Lecture

Let us begin with a prayer, the prayer which has been prayed throughout Christendom by millions of people on Trinity Sunday. Almighty and everlasting God, who hast given unto us thy servant’s grace by the confession of a true faith to acknowledge the glory of the eternal Trinity and in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the unity, we beseech Thee, that Thou wouldest keep us steadfast in this faith and evermore defend us from all adversities who livest and reignest one God, world without end. Amen.

Listen now to some of those primary texts in the New Testament where we hear of God the Holy Trinity. We begin in the Gospel of Saint Matthew in the twenty-eighth chapter with the command of our Lord Jesus, “‘Go ye therefore,’ he said, ‘and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’” You will notice there that in the English, as well as in the Greek, we have four definite articles in the name of, the Father—that is not any Father, but the Father, and not any Son, but the Son, and not any Holy Spirit, but the Holy Spirit.

And then moving into the letters of the apostle Paul, hear what he says in one of his early letters, 2 Thessalonians in chapter 2, “But we are bound to give thanks to God, the Father, always for you, brethren beloved of the Lord, for that God chose you from the beginning unto salvation in sanctification of the Spirit and belief of the truth, whereunto he called you through our gospel to the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Here we have giving thanks to God the Father. It is the same God the Father who chose you from the beginning. He chose you for sanctification and in sanctification of the Holy Spirit for the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.

And then Saint Paul again from 1 Corinthians in chapter 12, verses 4 following, where he writes, “There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit; there are diversities of ministrations and the same Lord; and there are diversities of workings, but the same God who worketh all things in all.” The gifts then and the Holy Spirit, the ministrations, the Lord Jesus, the workings, the same God who is the Father.

And then we are all very familiar with what is often called the grace, which is found at the end of Paul’s second letter to the church in Corinth, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God, the Father, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

Hear now further ones from the writings of Saint Paul which bring us the reality of the blessed Trinity. First of all from Galatians 3:11 following, “But that no man is justified by the law in the sight of God, the Father, is evident. Christ, the Son, redeemed us from the curse of the law that we might receive the promise of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, through faith.” Again from Galatians in chapter 4 in verse 6, “And because ye are sons, God the Father sent forth the Spirit [the Holy Spirit] of his Son [our Lord Jesus Christ] into our hearts crying, ‘Abba, Father.’”

From 2 Corinthians 1:21–22, “Now he that established us with you in Christ [the Son] and has anointed us is God, the Father, who hath also sealed us, and given us the earnest of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, in our hearts.” And again, 2 Corinthians, chapter 3 in verse 3, “Being made manifest that ye are an epistle of Christ, the Son, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, of the living God, the Father.”

And then from Romans, chapter 14, verse 17 and following, “For the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. For he that [hears and] serveth Christ [the Son] is well pleasing to God, the Father, and approved of men.” And again, the letter to the Romans, the fifteenth chapter, verse 16, “That I should be the minister of Christ Jesus, the Son, unto the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, the Father, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be made acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” And again, Romans 15 in verse 30, “Now I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, the Son, and for the love of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, that ye strive together with me in your prayers to God, the Father, for me.”

Philippians, chapter 3 in verse 3, “For we are the circumcision which worship God, the Father, in the spirit, the Holy Spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, the Son.” Colossians 1, verses 6 through 8, “Since the day ye heard and knew the grace of God, the Father, in truth, even as ye learned of Epaphras our beloved fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ, the Son, on our behalf, who also declared unto us your love in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.”

Ephesians 2, verse 18, “For through him [our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son], we both have our access in one Spirit, the Holy Spirit, unto the Father.” Again from Ephesians, chapter 2 in verses 20 to 22, “Christ Jesus, the Son, in whom each several building fitly framed together groweth into a holy temple in the Lord, the Lord, the Son, in whom ye also are builded together for a habitation of God, the Father, in the Spirit, the Holy Spirit.” And again from Ephesians, chapter 3, verses 14 and following, “For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named, that he would grant you according to the riches of his glory that ye may be strengthened with power through His Spirit, the Holy Spirit, in the inward man, that Christ, the Son, may dwell in your hearts through faith.”

