Warning: What follows is merely the latest in a long line of grumpy posts about how Christians talk about the importance of our fully developed theologies of God. Continue reading at your own risk.
Recently I was alerted to a press release which contained this quote from Kevin Giles:
“The doctrine of the Trinity is the foundational doctrine of the Christian faith. No other doctrine is more
important.”
Wrong.
The foundational doctrine of the Christian faith is “Jesus is Lord.” 
No other doctrine is more important than that the crucified Messiah is the resurrected Lord over all things.
Look, I’m as Trinitarian as the next guy. And, because of that, I do think that there are certain dynamics of Christian faith that will be impoverished if we do not allow our understanding of God to be shaped by this confession.
But we should not confuse the important conclusions at which the church later arrived with the foundations upon which the Christian faith is built.
People were Christians with a faith built on the foundation of the crucified and risen Christ long before there were Trinitarians. New Testament books were written, indeed, the whole New Testament–the foundational documents of the Christian faith, without much if any idea that God is triune as the “foundation” that has to be laid.
You can deny the Trinity and still follow the crucified and risen Christ.
You cannot deny the resurrection and still submit to the Lordship of the risen and enthroned Jesus.
You can deny the Trinity and still give all that you have to the poor, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.
You cannot refuse to follow the way of the cross, confess the Triune God, and expect that you should be welcomed into mansions of glory.
A vast amount of time can be wasted pondering the marvels of the Trinity and in coming up with all sorts of fruity ideas about the implications of the Trinity for the structure of the universe, humanity, language, and the rest (footnote: all of church history since Augustine).
But no time spent laying down our lives in self-giving love for our neighbor is ever wasted; it is the kingdom seed that seems menial only to then bear fruit 30, 60, and 100 times.
Let’s be careful about sending our doctrines to the front of the line in terms of what’s important for Christians to believe, and what is foundational for the Christian faith. That pride of place belongs to the Jesus who is storied in the New Testament and the call he issued and continues to issue through its pages: follow me.
You’re right, but, think about the early kerygma, a Trinitarian theology is clearly implicit therein. As early as twenty years after Jesus’ death, the great Christ-hymn of the Letter to the Phillipians (cf. Phil 2:6-11) offers us a fully developed Christology stating that Jesus is equal to God, but emptied Himself, became man, and humbled himself to die on the Cross, and that to Him now belongs the worship of all creation, the adoration that God, through the Prophet Isaiah, said was due to Him alone (cf. Is 45:23).
The earliest professions of faith in the apostolic Church are Christological and expressed in concise formulas: ‘Jesus us the Christ’ (cf Acts 2:36; 10:36; Col 2:6); ‘Jesus is the Lord’ (1 Cor 12:3; Rom 10:9; cf Acts 2:36; Phil 2:11); ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ (cf Acts 9:20; 13:33; Rom 1:4; Heb 4:14). Soon it received a more ample development in which the Christ-event, the central event of salvation history, is progressively elaborated upon (1 Cor 15:3-4; Phil 2:6-11; 1 Tom 3:16). A further development in the life of the apostolic Church is the introduction of a Trinitarian profession of faith. This is a natural evolution, not some orchestrated decision passed at council by means of assassination or coercion of any sort (if one studies the process and development it takes place universally), for the Trinitarian confession was latent in the Christological (cf. Acts 2:33) and implied in the early Kerygma (cf. Acts 2:14-39; 3:12-26; 4:8-12; 5:29-32; 10:34-43; 13:16-41). The Trinitarian profession of faith in the New Testament is best witnessed to by Matthew 28:19-20 and 2 Cor 13:13; it corresponds to the Trinitarian teaching of the Apostles (cf. Ephesians 1:3-14).
So, to sum up, the Trinitarian expression of faith was implied in the first preaching and is evident throughout the Old Testament.
Mark, thanks for jumping in.
It’s one thing to say that the idea of Trinity developed, and even developed naturally as an [one possible] elaboration of the Christian story. I agree that quite early on there was movement in the direction of a high Christology (even if I would disagree somewhat about Phil 2).
But to say that it is therefore implicit “from the beginning” or even in the OT is something very different. There is real development in the church’s musings, and we don’t have to resort to coercive councils as the only alternative to “it was there all along.”
Curious word “coercive” here, Daniel. When one recalls that a vast majority of the bishops gathered at Nicea had the “marks” of persecution on their bodies (or so the story goes), they clearly weren’t merely “musing” and they clearly believed something really crucial was at stake. The Arianism and semi-Arianism that were abroad undercut the basis for salvation by making the “savior” a demi-god or exalted human.
Mark, lots for me to agree with here.
I think the reason why many Christians are afraid to question the Trinity (DISCLAIMER: I do believe in the Triune God) is because, to them, without the Trinity it means Jesus really wasn’t God-in-flesh, and the Holy Spirit really isn’t God-within-us.
Or at least those are my own fears when I hear folks debate the Trinity.
Don’t you think that, in the light of the She’ma, the first prayer of Israel according to von Rad, the Christological profession seems necessarily to imply Trinity?
No. It worked itself out in that way, but there are other people called “Lord,” such as Davidic Kings (Ps 2). Kings stood very close to God in various parts of the OT’s royal theology. That is sufficient to account for most of what we find in the NT.
Does it matter if you’re reading the LXX or the TaNaK? Wouldn’t κύριος be the Greek interpolation for YHWH? I understand that this is considered a later interpolation by Christians, and that the original LXX would have contained the Tetragrammaton, but Thomas uses κύριος in Jn 20:28:
ἀπεκρίθη Θωμᾶς καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ, Ὁ κύριός μου καὶ ὁ θεός μου.
