What Is the Doctrine of the Trinity?

Hello, I'm Kevin DeYoung, pastor at Christ's Coven a Church in Matthew's North Carolina,

and you are listening to Doctrine Matters.

Each week on Doctrine Matters, we explore the rich doctrine of the Christian faith.

We'll pull from the church's long history, complex debates, and over the course of the

year, the hope is that we'll begin to frame out what is a clear, accessible, systematic

theology.

We'll be looking at different Christian doctrines and their relationship to each other, and

the hope Lord willing is we will grasp more and more the riches and the beauty of God's

Word.

Thanks for listening.

Let's turn to this week's Doctrine Matters.

We've been looking at the topic of theology proper, the doctrine of God, and having looked

at his incommunicable and communicable attributes, we now turn to the nature of God, or the

being of God.

We've looked at what God is like as attributes.

Now we want to turn to study who is this God.

This God is triune.

That's what we want to talk about, the Trinity.

The doctrine of the Trinity is perhaps the most important doctrine, period, and it's

almost certainly the most important doctrine that most Christians don't think nearly enough

about.

It often strikes people as a difficult kind of math problem.

You have three in one, and how does that work out?

But as Sinclair Ferguson has pointed out, it is remarkable that in John's Gospel, when

Jesus is facing betrayal, facing arrest, facing crucifixion, death, facing the wrath of God,

and he knows what is coming.

He spends his last hours with his disciples on earth in the upper room doing what?

He talks to them about the Trinity, and then in a high priestly prayer, it is unfolding

the mysteries, the inner workings of the Father and the Son.

Surely it says something about the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity that Christ would

spend his last hours with his disciples.

I mean, we would think, what's the most important thing you need to know before the Messiah

leaves you?

He's going to send his spirit to be with him.

That's part of what he teaches.

So he won't leave them in one sense.

He teaches them about the Trinity.

Of course, we need to know who God is.

Many Christians are very poor in their understanding, poorer in their articulation of this doctrine,

and poorest of all in understanding how the doctrine really matters.

And yet it is front and center in the great creeds and confessions of the church.

The apostles' creed is divided into three sections based on the Trinity.

I believe in God the Father.

I believe in Jesus Christ's only Son.

I believe in our Lord, or I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver of life.

The Athanasian creeds says, this is the Catholic faith that we worship one God in Trinity

and Trinity in unity.

The Belgian confession just to take one from the reformations is in keeping with this truth

in the Word of God.

We believe in one God who is one single essence in whom there are three persons, really truly

and eternally distinct according to their incomunicable properties, namely Father, Son,

and Holy Spirit.

Or think about Jesus, His last words before His ascension.

We know the Great Commission.

He tells His disciples that they are going to baptize people in the name of the Father,

Son, and Holy Spirit.

How then ought we to understand the doctrine of the Trinity?

Well, it is incredibly complex and deals with some of the most difficult doctrines.

Francis Turerton, who was no slouch when it came to theology, said at one point that

the two most difficult doctrines are the one God in three persons, the Trinity, and then

with Christology, the one person of Christ and the two natures, because both of those lead

us into certain ineffable mysteries.

But before we get to some of those terms, we can think biblically and lay out the doctrine

of the Trinity in a series of statements, seven statements.

There is only one God.

The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, the Father is not the Son,

the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not.

The Father, you may have seen this sort of diagram before with God written in the middle

and then Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and a line saying each of them is God, and then

a line going around the outside that each of those persons is not the other person.

So these seven statements can be shown manifestly from Scripture.

There is one God, there's lots of passages, the Shema, to 1 Timothy 1, lots of passages

that talk about there is one God, and there is this God is one, then there are a myriad

of passages which demonstrate that God is Father, that's rather obvious, and then scores

of text that prove the deity of Jesus Christ, the Son, the Word was God, Jesus said before

Abraham was I am, and him the whole fullness of deity dwells, and then there are texts

that assume the deity of the Holy Spirit, calling him the eternal Spirit, or using God interchangeably

with Spirit.

And then the shape of Trinitarian orthodoxy is rounded off by texts that hint at the plurality

of persons in the Godhead, from Genesis 1, 2 to 1 Corinthians 8, 6, many other passages.

That have triadic formulas of Christ's Spirit God or Spirit Lord Father that operate with

the assumption that we are talking about three persons who are distinct.

In other words, then the doctrine of the Trinity, before we get to all of the important

philosophical theological nuance, the doctrine of the Trinity can be outlined by these seven,

clearly, manifestly, biblical statements.

There is one God, the Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Spirit is God, the Father

is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father.

You take those seven statements, and everything else we're talking about is trying to explain

how can these seven statements, each of which can be shown, from texts in the Bible,

how can all of this be true at the same time?

Well, that's where we need to introduce some Trinitarian terms, and the most important is

the one and the three. Here's the Westminster confession. In the unity of the Godhead,

there be three persons. So you have three persons of one, substance, power, and eternity.

