Foundations of Systematic Theology LESSON...Theology Proper: The Trinity 5 of 12 Lesson 03 of 24...

Transcript - ST408 Foundations of Systematic Theology© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 03 of 24ST408

Theology Proper: The Trinity

Foundations of Systematic Theology

In lesson two, I said that Scripture presents God to us in three ways: by narrating His actions, by giving us authoritative descriptions of Him, and by giving us a glimpse of His inner-triune life. In the last lesson, we looked at the first two of these all too briefly. In this lesson, we will have a glimpse at the Trinity, which corresponds to the lordship attribute of divine presence, for it indicates that even before the world was made, the Father, Son, and Spirit were present to one another. Even before the world was made, they had a relationship to one another. A divine society existed—a kind of family, certainly a model to all the families that exist on the earth today.

I think theologians sometimes exaggerate what we know about the Trinity. I would emphasize that Scripture gives us only a glimpse, not a treatise. Much that the Bible teaches of the Trinity is very mysterious, and we must bow in humility as we enter into this holy realm. We can summarize the Trinity in five assertions. First, God is one; second, God is three; third, the three persons are each fully God; fourth, each of the persons is distinct form the others; and fifth, the three persons are related eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Let’s look at each of these in turn.

First, God is one. We tend to think of the doctrine of the Trinity as the doctrine of God as three persons, but the word “triune” says not just that God is three persons—“tri”—but that God is three in one— that’s the “une” part. God is part of the doctrine of the Trinity. Scripture, of course, says plainly that God is one. Deuteronomy 6:4-5 says, “Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one.” This is important, first because it is true there is only one God, only one Being worthy of worship, but not many as in the Greek religion or the Egyptian or the Babylonian or the Canaanite. It is also important because God’s unity is necessary for His lordship. Only one person could be fully in control of the world, speak with ultimate authority, and be the most intimate presence with His people. And because there is only one Lord,

John M. Frame, D.D.Experience: Professor of systematic theology

at Reformed Theological Seminary

Transcript - ST408 Foundations of Systematic Theology © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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there can only be one Savior. That’s what Isaiah says in 43:11, and Jesus, of course, says, “I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me” (John 14:6). So God is one.

We have to also, of course, emphasize that God is three. Scriptures also teach that in some mysterious sense God is also three. The Old Testament attributes plurality with God, but, of course, not with the clarity of the New Testament. In the Old Testament, God’s wisdom, for example, is divine attribute—it’s a divine attribute—but is also distinct from God. It’s a tool He uses in creating the world (Psalm 136:5). Same for God’s Word, His glory, His name, His Spirit, and the angel of the Lord.

Sometimes the Old Testament even speaks of trios of divine beings. In Isaiah 63:9-10, we read this: “In their affliction He,” that is, God:

In all their affliction He was afflicted, and the angel of His presence saved them; in His love and in His pity He redeemed them; He lifted them up and carried them all the days of old. But they rebelled and grieved His Holy Spirit; therefore He turned to be their enemy, and Himself fought against them.

You see the three persons there. There’s “He,” which refers to God; there’s the angel of His presence, who saves Israel; and then there’s the Holy Spirit in verse 10—the triad of divine beings. There are some other examples of these triads in the passages listed in your outline.

By the New Testament, however, it is a settled doctrine; the three persons are divine: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. How did this happen? Why is there such a difference between the New Testament and the Old Testament here? Because before the New Testament was written, the Son and the Holy Spirit both came into the world in a dramatic way. Amazingly the writers of the New Testament, mostly Jews, became persuaded that they should worship a man. The man Jesus was nothing less than God Himself. And they saw that the Holy Spirit, who came upon the church of Pentecost, was also fully God. So though they continued to confess that God is one, as in I Corinthians 8:4 for example, they recognized three beings who were God.

So often in the New Testament we see three divine persons lined up alongside each other. Think of Matthew 28:19, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name



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of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Second Corinthians 13:14, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” It is important for us to recognize that the three persons really are equal because each is fully God.

So we come to the third proposition—that the three are God. That is fairly obvious in the case of the Father and the Holy Spirit. There have been debates over the deity of Christ. I intend to discuss those in lesson 10. My conclusion, and the conclusion of the Christian church since its inception, and the conclusion of the Bible itself is that Father, Son, and Spirit are each fully God.