I think there is a good argument that the Apostles accepted Jesus was God (I need my books to look up the argument) but if they did, and they were Jews who believed in the Torah, and prayed the She’ma, and Jesus was a good Jew, which we know He was, then couldn’t one argue that Trinity was implicit in Thomas’confession? If Jesus said the phrase reported in Mt 20:28, would it not see that the Apostles understood what He was saying?
Thanks, Travis. These are great insights. We have, in fact, built much on the doctrine (at least, a few important things). This isn’t a bad thing, but is it the most important thing, that-without-which we have no Christianity? That’s my concern. It’s an important conclusion. But conclusions often are not foundations but pinnacles.
Just to jump in here, N.T. Wright said, regarding the She’ma, that if the church father’s had not come up with the word “Trinity”, it would be necessary to invent it based on Paul’s redefinition of the She’ma in 1 Corinthians 8:6.
Great article btw!
Oops, meant to jump into the previous comment.
And isn’t the Trinity dependent upon “Jesus is Lord”? If we don’t say “Jesus is Lord” first, then the questions that the councils and creeds answer don’t even come up.
That’s exactly what I’m on about, Isaac. Yes!
OK that makes sense. For a minute there I thought you were arguing that the Apostles didn’t think Jesus was God.
I don’t think that the apostles did, for the most part. But they confessed he was Lord, which raised the question that pushed some NT writers and the later the church to confess Jesus’ divinity.
So you don’t subscribe to the theory first outlined by Willhelm Bousset (1865-1920), who was convinced that the worship of Jesus as LORD originated not with the the early Palestinians Christian Community, but with Helenistic converts to Christianity, chief of whom was St. Paul?
I think that the fact that we have learnt from Qumran that in the Aramaic intertestamental documents that mara is a title for God in Aramaic. In the light of 1 Cor 16:22, where we have its original Aramaic in Maranatha, wouldn’t this lead us to conclude that the worship of Jesus as God goes back to the first Aramaic-speaking Christians, not to Greek Gentile converts?
St. Paul was only expressing in Hellenistic terms a faith which was already affirmed in very Semitic language prior to his Gentile mission.
Daniel, I’ve generally been with you on this matter that the apostles didn’t necessarily make the Jesus and Yahweh connection right away. But Rikki Watts has been producing some provocative work on a Yahweh Christology in the gospels. I think he presented these over the last couple of years at SBL. Are you familiar with those papers or his recent work?
I just want to say ‘amen’ to that. we should get a little button to go on Christian blogs, a bit like google’s +1 or facebook’s ‘like’ to add an amen, I reckon.
Seriously, spot on in refocussing the priority on Jesus. Theology is not the metaphysical pinnacle of God’s creation, the resurrected Christ is Lord and all else comes second.
Yes, the foundational belief of the Christian faith is that God resurrected Jesus from the dead as Lord. Everything else is just commentary.
“But no time spent laying down our lives in self-giving love for our neighbor is ever wasted; it is the kingdom seed that seems menial only to then bear fruit 30, 60, and 100 times.”
Where is the Resurrected Christ in this formulation, which is the second thing Jesus himself told us is necessary?
That’s the surprise of the 30, 60, 100.
Well OK then.
I have nothing to add except thanks for a great post! I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard people say to me that a person has to believe in (fill in the blank) in order to be a Christian. As often as not, though, the issue ends up being something that the early Christians didn’t have (like a developed doctrine of the Trinity) or something a believer in China may never see (like the Bible) or something a believer in Iran might not be physically able to do (like fellowship with other Christians).
Thanks for the encouragement!
“You cannot refuse to follow the way of the cross, confess the Triune God, and expect that you should be welcomed into mansions of glory.”
If that’s the case, and I’m afraid you are right, I sure hope God is a universalist. It seems to me that most of Western Christianity is more convinced of their doctrinal confessions than they are of actually following Jesus, and yet fully anticipate a glorious reward (Phil. 3:17-21). Though I am not a universalist, for my sake and that of all the other Christians in the top 1% of the world’s economy, we need to seriously consider what it means to take up our cross and follow Jesus, Trinity or not. May our lives reflect our faith in Jesus as Lord. May our good deeds glorify our Father in heaven. And, may we be continually filled with the Spirit so as to be graced to do all of the above.
Indeed. The doctrine of the trinity is the foundation of the orthodox doctrine of God, and in a historic sense is the dividing line by which we have said, “you are church; you are not” — even the central way we have first understood quite a few non-Christian religions, as anti-trinitarian heresies. But even if it is a pillar of historic orthodoxy, it is not foundational to the faith.
There’s a basic logical inversion at play, and you’ve touched on it, whereby we make other things foundational to the faith. In point of fact, the faith is foundational to everything else. There’s a basic pagan Hellenistic sense to this, and Paul plays on it in Romans: pistis is foundational to nomos — one’s basic relationship to a god constitutes one’s culture. Trinitarian theology, like Torah, is a way of life. It is an option among others in terms of the cultures of belief in this God. It is even a mark of our peculiar relationship to this God, in Christ — and so the relationship and the description become deeply interrelated. It then becomes reasonable to say that Trinitarian theology is a mark of Christianity as “a faith” (a creed, etc.) — that it is the foundation of that faith, even if it isn’t foundational to the faith of that faith.
I like what you’ve done here, Matt, and I’d like to subscribe to your newsletter.
This is a thought-provoking post. I wonder a lot about the practical implications of this question, ‘how important is the Trinity?’, particularly as it relates to the divinity of Christ.
You see, in the part of the world where I live, this is a life-or-death issue. When the Qu’ran says, “do not say ‘three’” when referring to God, and that Jesus denied his own divinity, people in this region take it seriously. Christian pastors are drug out of their churches and shot in front of their families for the ‘shirk’ of believing in the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.
