Son, and Holy Spirit[11].’” This negligence to contemplate the trinity on our part is a failure to see God for who He really is: a Triune being. And failing to understand and think through this doctrine has effects on other doctrines that the church holds very dear. There are three other doctrines that the doctrine of the Trinity has specific bearing upon. To be sure there are more than three, but I will only deal with these three: (1) God’s uniqueness, (2) God’s aseity, (3) and God’s love.

God’s nature has, in the last two centuries, slowly become more and more acclimated to the culture. Many today are opposed to Christian missions to the Jews, because after all, they assert, “they worship the same God.” This is, however, proof of nothing more than a shallow understanding of who the God of the Bible is. God’s Trinitarian nature makes Him distinct, separate from all other “gods;” it is His trinity that makes Him unique. Many other religions profess belief in a deity who is “all-powerful” or who is “personal” (though only in Christianity are both attributes combined into one being). Many other religions profess belief in “many gods” or in “a monad,” but the trinity is distinctly Christian, where God is one and yet three. Others may have presented a sort of philosophical trinity, but this proved to be nothing more than impersonal forces. The Trinitarian existence of the amazing God of the Bible is one of a kind.
In putting this doctrine on the historical shelves to be covered in the dust of time, by ignoring it, and by practically denying it the church has reformed the doctrine of God completely. He is no longer the one true God of Scripture, but the generic god of the culture. The Jew, Muslim, deist, and Christian can share and worship a divine being only if he is undefined. Such a truth should make the church think more carefully about its worship songs and its prayers; can this be sung or prayed by a deist or a Jew? If it can then it is not worshiping or praying to the God of scripture. If the Christian charismatic community focuses on the Holy Spirit to the point of ignoring the Father and the Son, than other churches focus on the Father or the Son (usually one or the other) without the acknowledgment of the Spirit. The church at large, then, has lost a view of the triune God. Thus the recovery of Biblical worship must begin with the recovery of the Biblical doctrine of God. Consciousness, within the church, about all three persons of the one Godhead reminds us of the truth that there is only one God like our God.

Part of what makes God unique is not only that He is three in one, but also that He is completely independent. This is sometimes referred to as God’s aseity, His self-reliance. He has no need of man, the earth, oxygen, or food; He is completely independent. In Psalm 50:12 God says, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine.” The apostle Paul affirms God’s independence when he writes, “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything” (Acts 17:24-25). This attribute of God, like His uniqueness, is also dependent upon His being Trinitarian in His inner life; allow me to elaborate.

I would like to be able to deal with each of these three attributes individually, but due to the fact that God’s attributes are not simply parts of a whole, but are so much a part of His very nature that they mix together, I cannot. So in dealing with God’s aseity I must also deal in part with His love, the two are that connected. The very nature of love is such that it must be communicated. Love cannot be “love” unless it is exchanged and shared. In order, then, for the God of the Bible to be a God of love, which the Bible says He is (1 John 4:8), He must communicate that love. This is where the issue of aseity becomes necessary. The need for love to be communicated requires that there exist someone or thing to receive that love, but if the only possible receivers of God’s love is creation then suddenly we find a God who is dependent upon His creation. Thus God is no longer a se. But the Trinity, as B.B. Warfield said, “brings us…the solution of the deepest and most persistent difficulties in our conception of God[12]…” The Trinity allows for God to be both genuinely loving in His very nature and yet also free from His created world.
The eternally existing triune nature of God allows for love to be exchanged between the three persons of the trinity. C.S. Lewis grasped this concept when he wrote, “All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love.’ But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, he was not love[13].” What Lewis is saying is essentially that in order for God to be love he must be love in His Ontological Trinity, which is what He is in triune nature apart from the world. In order for God to be “love” and to be self-sufficient this attribute must exist within God Himself. And since it does, the love that has flown between these three persons of the Godhead for all eternity allows for God’s creation of the world to be free, not out of necessity. The God of the Bible, unlike any other mythical or fabricated god, is both personal and independent; He is royally sovereign over the world and yet He loves the world. Without the trinity we lose these complimentary truths. Some theologians, such as Jurgen Moltmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg, have failed to articulate clear distinctions between the Creator and the creation and have thereby misconstrued the doctrine of the trinity. The Biblical doctrine of the Trinity, however, teaches that God both loves His creation and yet remains independent of that creation.

Many in the church today are quick to talk about the love of God and yet slow or completely resistant to talk about His transcendence. This is certainly true in non-Evangelical circles and it is even creeping into the Evangelical community with pragmatic based preaching, and most recently with Open Theism. Further investigation would need to be done on my part, but I believe, from an initial examination, that this can be traced back to a loss of the Biblical view of God, including a loss of His Trinitarian existence. When we realize that the Biblical doctrine of the Trinity teaches us that God is transcendent and independent, and yet also loving and personal we will be less prone to overemphasize one attribute at the expense of the others. Those who speak much about God’s love and not about His transcendence have forgotten an important lesson of the trinity: that God is royally above us[14]. Thus by overemphasizing love and ignoring transcendence the church is only speaking half-truths about God, and a half-true God is not the true God at all.

