Trinity

I mentioned in an earlier blog entry that I don’t go a bundle on the church’s liturgical year. True, this is ancient enough; and it is a useful aid to memory that certain events are marked at their appropriate season of the year. But for me all the ritual and pageantry of it get in the way of simple heart worship. Yet there is one Sunday I am generally careful to observe: Trinity Sunday.

To me, this Sunday embodies something that is at the heart of right-believing Christianity. Indeed, without the Trinity, the faith would not be what God meant it to be. Yet, because it jars with merely human logic, it has had to be stoutly defended from the start. Often the opponents have come from within the church’s own ranks.

For many thoughtful critics, this business of Trinity, the Three-One God, is the one belief of Christians above all others which sticks in the craw. Why have it? they wonder. Isn’t it divisive? Doesn’t it go against the grain when we are trying to develop an “advanced” religion that will commend itself to thinking people? Why apparently compromise the truth of the One God when this was so hard won over so many centuries?

After all, humankind has spent long ages groping painfully towards the mighty concept of one god, not many. In the 1300’s BC Akhenaten, an Egyptian Pharaoh, sought to abandon the worship of the many Egyptian gods in favour of Aten, the sun’s disc. After his death this reform movement was reversed. However, the neighbouring Jews later developed a firm belief in one God, who is, repeatedly, reverently referred to as “LORD” in the Bible. This conviction had to compete with the persistent and seductive view that other gods were in charge of their different territories.

The apostle Paul was a fanatical champion of this hard-won belief in the one God. He had a lot of thinking to do when he encountered the risen Jesus on the Damascus Road. Jesus, he concluded after much mental anguish, must be accorded the title “the Lord Jesus Christ”, because He did things that only God could do – forgive sins and conquer death. Jesus had also introduced the Holy Spirit as a “personality” rather than just a life force. Equally with Jesus, the Holy Spirit had an essential part in the personhood of God.

Yet Trinitarians have had to battle a constant stream of dissent down the ages. The followers of an early bishop, Arius, denied the Trinity. So do, among others, Jews, Muslims, deists, Unitarians, Free Christians and a number of cults. Some readers may be astonished to know that Sir Isaac Newton collected a list of Bible verses which, he said, went against the notion of Trinity. Some years ago I came across Pentecostal believers who held to the once-fashionable “Jesus Only” teaching. For them, Jesus is the Father and similarly Jesus is the Holy Spirit. It is not for them a matter of three “persons” within one God, but one “person” in successive phases.

Why do I defend the Trinity so stoutly? Because I am convinced that only the inescapable evidence of their eyes could make Paul and the other early Christian leaders use the title “Lord” for Jesus that belonged to God alone. Because I believe that the way Father, Son and Holy Spirit work together as one is a beautiful object lesson in true relationship. And because the power of the three Persons combined is a triple lock guaranteeing my eternal safety.

And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee (2 Corinthians 1:21-22 ESV).