Hi friends,
Greetings to you,
I was invited to a meeting as a speaker which will be held next week. My subject is: Trinity. They requested me to talk on this subject as it has many questions in people‘s mind. Such are:
Please share your thoughts and advises here on Trinity with Bible verses, Illustrations and your thoughts? Thank you for help…
Your Brother,
Jayaraj
Views: 119
Hi Prakash! The Trinity concept is foundational to our understanding of who God is. In essence it is that there is one God who has revealed himself in three persons--Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not three gods (not polytheistic), and not one God who just takes different forms at different times, but one God with three distinct persons.
Below is an article from the New Bible Dictionary on this subject.
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TRINITY. The term ‘Trinity’ is not itself found in the Bible. It was first used by Tertullian at the close of the 2nd century, but received wide currency and formal elucidation only in the 4th and 5th centuries. Three affirmations are central to the historic doctrine of the Trinity: 1. there is but one God; 2. the Father, the Son and the Spirit is each fully and eternally God; 3. the Father, the Son, and the Spirit is each a distinct person. Nowhere does the Bible explicitly teach this combination of assertions. It may, nevertheless, be claimed that the doctrine of the Trinity is a profoundly appropriate interpretation of the biblical witness to God in the light of the ministry, death and resurrection-exaltation of Jesus—the ‘Christ event’.
I. The biblical basis for Trinitarian confession
The OT witness is fundamentally to the oneness of God. In their daily prayer, Jews repeated the Shema of Dt. 6:4, ‘The Lord our God, the Lord is one’. In this they confessed the God of Israel to be the transcendent creator, without peer or rival. Without the titanic disclosure of the Christ event, no one would have taken the OT to affirm anything but the exclusive, i.e. unipersonal monotheism that is the hallmark of Judaism and Islam. It was NT writers, exploring the implications of the revelation of God in the Son, who first provided the basis for interpreting this monotheism inclusively, i.e. as involving more persons than one. Initially this took Christocentric shape in various forms of the affirmation that Jesus was one with the Father. Recognition of the divine personhood of the Spirit was then seen to follow especially from Jesus’ exaltation Lordship of the Spirit. Once this step had been taken, it was natural for the later Church, which affirmed the unity of the Testaments in one Bible, to seek the Trinity in the OT too.
a. In the Old Testament
The robust monotheism of the OT concedes only a few hints of plurality within the One God. Principal amongst these are: 1. the enigmatic plurals in God’s own speech in Gn. 1:26; 3:22; 11:7; Is. 6:8; 2. occasions where two separate figures appear to be addressed as ‘God’ or ‘the Lord’ (Pss. 45:6–7; 110:1); 3. the ‘divine’ angelic trio who come to Abraham in Gn. 18:1–22; 4. the ‘word’ of God active in creation (Gn. 1:3; Ps. 33:6) and redemption (Is. 55:11); 5. the creative ‘wisdom’ figure of Pr. 8:22–31; 6. the Spirit of God, regularly portrayed as bringing God’s revelation, wisdom and empowering to his people. It is unlikely that any of these was understood by the OT authors or their contemporary readers to denote eternal personal distinctions within Israel’s one God. They would take 4 as poetic reference to God’s powerful command, and 5 as literary personification for God’s own wisdom. 2 and 3 would naturally be taken as instances of the common phenomenon of divine agency (an exalted creature indwelt by and representing God). The Spirit, 6, was considered the extension of God’s own ‘life’, ‘vitality’ and ‘person’ (after the analogy of the human spirit: cf. 1 Cor. 2:10–11!). The deliberative plurals (1) would be perceived as plurals of divine council. Only developments reflected in the NT make it appropriate to read a deeper (Trinitarian) sense into these passages.
b. In the life and teaching of Jesus
The gospels clearly present Jesus as the supreme agent of God’s messianic redemption and revelation. As the ‘Son of God’ (a Messianic title, rather than an ascription of divinity, in the Synoptic Gospels, though filial uniqueness of some kind is indicated in Mt. 11:27; Mk. 12:6; 13:32; Lk. 1:35), and as the Isaianic liberator empowered by the Spirit (cf. Lk. 4:18–21), Jesus brings God’s eschatological reign into the present. He does this through miracles of deliverance and healing (Mt. 12:15–21, 28; Lk. 7:18–23; Acts 10:38, etc.), through the extension of divine forgiveness and sonship to the marginalized (cf. Mk. 2:3–12; Lk. 7:36–50; 14:15–24; 15:1–32, etc.), and through transformative teaching which fulfils and surpasses the law of Moses in authority (Mt. 5:17–20; 12:5–6; Mk. 2:23–28; 7:14–23, etc.). In the fourth gospel, Jesus claims to be: the true Bethel (1:51—i.e. the place where heaven comes down to earth); the true temple (2:19–21); the source of the water of life and salvation (4:10, 14; 7:37–39); the true bread from heaven (6:25–59); the light of the world (8:12), and the life of the world to come (11:25). He preexists Abraham (8:58), he descends from the Father (3:13, 31–36), and he is so much one with the Father that to see and hear him is to see and hear the Father revealed (10:30, 38; 14:6–11; cf. 1:18). According to all four gospels, Jesus also anticipated ascension to the Father, and (in the Synoptics) that he would sit at his right hand (Mk. 14:62 par.).