What are we to say to these Christians? “You can deny the Trinity and still follow the crucified and risen Christ”? “You can deny the Trinity and still give all that you have to the poor, take up your cross, and follow Jesus”? Wouldn’t this imply that those who refused to deny the Trinity when their lives were on the line actually made a mistake, since according to your words it isn’t really foundational to the faith?
I do understand the point you are making about the priority of Christ as Lord. I just wonder if statements about denying the Trinity do not go too far.
And I suppose there is a possible danger in wasting time thinking up ‘fruity ideas’ about the doctrine of the Trinity. But it would seem that the greater danger is in not knowing why we believe this doctrine at all, since many people are being challenged with their very lives to know whether it ought to matter, and how much.
You would do me a service by explaining exactly why it is that you are a Trinitarian, and why you believe in the divinity of Christ. I look forward to being strengthened in the faith by your response.
Mission,
I was challenged on a similar point over on a friend’s FB page in response to my post.
The most important thing I want to say in response is that “Jesus is Lord” is a totalizing claim: the God of Israel, the God who created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them, has enthroned the Crucified as the supreme sovereign over all things.
This does not leave a lot of room for syncretistic assimilation of Jesus into other pantheons. He stands in the place of king over all kings and lord over all lords and master over all gods.
I understand the Qur’an’s affirmation of the Trinity is an important point of divergence. And I do think that eventually someone who confesses that the crucified Christ is resurrected sovereign over all will but up against it.
But our divergence with Islam begins long before the Trinity. It begins with the life, death, and resurrection. What happens in conversation with a Muslim if you say, “Jesus was crucified and God raised him bodily from the dead in order to enthrone him over the entire cosmos–this Jesus is the sovereign over all things, the culmination of God’s covenant promises to Abraham”? I’m guessing you’ve got plenty of uniquely Christian material to keep your conversation going for a long, long time without getting our minds in a tizzy about what 3 in 1 might mean, how it might be possible, and the like.
Suddenly, the benefit of my heritage seems obvious. Do you know about de Deo uno – de Deo trino? The universal and the particular? How important is Trinity? It is the focus and centre of Christian theology. Why? Because it is everything about us.The uni-personal models of Augustine and Thomas best help us see the Trinity as the Exemplar for the inter-personal project…as the transcendent Archetype of unity-in-diversity, or, to use a more personal expression, as communion-in-love-without-rivarly. It is as such that the Trinity draws human communities, and the Church, to the goal of communion-in-love-without-rivalry: we are to cherish each one’s gifts and individuality in the Body in such a way that he or she can “become more him or herself” in the growth of non-oppresive unity.
Mark, the first few sentences of his paragraph are pretty much what I hope the church can begin avoiding, turning instead to the story of Jesus as our exemplar, the core of our identity, and the indicator of our calling.
That’s horrible. But it sounds there’s a lot more at play than the doctrine of the Trinity. Such a doctrine in normal circumstances is certainly not worth dying for. Ever read Shusako Endo’s “Silence”?
Would it be helpful to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is the most important in that it is, in one doctrine, the summation of all the experience and contemplation of Christ’s body regarding her God?
In other words Mr Giles has it on its head. The Trinity comes not as the foundation- which has its own authority and glory, but as the fullness of our faith. It assumes all that went before, and as such proclaims all that went before.
If the question is regarding the most radically fundamental of our commitments, then we should start at the gospel end; but if the concern is the fullness of what we have come to know about God (a knowledge that include the gospel), then one ought to go to the other end.
Love that!
sure… but who is Jesus?
You aren’t very clear on what you mean by “you can deny the Trinity and still follow the crucified and risen Christ.” Do you mean you can deny that Christ is God? Clarify, please.
As a ‘oneness’ believer who does not believe/subscribe to the triune/Trinitarian doctrine, I have never heard a Trinitarian explain it quite like this. So when you say “you can deny the Trinity and still follow the crucified and risen Christ”, what is the value that you allot to subscribing a Trinitarian doctrine?
Dammit, where is John Burnett when you need him?
Can anyone explain an undeniable way of interpreting Scripture that proves the Trinity? No. It can’t be done. You can choose verses here and there and manufacture a Doctrine, explain some things and ignore others. But there’s always another way to explain it as well. Coming at Scripture with a bit more humility would really take a chunk out of the importance of Trinitarian theology. Viva la Bible!
I suspect there are other issues bubbling under the surface here, too: the place of community in salvation and the nature of that community being examples.
Eventually that Muslim might wish to embrace Jesus as King. It seems to me that in the New Testament this involves more than an individualistic ‘following.’
The Trinity isn’t an esoteric doctrine that is to be puzzled over. It is first and foremost part of the new identity into which a believer is baptized- Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and this, according to the Canon, has been so from the beginning.
Trinity is first and foremost a baptismal issue. Baptism is a communal issue.
Once again, we take dogma out of it’s proper context in worship and we get hit with weird statements. You are absolutely correct, “Jesus is Lord” is the foundation of the Christian faith. The Trinity is the lense we developed to make sense of Christian worship. It’s a good lense, I even think it is a vital lense, but a lense it is – taking a reality behind our comprehension but which describes the way we encounter that reality in worship.
Amen. Maranatha. Adoramus te domine.
Then think.
It took me a bit longer than you to get there, & I was much more verbose. But I got there!
Dear Daniel,
A friend linked to your post and asked for responses and I’d like to reproduce my response below so you may comment. I apologize that it treats you in the third person – had I been writing a direct response, I would have phrased it differently:
For me? Absolutely fundamental. Without it, Christianity as we know it is dead, dead, dead. Not just saying so because of some sense of creedal obligation, either. Rather, it’s tied up with Basil of Caesarea’s comment about Christian faith involving “the knowledge of the one God through the one Son by the one Spirit.” That was a fundamental claim which informed my post-grad work on Christian epistemology and I will say, without reservation, that if one attempts to expunge either the Spirit or the Son from a doctrine of the Trinity, then the traditional Christian claim – that Christianity involves knowledge OF God, and not merely knowledge ABOUT God – utterly falls to the ground.
