Introduction:
In our last post we began a series I'm calling "An Overview Of The Doctrine Of The Trinity" here Growing Christian Resources: An Overview Of The Doctrine Of The Trinity P1: Four Pairs Of Truths That Comprise The Doctrine Of The Trinity. Today is the first pair of four pairs of truths which comprise the teaching. Let me list the four headings as I laid them out in the last post and then expound some on the first one.
1. Truth Pair #1 God's oneness of being and plurality of Personhood.
2. Truth Pair #2 God the Father's eternal act of begetting and God the Son being eternally begotten.
3. Truth Pair #3 God the Father and the Son's eternal out-breathing of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit's procession from the Father and the Son.
4. Truth Pair #4 The Trinity in unity and the unity in Trinity.
With those four pairs of truth in mind, let's expound briefly on the first one.
Truth Pair #1 God's oneness of being and plurality of Personhood.
When we study the Bible to understand what God is and who He is, we come away with two broad clusters of truth:
A. God is one in being and three in Personhood. God being one God is affirmed throughout Scripture (Deut. 4:35; 6:4-5; 32:39; Ps 18:31; Isaiah 40:18; 43:10-11; 44:6; 45:5; Mark 12:29). The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 begins its article on God with this sentence: "There is one and only one living and true God." God is one in being.
B. We then understand the second important pillar of the doctrine of the Trinity - He is a plurality of Persons. He being a plurality of three Persons is also affirmed, whether it be by use of Divine titles that show Yahweh and the Angel of the Lord in the Old Testament, or in passages that show two of the three Persons (Genesis 1:2; Proverbs 30:4; 1 Corinthians 8:6) or all three (Matthew 28:19; 2 Corinthians 13:14) in the New Testament. The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 asserts:
"The eternal triune God reveals Himself to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with distinct personal attributes, but without division of nature, essence, or being."
What is meant by "Person" and "Being" when discussing the Trinity?
Two terms must be defined before going further into our study.
A. What is meant by a Divine Person?
First, what is meant by "person" when studying the Trinity? When we refer to the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit as "Persons", we refer to how they are active, eternal subjects within the Divine nature or Godhead.1 All three share in the Divine nature in such a way as to each be truly God in the fullest sense. In sharing the one, undivided Divine essence or nature, there is one will and one mind among the three Persons. This observation is demonstrated in how God at times will use plural pronouns to describe how He is acting in creation (Genesis 1:26) and in salvation (John 14:23).
We must remind ourselves that as we meditate on the Trinity, we are entering into the realm of mystery, meaning unless God has revealed the details of truth to us from Scripture, we can only respond in worship, rather than full analysis.
There will be aspects of the doctrine of the Trinity that are clear from Scripture, others which we can draw conclusions from indirect connections in the Bible, and still others that evade our comprehension.
B. What is God's being?
The second term we need to define is "being", or what is also called "essence" or "nature". When we talk of God's being, nature, or essence, we refer to what God is in His existence and attributes.
God's existence and attributes are unique from all other things, since God is eternal and without beginning, existing before everything else. God's attributes are each an excellency, a perfection, and total revelation of God's being. In other words, we don't have God's being on one side and His attributes stacked off in a corner on the other side. Rather, God's being is His attributes and vice-versa declaring to us that when you focus on one attribute, you have all that God is in that perfection along with all the others!3
When we talk of God's being or nature, we also will use the related term "character" which covers consideration of His being and attributes. The Bible will make reference to "the Divine nature" (Romans 1:18-20) for example, with older translations using the term "Godhead", to point out God's essence, nature, and thus His deity. 2
With those two terms defined, we now can move forward by considering this question: how does Scripture help us bridge these two general truths of unity in being and plurality in personhood?
1. The glory of God as a bridge between discussion of the Divine nature and the Trinity.
The Biblical teaching on the glory of God is the first way the Bible bridges the revelation of God being one in being and a plurality of three persons. For example, Psalm 19:1 tells us how "the heavens declare the glory of God", with "glory of God" gesturing toward contemplation of God in all that He is as revealed through the general revelation of creation.
