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Doctrine of the Trinity

Transcript - ST506 Doctrine of the Trinity © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 22 of 24ST506

Protestantism

Doctrine of the Trinity

I begin with a prayer, Grant to us, O Lord, we beseech thee, the Spirit to think and do always such things as be rightful that we who cannot do anything that is good without thee may by thee be enabled to live according to thy will through Jesus Christ, Our Lord. Amen.

In the last lecture, we were thinking about the rupture between the East and the West in what is called by historians the Great Schism which turned, as we noted, upon the inclusion or exclusion of the filioque. However, we did note in looking at this that while this was a controversy and separated the East and West, it did underscore the unquestioned prominence given to the doctrine of the Trinity in the Middle Ages.

And now as we move over into what we call the period of the Reformation, I think that the only way we can really understand how the Roman Catholics, as they came to be called, and the Protestants, as they came to be called, were able to debate and to have controversies one with another is that there was so much that they held in common. In other words, they could only fight their battles concerning the sacrifice of the Mass, the nature of justification, the nature of the grace of God given in the sacraments, what is spirituality, what is the gospel, and so on; they could only debate and fall out over these points because they had a common base upon which they stood, and it was a nonnegotiable stance, and that was that they all stood upon the classical received dogma not only of the holy and undivided Trinity, but also on the dogma of the person of Christ, which was set forth with such clarity at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and clarified by later councils.

So as we turn to the Reformers, what we have got to bear in mind is that 99 percent of them were committed and did not raise any serious questions concerning the received dogma of the Holy Trinity. There were those who used to be called Socinians and maybe still are, but are often called by modern historians,

Peter Toon, DPhil Cliff College Oxford University

King’s College University of London Liverpool University


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the radical Reformers, who insisted so much on the principle of sola Scriptura that they wouldn’t allow any use of classical terminology and they in the main became anti-Trinitarian, partly as I said, because they did not want to use any other terminology or phraseology than what is given in the Bible or else that they were so extreme in their pendulum swings against the medieval church and medieval theology that they went too far and became actually anti-Trinitarian.

So let us now proceed to move into the Reformation and to note briefly some of the teaching that we find there concerning the Holy Trinity, and the best place to start is the Augsburg Confession, which was the first major confession of faith of the Reformation period. It is still received by the Lutheran churches as their primary confession of faith, at least in their constitutional documents. So let me quote to you from the Augsburg Confession. “Our churches with common consent do teach that the decree of the Council of Nicea concerning the unity of the divine essence and concerning the three persons is true and to be believed without any doubting. That is to say, there is one divine essence or substance, which is called and which is God, and yet there are three persons of the same essence and power, who also are coeternal, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” And the term “person” they use as the Fathers have used it to signify not a part or quality in another, but that which subsists of itself. They condemn all heresies which have sprung up against this article of faith as the Manichaeans, the Valentinians, the Arians, the Eunomians, the Mohammedians, and all such. They condemn also the Samosatenes, old and new, who contending that there is but one person sophistically and impiously argue that the Word and the Holy Spirit are not distinct persons, but that Word signifies a spoken word and Spirit signifies motion created in things.

That’s as clear as you could want it, the Augsburg Confession speaking for the evangelical churches, or as we call them on this side of the world, the Lutheran churches of Germany, states the commitment to the classical creed and the classical Western doctrine of the Trinity. And in the Apology for the Augsburg Confession, Philip Melanchthon, the junior colleague of Martin Luther, added, “This article we have always taught and defended, and we believe that it has in holy Scripture sure and firm testimonies that cannot be overthrown, and we constantly affirm that those thinking otherwise are outside the church of Christ and are idolaters and insult God.”


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Now you can turn to the various writings of Philip Melanchthon, especially the ones which are his doctrinal writings, and you will find more of the same. It was their common commitment. In fact, I don’t think that they investigated it in any real sense. They received the faith of the church and only challenged what they received when they believed that it was contrary to the sacred Scriptures, so the Lutheran Reformation then was, at least in name and in principle, committed to classic Trinitarianism. We find much the same when we move over to England, where we have the Church of England, which is influenced in its theological presentation both by the Calvinist, to which we’ll return, and the Lutheran Reformation which we have just noticed.

