What is the Doctrine of the Trinity?

Thanks for coming out to this session. If you're here, I presume you know what the topic is, but we're going to be talking about the Trinity, what that means, what this concept in Christianity is, and how it's essential not only to historical Christianity but also to how we worship and love God in spirit and in truth.

Just a show of hands: how many of you, even now or in the past, have had confusions about the doctrine of the Trinity? Right? Yeah, everybody's hand is up. I don't blame you; it's not the easiest concept to grasp. There's a long history of big names in Christianity simply trying to figure this out.

So, what I'm going to do for you is flesh out what we mean when we talk about the Trinity, and then I want to discuss how that's essential to understanding how we live as Christians.

The first thing I want to start off by saying is that the Trinity, as the concept is understood biblically, teaches three fundamental truths. The first of those truths is that there is only one God. That's probably not new to you—monotheism, right? Christians historically have believed in one God only.

There are verses like Isaiah 43:10, which says, "You are my witnesses," declares Yahweh, "my servant whom I have chosen, so that you may know and believe in me and understand that I am no God was formed before me, and none will outlive me. I am Yahweh, and besides me, there is no Savior."

Now, one of the confusions that has happened historically is how we can believe in one God and yet have three: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. How does this complex unity within Christianity work? Historically, if you look at the groups that splintered off of Christianity, like the Arians or the Ebionites, those are names you can forget as soon as you hear them. But those groups within historical Christianity have gone wrong in one of the main areas, which is a misunderstanding or a purposeful changing of this truth of the Trinity.

Even now, this is one of the essentials that splits off historical Orthodox Christianity from believing Christianity, such as the Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, or Christadelphians. There are all sorts of other issues that go into that, but a big part of it is the doctrine of the Trinity.

As I've just outlined, we believe in one God as Christians. Secondly, the reality that we see in Scripture is that within that one God, there are three divine persons who are distinguished from one another: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. What we see in Scripture is that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father.

When we see Jesus in places like John 17, the high priestly prayer, when he's praying to the Father, it's not some act of ventriloquism or puppetry. Jesus is not praying to himself; he is praying to God. He says, "Glorify me with the glory I had with you in your presence before the world was." That's clearly two persons speaking in harmony with one another.

Jesus, in John chapter 17, is describing a time in eternity past—if that's a concept that even makes any sense—when he and the Father existed in communion with one another. These three are identified by one name in Scripture, and that name is the name of God that we see in the Old Testament: Yahweh. This is a name that God uses in the Old Testament to describe himself. A lot of your English translations in the Old Testament will render that as capital "LORD." So, a lot of the time, if you see that in the Old Testament, that's a rendering of the divine name, Yahweh.

In the Q&A, if you want me to explain why you see that capital "LORD," I'll be more than willing to do that; I'm just not going to do it at the moment for time's sake.

Now, this name is utilized in an interesting way. If you remember Jesus's Great Commission, we talk a lot about the Great Commission in Matthew 28. It starts off, "All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me," says Jesus. Then he says, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit."

Now, that's an interesting thing because if we look at what's translated as "name" in the original Greek, it's a noun, but it's an accusative neuter singular. Now, it's specifically one name, but then what do we see? We see it wanting to explain three distinct persons within that name: Jesus says to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

That's a little bit odd—to baptize in a singular name and then describe what appears to be three names. Well, I would argue that the name of God is Yahweh, as we see in the Old Testament, and that one God is encompassed by these three persons who we see outlined in this verse in Matthew 28, but also in other places.

If we look at Jesus's baptism, also in the Gospel of Matthew, in chapter 3, verses 16 and 17, it says, "After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on him. And behold, a voice out of heaven said, 'This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.'"

Once again, we have three identified there: the voice from heaven, the Spirit descending like a dove, and Jesus being baptized.

Now, I think it's important to understand that we don't get any essential Christian doctrine from simply reading one verse. Essential Christian doctrines are communicated through all of Scripture, identifying something that we can look at and then come to the conclusion of what it's teaching.

So, there is no single verse in a systematic theology way that says, "As Christians, we believe in the Trinity." The Trinity is one being in three persons. No, what we're seeing is the truth spread throughout Scripture that we can pull out in the narrative of this grand narrative of God within the fall, the redemption, and the restoration of God's people for his glory.

