The Word That Isn't in the Book: An Exploration of the Trinity | Ep. 89
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Jeremy: [00:00:00] I grew up being taught about the Trinity,
that God existed as one, but also that God was Father, Son, and Spirit, which as a kid led to a lot of questions. And I've discovered as an adult, those questions haven't gone away. They, they don't suddenly get answered. As you journey further into the realm of Christian explanation, you just tend to have bigger questions.
As I got older, these questions didn't go away, and I remember recently going through the entire Gospel of John on a separate podcast. I did a Rebuilding Faith podcast where I went through verse by verse, and I noticed that the discrepancies between the ways that we think about Jesus and how Jesus interacts with other members of the Trinity are confusing, and they don't make sense.
And I can give you just a couple [00:01:00] examples that clearly illustrate this. I found ton of these as I was going through verse by verse this recent time, and I hadn't realized how many examples there are like this until I was rethinking some of the ways I understood the Trinity and then did this study.
For example, you have John ten, verse 30. Jesus says this: "The Father and I are one." Great. Love it. Perfect. That's the Trinity, right? We, we get this. You're the same. No problem at all. Except you also have numerous passages like John 14:28, where Jesus says, "If you really loved me, you would be happy that I am going to the Father who is greater than I am."
Well, shoot, these are, these are very different things, right? These are not the same thing that we were just talking about. [00:02:00] So which is it? Is God and Jesus the same, or is God the Father greater than Jesus? This became a major division early on in Christianity. Some Christians thought that there was a time when Jesus, as the Son, did not actually exist, that he was the first and the greatest of God the Father's creations, but still a creation.
Then other people said absolutely not. The other side thought that the Son was the same substance as the Father, eternal and uncreated, and this went back and forth for a while. In the year three twenty-five, the Emperor Constantine decided to resolve this. He was going to fix up this error, this confusion.
He was gonna solve this once and for all. He had recently legalized Christianity, and so he wanted a unified church to [00:03:00] help hold a fracturing empire together that he was responsible for leading. So he summoned the bishops to the Council of, or the city of Nicaea to settle the matter together. Now, Constantine was not even baptized at this time.
He was a political ruler managing a political problem, and he directly presided over the proceedings. Now, this council at Nicaea did not even finish the job of what we would consider the Trinity today. They were primar- primarily addressing the role of Jesus, the role of the Son. The full doctrine of the Trinity that we know and love today, which includes the co-equal divinity of the Holy Spirit as well, this was not settled until a second council that was held at Constantinople in the year three eighty-one, which was more than [00:04:00] half a century later than Constantine's efforts to resolve all this Which makes us wonder, is Christianity really a monotheistic religion?
Do we really only believe in one God, or is there something else going on here? Is this more complicated than that? The belief that Christians now treat as the timeless and obvious nature of God as Trinity was actually built in stages by communities in response to a political need. Oof. Changes, changes the context a little bit.
I think this is a topic that we should revisit once in a while, every so often, just freshen up our understanding of what's going on with the Trinity. So today's episode is called The Word That Isn't in the Book
I've never shared this with anybody publicly If this was SportsCenter, [00:05:00] that would be like such a hot take. Skip Bayless would have no idea. Stephen A. Smith would have no idea what to say if you drop that down. That is so good. The joke I always say is like, "How'd you learn so much?" Gotta drink a lot.
Resistance to change is hurting the church. I'm not in the camp that God has a penis or a vagina or a body at all. I'm in the camp that God is a universe spirit. This is the strangest podcast that I have been on. I don't even know what to do. I'm kind of geeked up about this wine. So this is my second glass, and it delivers a little more of a punch than I expected.
So if I get a little loopy, it's your fault. You told me to drink on this show. I will also say as a confession, I am a lightweight. So I've had like three sips of this wine and I'm already feeling it, so this is fun. You've uncovered the mystery. You've exposed the formula. You've just duct-taped together a number of things that aren't normally hanging out together, and I'm here for it.
