The Deep Things of God (Second Edition)

How the Trinity Changes Everything

Fred Sanders

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781433556401
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The doctrine of the Trinity is taught and believed by all evangelicals, but rarely is it fully understood or celebrated. In The Deep Things of God, systematic theologian Fred Sanders shows why we ought to embrace the doctrine of the Trinity wholeheartedly as a central concern of evangelical theology. Sanders demonstrates, engagingly and accessibly, that the doctrine of the Trinity is grounded in the gospel itself. In this book, readers will understand that a robust doctrine of the Trinity has massive implications for their lives, restoring depth to prayer, worship, Bible study, missions, tradition, and understanding of Christianity's fundamental doctrines. This new edition includes a study guide with discussion questions, action points, recommended reading, and more.

1

Always Already Trinitarian

(Or, How Evangelicals are Profoundly Trinitarian Whether They Know It or Not)

We have received . . . the Spirit who is from God, that we might understand the things freely given us by God.

1 Corinthians 2:12

I believed it, but I still didn’t understand it.

Nicky Cruz

Reality comes first, and understanding follows it. If you want to cultivate the ability to think well about the Trinity, the first step is to realize that there is more to Trinitarianism than just thinking well. Specifically, the starting point for a durable Trinitarian theology is not primarily a matter of carrying out a successful thought project. Christians are never in the beggarly position of gathering up a few concepts about God and then constructing a grand Trinitarian synthesis out of them. Christians are also not in the position of pulling together a few passages of Scripture, here a verse and there a verse, and cobbling them together into a brilliant doctrine that improves on Scripture’s messiness. Instead, Christians should recognize that when we start thinking about the Trinity, we do so because we find ourselves already deeply involved in the reality of God’s triune life as he has opened it up to us for our salvation and revealed it in the Bible. In order to start doing good Trinitarian theology, we need only to reflect on that present reality and unpack it. The more we realize that we are already compassed about by the reality of the gospel Trinity, the more our Trinitarianism will matter to us. Evangelicals in particular should recognize that we have everything we need to think about the Trinity in a way that changes everything.

The Trinitarian Theology of Nicky Cruz

Nicky Cruz is famous not for his Trinitarian theology but for having been the warlord of a violent street gang called the Mau-Maus in New York City in the 1950s and for the dramatic story of his 1958 conversion to Christianity. At the center of his conversion story was a confrontation between this hard-hearted, knife-wielding teenage gang leader and a young preacher who brought the simple message that Jesus loved him. It was a confrontation, that is, between The Cross and the Switchblade, as that young preacher David Wilkerson would put it in a book about his Times Square ministry.1 Nicky Cruz would retell the story from his own point of view in his 1968 biography, Run Baby Run.2 Against the dark background of his young life as a victim and a victimizer, Cruz tells about forgiveness, the power of Jesus Christ, and how he was set free from soul-crushing loneliness. That dramatic turnaround is the story Nicky Cruz is famous for. There is not a word about the Trinity in it. Looking back, Cruz would say, “I came to Jesus because I knew He loved me, and still didn’t know anything about God.”3

But in 1976 Cruz wrote another book to describe what he called “the single most important fact of my Christian growth.” The book was The Magnificent Three, and the fact that had become central to Cruz’s Christian life by that time was the Trinity:

Something has emerged in my walk with God that has become the most important element of my discipleship. It has become the thing that sustains me, that feeds me, that keeps me steady when I am shaky. I have come to see God, to know Him, to relate to Him as Three-in-One, God as Trinity, God as Father, Saviour, and Holy Spirit. God has given to me over the years a vision of Himself as Three-in-One, and the ability to relate to God in that way is the single most important fact of my Christian growth.4