PS: I reckon I’m against Kirk on this one. First, without the Holy Spirit, he wouldn’t know that “Jesus is Lord”. Second, to claim “Jesus is Lord” in the NT sense is to claim unity of the Son with the Father. I think he misunderstands, that to affirm that “Jesus is Lord” is to affirm the Trinity by implication, whilst to deny the Trinity is to deny “Jesus is Lord” by implication.
The point isn’t that the Trinity is foundational – so that you have to start with it – more that it’s intrinsic to the entire web of Christian theology. I think Kirk misses this point in his post.
Probably, however, Kirk simply means that one doesn’t have to sign off on a creedal statement about the Trinity in order to do, say, believe, etc., but I am surprised that a professor of Christian theology at an eminent institution like Fuller can set the concept of the Trinity (as opposed to the doctrine, if you get the distinction) off to one side as being of no account when, in fact, everything he said about what Christians say, do, believe, are in and of themselves affirmations of the reality of the Triune God.
****
Look forward to your response!
I think the Trinity is intrinsic to your web of Christian theology. But to many other Christ-believers and Christ-followers it is irrelevant. If you would like to look them in the face and tell them that they are not Christians, go ahead, but that’s only your definition. Otherwise, you can take or leave the whole doctrine, because it is just another symbol we use to explain the unexplainable.
“If you want to look them in the face and tell them they are not Christians”
Actually, in a follow up to the above I wrote this:
My point, rather, is that the basic elements from which the doctrine of the Trinity is constructed can’t be affirmed without affirming the Trinity by implication. On which, paradoxically, I think one can actually DENY adherence to the doctrine of the Trinity whilst STILL being a thoroughly Trinitarian Christian.
Let me make clear though that the technical theological talk about substances, essences, procession, etc., is a whole other story. I think it OBVIOUS that one can be a Christian, even a Trinitarian Christian, without even thinking about such issues, much less signing off on a creedal statement.
I also, interestingly, went on to flesh out my comments by saying something not unlike Andrew’s remarks below – much better to approach this historically and epistemologically. When one takes that approach one can see how the doctrine of the Trinity is pretty much inferred by the claim “Jesus is Lord.”
The key word here is “inferred” – as Andrew writes “The issue there is not which statements are primary and which secondary, but what secondary or systematic theological affirmations proceed from the immediate experience expressed doxologically.”
Interesting, but one could affirm the Divinity of Christ but be a Sabellian/Modalist. This is irrelevant to what logical flaws are inherent in Modalism. One could still be a Modalist and Worship/Follow Christ. Sure, there is a theological debate to be had, but if Scripture is not primary as a source over and above theology, then I’m not sure what is. Theology/Creeds/Doctrine, while allowing some pushback from reality and experience, must all be in discourse with Scripture, and as such are secondary interpretations of Scripture.
Concerning Andrew’s epistemological argument, Trinitarianism is not the only implication of “Jesus is Lord.” If it were, I would concede my argument. But until that time, Trinitarianism is always just secondary to the witness of Scripture, like the creeds.
I concede everything you just wrote, Adam, but two observations are merited:
A modalist in the present age would have to give some account of their claim to know God. Even if they were to express this in modalist terms, they would still THEN be saying something akin to the orthodox claim that God the Father is known through Christ by the Spirit – except each would be a mode of divine being. So it implies the Modal Trinity, I think.
Conversely, I would want to argue that the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity actually assumes that “Jesus is Lord” is NOT to be understood in modal terms.
So I’m sure my initial claim, that the doctrine of the Trinity, however understood, is implicit in the claim “Jesus is Lord” is correct. Clearly, however, there are a number of nuances I hadn’t considered.
Further, it’s only proper to acknowledge that Daniel’s discussion on the matter here and elsewhere clearly indicates that he’s fully aware of the point I’m making. He may not agree in detail (I can’t quite ascertain this yet) but he’s certainly not, as I thought, dismissing the fact that the claim “Jesus is Lord” connects in a quite intimate way with the formulation of the Trinity.
It was actually to get that point of clarification, rather than to challenge Daniel per se, that I posted my initial comment.
“Modal Trinity” bravo. If your tolerance of other understandings of Trinity is that flexible, I have nothing more to say. That’s enough for me. Sorry if I misunderstood from the beginning.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post (as always) Daniel.
I think the conversation would be better for distinguishing between the way this works epistemologically and historically – how we discover (or how the Church has discovered) Jesus as Lord or God as Trinity – which is what most of the discussion implies, and how God/Christ as Lord/Trinity “is” essentially (in itself) from a Christian point of view.
“Jesus is Lord” is a doxological statement that reflects the experience of believing in him, but it’s only implicitly a statement about who God is in the light of that confession. So yes, you’re right that there’s development – the Trinity is not named or described explicitly in scripture.
But to say that this means Trinitarian belief is secondary is conflating how it works epistemologically and historically with how we believe things really are. Maybe we infer trinitarian faith as a logically secondary acknowledgement of the experience of Jesus’ lordship, but that doesn’t mean its secondary in itself or in its importance.
For context, Kevin is speaking to a situation where explicitly subordinationist formulations are being offered as supposedly adequately Christian views of God – so in that context the issue is actually about what sort of God “Jesus is Lord” implies. The issue there is not which statements are primary and which secondary, but what secondary or systematic theological affirmations proceed from the immediate experience expressed doxologically.
I’m very much with you on this, Andrew.
I just finished a post-grad thesis which compares contemporary epistemology and Johannine theology with rather a background emphasis on the development of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit in church history.