We're gonna sit down at table, we're gonna have a glass of wine and some food, and we're gonna talk about the beauty of [00:06:00] Jesus. Thanks for what you're doing with this podcast and for the creative way you're doing it, and the beautiful, positive spirit in which you're doing it. I really appreciate this venue, what you're doing.
It is fun, and yet you dig into the deep stuff. I've heard about your podcast for a long time, and I love that you're a pastor and that you explore the world of faith through wine. That's very unique. I never thought of church history in terms of wine drinkers. I love this question. You had me with herbaceous notes, I want you to know.
I'm ready to just stay here and live in the wine tour. I will never forget the first time I bought a bottle of wine by myself, which was yesterday. If you're familiar with Drunk History, I thought it's like drunk theology. So I, oh. I got a little spicy there. It's the peach wine. Apparently the wine is... But here we are.
Queer we are. Beer we are. No, it's wine, Jeremy. I'm an emotional guy. Paired with a half a glass of wine, I'm beet red, sweating, and about to cry here. By the way, drinking this Pinot [00:07:00] Grigio at 3:00 in the afternoon is making me even more direct in my communication than I normally would be. I know why you had your guests drink wine.
It makes sense now. Yeah. I get it. A little bit of liquid courage here to unleash the beast. I think you've got a good podcast. Th- throwing the wine bit in there, that's nice. Cabernet and pray, yeah.
Jeremy: As we dive in today, I wanna let you know about what I am drinking in this episode. I have got a 2023 Sokol Blosser Orchard Block. This is a Pinot Noir from the Willamette Valley in Oregon, and I'm getting beautiful clove spice notes. That is a hallmark of a lot of Oregon Pinots. Getting some cranberry, some strawberry in there, and I, I just love all things Oregon Pinot.
I was at Theology Beer Camp this last week, and one of our buddies, a friend of mine, Andrew Camp, he hosts the podcast The Biggest [00:08:00] Table, he snuck in a bottle of Oregon Pinot for us, and it was delightful. So I'm reminded of how much I, I love Oregon Pinot, even when I'm not drinking beer all day. This is a delightful glass Perfect to stand alone without any food or any accompaniments with it.
And a fun note on this one in particular, 2023 was the first vintage under Robin Howell as the winemaker. She became the lead winemaker in February of that year after being mentored by Alex Sokol Blasser, who is the named family member of this winery. She's also the first female winemaker in the company's history.
So as I'm drinking this glass, I'm drinking a tradition that was passed down from one person to another, and I get to be the recipient of the, the fruit of that, [00:09:00] literally, the product of that. Which reminds me a little bit about what we're gonna see with the Trinity today. That we are receiving what has been passed down generation after generation, what has been added, what has been changed, the nuances that maybe we've missed in the process, and now we get to experience something that has gone through all of these previous generations.
Now, as we continue this episode, I also wanna invite you to pour a glass with me. The oldest thing that the church does together is to share a cup, and somewhere along the way, we turn that shared cup into a checkpoint, but this is a table without a fence around it. So bring your questions and bring your doubts because you are welcome here.
Cheers.
So let's talk about the Trinity, my friends. Exactly one passage [00:10:00] in the entire Bible states the theology of the Trinity clearly, in plain words. The older editions of 1 John 5:7 say this: "The Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one." There we go. End the episode. We have the perfect verse.
It explains it. It, it, it does a great job. That's all we need, right? This is the proofic- perfect proof text. The problem is it's a fake text. This insertion is known to scholars as the Johannine Comma, which isn't that a cool expression? The Johannine Comma, and the evidence against the Johannine Comma is overwhelming.
It is missing from every early Greek manuscript of the letter. It appears first only in Latin, and only then centuries after this was written down. [00:11:00] When the first printed Greek New Testament was produced in the 16th century, the line was absent. It was added to later printings only under political pressure.
Modern critical translations have removed it again, or flagged it in a footnote as not original, and if you look it up in your Bible, it probably does not say it the way I just read it. Now, there are a couple other passages that get used to ex- to de- defend and describe the Trinity, and maybe you're going, "Yeah, what about these?"
