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Who invented the Trinity?

Matt 28: 1 – 20

Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 21 May, 2006

WOULD YOU like $1000? I will give you that much if you can find the word, “trinity” anywhere in the text of your Bible. I don’t mean in footnotes or in section headings, but in the actual text.

That’s an offer the late Herbert W Armstrong made on the radio one evening. He was the founder of the Worldwide Church of God, which used to be very off the beam theologically, but is now very much more orthodox.

Armstrong said, “I can safely make that offer, because you will not find the word anywhere in the Bible, and, if it’s not in the Bible, it is a pagan doctrine that you don’t need to believe.”

What a devious and deceptive argument!

“Fundamentals” isn’t a Biblical word, but it covers that bundle of concepts that we believe are fundamental to Christian faith. Should we dismiss the Virgin Birth because the word, Fundamental” is not a biblical word? Or because the term, “Virgin birth” itself doesn’t appear in that form in the Bible?

That is a spurious argument, the kind of thing you might hear from a Goebbels, but should never hear from a person claiming to be a follower of God and his word.

But it shows an interesting fact: when we talk about who invented the trinity, we have to think about two parts of the question. We have to think about who invented the word or the term, and we have to think about who invented the idea that that word describes.

And let’s be honest: Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus invented the word. Most people call him Tertullian. He was born around 155 AD and died around 230 AD.

In other words, he died roughly a century before the Council of Nicea which we were talking about last week.

Tertullian lived in Carthage in what is now Tunisia, and was probably a lawyer. He was also a presbyter in the Carthage church.

He was converted to Christianity in around 197–198. It was a sudden and decisive event, which transformed his entire personality. Tertullian said that he could not imagine a truly Christian life without a conscious break from the past and a radical act of conversion. He wrote, “Christians are made, not born” (Apol, xviii).

Tertullian was a great logical thinker and a strict moralist. In the thirty years between his conversion and his death, he wrote a vast number of books in both Latin and Greek. Along with the term, “trinity”, he also invented the expressions, “Old Testament” and “New Testament”. Maybe we shouldn’t believe in those books either, seeing that their names are not part of the text!

Tertullian needed a way to describe what theologians had grappled with since the beginnings of Christianity: what is the nature of the relationship between God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit?

I want to pause here for a minute. I want you to think about that question for yourself. It is something that we all grapple with, and I’m sure that we all have different mental pictures.

Think back to when you first heard of Jesus. Wasn’t he — to you — a man who went around doing good, while God worked miracles and healings through him?

Then you may have thought of him as the man who was specially indwellt by God, the Son of God, who had a family resemblance to his Father. Or you may have thought of the relationship between Father and Son and Holy Spirit as being like how you can experience water as ice or as water or as stream, or you might have thought of Jesus and the Spirit as being kind of eddies in the great river of God.

And then, you realised that all these illustrations don’t go far enough. You thought about how Jesus is truly individiual, not just a way that God presents himself, and you wondered if he was just very like God the Father or whether he was of exactly the same stuff as God is made from.

Bit by bit you began to see that only a theory something like the idea of the trinity will really work.

Does that all make sense to you? If it does, you have been on exactly the same journey as the early Christians went on.

Be totally clear that orthodox Christianity has never ever believed in three Gods. Some historians and archaeologists and liberal Bible interpreters pointed to groups of three gods in pagan religions and said, “That’s where Christianity gets its trinity from.”

Nonsense!

Christians have never seriously believed in three gods. From the beginning they have known the scripture,

Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One.

That scripture can never be broken.

Furthermore, Christians have, from the earliest days, acknowledged that Jesus is so closely bound to the nature of God that, if we have seen Jesus, we will have seen God the Father — as Jesus says to Philip in John 14.

Of course, there are groups of three gods in pagan religions. There are groups of three in just about everything. Threeness is part of the basic wiring of our brains. We think in threes.

One, two three

Four, five, six

Seven, eight, nine

Ten, eleven, twelve,

Twelve ladybirds

At the ladybirds' picnic...

Those groups of three in the opening lines sound right, don’t they?

Preachers and speakers often make three points: it is easier to remember 3 or 5 points than to remember four or six points.

Five is three with an extra one tacked onto each end, three with outriggers.

But there is no other religion with a true trinity like Christianity has. Three gods, yes. Perhaps one god who manifests himself or herself in three different forms at different times. But no concept of three persons sharing a single quality or nature of God.

There are good reasons why the early Christians saw Jesus as God.

John writes,

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God,and the Word was God.

The rest of the chapter makes it very clear that this Word came among us as the man, Christ Jesus.

That passage hits us three ways with this Logos or Word or reason of God.

It echoes Genesis to put the Word there right at the start of all things, just as God is in Genesis.

It puts the Word face to face with the sovereign of the Universe. Only someone equal in rank to God can stand face to face with him. That word for “with” is the face–to–face word in Greek. Finally it declares that the Word is God.

Don’t believe Jehovahs Witnesses and others who say “the Word was a god”. I won’t go into the Greek grammar here, but that’s just not true. They are applying the rules of English grammar to the Greek text.