Point being that I’ve bashed my head against the historical and epistemological issues for a while and, from my perspective at least, you utterly nail it here.
Frankly, I’m a bit over the debate as to whether the Trinity is “biblical.” The point isn’t what verses one can pluck out of the text to support the doctrine, the point is that if one makes the claim “God is known in Christ” and THEN acknowledges that our only access to that knowledge at the present time is dependent upon the action of the Holy Spirit THEN that’s all one needs to formulate the doctrine of the Trinity.
Obviously theologians work this through at a pretty sophisticated level, but I reckon that any person who says “Jesus is Lord” (which, to my understanding, can only be said by revelation of the Holy Spirit) IS a Trinitarian regardless of what creedal formulas regarding “Three in One” and so on they affirm or deny.
I have to say, actually, that some of Daniel’s responses in the comments thread may well suggest that I’ve been rather too critical. He acknowledges in response to Isaac Gross that there’s a historical path from “Jesus is Lord” to the doctrine of the Trinity and I didn’t give Daniel credit for this acknowledgement.
Perhaps the only thing we might disagree on is just how tightly coupled is the affirmation “Jesus is Lord” and the doctrine of the Trinity. In saying that the later is inferred by the former, I intend coupling them very tightly. Daniel may well be of another mind.
Incidentally, I just wanted to acknowledge that my remark: “I’m surprised that a professor of Christian theology…& etc.” makes me sound like a conceited prat. I studied theology under Brian Edger (now of Asbury Seminary) and he was pretty big on explaining the place of the Trinity in theological systems – so please forgive a pet hobby horse.
Obviously theologians work this through at a pretty sophisticated level, but I reckon that any person who says “Jesus is Lord” (which, to my understanding, can only be said by revelation of the Holy Spirit) IS a Trinitarian regardless of what creedal formulas regarding “Three in One” and so on they affirm or deny.
I’ve seen people express similar sentiments like this before, but when asked if this means Mormons are indeed Trinitarian, the answer is a clear and resounding no. This is followed by, what appears to me, to be a contrived excuse of saying that Mormons don’t believe that “Jesus is Lord” in the first place (since they deny the “biblical” Christ), thus they can not be labeled Trinitarian.
Dang, that first paragraph on my previous comment was meant to be in italics as its a quote from a previous commentator.
I should be very clear that the thrust of my thinking here is epistemological. That is, I’m coming at this from the perspective of how God is known.
In that respect, if you ask ME whether a Mormon who sincerely confesses “Jesus is Lord” is a Trinitarian Christian, then MY answer would be a clear and resounding “yes.”
Let me be very clear here that I don’t claim that Mormons hold to a Trinitarian theology. I am suggesting that a Mormon with genuine faith, who sincerely affirms “Jesus is Lord”, knows God according to a Trinitarian model of knowing and that they are, consequently, inconsistent in NOT holding to some form of Trinitarian theology.
Here my ultimate point is that what people affirm by way of creedal formulas may have NO association with how they actually come to believe.
My own view is that Basil of Caesarea’s comment about “the knowledge of the one God, through the one Son, by the one Spirit” (De Spiritu Sancto) expresses how God is known – I don’t say anybody has to believe this to know God, anymore than a person has to give a full account of visual perception in order to know that they see a tree.
The other side of this is the nominal Christian who affirms a trinitarian creed but does not sincerely believe that “Jesus is Lord” – such a person is NOT, in respect of a knowledge of God, to be regarded as Trinitarian despite the theological affirmations they may make.
Hope that helps.
Thanks. I understand better now what you’re saying
Daniel, I would agree that belief in the Trinity (which I have) is not essential for salvation. What’s more, I don’t think most people who would affirm the Trinity could really tell you what the Trinity represents. From my own theological perspective, I also think there are a lot of functional Binitarians who are afraid of the Holy Spirit and so treat the third Person of the Trinity like power or the Force or something bizarre like that.
All that said, I would suggest that when people in the Greco-Roman world, Jewish or not, heard the proclamation about Jesus, the terms that were used meant something. That is, Lord, Messiah, King, Son of God, etc., all had content for everyone who heard or read those words applied to Jesus. It meant something specific to affirm that Jesus is Lord. The NT writers give a pretty good idea of what they mean by that word. It’s apparent to me, at least in my reading of Phil 2:6-11, Col 1:15-20, Revelation 1, John 1:1-18 and John 10, 1 Timothy 3:16, etc., that Jesus’ lordship is not simply political power superior to that of the emperor but is in some unexplained way, equality with the biblical God. There is another problematic noun. When anyone heard the word “g/God,” they had specific ideas in mind and the NT writers work at making sure that those without a Jewish foundation get a clearer picture. While the Trinity is not explicit in the NT, I become more and more convinced as I read John’s Gospel that one must reach a conclusion much like the doctrine of the Trinity. Otherwise, the text is filled with huge tensions that make little sense.
The early preaching about Jesus included the affirmation that he is Messiah and we need to believe that. I find that interesting because most Christians through the ages have been Gentiles, who were not looking for a Messiah, and I often wonder what we’re supposed to do with the reality that Jesus is the Messiah.
I agree with you that we need to believe in Jesus and follow him, and that being able to check off on a list that one believes n doctrines is not sufficient. However, I find it equally problematic that I’ve encountered students, especially those who label themselves as “emergent,” who say that they want Jesus, but don’t want any doctrine. You cannot “believe” in Jesus without having beliefs about who he is and what he accomplished). Confessing Jesus as Lord and following him have specific content, and I would claim that it is equally a problem to confess Jesus without being able to articulate who Jesus is or what his lordship and Messiahship mean (for the believer) as it is to affirm the Trinity but not be a disciple.
