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Adventist Theological Society

Why the Trinity Matters

Steve Bauer

Why the Trinity Matters- Part 1

I'd like to officially begin by saying this is not going to be the usual ATS.

We're going to be on turbocharging in the ballpark in 90 minutes, plus or minus.

We got a giant topic, and to try to do it some justice, I can't do it in 50 minutes.

And so without further ado, I want to get started.

With the Adventist history of mixed views on the Trinity in our early inception that's coming back to haunt us today.

Adventist resources, you have this book that's been on sale in the ABC for some time and is still available.

It's made to be more at the kind of layman's level.

It's not heavy scholarship, but it is modestly scholarly and has a mix of basic theology and Adventist history, some of these issues of basics covered in here.

Our own Norman Gully, Volume 2, especially Chapter 1, from Andrews University Press, and because he's our local research professor, they often have a set or 2 of these on sale in our Collegedale ABC.

General Conference, the Biblical Research Institute has a website and if you hack around in there they've got some stuff on Trinity and Adventist issues with the Trinity that can be helpful as well.

As a former president of the International ATS We have, in addition to our scholarly articles on the main website, we have a more Reader's Digest-y type version called perspectivedigest.org.

If you go to that website, put my last name in, when I was president I wrote several short articles addressing some of the key anti-Trinitarian issues that I was facing back 7 or 8 years ago that are still relevant today.

You can also put in the word Trinity and there's other of us who address these issues.

You've got a number of resources in Perspective Digest.

And again, if you head back to the main website for the Adventist Theological Society, there may be some scholarly stuff in the archives there that you can dig a little deeper with as well.

There's a lot out there that I could say, but a quick primer on the history and development of the Trinity and Christianity.

Millard Erickson's theology is a good, well-balanced overview, not Adventist specific, but gives you a bigger picture of church history and Christian history and the like.

Now, when I came down here from pastoring in the Atlantic Union, we didn't have back at the end of the 90s, at least I wasn't finding, aware of any great Trinity issues up in the Atlantic Union and I walked in the door down here and within a year I got conferences coming to me, we got this church, that church, the other church, et cetera.

And so between, I don't know, 2000 and 2006 or so, I spent so much time in the Gulf States Conference that Don Shelton was calling me the Associate Ministerial Secretary.

And so it appears to me that somewhere in the late 90s, this escalated, maybe subsided a little, but we're in a new surge, particularly in the Collegedale area, of anti-Trinitarian or non-Trinitarian.

For me, they basically believe the same thing.

The non-Trinitarians are quiet about it and the anti-Trinitarians agitate about it that way.

There's a great tendency in my experience that these people appear to our pioneers, Joseph Bates, James White, etc.

To me it's more of an argument from tradition.

And so they are enticing us to argue over our church fathers the way the Catholics argue over the classic church fathers.

And it's really an argument over tradition and what is the best correct Adventist tradition?

And the correct Adventist tradition is not to appeal to tradition, but to do your Bible homework.

And so, in my view, we are repeating patterns of early Christian history, and that's what I wanna get to in a moment.

But as somebody once quipped, and there's no definitive answer on who said this first, I see all sorts of ascriptions, but the 1 thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history.

And I see us following a very similar trajectory to the early church at about twice the speed.

Now, I want to make a nuance here that I'm not convinced that our anti-Trinitarian friends recognize.

And that is to make a difference between the creedal trinity, i.e.

The creed that mainline Christendom confesses with very specific details, which I'll come back to later, formally established in 381 AD at the Council of Constantinople, and a biblical view of the Trinity which is much less defined.

Our pioneers, from my interactions with our Adventist history experts from Judd Lake to Jerry Moon, to you know, etc.

I am quite convinced that when James White and Joseph Bates used the word trinity, they are using it with a precision that we do not use today.

And they're using it specifically of the creedal definition from the Council of 381.

Today, we use the word trinity for basically any kind of 3 person Godhead, whether the definitions all fit the creedal definition or not.