The Church of England probably was more conservative than either the Lutheran or the Calvinist Reformations in that it described itself subconsciously as Reformed Catholic and sought to keep as much of the structure and the life of the medieval church as it could that was consonant with commitment to the authority of Scripture in faith and morals. And so, it’s not surprising, as we’ve already noted, that the Church of England receives that explicit confession of faith, the Quelconque Vult, the Athanasian Creed, and requires it to be recited in divine worship on certain occasions. But this is the first of the 39 Articles of religion of the Church of England of faith in the Holy Trinity, “There is but one living and true God, everlasting without body, parts, or passions of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three persons of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

The second article is of the Word or Son of God, which was made very man and this statement presupposes the doctrine of the Trinity. You will notice, however, that in this article one of faith in the Holy Trinity, the manner of presentation is very much in the Western tradition. You move from the unity of the Godhead to the three persons. You do not begin as sacred Scripture does and the Greeks do from the person of the Father, who is God, and then speak of the only begotten Son of the Father, and of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father through the Son, but you begin here in that tradition of understanding which begins very explicitly as we noted several lectures ago with Saint Augustine and is continued in the Western church. That makes it all the clearer, as do the Lutheran statements, that the way of thinking and the way of presentation in terms of classical theology is very much that of the Western rather than the Eastern


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church.

I have left Calvin to last in referring to the three major traditions of the Protestant Reformation, the Lutheran, the Anglican, and now the Reformed or the Calvinists or Presbyterian, whichever word you prefer or maybe all three. There is no doubt whatsoever if you are familiar with the Institutes of the Christian Religion and the other writings of John Calvin that he is very much a Trinitarian theologian. He very much lives, if you like, intellectually and spiritually within a mindset that is Trinitarian. I’m sure this is so for others theologians of the Reformation, as it is also true for some of the leading Roman Catholic theologians of the Reformation, but Calvin, I think, deserves special attention here because, apart from his other many facets and aspects, he is very much the theologian of the Holy Trinity. Maybe some of you are aware of the splendid essay that was written by Benjamin B. Warfield some years ago now, of course, on this very subject of “Calvin on the Trinity.” You’ll find that essay in his collected works.

More recently than the time of B. B. Warfield, in fact, just this last year or so, the InterVarsity Press of America has published a series entitled Contours of Christian Theology, and Gerald Bray is the general editor, and he is the author of the first in the series The Doctrine of God. I used to work with Gerald Bray in London at the Anglican theological college known as Oakhill College. In his book on The Doctrine of God, which I commend to you in which there is much that is very useful to you if you are doing this course, he makes various claims which I think are based upon Warfield’s original work and then on the further studies in Calvin since. He makes various claims. I don’t know whether they are fully true, but I commend them to you for your investigation and for your consideration concerning Calvin and the doctrine of the Trinity.

Let me quote to you one or two lines from him so you get the flavor of what he’s saying. This is The Doctrine of God, Gerald Bray, InterVarsity Press:

The great issues of Reformation theology, justification by faith, election, assurance of salvation, etcetera, can be properly understood only against the background of a Trinitarian theology which gave these matters their peculiar importance and insured that Protestantism instead of becoming just another schism produced by a revolt against abuses in the medieval church developed instead into a


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new type of Christianity. The radically different character of Protestantism and especially of Calvinism has often been recognized by secular historians, but its theological origins have seldom been discerned. Partly this is because theology is a difficult and unpopular subject, which many scholars in other disciplines refuse to take seriously, preferring to treat theological statements as mythical conceptualizations of what are really socio-economic problems. Partly, too, it is the result of theologians’ failure or sheer inability to perceive the uniqueness of what the Reformists taught about God. It is often assumed that the Reformers accepted their ancient inheritance without quarrel and have nothing original to contribute to it. Many people assume, for example, that Calvin’s defense of the Trinity was intended mainly as a refutation of heretics like Servetus and that in that refutation nothing is offered that is new or little is offered that is new.

