A Digest on the Trinity: Prolegomenon

This article is the prolegomenon in a series that will seek to set out the doctrine of the Trinity in clear and accessible language, to lay the foundation for deeper Trinitarian reflection. It is a digest that will try to cover the high points of the doctrine to hopefully equip the reader with sufficient vocabulary and concepts to probe deeper into the wonderful felicity that is the inner life of God.

Excellent books to go deeper include:

• Robert Letham: The Holy Trinity;

• Fred Sanders: The Deep Things of God & The Triune God;

• Herman Bavinck: Reformed Dogmatics.

Definitions

The word “trinity” is made up of the prefix “tri-” and “unity”. A variant would be “triunity”, or its derivative “triune”. All of these words mean the same thing.

Doctrine and revelation

Theology is all about distinctions and the first distinction we must make is between revelation of the Trinity and doctrine of the Trinity. Revelation is what God has revealed about Himself, while doctrine is what Man formulates based on the authoritative revelation from God. With regards to the Trinity, revelation would be that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, while doctrine is that God is one in essence and three in person.

Therefore, although we say that the revelation of God’s trinity is infallible and authoritative, our doctrine of Trinity is only authoritative insofar as it is faithful to revelation and is not by any stretch of the imagination infallible. The labours of Trinitarian theology usually centre on language that would accurately describe the incomprehensible life of God – the difference between heresy and orthodoxy usually lies on a razor’s edge of not just what vocabulary is used, but how the vocabulary is used.

For instance, both the heretics and orthodox affirmed that the Son is eternally generated (or begotten) by the Father, which forms the basis of their Father-Son relationship (more on this in another article). However, while the orthodox affirmed that it was an eternal and necessary act with no change in the Father nor causal origin of the Son, the heretics took it to mean that the Son was created by the Father. In this example, we note that while the same vocabulary was affirmed by both heresy and orthodoxy, the difference lay in the way each group understood it.

Assumed Trinitarianism

One must understand that because the Scriptures, for the most part, do not argue Trinitarianism but assume it, proof-texting is an insufficient way to prove the doctrine. Across the centuries, both heretics and orthodox have resorted to Scriptural language to argue their case.

Rather, the correct method in developing a Trinitarian doctrine must be a synthesis of the available biblical data into a comprehensive and coherent system with its own unique vocabulary to state the data in propositions. For instance, using the example of revelation and doctrine again, the Scriptures reveal to us that the one God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That is the data. When developing the doctrine, theologians co-opted existing vocabulary (while noting the etymological baggage) to put this data into propositions:

• God is one in essence;

• God is three in person;

• All three persons are united in simplicity; and so on and so forth.

Hence, we should be comfortable when the Scriptures seem Unitarian or Binitarian without trying to force it into a Trinitarian proof-text. When the Scriptures speak of only the Father and the Son, we need not read the Spirit into it to insist on having all three persons present. In the same breath, when the Scriptures speak of only the Son and the Spirit, it would be improper exegesis to insist that the Father be present in the immediate context of the Son and Spirit. Whether the Johannine Comma is inspired Scripture or not does not matter to the doctrine as a whole. Ultimately, one proof-text does not the doctrine make.

On the other hand, we should also be comfortable with extra-scriptural language to explain the truth in the Scriptures. Again, since Scripture does not set out the doctrine propositionally for us, we must make do with language foreign to Scripture to gain clarity on the concepts native to Scripture. Granted, that much of what you will read in the subsequent articles will sound like mere speculation. Yet, they only sound so if one approaches Trinitarian doctrine with the idea that all language used must and can be found in the Scriptural texts. For instance, some areas of modern scholarship have debunked the traditional interpretation of monogenes as “only begotten”, used to support the proposition that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. However, whether that modern scholarship is true or not does not impact the proposition: the Son is confessed to be eternally begotten of the Father not only because of the word monogenes, but because of a whole host of data that indicate their eternal Father-Son distinction within the indivisible being of God.

Insufficiency of human language

The first thing the theologian always realises when embarking on his task is that his language is woefully and painfully adequate to map the incomprehensible and immense being that is God. Yet, we still do so, for God in His great grace has condescended to “lisp” to us the truths about Himself.

One of the most common words used to describe the threeness of God is person. However, by bringing the word up, there is in the reader’s mind a preconceived notion of what “person” means. The danger is not in using words, but the reading of all the words’ preconceived notions into the being of God, as though He is entirely like us. Rather, we must note that our language is only analogical of God, that our best efforts at theologising shall only be descriptions of God analogically and never univocally.

With all of these prolegomena set forth, we can turn to the first article, which examines the Scriptural data of God’s triunity.