The Christian Doctrine of the Trinity: Part 1

I approach this subject of the Trinity with some fearful hesitancy. This is not to say that I speak without surety or firm foundation but that the very nature of the discussion relies upon God's revelation of Himself to us. As Dr. Schaeffer has put it, "He is there and He is not silent." It is my intention to discuss only Christian theism and no other theistic belief, upon the premise that the personal-infinite God who is there has given us truth in the form of objective and propositional truths that have been communicated to us in the sixty-six books of the Bible. God's existence and His word to us are therefore foundational to everything in this discussion, which will consist of facts and attributes of God that could not know apart from His revealing them to us. All of man's wisdom could not arrive at the conclusions given to us by Scripture, and it is only by Scripture and Scripture alone that we can know that what we believe is true.

We begin by looking at the attributes of God and for the sake of study we set these attributes in three classifications. I. The natural attributes, II. the attributes pertaining to infinity and III. the attributes pertaining to creation. It is impossible to divide God up or to place Him into a box or under a microscope so you will find that many of the attributes discussed here overlap one another or look similar. But for our purposes here I place them into such a sequence.

I. Pertaining to the natural attributes of God we have (1) Spirituality, (2) Personality and (3) Life.

(1) Spirituality
When we say that God is spirit we are saying that God's very nature is spirit, that He is not a material being nor is He limited to the material realm. The pantheist would say that God is intimately connected to the material realm--that it is a part of Him and He is a part of it--and that He cannot escape it. But as we will see the God of the Bible is spirit and He is not limited to the physical realm because He is the creator of the physical realm and He existed before the physical realm existed. As John tells us in chapter 4 verse 24 Jesus says that, "God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth." God's very nature of existence is that of spirit. The Reformed theologian Louis Berkhof comments here:

"The Bible does not give us a definition of God. The nearest approach to anything like it is found in the word of Christ to the Samaritan woman, "God is Spirit," John 4:24. This is at least a statement purporting to tell us in a single word what God is. The Lord does not merely say that God is a spirit, but that He is Spirit... By teaching the spirituality of God theology stresses the fact that God has a substantial Being all His own and distinct from the world, and that this substantial Being is immaterial, invisible, and without composition or extension. It includes the thought that all the essential qualities which belong to the perfect idea of Spirit are found in Him: that He is a self-conscious and self-determining Being. Since He is Spirit in the most absolute, and in the purest sense of the word, there is in Him no composition of parts. The idea of spirituality of necessity excludes the ascription of anything like corporeality to God, and thus condemns the fancies of some of the early Gnostics and medieval Mystics, and of all those sectarians of our own day who ascribe a body to God. It is true that the Bible speaks of the Hands and feet, the eyes and ears, the mouth and nose of God, but in doing this it is speaking anthropomorphically or figuratively of Him who far transcends our human knowledge, and of whom we can only speak in a stammering fashion after the manner of men. By ascribing spirituality to God we also affirm that He has non of the properties belonging to matter, and that He cannot be discerned by the bodily senses. Paul speaks of Him as "the King eternal, immortal, invisible" (I Timothy 1:17), and again as "the King of kings, and Lord of lords, who hath immortality, dwelling in light unapproachable; whom no man hath se, nor can see: to whom be honor and power eternal," 1 Tim. 6:15, 16. [1]

(2) Personality
Much can be said on the subject of personality and I will speak more of it later but we will be brief for our purposes here now.

There are no pointed verses of Scripture that apply the term person to God, though the Hebrew panim and the Greek prosopon come close in presenting this idea. Though we do see very strongly that God is spoken of as a personal being, indeed personal of the highest order. In Exodus 3:14 when God revealed Himself to Moses He said, "I AM that I AM." God is aware of His own existence and He is aware of the existence of other things, He has feelings and emotions--all things that are attached to a personal being. God is not the impersonal everything, He is not "it." (for further research I recommend the books "The God Who Is There" and "He is There and He is Not Silent" by Francis A. Schaeffer, as well as Berkhof's systematic theology)

(3) Life
We have seen that God is spirit and therefore is not limited to creation. God is also personal and because He is He can communicate to man. Now when we say that God is life I'm saying that He is alive and that He is the source of all life. In Jeremiah 10:6-11 God draws a comparison between the dead gods of the idols and the true God who is described as the living God. God is the source of all life, He is living, He is alive.