And turning to the other parts of the New Testament, first of all to the first letter of Peter, chapter 1 in verse 2, “According to the foreknowledge of God the Father in sanctification of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ, the Son.” To Hebrews, chapter 10 in verse 29, “Of how much sorer a punishment, think ye, shall he be judged worthy or who have trodden underfoot the Son of God,” that is, of God, the Father. “And have done despite unto the Spirit of grace, the Holy Spirit.” And Jude 20–21, “But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, the Father, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son, unto eternal life.”

And then from the book of Revelation, chapter 1 in verses 4 through 5, “Grace to you and peace from him which is and which was and which is to come, the Father, and from the seven spirits which are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness.” And then in 1 John 5, verses 7 to 8 from the Byzantine text, “There are three who bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word, that is the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and these three are one.”

Those are a selection, the primary selection, of those specific texts within the canon of the New Testament, which point us to the Holy Trinity. And now what I would like to do is to share with you some of the earliest Christian Trinitarian statements outside the New Testament, which we find in the ancient literatures. I’m turning to the early Greek literatures, and what I want to do is to read to you several portions, brief portions, first of all from the Order for Matins, that is, for morning prayer, and then from the Vigil for Pentecost, because I’m now recording in the season of Pentecost, and then one or two short extracts from The Order for Holy Communion or the order for what they call the Eucharist.

First of all, the order for morning prayer, or as it’s called matins, and you will notice as I read to you these words which are part and parcel of the act of the adoration and the worship and the praise of Almighty God, you will see how solidly Trinitarian is this language of worship.

First, the refrain, which comes so often in the classic ancient literatures, “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit now and ever and even unto the ages of ages. Amen.” And then the prayer, “O all holy Trinity, have mercy upon us. O Lord, wash away our sins. O Master, pardon our transgressions. O Holy One, visit and heal our infirmities for thy name sake. Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit now and always and even unto the ages of ages.” And then in the praying of the prayer that our Lord taught us, which we call the Lord’s Prayer, in the ancient literatures they extended the last part of the prayer, so I will pick up from “but deliver us from the evil one” or “from evil,” and then they end “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit now and ever even unto the ages of ages. Amen.” That is from the Order for Morning Prayer; now from the service which was designed for this period of the year in which I record today, that is, the period of Pentecost after the festival of Pentecost.

Once again, you will note the gloria and then you will hear coming through in the call to worship a very powerful Trinitarian understanding which is part of the call to worship. So it begins with the familiar gloria, “Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, now and always, even unto the ages of ages. Amen. Come, O ye people, let us worship the Godhead in three persons—the Son in the Father with the Holy Spirit—for the Father before time begat the Son who is coeternal and is equally enthroned and the Holy Spirit who was in the Father and was glorified together with the Son, one might, one essence, one Godhead, adoring the same let us all say, ‘O Holy God, who by the Son didst make all things through the cooperation of the Holy Spirit. O Holy Mighty One through whom we have known the Father and through whom the Holy Spirit came into the world. O Holy Immortal One, the Spirit of comfort, who precede us from the Father and restest in the Son, O Holy Trinity, glory be to thee.’”

You will notice there that there is the assumption of the centrality of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and after that is made clear, each of the divine persons—the Father, the Son, and then the Holy Spirit—is addressed and adored, and that preface begins and ends with “O Holy Trinity, glory be to thee.”

And then from the basic liturgical service of the ancient Greek church from the liturgy which is attributed to Saint Chrysostom from the fourth century, I give you one or two brief extracts in order, once again, to make clear just how central in the act of Christian worship is this doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The liturgy of what is called The Catechumens, which is the first part of the written liturgy, begins with the minister, the presbyter, or the bishop there blessing the congregation and saying these words, “Blessed is the kingdom of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit now and always even unto the ages of ages.” And then a little later in that first part which today is called the ministry of the Word when the Scriptures are read and expounded and a prayer is offered, we get this exclamation by the minister, by the presbyter, “For unto thee are due all glory, honor, and worship to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit now and always and even unto the ages of ages.” And finally, from this service we have these words a little later on, “For holy art thou, O our God, and unto thee we ascribe glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit now and forever even unto the ages of ages.”

