Part I - Confusion
Confusion About the Meaning of “the Trinity”
Ask almost any Christian “Do you believe in the Trinity?” and the automatic response will be “Yes.” But then ask them “What is the Trinity?” and the answer may be more hesitant. There is widespread agreement that an explanation of the Trinity must include mention of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (or Holy Ghost, in the old terminology), but beyond that there is a wide variety of mumbo jumbo.
The important thing to remember is the mumbo jumbo is important! The Trinity is not just a shorthand word for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Trinity is a doctrine which defines who God is; it gives a metaphysical definition of God. It is a definition of God constructed by theologians long after the Bible was written.
The original statement of the Trinity Doctrine is contained in the Athanasian Creed. This creed is written in rather inflated language, so it is usually summarized in a few sentences like this: “God is one God eternally existent in three persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. These three persons are to be known as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and are all equal to one another, and are all equally God. The combination of the three into one unit is sometimes called the ‘Godhead’.”
A Mental Image of God
If I asked you—as a Christian—what sort of mental image of God you had, what would you say? If you have a pretty good knowledge of the Bible, you would probably say something like the following. You would probably say you picture God as the exalted king, judge, and ruler in heaven, living in holy splendor and sitting on a throne high and lifted up above all the host of heaven. This is pretty much the image which Isaiah saw in Isaiah chapter 6:
In the year that King Uzzi′ah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his train filled the temple.
And the foundations of the thresholds shook at the voice of him who called, and the house was filled with smoke (Isaiah 6:1,4).
This is like the vision given some years earlier to Micaiah the prophet:
And Micai′ah said, “Therefore hear the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left” (1 Kings 22:19).
This is also like the vision of God given to the apostle John in the Book of Revelation:
Then I saw a great white throne and him who sat upon it; from his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them (Revelation 20:11).
And you would probably add to these visions that since New Testament times, a believer must also picture God’s Son, Jesus, sitting at God’s right hand. That’s in accord with Hebrews 12:2 that says Jesus “endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.”
Some Bad News!
Now I have some bad news for you. Your mental picture is completely wrong, according to modern theologians. Modern theologians say God is a “triune” God, or God in three parts (hence Trinity). The three parts are (as stated earlier) three persons called God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, and they are described as being coeternal and coequal to one another. Chances are that some or all of this terminology appears in your church’s website, near the top of the Statement of Belief.
This triune God is variously pictured on Bible book jackets and church windows as an equilateral triangle within a circle, with the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit on the three sides of the triangle; or as three circles arranged in a triangular pattern such that the three overlap in the center of the pattern (the area where God’s presence is “most intense”); or as an oval with the word “God” written above the oval, and the words “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” inside the oval; etc. etc. There are no thrones in these pictures, only geometric shapes and patterns.
Trinitarian Confusion: An Incorrect Concept of God
So which concept of God is correct—the prophets’ vision in the Bible of a mighty God seated high up on a throne in heaven, or the modern theologians’ construct of geometric shapes within shapes? And approaching it from a believer’s point of view, which concept corresponds to the God we pray to? The answer seems obvious if you think about the Lord’s prayer, where Jesus taught us to pray to our Father in heaven.
And which concept corresponds to the language of the Bible? In the remainder of this document we will dig deeper into the way the Bible speaks of God, but for starters consider these things: Nowhere in the Bible does the word “Trinity” occur (or any word with a similar meaning). Nowhere in the Bible does the Trinitarian phrase “God the Son” occur (but many times the phrase “Son of God” occurs). Nowhere in the Bible does the Trinitarian phrase “God the Holy Spirit” occur (but many times the phrase “Spirit of God” or “Spirit of the Lord” occurs). In other words, phrases and words which are key concepts of the Trinity Doctrine never occur in the Bible, but phrases with a conflicting meaning do occur.
Trinitarian Confusion: Verbal Sleight-of-Hand
Some theologians try to make the Trinity Doctrine more people-friendly by using the “ways-we-experience-it” explanation. They say the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three ways we experience God. And they may liken this “experience” to some natural phenomenon, like experiencing the effects of the sun. The sun gives off heat which we experience on our skin, and light which we experience with our eyes, and gravity which we experience as the force holding the earth in the sun’s orbit. So, the Trinity is like the sun, they say, since it is one single entity, but we experience it in three different ways.
