III.

Keith Small: A note about the Trinity

The following thoughts were prepared for the evening, but time and questions did not permit these thoughts to be shared in detail. They are offered here for your consideration.

In the centuries immediately following the first generation of Christians, Jesus’ claims to deity, and the Bible’s assertions of God’s aspects of plurality and unity became the focus of much theological thinking.  This especially happened as Christians had more contact with Greek and Roman thoughts of deity, when they realized they had to protect the Jewish and Biblical conception of God’s uniqueness and ability to enter time and space against pagan Greek categories of a distant deity who works through semi-divine intermediaries.[1]

For instance the Holy Spirit, God’s Spirit in the Bible, never refers to an angel acting as an intermediary of a distant, wholly separate God. The Holy Spirit is always treated as an eternal person with the same attributes, powers, and eternity of being as God. This, to my mind is one of the key differences between the view of God given in the Bible and the one given in the Qur’an. The Qur’an’s view seems to me to more like an Aristotelian view, or a neo-Platonist Gnostic view with a distant god working only through semi-divine intermediaries,[2] rather than a view in line with the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.

Jesus is the eternal Son who has always existed as the personified Word and Wisdom of God, and who takes on; adds to His eternal spiritual existence, a human body, which died on the cross, was raised from the dead, and in which He will live forever.

Working from the foundation of words, ideas, and revelations laid in the Old Testament, Jesus and His disciples presented with more clarity and explanation the nature of God’s existence as three eternal spiritual persons sharing one eternal spiritual essence in complete harmony and unity. When one tries to understand how this works, physical categories break down, and human analogies break down. It is however, logically consistent because the three persons share one essence, person and essence being two different though related categories of existence. If Christians were saying 3 essences = 1 essence, that would be illogical. Or, if they were saying 3 Persons = 1 Person, that too would be illogical. But the formal definition, and what is described in the Bible is 3 Persons sharing 1 essence. This is logically consistent, though we can’t conceive exactly of how it works. And it is also reasonable that God’s unique existence would be above our comprehension. Any model that makes it completely understandable limits God, and is an inadequate description.

The doctrine of the Trinity was the result of devout Christians seeking to understand and stay true to the Bible’s testimony in the face of the religious ideas of the ancient world. Gnostic views imbibed too heavily of the Greek thought and could not accept God entering time and a flesh and blood existence. Also, these Gnostic views came well after the time of Jesus and are foreign to the Old Testament conception of God. These are basic facts which the DaVinci Code and similar books fail to take into account.

Though above comprehension, the Trinity does not violate logic. It faithfully accounts for the entire Biblical view of God, and faithfully takes Jesus at His word and gives His actions their full weight. Also, it fully agrees with the testimony of those who received Jesus’ teaching firsthand - His disciples.[3] The word Trinity is not in the Bible, but the concept can be legitimately found in both the New and Old Testaments.