Doctrine Notes-Trinity Chapter One

Favorite Quotes

-p11 “we long for selfless, trustworthy, unending love from someone we can trust to be faithful and helpful”


-p25 “To be a Christian is also to be a member of the universal church. The church includes everyone from every nation, culture, language, and race whose saving faith is in Jesus Christ. Practically, this means that a Christian is part of a tremendous heritage and does not come to the Scriptures apart from community with all of God’s people from throughout all of the church’s history. Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians confess together that the God of the Bible is Trinitarian.”


Areas Of Disagreement

--p14 – Other “gods” as demons.

>>I think the authors overstate the case. I do believe in demons and I do think it’s possible that demonic activity could have caused people to worship false gods and idols. But, I think it is just as likely that these false gods were created by human imagination and speculation.


When Paul talks about the gods in the Greek and Roman pantheon and temples, he says this:


1 Cor 8:3-6 "But the man who loves God is known by God. {4} So then, about eating food sacrificed to idols: We know that an idol is nothing at all in the world and that there is no God but one. {5} For even if there are so-called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many "gods" and many "lords"), {6} yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live; and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live."


No mention of any spiritual forces at all. I think we need to be careful not to say any more than the Bible itself says.

--p21 – Jesus as the Angel of God in the Old Testament

>>There are several times in the OT when an angel appears and it is vague as to whether the angel is merely a messenger from God or God himself. It is clear that the people who met these messengers felt they were in the very presence of God. I think we should leave that as a mystery and not try to solve it by inserting Jesus.


In find, in general, efforts to ‘prove’ the existence of the Trinity in the OT unconvincing. Several places where God is referred to in the plural may simply be examples of what is called the “royal we”. In others, the word can be both singular or plural. And on page 19 the authors are simply mistaken about the “Targem Neofiti”, mis-translating a word that is actually ‘wisdom”.


While there may be echoes of God’s Trinitarian nature in the OT, it is not truly manifest until the ministry of Jesus and the fullness of God’s self-revelation.

--p31 – Modalism

>>While I agree Modalism is an error, I think the authors do a poor job of defining it. Modalism says that God is one, but that we experience, and thus know God in different ways: Creator/Father, Son/Savior, and Spirit/Sustainer. God never changes, only the way we encounter God does.


While this is an attractive idea and one that gets around the most difficult elements of the concept of the Trinity, I think it falls short of describing the Biblical picture of the nature of Jesus’ relationship to his Father.