Some defenders will point to Matthew 28:19. Jesus says, "Therefore go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." Isn't that the Trinity right there? Or some people point to Genesis 1:1-2. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was formless and [00:12:00] empty, and darkness covered the deep waters, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters." Now, this one is a little more abstract, if you're going, "Where was the Trinity in that one?" You have God the Father creating. God speaks creation into being through the Word of God, which we later find out is Jesus.
And the Spirit, we find out in this verse, hovers over the waters. So we have, obviously, this is the Trinity, right? But I wanna say this, mentioning three forms of God is not the f- the same thing as defining the metaphysical doctrine that they share one divine substance in three persons. And this is what we're gonna get into in this episode.
The word Trinity, or the clear concept or idea of it, isn't in your Bible, my friends. It is not there. And yet most Christians would say that it's true. [00:13:00] And so I wanna show you how the Church arrived at this conclusion, how we got to the place where we believe what we believe about the Trinity. And to do that, we're gonna explore several ideas that are now considered heresies.
Ah, yes. We, we love talking heresies. We're gonna go through some heresies, but we need to start with a premise that may not be obvious to you. The first Christians, the very first ones who literally walked with Jesus, responded to Jesus, these Christians were not carrying a doctrine of the Trinity. They didn't have it.
There was certainly talk of God as Father and Spirit and Jesus as God, but they had not figured out how to put all of that together, and that's what's easy for you and I to miss today. We still struggle with it today. They certainly would have not been able to put it into a nice and [00:14:00] tidy doctrine for you to understand.
Now, there's a phrase today that we use, is often used to describe the Trinity. The phrase is this: one substance in three persons. But here's what I want you to think about. If you were to say that phrase, that today Christians would rally around and go, "Yeah, that's how you explain it, one substance in three persons."
If you were to say that to one of the early followers of Jesus, they would have no clue what you're talking about. No clue. They'd be like, "What? What do you mean one substance and three..." Like, that's not an idea that they had. They were carrying an experience that they did not yet have words for They didn't know how to explain it, but they knew they had experienced something.
One of the early ideas that they established was the idea that Jesus is God. This, this tends to be one of the first hallmark [00:15:00] beliefs of these early Christians, and this is a great understanding for us today to begin with. What does God look like? What is God really like? We get verses like Hebrews one:three, "The Son," meaning Jesus, "radiates God's own glory and expresses the very character of God, and he sustains everything by the mighty power of his command.
When he had cleansed us from our sins, he sat down in the place of honor at the right hand of the majestic God in heaven." Yeah, the Son radiates God's glory and expresses the very character of God. Love it. Colossians one:fifteen, "Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation."
John fourteen:nine, [00:16:00] Jesus says, "Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father." So the f- the things that we've got to realize that the early church established, it wasn't a formula they began with, it was a face. God looks like Jesus. That's what they began with, not a formula. If you wanna know what God looks like, you look at Jesus.
If you wanna know how to imagine God, you imagine Jesus. This was the test. This was the way the early church made sense of all of it. But this can be rather confusing to try to logically fit together. How can we have God the Father and Jesus? Right? If Jesus is the face of God, what about God as Father?
What, what about that face? Now, if we study the early centuries of the church, we can see how they worked this out, and what we see is they had a few false starts, [00:17:00] shall we say. It took them a few attempts, a few trial and errors to figure out how do we explain this, and I wanna show you a few of them
The first one we're gonna look at is called modalism. Modalism was one of the early explanations of the Christian God. It's the idea that God is a single person who appears in three different modes rather than three distinct persons. So there's some really iconic ways of understanding this, examples of this.
We think about H2O. The same H2O can show up as ice, as liquid water, or as steam, right? In, in different modes, and those modes are determined by the temperature, primarily, that that something is in. So what- whatever mode of H2O you get is determined by the temperature. Or [00:18:00] in relationships you can think about modalism.