There is a major problem with this explanation of the Trinity, though. The problem is that there are many ways we experience God, not just three. We can experience God through the wonders of nature, or through a kind act from a neighbor, or by the moving testimony of a new believer, and so forth. We know better than to say these things “are” God. They are various manifestations of God’s power and grace, but they no more “are” God than an artist “is” the painting he produces.
The Trinity Doctrine, on the other hand—if you read what it says—is not a statement of ways we experience God; it is a definition of God, a statement of who God is! To say we experience the sun as light and heat and gravity is not a definition of what the sun is. The sun is not light + heat + gravity; those are results of the sun’s activity, but they do not define the sun. The sun is defined as a medium-size star which generates light photons from internal nuclear fusion reactions, etc., etc.
The ways-we-experience-it method of explaining the Trinity is clever, I’ll give the theologians credit for that much. But it is an avoidance technique. It avoids the fact that the Trinity Doctrine is an incomprehensible and unbiblical attempt to define who God is.
Trinitarian Confusion: Our Relationship to God
Does the Trinity Doctrine serve a purpose in God’s plan? Ask yourself these fundamental questions: Why are we here? What purpose do we serve in God’s plan? And the answer is: God’s purpose for us is to give praise and glory to the name of the Lord. The psalmist tells us in Psalm 150 how we are to do that:
Praise the Lord!
Praise God in his sanctuary;
praise him in his mighty firmament!
Praise him for his mighty deeds;
praise him according to his exceeding greatness! (Psalm 150:1-2)
We are to praise God “in his sanctuary,” “in his mighty firmament [his heavenly abode].” God is a king seated on a throne in heaven, and we are to honor him as such. He is not some kind of blob which morphs constantly in and out of three different “persons,” so that nobody can tell you exactly where God is or who he is at any given time. To pretend that God is three different persons all at once, popping up in some undetermined places, is to make it awkward or impossible to praise him properly. And if we cannot praise him properly, it defeats the purpose God has ordained for us; and that makes Satan very happy!
Who Is Promoting Trinitarian Confusion?
A doctrine as prevalent as the Trinity Doctrine does not come about by accident; it requires agreement among a lot of leaders. So that raises the question: Who are these leaders? Who are the theologians who are promoting the Trinity Doctrine, and what do they say in their own defense?
They are professors at seminaries, or they are ministers or priests who have been taught by professors at seminaries. They start out as dutiful and high-minded seminary students memorizing their lesson on the Trinity Doctrine so they can graduate from seminary and work for the Lord.
They are also very trusting—too trusting. They are akin to the lazy journalist who simply repeats what people tell him without checking against original source documents. But as time goes by, seminary students and seminary graduates realize their “knowledge” of the Trinity sets them apart from laymen and gives them special status; it becomes a way of making “their phylacteries broad and their fringes long” (Matthew 23:5). So, they become the next generation of Pharisees who “amplify” the scripture, adding their own words to God’s words, “thus making void the word of God through your tradition which you hand on,” as Jesus said of them (Mark 7:13).
They do indeed make void the word of God, as we will see.
Is the Trinity Doctrine Biblical? John 10:33, 36
If you were to ask Peter or James or John or Paul or Matthew or Luke, “Do you believe in the Trinity?” they would answer, “I never heard of it.” If you then explained to them that according to the Trinity doctrine, Jesus is God, that Jesus is equally God along with the Father and the Holy Spirit, they would say, “That is ridiculous! Jesus is the Son of God. He never claimed to be God. How can he be both God and the Son of God? How can somebody be the son of himself? That is stupid and it is a gross theological error!” And the apostle John would add, “Look, I even recorded for you an incident where Jesus corrected a similar error. The Jews wanted to stone Jesus because, in their words, ‘you, being a man, make yourself God.’ But Jesus corrected them and asked if they were accusing him ‘because I said, “I am the Son of God”’ (John 10:33, 36).” Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, not God.
But all this would not stop our modern theologians. They would say to Peter, “Oh, but you don’t understand. Over many generations we scholars have parsed and analyzed and examined the Bible with microscopes—we’ve done research that you really did not have time to do in your day—and we have come up with this doctrine of the Trinity which is really intended to defend the things you wrote about.” To which Paul, or Peter, or James, or John, would reply: “You’d better throw all your microscopes in the trash, because what we wrote and what we understand is from the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, and we’re telling you right now that Trinity stuff is not from God!”
Then modern theologians would dig in their heels and point to a list of scriptures which, to their thinking, verify the Trinity doctrine. They would say, “But … but … but look: here’s what the Bible says!” and then go on to cite a list of verses. We will examine the most commonly-mentioned verses in Part II.