Let’s now look at the fourth proposition—that each of the persons is distinct from the others. This discussion so far leaves us with some difficult problems. There is one God, but there are three divine beings. That would appear to be a contradiction. But God’s Word—the Bible—is never contradictory. So where is the reconciliation of these? Some have thought to reconcile these positions by saying that God is really one but only apparently three. God only appears to be three, but He really is not. Father, Son, and Spirit are just the one God playing three different roles. Sometimes He appears as Father, sometimes as Son, sometimes as Spirit. This position is sometimes called modalism since it makes the three persons only modes or ways in which God exists—modes and not real persons. This view is also called sabellianism after Sabellious, who was one of its early advocates.

Today there are so-called “oneness” churches, which teach that Jesus is the only divine person. They call this a “Jesus-only position.” But the church rejected modalism as a heresy, and it’s clearly unbiblical for the three Persons to enter transactions with one another. Jesus prays to the Father often in the New Testament—in John 17 for example. The Father speaks from heaven while Jesus is on earth (Matthew 3:17). The Father and the Son together send the Spirit into the world, and the Spirit bears witness to Jesus. Here we see three divine Persons interacting with one another, conversing as human beings do, not just one person playing three roles. So the three Persons are both one and many, both united and distinct.

Look at the diagram in your outline. The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. But the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father. But even though they’re distinct Persons, they are nevertheless intimately involved with



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one another. This mutual involvement is called by some big words; the English terms circumincession and co-inherence—the Latin word circumlensessio, the Greek word perchoresis. I don’t expect you to know those terms, but you do have them now and you have them for reference. What these terms all mean is that, first, the Father is in the Son, and the Son is in Him (refer to the passages in your outline). Secondly, both the Father and the Son are in the Spirit and the Spirit is in them. Notice, it’s not that the Father is the Son and so on, but the Father is in the Son. That’s the way we need to think of their relationship. So when the Spirit comes, inevitably Jesus comes with Him and in Him (John 14:18). When Jesus comes, we see the Father in Him. As He said to Philip, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). All three persons participate in all the works of God: creation, redemption, judgment—the three glorify one another.

Now there are some differences in focus, some division of labor, we might say, between the three persons, although it’s always dangerous to generalize here. This is a very rough generalization that I’m going to be giving you right now. In redemption, the Father foreordains, the Son accomplishes, and the Spirit applies the work of Christ to the heart. The Father plans, the Son executes, the Spirit applies. Perhaps this is the intra-Trinitarian basis for the three lordship attributes. The Father is the authority, the planner; the Son is the controller, the accomplisher; and the Spirit is the presence. But remember that even when the Father is planning, the Son and the Spirit are joyfully cooperating, and the same for all the divine tasks. It’s always dangerous to try to separate the three Persons of the Trinity in anything they do.

Now let’s move on to the next assertion—the three Persons of the Trinity are related eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What we have said already pretty well completes the teaching found in the Bible itself about the Trinity. But you should also know something about the way the church has dealt with questions and problems concerning the Trinity. Make no mistake, the Trinity is a difficult doctrine. The church has had to fight terrible battles over it.

First let’s look at the distinction between substance and Persons. First, the church has adopted standard terminology to indicate how God is one and how God is three. God is one substance, they said, and He is three persons. Now these are philosophical terms; not biblical ones. There is nothing wrong with using terms outside the Bible for theological purposes. We do it all the time



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when we use English words for the Greek and Hebrew languages of Scripture. Indeed, even the word “trinity” is not found in the Bible. The work of theology is not just reading the Scriptures but applying the Scriptures to questions people ask—applying it to their needs. We’ll discuss this some more in lesson six. But these terms are terms that are used by the church to answer some of the questions that come up about the Trinity.

Now the term “substance” means something like what He really is. So the Father really is God, the Son really is God, and the Spirit really is God. And so we say, “They have one substance; the divine substance; the substance of being God.” Or you can think of the one substance as the goodness of God. All three Persons have the goodness. But all that means is that they are one God, and they’re each that one God. In the original Greek text of the Nicene Creed, we read that the three Persons are homoousios. That’s a Greek word which means “of the same substance.” Again, that simply means that there is only one God and each of these three Persons is that one God.

Now the word “person” is a trickier term. Theologians have tried to understand it in a lot of different ways. But after all is said and done, you probably can’t do better than to think of God’s three Persons similar to, or at least analogous to, three human persons. So the church used these terms to show how the heretics were wrong. There is a group called the Arians—followers of somebody called Arias—who said that the Son and Spirit were created beings. On that view, the Son and the Father were not of the same substance. They were not all God; they were not both the true God. The Sabellians, who I mentioned earlier, did not believe that God was in three Persons. They thought He was only one Person. So the church used, in its creeds, the language that God is one substance against the Arians’ three persons against the Sabellians.

