God: Chapter 2 (1+1+1=1)

When I led a session on the Trinity, I asked the class to draw the Trinity. The result of this request was looks of bewilderment and to this day it is brought up. I don’t really understand why. The reality was that the objective was achieved the moment I asked the task of them. #1. It showed the complexity of the issue. #2. It revealed misunderstandings about the Trinity. It’s funny, but it’s hard to draw or talk about the Trinity without conveying a heresy. How do you draw singularity and plurality at the same time?

Why not tri-theism? Why don’t we just bite the bullet and admit we’re tri-theists? Remember the last chapter where I discussed why monotheism is superior to polytheism? There is no such thing as polytheism. If God exists as we think of him, then he must be a single essence.

What does this matter? Why does God being 1 essence and 3 persons matter? Dr. Cross says that the Trinity is a model for the church. He bases his entire systematic theology on this concept. God exists in community. I’m sure you’ve heard of the “body of believers.” What if God himself were a mini “body of believers.” The Father is the sender. The Son is the sent one. The Spirit is the relationship between the two. The Spirit acts as informer and comforter. So to, for humans, does the Spirit act as informer (e.g. Spirit of Truth) and comforter (e.g. Paraclete meaning “called alongside of”). Some have described it like this: The Father is the fullness of the Godhead invisible, the Son is the fullness of the Godhead visible, and the Spirit is the fullness of the Godhead to the believer.

Some in the early church didn’t think there was a “Trinity.” In reality, it’s not like before Jesus’ ascension he said, “Now you guys need to believe that My Father, the Spirit that is coming and I are all in this conglomeration called a ‘Trinity.’” The Trinity matters because the denial of the Trinity is the denial of who Jesus was. Can someone be saved and not believe in the Trinity? Yes. Why do I say that so confidently? I say that because people don’t know what the Trinity is even now, yet they know Jesus as “savior.” Jesus’ mission was to save, not convince us of his ontology (being). Why it matters is because philosophically, a human cannot save us. A human cannot remove our sins. A human cannot do what only a divine being can do. Therefore, for us to be saved, Jesus must be divine. Those who attempt to rob Jesus of his divinity attempt to rob us of our salvation. So, it must be true that Jesus is divine for us to be saved, but it doesn’t require our intellectual understanding of this. It isn’t intellectual assent alone that saves us “for even the demons believe.” Jeremy Taylor shows us that it begins with this but matures itself leaving the residue of works. Mature faith reveals the Trinity. It exists in community. It overflows in a loving relationship. It expands from the individual to the community to the society (as does the Trinity). It makes disciples of all nations. It doesn’t say “the three of us are enough.” It expands because it desires to.

One final note, John Calvin burned a man at the stake for a heresy of the Trinity (Servetus). You might not want to believe that God was the Father, then the Son, and now is the Spirit (Sabellianism). I used to be completely baffled as to why people burned others at the stake. I was especially perplexed for John Calvin to do it as a Protestant who understood how many early Reformers were burned at the stake. It hit me one day why they did this with no problem of morality. Besides the fact that they believed the condemned’s actions were severely dangerous to the community, they believed this person was going to burn in hell forever. If the person is going to do this forever, what is a few more minutes? It served to be a deterrent of that belief system. So the justification was to prevent others from following that “wrong” path. They could see where it would lead not only on earth but in eternity. It was an “object lesson.”