The Trinity

 

I believe in the Trinitarian view of God.[1] I affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity is crucial and it concerns who God is and whom we should worship and to whom we should pray. I believe that God eternally exists as three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and each person is fully God and there is one God.[2] I affirm that the Father is not the Son and the Father is not the Holy Spirit but they are distinct persons. Scripture is absolutely clear that there is one and only one God. The three different persons of the Trinity are one not only in purpose and in agreement on what they think but they are one,, in essence, one in their essential nature. I believe that the Trinity is eternal and there have always been three. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and all of them have always been divine. The function of one member of the Trinity may, for a time, be subordinate to one or both of the other members of the Trinity but that does not mean he is in any way inferior in essence.

All allegories we may adopt to explain the Trinity have its own shortcomings. I affirm that the Trinity is incomprehensible and we cannot fully understand the mystery of the Trinity. We can try to explain the Trinity using many allegories but nothing will be able to fully represent the reality of this doctrine in its fullness. I believe that New Testament is Trinitarian in character, and there is no explicit development of the doctrine of the Trinity in its pages. The theologians of the early church were faithful to the biblical witness when they embarked on the difficult task of formulating a coherent Trinitarian doctrine.[3]

---

[1] Erickson, Christian Theology, 346.

[2] Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 226.

[3] Gerald Bray, The Doctrine of God: Contours of Christian Theology (Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity, 1993), 151.