On the Trinity
Recently I was listening to Garrison Keilor on the radio. The long running show, “The Prairie Home Companion” was doing its periodic joke episode and that’s about the only kind of episode from that once wonderful show that I can still digest without feeling a little queasy. So I turned it up and sat back with expectation. They had just finished a bunch of “K-nock, K-nock” jokes and they were headed into the “how many so and sos does it take to screw in a light bulb?” jokes. After a good giggle or two I heard the host ask this one.
“How many Christians does it take to change a light bulb?”
Well, I was listening anyway but this question almost literally scraped the wax out of my ears and caused me to draw just a little nearer the radio.
“I don’t know,” replied one of his assistants dutifully, “how many Christians DOES it take to change a light bulb?”
“Three,” answered Keilor, “but they are one.”
Dead silence. The audience didn’t get it and neither did I. So Keilor did what you can never do with a joke: He tried to explain it (it's kind of like dissecting a frog and expecting it to survive the procedure). “That’s a Trinity joke,” he said uncomfortably. Still there was silence. “You know,” he said with a fading voice, “Father, Son and Holy Ghost? Three....yet One”. The silence still remained. Maybe some of them noticed the clumsy premise that confused individual Christians with their Triune God (we’re not Father, Son and Holy Spirit, He is!) but for the most part, I think the audience just didn’t understand, nor did it want to understand what a Trinity was; the doctrine is simply not good gag fodder, never was and never will be. In the end, the silence gave way to the odd sound of thousands of people coughing and twittering with polite insincerity, thereby ending the misery and sending the cast members rushing to another gag. For a moment, but only for a moment, I felt sorry for Garrison Keilor.
HERE’S THE THING
If I were going to invent a religion I would not invent Christianity. The faith, if it were false, would simply be too fraught with philosophical conundrums to be easily foisted off on any targeted worldly audience. Forget about Free Will versus Predestination, set aside the Hypostatic Union (now there‘s a theologian's term for you!), what about that Tri-unity stuff? The Trinity. Islam is offended by it and various cults have the utter lack of self awareness to actually call it ‘heretical’. What’s with all this ‘three yet one’ stuff?
Well, the 4th century Nicene Creed was written to deal with confusion about the person of Jesus Christ...but in dealing doctrinally with the person of Jesus it is impossible not to deal doctrinally with both God the Father and God the Holy Spirit also. Like it or not, the Bible connects the three as one and though it can defy human logic to do math like theologians do math, there is little denying that Jesus claimed to be God, claimed to have a Father who was God and claimed He was going to send a Spirit who was also God.
Now all of this might have seemed fine had the Christians simply separated themselves immediately from Judaism and identified themselves as the polytheists that Muslims would later claim they were; but this has never been true with Christians. We have always claimed the one God of the Old Testament as our one and only God; we have just simultaneously claimed that our one God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, simultaneously and eternally three... who are one.
Now, can I give an analogy that will straighten out the confusion that such a doctrine causes in the minds of men? No. Better men and women than I have tried and failed over 2000-years and I’m at least humble enough not to think I can do what no one else has yet succeeded in doing. I can make no logical sense of it at all; but I can say with confidence that I believe it. Why? Well, because it's Biblical. No, the word ‘Trinity’ is not found in the Bible. ‘Trinity’ and ‘Triune’ are theological terms; verbal contractions that
combine the word ‘Tri’ (for three) with “Unity” (a union of more than one). If one wants to reject the word ‘Trinity’ as unbiblical one is free to do so; but to reject the doctrine is to reject the teaching of both the Old (which teaches the Trinity by way of shadows) and New Testaments (which refers to it openly). What do I mean? Well, this is just a Facebook post and my middle daughter has pointed out that my Facebook posts are always too long to bother reading beyond the first couple of lines. She’s probably right so I’ll try to keep this one from being so long and boring that it helps the reader from gaining an experiential glimpse of what an ‘eternity’ means. Listed below are some quick reasons for the doctrine of the Trinity:
1. Deuteronomy 6:4 specifically says that there is only one God but the Hebrew word for ‘one’ in that verse (Echad) implies a compound unity (Gen 2:24, 11:1, Ex 24:3 and Num 13:23), which means two or more entities being counted as one.
2. The Hebrew word ‘Elohim’ is translated as ‘God’ 2083 times in the 39 books of the Old Testament Scriptures. I’m no Hebrew scholar but I play one on television and my experts tell me that the word ‘Elohim’ is plural, not singular.
3. God uses plural terms to refer to Himself on more than one occasion in the Old Testament (Gen 1:26, 3:22, and 11:7) and it is doubtful that He was imitating the late great Queen Victoria (“We are not amused!”).
4.God says things in the Old Testament that imply a plurality of divine ‘persons‘ within the ‘One‘ of Deuteronomy 6:4. For instance, in Isaiah 48:16, God tells the prophet Isaiah that God has sent Him (God), along with God’s Spirit. Interesting huh? God was sent by God, along with God’s Spirit; 1, 2, 3. I wonder what Isaiah thought. Proverbs 30:4 Does something similar, though only God the Father and the Son are in that particular verse. Nothing in Scripture is accidental (2nd Pet 1:20-21)!
5. The three in One are simultaneously seen in the Baptism of Christ (Matt 3:13-17) and they are specifically referred to by Jesus Himself when He gives the Great Commission to the church (Matt 28:16-20).
THE CRUX
Christianity sprang from a Jewish context and just as the Jews claim but one God, the Christians have always done the same. We just claim He is one, yet three. The Bible presents the Father as God (1st John 3:1, Gal 4:6) as it also does the Son (Isa 7:14, John 8:58, Rev 1:17-18) as well as the Holy Spirit also (Acts 5:3-4).
You know what though? I think that the very incomprehensibility of the Trinity is a strong evidence of the veracity of the Christian faith. No con man would’ve bothered with anything so plainly impossible and no philosopher could ever have conceived of it. A mathematician would’ve dismissed it as unworkable and no wise comedian would ever consider it one of the threads from which belly laughs could be woven (are you listening Mr. Keilor?). The Trinity is quite simply a clear visitor from outside our human reasoning. It is other-worldly and transcendent; the word ‘Trinity’ is a word of men, but the doctrine is more than men would ever have been able (or inclined) to carry from the well. It must’ve been placed there for them; by a God whose explanations of even the simplest things might possibly blow our very minds away.