We can see all of those things communicated beautifully in places like God communicating who he is by showing us that he is one, and that one is encompassed by three.

Now, the third truth that we see taught is that these three persons hold equality. That equality doesn't mean sameness. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit clearly differentiate from one another, and yet they are equally given things like honors, attributes, and names that we see only given to God.

So, they are equal, but they're not the same. The Father, as I said, is not the Son; the Son is not the Spirit; and the Spirit is not the Father.

So, how does this really work? How can we have three in one? Well, I think it's important to understand the difference between what's referred to as "being" and "person."

So, "being" in English describes what something is; "person" describes who someone is. For example, you all walked in this room and recognized that the chairs had being; they had existence. Why? Because you sat on them, and you know right now that that being exists because it's holding you up.

However, the chairs do not have personhood. You didn't ask the chair for its permission before you sat down, right? You recognize, even if we don't understand it fully, that things have being but not everything has personhood.

Likewise, I am one human being, but yet I'm a distinct person from all of you. I'm Wesley; I have a distinct personhood to me, and yet I am one being.

I don't think it's unusual that when we're talking about the creator of the universe, we should see someone who is greater and more complex than we are. I think that would make sense. I think it would make sense that we would see something like a complex unity, which we can try to grasp but may not fully understand.

In the same way that I may understand that there's a lot of water in the ocean, okay, but how can I grasp how much water there actually is? I don't think I can; it kind of blows my mind.

Or to give another example, we talk about eternity in Christianity, right? You talk about living and worshiping on the other side of eternity. Now, I can understand eternity as a long span of time, but I can't understand time without end. That doesn't really make sense to my mind.

But there are aspects of it that I can grasp. I can grasp time that doesn't stop, even if I can't understand time that doesn't stop. Is that really time? I don't know.

But in the same way, we can understand what God has revealed about who he is. God is unique in the sense that he is one being. I think that's what we can call the being Yahweh, the name that we see throughout the Old Testament Scriptures.

And not one being; there are three co-equal and co-eternal persons. In other words, the one God is encompassed by three. Yahweh doesn't just appear in three ways; he doesn't just manifest in three ways; he isn't divisible by three.

The Father is fully God, the Son is fully God, and the Spirit is fully God. And yet those three, in being fully God, are distinct within their personhood.

This may be complex, and if you're not grasping it, that's okay because I don't know if I fully grasp it entirely. But I think we can look at Scripture; we can look at what it is communicating through, I would argue, both Old Testament and New Testament passages about the complexity of God appearing in certain ways to certain people and the culmination of that in what we call the Incarnation.

Right? We just celebrated Christmas with God stepping into humanity, taking on human flesh. It was the Father who did that; the Father sent the Son to do that, and yet they are both co-equal, co-eternal.

Being and person are distinct categories, and it's in confusing these categories that we start to go wrong. When we start to say that God is one being and one person, that's called Unitarianism.

There are branches or offshoots of Christianity, like the Unitarian Church or Oneness Pentecostals, who believe that the one being of God is encompassed by one person and that God the Father is Jesus and died on the cross.

Now, that's a concept that has been deemed heretical throughout Christian history—that God the Father died on the cross. If you talk with intelligent Muslims, that's one of the objections you may hear: "If Jesus is dying on the cross, who's running the universe?"

What does that show? It shows a lack of understanding of what we believe within Christianity. When Jesus is dying on the cross, the Father is not paying for our sins; the Father is in heaven ruling and reigning. The Son is dying on the cross. They are both equally God, but yet there is a distinction in personhood.

Now, the other thing that's important to understand—sorry, I backtrack for a little bit—this is encompassed in a creedal statement called the Athanasian Creed. The amazing Athanasian Creed didn't come from Athanasius, the church father, as much as it was drawn from ideas that Athanasius developed.

So, it came after him, but it was pulled from his teachings as a professor of the church. In it, it says this: "This is the universal faith that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, neither blending their persons nor dividing their essence."

Essence is just another description of what I referred to as being one God encompassed by three co-equal, co-eternal persons: the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.

