What Is The Trinity? (Crucial Questions, #10)

by R.C. Sproul

For instance, I once had a conversation with a man who had a PhD in philosophy, and he objected to Christianity on the grounds that the doctrine of the Trinity represented a manifest contradiction—the idea that one can also be three—at the heart of the Christian faith. Apparently this professor of philosophy was not familiar with the law of non-contradiction. That law states, “A cannot be A and non-A at the same time and in the same relationship.” When we confess our faith in the Trinity, we affirm that God is one in essence and three in person. Thus, God is one in A and three in B. If we said that He is one in essence and three in essence, that would be a contradiction. If we said He is one in person and three in person, that also would be a contradiction. But as mysterious as the Trinity is, perhaps even above and beyond our capacity to understand it in its fullness, the historic formula is not a contradiction.

Before we can talk about the Trinity, we have to talk about unity, because the word Trinity means “tri-unity.” Behind the concept of unity is the biblical affirmation of monotheism. The prefix mono means “one or single,” while the root word theism has to do with God. So, monotheism conveys the idea that there is only one God.

Those who hold to an evolutionary view of religion say that the next step in the process is polytheism:

After polytheism, the next stage of religious development is called henotheism, which is a sort of hybrid between polytheism and monotheism, a transitional stage, as it were. Henotheism is belief in one god (the prefix hen comes from a Greek word for “one,” a different word from mono), but the idea is that there is one god for each people or nation, and each one reigns over a particular geographical area. For example, henotheism would hold that there was a god for the Jewish people (Yahweh), a god for the Philistines (Dagon), a god for the Canaanites (Baal), and so on. However, this view does not posit that there was only one god ultimately.

Orthodox arguments hold that monotheism was present at the very beginning of biblical history. We read in the very first verse of Scripture, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” The creation narrative affirms that the God who is introduced on the first page of the Pentateuch has the entire creation as His domain, not just the limited geographical boundaries of Old Testament Israel. God is sovereign over heaven and earth, having made them at the word of His command. Critics often note that in the early chapters of Scripture, there is a vacillation between two names for God. On the one hand, God is referred to as Jehovah or Yahweh; on the other hand, He is called Elohim. That name, Elohim, is striking because the suffix, him, is the plural ending of the Hebrew noun, so one could translate the name Elohim as “gods.” However, while the name Elohim has a plural ending, it always appears with singular verb forms. So the writer was saying something that could not be interpreted to mean “many gods.” Plus, as I noted above, God is revealed to us in the opening chapters of Genesis as the one who is sovereign over all things. So I think that those who hold that the name Elohim hints at polytheism are jumping to an incorrect conclusion.

When we come to Exodus 20, the account of the giving of the law, we see that the first commandment God gave on Sinai was strongly monotheistic. God said, “You shall have no other gods before me” (v. 3). Some would say this verse gives evidence of henotheism, because God is implying there are other gods, and the commandment is declaring that the people must not let those other gods outrank Him; He must be the chief deity in their lives. But the Hebrew indicates that when God says “before me,” He is saying, “In My presence.” His presence, of course, is ubiquitous; He is omnipresent. So when God says, “You shall have no other gods before me,” He basically is saying that when a person worships anything apart from Him, whether that person lives in Israel, Canaan, Philistia, or anywhere else, he engages in an act of idolatry, because there is only one God. The second commandment therefore reinforces the first with its blanket prohibition of all forms of idolatry.

Later in the Pentateuch, we find a striking statement of monotheism. It appears in the Shema, ancient Israel’s confession of its belief in one God: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4).

In the prophetic books, we see an almost constant diatribe against the false gods of other religions. These gods are seen not as competing deities but as useless idols. In fact, the prophets characteristically make fun of people who worship trees, statues, and other things they have made with their own hands, as if a block of wood could be inhabited by an intelligent being. They ridicule the ideas of animism and polytheism consistently.

We have to understand that the distinctions in the Godhead do not refer to His essence; they do not refer to a fragmentation or compartmentalization of the very being of God.

To understand how the doctrine of the Trinity came to be such an important article of the Christian faith, we need to see that there was a development of the church’s understanding of the nature of God based on the Scriptures. When we look into the Scriptures, we see what we call in theology “progressive revelation.” This is the idea that, as time goes by, God unfolds more and more of His plan of redemption.