Ken
Hi Ken, just briefly: YES! The titles meant something! Which is exactly why “Jesus is God” is really not a viable option for the earliest confessions about Jesus. “Lord” meant something else, as did “son of God,” as did “Messiah.”
All of what I’m saying depends on and presupposes a quite unique and radical set of claims about Jesus even before the idea of Jesus as Divine, much less the Trinity, developed.
Daniel, how do you evaluate the work of Larry Hurtado, who argues at length in multiple places that Jesus was worshiped, something reserved only for God for a Jew?
Daniel, I know that you are inundated with comments, but I was hoping for your comment on this:
Worshiping anything/anyone other than the one, true God is damnable idolatry. So, without a *necessary* belief in – or, more importantly, relationship with – all three persons of the Trinity, would it not follow that it is not necessary for someone to *worship* Jesus in order to be a Christian (as long as they are worshiping ‘God’)? Or are you saying that it is alright for strict ‘unitarians’ to believe and worship as such, as long as their ‘one God’ is the person Jesus of Nazareth?
I’m not sure that this standard is as consistently applied in early Judaism as we might want to think based on our understandings of the limits of worship given the possibility of idolatry. There’s simply too much grey area (other people being worshiped, God’s representatives on earth being bowed down to, honored, and sung to) to say that the mere presence of such cultic honor to Jesus means that the early church saw Jesus as God from the beginning.
Yes, it’s part of what we do when we worship because we’re sure he is God. But they started doing such things before there was a clear sense of Jesus as divine.
I guess that answers my question about your evaluation of Hurtado’s work. There might be some ambiguity on this matter, as witnessed in the work The Two Powers in Heaven, but I don’t find that argument convincing. In the very first message preached about the risen Jesus identified him as Lord in a text (Joel 3:5) that renders YHWH with kurios. I’m not sure how Peter could have given Jesus a more elevated title in this context short of articulating some idea of how the Father is God and the Son is God. I guess I don’t see the ambiguity in Second Temple sources that you do.
Ken, I find Acts 2 to be one of the clearest indicators that Luke did not see Jesus as ontologically divine: “Jesus was a man witnessed to by God…” “God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ.”
Jesus is made Lord and Christ by God. I worry that reading YHWH into claims about Jesus as kurios is too much overrunning the things Peter actually says about Jesus and Jesus’ relationship with God.
I can only say that I understand the speech in Acts 2 referring to both the reality that Jesus was a man and that Jesus should be identified with/equated with (perhaps) with YHWH. Those are the very tensions that the early church dealt with for its first four hundred years. I don’t suppose that we will agree on this topic, so I don’t have anything else to say. You did raise a useful topic, however.
Ken
I’m sure someone else has already made note of this, but since I am too lazy to read 53 previous posts or too averse to reading people getting worked up in blog comment threads to actually check, let me just point out:
“Look, I’m as Trinitarian as the next guy.” <–that was funny.
Finally, my humor getting a little respect.
Everyone, I stayed out of this far too long, for which I apologize.
I want to respond to one or two lingering points, to Murray’s first post, specifically this comment:
First, without the Holy Spirit, he wouldn’t know that “Jesus is Lord”. Second, to claim “Jesus is Lord” in the NT sense is to claim unity of the Son with the Father. I think he misunderstands, that to affirm that “Jesus is Lord” is to affirm the Trinity by implication, whilst to deny the Trinity is to deny “Jesus is Lord” by implication.
First, as an argumentative strategy, to say, “Well, you’re agreeing with me by logical deduction even if not in fact” is not a persuasive manner of argument.” Arguments based on what your “actual” epistemology is, even though you don’t know it, are only convincing to people who already hold the entirety of your epistemological framework.
Second, to say that the Spirit is crucial for Christian confession is not to say anything about the Trinity. Yes, for a Trinitarian to claim the activity of the Spirit is to invoke the Trinity. But for someone like Paul or Jesus who had no such doctrine, it was simply the “Spirit of God,” not the third person of the Trinity. We can talk about Spirit, and affirm its radical necessity, without being Trinitarian.
I’m not saying that’s what we should do, but it can be done with exegetical and epistemological integrity.
On Jesus as Lord in unity with the Father. Well… that works relatively well for the Gospel of John, but it’s not what Paul meant by it. Paul meant that Jesus is the Messiah, the same thing that Mark meant by Jesus is son of God.
The problem with many of the arguments being offered is that they only work if you assume the Trinity as the conclusion. All the data can be put together in other ways, and it’s a matter of a separate decision to submit to the church–beyond your decision to submit to the Christ whom we discover on the pages of scripture–to decide to affirm it.
Again, I am a Trinitarian. But no, Paul was not a Trinitarian. Nor a binitarian. John was not a Trinitarian, though he might have been something close to a binitarian. And no, there is no absolute logical necessity to put the data of scripture together in just that way.
On analogy: I was in conservative Reformed circles for a long time. They will tell the rest of you / us that we are only Christians to the extent that we are affirming Reformed theology. If you think you’re saved by grace you’re really a Calvinist; if you pray for God to act, you’re really believing in God’s sovereignty. Ever pray for a person to be saved? See–you’re a Calvinist.
The manner of argument is identical: come up with a conclusion that you’re sure all real Christians actually must believe in order for the label to apply, then tell them they’re covertly agreeing with you even when they disagree. It simply isn’t true.
It might only be worth mentioning that the cut and paste above was in response to the question “is the Trinity necessary for Christianity” and not “is belief in the doctrine of the Trinity necessary to be a Christian.”
Unfortunately that question, or particularly the way I interpreted it, steered my thinking in a particular direction which, as subsequent discussion has made clear, is quite at cross-purposes to the point of the original post.
Consequently, I’m happy to concede that your objection to Giles’s remark seems legitimate. The affirmation “Jesus is Lord” is clearly historically prior to the affirmation of the doctrine of the Trinity and in that regard it is certainly more foundational in doctrinal terms.
