How to Better Understand the Holy Trinity (TGC Classic)

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Tim Keller
Brothers. I think that the doctrine of the Trinity is something that in evangelical circles we tend to take for granted. We’re always taught that all Christians believe in the Trinity, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant. There’s no divergence there, and so we we tend not so much then to perhaps school our younger leaders coming up in it, and we, perhaps ourselves, don’t dwell as much on it. We were much more concerned to be sure that our doctrine of Christ and of the Atonement and of salvation is right. So when, as has happened in I think, in the last couple of decades, people have come along and said, We need to re engineer our understanding of the Trinity. Is that something that we is that all right? Is we saying, well, that’s actually not very it’s not as important as the cross. It’s not as important as the as the doctrine of salvation, or is it, is it that if we get our doctrine of the Trinity wrong, all the other doctrines go wrong too? And of course, the way I’m asking the question is, obviously we believe that it does affect everything else, so we need to begin to talk about how, how it affects everything else.

Don Carson
I think in the first place, it’s worth reminding ourselves that the word Trinity has come to stand as a one word summary for a whole lot of truths that contribute to the big doctrine. Calvin has a wonderful place in the institutes where he says, in effect, that if somebody wants to dispute the word trinity. He doesn’t really care one way or the other. It’s it’s all of the pieces that go into it that really catch him. But he said, on the other hand, to use the word trinity is a really good one summary, one word summary of of a great deal of understanding of of who God really is, and and that’s the way we should think of it, rather than as a fourth century later creation by people who were disputing things at the time of nikea and Chalcedon. Then I would want to say that it’s pretty easy once the doctrine of the Trinity is well understood, to show that there’s scarcely a doctrine that is not affected by misunderstanding the doctrine of the Trinity. Consider, for example, atonement. On the one hand, you want to say that it is only Christ who dies as a substitute for us in our place the father does not die. That’s patripassianism, which was rightly condemned in the early church. On the other hand, it is wrong to say that the father stands over against us only in wrath, and the son comes along only in love and assuages his father’s wrath. Since, after all, the Father sent His Son into the world, and the son comes in obedience to the Father’s plan, the father stands over against us in both wrath and in love and and in the matrix of this spectacular plan grounded in eternity past, the son comes and bears our sins in perfect obedience to the Father and and and yet bearing at the same time is wrath. And suddenly the the relations of the Godhead stand at the very heart. There is a sense in which what drives Jesus to the cross logically prior, emotionally, prior to his concern for me the sinner, is his concern to do the Father’s will, and that’s why he goes to the cross. So there’s so many doctrines that are tied up, finally, to the relationships among the persons of the Godhead.

John Piper
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and the Word became flesh, and we beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. And from that fullness, we have all received grace upon grace. If you break that line, Grace goes away and and most people don’t want grace to go away. I’m I’m feeding on Grace, upon grace, because the son revealed the glory of the Father, and he revealed the glory of the Father as the word who is one with the Father. And so I think the way John develops his whole gospel, and especially those first 18 verses says, you throw this away, you throw the deity of the son away, you throw Grace away, you throw glory away. Or another way to say it is We exist to worship God as he really is, not as we want him to be, and if you don’t know as he really is, you won’t worship Him. So Owen’s communion with God is just unparalleled, and it’s worshiping the son, worshiping the Father, and worshiping the spirit as they are revealed in unique ways in the Bible.

Tim Keller
Now, John, you and I have actually gotten a lot out of Ed. Edwards’s approach to Oh, for example, Edwards is the end for which God created the world, or the idea that God in himself, enjoys his own glory and that it’s our job to glorify God by enjoying him. That all seems to be, to me, tied up if you don’t have a Triune God that makes no sense at all.