God, the Father, God, the Son, God, the Holy Ghost, the Father, now listen to this language

from Westminster. What we have here are called the personal properties. That is, what is proper

to each person and each person alone? What can be said of one person but not the other persons?

What distinguishes one person of the Trinity from another? That's what Westminster is giving

to us. So said, the Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding, and there are fancy

theological terms for that, but I like the way the confession puts it. That's what we're saying.

When we mean the Father, how is the Father not the Son? Well, because the Father is of none.

He's not begotten of another. He does not proceed from another. And then this is the Son

is eternally begotten of the Father. So that's the personal property of the Son. That makes sense.

A Son is one who is begotten of a Father. Now it says eternally begotten to tell us that this

takes place outside of time, that this is not a human beginning. He is not the first creation.

He's not a created being, but he is eternally begotten. God, the Father, communicating his essence

to God the Son. And then the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.

And there's many other complicated, even more complicated definitions. Aquinas has one of the

most famous, but what we can see here from Westminster, this basic outline. The three persons of the

Trinity are not three existences, strictly speaking, that is, they are not three independent beings.

So this is very hard. There's no analogy. Water rice vapor doesn't work. That's that's

modalism, an apple having, you know, seeds and the red skin and then the white stuff inside.

That doesn't work. There's no human analogy that is going to work to describe the ineffable

mystery of the Trinity. So the three persons are not independent beings. You don't want to think

of Father Son and Holy Spirit as, you know, that that old song really is one of my favorite songs.

American Pie by Don McLean and then the last verse and the three men I admire most. They caught

the last train to the coast. Father Son and Holy Ghost. So these are not three guys who can

ride a train together. They are three subsistences, meaning each person, hypothesis, shares the same

essence and can be identified equally as God. These three persons are distinguished by their

personal properties. That is by how each person relates to the other two. This is what the

Westminster Confession is teaching us. The Father is of none. He is the begetter of the Son.

The Son is the begotten of the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.

It may be easier to explain what we mean here by talking somewhat about what we don't mean.

So Orthodox Trinitarianism, that's what we're outlining here. What the church has believed

from the beginning and then finding its careful articulation in the 4th and 5th centuries.

Orthodox Trinitarianism rejects adoptionism, which believes that the power of God came upon Jesus

that is baptism thereby adopting him into the Godhead, deifying his humanity. So we're not saying

that. Orthodox Trinitarianism rejects monarchyanism. So mono there, meaning one,

archaes word for power or authority. So monarchyanism believes there's only one supreme divine

person and maintains that the Son and the Spirit subsist in the divine essence as impersonal

attributes. So not distinct divine persons. That's a heresy that was rejected in the early church.

Orthodox Trinitarianism also rejects modalism, sometimes called subbellionism after its

most famous proponents, subbellius. modalism believes that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are

different names for the same God acting in different roles or manifestations. This is the

well-intentioned but misguided water ice vapor analogy. Those are different modes of being,

the same chemical properties that exist in different modes of being. That's not what we're talking

about. Like the Father puts on one kind of clothes and then he comes out and he's the Son and then

he goes into the phone booth like Clark Kent and he takes that off and he comes out as the Father

and then does another costume change and he comes out as the Holy Spirit. Those are modes of being.

That's not what we mean. Orthodox Trinitarianism rejects Aryanism in all forms of

ontological subordinationism that deny the full deity of Christ.

Aryus was a a theologian in the fourth century. It was his teaching that prompted the Council

of Nicaea in 325. In Aryanism the full divine essence is only identified with the Father

so that then the Son and the Spirit are separate entities to not share in the divine nature.

They're subordinate. In fact in famous poem or hymn from Aryus he says that they share in

unequal glories was the language of Aryus. Now Orthodox Trinitarianism says all three persons share

same rank, power, glory and being. They are not created beings. They are rather uncreated. They

are eternal. And finally Orthodox Trinitarianism rejects all form of tri-theism which is when

you dig into Mormon theology really how they understand the Trinity that the three members of the

Godhead are three distinct beings. They will use the language of personages which are really three

separate gods. In Orthodox Trinitarian theology then God is one and the divine essence is held

in common by Father, Son and Holy Spirit. To put some theological terms we can say they are

consubstantial, co-inherent, co-equal, co-eternal. They are distinguished with respect to their

personal properties but they do not differ in authority, rank, power or glory. Gregory of Nazean's

4th century capidotian father put it memorably, no sooner do I conceive of the one

than I am illumined by the splendor of the three, no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried

back to the one. Such a great sentence to describe the doctrine of the Trinity that as we think

about God as one we ought to be pulled along to think of God as three Father, Son and Holy Spirit

and when we think of him as three we ought to quickly be drawn in to think of him as one.

One essence, three persons, the doctrine of the Trinity.

Thanks again for joining us on Doctrine Matters. I'm your host Kevin D. Young.

Our hope and prayer is that this has been helpful to you as you look at scripture and try to

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