I don’t think you’ll find anything more specifically and clearly Trinitarian than these ancient liturgies or acts of worship or forms of worship that we find in what we call the Greek patristic church. In fact, if anyone wants to know in the clearest possible way what is the classic doctrine or dogma of the Holy Trinity, my advice to them is to read the ancient classical literatures of Saint Chrysostom and Saint Basil, and there they will find not only a marvelous statement of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, but they will find it in the most appropriate and right way to encounter it in the words of worship, in the words of adoration,

in the words of praise addressed to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.

Today, I believe, we are going through a period, and it’s been a long period, when functionally it would appear the doctrine of the Trinity is non-operative, or if operative, is there very much in the background and is not in the forefront of the understanding of who is God, who is Jesus, and what is the gospel. In order to illustrate that point, which is a regrettable and sad point to have to illustrate, I want to give you some quotations from various writers, some of whom you will probably know of or even have known.

My first quotation to illustrate how peripheral it would appear, this glorious and wonderful doctrine of the Holy Trinity is in recent days, and maybe today, I give you a quotation from the beginning of the book The Trinity by the philosopher Gordon H. Clark, and this was published in 1985. Many of you will have heard of Professor Clark as a Christian philosopher and a great defender of classical Christian understanding. This is what he says, and you will notice how it ties into my reading from the ancient Greek literatures. “Anyone who has ever attended even a mildly orthodox evangelical church must have heard something about the Trinity. If the congregation did not sing Holy, Holy, Holy, God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity, the pastor probably closed the service with the apostolic Trinitarian benediction, The blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” But even a regular worshiper has probably heard very few, if any, sermons on the Trinity. Over a period of thirty years the present writer, that is, Gordon H. Clark, has attended services in many places between Philadelphia and San Diego, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas, Oklahoma, and so he lists all these names, and in various churches, Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, independent, and so on, and he says, “I never heard a sermon on the Holy Trinity, but” (and here’s the connection with what I said earlier) “one morning in 1979, I turned on the radio and found myself in the middle of a sermon. It sounded good. Then it sounded better. The preacher, yes, he was preaching on the Holy Trinity. It was a remarkable presentation. Who could the preacher be? What was his denomination? At the end, the announcer gave the man’s name and his position as a priest in the Greek Orthodox Church. Well,” says Dr. Clark, “there are many things wrong with the Greek Orthodox Church, but I wish a million Protestants could have heard that sermon.”

That’s my first quotation, and it speaks for itself. Now I turn from a well-known evangelical American philosopher to one of the leading German theologians from Tubingen, Jürgen Moltmann, in his book The Trinity and the Kingdom of God. I heard Professor Moltmann when I was studying, a long time ago now, in London, and then when I was doing my doctorate in Oxford, he came and preached in the university church. He’s a very attractive man, and whatever he writes, even if it’s wrong, it’s worth reading. But in the beginning of this particular book, he is asking the question about why the doctrine of the Trinity has gone into the background or has been forgotten. And this is how he begins: “What do we think of when we hear the name of the triune God? What ideas do we associate with the Trinity? What do we experience in the fellowship of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit? The answers will vary greatly, if indeed an answer is attempted at all. Some people, perhaps, will think of the traditional rituals and symbols of Christian worship—baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and the blessing at the end of the service—other people are reminded of passionate disputes in the early church. Some will see in their mind’s eye the pictures of Christian art depicting the three divine persons or two persons and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. Many people view the theological doctrine of the Trinity as a speculation for theological specialists, which has nothing to do with real life. That is why modern Protestants like to content themselves with the young Melanchthon’s maxim [this is Philip Melanchthon from the sixteenth century, the colleague of Martin Luther]. The young Melanchthon said, ‘We adore the mysteries of the Godhead, that is better than to investigate them. It is difficult enough,’ he says, ‘to believe that there is a God at all and to live accordingly. Does belief in the Trinity not make the religious life even more difficult and quite unnecessary? Why are most Christians in the West, whether they are Catholics or Protestants, really only monotheists, where the experience and practice of their faith is concerned? Whether God is one or triune evidently makes as little difference to the doctrine of Faith as it does to ethics. Consequently, the doctrine of the Trinity hardly occurs at all in modern apologetic writings which aim to bring the Christian faith home to the modern world again today.’”

