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by
Fred Sanders
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March 25 - July 31, 2013
the doctrine of the Trinity continues to be treated as an awkward guest in the evangelical household.
Nothing we do as evangelicals makes sense if it is divorced from a strong experiential and doctrinal grasp of the coordinated work of Jesus and the Spirit, worked out against the horizon of the Father’s love. Personal evangelism, conversational prayer, devotional Bible study, authoritative preaching, world missions, and assurance of salvation all presuppose that life in the gospel is life in communion with the Trinity. Forget the Trinity and you forget why we do what we do; you forget who we are as gospel Christians; you forget how we got to be like we are. The central argument of this book is
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the gospel is Trinitarian, and the Trinity is the gospel.3 Christian salvation comes from the Trinity, happens through the Trinity, and brings us home to the Trinity.
When serious-minded evangelical Christians feel the desire to go deeper into doctrine or spirituality, they typically turn to any resources except for their own properly evangelical resources. A strange alienation of affections sets in. They cast about for something beyond what they already have, which leads them to look for something beyond the gospel. What sounded like such glad, good news at the outset (free forgiveness in Christ!) begins to sound like elementary lessons that should have been left behind on the way to advanced studies.
The gospel is so deep that it not only meets our deepest needs but comes from God’s deepest self.
A Deep God brings a Deep Gospel
the most strategic decision we ever make is the decision of what to emphasize.
When evangelicalism wanes into an anemic condition, as it sadly has in recent decades, it happens in this way: the points of emphasis are isolated from the main body of Christian truth and handled as if they are the whole story rather than the key points.
Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its one point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! the cross! the cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionist. The rest of the matrix matters:
What is needed is not a change of emphasis but a restoration of the background, of the big picture from which the emphasized elements have been selected.
Christians should recognize that when we start thinking about the Trinity, we do so because we find ourselves already deeply involved in the reality of God’s triune life as he has opened it up to us for our salvation and revealed it in the Bible.
The difference is that he had gotten on the inside of the doctrine.
Whereas he first encountered the doctrine as a problem, he came to understand it as a solution.
People can become Christians after learning a very small amount of doctrine and information. As they grow in discipleship, they read more of the Bible and come to understand more than they had understood before.
His radical Trinitarianism did not come from an advanced theology lesson; it came from the gospel and then led him to an advanced theology lesson. He was like a man who found a treasure hid in a field that he didn’t have to buy, because he already owned it. He heard God calling him to dig into the depths, and what he found there changed everything for him.
What is the difference between a belief in the Trinity that simply doesn’t matter and one that changes everything?
We know more than we can say about the Trinity, and we should not let ourselves be trapped into thinking that everything depends on our ability to articulate the mystery of the triune God.
It is possible to be radically Trinitarian without knowing it or to have amnesia about one’s real status. We may be formed and schooled by a movement that came into being as the most consistently Trinitarian force in the history of Christianity, but we can live in a way that is alienated from those Trinitarian riches.
Although the doctrine may still be dutifully taught and just as dutifully learned, it has long been viewed as an abstract series of propositions, an undigested lump of tradition or of revealed ideas. Like anything that should be living but is dead, it stays in its place and decays.
Trinitarian without knowing it, or of living in an encounter with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that we then give very weak and inadequate explanations of. We have the thing itself but act as if we do not know we have it.
Anybody who has encountered God in Christ through the Holy Spirit has come to know the Trinity. But not everybody in this position knows that they know the Trinity. When they move to that next level of knowing that they know the Trinity, a bright light shines on everything they knew before.
Trinitarianism is the encompassing framework within which all Christian thought takes place and within which Christian confession finds its grounding presuppositions. It is the deep grammar of all the central Christian affirmations.
God’s way of being God is to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simultaneously from all eternity, perfectly complete in a triune fellowship of love. If we don’t take this as our starting point, everything we say about the practical relevance of the Trinity could lead us to one colossal misunderstanding: thinking of God the Trinity as a means to some other end, as if God were the Trinity in order to make himself useful.
God the Trinity would have been God the Trinity whether he had revealed himself to us or not, whether he had redeemed us or not, whether he had created us or not.
Frederick W. Faber: When Heaven and Earth were yet unmade When time was yet unknown, Thou, in Thy bliss and majesty, Didst live, and love, alone.
Grace calls forth gratitude, and we answer with “thank you.” This is also, by the way, why we say the word please when we ask for something. It is a shortened form of the expression, “If it pleases you,” which is a way of recognizing that the person you are asking a favor from is not your servant but a free person who isn’t required to do your bidding. Good manners are good theology.