It's statements like the Athanasian Creed, or there's a longer example of that in the Nicene Creed, which comes much earlier in the fourth century. But this works as a good summation that this is the faith that Christianity universally believes: that we worship one God in Trinity and Trinity in unity, and that we don't divide or confuse their essence for their being with their personhood.

Otherwise, you start to fall into error and significant issues. I want to illustrate this with a term that I'm going to use that I didn't come up with. Two New Testament scholars, Rob Bowman and Ed Klink, came up with it in a book called "Putting Jesus in His Place."

They use this acronym H.A.N.D.S.: honors, attributes, names, deeds, and seat. When we look at how each individual in the Trinity is described, what we see is that the Father is given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds, and the seat of God.

When we look in Scripture and see how the Son is described, we see that he's given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds, and the seat of God. And when we see how the Spirit is described, we see him being given the honors, the attributes, the names, the deeds, and the seat of God.

This is a reality that we see through Scripture. Jesus was not just a mere conduit of God; he was not just a mere prophet; he was not just a messenger. He uses categories; he does things that you can't attribute to anyone but God.

For example, he's given the honors of God. What's one of the most popular statements in the Gospel of John? One way that Jesus talks about himself is through the "I am" statements. "I am" is a title of God.

In fact, that first verse that I put on the screen, Isaiah 43:10, says, "You are my witnesses," declares the Lord, "and a people whom I've chosen, so that you may know that I am." Before me, there was no God formed, nor will there be one after me.

And Jesus uses this title, which also has echoes of Exodus and Moses at the burning bush, for himself. If you see the way that his audience reacts, they know what he's doing. They pick up stones to stone him. Why? Because he's committing blasphemy; he's claiming an honor that only God can claim.

With attributes, one of my favorite attributes that Jesus uses is one that's often not talked about in books when you read about the divinity of Christ. It's this title that's used in different ways throughout all the Gospels.

In the Synoptics, it's a title that Jesus talks about being "Lord of the Sabbath." In one of the stories, Jesus is walking through a field on the Sabbath day, and his disciples are picking food and eating it. They're accused of working on the Sabbath.

Jesus's response is that he is the Lord of the Sabbath. In the Gospel of John, he says, "My Father is working, and I am working to this day as well." We may not understand what's going on there, but the title "Lord of the Sabbath" was an acknowledgment that God's people rest on the Sabbath day.

But God is keeping the planet spinning in orbit. There is one person who is, at least to some degree, working on the Sabbath day in the sense that the sun is still rising. When Jesus says, "I am the Lord of the Sabbath," he's essentially claiming to keep the cosmos in order.

That is a crazy thing to attribute to yourself. That's an insane thing to attribute to yourself unless you can back it up.

He's also given the names. As I said, he refers to himself as the "I am." He also refers to himself as the "Son of Man," which ironically, when I was growing up, I always thought that the "Son of God" meant that he was divine, and the "Son of Man" meant that he was human.

Those were like the two components. But if you actually look at the title "Son of Man," particularly in Daniel, it's a divine title. If you go back to Daniel chapter 7, you see that there's one like a "Son of Man" whom Daniel sees in a vision, and he's coming on the clouds of heaven.

Now, in the ancient Near East, the only people who came on the clouds of heaven were gods. We have this character who is riding on the clouds of heaven, and all authority and dominion and power are being given to him.

Now, we know because of other Scriptures that dominion, authority, and power are due only to Yahweh. And then what does this "Son of Man" do? He sits down at the right hand of the Ancient of Days.

Now, you have two persons identified there: the Ancient of Days and the "Son of Man." The "Son of Man" is referred to as a divine being. Jesus talks about this. In fact, John, in the first session, talked about three specific instances where Jesus himself, the "Son of Man," is mentioned 80 times throughout the Synoptic Gospels.

But this was his favorite way of identifying himself. We see at his trial when they ask him, "Are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One?" What does he say? He says, "I am, and you shall see the Son of Man riding on the clouds of heaven."

What do the chief priests do? They tear their robes and say, "You have heard the blasphemy." Now, there is no law, he says, "is blasphemy," and by that law, this man must die. There is no law against calling yourself the Son of God, but there is a law against calling yourself God.