And the precision that these people are using, I think, has been missed in this discussion.

And there are issues in the creedal trinity that I would agree are problematic from a biblical perspective.

But instead of reusing the name for their own view, Trinity is the Creed, and so we're going to use the term Godhead or something else.

If you don't understand that precision, you can mess up your Adventist history very, very quickly.

Our fundamental belief statement on the Trinity, what we say about the Godhead would plug quite well into the creed.

But the creed goes way beyond the biblical data and so there's stuff in the creed that won't plug so well into our fundamental beliefs.

And so there's some overlap but not a perfect overlap.

So with that in mind, the doctrine of the Trinity is not explicitly defined in the Bible the way like you get the doctrine of the Sabbath or stuff like this.

We observe 3 beings in the Bible, etc., etc., but it's not spelled out in any real doctrinal way.

The doctrinal formulation is constructed through doing biblical theology, much as we would have a doctrine of healthful living.

There's no chapter and verse where they expound, but we take theological principles to build our doctrine of healthful living.

We take theological principles to argue anti-slavery.

And you go back 100, 150 years here in the South, and you had people taking Paul's statements about slaves obey your masters, Paul was affirming slavery, why should we get rid of it, right?

So how do we make a biblical argument against slavery?

There's nowhere in the Bible that says, thou shalt not have 2 wives or 2 husbands or 3.

Unless you follow Mark Twain's exegesis where he said, there was 1 text of the Bible that expressly forbid for polygamy, no man can serve 2 masters.

We construct our doctrine of the Trinity the same way that we construct our anti-polygamy, anti-slavery type stuff, et cetera.

And so just because we construct it theologically from biblical theology and there's no exact cases doesn't mean it's not biblical.

Or we'd have to throw out some of these other constructed doctrines as well.

Since the 1 thing we learn from history is that we don't learn from history, we need to go back and do a little review here.

The early church started out as being mainly comprised of Messianic Jews, all right?

The Gentiles really weren't coming to the church until Acts 9, and even through the better part of the first century, the church was dominantly Jewish.

It's in the early second century that things really get to the Gentile majority as I understand it.

And by the mid-second century we started to even get anti-Semitism in the church history.

So somewhere in the late 1st century, early 2nd century, we move to a Gentile majority in the church.

So the question is, How does a church that starts out with Messianic Jews who would have been strict monotheists and in their Judaism you have 1 God, 1 person, how do they suddenly morph, right?

How do they suddenly morph to having some kind of multi-person single God.

I think there are 3 factors involved in this history.

First of all, the New Testament claims of the deity of Christ.

So if Christ is God and the father is God, how are you monotheist?

Number 2, early persecution suppressing philosophical theology.

When becoming a Christian was a good way to get yourself killed or economically destroyed, you're more focused on survival and practical theology than you are on philosophical questions.

And so no one's gonna think about this apparent, I'm monotheist but Christ is God, the Father is God, you're too busy surviving and looking to God to help you through the persecution.

By the way, early Adventism with the mixed bag of Trinitarian belief, we were too busy defending the Sabbath, Ellen White, State of the Dead, Sanctuary, 1844, to ask these philosophical questions.

And so we had a similar pressure that suppressed that philosophical speculative theology, and it just really wasn't a big issue.

And then in the early church, especially in the second century, we have the explosion of Greek philosophical influence, particularly Neoplatonism into church leadership especially.

Leaders and bishops were starting to bring Plato into the theology and that's going to play a significant factor.

It comes to a head in the early 4th century, very end of the 3rd century, very early 300s.

Arius brings out his charges that Jesus is the first thing that God made and then he made everything else through Jesus and the traditional New Testament people the idea that Jesus was a created being is obviously a problem.

And so the Arian controversy raises the question, who is Jesus in relation to God?

So if Jesus is deity, how do we only have 1 God?

And that really becomes the question to answer now that Arius brings it out.