II. The next series of attributes pertain to God's infinity and these include (1) Absoluteness, (2) Sovereignty, (3) Self-existence, (4) Immutability, (5) Unity, (6) Perfection, (7) Immensity and (8) Timelessness. And I hope that as we go along you'll understand what I mean by infinity.

(1) Absoluteness
For a very long time I didn't understand what this meant when referring to God. I took it for granted that God was the absolute of good or the absolute of love but I did not understand the implications. When we refer to God Himself as being absolute what we are saying is that God is the foundation of all else that exists, and for all else that exists to have its proper meaning must be related to the personal-infinite God. As Creator, God is the absolute standard and to know the truth, to know meaning or right, we must have an absolute. Nothing in creation exists or has meaning apart from its relationship to God.

(2) Sovereignty
God does not depend on the created order, He is not frustrated by the created order and He is not contingent upon the created order. Isaiah 43:12-13 God says, "It is I who have declared and saved and proclaimed, And there was no strange god among you; So you are My witnesses," declares the LORD, "And I am God. "Even from eternity I am He, And there is none who can deliver out of My hand; I act and who can reverse it?" God here points out that one of the differences between he true God and the false gods that He is debating in the book of Isaiah from about chapters 40-50, is that the false gods have no ability to act but when the true God acts no one can reverse it. God says that He is sovereign and that none can deliver out of His hand. In Isaiah 46:9 God says, "Remember the former things long past, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me."
These are but a few places in Scripture that demonstrate that God is sovereign and supreme.

(3) Self-existence
Let us state briefly here that God does not depend on anyone or anything at all. He can say "I AM." You or I say "I am" we must say "I am... because I have the proper atmosphere, oxygen, light, food, etc., etc." We are contingent beings who could at any point in time cease to exist in the state that we currently are. God is self-existent and we owe our existence to God. Often someone will say, "Didn't God, then, if He is personal and if He loves, need an object for His love? Didn't He have to create? And therefore, isn't the universe just as necessary to Him and He is to the universe?" This is what we will discuss more in the conclusion but as you will see that because God is triune He wasn't forced to create.

(4) Immutability
Immutability is just another word for unchangeableness. If you think about it logically if a being undergoes change or growth it begs the question, "The change that occurs, is it for the better or for the worse?" A perfect being cannot change, for if he changes for the better than he wasn't perfect to begin with, and if he changes for the worse then he's no longer perfect. God's unchangeableness however, is not just a logical argument but is also Scriptural.

In Psalm 102 the psalmist is describing the unchangeableness of the Creator and the changeableness of creation in verses 25, 26 (you might want to not that this very passage which is speaking of Yahweh God is quoted of Jesus Christ in Hebrews 1), "Of old You founded the earth, And the heavens are the work of Your hands. "Even they will perish, but You endure; And all of them will wear out like a garment; Like clothing You will change them and they will be changed." God remains the same though the universe will be discarded as an old garment, God will not change. There is nothing more comforting to the people of God than to know that His covenants and His salvation will not be canceled. Not only do many cult groups have a problem with this concept but even within mainline "orthodox" denominations you will find such teachings as Process Theology, Finite-godism or Open Theism which teaches that God has no coercive power, no actual power to hold the universe but only has persuasive power. But we can see that this concept of God's immutability is infinitely connected to everything else we say about God; His eternity, His timelessness, etc., etc.

(5) Unity
There is one substance, to use the terminology used by some of the Greek fathers of the early church, one ousia, one being of God. God is indivisible, He cannot be divided up whether it be in three parts or a thousand, you cannot divide God up. If you could picture God's being and chop it up into pieces that would cease to be God.
This is the root of biblical monotheism--the belief that there is only one God. If you recall the Jewish people rise in the morning would recite the Schma. The Schma starts off, "Hear O' Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one." It is central to the revelation of God's word that God is one. There are not two Gods or three Gods, but only one God. You might be thinking, "But aren't you going to be talking about the Trinity? Aren't you contradicting yourself?" No, not at all. I'm contradicting "Tri-theism" but not the Trinity. Never confuse Tritheism with the Trinity, they are not at all the same thing.

(6) Perfection
You might think of Matthew 5:48 where Jesus talks about our Heavenly Father being perfect. In all reality this is relevant to His moral perfections, His moral completeness, but what I mean here speaking of God's perfection is the lack of anything missing in God. He does not come short of perfection in any of His attributes. So when we talk about God's love or His holiness we mean that these are perfect and complete.