And that's what Jesus is doing by attributing a name like the "Son of Man" or the "I am" to himself.

And deeds: at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Mark gets this bad rap for not being as clear on the divinity of Christ as the Gospel of John. I think that's not necessarily true because when we start off, we start off with Jesus being referred to as the "Son of God."

You know, the Gospel according to Mark talks about the "Son of God," and then we have him being identified by John the Baptist. There's a quotation from Isaiah which says, "Make way." Everybody remember the passage?

Yeah, "Make way the path for the Lord." Now, it's applied, if you go back to that passage, to Yahweh God in Isaiah. John the Baptist applies it to Jesus. So, right off the bat, Jesus is being identified: "Make a straight path for Yahweh," who shows up as Jesus.

Then our first instance of Jesus at the synagogue is he casts out a demon, and then he heals someone. When he heals this man, he says, "Your sins are forgiven." What's the retort by his audience? "Who can forgive sins but God alone?"

He's doing the deeds that God can do. He's healing people; he's bringing people back from the dead; he's forgiving their sins—something only God can do.

And then the seat: what do I mean by that? Well, Jesus, like the "Son of Man," ascends to heaven after his resurrection and sits down at the right hand of the Father Almighty. He's given an authority that only Yahweh is given.

We see this time and time again. These are just a few examples, but we see them for the Father, for the Son, and for the Holy Spirit.

Now, this brings me to sort of a closing point, but this is what I want to highlight. We know particularly in 1 John that God is identified as a God of love, and we see this all through Scripture.

In fact, one of the most repeated phrases in the Bible is this phrase: "God, a compassionate God, merciful and abounding in steadfast love." We see this in Deuteronomy, and Jonah—that's Jonah's beef with God.

You know, "I didn't want to go to Nineveh because I knew you were so loving, and I knew you would forgive these no-good rotten Ninevites." His beef is that God is too loving.

Then we get to 1 John, and we see he says, "The person who does not love does not know God because God is love."

Now, this is an interesting concept of God being love. It's not something, if you study other world religions, that you get. You do have deities who are loving, but this idea that God is love is something unique to Christianity.

In fact, in something like Islam, you have 99 names of Allah. Now, one of them is the loving, but love specifically is not one of them. Allah is not love. In fact, if you read the Quran and the Islamic sources, God is loving but only to those who obey.

He's actually not loving to those who disobey. But love is an interesting thing because love requires an object and a subject. You don't wake up in the morning and love; that's weird.

There's a lover and a loved, if you want to put it that way. I love my wife; I love my son; I love pizza—although in a different way than I love my wife and my son, right? There is an object and there is a subject of the one who is loving and the object of the devotion.

Now, there's something that philosophers refer to as the philosophical problem of love because of this issue. Love requires an object and a subject.

So, what we see within Christianity is unique because we have God existing eternally in a set of living, loving relationships. The Father loves the Son; the Son loves the Spirit; the Spirit loves the Father.

This has happened eternally. God has existed eternally as a set of living, loving relationships.

And so, for this problem—the philosophical problem of love—we don't have to have God creating to experience love. But if God is not complex in his unity, if God is Unitarian in his being and one in his person, then he does have to create to experience love.

In that sense, God would be dependent on his creation to experience love because outside of himself, he cannot feel it. It requires an object and a subject.

If God is a Unitarian deity, if God is one in his being and one in his person, he doesn't know what love is until he creates the world and you and I. Then God is fulfilled.

But we know that that's not true. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity solves the problem of love. God did not need to create; he did so as an outpouring of the love that he has for his own glory in existing as a set of living, loving relationships.

Whoever thought about the fact that God is no worse off or better off whether I love him or not? God doesn't lose anything. God is still all-powerful and all-knowing; he's still omnipotent. He doesn't need me.

So why does God create? God creates because he loves. God creates as an outpouring of his love. He didn't need to create; he didn't need to put up with us continually turning against him, especially the actions of our first parents, Adam and Eve.

He didn't need to do that; it wasn't required of him. And yet he did. Why did he do that?