There are other ways that the relationship between the trinity and the attribute of love are being challenged today, and have been challenged in the past. Throughout the history of the church some have rejected the usage of the word “person” to identify the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Early on St. Augustine expressed reservations over the word, and in the 20th century both Karl Barth and Karl Rahner attempted to abandon or qualify the word. Karl Rahner (1904-1984), a prominent Catholic theologian, composed an alternate definition to replace “person”. He calls the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “…three distinct manners of subsisting[15].” The concerns of Barth, Rahner, and others should be taken seriously; there is nothing sacred about the word “person” (it’s never once found in Scripture), and it is, perhaps, not the best word for identifying God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Yet finding a fitting substitution seems to be extremely difficult, and most who have attempted to avoid the word “person” have done more damage to the doctrine of the trinity than good. Take Rahner’s definition for example. By denying himself the use of the world “person” Rahner has, in turn, made God impersonal. The attribute of love, which is so important to the church, is not only lost if we deny the trinity, but it is lost if we fail to speak of that trinity in personal language. Robert Letham appropriately asks “how three ‘distinct manners of subsisting’ can love each other[16]?” The related question of how three “distinct manners of subsisting” can love us needs to be asked as well, for the impersonal does not love.

The significance of the trinity is that it gives the creation both a God who is un-limited in His power, un-contaminated in His purity, and yet who draws near to that creation in love. It preserves His justice allowing man to trust God in His word, to believe Him to be powerful and almighty, and yet to feel and know Him intimately. The trinity allows God to be both far and near, not spatially but relationally. He is far above us in His transcendence, holiness, and otherliness; He is in no way dependent upon us for anything. But He is also near to us in love and intimacy, giving to man all things from His gracious hands. The Trinity gives to man, what John Frame has identified as, the Covenant Lord. He joins Himself into a personal covenant with man, and yet He remains the sovereign Lord over all. Frame elaborates on the importance of the trinity for God’s love:

“We might imagine that God’s love…is defined as a relationship between Himself and the world. But then a divine attribute would be dependent upon the world. God would have needed the world in order to have an adequate object for His love. But Trinitarianism teaches us that God’s love is defined not by the world, but by the eternal love between the Father and the Son. God would have been a loving God even if He had chosen not to create the world. So God is sovereign in defining His own nature. And He is sovereign, not only in defining His love, but in exercising it. He loves the world, not because He must, but because He chooses freely to do so[17].”

In the fourth century the Orthodox Christians fought hard for the doctrine of the Trinity, they knew what was at stake in its being challenged. At that time in history a denial of the trinity from a group known as the Arians was an attack on the divinity of Jesus. In our own day and age, however, the denial or neglect of the trinity does not tend so much towards a denial of the divinity of Jesus (though there certainly are some). In evangelical circles, however, the neglect of the trinity often means imbalanced presentations of God’s attributes, or imbalanced presentations of His Covenant Lordship (leaving off either the Covenant part or the Lord part). It means making the persons of the trinity either impersonal forces or making them nothing more than “good buddies”. The true Biblically saturated concepts of the divine Godhead hold before the eyes of man a God who is unique, who is a se, and who loves. It is this God, and no other, who is worthy of worship. Our prayers, hymns, and praises should reflect who He truly is in character and nature. This means praying in the name of Son, calling upon the Spirit’s aid, worshiping the Triune God, and baptizing in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. John Frame sums this truth up so succinctly when he writes:

So the doctrine of the Trinity is quite integral to the doctrine of divine lordship. It reinforces God’s sovereign control, His aseity, the sovereignty of His love and knowledge, the authority of His word, the intimacy of His relationship to the creation, the richness of salvation. The doctrine of the Trinity is not an incidental addition to the doctrine of God; rather, it is the doctrine of God as a whole, in which God gives us a glimpse of His own inner life[18].

The culture’s obsession with weight loss and dieting has gone too far when it takes aim at shaving a few pounds off the doctrine of God. It is the responsibility of the church to both grasp the true significance of the doctrine of the Trinity, and to proclaim it to the world. We are to be like Athanasius, in the fourth century, who boldly and defiantly held that God is one and yet He is three. If we fail to hold on tightly to this deep and full theology of God we end up with a deity who is not merely theologically thin, but one that is really non-existent.







Bibliography:

Banvinck, Herman. The Doctrine of God. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951.

Calvin, John. On the Christian Faith. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957.

Frame, John. The Doctrine of God. Philipsburg: P&R, 2002.

Letham, Robert. The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship.
Philipsburg: P&R, 2004.

Lewis, Peter. The Message of the Living God. Leicester: IVP, 2000.

Warfield, B.B. Bible Doctrines. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1932.

Wells, David. God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.



[1] David F. Wells, God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).
[2] Ibid. 28.
[3] John Calvin, On the Christian Faith. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). 19.
[4] Here in Romans 3 Paul asserts that the God of the Jews is also the God of the Gentiles, something he can assert because there is only one God.
[5] Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship. (Philipsburg: P&R, 2004). 25.
[6] Herman Bavinck, The Doctrine of God. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1951). 264.
[7] Peter Lewis, The Message of the Living God. (Leicester: IVP, 2000). 39.
[8] Quoted from Letham, 93.
[9] For a more thorough treatment of how the Bible proves that all three are God I recommend John Frame, The Doctrine of God. (Philipsburg: P&R, 2002). 644-687.
[10] A label applied to those who see the three persons of the trinity not as persons, but merely as roles that the one God plays.
[11] Letham, 5-6.
[12] B.B. Warfield, Bible Doctrines. (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1932). 139.
[13] Quoted in Robert Letham, 458.
[14] The concept of God’s royal transcendence I have adopted from John Frame, The Doctrine of God. Frame argues that by accepting the doctrine of transcendence as a reference to spatiality we have lost the doctrine of immanence. “So the transcendence of God is best understood, not primarily as a spatial concept, but as a reference to God’s kingship”. 106.
[15] Quoted in Letham, 295.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Frame, 734.
[18] Ibid. 735.