The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief

by James R. White

when speaking of the Trinity, we need to realize that we are talking about one what and three who’s. The one what is the Being or essence of God; the three who’s are the Father, Son, and Spirit. We dare not mix up the what’s and who’s regarding the Trinity.

Thirdly, we are told that the relationship among these divine persons is eternal. They have eternally existed in this unique relationship.

The Father is not ⅓ of God, the Son ⅓ of God, the Spirit ⅓ of God. Each is fully God, coequal with the others, and that eternally.

Every error and heresy on this doctrine will find its origin in a denial of one or more of these truths.

The Trinity is a doctrine for Bible-believing people.

The only folks who are truly biblical are those who believe all the Bible has to say on a given topic.

Christians believe in the Trinity not because the term itself is given in some creedlike form in the text of Scripture. Instead, they believe in the Trinity because the Bible, taken in its completeness, accepted as a self-consistent revelation of God, teaches that there is one Being of God (Foundation One) that is shared fully (Foundation Three) by three divine persons (Foundation Two), the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There is, therefore, no contradiction between being a “Bible believer” and holding to the Trinity.

Each of the three sides represents a foundational truth. When any one of these truths is denied, the other two sides form an arrow that point to the resultant error.

This diagram also points out how balanced we must be in our study of this important subject. Failing to believe one fundamental element of God’s revelation will lead us into grave danger and error.

Most often people confuse modalism, the belief that God exists in three “modes” (Father, Son, and Spirit), but is only one person, with the real doctrine of the Trinity.

It is important to emphasize that we are not saying that the Father is the Son, nor that the Son is the Spirit. That is not the doctrine of the Trinity, despite how many people in honest ignorance think otherwise. No true Trinitarian believes the Father was a “ventriloquist” at the baptism of Jesus, nor that Jesus was praying to himself in the Garden of Gethsemane.

If you are a Christian, you are a theologian. You have no choice. Theology is simply knowing about God.

The primary focus of this chapter is to establish the very foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity: absolute, uncompromised monotheism. Monotheism—the belief in one true and eternal God, maker of all things—is the first truth that separates Christianity from the pagan religions of the world.

Anyone who thinks that the doctrine of the Trinity compromises absolute monotheism simply does not understand what the doctrine is teaching.

If we wish to know God truly, we must be willing to allow Him to reveal to us what He wants us to know, and He must be free as to how He wants to reveal it.

Monotheism. One God, Yahweh. No other gods beside Me. These are basic and fundamental truths confessed by Jews and Christians alike.

In Isaiah’s prophecy we find the most explicit testimony to God’s utter uniqueness and to the resultant truth of absolute monotheism. Here, in chapters 40 through 48, we find what I like to call the “Trial of the False Gods.”

There is no excuse for idolatry, no defense for polytheism. This is the true Creator, the Maker of heaven and earth, and the men who dwell on the earth.

God does not exist in the same mode or way we do. He is utterly unlike us in many aspects. One truth about God’s existence that is very difficult for us to grasp (but very important for us to struggle with) is that He is not limited to time and space.

as spirit and is therefore “omnipresent.” It is best to think of omnipresence more in the realm of “lack of spatial limitations” than anything else.

God’s being is not limited. And since God is omnipresent, another important truth can be seen: God’s being cannot be divided. What is half of omnipresence? How can the infinite be divided into parts? We will see why this is important when we consider how all the fullness of the being of God is shared completely by each of the Divine Persons of the Trinity.

We struggle with God’s eternity. We cannot grasp it. Our lives are conditioned by the passing of time. Our language itself is based upon tenses: past, present, future.

The doctrine of the Trinity is based upon this firm foundation. We are no proclaimers of a plurality of gods. We have no allegiance but to the same God who appeared to Moses in the burning bush. The Trinity in no way, shape, or form compromises this fundamental truth—it does, however, fulfill it, bring it to full realization, and reveal to us how this one true and eternal God exists as three coequal and coeternal persons.

The prologue of John is a literary masterpiece. Its balance is almost unparalleled. It is a carefully crafted work of art, a revelation that has inspired believers for almost two thousand years.

Few passages of Scripture are more important to our study of the Trinity, and in particular, of the person of the Son, than the prologue of John.