The Magnificent Three is Nicky Cruz’s personal testimony to the power of the Trinity in his life. It never sold like Run Baby Run, but it is vintage Nicky Cruz, from the chapter about the salvation of a drug addict named Chico, to the healing of a nameless prostitute, to the chapter about Cruz being ambushed by rival gang members a few weeks after his conversion. As a theologian whose specialty is Trinitarian theology, I have several hundred books about the Trinity on my shelves, but only one of them includes a knife fight: the one by Nicky Cruz. “Dynamite! A real turn-on!” say the publishers in a prefatory note. “Nicky lays it on you with his hard-hitting straight talk. You are there with him—in the tenement, in the jail.”5

Cruz’s testimony to his experience with the Trinity is indeed powerful. He praises the three persons in turn, beginning with several chapters about Jesus as his “magnificent saviour.” He especially emphasizes Christ’s presence, reality, and power to save. Cruz has already told us, “When I first became a Christian, I knew nothing about anything. So far as the things of God were concerned, I was a totally ignorant man. I knew nothing. But Jesus reached me despite my ignorance of Him.”6 In these chapters he tries to look back and describe that strange knowledge he gained in his first encounter with Jesus, before he had learned any details. In prose that turns to prayer, Cruz says:

I remember when I saw the real Jesus for the first time. Suddenly I saw You as You really were. I saw that You were human, just like me. . . . I saw that You had courage, You had guts. You had something I couldn’t describe, something I had never seen before, something incredibly strong and tender all at the same time. I saw that You had the power to squash me like a bug, and instead You poured out Your blood to save me, to love me, to heal my aching heart.7

This is the heart of Cruz’s message, and he moves effortlessly from the language of prayer to the language of invitation, directing his readers to the presence of Christ: “He wants to forgive you of your sin. He wants to heal you of your sickness. He wants to keep you from anxiety and fear and guilt. He wants to free you from every kind of bondage. And He is there with you now to do it. He is a wonderful, magnificent Saviour!”8

But this intense focus on Jesus does not keep Cruz from celebrating “the Magnificent Father,” whose fatherhood “is not simply a figure of speech.” God is not our father merely in a “universal and impersonal” sense of having created us but “also in a new, personal, special kind of fatherhood that is reserved for born-again Christians only. He is my Father not just because He created me but now also because He adopted me as His child! I am His creature, but more than that I am His adopted son!”9 Cruz is no less eloquent and impassioned about God the Father—his fatherly intimacy, his protection, his generosity, and his discipline—than he is about Jesus.

Nicky Cruz does not say very much about how his experience of Jesus and his experience of the Father are related. But when he turns to the third person, “the Magnificent Holy Spirit,” he begins tying the three together in one unified view of salvation. He accomplishes this by pointing out the absolute necessity of the Spirit’s work in bringing us into contact with the Father and the Son:

God is a magnificent Father. God is a magnificent Saviour, Jesus Christ. But if it were not for the magnificent Holy Spirit, I would still be a wretched, hateful sinner! It is not enough to have a Father-God who loves and provides for me. It is not enough even to have a Saviour who died for my sins. For any of those blessings to make a difference in our lives, there must also be present in this world that Third Person of God, the Holy Spirit.10

In what sense is the ministry of the third person necessary? The Spirit’s work is necessary because he is the one who actually brings us into contact with the Son and the Father. It does not take away from the Father and the Son to say that their work depends on the work of the Spirit. As Cruz argues, though Jesus died for us and the Father forgives us, we need to ask ourselves, “But why did you come to Jesus in the first place?” and answer, “Because you were drawn by God the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus saved me; the Father forgave me. But the Holy Spirit convicted me, brought me to my knees, and showed me God. . . . He showed me Jesus Christ, and I was gripped by His strong, sweet love. And then He shoved me toward God, and I gladly fell into the arms of my loving Father.11

In the work of the Spirit, the purposes of God are fulfilled, and all the salvation, forgiveness, and fellowship are realized.

Nicky Cruz is famous for preaching a simple gospel message in a way that is relevant to street-hardened young people. He is not famous for his Trinitarian theology, and it might even seem incongruous to highlight him early in a book about the doctrine of the T...