Bray in this chapter, where he deals with the Protestant Reformation and afterwards, challenges that view. He, as I said, following the initial contribution of B. B. Warfield on Calvin and the Trinity, he seeks to argue that far from being more or less the same as its Catholic counterpart, in terms of Trinitarian theology, Reformation theology is distinguished from it by a number of characteristics, and then he establishes what he thinks to be the most significant. I will read them to you in a moment or two. My understanding of the situation is not wholly different from that of Gerald Bray and B. B. Warfield. It seems to me from my observation, although I’m very much open to correction on this, that the Reformers applied the doctrine more, if you like, religiously. They brought the doctrine out of ontological, speculative, reverential thinking. They brought it down as it were without changing it. They brought it down and made it as it ought to be and as it really is more of a truly religious and practical doctrine. And in saying that, that meant that their handling of it was affected by that purpose, but I can’t really see myself that there was any major change in terms of the intellectual content of the doctrine. A different use of it and a more religious use of it, yes. So I leave it to you if you’re interested in this subject, I urge you not merely to read Calvin for himself, begin with the Institutes and then read his answer to Servetus and then read B. B. Warfield’s essay and then perhaps you will be coming to some clarity of mind on this point.


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Here are the points that Gerald Bray makes which he takes to be significant. First, the Reformers believed that the essence or the substance or the ousia of God is of secondary importance in Christian theology. That is, they did not deny that God has an essence or that the Godhead is an essence, and they did not reject the type of description found either on the one hand in John of Damascus or on the other hand in Thomas Aquinas. They said only that God speaks sparingly of His essence because He wants us to focus our attention and our worship elsewhere. Well, I accept that, but this is not a change of doctrine. It is simply a change of focus.

“The second point,” he says, “which distinguishes the theology of the Reformists,” Calvin in particular, “is their belief that the persons of the Trinity are equal to one another in every respect.” He admits that this belief was already deeply rooted in earlier tradition as the Athanasian Creed, which at least the Lutheran and the Anglican churches recited, which you will remember says it of the persons that in this Trinity none is afore (A F O R E) or after other non is greater or less than another. But he says that in the medieval tradition, this creedal assertion was qualified theologically in two important ways. First, the Father was recognized as the source of divinity in a way that the other two persons were not, and second, the Holy Spirit was regarded as the bond of unity between the Father and the Son bringing His own personhood into question.

Now he says, “Once again, the Reformers did not deny either of these qualifications but insisted that they must not be understood in a way which would effectively elevate one of the persons of the Trinity above the others.” And this was the real burden of Calvin’s opposition to Servetus and to those who thought along lines similar to him. That is his second point and it is in discussing this second point that he calls on the work of B. B. Warfield.

The third principle, and he says this applies to all Reformation theology, “It is that the knowledge of one of the persons involves knowledge of the other two at the same time.” “Knowledge of one of the persons involves knowledge of the other two at the same time.” Now I don’t want to go into this; I will leave you to look at this. Again, it seems to me that a point is being made which is totally in harmony with previous teaching and only differs in the sense that the Reformers are being less philosophical and more practically religious because their writings are not primarily writings in the academic sphere or on the academic scene, but


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they are writings which are practical in the sense that they are addressed urgently to a waiting public or they are addressed to meet some contemporary, vital question.

So we move on to his fourth distinguishing feature of the Reformist theology: their belief that human creation in the image and likeness of God cannot be understood either as the image of the Trinity or as the image of Christ. Now that’s an important one and worth looking into. The fourth distinguishing feature of the Reformist theology is their belief that human creation in the image and likeness of God cannot be understood either as the image of the Trinity or as the image of Christ. You’ll remember that the last part of the De Trinitate of Augustine was a contemplation, as he believed of the image of the triune God in and upon the soul of man and that this way of thinking was developed and extended by not a few medieval divines.

In rejecting this, the Reformers and Calvin, in particular, were not rejecting the medieval doctrine of the Trinity, but they were rejecting one chosen way of seeking to expound it. They were rejecting one chosen way of seeking to explain by human analogies the nature of Trinity in unity and unity in Trinity. But that is an important difference, and it relates to the whole question of the difference between natural revelation and natural theology where there is a difference between the Calvinist Reformation and the position of the Scholastics, but that is a different subject and it is not my purpose to go into it now.

You can read further in John Calvin, and I have indicated various other things you can read by Bray and by Warfield. So my understanding is that in the initial stages of the Reformation, be it in England or Germany or Scotland or in Holland or in Switzerland, that the doctrine of the Trinity was received but it was received with dynamic faith and religious power and, therefore, the presentation of it and the use of it was for these dynamic, vital religious ends and so the way it was utilized and the way it was used was certainly different from what we may call the “cold scholastic ratiocinative presentation” that you find in some of the medieval writers.