You see this love manifest by the Son being sent by the Father and voluntarily going to the cross. That's the culmination of what we see in God's love.

The cross is not a contingency plan based on the fact that his creation messed up. In fact, both in Peter's letter and in Revelation, we see hints of the fact that before the creation of the world, before the foundations of the earth were laid, the Lamb was slain.

It wasn't a contingency plan; God knew what he was doing the whole way along.

And without the Trinity, the cross is made useless because God sends the Son in an act of love, and the Son goes voluntarily. "No one takes my life from me; I give it up of my own accord," Jesus says.

Without the Trinity, not only is the philosophical problem of love an issue for the God that we worship because he would be dependent, but God's love and forgiveness are also not an issue.

I was listening to this interview recently, and it was a talk given. In the Q&A, someone stood up and asked, "Why is the Trinity central to the gospel?"

The answer given by Lig Duncan in this Q&A panel was, "That's kind of like asking why is your spouse essential to your marriage." Or better yet, replace the word "Trinity" with "God."

Now ask me, "Why is God central to the gospel?"

Why is the gospel, or why is the Trinity essential to the gospel? Because without the Trinity, there is no gospel. It's made null and void; it's made useless because it's only by God, within this complex unity, sending of himself in the second person of the Trinity who steps out of eternity and puts on humanity and then voluntarily goes for the sin of his people, taking that upon himself—that is the gospel.

It's a self-giving. The Trinity is as essential as you can get to who God is and to what Christianity is.

Now, there are some book recommendations on the screen, but while those are up there, I just want to explicate that by saying you cannot understand the cross without the Trinity because it doesn't make any sense.

The whole concept of atonement, of being made right with God, becomes irrelevant. Why? Because the whole concept of our forgiveness as sinners at the cross—that central point of history—comes down to the Father sending his one and only Son, empowering those whom he gives faith with the Holy Spirit.

The gospel and the whole Christian worldview is predicated on the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. We come to the Father through the Son by the empowerment of the Holy Spirit.

The Trinity is as essential to the Christian faith as anything.

Who could describe the love of God? God exists in a set of living, loving relationships. He doesn't need us, but he invites us to participate in that.

God is no better off, as I said, or no worse off if we do or don't love him back. And what does the Bible say? That before we loved him, he already loved us.

That he died for his people knowing who they were. He knit us together in our mother's womb, and he knew our names. The Bible says he knows the hairs on our head—the number of the hairs on our head. For some of us, that's more than others.

But what this encompasses, this complex idea of the Trinity that I think realistically we find a little bit complicated, is the idea that God is love—not that love is God, don't get me wrong—but God is love.

In the beginning, there was light and life and love. There was a Father loving his Son in the joy of the Holy Spirit, and everything was coming from light and life and love.

This world that we live in is not like that, and I know that this world is not like that. We look around and see darkness and death and destruction.

Now, where does that come from? Well, we've turned from the light. And where else do you go when you've turned from light? The darkness. When you turn from love, where else do you go but destruction? When you turn from life, where else do you go but death?

And this is the kind of world that we live in. But when love sees the beloved in trouble, he says, "Your pitch will be my pity; your plight will be my plight; your depths will be my depths; your darkness will be my darkness; your death will be my death."

Jesus is love come down. The Son of the Father comes and becomes our brother to be with us in the darkness, to take that darkness on himself on the cross, to take that destruction on himself—even to death, a death which we all deserve for turning from God.

He plunges it down into the hell that it deserves and rises again to light and life and love and says, "You in the darkness, do you want my light? You in the death, do you want my life? You in the disconnection, do you want my love?"

Anyone who simply says yes to Jesus will get Jesus's life. We'll get his Father as our Father; we'll get his Spirit as our Spirit; we get his future as our future.

It is free forever because God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that all those believing in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

By grace, you are saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone can boast.

In this is love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and gave his Son as a sacrifice for us. God demonstrates his love in this by dying for us while we were still sinners.

He did it all.

So, the question is: what is the gospel, and how do I get it? I simply ask, "Do you want Jesus?"

So, what does the Trinity have to do with the gospel? What doesn't the Trinity have to do with the gospel? The Trinity is the gospel message in its fullness and entirety.