Simply Trinity
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Simply Trinity

The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit

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eBook - ePub

Simply Trinity

The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit

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About This Book

What if the Trinity we've been taught is not the Trinity of the Bible? In this groundbreaking book, Matthew Barrett reveals a shocking discovery: we have manipulated the Trinity, recreating the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in our own image. With clarity and creativity, Barrett mines the Scriptures as well as the creeds and confessions of the faith to help you rediscover the beauty, simplicity, and majesty of our Triune God. You will be surprised to learn that what you believe about the Trinity has untold consequences for salvation and the Christian life. To truly know God, you must meet the One who is simply Trinity.

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Publisher
Baker Books
Year
2021
ISBN
9781493428724

1
Trinity Drift

Therefore we must pay much closer attention to what we have heard, lest we drift away from it.
Hebrews 2:1
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
J. R. R. TOLKIEN, THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING
Dagon and Ebenezer
“Dad, what’s an Ebenezer?”
It was an honest question. Our family had sung that famous hymn “Come Thou Fount” a thousand times, but this time when we sang “Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by Thy help I’ve come,” my daughter Georgia interrupted, confused by this strange word.
“It’s a rock,” I responded.
“A rock?”
“Let me tell you a story. A long time ago, before Jesus, even before King David, there was a prophet named Samuel.”
“The boy in the temple? Didn’t God keep calling his name when he was sleeping?”
“Yes, but in this story, he was much older. Samuel had a tough job. He had to tell God’s people, Israel, to repent, and they wouldn’t. They wanted to worship false gods instead.”
“Idols?”
“That’s right. Except it was so out of control that God let Israel’s enemy, the Philistines, conquer his people in war. But that’s not the worst of it. The Philistines took the most holy thing God’s people had: the ark of the covenant. The ark sat in the house of God, and when God wanted to be with his people, his presence came down on the ark. When the ark was captured and taken away, it was as if Israel had lost God himself. It was the worst thing that could ever have happened.”
“Did they get it back?”
“They did. The Philistines put the ark in the temple of their god, Dagon. In the morning, Dagon had fallen down face-first in front of the ark. Embarrassing, right? The Philistines propped Dagon back up, but the next morning he was on his face again in front of the ark, and this time his head had fallen off. Not just his head, but his hands too, like they’d been cut right off. Are you laughing?”
“Yes,” Georgia said with a smile she was trying to hide.
“It is kind of funny. Anyway, the Philistines got the message. They sent the ark back. Samuel couldn’t believe it: just when it appeared God had left his people for good, he came back to save them from their enemy. That’s so like God, isn’t it? But Samuel knew how unworthy the people were to receive the ark back. So he summoned all of them to put away their false gods and serve the one true God. Believe it or not, Israel listened and obeyed. When the ark arrived, Samuel took a stone, set it in a spot where Israel would see it for generations to come, and he called that stone—”
“Ebenezer!”
“That’s right. He called it Ebenezer because he said, ‘Till now the Lord has helped us.’ From that day forward, for hundreds and hundreds of years, every time a little boy or girl, just like you, asked their mom or dad why there was a giant stone in the middle of town, they heard this story. The stone was just a stone, but it was so much more: it helped the people always remember who this great God is and what he has done; it helped them never to forget their story, their family heritage.”
“What a great story.”
“Isn’t it? One of my favorites. Don’t forget, it’s your story too.”
divider
First Samuel 6 and 7 really is one of my favorite stories. But it took my little girl to help me see why: God deeply cares about heritage.
Your heritage matters. It’s your story, and one day it will be the story of your sons and daughters, a story they will in turn tell to their sons and daughters. And on and on it will go. The stories of our lives, the stories we inherit and find ourselves in, leave us a heritage that more or less defines who we are and who we will become.
But have you ever considered what kind of theological heritage you have inherited or will leave behind? If you are reading this book, your heritage, like my own, may be an evangelical one. There are many reasons to be proud of our evangelical heritage: its insistence that one must be born again to be a Christian, its commitment to the Bible as our supreme authority, its determination to keep the cross of Jesus central, and its zeal to take the good news of Jesus’s sacrificial death to the nations. These marks define our evangelical story.
But our evangelical heritage is cut short if it’s not also a catholic heritage—catholic with a small c, referring to those universal beliefs the church has confessed from its inception. Due to their biblical fidelity, the church has put these beliefs in creed form to be confessed by the church universal (in all times and in all places) and to guard the church against the threat of heresy, which more often than not poses as scriptural teaching. For this reason, they are called orthodox beliefs. Question is, do our beliefs as evangelicals align with those biblical, orthodox beliefs the church has cherished and confessed since its beginning, and will our identity moving forward be characterized by those same beliefs?
I didn’t tell you, but the four marks I mentioned above make up the evangelical quadrilateral: conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism. According to historians, these four marks define and determine whether one is an evangelical.
But notice, no Trinity. Wherever did the Trinity go?
Young, Restless, Reformed . . . but Trinitarian? Trinity Drift