When we move on from the sixteenth century into the development of the Reformation and to the confessions of faith and the catechisms that are produced in the seventeenth century, we find more of that kind of precision, more of that kind of propositional clarity that we encountered in the medieval church. For example,


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if we turn to the Westminster Confession of Faith to the Westminster Larger Catechism and the Westminster Shorter Catechism, we enter here a world of very careful precision, howbeit, it is for definite religious ends, but when I read to you and remind you of some of the statements, you will see that we are very much back into the ontological, the essential Trinity, and there is an attempt to state precisely with great care the ontological Trinity and more so to state it with scriptural proofs. So let me take you very quickly on a journey through the appropriate chapters and questions and answers of the Confession of Faith, the Larger Catechism and the Shorter Catechism, to remind you of what is said concerning the Holy Trinity.

The first thing to note is that much the same as you get in the scholastic divines of the Middle Ages, so in the Westminster Confession and Catechism, you begin with the question “Who or what is God?” and then you come secondly to the Trinity. The Westminster Confession of Faith then in speaking of God says that “there is but living and true God who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions, immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, most wise, most holy, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of His own immutable and most righteous will, for His own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, longsuffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek Him; and withal most just, and terrible in His judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty.” In answering the question “What is God?”, question 7, the Larger Catechism says, “God is a spirit in and of Himself, infinite in being, glory, blessedness, and perfection, all sufficient, eternal, unchangeable, incomprehensible, everywhere present, almighty, knowing all things, most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful, and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in goodness and truth.” And then the brevity of the Shorter Catechism, “What is God?”, question 4, “God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable; in His being wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”

Question 8 of the Larger Catechism, “Are there more Gods than one?” Answer, “There is but one only the living and the true God.” Question 5 of the Shorter Catechism, “Are there more Gods than one?” Answer, “There is but one only, the living and true God.”

Moving on to the second paragraph in The Westminster Confession of Faith, on the question of God, reads, “God hath


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all life, glory, goodness, blessedness, in and of Himself; and is alone and unto Himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creatures which He hath made, nor deriving any glory from them, but only manifesting His own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things; and hath most sovereign dominion over them, to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever Himself pleases. In His sight all things are open and manifest, His knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creature, so as nothing is to Him contingent, or uncertain. He is most holy in all His counsels, in all His works, and in all His commands. To Him is due from angels and men, and every other creature whatsoever worship, service, or obedience He is pleased to require of them.”

And then only in the third paragraph of this chapter on God do we come to the Trinity. “In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons of one substance, power, and eternity; God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.” And then parallel to that question 9 of the Larger Catechism, “How many persons are there in the Godhead?” Answer, “There be three persons in the Godhead: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one true eternal God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory, although distinguished by their personal properties.” And then in line with that from the Shorter Catechism, question 6, “How many persons are there in the Godhead?” “There are three persons in the Godhead: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory.” And then in the Larger Catechism with as far as I can see no parallels in either the Confession of Faith or the Shorter Catechism, question 10 and question 11: “What are the personal properties of the three persons in the Godhead?” Answer, “It is proper to the Father to beget the Son and to the Son to begotten of the Father and to the Holy Ghost to proceed from the Father and the Son from all eternity.” Remember scriptural passages are given to illustrate what you will already have noted is the ontological Trinity. Then question 11, “How did it appear that the Son and the Holy Ghost are God equal with the Father?” “The Scriptures manifest as the answer that the Son and the Holy Ghost are God equal with the Father, ascribing unto them such names, attributes, works, and worship as are proper to God only.” And then we get a collection of scriptural texts.


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I want you to think about this arrangement. I mean, in my judgment it’s splendid theology, and it is very precise, and that is what I would expect from the divines who met at Westminster Abbey. I’ve been several times to sit in the place in that wonderful ancient Church of England church, Westminster Abbey, where the divines sat in the 1640s, and I’ve imagined them there doing their work. Of course, bringing their work with them and then sharing it with others there for mutual advice and correction. But I want you to think about this, here we have this very learned assembly of the most educated theologically divines of the Church of England, and that included members from Scotland and from Ireland and Wales as well, setting out here what they believe to be the scriptural teaching concerning God and the Holy Trinity. It’s obviously intended to be scriptural because of the abundance of proofs that were added to these statements, but I want you to notice how it is done. It is done with first of all the question asked and answered, “What is God?” And only in the second place is the doctrine of the Trinity brought in by “How many persons are there in the Godhead?” Having established that there is one God and one God only and Deuteronomy 6:4 is there very much in evidence as a Scripture that is referred to, but having declared that there is but one only, the living and true God, only then having established the unity of God is the doctrine of the Trinity brought in, and it’s brought in with great precision as you’ve noted, it sits upon and rests upon that developed understanding, that developed dogma, that developed way of speaking of the ontological Trinity that began with the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople through the Athanansian Creed and the later medieval councils. It sits upon, as it were, that treasury of clarification and makes use of it and uses it all giving scriptural references.