You see, John clearly intended this passage to function as a lens, a window of sorts, through which we are to read the rest of his Gospel. If we stumble here, we are in danger of missing so much of the richness that is to be found in the rest of the book. But if we work hard to grasp John’s meaning here, many other passages will open up for us of their own accord, yielding tremendous insights into the heart of God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ.

In the same way, the prologue of John calls us to do some work, to stretch ourselves beyond what might be our “comfort zone,” but the reward is more than worth it.

John didn’t write the prologue in English, and the person who wishes to delve deeply into his meaning will seek to hear him speaking as he once spoke in the beautiful Greek language.

Each of the terms provided above is very important, and as we work through the prologue, you will see how each word reinforces the truth of the Christian belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures as well as in the deity of Jesus Christ.

We must keep foremost in our thinking the purpose of John’s prologue. It can be summed up rather simply: Who is the Word?

Right at the start we must ask why John would use such a term as “the Word.” What is he attempting to communicate?

The Greek term translated “Word” in this passage is logos. It is certainly not an unusual term. It appears three hundred and thirty times as a noun in the Greek New Testament alone. It has a wide range of meanings, from the basic “word” to merely a “matter” or a “thing.” So why would John choose such a word for such an important task?

The Greeks had used the term logos in their philosophical explanations regarding the functioning of the world. The logos was for them an impersonal ordering force, that which gave harmony to the universe. The logos was n...

Such passages as Psalm 33:6, “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, and by the breath of His mouth all their host,” lent themselves to the idea that there was more to the “word” than one might see at first glance.

Compare this with the verb he chooses to use when speaking of everything else—found, for example, in verse 3: “All things came into being through Him,” ἐγένετο, egeneto. This verb[2] contains the very element missing from the other: a point of origin.

Why emphasize the tense of a little verb? Because it tells us a great deal.

The Word is eternal, but the Word was not alone in eternity past. “The Word was with God (πρὸς τὸν θεόν).” Yes, it is the same word “was,” again pointing us to an eternal truth. The Word has eternally been “with God.”

Just as Greek verbs are often more expressive than their English counterparts, so too are Greek prepositions.

Immediately, questions about how this can be pop into our minds, but for the moment we must stick with the text and follow John’s thought through to its conclusion. He will answer our question about the identity of “God” in due time.

It is the word any monotheistic[7] Jew would use to describe the Almighty God, Yahweh, the Creator of all things. Someone such as John would never think that there were two eternal beings. John will explain himself soon enough.

The third clause of John 1:1 balances out the initial presentation John is making about the Word. We read, “and the Word was God (θεός ἠν ὸ λόγος).” Again, the eternal en.

John avoids contradiction by telling us that the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

If John were making this an equation, like this: All of the “Word” = All of “God” he would be contradicting himself. If the Word is “all” of God, and God is “all” of the Word, and the two terms are interchangeable, then how could the Word be “with” himself? Such would make no sense. But John beautifully walks the fine line, balancing God’s truth as he is “carried along” by the Holy Spirit (2 Peter 1:21, NIV). John avoids equa...

We need to realize that in Greek the order in which words appear is not nearly as important as it is in English. The Greeks had no problem putting the subject of a sentence, or its main verb, way down the line, so to speak. Just because one word comes before another in Greek does not necessarily have any significance. What does this have to do with John 1:1? Well, in English, the final phrase would be literally rendered, “God was the Word.”

But in English, we put the subject first, and the predicate nominative later. The Greeks used the article to communicate to us which word is the subject, and which is the predicate. If one of the two nouns has the article, it is the subject. In this case, “Word” has the article, even though it comes after “God,” and hence is our subject. That is why the last phrase is translated “the Word was God” rather than “God was the Word.”

If both of the nouns in a predicate nominative construction like this one have the article, or if both lack the article, this is significant as well. In that case, the two nouns become interchangeable.

Or, if neither of them had the article, we would have the same idea: an equating of all of God with all of the Word. “God” and “Word” would be interchangeable and equal terms.

You see, much has been made, especially by Jehovah’s Witnesses, of the fact that the word “God” in the last clause of John 1:1 is anarthrous, that is, without the article.

You will notice that there is no form of the Greek article preceding the term θεός (theos). Because of this, they argue that we should translate it “a god.” This completely misses the poi...

If John had put the article before theos, he would have been teaching modalism, a belief we mentioned earlier that denies the existence of three divine persons, saying there is only one person who sometimes acts like the...