John Piper
Right? It’s, it’s totally tied up. I mean, without going all the way with Edwards, you can just say God is love. Has its ultimate meaning in the Trinitarian, communitarian dimension of the Father’s delighting in the son and not be Edward Edwards Ian, the love between the Father and the Son, standing forth with such completeness that it embodies and becomes he the Holy Spirit. So that the Holy Spirit is the love of the Father for the Son, and the son is for the Father, and the Son is the perfect representation or knowledge or logos of the Father. So what the Trinity is, is God knowing himself perfectly and thus standing forth as a separate being, and God loving himself perfectly and thus standing forth. So you have father, the originator, the son, known from eternity, the spirit, felt and enjoyed from eternity and now created in God’s image. We have these capacities to know Him and we love him. And the knowing and the loving are both with the very knowing of the father of the son. Matthew 11, no one knows the Father except the Son. Anyone to whom son reveals him, and we love Him with the very joy that the Son has in the Father. John 1511, my joy may be in you, so the profundity of what flows from the community of the Trinity into the into the human nature, as in God’s image, and then the returning of back to God, a right knowing of him and a right loving of him. If you pull, if you pull the thread of the Trinity apart. I think Edwards would say this, the whole thing absolutely unravels. The Universe unravels, right?

Tim Keller
You know? I mean, one of the more powerful arguments I have in talking to secular people about the Trinity. I mean, the the average secular person says, Hey, Islam, Judaism, okay, maybe. But the Trinity, it just doesn’t make any sense. And Augustine’s great point is, you couldn’t really say God is love, except about a Triune God, because if you have an impersonal God, obviously, then there’s, if you have an Eastern view of God is impersonal, that it’s obviously that kind of God is not a God of love, but even a universal God wouldn’t be loving until that God created some other beings. Because love, you need another being to have love, which means power came before love. That is a uni personal God, using his power, creates a race of beings, and now he has their love, and he loves them. So love comes in later. Power is before love. And Augustine says, which, of course, figures, that figures with paganism, the whole idea that basically what life’s really about is power. No, if God is tri personal, then he was love and community from all eternity. And of course, as Edward says, as out of that love, he decided to create a race of beings to share that love and that glory. So love comes first, and it’s the basis for power, which has enormous implications for what’s actually important in human life. So Augustine is saying, if you really think love is the meaning of the universe. And if you really think love is is at the heart of the universe, you have to believe in a Triune God. If you don’t believe in a Triune God, love is peripheral. Comes along later. I found that as an apologetic argument, I’m saying, Look, I’m not proving that God exists. But if you think love is important, if you think it’s more important, relationships is more important than accruing wealth and power. This is the kind of God that it gives you a basis for believing that, and actually gives you a basis for your intuitions. So I’ve seen the Trinity good in also in apologetics. How else is the Trinity important for us? It’s also

Don Carson
important for the for the love in the church itself. Read John 17, that is, it’s the eternal intra personal love of the Triune God that becomes the model and the empowering for Christians loving one another. And one of the things that has stood out more starkly in my reading of Islam in recent years has been to see how the contrast between the Quran and and the Bible on this front is very, very sharp. The Quran speaks regularly of God as merciful. It is very rare to to read that God is love. That sort of context. One of the most powerful books I’ve read defending Islam is by Shabir at the all in recent years, Islam is a political religion. Right, where, where? Again, he gets Christianity more or less right, and then thinks of all the reasons why it’s wrong. But in the whole area of the Trinity, he doesn’t understand anything. He really, he really is completely up the creek without a paddle. He doesn’t understand anything of what the Bible says. It becomes a caricature that is destroyed, and it’s partly because, at the end of the day, his understanding of God is really devoid from any meaningful notion of love. It’s bound up with power, with merciful, with being merciful, all merciful, but not not in and of himself being a God of love, because that somehow destroys the perfection of his solitude and his and his strength is power and over against that to to read that the Father has determined that all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father, that the son came to do the Father’s will and that all should honor Him and so on, it becomes so transparently a totally different picture of God that ought to make us respond with renewed gratitude and faith.

John Piper
Let me go to John 17 and just give a really practical on the ground emotional relevance. I have found that in my Christian hedonism presentations, people are deeply discouraged that what I’m saying, namely that God is glorified most when we’re satisfied in him, and they’re not very satisfied in him, and they feel like I don’t. I didn’t grow up in a home where I could even have a capacity to feel what you’re saying. I’m supposed to feel and and I’m supposed to glorify God by these feelings. Well, I don’t, and I can’t. So you get to the end of John, 17, and he prays, Father, I pray that the love with which You have loved Me may be in them, and I in them, and I say to them, do you hear what’s being promised to you? You won’t be left to yourself when it comes to the energy to love God the way you should, the very love of the Father for the son will be put in you, and you will have an infinite assistance in enjoying God in the age to come. Now that’s an impossible conception, if there hadn’t been a love of the Father for the son, as he was conceiving it, before the world was and so flowing out of the doctrine of the Trinity comes this incredibly practical encouragement for a person who grew up in a fatherless home with zero emotions except anger, feeling totally helpless in their ability to honor God by affections that rise to the level of what they should be.