Second thing: the most important reason I have for posting the post I did has been reflected in any number of comments and conversations elsewhere: people are panicking about this, or insisting on certain readings, in large part because we as Christians have an underdeveloped sense of the significance of what it means to say that Jesus was a human being.
If “Jesus is Lord” entails eternal divinity, then God’s whole plan to submit the rule of humanity (Gen 1) is done.
On another thread, someone was up in arms that Christianity would not have any claim in a pluralistic world, no way to say Jesus can’t just be another shaman, if we deny the Trinity.
This only shows that we have not put enough stock in the absolute narrative necessity of a human one ruling the world on God’s behalf.
To say “Jesus is Lord” is not first and foremost, or even in any sense at all necessarily, a statement of Jesus’ divinity. It is a confession that God has made good his promise to Abraham and David that king would arise through whom all the nations would be blessed through its submission to the Lordship of God expressed in the Lordship of a faithful king.
Your elucidations are important Daniel. I think they confirm a sense I had that the implied conversation was about the question “is X a Christian or not” where X might be all kinds of people (including as you remind us, Paul and maybe even Jesus [pondering that one...]), not really on what is fundamental Christian doctrine.
I’m certainly with you on answering that question – not that you need to be reminded, but Paul’s approach to the Corinthians is a fairly clear exemplar of how wide one might have to cast the net containing brothers and sisters. Assent to propositions is a poor substitute to faith (if it’s actually a substitute).
You also invoke an apologetic framework when you talk about an “argumentative strategy” involving someone who needs to be convinced. Fair enough – but neither that context nor the previous one need – or even should, IMHO – be where the question of what is “foundational doctrine” is determined.
So I still agree with Giles, but I think he’s addressing a different question. In fact he’s addressing critically a bunch of people who hold the “affirming Reformed theology” position…
This post is not helpful. The understanding of Trinity has expanded God’s kingdom and is absolutely foundational to our understanding of Jesus’s message about both His Father… and the promised comforter & advocate. What is your point? How do you think you are helping anybody with this line of thinking? Confused.
Hi, Aaron, Sorry you’re confused. Part of the point of making posts like this is to help us see how assumptions that our theology causes us to bring to the table (such as Jesus had an idea of Trinity when he spoke of God as father) are misguided. The hope is that after the confusion we’ll be able to be better readers of the Bible we have and thus understand better the theology God has given the church, in scripture, for our edification.
Appreciate your kind response.
So a couple simple questions from a simple mind:
Is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit a reality to you?
Why?
Read the article. I’m as Trinitarian as the next guy. There’s a simple answer for you! Peace.
From Vanhoozer’s The Drama of Doctrine:
In sum, the Gospel is ultimately unintelligible apart from Trinitarian theology. Only the doctrine of the Trinity adequately accounts for how those who are not God come to share in the fellowship of Father and Son through the Spirit. The Trinity is both the Christian specification of God and a summary statement of the Gospel, in that the possibility of life with God depends on the person and work of the Son and Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity thus serves both as an identification of the dramatis personae and as a precis of the drama itself. “He is risen indeed!” (Kevin Vanhoozer, “The Drama of Doctrine,” 43-44)
So it would seem Kevin Vanhoozer is of the ilk of those with whom I disagree in this post! If the Gospel is unintelligible apart from Trinitarian theology, then nobody understood the gospel for hundreds of years after Jesus. It is not, in fact, a “summary statement of the gospel.” The gospel is about the work of Christ in life, death, and resurrection. That’s not the Trinity, it’s the work of Christ. I know that many theologians advocate for an identity between christological and trinitarian readings of the Bible/theology. I don’t follow them down that path.
That isn’t accurate, because nobody had the full canon of scripture during most of that period either. Scripture and Spirit are interdependent.
Bottom line is I respect you but you have obviously struck a nerve here with me. I suppose I need to study further. But at first blush, I don’t think your argument is as straight forward as you are making it.
I didn’t say any of them had the canon. It’s perfectly accurate to say they had neither canon nor Trinity.
But they did all have a crucified and risen Messiah. The son-giving Father and self-giving son, the God who raised Jesus from the dead–these are the most important things we say about God.
Dr Kirk, as a Trinitarian is there an important place for understanding the gospel in terms of its fullness- as opposed to its irreducible core. Modernity and its analysis seems to favor the later, but isn’t day to day life best thought of in terms of the former. Who would be interested in the irreducible female, when there are walks on the beach and rendezvouses between the sheets to explore? Is it proper to point to one of these mature encounters as a fitting summary of the person who came into the world naked and weighing less than six pounds?
Might the publications of the ecumenical councils be properly called ‘summaries of the gospel’ in that each depends on the one that went before? There need be no illusion that the 2nd century church used icons as does the church after Second Nicaea, but once the question was raised, there is no going back; or better, why would motivate such a return.
An Icon summarizes the church’s experience and understanding of the God in Christ by simply being possible. One can distinguish the Christian understanding of God from that of Islam and Judaism by simply pointing at an Icon. It’s all there.
Insisting that we find Icons in scripture is a different matter, and I understand that a proper understanding of any text ought to approach from the ‘back of the text,’ but our faith is much more than the proper understanding of any canonical text.
In other words, thank God for Pediatricians, but thank God for the poet who wrote “How beautiful are your feet in sandals, O noble daughter! Your rounded thighs are like jewels, the work of a master hand. Your navel is a rounded bowl that never lacks mixed wine. Your belly is a heap of wheat, encircled with lilies. Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle…”
That was a bit confused and confusing, I’m afraid.
May I try again?
The precious baby girl is foundational to the woman; not vice versa, but the mature woman is the intended ‘fullness’ of the baby girl.