These claims are entirely consistent with Trinitarian (or, at least, binitarian) thinking. But, taken on their own, they stop somewhat short of an outright claim to eternal, divine Sonship. The claims above are thus overpressed when taken (with the resurrection) as hard ‘proofs’ of Jesus’ divinity. It needs to be remembered that the disciples too worked miracles, were given the authority to forgive sins (cf. Jn. 20:23), and were called to share in the sort of unity with the Father and the Son, that the Son himself had evinced (so Jn. 17:21–22). Even Jesus’ claim to preexist Abraham does not itself ‘prove’ eternal divinity, for the angels and other heavenly creatures were considered to preexist the world. Similarly, at least some rabbis considered David might be given the seat at God’s right hand, in accordance with Ps. 110:1. In short, the claims above could all be accounted for (e.g.) on the understanding that Jesus thought of himself as a preexistent Messiah—i.e. an exalted divine agent of great glory, endowed with extraordinary powers and prerogatives, but a creature, nevertheless, in whom God dwelt uniquely—rather than God the Son.
But in one line of affirmation, Jesus makes a claim that goes beyond anything that could be considered possible of any creature, however exalted. In Jn. 15:26, 16:6 and Lk. 24:49, Jesus promises he will send/commission the Spirit to the disciples from heaven, and in Jn. 14:16–23 he teaches that the Spirit will mediate to them the presence of the Father and the Son (i.e. it is through the promised Spirit that Jesus and the Father are to make their self-revealing dwelling with the disciples). As the phrase ‘Spirit of God’ was understood as referring to God himself in action (speaking, revealing, empowering, etc.), Jesus’ implicit claim to be Lord of the Spirit goes beyond the bounds of creaturely possibility. The same claim also pushes pneumatology in a Trinitarian direction. The Spirit can no longer be thought of as a way of speaking of the Father himself, without making Jesus’ commissioning of the Spirit tantamount to his being Lord in some respect over the Father! It is not surprising that in the very context in which the Spirit is revealed as the One who will come as the Spirit of Jesus (i.e. in the Paraclete discourses of Jn. 14–16), the Spirit also emerges as a divine person, distinguishable from both the Father and the Son. Thus, (1) he comes from the Father and the Son as a full personal replacement for Jesus (‘another Paraclete of the same kind’: 14:16), (2) he is so united with them that he mediates their presence and activity (as Jesus had the Father’s), and (3) he glorifies the Son in his teaching, just as the Son had glorified the Father (Jn. 16:14; cf. 17:4). A similar perspective is perhaps encapsulated in the great commission of Mt. 28:19, where disciples are instructed to baptize in the one name of the Father and of the Son and of the Spirit.
c. The New Testament church and its writings
Peter’s Pentecost speech chimes well with the teaching in the Johannine Farewell Discourses. The apostle affirms, ‘This Jesus … being … exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you see and hear’ (Acts 2:32–33). Jesus is hereby declared to fulfil the promise of Joel 2:28–32 that God would pour out his Spirit (cf. 2:17). Accordingly, in 2:36, 38, Peter concludes that Jesus has become one with ‘the Lord’ of Joel 2:32 (cf. Acts 2:21) on whose name people should call for salvation.