I'm a father to my kids, I'm a son to my parents, and I'm a husband to my wife. Which mode I'm in depends on who I'm with, depends on who I'm around as to which versions of those, uh, come out in me, right? Now, modalism was a sincere attempt to both protect monotheism and the full divinity of Jesus. How do we put all of these together?
And modalism was very popular for a while. But in fact, the Bible scholar Bart Ehrman says this: "Modalism was the view that evidently was held by a majority of Christians at the beginning of the third century, including the most prominent Christian leaders in the church, the bishops of the Church of Rome."
So we are led to believe this was the dominant way of understanding the Trinity, of understanding how God exists in these different forms. [00:19:00] But if you know church history , you know that eventually modalism was declared to be a heresy. Yeah, God is not like this. Because if Father, Son, and Spirit are one person in three forms, then Jesus praying in the garden is just Jesus praying to himself Which gets a little weird, right?
Every example of Jesus praying would be the same. So the relationship that the Gospels keep showing us disappears with modalism. It's the same person talking on both ends. So God stops looking like Jesus, who prays to a Father, because that doesn't make much sense with modalism. Now, this might be a little awkward for you as I explain that modalism was declared a heresy, because we still use these analogies to explain the Trinity today.
In fact, the H2O analogy is [00:20:00] probably the most popular way for someone to explain the Trinity. And the relationship analogy is often used in churches to explain how God can be in all of these different ways. We use modalism to explain the Trinity today, even though the early church said God is not like this.
Okay, so if we don't have modalism, what about Arianism? Now, Arianism was another early explanation of God. Arianism is the idea that Jesus is the highest and the first being that God created, made by God and lesser than God, rather than fully and eternally God himself. So there's a distinction. This is how you get all those John references to Jesus saying, "God the Father is greater than I am."
So with Arianism, you can say a son is younger than his father and owes his existence to him, right? He comes after, and he's made by the one who came [00:21:00] before him. Or think about a chief of staff to a president. The chief of staff speaks with the president's full authority, speaks on his behalf, but he is not the president, and he was appointed by the president.
So again, you're seeing versions of Arianism there. Now, Arianism was a sincere attempt to protect God's oneness while also taking seriously all the places where Jesus seems to make himself lower than the Father, and there are many just in the Gospel of John alone. Arianism also became very popular.
Jerome, the early Bible translator, writing around the year 379, said this, "The whole world groaned and was astonished to find itself Arian." Which is a funny, I guess, Bible scholar way of, of saying, "Hey, this idea is really popular right now. A lot of people like [00:22:00] Arianism." But if Ari- if Jesus is a created being, then when we are looking at Jesus, we're not actually looking at God.
We're looking at God's finest creation. So God stays at a safe distance, and God sends someone else instead. But a created Jesus means looking at Jesus is looking at God's finest creature, not actually seeing God. The face at a distance is not God's face. And the early church said, "No, this is heresy. This is not what God is like."
Now, thankfully, Arianism doesn't have a famous bad analogy for the Trinity, so you don't have to worry about that one. All right, so we've got two down. These are heresies. We can't explain God this way. How about partialism? Partialism was another way that people tried to make sense of the Christian God.
This is the idea that Father, Son, and Spirit are each one part of God, three pieces [00:23:00] that together add up to the whole rather than each being fully God. So you can think about it like this. A shamrock has three leaves on one stem, and each leaf is one part of the one plant. Or an egg. An egg is shell and, uh, egg white and the egg yolk, and you need all three parts to have the whole egg, but there are different aspects of an egg.
Partialism was also a sincere attempt to hold onto the oneness of God while still taking Father, Son, and Spirit as genuinely three distinct persons, right? But if each person is only a third of God, then none of them is fully God. So when you meet Jesus, you're only meeting a part of God, a sliver of God.
You're not seeing God fully. A one-third Jesus [00:24:00] means that two-thirds of God stays hidden behind him and might look nothing like him. Right? Might look like this angry God of the Old Testament that we see, 'cause that would make sense. And so they decided partialism, no, this is a heresy. God is not like that.