Even in the synoptics, the “work of Christ” is never the work of Christ alone. The miraculous birth brings Mary, the baby, and the Spirit together. At the baptism, the man in the water (or, in Mark, out of the water), the bird, and the voice from the sky are (retrospectively) trinitarian and “show” all three persons involved in the redemptive work. Even Paul (Deutero-Paul?) uses language shot through with trinitarian implications, eg Ephesians 3:14-17. When the doctrine of the Trinity received its full, classical form in the late 4th century, all kinds of (seemingly) fragmented pieces in the NT fell into place in coherent patterns.
Daniel, it’s not a case of anyone (St Paul or a modern believer) having to affirm the Trinity in its developed form; but once the Church achieved a common mind on the matter, it became an issue whether one would side with the consensus or take a side road. The Church, through it “rule of faith” (regula fidei) provided a way of holding the disparate parts of Scripture together. You seem to be going back to the fragments and “privileging” one part over others. What’s the overall pattern you’re prepared to offer? And does it provide a way of bringing ALL the parts together? Or are you content to put the unity of Scripture aside in favor of its (manifest) diversity?
Thanks, Daniel, for (as always) a provocative statement. Curiously, what you say about “following the crucified and risen Lord” could have received whole-hearted agreement from the various “Arian” and Socian groups that flourished in places like Poland and England in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. Their “Lord” tended to a second “god” or an exalted man who was given the “kurios” or “son of God” title after his resurrection (Romans 1:3). But it seems to me (and you too, no doubt) that “Jesus is Lord” isn’t a designation with transparent, self-evident meaning; it needs a larger context which relates it to God. Paul’s “one God, one Lord” language (I Corintians 8:6) strikes me as a pretty good place to start. Unpacking that goes a long way towards what became orthodox Trinitarianism.
But I’d prefer to look elsewhere and turn to John’s gospel and especially his prologue. Rightly or wrongly, the Fourth Gospel’s Christology became the focusing lens through which the “Fathers” read the rest of the NT (especially the synoptics) and the OT as well. The concern for the earliest Christians wasn’t with something called “the Trinity” but with how the Son is related to the Father. John 1 provided the way of reading the rest of the gospel with its seemingly contradictory ways of alternately speaking of Jesus as equal to God (John 10:30, 14:11?)and subordinate (as in John 14:28, 17:3)by claiming that the “Word” (the Son or even God in 1:18) is both “God” and “with God” (Jn 1:1). In short, there is both “identity” and “difference” in the relation of the Son and the Father. The “contradictory” words that follow in the gospel, when read in that light, have all kinds of Trinitarian implications, even though technically they are “binitarian.” How the Paracletos of of John 14 and 16 fits in as a “third party” isn’t (so far as I can see) John’s concern. It took a Basil of Caesarea (in the 4th century) to bring to light the full implications of the Spirit in relation to the other two “persons.”
But why does it matter? How does all this relate to “us and our salvation”? James Barr said (in his provocative FUNDAMENTALISM)that, for evangelicals/fundamentalists, doctrines like the Trinity often have no function in shaping the Christian life or worship at all; they merely function as “tests of orthodoxy.” “We” believe them because they are (ostensively) “in the Bible.” Thomas Torrance, Barr’s one-time colleague at Edinburgh (and his fierce antagonist) would have agreed with Barr at this point. So would Tom’s brother James, who (as did Tom) lectured at Fuller. Both the Torrances (in line with the Greek Fathers) were convinced that the Trinity (and the Incarnation) was indeed central. As they often put it, “Who” comes before “What.” Jesus is able to be “Lord,” not only because of his humbling himself and submitting to a horrible death, but because he was (originally) in the morphe of God. Both full divinity and full humanity were required for Jesus to “do his job.” As the “God-Man” Christ was able (to quote Tom Torrance) to offer us the things of God and offer to God the things of humanity (in the form of a sanctified, purified human nature which Christ achieved by a life of perfect obedience). Such is the rationale undergirding the ecumenical councils of the first eight centuries and modern theologians such as the Torrances and most Orthodox and Catholic thinkers.
With this in mind, the homoousios of the “Nicene” Creed becomes absolutely crucial. Jesus is able to speak for God because he can speak as God (and not as the OT prophets); he is able to bring God’s salvation because he is God’s salvation in the flesh. For Arius and the Socinians, he could merely be a messenger, albeit the most exalted one.
Complicated issues to be sure. I could write a book (indeed I have!), but perhaps we can all affirm that Jesus’ claim (in John 14 and 16) that there were “many things” his disciples could not then understand and his promise that the “Spirit of Truth” would reveal them–that both of these (the claim and the promise) have implications of doctrines like the Trinity which took centuries for the church to receive real clarity. Perhaps we could also agree that the ultimate issue at stake is soteriological, not “theological.” “Who” may be the first question, but it ultimately is directed to “What” and is, indeed, the absolutely essential basis for the “what.” We need asssurance that the “man on the cross” isn’t merely just another executed criminal. We need assurance the the man who “shows up” after his execution is something more than a resuscited Lazarus.
Daniel, until we can recapture the existential import of the Trinity, James Barr’s point stands. Your post illustrates the crying need for biblical scholars and (historica, dogmatic) theologians working closely together. If exegetes frequently pull their hair (justifiably) out at the way theologians often handle the biblical text, theologians often return the compliment when they see exegetes woefully ignorant of the spiritual implications of the Great Tradition. I often think of Martin Kahler’s lamentation about the “tyranny” of the exegetes (the new “popes”), on whom we’re dependent for what we can or cannot believe. Historically, that role used to be taken by the whold Body of Christ, whereby certified teachers needed their teachings to be confirmed by the consensus of bishops who in turn needed to have their deliberations confirmed by the faithful “back home.”
“Socian” above should have been “Socinian”