Progressive revelation is not a corrective, whereby the latest unveiling from God rectifies a previous mistaken revelation. Rather, new revelation builds on what was given in the past, expanding what God has made known.

Even though we cannot find an explicit definition of the Trinity in the Old Testament, we do find scattered hints there about God’s triune nature.

We touched on one of those hints in chapter one—the name of God that appears in plural form, Elohim. The critics see the use of that name as an indication of a crass form of polytheism. Others, however, have seen in that plural name, particularly since it is accompanied by a singular verb, a cryptic reference to the plural character of God.

I believe that the name Elohim is compatible with the doctrine of the Trinity and may be hinting in that direction, but the name itself does not demand that we infer that God is triune in His nature.

It is also in the creation account that we first encounter the Spirit of God (Gen. 1:2). By bringing something out of nothing, the Spirit meets one of the criteria for deity that are set forth in the New Testament.

Another is found in the Old Testament passage that is quoted in the New Testament more often than any other text—Psalm 110.

Characteristically, when we see the personal name of God, Yahweh, in the Old Testament, we also see His chief or supreme title, Adonai, associated with it. For instance, Psalm 8 says, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (v. 1a). In the Hebrew, “O LORD, our Lord” reads “O Yahweh, our Adonai”; there is a clear connection between Yahweh and Adonai. In Psalm 110, however, God is having a conversation with David’s Lord: “The LORD [Yahweh] says to my Lord [Adonai]: Sit at my right hand. . . .” The New Testament picks up on this and talks about Jesus simultaneously being David’s son and David’s Lord. This psalm also provides another hint to the multiple dimensions of the being of God when it declares that God’s Son will be a priest forever, an eternal priest after the order of Melchizedek (v. 4).

The new element here is that Paul ascribes deity to Christ. He distinguishes between the Father and the Son, and he notes that all things are “from” the Father and “through” Christ, and that we exist “for” the Father and “through” the Son. Clearly, Paul is equating the Father and the Son in terms of Their divinity.

In John’s gospel, Jesus makes a number of “I am” statements: “I am the bread of life” (6:48), “I am the door” (10:7), “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (14:6), and others. In each of these statements, the wording in the Greek New Testament for “I am” is ego eimi. These Greek words also happen to be the words with which the essential name of God, Yahweh, is translated from the Hebrew. Jesus, then, by using this construction for Himself, is equating Himself with God.

There is another “I am” statement in John 8. Abraham was the great patriarch of Israel, the father of the faithful, who was deeply venerated by the Jewish community of Jesus’ day. Jesus told the Jewish leaders that Abraham had rejoiced to see His day (v. 56). When the leaders asked how Jesus could possibly have seen Abraham, He replied, “Before Abraham was, I am” (v. 58). He did not say, “Before Abraham was, I was.” Rather, He said, “I am.” In doing so, He made a claim to eternality and deity. What many people miss in our day, the first-century contemporaries of Jesus caught rather quickly. They were filled with fury against Jesus because He, a mere man in their eyes, made Himself equal with God.

John’s gospel also records the intriguing narrative of a post-resurrection appearance of Jesus.

Jesus accepted Thomas’ worship without rebuke. He recognized Thomas’ confession as valid.

The clearest reference to Jesus’ deity in the New Testament comes at the opening of John’s gospel. It reads, “In the beginning was the Word [that is, the Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1). In that first sentence, we see the mystery of the Trinity, because the Logos is said to have been with God from the beginning. There are different terms in the Greek language that can be translated by the English word with, but the word that is used here suggests the closest possible relationship, virtually a face-to-face relationship. Nevertheless, John makes a distinction between the Logos and God. God and the Logos are together, but they are not the same.

The New Testament also states that the Holy Spirit is divine. We see this, for instance, in Jesus’ triune formula for baptism. By the command of Christ, people are to be baptized in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19). Likewise, Paul’s closing benediction in his second letter to the Corinthians reads, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (13:14). The apostles also speak of the Father, Son, and Spirit cooperating to redeem a people for Themselves (2 Thess. 2:13–14; 1 Peter 1:2). In these and many other