Notice what this very well-known theologian says, and he’s speaking out of the experience of Germany. Although I’m not of his stature, I can speak of the experience of England, and it seems to me that we both can say, Whether God is one or triune evidently makes as little difference to the doctrine of the faith as it does to ethics. In other words, the evidence of the piety and statements and worship of Christians today seems not to indicate the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity and shows a very great difference from that of the early Christian church.

Now I read to you a few lines from probably the greatest of Roman Catholic theologians since the 1960s, a man who’s written tremendous amounts of books and articles and although difficult at times because of his Germanic style, is always rewarding even if you do not agree with him. This is Karl Rahner writing in his book, a very influential book on the Holy Trinity, in the early pages beginning at page 10: “Christians are in their practical life almost mere monotheists,” that is, believers in one God, but that’s the end of it as it were. “We Christians,” says Rahner, “must be willing to admit that should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged. Nor does it help to remark that the doctrine of the incarnation is theologically and religiously so central for the Christian that through it the Trinity is always and everywhere inseparably present in his religious life. Nowadays when we speak of God’s incarnation, the theological and religious emphasis lies only on the fact that God became man, that one of the divine persons of the Trinity took on the flesh, and not on the fact that this person is precisely the person of the Logos. One has the feeling that for the catechism of head and heart, as contrasted with the printed catechism, the Christian idea of the incarnation would not have to change at all if there were no Trinity. For God would still, as the one person, have become man, which is in fact about all the average Christian explicitly grasps when he confesses the incarnation.”

That may sound a little involved, but what Rahner is actually saying is, based upon his experience of the Roman Catholic Church in Europe, and I remind you, he was the most prominent theologian, widely traveled and widely consulted, and he is there saying that in his experience and presumably that of others who have come to him to speak to him, the doctrine of the incarnation seems not in the thinking and piety of people specifically to be related to the dogma, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity.

Now I read from another Roman Catholic theologian, Joseph Bracken, who has written a simple introductory book on the Holy Trinity for students. It’s entitled What Are They Saying About the Trinity? and here is what he says, he’s a well-known American who has taught at Marquette, the Jesuit university in Milwaukee. I quote: “In any case, it seems fair to say that for many years the dogma of the Trinity has been presented in manuals of theology more as a triumph of speculative reason than as a living article of Christian belief. Thus priests [that is, Roman Catholic priests] who with considerable effort learned the Thomistic [this is the scholastic approach from Saint Thomas Aquinas] explanation of the Trinity during their seminary years naturally hesitated to present it to their people from the pulpit, even on Trinity Sunday. Since there was no apparent pastoral value to be gained from an explanation of the doctrine, why should one bore people with something that in the end they wouldn’t probably understand anyway? The net result, however, has been an informal conspiracy of silence among priests and pastoral work about the Trinity and the place of the dogma in Christian life and worship.” Hence more by inadvertence than by anything else, Rahner’s judgment, which we’ve just read, that most Christians are practicing monotheists rather than Trinitarians seems to me to have been verified in fact.

That’s a pretty damning statement to make about the priests, the ministers, and the people of the Roman Catholic Church, but I think those of us who are within Protestantism and are familiar with it would have to say something very similar if not worse about the state and the understanding and the reception of the glorious doctrine of the Holy Trinity within the Protestant churches.

Now, finally, for my extracts, I want to bring you right up to date and to quote to you from a woman who teaches at a Roman Catholic university, the famous one in South Bend, Indiana, Notre Dame—I can never pronounce that in the American way, but I know you will understand me—she is called Catherine Mowry LaCugna, and she is, I must confess to you, a brilliant woman and a very good writer, but she is a leading feminist theologian and now we find that while the classical doctrine of the Holy Trinity was, as it were, set aside or forgotten before the feminist movement, now that we’ve got the feminist movement in the Roman Catholic and the Protestant churches, the feminist movement is telling us that we really need to rethink this whole doctrine again because as it stands, it is patriarchalist, sexist, androcentric, and offensive to women.