Now, this might feel a bit awkward to you because the shamrock and the egg are two very popular ways that we explain the Trinity today, and yet the early church said, "No, God is not like that." Are we confused yet? I need more wine for this Yeah, you might be going, "Okay, what do we got left? All these things that I thought I knew about the Trinity, they don't work."
Each of these heresies was an attempt to make the Trinity simpler, but each of them [00:25:00] ended up diminishing Jesus, and this was the problem. With modalism, you lose the relationship. With Arianism, you make Jesus less than God. With partialism, you make Jesus only part of God. And so what we have to remember is that the doctrine of God came out of these early Christians' experiences, encounters with God.
God was not handing them down a formula to memorize. God was moving in their midst. They were experiencing God, and they're trying to explain it. They're trying to be like, "What was that? How do we describe what that was?" Listen to the way 1 Corinthians 8:5 and 6 say it. Paul writes this, "There may be so-called gods, both in heaven and on earth, and some people actually worship many gods and many lords.
But for us," as Christians, "there is [00:26:00] one God," the Father, "by whom all things were created and for whom we live. And There is one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things were created and through whom we live. And we're not gonna talk about the Holy Spirit right here, right? So you're like, "Okay, Paul's just describing what they've experienced," but even Paul doesn't have a great way to put words to this.
So the first Christians, they were not using the word Trinity to explain their faith, to explain how they understood God. In fact, the word Trinity, we can trace it back to its creator. It's a guy named Tertullian. Around the year 200 AD is the first mention you have of the word Trinity. Now, if you wanna go, "Okay, what about the concept of Trinity?"
The one substance and three persons language, [00:27:00] that's not established until the fourth century. So these are, are progressions of thought that the early church did not have, and if we make them the litmus test today, you have to understand Trinity the way we understand it today, you would have to rule out the very first Christians that began this story in the first place, the ones that started all of this movement that you and I get to be a part of today.
And so throughout the years, we can read all of these creeds that the church was trying to establish. How do we explain what God is really like? And I would suggest to you that these creeds serve as fences, right? So you have phrases from the different cr- creeds, and some of you, depending on your church background, you will remember these phrases.
You have phrases like begotten not made and true God from true God. These were phrases to fence out Arianism, [00:28:00] because Jesus isn't a creature. Or you have the phrase, "Neither confounding the persons," right? This fences out modalism, because we don't wanna collapse the three into one. Or there's the phrase, "Nor dividing the substance," which fences out partialism, because we don't split God into pieces, right?
Each fence guards the Jesus that we can actually see. But here's the problem, friends. The fences stopped there. They, they kept us away from some of these heresies, but they didn't explain how to move forward. They didn't help us truly make sense of all of this at the end of the day. The theologian N.T.
Wright has said it like this, "The doctrine of the Trinity, properly understood, is as much a way of saying we don't know as [00:29:00] of saying we do know." I don't know if you know who N.T. Wright is. The dude is brilliant, right? One of, uh, just the great living legends of our day, and he's even saying, like, "This is, this is the trinity," like, we don't know how to explain it.
Which means that the earliest Christians experienced a God they didn't fully have words for. Yeah. They experienced something that they could not explain. Now today, many people continue to experience God and carry an experience w- of God with them, and they don't have words for it. Now, some of these people, they're asking their questions, they're using these doubts inside of the church.
They're bringing them to their church leaders and their church community, and they're trying to figure out, "How do I explain the God that I have experienced?" Some of these people, [00:30:00] they're trying to make sense of this outside of the church. And I know that many listeners to this pod, you fit into this category, 'cause you've told me that.
"Hey, this, this is as close as I get to church," or, "This is my church," right? "Because I don't want to be a part of that any longer." And yet here you are, still trying to make sense of your questions and your doubts and your experiences with God. And some Christians, like me, we go back and forth. We, we put a step into the, the camp inside the church, then we go back outside the church with those people, and we go back and forth, and we try to, to live in both of these camps and make sense of all of this together.