About this time that this controversy is brewing, Constantine converts to Christianity, and so there's no more legalized persecution.

If the emperor is Christian, right, the government's not going to persecute you.

And so that removes, finished removing, I think the late third century, the persecution was waning.

And so as the persecution wanes, the speculative theology increases.

And the battle against Arius was waged very heavily based on Plato, much more than waged on the Bible.

The Bible was involved, but I think Plato was more involved.

Now, the Council of Nicaea, 325 AD, began the process, and over the next 56 years, help me out Dennis, I think there was a total of 4 councils as I recall, culminating in Constantinople in 381.

It was either 4 or 5 councils total where they kept coming back to discuss the nature of the Trinity, starting with Jesus issues, and then the closer we get to the final council, they start grappling with the Holy Spirit.

And finally in 381, we get the creedal formula that, quote, orthodox, unquote, Christianity ascribes to to this day.

And you have to understand for orthodox Christianity The Trinity is the distinctive feature of Christianity.

Why the Trinity Matters- Part 2

Now, I'm taking a different track to address more directly the issues I see with the Holy Spirit.

And that is basically the denial of the personhood of the Holy Spirit.

And so, I will likely come around to the deity of the Holy Spirit, but I think that's more obvious.

It's the personhood, that's the area of contention.

What was interesting is with this major lynchpin with his websites and everything in Georgia a few years ago, as we dialogued, and I believe the Father, I believe this son business, but the Holy Spirit is not a person.

I joked with him, I said so you're really a Benetarian not a Trinitarian.

And once you know it I hit his website about a year later and he had a little article in which he described himself as a Benetarian, so I coined a word which he adopted that way.

So I'm focusing again on the personhood and I'm going about it again with the biblical theology with evidences found by examining personal functions performed by the Holy Spirit.

I don't have time to deal with Old Testament roots when I've done this for camp meetings and the like.

I start with Old Testament examples of personal functionalities of the Holy Spirit and then I show the matching New Testament 1.

So we're just going to give you the matching New Testament without the Old Testament for the sake of time today.

Ephesians 4, verse 30, this is the 1, I will give you the Old Testament parallel, both tell us not to grieve the Holy Spirit of God.

This is an emotional word, so the Holy Spirit is ascribed as having some kind of emotional response, and emotions are the function of a person, not of an impersonal entity.

Matthew 12, 31 and 32, the Holy Spirit can be blasphemed and sinned against just as Christ can be blasphemed and sinned against.

Blasphemy is always against a person, whether a divine person or also when you ridicule other people in the Bible, that's also blasphemao.

They blaspheme the apostles and so forth, trying to discredit them.

It has the technical term that when you claim divine attributes when you're not God, that's a fundamental slap in the face of God, and hence the technical theological concept of blasphemy.

But in the Greek New Testament, it is any kind of disrespectful slap in the face to anybody.

The point is blasphemy happens to a person.

I know I find nowhere in the Bible where it happens to a donkey or to a rock or it's somebody who has to be intelligent enough to understand they're being insulted.

And the parallelism is juxtaposing with blaspheming Christ who is a person.

And so the parallelism with then if Christ is a person and divine, it's strongly implying that the Holy Spirit has to be a person and divine to be blasphemed and sinned against in the same way as Christ.

And so I think that's evidence of personhood and divinity of the Holy Spirit, especially the personhood.

Holy Spirit intercedes and pleads for us in Romans 8.

Pleading for us, this is courtroom type language.

Intercession is done by people, not by forces.

Likewise, the same passage, Paul talks about the mind, the noose of the spirit.

In Greek thinking, noose is a human or divine quality.

This is, persons have minds, forces don't.

Acts 13 and First Corinthians 12, the Holy Spirit is a causal agent making administrative decisions.

So First Corinthians 12, it's the Holy Spirit who decides who gets which spiritual gifts.

Administrative decision making, function of a person, not a force.