But remember, Scripture gives us a glimpse of the Trinity, not a treatise. We don’t know very clearly what it means for God to be a substance or for Him to be three Persons. We don’t even know clearly what substance and person mean when applied to God. We have a rough idea of how these terms apply to things in the creation, but we don’t know what a divine person is and how precisely it’s different from a divine substance. Remember that these terms are just vehicles for biblical content. Sometimes we get the idea that when we learn technical theological terms like these, we’re learning information about God that’s not available



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in the Bible—stuff that we could learn apart from the Bible alone. But that is certainly not right. These terms are only attempts to summarize biblical content. They don’t stand on their own. The mystery remains.

Under “B” on your outline is the next distinction between ontological and economic Trinities. These are not two Trinities but the same Trinity viewed from different aspects or perspectives. Of course, since there is only one God, there is only one Trinity. Ontological Trinity is the Trinity in itself. Ontological is a word that refers to being or reality. So ontological Trinity is the Trinity as it really is, as it exists apart from the creation, as God would’ve existed if He had never created anything. In the ontological Trinity, there is no subordination between the Persons—Father, Son, and Spirit are equal. That is to say they are equally God, equally divine.

The economic Trinity, however—now the word “economic” refers to God’s relationship to the world, God’s relationship to the creation. So the economic Trinity is the Trinity in relation to the creation. As we saw earlier, the three Persons of the Trinity take on sort of a division of labor with regard to relation and creation. The Father plans, the Son executes, the Spirit applies. In this great drama, the Son voluntarily becomes subordinate to the Father. Jesus sees nothing of Himself but what He sees the Father doing (John 5:19). In John 5:30, He says, “I seek not My own will but the will of the Father which has sent me.” The Father has commanded; the Son obeys.

Similarly, the Holy Spirit—when Jesus and the Father send Him into the world, the Bible says, “He shall not speak of Himself but whatever He shall hear, that shall He speak, and He shall show you things to come” (John 16:13). You see that order: the Father sends, Jesus and the Spirit are sent, the Father speaks of Himself, the Son and Spirit speak the words that the Father has given them to speak.

So the three persons are equal ontologically, but they take on different jobs in creation and redemption economically. Some of those jobs involve obedience and subordination. Is that subordination unworthy of God? Not at all. As Jesus taught us in Matthew 20, for example, it is entirely right for great people to be servants just as He washed the feet of His Disciples. It’s important for us to recognize that in any case, the Trinity is both ontological and economic. It’s not that God is really just one Person but He



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appears as a Trinity to us in the world. That’s what the Sabellians taught. Trinity rather is ontological. That means Trinity is what God really and truly is through all eternity. He exists as Father, Son, and Spirit, and He could not exist in any other way.

Now the next church historical issue I want to discuss (C on your outline) is the eternal generation of the Son—sometimes called “the eternal begetting.” This doctrine attempts to answer the question, “How did the Son become the Son?” Generation is becoming. It’s the process by which someone becomes something, or something becomes something. We talk about the generation of products from an assembly line, for example. Is there a process like this within the ontological Trinity? Well maybe here we’re asking questions that go beyond our competence. But let’s at least think a little bit about what the church has said about the eternal generation of the Son. One biblical answer to the question, “How did the Son become the Son?” is found in Luke 1:35 where the angel says to the Virgin Mary, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called Holy—the Son of God.” Here the baby Jesus is called “the Son of God” because of His conception of the Spirit in the womb of the virgin.

So He is the Son by conception or generation or begetting. These are more or less synonymous terms in the theological literature—conception, generation, begetting. The Scripture teaches that this conception was not the beginning of His sonship. Before He went to the cross, Jesus prays, “Father, glorify Me in Your own presence with the glory that I had with You before the world existed (John 17:5). So Jesus was the Son of His heavenly Father even before He was conceived in Mary’s womb.

Now the theologian asks, “If Jesus was already the Son in eternity, was there some kind of generation or begetting or conception in eternity that made Him the Son?” This question is rather speculative I think, but Scripture may speak to it, and if it does, we need to hear what it says. Scripture describes Jesus as monogenes. This is a Greek term that may mean “only begotten” in some passages listed on your outline. Now there is some dispute about that. Some Bible scholars think the word means “unique” rather than “only begotten.” I personally think the older view is right so that these passages do say that Jesus was begotten by the Father before the world was made, and that He was the only one begotten by the Father—the only begotten Son. So I’m happy to confess as we do in the Nicene Creed that Jesus is the only begotten Son of



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God, begotten of His Father before all worlds—God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.