But I want you to remember, the first Christians followed and worshiped and prayed and baptized and died for a God they had not yet defined. And that is the tradition we have inherited. Now, the church didn't fight for [00:31:00] three centuries over abstract math. There's something more important going on here that all of these conversations build upon.
They were guarding the idea that God looks like Jesus. So maybe you and I today can create more room for people to experience Jesus without having the right words for it. Yeah. Maybe we can be the people to, to create a safe space for others to talk about and make sense of their experiences with Jesus without the right words or the right explanation for it.
The author Richard Beck has said that, "Faith is a matter of perception. Faith isn't forcing yourself to believe unbelievable things. Faith is overcoming attentional blindness. Phrased differently, faith is about enchantment [00:32:00] or rather a re-enchantment, the intentional recovery of a holy capacity to see and experience God in the world."
And the part of God that you and I can see looks like Jesus. That's what we can know. So we can be the people who welcome others to experience God like that, which means we hold tightly whatever keeps God looking like Jesus, and we hold loosely every attempt to explain how . Yeah, we're gonna hold the Jesus-looking part tightly, and all the explanations to how we get there, we're going to hold that very loosely
And when we do this, it also gives us a chance to experience the mystery of God [00:33:00] in new ways. I wanna give you a real-time update as I wrap up this episode, something that I am thinking about literally this week. A thought I had this week, I wrote this down, I've been thinking about this episode. And I had a thought, I don't think I've ever had this thought before, and on its surface level, technically this is a heretical thought, so I'm aware of that.
I've studied the, the heresies around this, I, I understand. And yet because Trinity is mystery and we can't fully wrap our hands around how God exists the way that God seems to exist, I'm gonna offer this as a way of experiencing God or a thought that we might, we might test and discern, and you can test it for yourself.
Here's my thought What if the Spirit of God is less of a person and more of a way of living? Okay, so I'm talking about the spirit of the Trinity in [00:34:00] particular. What if the Spirit of God is less of a person and more of a way of living? Well, what do I mean by that? Well, think about how we use the word spirit in our conversation today.
We might say, "In the spirit of full disclosure," right? Or we would say, "The spirit of the law." Or you could refer to someone having Christmas spirit. Right? All of these are common ways we reference the idea of spirit, but these are not persons. None of these examples are referring to the personification of a spirit.
It's referring to a way of existing or a way of thinking or a way of processing life. Perhaps this is a way to explain what we are invited to do with Jesus. The early Christians were called followers of the Way. That was, that was the description. You find this in Acts nine [00:35:00] two, Acts twenty-two, four and five, Acts twenty-four, verse fourteen.
In fact, that last one, Paul says it like this, "But I admit that I follow the Way, which they call a cult." So Paul's saying, "Yeah, like, I'm one of those guys that is following this way of life," and then even acknowledges, "Some of you refer to this way of thinking, this way of living as a cult. I'm aware of that."
And yet Paul says, "That is what I am living in. I am following that." Isn't this the same as saying that there was a shared spirit that they had, that they were a part of, that they were living into? What if living with the Spirit of God is what it means to live in the way of Jesus? And maybe that helps you make sense of the Trinity.
Yeah, we, we live by the spirit of Jesus, which is the way in which [00:36:00] Jesus invites us to live as he modeled for us, as he invites us to experience a better life in a better world Now, after all of that explanation, 34 minutes in, hopefully you have no lingering questions about the Trinity. Yeah, I suspect you do.
I do, too. And yet we hold the explanations loosely, and we hold a Jesus-looking God tightly. If you want to talk through these kinds of ideas, this deep theology as it references things of the past, but also our lived and shared experiences today, I wanna encourage you to check out our online community.
This is a place that I absolutely love. There are people who every week are showing up, are experiencing one another. How do we live this out together? Not in [00:37:00] abstract ideas, but in real life, in our real shared lived experiences. And if you are looking for a space to do that with others, to ask your questions, to share your doubts, I invite you to do that with us in our online community.
You can find the link for that in the show notes below the episode. I will see you next Wednesday for another episode of Cabernet and Pray.