While Trinitarian theology could have taken off from such proclamation, it is perhaps not surprising that the early church devoted more time to elucidating its Christology than its pneumatology. This was the appropriate response to the Christ-event, which was a scandal to unbelievers, but was perceived as the definitive revelation of God’s saving love by Christians. In seeking to demonstrate the proclamation about Jesus as the fulfilment of Israel’s faith and hopes, much attention naturally focused on Jesus as the resurrected Messiah, exalted to the throne at God’s right hand (e.g. Acts 2:25–36), and as the Danielic ‘Son of Man’ who would come again in glory at the Parousia to exercise God’s judgment. But some of these attempts to integrate the unity of the new faith with that of the OT pushed more towards a divine Christology. As early as 1 Cor. 8:6, the Father and Jesus are identified as the one God and one Lord of Dt. 6:4 (Israel’s prototypical monotheistic confession has thus become a binitarian confession!), and both are portrayed as the wisdom that brought creation into being and sustains it (cf. also Col. 1:15–20; Heb. 1:2–3; Jn. 1:1–18). Similarly, the assertion of Phil. 2:6, that Jesus was ‘in the form of God’ but ‘did not count equality with God as something to be exploited’ provides another early hymnic confession of Jesus’ pre-existent divinity. That this is the intent of the language is confirmed in 2:9–10, where the exalted Jesus is revealed as the Lord of Is. 45:21–24—as fiercely monotheistic a passage as can be found anywhere in the OT! Despite their conservative tendency to keep the title ho theos (‘God’) for the Father, on seven or eight occasions NT writers specifically apply the title ‘God’ to Jesus (Heb. 1:8—citing Ps. 45:6–7; Jn. 1:1, 18—some mss; 20:28; 1 Jn. 5:20; Rom. 9:5; Tit. 2:13 and 2 Pet. 1:1). Beyond these lie many less direct affirmations of divinity. Amongst them we may make special mention of two striking phenomena. 1. The opening salutations of Paul’s letters (Rom. 1:7; 1 Cor. 1:3, etc.) invoke divine grace from both God and the Lord Jesus (no Jew thought of any human or heavenly creature as the source of divine grace!). 2. Even more significantly, Jesus is offered the community’s prayer and worship (cf. Mt. 28:17; Jn. 20:28; Acts 7:59; 1 Cor. 16:22b (Maranatha!); Rev. 5:11–14; 22:1–5, 17, 20, etc., not to mention the hymnic confessions mentioned earlier). It was widely considered unthinkable and blasphemous to worship any but God alone within the Judaism from which Christianity sprang, yet worship here is directed to Jesus.
Scholars have not found it easy to explain how Christians came to this startling conviction that the crucified and resurrected Messiah was somehow one God with the Father, and that it was appropriate to offer him worship. But the readiest explanation is the church’s continuing experience of the risen Lord as presented to them through the Spirit. By the Spirit they had visions of him (cf. Acts 7:55–56; 9:10–16; 18:9–10; 22:17–21; 2 Cor. 12:1–7, etc.), including the telling visions in Revelation which saw the Lamb on God’s throne, receiving the worship of the heavenly congregation (Rev. 5, etc.). Also they themselves received words and guidance from the risen Lord (cf. Acts 16:17; 2 Cor. 12:8–9, etc.). More important, they experienced the Spirit of God as bearing the character of Jesus and impressing this on their own lives (cf. Rom. 8:9–10, 15; Gal. 4:6). If the Spirit of God had become the ‘Spirit of Jesus Christ’ too (cf. Acts 16:7; Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:9–10; Phil. 1:19), the means of the presence of Jesus’ grace and gifts (cf. Acts 2:33; 1 Cor. 12:4–6), then this could hardly mean anything less than that he shared in the divinity of the Father and the Spirit. Indeed the presence of this Spirit-of-God-and-of-Jesus would probably have been understood to evoke the response of confession, prayer and worship in question (cf. 1 Cor. 12:3; 14:14–16; Rom. 8:26–27).
All this takes us back from incipient binitarianism to incipient Trinitarianism. Once Jesus is seen to give his character to the Spirit, and to exercise Lordship through the Spirit, the church can no longer be content with the Jewish understanding of the Spirit as the invisible inner life of a uni-personal Father, extending into the world in action and self-revelation (lest the person now acknowledged as the Son be made Lord of the Father). For the Spirit to mediate the Father and the Son, implies his own divine personhood. Accordingly, Paul can even posit sufficient personal ‘space’ between God the Father and the Spirit to say that God ‘knows the mind of the Spirit’ who intercedes through the saints (Rom. 8:27): i.e. the Father knows the Spirit in the same way as he knows the Son, in intimate unity yet with a real distinction between them. It is not surprising that Paul links Father, Son and Spirit in a triadic, indeed triune pattern as for example in Gal. 4:4–6, 1 Cor. 12:4–6, Rom. 1:1–4, Eph. 4:4–6 (cf. 2 Pet. 1:2), and in what are probably Paul’s most often repeated words, the closing ‘grace’ of 2 Cor. 13:13.
While no NT writer fully articulates a ‘doctrine of the trinity’, the implicitly Trinitarian thought-forms of the teaching of Paul and John (especially) provide much of the basis for that later formulation.
Turner, M., & McFarlane, G. (1996). Trinity. In D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard, J. I. Packer & D. J. Wiseman (Eds.), New Bible dictionary (D. R. W. Wood, I. H. Marshall, A. R. Millard, J. I. Packer & D. J. Wiseman, Ed.) (3rd ed.) (1209–1211). Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
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