Don Carson
Let me ask a slightly different question. I mean, we’ve talked about the positive benefits of the doctrine of the Trinity. But today, there’s a lot of publication on the doctrine of the Trinity that is speaking of the social Trinity and so on, and some of it is abusing the doctrine of the Trinity in a variety of ways. Have you come across that at the pastoral level?

Tim Keller
Yeah, I think it’s the perception. The perception is that we, we’ve not talked enough about the three ness of the of the Godhead, and we’ve spent too much time talking about the oneness. And so it’s always very dangerous to say, now let’s, let’s hit the threeness in the social Trinity, because obviously God is as one in three, and that the equally. We can’t, we can’t say he’s more one than he’s three, or is more three than he’s one, but yeah, and the social Trinity is is a usually it’s put forth, by the way, I think, as a basis for talking about egalitarian relationships, that it’s non hierarchical, at least in the ontological Trinity, that they’re all three equal. And yet I, I must say, one of the ways in which I preach it is that, is that servanthood does not demean you. Because if g if for Jesus to serve the father and the and the Holy Spirit to never speak of himself, but only, only show us Christ, if that doesn’t demean those, the deity of those persons, then why, in the world, couldn’t you decide it’s my place to be subordinate, it’s my place to submit? Because Christ has done it. So I’ve never understood how the the relationships between the I mean, it’s true that there’s an ontological and economic trinity always known that, but the fact is that that you know Jesus and Holy Spirit do submit. They to one another. And so I think it’s a case for for servanthood. It’s to me, it’s not a great case for egalitarianism well.

Don Carson
And it’s the argument against that that is often put is that if all the subordination passages, it is argued falsely, in my view, have to do with the economic trinity that is, as God has manifested Himself in space time. So at this point, Jesus is the God man. He’s somehow limited and in some ways as a human being. But the fact of the matter is that John, John makes it clear that the Father sends the Son. If he sends the son, then. Right? You’re talking about him sending him before he became a human being. He sends him back from eternity past. This is the father’s own design from eternity past. And there the relationship, the dynamic is always one way the Father sends the son obeys. And to talk about this, as some theologians do, as mutually reciprocal deference is hiding, in fact, a real distinction in the way the command goes. I have come to do my father’s will. I always do those things that please Him, Jesus says, And the father doesn’t turn around and say, Oh yes, that’s very good. And I always do those things that please Him too. I mean, it just doesn’t work that way from eternity past, this was God’s design. But this does not in any sense diminish the son or take away from his status as as one with God. So from eternity past, the Word was with God, God’s own fellow, the Word was God, God’s own self. And we live with that and and shape our understanding of their mutual relationships and dynamics by the word of God itself.

John Piper
I know our time is up, but just I feel jealous for the Holy Spirit right now, that he get his due. And so let me say one thing, and let you close because you preached on the prayer of Paul Ephesians, 314, which ends with that we may be filled with all the fullness of God. And the text I have in mind that goes there is Romans five, where the love of God is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, which probably means that the Holy Spirit is the living embodiment and presence of God loving us. It’s not just an influence that kind of takes love and does it like that. It is God loving us. And then at the end of that prayer, it comes to a climax with that we may be filled with all the fullness of God, which wouldn’t that be almost the same as be filled with the Holy Spirit?

Don Carson
Yes, for Paul that’s that’s almost an equivalent of saying that you may be as fully mature as you can be by God himself taking up residence within you, which in Pauline emphasis is the Holy Spirit taking up residence within you, and earlier on in the same prayer, it’s that God may strengthen you with all power by the Spirit in your inner being, so that God may dwell in your hearts through faith, and then that you may be filled with all the measure of the fullness of God. In other words, the very mark of Christian maturity is bound up with it, the Triune God in in Father Son and Spirit working their jointly planned rescue from before the foundation of the world in the lives of actual individual Christians and in the life of the church.