So I quote to you from an essay by Catherine Mowry LaCugna in which she writes as follows: “The doctrine of the Trinity has been seen as a stumbling block to the concerns of Christian feminism on at least two fronts. First of all, Ttrinitarian theology has been seen to compromise the feminist concern for the equality of women and men, primarily because the relationship among the divine persons has been seen as hierarchical. This arrangement, this hierarchical arrangement, has been used to reinforce the complementarative theory of the true nature of male and female. According to this theology, femaleness and maleness are radically different ways of being human. Man is the head over woman; man fully images God, while woman images God by virtue of her relationship to man. Woman’s being is derived from man’s being. Further, sexual differentiation between women and men is interpreted to mean that it is God’s will that man serve in public leadership roles, while women are created for domestic roles. These roles are not interchangeable. Although women and men are equal with respect to their God-given dignity, it belongs to natural law and to the order of creation that women be subordinate to men. Although the theology of complementarity belongs properly to theological anthropology [what used to be called the doctrine of man, now called the doctrine of humanity], it emerges because appeal is often made to the doctrine of the Trinity to support the subordination of women to men.”

That’s the first reason; the second one: “Because God is named the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, the doctrine of the Trinity has been seen to reinforce solely masculine images for God. The exclusive use of masculine images in worship or in theology,” she says, “contributes to an overwhelming sense of God as male. This constitutes religious legitimization of patriarchy in the sense that not only is the human male normative for all human experience, but God is imaged and addressed and conceptualized in terms that are thoroughly masculine.”

That is very well put by this very able lady, and that indicates for us the difficulty that we are facing today in terms of a modern statement of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. This is not only a problem for the Roman Catholics, for this lady is a Roman Catholic, but I could have used quotations from Protestant theologians, and I must tell you it is not only a problem for liberal Protestants, but it is becoming, as I discern, also a problem for evangelical Protestants. Once you begin to think in terms of the equal rights of women, once you begin to think in terms of women’s ordination, once you begin to go for inclusive language for humanity, for that’s the modern word used instead, of course, the old word for mankind, once you do these things, you seem to be part of a wind that blows, or you seem to be the top of a slippery slide and once you get blown by this wind or sliding down this slide, it seems to be very difficult to stop. I’ve watched this particularly in my own church, the established, the national

Church of England, and within the Episcopal Church of the United States, the Anglican Church of Canada, and then in the Lutherans and the Methodists, and so on. So, I must make clear, as far as I can tell, that for evangelicals to say, This doesn’t concern us, I think they are not living in the real world. These are pressures. These are winds. These are slippery slides, which we must be aware of and we must address.

What I’ve done up to now, then, is to bring to you the major Trinitarian texts, but not the only ones of course, because when you read it carefully, the whole New Testament can be said to be Trinitarian. It is from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, and it calls for a response to the Father through the Son by and in the Spirit. And so the movement from God is Trinitarian, from the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit, and the movement back to God in worship, in devotion, in service, is also Trinitarian. We first of all then noted that, and then we noted that in the earliest Christian literatures, the Trinitarian understanding is fundamental and basic and is the structure for worship and for prayer. And then we have moved on to the present day, and from a variety of sources we have attempted to illustrate just how much apparently we have forgotten, just how much we have set aside or not made use of the great and wonderful and glorious dogma and doctrine of the Holy Trinity. And we have noticed last of all there that the movement of feminism, the feminist movement, is forcing us to consider this even with greater attention now and to cause us, perhaps, to want to restate the whole dogma in such modern terms as will not be offensive to those who call themselves Christian feminists.

So we really are faced here with a major challenge, and I want to try in these lectures, first of all, to give you a full biblical understanding and as far as possible a full historical understanding, and then at the end to come back and to address some of these questions because not only am I interested in them from what we may call an academic point of view, for my interest is in the history of Christian theology and in systematic theology, not only am I coming at it from that point of view, but as a pastor who is committed to the worship of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, I really want to share with you my concerns in that specific area of adoration and praise and thanksgiving and salvation.

So that’s where we’ve come from, and I’ve now indicated where we are going. I look forward now to presenting to you my second lecture which will continue these themes.