Perhaps the Trinity is assumed with each mark of the evangelical quadrilateral. I hope so. But you must admit the Trinity’s absence as a mark in its own right parallels its absence within evangelical culture today. I have been an evangelical for decades now, and I’ve never met anyone or heard of anyone outside the evangelical fold who has said, “Those evangelicals may be many things, but there’s no question they are trinitarians through and through.” I’ve heard them call us by many names, but trinitarians? Never.
Granted, many evangelical churches and pastors know they are supposed to affirm the Trinity, and so they do. But if they’re being honest, they have no idea why other than to say, “The Bible says so somewhere, right?”though they’re not sure what verse that might be. Ask them to articulate that same Trinity according to biblical orthodoxy, and they will return a blank stare. You may be giving me one right now.
“Hold on, professor,” you might object. “Haven’t we experienced a resurgence of theology in recent years?” We have. Malnourished and hungry for meat rather than just milk, young folks at the turn of the century dug deep to resurrect theology in the church, and not just any theology but Reformed theology. But two decades have passed, and we now have the advantage of looking back to recognize gaping holes we did not see before—blind spots. Here is one too big to ignore: with all our focus on the bigness of God in salvation history, somehow who our triune God is in eternity was left out. How ironic. The story of salvation is a story that reveals not only what our triune God has accomplished but who he is in and of himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. How telling. Perhaps our Reformed resurgence is not all that Reformed after all, or at least not as Reformed as it should be.
But it’s not just that the Trinity has received little attention among the young, restless, and Reformed. There is reason to believe that in the middle of our Reformed resurgence—and all the excitement it brought—we’ve drifted away from the biblical, orthodox doctrine of the Trinity. Trinity drift, as I like to call it, was not sudden and explosive but gradual, like a couple on a sailboat enjoying each other’s company in the blue sea breeze, congratulating each other on the fine outing they’ve prepared, only to look up and realize they no longer see the shore. Worse still, they have no idea how to get back.
Don’t believe me? Let’s revisit our story; let’s go back in time to determine what our future holds.
Back to the Future
One of the best moments of my life was the day my dad and I first watched Back to the Future. I had just turned twelve, and little did I know I was about to watch a classic.
Marty McFly and Doc—and let’s not forget Einstein the dog—transcend the limits of time thanks to the DeLorean, a chic time machine if there ever was one. But as Doc and Marty learn the hard way, time travel is littered with danger, so much so that Doc wishes he had never invented the flux capacitor in the first place. To alter the past, even in the slightest, is to put the future at risk. When Marty leaves 1985 and travels back to 1955, he makes a terrible mistake, one that puts his own future existence in jeopardy.
We can’t go back in time to change our evangelical future, as much as I’d jump at the opportunity to glide through history in the DeLorean. But we can look back in time and see where the future might go . . . if things don’t change in the present. What will the future look like for evangelicals if our present trajectory continues to mimic our recent past? To answer that question, we need to take a hard, honest look at the last three decades if we are to understand why the future of trinitarian theology might be in jeopardy.
If Doc’s DeLorean took you back to the turn of the century and to any evangelical college campus, what would you see? You’d see me—the much younger me, that is—sitting in the college cafeteria highlighting the pages of a thick blue hardcover book with a square picture of Moses facing the desert. If it weren’t for Moses, you’d think this tome was a medical encyclopedia. But we all know the book: it’s Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, popular among evangelicals for its clear and trusted summary of Bible doctrine.
But let’s say your DeLorean is sophisticated enough to jump forward in time and drop you off not just on any ol’ college campus, but one with a seminary community. If that’s the case, then as you leave the DeLorean for the coffee cart and library carrels, you’d spot me again, lost in a book just as thick, but this time with a cover that looked like blue and red stained glass and featured a cross down the middle. It’s Millard Erickson’s Systematic Theology, popular for the philosophical flavor it brings to doctrine, reasoning its way to conclusions with rigorous, logical prose.
These were some of my first introductions to the doctrine of the Trinity. Sure, I believed in the Trinity; I was a Christian, after all. But I had no idea why. So, as a young, aspiring student, eager to learn Christian theology, I jumped in headfirst, yellow and pink highlighters and all. I was sure to pay attention in class, too, looking for opportunities to learn more about this Trinity so central to my Christian identity.
The way I was taught to approach the Trinity, however, was more or less like a hard science. The Trinity was treated like a conundrum, even a problem, but one that could be solved with the proper formula. Since no verse in the Bible taught the Trinity, one had to get mathematical. First, add up and list the verses that say God is one. Next, add up and list the verses that say Father, Son, and Spirit are each fully God. And . . . voila! We know God is one essence and three persons. Done.
Or so I thought.
At the time, I remember thinking this approach felt somewhat forced, even foreign to how I first met the Trinity of the Bible. I came to know the Trinity at a young age, but I should clarify that it was the other way around: the Trinity came to know me. The extraordinary thing about my conversion was that it was so . . . ordinary. My parents were faithful to read me the Bible, and they had a special affection for the Gospel of John. After reading texts like John 3, the Holy Spirit opened my eyes to Jesus as the Son of God, and when ...

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