The Forgotten Trinity (3 page)

THE EXAMPLE OF EDWARDS

I have always been challenged by the example of Jonathan Edwards'
when it came to this matter of loving God as He has revealed himself
rather than loving an image I have created of Him in my mind:

Sometimes, only mentioning a single word caused my heart to
burn within me; or only seeing the name of Christ, or the name
of some attribute of God. And God has appeared glorious to me
on account of the Trinity. It has made me have exalting thoughts
of God, that he subsists in three persons; the Father, Son and Holy
Ghost. The sweetest joys and delights I have experienced, have not
been those that have arisen from a hope of my own good estate,
but in a direct view of the glorious things of the gospel.

Once, as I rode out into the woods for my health, in 1737, having alighted from my horse in a retired place, as my manner
commonly has been, to walk for divine contemplation and prayer,
I had a view that for me was extraordinary, of the glory of the Son
of God, as Mediator between God and man, and his wonderful,
great, full, pure and sweet grace and love, and meek and gentle
condescension. This grace that appeared so calm and sweet, appeared also great above the heavens. The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent with an excellency great enough to
swallow up all thought and conception-which continued, as near
as I can judge, about an hour; which kept me the greater part of
the time in a flood of tears and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency
of soul to be, what I know not otherwise how to express, emptied
and annihilated; to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone;
to love Him with a holy and pure love; to trust in Him; to live
upon Him; to serve and follow Him; and to be perfectly sanctified
and made pure, with a divine and heavenly purity. I have, several
other times, had views very much of the same nature, and which
have had the same effects.2

When people today talk about "spiritual experiences," I am often
forced to reflect upon the fact that rarely are these experiences focused
upon God, but rather upon what that person believes God has done
for him or her, or what that person has accomplished "for God." How
much deeper, how much more meaningful, is the experience of Edwards. The object of his reflection is unchanging, for it is nothing other
than the eternal truth of God. The world, and his circumstances,
cannot take away from him what is most precious: his God.

I confess that the times when my soul is so enraptured by such
divine joys is far too infrequent in comparison with how often it is
taken up with worldly things and distracted by much less worthy objects of consideration. It seems as though the whole world does its best
to keep me from enjoying myself in my God, in contemplating His
nature, His attributes, and His works. But I read of great men of God
in the past and realize there are two common elements in their lives:
suffering and a love of the contemplation of God's attributes and
works. When I compare myself with Edwards, or any other of the great godly men and women of the past, I quickly see how influenced I am
by worldly standards and worldly priorities.

But most importantly, Edwards was drawn heavenward by the very
attributes of God that turn the worldly person cold and, in fact, are
often the most offensive to the natural or unsaved man. Do we love
God-all of God, including the "tough" parts of His nature-or do we
refuse to bow before those elements that cause us "problems"? If we
love Him and worship Him as He deserves, we will not dare to "edit"
Him to fit our desires. Instead, we will seek to worship Him in truth.

GOD IS GREAT

The Trinity is a truth that tests our dedication to the principle that
God is smarter than we are. As strange as that may sound, I truly believe that in most instances where a religious group denies the Trinity,
the reason can be traced back to the founder's unwillingness to admit
the simple reality that God is bigger than we can ever imagine. That
is really what Christians have always meant when they use the term
"mystery" of the Trinity. The term has never meant that the Trinity is
an inherently irrational thing. Instead, it simply means that we realize
that God is completely unique in the way He exists, and there are elements of His being that are simply beyond our meager mental capacity to comprehend. The fact that God is eternal is another facet of
His being that is beyond us. We cannot really grasp eternity, nor how
God exists eternally rather than in time. Yet this truth is revealed to us
in Scripture, and we believe it on the logical basis that God is trustworthy. It is a "mystery" that we accept on the basis of faith in God's
revelation.

When men approach God's truth with a haughty attitude, they
often decide that particular elements of that truth are not "suitable"
to them, so they "modify" the message of the faith to fit their own
notions. Since the Trinity is the highest of God's revelations concerning
himself, it is hardly surprising to discover that many groups deny it.
If one denies any of the preceding truths upon which the Trinity is
based, one will end up rejecting the entire doctrine en toto. An unwillingness to worship God as God is and has revealed himself lies be hind every denial of the Trinity that appears down through history. We
want a God we can fit in a box, and the eternal, Triune God does not
fit that mold.