Of course, what I’m trying to say is this, and I’m very glad to see it and I rejoice to see it myself, but I think we need to be aware what it is that we have here. This is not to the untrained eye, as it were, merely and only the drawing of a doctrine from Scripture. It is rather, receiving a doctrine that over the centuries has been clearly seen to be a biblical doctrine; in fact, to be the most basic of all biblical doctrine and of the use of the clarifications that have been developed in the meditation of the church over the centuries. It’s a use of all this, and thus the Scripture is being read here in the light of, or if you like, with the spectacles of the Western Trinitarian theological tradition. That’s why it begins with the unity of God and proceeds to the Trinity of God, and in that order and does so with such splendid and careful precision.


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Now had the divines, and they were quite capable of this, had they believed that you do theology simply by starting with your private judgment and the open Bible before you, what they would have come to I do not know, but had they looked rather to the Eastern tradition than to the Western tradition, then their Trinitarian doctrine would have looked different. It would have begun not with the treatise on the one God, as it were, and then move to God and Trinity—one God in three persons—but it would have begun with ho theos, God as God is in the New Testament, and as we’ve said many times and I think I cannot say it too often that ho theos in the New Testament is virtually always God who is the Father and so had they followed that biblically grounded tradition which is the way of the Eastern church, then the Confession of Faith would have looked different.

If I had time and it was appropriate, I could go on and look at the other parts of this Confession of Faith and the Larger Catechism and show you that in other ways, as well, the way of dealing with doctrine and theology and the way of reading the Scriptures is scholastic, and I don’t use the word scholastic in any [pejorative] sense. To me it is a descriptive word of a methodology that the theology, for example with the respect to the doctrine of creation, the theology with the respect of the doctrine of providence, the theology with the respect to the doctrine of election and predestination; on all these points, there is a living, intellectually and a reading of the Scripture intellectually within what we may call the Western scholastic tradition, that tradition which was brought to near perfection by the medieval divines such as Thomas Aquinas, and I commend to you if you’ve never read Thomas Aquinas, don’t listen to what people say about him, but take the first forty chapters or so of his Summa Theologiae and read it for the improvement of your mind and the elevation of your soul. And likewise, I say the same of those seventeenth-century divines who were responsible for the Westminster Confession of Faith, as it came to be called, the Larger and the Shorter Catechisms.

Just a few years after the production of the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms, there was another confession produced, this time by the Congregational churches, the Independents, as they were called. They were called together in the time of Oliver Cromwell, and their most prestigious, in terms of later judgments, of theologians was John Owen about whom some of you may know. I’ve published several books and written his biography, but he himself added to the Westminster Confession of Faith in their own Savoy Declaration of Faith, and then later on he wrote


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some very marvelous writings upon the Holy Spirit and upon the blessed Holy Trinity and upon communion with God. So if we take John Owen as an example of a scholastic, a Puritan scholastic theologian, using scholastic in the sense already established, we find that with someone like him there is a resting within and a drawing from the Western tradition of clarity, but there’s also a deep feeding upon, a deep meditating upon scriptural content and then a contemplating of the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, as Scripture says, “a contemplating of the glory of the Father in the face of Jesus Christ,” and some of the books that came from his pen toward the end, of course, were on meditating upon Christ in His glory.

So don’t be put off by the scholastic method. Recognize it for what it is and make use of it for all the goodness in it, but never be drawn away from meditating upon Scripture and contemplating the God whom Scripture points to and describes.

Download - Doctrine y rinitthe T f o Doctrine of the Trinity ST506 LESSON ......flavor of what he’s saying. This is The Doctrine of God, Gerald Bray, InterVarsity Press: The great issues of

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