The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief

by James R. White

I love the Trinity.

Any revelation of God’s truth is an act of grace, of course, but the Trinity brings to us a blessing far beyond the worth normally assigned by believers today. Why? Because, upon reflection, we discover that the Trinity is the highest revelation God has made of himself to His people.

As I will assert more than once in this work, God revealed this truth about himself most clearly, and most irrefutably, in the Incarnation itself, when Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God, took on human flesh and walked among us.

A person who wants to “know Jesus” must, due to the nature of God’s revelation, know Him as He is related to the Father and the Spirit. We must know, understand, and love the Trinity to be fully and completely Christian. This is why we say the Trinity is the greatest of God’s revealed truths.

Why has the Trinity become a theological appendage that is more often misunderstood than rightly known?

There is the utterly false idea that God does not want us to use our minds in loving and worshiping Him (anti-intellectualism),

The idea that there is some kind of contradiction between the in-depth study of God’s Word, so as to know what God has revealed about himself, and a living, vital faith is inherently self-contradictory.

This book is not meant to be a handbook of all the “arguments” you can use to “prove” a point. There are plenty of such works in existence. Instead, this work is written by a believer for other believers. While I must explain and teach, illustrate and document, I do so to achieve a higher goal.

I wish to invite you, my fellow believer, to a deeper, higher, more intense love of God’s truth. It is my longing that when you complete this work, you will not simply put it down and say, “I got some good ammunition to use the next time I debate the Trinity.”

Instead, I hope that God, in His grace, will use this to implant in your heart a deep longing to know Him even more. I pray that longing will last the rest of your life, and that it will result in your loving Him more completely, worshiping Him more fully, honoring Him with the totality of your life....

True worship must worship God as He exists, not as we wish Him to be. The essence of idolatry is the making of images of God.

But most importantly, Edwards was drawn heavenward by the very attributes of God that turn the worldly person cold and, in fact, are often the most offensive to the natural or unsaved man. Do we love God—all of God, including the “tough” parts of His nature—or do we refuse to bow before those elements that cause us “problems”? If we love Him and worship Him as He deserves, we will not dare to “edit” Him to fit our desires. Instead, we will seek to worship Him in truth.

The Trinity is a truth that tests our dedication to the principle that God is smarter than we are.

I truly believe that in most instances where a religious group denies the Trinity, the reason can be traced back to the founder’s unwillingness to admit the simple reality that God is bigger than we can ever imagine.

“mystery” of the Trinity. The term has never meant that the Trinity is an inherently irrational thing. Instead, it simply means that we realize that God is completely unique in the way He exists, and there are elements of His being t...

When men approach God’s truth with a haughty attitude, they often decide that particular elements of that truth are not “suitable” to them, so they “modify” the message of the faith to fit their own notions.

Since the Trinity is the highest of God’s revelations concerning himself, it is hardly surprising to discover that many groups deny it.

An unwillingness to worship God as God is and has revealed himself lies behind every denial of the Trinity that appears down through history.

We want a God we can fit in a box, and the eternal, Triune God does not fit that mold.

Take out of the New Testament the person of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and there is no God left.

Mysterious as it is, the Trinity of Divine Revelation is the doctrine that holds in it all the hope of man; for it holds within it the infinite pity of the Incarnation and the infinite mercy of the Redemption.

And it shares its mysteriousness with the doctrine of the Divine Eternity. It is difficult to say which is most baffling to human comprehension, the all-comprehending, simultaneous, successionless consciousness of the Infinite One, or his trinal personality. Yet no theist rejects the doctrine of the Divine Eternity because of its mystery. The two doctrines are antithetic and correlative.

One attitude of the heart struggles against an eternal God, desiring to make Him “more like us.”

The more exhaustive our knowledge of God’s revelation, the deeper our love for Him will be.

I wish to bring my love for the Trinity into the hearts of many of my fellow believers. As a result, I have done my best to avoid the temptation that comes from having defended this great truth against those who deny it: to attempt to be exhaustive at every point.

My reason was simply to make sure that the final result was readily available to the widest possible audience.

The single greatest reason people struggle with the doctrine of the Trinity is miscommunication.

It is very rare that anyone actually argues or debates about the real doctrine of the Trinity.

It is basic to human communication to define terms. Yet so many people have so much emotional energy invested in the Trinity that they often skip right past the “definitions” stage and charge into the “tooth and claw” stage.

Historically speaking, many of the early battles over the doctrine centuries ago had to do with one side using a certain set of terms in one way, and the other the same set of terms in another way. This was made even more a difficulty by the fact that you had Greek-speaking people trying to understand what Latin-speaking people were saying, and vice versa.

Today we can look back and realize that early on both sides were saying the same thing, only they were saying it with different words. If someone had just sat down and defined terms clearly and fo...

When it comes to the central affirmation of the triune nature of God, most of the time we leap right past the “formalities” and directly into ...

we must resist the temptation to bypass the necessary “groundwork” and insist that everyone define what they believe the Trinity to be, and how they are going to be using many of the key terms that come into play. Without this first step, little else will be accomplished.

Before we present a definition of the Trinity, it is important to point out that we face a real difficulty right at the start: language itself.

We struggle because language is a finite means of communication. Finite minds are trying to express in words infinite truths.

Humans communicate by means of examples.

When we encounter new thoughts, new ideas, it is natural for us to fit them into preexisting categories by comparing them with past experiences or facts. This process works just fine for most things. But for unique things, it doesn’t. If something is truly unique, it cannot be compared to anything else, at least not without introducing some element of error.

The problem is, of course, God is completely unique. He is God, and there is no other. He is totally unlike anything else, and as He frequently reminds us, “To whom then will you liken Me?” (Isaiah 40:25).

There is no answer to that question, because to compare God to anything in the created order is, in the final analysis, to deny His uniqueness.

When we say, “God is like . . .” we are treading on dangerous ground. Yes, we might be able to illustrate a certain aspect of God’s being in this way, but in every instance the anal...

Our language fails us in two other ways as well. First, our languag...

Thus, when we speak of Him with our language, we are forced to place misleading limitations upon His being. This often causes real problems for us in discussing His triune nature, for we slip into the all-too-human mode of thinking as time-based, time-limited creatures.

The second way in which our language fails us has to do with what I call “excess baggage.”

particular mental images every time we hear it. The most glaring example of this is the word “person,” a word that is often used when discussing the Trinity. When we use the word “person,” we attach to it all sorts of “baggage” that comes from our own personal experiences. We think of a physical body, an individual, separate from everyone else. We think of a spatial location, physical attributes like height, weight, age—all things associated with our common use of the word “person.” When we use this word to describe a divine person (Father, Son, or Holy Spirit), we tend to drag along with it the “baggage” that comes from our common use of the term in everyday life.

It will be our task (and it is a difficult one!) to labor to separate such “baggage” from our thinking and use such terms in very specific, limited ways so as to avoid unneeded confusion.

Within the one Being that is God, there exists eternally three coequal and coeternal persons, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

First, the doctrine rests completely upon the truth of the first clause: there is only one God.

It not only asserts that there is only one God—the historic belief, shared by Christians and Jews known as monotheism—but it also insists that God’s “Being” (capitalized so as to contrast it with the term “persons” found in the next clause) is one, unique, undivided, indivisible.

But for now, the emphasis of the first clause is monotheism and the assertion that there is only one true God. Second, the definition insists that there are three divine persons. Note immediately that we are not saying there are three Beings that are one Being, or three persons that are one person.

What “person” means when we speak of the Trinity is quite different than when we speak of creatures such as ourselves.