The conclusion, which Susanna Wesley found utterly unacceptable, would be that God depended on something outside himself to make possible his full self-expression.
Anti-Trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God’s perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately, leads . . . to pantheism.”
Balanced evangelical Trinitarianism does not just throw itself into the river of good news and swim away downstream; it also acknowledges the fountain from which that river flows.
Things like creation and redemption are things God does, and he would still be God if he had not done them. But Trinity is who God is, and without being the Trinity, he would not be God. God minus creation would still be God, but God minus Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would not be God.
God is essentially triune.
we should never rush to new covenant clarity if it means leaving behind old covenant profundity.
But as soon as he begins reflecting on that salvation, he has to ask, how did Jesus bring about this salvation? The answer is: through his death and resurrection, Jesus paid for my sin by making atonement to God. That is how the Bible portrays the predicament we are in and the deliverance that Jesus brings. As soon as this answer is given, though, it raises another question: Who must Jesus Christ be, if he is capable of saving people in this way? The answer is that he must be fully human and fully divine. See how the logic of salvation works its way out into ever wider circles of
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The Trinity is bigger than you and your salvation and has other things going on in the parts of the circle that don’t overlap with your circle. Those other parts of the Trinity circle are the rest of the fullness of God’s own life, the happy land of the Trinity.
But in the process, it nevertheless obscures something else. It takes for granted the fact that all our thinking starts where we are, and then works outward from that center point.
We ought to take God so seriously that we consider him more interesting than ourselves.
the doctrine of the Trinity is not so much heard in the New Testament as it is overheard.
Simply knowing that the life of God in itself is the liveliest of all lives is a medicinal correction to our sick, self-centered thinking.
Since this threefoldness belongs to what God actually is rather than being only something he freely does, it has been called the ontological Trinity, the essential Trinity, or the Trinity of being.
Theologians have also called it the immanent Trinity, because immanent means “internal to” itself.
In order to contemplate the ontological Trinity, of course, we had to start with the salvation-historical Trinity. We couldn’t have started anywhere else, because the Trinity is a revealed doctrine, and it was revealed when Christ and the Holy Spirit showed up. It was the sending of the Son on the mission of incarnation and atonement that gave us the starting-point for discerning his eternal sonship and revealed the proper meaning of the fatherhood of God the Father.
It is unworthy of the glorious gospel of the blessed God to give the impression that we are begging for people to please be reconciled to God so his life won’t be ruined by sadness.
Usually evangelicals get only a few steps down the road of theological reflection before they begin asking for reassurances that the trip is going to be worthwhile. They often express this in the curt question, Is this necessary for salvation? Bad motives may lurk behind such a question: shortsighted pragmatism, intellectual laziness, a desire to reduce everything in Christianity to the bare minimum of experiential, and preferably emotional, accessibility. There’s no use denying that these traits do exist in evangelical churches, and formally the question itself is dismayingly similar to the
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The excessiveness of Paul’s sentence seeks to disorient our existing categories in order to reorient us by drawing us in to the divine orientation. What we need is the miracle of being able to see our own situation from an infinitely higher point of view. We need to start our thinking from a center in God, not in ourselves.
If we are going to discuss subjects like the fullness of the gospel, however, we will have to come to terms with the mystic.
The fact that Spurgeon had a Calvinist uttermost and Wesley had a holiness uttermost is insignificant compared to the more basic fact that both of them had big thoughts about the gospel and pushed hard to communicate them. They perceived the scope of salvation and struggled to frame thoughts big enough to accommodate it. Neither of them could be reproached with “your gospel is too small.”
A gospel which is only about the moment of conversion but does not extend to every moment of life in Christ is too small. A gospel that gets your sins forgiven but offers no power for transformation is too small. A gospel that isolates one of the benefits of union with Christ and ignores all the others is too small. A gospel that must be measured by your own moral conduct, social conscience, or religious experience is too small. A gospel that rearranges the components of your life but does not put you personally in the presence of God is too small.
The gospel is the underlying reality that gives rise to all these benefits. The salvation that we are in danger of undervaluing is in itself a great thing, which radiates blessings and benefits in every direction, at all levels.
In these cases, our problem is not so much that we’ve distorted the gospel by adding to it or taking away from it. The problem is that we have taken one true element of it and characterized the whole by that part.
Their problem is not that they care about being orthodox but that they care about nothing else,
The gospel is God-sized, because God puts himself into it. The living God binds himself to us and becomes our salvation, the life of God in the soul of man. We are saved by the gospel of God to worship the God of the gospel.
The good news that Jesus brings is that God has chosen to accomplish our salvation by being himself for us, by opening up his own life and bringing us into fellowship.