The only trouble is that as with the word “substance” and the word “person,” I’m not sure what this means exactly. What does it mean for someone to be begotten eternally? When parents beget a kid in this world, the child is younger than the parent. But that’s not the case with Jesus. With Jesus, He and His Father are the same age, eternally existing. Earthly generation requires two parents of the opposite sex, but not eternal generation. When earthly parents beget a child, the child is weak, helpless, ignorant. But the Son of God in eternity was never weak, helpless, or ignorant. He became that on earth—paradoxical and mysterious as it may seem—He became that on earth when He was a baby. His earthly generation was like that, but His eternal generation was not. So eternal generation is evidently very different from earthly generation.

To be honest, I don’t think that the phrase “eternal generation” takes us any farther than the term “Son.” Jesus is the eternal Son. Sons, by definition, are people who have been generated by fathers, but we know nothing about that generation except that it’s the generation of a Son. But the doctrine of eternal generation does help us, perhaps, to see why it was appropriate for the Son and not the Father to be generated as a human child in the womb of a virgin. And perhaps it gives us a glimpse of why the Son, not the Father, came into the world as the obedient servant.

The next historical issue concerning the Trinity (D on your outline) is the eternal procession of the Spirit. This is similar to the eternal generation of the Son. Just as Jesus was begotten or generated in history, so the Spirit proceeded—or was sent forth—from God on many occasions, but especially on the Pentecost following the ascension of Jesus. And so theologians have asked, “Is there an eternal procession corresponding to His procession into the world on Pentecost?” The biblical evidence for this doctrine is even more sparse than that for the eternal generation of the Son.

People have cited John 15:26 as possibly referring to the Spirit’s procession. Listen to it. Jesus says, “But when the Helper comes,” He’s referring to the Spirit there, “But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of Truth, who proceeds from the Father, He will bear witness about Me.” The word “proceeds” here has been taken to refer to eternal procession. I’m



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not at all sure that’s what it means. I think it’s much more likely to refer to the many times in history where God has sent His Spirit into the world to do His bidding.

So as far as I can see, that’s the only passage in the Bible that may refer directly to the Spirit’s procession. But we should perhaps say this as well. There must be something about the Spirit’s nature, His ontological nature, about His eternal relationship to the Father and the Son that makes it appropriate for Him to be sent, rather than to be the sender, that makes it appropriate for Him to be the one who proceeds. That I think is about as much as we can say. Since this doctrine has so little support, I certainly would counsel you not to make a big issue out of it. However, you should know that some people have made a big issue out of it, indeed many still do. The division between the Western and Eastern churches in AD 1054 was partly—maybe to a great extent—over the detailed formulation of this doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit.

Now the last of these historical issues (E on your outline) has to do with Trinitarian models. People have tried very hard to find illustrations of the Trinity, because, after all, the Trinity is very hard to understand. Illustrations or pictures can make instructions easier. So St. Patrick, for example, compared the Trinity to an Irish shamrock—one plant, three leaves. Of course, the picture isn’t a very good one. You can tear the shamrock into three pieces but you can’t tear the Trinity into three parts. The Trinity is immaterial; the shamrock is material. And the Trinity is three persons, while the shamrock is not even one person.

But other theologians came up with more sophisticated models or illustrations. Basically in the history of theology, there are two kinds of models or pictures or illustrations that people have used to illustrate the Trinity, and those two models can be called psychological and social. The psychological model was developed in great detail by the church father Augustine. Augustine thought that the Trinity was like a great mind. In the human mind, there is intellect, memory, and will, but the three are one. When we know ourselves we are the knower, the known, and the knowledge at the same. God, of course, has a mind, and Augustine thought when God knows Himself, His thought of Himself is so perfect that that thought itself is a divine being. So the three persons of the Trinity are God as knower, known, and knowledge.



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Now this is an interesting model, but it doesn’t do much to account for three persons. In our experience, thought is not a person, nor is memory a person or will or knowledge. This model is pretty good in illustrating God’s oneness too, but not His threeness, because our knowledge is one. It’s one aspect of one person. But it doesn’t show that God is three persons who can enter into transactions with one another.

Now the social model of the Trinity—the second model—comes from the church fathers who lived in a place called Cappadocia in the fourth century AD. One was named Basil—sometimes called Basil the Great—one was called Gregory of Nazianzus, and one was called Gregory of Nyssa. They together presented what has been called the “social model of the Trinity” in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three persons, well, just like me and my two sons, Justin and Johnny. They relate to one another in love, they relate to one another by talking to one another, by entering into different transactions with one another.

