What Is the Trinity? (Crucial Questions)
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Read between December 4 - December 9, 2020
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Some people think that the doctrine of the Trinity means that Christians believe in three gods. This is the idea of tritheism, which the church has categorically rejected throughout its history.
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Others see the Trinity as the church’s retreat into contradiction.
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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.
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In the nineteenth century, thinkers were preoccupied with the concept of evolution, but not simply with respect to biology. Evolution became almost a buzzword in the academic world and in the scientific community, and it was applied not only to the development of living things, but also to political institutions.
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They worked with this assumption: All spheres of creation, including religion, follow the pattern of evolution we see in the biological realm, which is evolution from the simple to the complex. In the case of religion, this means that all developed religions evolved from the simple form of animism.
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So, the assumption was accepted that all religions begin with animism and progressively evolve.
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Those who hold to an evolutionary view of religion say that the next step in the process is polytheism: many gods.
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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.
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Assuming this evolutionary framework, the nineteenth-century critics challenged the idea that the Bible is consistently monotheistic.
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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.
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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.”
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These affirmations of monotheism are a startling dimension of Old Testament faith because of the rarity of such assertions in the ancient world. Most of the cultures of antiquity from which we have historical records were not monotheistic.
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The idea that there is one God was firmly established in the religion of Israel from the earliest pages of the Old Testament.
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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.
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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.
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The fact that there is this progress in revelation does not mean that what God reveals in the Old Testament He then contradicts in the New Testament. 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.
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In fact, the very word universe combines the concepts of unity and diversity—it describes a place of great diversity that nevertheless has unity.
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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.
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In the Hebrew, “O LORD, our Lord” reads “O Yahweh, our Adonai”; there is a clear connection between Yahweh and Adonai.
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That means that every human being knows of the existence of the Most High God, but the sinful character of humanity is such that all of us repress and bury that knowledge, and choose idols instead. That is why we are all held guilty before God.
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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.
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Elsewhere in Scripture, when people see the manifestation of angels and begin to worship them, the angels prevent them, saying that they are not to be worshiped because they are creatures. But Jesus accepted Thomas’ worship without rebuke. He recognized Thomas’ confession as valid.
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In these and many other passages in the New Testament, the deity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is set forth explicitly or implicitly. When considered together with the Bible’s clear teaching as to the oneness of God, the only conclusion is that there is one God in three persons—the doctrine of the Trinity.
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Nearly every Christian community in the world today affirms the assertions of the so-called ecumenical councils of church history, the two chief of which were the Council of Nicea in the fourth century and the Council of Chalcedon in the fifth century.
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Monarchianism, then, was the attempt to preserve the unity of God, or monotheism.
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The first great heresy that the church had to confront with respect to monarchianism was called “modalistic monarchianism” or simply “modalism.” The idea behind modalism was that all three persons of the Trinity are the same person, but that they behave in unique “modes” at different times.
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Modalists held that God was initially the Creator, then became the Redeemer, then becam...
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As you can see, the idea here was that there is only one God, but that He acts in different modes, or different expressions, from time to time.
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A second form of monarchianism that appeared was called “dynamic monarchianism” or “adoptionism.” This school of thought was also committed to preserving monotheism, but its adherents wanted to give honor and central importance to the person of Christ.
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Those who propagated this view held that at the time of creation, the first thing God made was the Logos, after which the Logos created everything else. So the Logos is higher than human beings and even angels. He is the Creator, and He predates all things except God. But He is not eternal, because He Himself was created by God, so He is not equal with God.
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Thus, it is proper to call the Logos the Son of God. However, He became the Son of God dynamically. There was a change. He was not always the Son of God, but His Sonship was something He earned.
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They also argued that the New Testament’s descriptions of Christ as “begotten” carry the implication that He had a beginning in time, and anything that has a beginning in time is less than God, because God has no beginning. In short, they believed the Logos is like God, but He is not God.
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With these affirmations, the church said that scriptural terms such as firstborn and begotten have to do with Christ’s place of honor, not with His biological origin. The church declared that Christ is of the same substance, being, and essence as the Father.
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The term monophysite consists of the now-familiar prefix mono, meaning “one,” and physite, which comes from the Greek phusis, meaning “nature.” So the word monophysite literally means “one nature.”
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The monophysite heresy taught that Jesus had only one nature.
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Eutyches was saying that in Christ there is only one nature—a divinely human nature, or, to express it the other way around, a humanly divine nature.
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In fact, the monophysite heresy sees Christ as neither God nor man, but as something more than man and less than God.
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Nestorius basically said that one person cannot have two natures; if there are two natures, there must be two persons.
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In the Nestorian heresy, the two natures of Christ were not merely distinguished, they were totally separated.
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We say that a human being is a duality—he has a physical dimension and a non-physical dimension, which the Bible describes in terms of body and soul. If I distinguish a person’s body from his soul, I do no harm to him, but if I separate his body from his soul, I not only harm him, I kill him.
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By not grasping the difference between distinguishing and separating, Nestorius essentially destroyed the biblical Christ.
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Jesus has two natures, a divine nature and a human nature, and at times He reveals His human side, while at other times He reveals His divine side. We can distinguish the two without separating them. But when the human nature perspires, it is still united to a divine nature that does not perspire.
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The Council of Chalcedon met in AD 451 to deal with the heresies of monophysitism and Nestorianism.
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This affirmation means that Jesus Christ, in the unity of His two natures, is both God and man. He has both a true divine nature and a true human nature.
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In reality, Chalcedon affirmed that Jesus has two natures, one of which is divine. His divine nature is fully divine; it’s not just semi-divine, it is completely divine. The divine nature of Christ possesses all of the attributes of deity, lacking none of them. At the same time, the human nature of Christ is fully human in terms of created humanity. The one thing we have that Jesus’ human nature does not have is original sin. He is like us in all respects except sin. He is as human as Adam was in creation. All of the strengths and limitations of humanity are found in the human nature of Jesus.