Holy Trinity Quotes

“And it is only within the loving fellowship of the church that “perfect love,” that is to say, mature, whole-hearted, self-denying love, becomes a possibility. Young Christians can never mature to the point where they love God with all their hearts, unless they are nurtured within a church community that has just that quality of love from those who are mature in the faith. Sanctified people are nurtured within genuinely holy, that is, loving, church fellowships.”
― T.A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People: The Theology of Christian Perfecting

“Hodgson argued that the doctrine of the Trinity arose from the Christian experience of “adoptive sonship,” our sharing by the gift of the Spirit in Jesus’ intimate communion with the God he called “Father.” The life of Christ was “a life of self-giving in response to the Father’s love, through the Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity is the projection into eternity of this essential relationship, the assertion that eternally the divine life is a life of mutual self-giving to one another of Father and Son through the Spirit who is the vinculum or bond of love between them.”401”
― T.A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People: The Theology of Christian Perfecting

“Jason Vickers has argued that Wesley’s hymns to the Trinity, together with his earlier Hymns on the Nativity of our Lord (1745) must be taken into account against the general assumption that the doctrine of the Trinity had become a dead letter in eighteenth-century Protestant theology. While the systematic theologians had reduced it to a mere abstract statement that had to be defended intellectually against charges of incoherence, the hymns demonstrate that in the pastoral theology of the Wesleys, trinitarian doctrine and spiritual life were intimately connected.375”
― T.A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People: The Theology of Christian Perfecting

“It is a dangerous thing to do,” wrote P. T. Forsyth, “to work at your own holiness.”367 Surely, as Luther saw, the last and most subtly hidden bastion of our sinful self-centeredness is self-centered religion. As Paul makes clear in Philippians 3, the aim of the “perfect” is not their own perfection, but that they may know Christ. He is the goal. Christian “perfection” is only a by-product.”
― T.A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People: The Theology of Christian Perfecting

“Two centuries after Irenaeus, it was the Antiochene theologians based at Antioch in Syria who emphasized this line of thought. Recognizing that our salvation depended on Christ’s obedience, they insisted that it must have been real obedience. That it is to say, Jesus as a real human being must have had real choice. There must be no thought of his divine nature coercing his human choice. He must have been free as a human being to choose if the temptation was to be real and the obedience genuine. If there was no genuine choice, there was no real obedience.341”
― T.A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People: The Theology of Christian Perfecting

“sanctification is coming into personal relationship with a Person in such a way that we increasingly image his scintillating holiness, his compassion, his patience, his self-discipline, his self-denial, his out-going love.”
― T.A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People: The Theology of Christian Perfecting

“A gospel that focuses on my Christian experience, my faith, my conversion, my sanctification, can only be a false one.”
― T.A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People: The Theology of Christian Perfecting

“the holy people are committed to their Lord and their unity is demonstrated in their communal life as they give attention to teaching, to fellowship, the breaking of bread, prayer, and praise.”
― T.A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People: The Theology of Christian Perfecting