The interesting thing is that on the social model, some have seen the Trinity as a model for human society. Well that model is good as far as it goes. Unlike the psychological model, it does present to us a plurality of persons. It’s interpersonal; it presents a relationship to us. But this model doesn’t help us much to see how the three are one God. Augustine began with a single person—a single mind—and then tried to show how complexities in the mind would make it possible to speak of three. The Cappodocians began with three, but then they found it hard to show God is one. So the pendulum goes back and forth between these models.

In the early 20th century, Karl Barth, the leading Protestant theologian, and Karl Rahner, the leading Roman Catholic theologian, respectively, insisted that God did not have three centers of consciousness. Now even though they were Protestant and Catholic, they nevertheless agreed that God did not have three centers of consciousness. They followed, more or less, the Augustinian model. Barth, I think, even verged on modalism. But in the later 20th century, under the influence of Jürgen Moltmann and Wolfheart Pannenberg and Cornelius Plantinga in the United States and a number of other people, theologians have tended to favor the social model of the Trinity. But in my judgment, these theologians have not done justice to the fact that God is one God.

So we want to move from an emphasis on a psychological model in the first 50 years of the 20th century to a social model in the



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last 50 years of the 20th century. Well I would say that neither model is perfect. We need to find a model that does justice both to God’s oneness—for He is far more one than any of us—and His threeness—for He truly is the society of three. Or perhaps better still, we need to recognize the mysteriousness of the Trinity, and perhaps we need to be satisfied without an adequate pictorial model.

Finally, does the doctrine of the Trinity have anything to do with the lordship of God, which has been my main theme in this course? I think it does. Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria in the fourth century AD, was one of the great heroes of the faith. A defender of the Trinitarianism of the Nicene Creed, he suffered terrible persecution for his stand at the hands of Arian heretics. But he kept going and eventually, through God’s providence, I would say his position prevailed.

His biography would be very interesting for you to read, and certainly very inspiring for you to read. He was deposed from his office as bishop five times. He wandered around the face of the earth through the deserts fleeing from people that were trying to take his life. It seemed at one point as though the doctrine of the Trinity, which was formed by the Nicene Council, would fall by the wayside and that Arianism would replace it as the doctrine of the church. But Athanasius was confident in God, confident in God’s Word, and very brave and very courageous.

Well why did Athanasius fight so courageously? Why did he fight so persistently? It wasn’t that he was ready to live or die for philosophical terminology. Even the formulation of the form was of one substance with the Father. Now that was a tremendously important piece of phraseology, because the word “substance” distinguished the Orthodox from the Arians. The Orthodox said that the Lord Jesus Christ, the son of God, was the same substance—one substance with the Father—while the Arians said that the Son of God was only of like substance with the Father.

The word in Greek for “same substance” differs from the word “like substance” by only one letter. It’s the letter “I,” the word of the letter Iota, and people sometimes say that the whole battle over the doctrine of the Trinity was a battle over an Iota or a “dot” as we sometimes say in English. But really the difference between those two terms—the difference between the same substance and like substance—is a vast difference. What we believe in Jesus about Jesus—what the Bible tells us about Jesus—is that He is the

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same substance with the Father, and all that means is that He is truly God. He’s not just like God—we are all like God—but Jesus is truly God. Jesus is identical with God.

But Athanasius did not fight his battle courageously and persistently because he wanted to maintain some technical terminology like “one substance.” For him rather the important issues were basic and simple; not things we would need to study in seminary in order to understand the basic and simple things that every believer is faced with. Those two things are worship and salvation.

First, worship—if Jesus the Son of God is only a creature, “only a created being,” said Athanasius, “then when we worship Jesus, we are guilty of idolatry.” For Christians had already, for nearly 400 years, worshiped Christ as God, and He is worthy of worship only if He is equal to the Father, a member of the ontological Trinity. In the Bible, idolatry is worshiping a created being in the place of the true God. “And if the Arians were right,” Athanasius, “then we are worshiping a creature, a created being, rather than the true God.” Only if Jesus is fully God, only if He is a member of the ontological Trinity, can He save us from our sins.

[Second, worship]—remember in Isaiah how the Lord said, “I am the only Savior. I, even I, am the Lord; beside Me there is no Savior” (43:11). So Jesus can be the Savior, the deliverer of His people only if He is fully God. So worship and salvation, those are the issues. And in the end, these are issues of lordship. For the Lord is the only one who deserves worship, and, as Jonah said in his prayer from the belly of the fish, “Salvation belongs to the Lord” (Jonah 2:9). So if we want to maintain lordship—the lordship of God—then, as the Bible presents it, we must certainly affirm the doctrine of the Trinity.

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