(7) Immensity
In 2 Chronicles 6:18 we read that God fills the heavens and the earth. You might be asking what the difference is between this and omnipresence? What we're talking about here is that God's being is unlimited in that it cannot be spatially limited to a particular place with the exclusion of other places. This does not mean that God does not use language of dwelling with His people or dwelling in someone's heart for example. We're talking about His being in the absolute sense as immense and unlimited.

(8) Timelessness
We get some indication of God's timelessness from passages looked at before, Exodus 3:14 where God identifies Himself as the "I AM" and Isaiah 43 where we see that He proclaims the beginning from the end. When we look at Psalm 90:2, "Before the mountains were born Or You gave birth to the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God." When we look at New Testament passages like 1 Timothy 1:17 and Jude 25 where it talks about the eternal God, the everlasting God, we understand the Scriptures to be teaching that God is eternal. But what does this mean? Does it mean that God has simply always existed? Or that His timeline is infinitely longer than our own? Or is there something more to the existence of God in His relationship to time? I think that when the Bible says that God is eternal it's not just saying that God has existed for a very long time but that it is speaking of an entirely different kind of existence. Time itself, I think, is a created thing, that is, it is the measurement of changes within the created order such as the movement of the stars and planets. But was there this kind of time before creation, before "in the beginning"? What I am putting before you is the concept that God is eternal in that He exists outside the realm of time and He is not limited to time as you and I are. He is not, as to His nature, experiencing a progressing of events.
You can make a simple illustration of this concept by taking a plain sheet of paper with no lines on it, and draw a straight line with two ends so that it doesn't go all the way across the paper. This line represents time with a beginning and an ending. Let me say in passing that we must insist that time really is going somewhere and there was a beginning and there is an ending. So on your sheet of paper there is now a straight line representing time. You may place us anywhere on the line you wish but knowing that time is only going in one direction--forward. So what does this mean? If this line is time then attempt to view the entire sheet of paper as God's being. If God exists all around the timeline and all through the timeline then we are saying that all points in time are instantaneous to God. Have you ever struggled with the question of how God sees the future? Does He just look into the future or make a calculated guess? I don't think so. In order to be consistent with our other attributes I believe God knows the future because all points in time are a present reality to Him.
Possibly difficult to understand but I think vital when we start talking about how God deals with man and how He talks about salvation and aspects of salvation especially in the revelations of the New Testament.

Let us be reminded again that we are talking about a unique being who far transcends our small thoughts about Him, and that we would not know these things apart from His revelation to us.

III. The third section under the attributes of God are those pertaining to creation. That is, assuming creation exists and we are here, what are some of the attributes of God that we see in relationship to that creation. These are the famous "Omni's," Omnipresence, Omniscience, and Omnipotence. God is omnipresent in that there is no part of His created universe that He does not have access to; He is present in all of creation. This is not to say that He is intimately connected to His universe. The difference is that the pantheist would tell you that God is within the very computer screen or keyboard or sheet of paper before you and He can't escape it--that it is a part of Him and He is a part of it. The Christian says no, God existed before those things ever did. He created not because He had to but because He wanted to. He is present in all of creation but not in an existence sort of way, not in a way in which He is dependent upon that creation.
His omniscience means that God has all knowledge. You've undoubtedly heard the atheist with the absurd questions which really are absurd; they are totally illogical and without resolution. The same thing can be seen in relationship to God's omnipotence. It is sometimes said this means that God can do anything, but He can't. God can't cease being God, the writer of Hebrews said that. God cannot make a square peg fit into a round hole. He might change the laws of physics and make it so but the way things are right now that is a logical self-contradiction, and absurdity, and it's ridiculous to say that God as the ability to do the absurd.
There are many passages that demonstrate these. For example for omnipresence we have Psalm 139:7-10 and Jeremiah 23:23-24. For omniscience Hebrews 4:13; Matthew 10:29, 30; Romans 11:33. For omnipotence Genesis 17:1; Revelation 1:8 where God is described as the "Almighty God"; and Romans 4:17. This is a very brief run through some of the attributes of God revealed to us by Scripture.

[1]Louis Berkhof Systematic Theology, Combined edition with new preface, copyright 1996 by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.