We then see God's glory as a theme in a key Trinitarian passage, reminding us in Hebrews 1:3 of how the Son is "the radiance of God's glory, and the exact representation of His being". The term "God" in Hebrews 1:3 refers to the Person of the Father, of whom the Son discloses in His effulgence as the Divine Son. God's glory bridges any discussion of the Divine Godhead to the Persons in the Godhead.
2. The Old Testament's preparation for the full revelation of the Trinity in the New Testament.
Not only does God's glory help us bridge between discussion of God's oneness of being and Triune identity, but also the Old Testament revelation of God. Genesis 1 reveals what we could call the "twin pillars" of any Biblical doctrine of God - God's oneness of being and plurality of personhood.
Genesis 1:1 squarely tells us that God created the heavens and the earth. The Hebrew text utilizes a singular masculine verb in the third person to tell us of a singular God verbalizing everything into existence. Yet, the subject of the sentence, "God", is the Hebrew name for God "Elohim", which is a plural masculine noun. This intriguing point of Hebrew grammar gestures toward our main thesis in this first truth pairing: One God in being and plural in Personhood.
We see this same sort of phenomenon in Genesis 1:26, with the third masculine singular verb for "make" in reference to the making of man as male and female. Yet, the subject of that verb in the sentence is the Hebrew name of God "Elohim".
Furthermore, Genesis 1:26 also includes pronoun "our" in reference to the image He would stamp into the moral and spiritual make-up of the man and woman. God is no doubt a singular entity, Creator of all things. At the same time, this one God is a plural personality.
Throughout the Old Testament revelation we see references hinting at the personages in the Godhead. For instance, we see "The Spirit" (Genesis 1:2) and "The Son" in Psalm 110:4 and Proverbs 30:4.
The Old Testament doesn't get to the level of detail we find in the New Testament revelation to how it ties together the oneness of God with the plurality of personality. Nonetheless, The Old Testament sets up for what would be that eventual bringing together of the complete picture of "One God in Three Persons" observed in the New Testament.
3. The mutual indwelling of Father, Son, and Spirit as One God by nature.
Jesus' teaching on the doctrine of God is a quantum leap forward in the progressive revelation of Scripture in bridging God's oneness of nature and plurality of personality. As only Jesus could do, He utilizes the language of what theologians call "mutual indwelling", which is to say the "Father is in me and I in the Father" type of expressions. For instance, we read Jesus' words in John 14:10-11
"Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works. 11 Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves."
What Jesus taught in John 13-17 about Himself, the Father, and Holy Spirit being One in unity and distinct in identity moves our understanding forward in formulating a Biblical doctrine of God that affirms a oneness in being and three in identity.
Endnotes:
1. The term "Person" has quite a history in the historical development of the doctrine of the Trinity. I used the phrase "eternal, acting, subject" as a summary of the more technical term used by systematic theologians: "subsistence" or "hypostasis". Both terms are respectively of Latin and Greek origin, and refer to how the Father, Son, and Spirit are concrete, eternal subjects that eternally have ever acted within the Divine nature. The closest example of where we find the Greek word "hypostasis" in the New Testament used in this way is where the Son of God is deemed "the exact representation of His being" in Hebrews 1:2-3. The Son's co-equality and co-eternality of nature shared with the Father is such that the Son is Himself truly God just as much as the Father Himself is truly God. In the early third century, the Latin Church Father Tertullian began to use the Latin term "persona", with later writers using the Latin term "subsist" to refer to how the Persons of the Trinity act and relate to one another in their sharing of the One Divine nature.
2. There is overlap in meaning when it comes to the terms "nature", "being", and "essence".
3. This particular quality of God's being is called "Divine Simplicity", meaning God has no parts. We don't have a part of God's being in His love, another part in His holiness, and so forth. Rather, God is all holy, all loving, and so forth. He doesn't merely have love, He is love by nature - i.e. the loving God (1 John 4:8). He doesn't merely have holiness, He is holy (Psalm 99:1). This is what we mean by God being His attributes.
No comments:
Post a Comment