Truth Unites - Is the Trinity in the New Testament? Yes!!

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

I give three reasons in five minutes why the doctrine of the Trinity is in the New Testament. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

In this video, I want to explore three aspects of the New Testament that go a long way to establishing the doctrine of the Trinity, even if they don't get you fully there resolving every nuance. They're pushing you a long direction toward it. We'll try to do this in five minutes. I haven't timed it. I'll go as fast as I can. Number one, how Jesus is described. So the deity of Christ is obviously an important building block of the Trinity. You might think of this as like the first domino that falls in the trajectory of thought that results in the Trinity. and arguably the deity of Christ is one of the great themes or motifs of the New Testament deposit of Revelation. Think of in the Gospels.

Think of how John's Gospel starts off, where the Logos is distinct from God, and yet, at least in some sense, he is God as well. Or throughout John's Gospel in Christ's teaching, there's this awareness of some kind of divine identity, divine authority. In Paul's writings, there's an identification of Christ with God in some sense. sense. In Hebrews 1, you have a similar identification, and then you even have these Old Testament passages like Psalm 45 and Psalm 102 applied to Christ. But the interpretation of these passages is contested. We can't go through all of them in a five-minute video. And some of these passages

are clearer than others. So let's go to one of the clearest. That's the hardest to get around at the end of John's gospel. Thomas, the great skeptic of the apostles, explicitly calls Christ his Lord and God. And then Jesus commends that as belief. Now, this is not Thomas taking the Lord's name in vain. This is Thomas confessing to Jesus who Jesus is. As D.A. Carson notes, this is the common way to take this. And I love that this comes from the former skeptic, you know. But secondly, it's not just how Jesus is explicitly identified. It's more pervasively how Jesus acts all throughout the Gospels and the entire New Testament. In other words, think of it like this. The deity of Christ is not just an explicit

teaching that pops up here or there. It's implicit in everywhere, everywhere in how Jesus functions, and specifically how he wields divine authority throughout his ministry, inaugurating the kingdom of God as the Jewish Messiah. To put this point simply, Jesus was crucified for perceived blasphemy. His opponents recognized that he claimed to be got. This is the drama and the energy that drives the gospel narratives from the beginning of his ministry in Luke chapter two, when he claims divine authority to forgive sins, to the climactic conclusion of his ministry, when at his trial he claims divine authority to judge the world as the son of man of Daniel 7, his opponents understood what he was saying. In other words, it's not just here or there you have

this identification made. And we wouldn't expect that Jesus would say, oh, you know, God is a Trinity and I'm the second member. We would expect that this truth would come out in the context of his ministry with what he's doing inaugurating the kingdom of God. That's exactly what you see. If you interpret the New Testament in light of the strict monotheism of Jesus' first century Jewish context, the deity of Christ is implicit in the whole plot. It's also reflected in the way he receives worship. It's even reflected in his names or titles like the Lord or King of Kings and Lord

of Lords, or the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End, or even the simple words drawing from the Divine Name of Excess. is three, I am. I like how Thomas Torrance puts it. He says, the deity of Christ rests not just on one passage or another, but upon the whole coherent evangelical structure of historical divine revelation given in the New Testament scriptures. Thirdly, the Holy Spirit is included in the name of God. Now, you can see this in many passages, these triatic formulae in the New Testament, but perhaps the most significant is the Great Commission, where Jesus commands baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. The inclusion of the Holy Spirit in the baptismal formula is extremely significant because baptism

in or into the name of an entity is an expression of ultimate loyalty and commitment to that entity. And the word name here is in the singular. So straight from the mouth of Christ himself, we have these words, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit as the singular name to which Christians pledge their ultimate loyalty through baptism. And then you can see Trinitarian and baptism from the earliest times of church history in the didache, for example, or in Justin martyr in the second century. Later Christians will use this baptismal formula to show that the Holy Spirit should not be removed from the Godhead. So there's more to say about the deity of the Holy Spirit and also actually the deity of the sun. But I'm just trying to build some basic building

blocks here in this short minute. I'm probably already over five minutes. I'll finish off here, though. So you've got the deity of the sun, you've got the deity of the Spirit. Now those two facts obviously don't themselves establish the Trinity proper, but it gets the ball rolling. Because if you combine those two features of the New Testament deposit alongside its emphasis upon the unity of God, which is also clear in the New Testament, and then you recognize that the Father and the Son are distinct. You know, the Son is praying to the Father, for example. The son sends the Spirit, for example. Reflection on those data of Revelation get you basically into the ballpark of a Trinitarian conception of God. Because from the New Testament,

Testament alone, you can affirm that there is one God, that the Father is God, that the Son is God, that the Spirit is God, but that the Father is not the Son, the Father is not the Spirit, and the Son is not the Spirit, and those seven affirmations are the core of this doctrine. The subsequent development of the doctrine of the Trinity can then be seen as a fleshing out and further growth of understanding of this doctrine, and then the development of a technical vocabulary to distinguish it from heretical alternatives. But the basic doctrine is there right there in the New Testament. Yes, the Trinity is in the New Testament. I'm curious how much I went over. Hope that's helpful. What do you think? And would a longer video on this be of use? Let me know.