William G. T. Shedd saw the truth when he wrote,

The doctrine of the Trinity is the most immense of all the doctrines of religion. It is the foundation of theology. Christianity, in
the last analysis, is Trinitarianism. Take out of the New Testament
the person of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and there
is no God left. Take out of the Christian consciousness the
thoughts and affections that relate to the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit, and there is no Christian consciousness left. The Trinity is the constitutive idea of the evangelical theology, and the formative idea of the evangelical experience. The immensity of the
doctrine makes it of necessity a mystery; but a mystery which like
night enfolds in its unfathomed depths the bright stars-points of
light, compared with which there is no light so keen and so glittering. Mysterious as it is, the Trinity of Divine Revelation is the
doctrine that holds in it all the hope of man; for it holds within it
the infinite pity of the Incarnation and the infinite mercy of the
Redemption.

And it shares its mysteriousness with the doctrine of the Divine
Eternity. It is difficult to say which is most baffling to human comprehension, the all-comprehending, simultaneous, successionless
consciousness of the Infinite One, or his trinal personality. Yet no
theist rejects the doctrine of the Divine Eternity because of its mystery. The two doctrines are antithetic and correlative. On one of
the Northern rivers that flows through a narrow chasm whose
depth no plummet has sounded, there stand two cliffs fronting
each other, shooting their pinnacles into the blue ether, and sending their roots down to the foundations of the earth. They have
named them Trinity and Eternity. So stand, antithetic and confronting, in the Christian scheme, the trinity and eternity of God.'

One attitude of the heart struggles against an eternal God, desiring
to make Him "more like us." But a godly attitude, the attitude that is
imparted by the Spirit of God, bows in humble reverence, and instead of struggling, it embraces in love the God who is beyond all comprehension. Such an attitude cannot be forced on anyone. It takes a miracle for the naturally hostile4 soul to be made willing to love God and
seek His face. That miracle is the work of regeneration, of causing one
to be "born from above,"5 made "a new creature."6 Hence, such truths
as the eternality of God, and His Triune nature, are doctrines for Christians, in the sense that to truly love, accept, and hunger for these
things, the miracle of salvation must take place.

The more exhaustive our knowledge of God's revelation, the deeper
our love for Him will be. So we must delve into God's revelation, "put
our waders on," so to speak, and explore the Scriptures so that we can
properly understand the pinnacle of God's revelation about himself the
Trinity.

A BRIEF WORD ABOUT THE FORMAT

I wish to bring my love for the Trinity into the hearts of many of
my fellow believers. As a result, I have done my best to avoid the temptation that comes from having defended this great truth against those
who deny it: to attempt to be exhaustive at every point. Anyone who
has spent a great deal of time "debating" with someone who denies the
Trinity knows how one must, at times, get very, very particular in responding to certain arguments and points. But since I am not writing
specifically for those who don't believe, but for those who do, I have
tried to be brief, concise, and direct. There are many passages of Scripture I could have presented, objections I could have addressed, but I
did not. My reason was simply to make sure that the final result was
readily available to the widest possible audience.

The single greatest reason people struggle with the doctrine of
the Trinity is miscommunication. It is very rare that anyone actually
argues or debates about the real doctrine of the Trinity. Most arguments that take place at the door, or over coffee, or at the workplace
involve two or more people fighting vigorously over two or more misrepresentations of the doctrine itself. It is no wonder so many encounters create far more heat than they do light.

It is basic to human communication to define terms. Yet so many
people have so much emotional energy invested in the Trinity that they
often skip right past the "definitions" stage and charge into the "tooth
and claw" stage. And this is not only true today. Historically speaking,
many of the early battles over the doctrine centuries ago had to do with
one side using a certain set of terms in one way, and the other the same
set of terms in another way. This was made even more a difficulty by
the fact that you had Greek-speaking people trying to understand what Latin-speaking people were saying, and vice versa. Today we can look
back and realize that early on both sides were saying the same thing,
only they were saying it with different words. If someone had just sat
down and defined terms clearly and forcefully, a lot of arguments could
have been avoided.

When it comes to the central affirmation of the triune nature of
God, most of the time we leap right past the "formalities" and directly
into a tug-of-war with passages of Scripture. The result is almost always the same: both sides go away thinking the other is utterly blind.
Such frustrating experiences could be minimized if we remember that
we cannot assume that the other person shares our knowledge or understanding of the specifics of the doctrine under discussion. As tedious as it may seem at first, we must resist the temptation to bypass
the necessary "groundwork" and insist that everyone define what they
believe the Trinity to be, and how they are going to be using many of
the key terms that come into play. Without this first step, little else will
be accomplished.