Matthew writes,

As you go, make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the Father’s, the Son’s and the Holy Spirit’s name, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

There is only one name, one authority, one status for Father, for Son and for Spirit. It is a strongly trinitarian statement.

Or there’s what Mark writes:

^{MK 1:1} The beginning of the gospel about Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

² It is written in Isaiah the prophet:

“I will send my messenger ahead of you,

who will prepare your way” --

³ “a voice of one calling in the desert,

`Prepare the way for the Lord,

make straight paths for him.’ “

^1:4 And so John came, baptising in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

The quotation from the Old Testament says, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord...’ But to any Jew, that was a reference to Yahweh, the Lord God. Yet Mark applies the word, Lord to Jesus.

Paul writes,

...if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

That’s Romans 10:9. Once again, we see that the word normally used for Yahweh, the Lord God, is applied to Jesus.

Or what about those verses which directly identify Jesus with God? Thnk of Titus 2:11ff:

^{TIT 2:11} For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. ¹² It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, ¹³ while we wait for the blessed hope--the glorious appearing of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ, ¹⁴ who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.

The Biblical writers may not have had a word for the trinity, but they had a very clear sense of the fact that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are equally God with God the Father.

But, as I said, people struggled with how to understand the concept.

It’s a bit like the discovery of gravity.

You all know the story, that Isaac Newton was sitting under a tree, wondering, “What can I discover today?” and an apple fell on his head.

At first he considered discovering cider, but that had already been done, so he thought for a while and said, “I’ve got it! I’ll discover gravity!” So he did.

I’m sure that many apples had fallen before Isaac Newton thought of gravity. Everyone knew that apples fell, but they didn’t know why.

Newton said it was an attractive force between the earth and the apple, and it was the same force between the earth and a feather. Newton was the first to work out a really effective theory.

And everyone knew that Jesus and God were sort of the same, but it took Tertullian to begin to work out a really effective theory.

He also talked about three “persons” sharing a single “substance” or “stuff” — all made of the same stuff that God is made from.

Tertullian’s theories wiped out Sabellius. Sabellius thought that there was only one God who, at one point manifested himself as the Father, at another point manifested himself as the Son, and at another point manifested himself as the Holy Spirit.

People knew that Sabellius didn’t make room for the Spirit to come on Jesus at his baptism, or for Jesus to pray to the Father. But Tertullian’s theories showed just why Sabellius was wrong.

Tertullian and Sabellius were both a century before the Council of Nicea, around 200 AD.

You can go back even further to the Docetists, who were around when St John was an old man, maybe around 90AD. John went into the public baths, but, when a famous Docetist came in, John left, because he didn’t want to be around if God judged that man on the spot!

The Docetists were even weirder than the Sabellians. They Docetists said that Jesus was so much God that he wasn’t human at all. They said that he only appeared to suffer, but that he was really a spirit being who couldn’t suffer.

Look at what this means.

At least 230 years before the Council of Nicea, people were wrestling with the idea of the trinity, They accepted that Jesus is God; they couldn’t work out what that meant.

It was Tertullian who gave it a name; it was Nicea which said, “Tertullian got it right.”

And the Council never came together to make doctrine; they always made it clear that they had come together to determine what it was that the churches always believed.

The vote recorded for the trinity at Nicea was 298 to 2.

Dan Brown gets it wrong again.

Rev Dr Gordon Wong, of Trinity Theological College in Singapore, puts it very neatly.

He says that it is good that The Da Vinci Code highlights the need to deal with the important question, “Who is Jesus, really? Son of God, or just a man?”

But he points out that Brown gets it wrong when he says that Jesus was only a man, and that this was the message of early Christianity. That is far from true.

But let’s finish with a look at why it is important to believe in the trinity. Ours is an age that demands a practical usefulness for what we believe.

If we don’t believe in the trinity; that is, if we don’t believe that Jesus is truly and eternally God, then either God is not love, or God didn’t create the universe: it has always existed.

Love can only exist if there is a lover and one loved. If there is no plurality within the nature of God, then God, who can’t change, can’t have started out not being love, and then have changed so that God is now love, but wasn’t once love. So he needs an eternal creation to love. But if the creation is eternal, then God is not the creator any longer. You work it out...

If we don’t believe in the trinity; if we don’t believe that Jesus is truly and eternally God, then we are left with the god of Islam, eternally and radically disconnected from us humans.

And that means that, if we don’t believe in the trinity; if we don’t believe that Jesus is truly and eternally God, then we have no basis for assurance of salvation, because we have no God who knows our weaknesses and understands our infirmities, we have no possible connexion with God, we have no saviour, and we are without any basis for hope.

The doctrine of the trinity is a logical outcome of Biblical teaching, and it is essential and basic to a real, soul–saving, devil–defeating religion. We don’t have to cast stones at the evil one, because our God has acted on our behalf; and at Calvary he was present in Christ, as he bore our sins and carried our sorrows.

It’s not an easy doctrine to understand, because our minds are so limited. All we can say is that it is true.

What can we do, but bow in worship and in praise. Let’s do so,

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2006. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)