Acts 13, the Holy Spirit calls and sets, I need to put an S in there, sets apart Paul and Barnabas to a work, and he says set them apart to me.

The Holy Spirit uses a personal pronoun from the data form of ego, I, for himself.

Personal pronoun plus the function of calling and making an administrative decision plus the fact that he's in conversation with the church and using language.

Okay, you find the Holy Spirit using language several times, right?

Comes to Paul in the dream, you know, et cetera.

Old Testament, Ezekiel has a conversation with the Spirit of God, lifts him up, says things to him, Ezekiel says things back.

I say people in the sense of person, not in the sense of human.

Some of our non-anti-Trinitarians feel that calling the Holy Spirit a person is somehow humanizing and turning him into a creature.

So understand that the word person doesn't necessarily mean human.

We have human persons, angelic persons, divine persons.

Person is someone who has this ability to think and reason and relate and love and so forth and so on.

So we have different kinds of persons, divine, angelic, human, etc.

Cherubim and seraphim are types of persons.

So person does not imply creation, it's just that you have these abilities to interact and relate this way.

Matthew 28, the Holy Spirit shares a name with the Father and the Son.

Now we've already seen the Father and the Son sharing the name Yahweh in Hebrews among other places.

Interestingly in Hebrews, I admit it's the only place in the New Testament, but in Hebrews 3.7, he says the Holy Spirit is speaking, but when you look at Psalm 95, that is being quoted.

In the Psalm, it's Yahweh who's speaking.

So suddenly, what Psalm says is Yahweh speaking, is now the Holy Spirit speaking.

So Hebrews 3 now ties the Holy Spirit to Yahweh.

Again, some would cite the greetings from.

I recognize there's a challenge with the 7 spirits.

Not everybody agrees that's the Holy Spirit, but many do.

And so once you accept this is the Holy Spirit, you have the triune greeting, but I recognize there's more debate over this.

John 16, 8, the Holy Spirit convicts of sin, which is related to that pleading and intercessory type function.

More so, the Holy Spirit, we're promised, is going to teach and to guide.

This is the book of Acts, right, where the Holy Spirit guides him, go here, don't go there, and so forth, back to those administrative functions and so forth.

"'I will pray the Father, ' said Jesus, "'and He will give you another counselor, ' or comforter depending on your English translation to be with you forever.

Now I want to start with the word another.

We got heteros, which is another of a differing kind.

Biblical example, Paul complains that there's another gospel of a differing kind that's a false gospel floating around and he wrote the Galatians to counter that.

Okay, If we were to make an analogy, let's say we had a fruit bar up here, and you went up and you got a banana.

And you eat your banana and you come back up to deposit the skin and get some more fruit.

And if you asked the server for a heteros piece of fruit, you'll get something other than a banana.

Say, another of a different kind of fruit.

Then there's alos, it's another of the same kind, for example, here another parable in this same genre I'm talking with, or in our fruit analogy, if you come up with the banana peel and you say give me an alos piece of fruit, you would get another banana.

So which 1 of these is the another counselor?

Now, the lexicons do note that there are a few places where these 2 words get blurred and get used interchangeably, but I see nothing in John 14 that would allow that interchangeability, and so I'm confident that allos is another of the same kind this way.

Now, before I finish on allos, I want to look at comforter for a moment.

John 14, this word is parakletos, a helper or an intercessor or an advocate.

This is another legal term, the 1 who advocates for you in court.

John 14 and 16, the comforter is the Holy Spirit, the paracletos is the Holy Spirit.

But in 1 John 2, 1, I write these things to you that you may not sin, but if we sin we have a what?

But because our English translates 1 as comforter or counselor and the other as advocate, you don't see it.

By the way, I see a couple of in-spirit people who may have gotten here late.

This is being recorded by AudioVerse and they will also have the PowerPoint PDF to go with it.

So If you came in late, that will all be taken care of eventually.

So both Jesus and the Holy Spirit are parakletos, shared title, shared function.

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