Truth Unites - Is the Trinity Politics?

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

Gavin Ortlund interacts with Jacob Hansen's comments about the Trinity in his discussion with Alex O'Connor. Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) 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/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Christians believe that God is a Trinity, one God who is the Father of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Sometimes it's claimed that this doctrine is a later development in church history, and sometimes that it's enforced by politics and social pressure and this kind of thing. I hope Alex O'Connor doesn't mind me engaging so much with his videos. It's just because I find them interesting. And I wanted to interact in this case with something that his guest, Jacob Hanson, said about the Trinity, in a video entitled, A Mormon Explains Mormonism. Speaking of things becoming true, here's what's interesting, just historically speaking.

the great Christological debates were never resolved. Instead, a particular take on the Christological debates was enforced. In other words, if you were outside of the orthodoxy of the official church of the Roman Empire, the official religion, then you were a heretic not just in a vague sense, like you were against the official church. And this creedal tradition, it didn't really spread because it just like made so much sense. It wasn't like, you know, they went to people more like, oh, hypostatic. Union. There's like, that makes total sense. Like, Trinity, like, perfect. The reason that it spread was because it was the official religion of governments that

for 1,500 years had adopted this sort of creedal tradition as their official, like, orthodoxy. And then as they expand, well, this is our religion. Right? And so for essentially, for 1,500 years, this creedal tradition spreads around the world and is enforced through the state. And it's funny because to this day, it's still not enforced through argument. It's enforced through sort of social pressure. For example, you're on Ruslan's podcast. And as soon as you mentioned Latter-day Saints, what's the first thing he says? He says, they're not Christian. Okay. What he's doing is he's saying, they, why aren't we Christian? You want to know why he say we're not Christian? It's not because we don't accept the New Testament or

believe that Jesus rose from the dead, it's because we don't accept the Trinitarian formulation of God, which is demonstrably a formulation that came through the creeds centuries after Christ. This is a very common narrative that you will hear, not just from Mormons, but for many others as well. So I wanted to say a few words to defend the doctrine of the Trinity, primarily because I know a lot of Christians who have anxieties and uncertainties about this. It's true that in 380, you have the Edict of Thessalonica, where Nicene Christianity, because comes the Roman Empire's official religion under Emperor Theodosius and others. And then a year later, you have the Council of Constantinople with the revised Nicene Creed. And if you can pronounce the phrase,

the Nicino-Constantanapolitan creed. Can't believe I got it right. So starting in the fourth century, Nicene Christianity has a kind of imperial backing. And that will be true for all the doctrines in the Nicene Creed, the virgin birth, for example, or the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, for example. all of these doctrines are kind of now interwoven with imperial politics. And that doesn't falsify them. That also doesn't validate them. You might believe both that Jesus was born of a virgin and that belief now becomes interwoven with Roman Empire politics.

And you can believe that about the Trinity. You can believe it's true and it's interwoven with the politics now. But the reason why the Trinitarian traditions spread going forward for the next 1,500, years was not just politics and social pressure, and I think that's very unfair to the trinitarian tradition. One of the ways you might look at this, I mean, you can just look at how the Trinity subsists in groups outside of a church-state connection, which it does, but another way you can see is even in the medieval era, just the courage of missionaries who are advancing the doctrine of the Trinity into other contexts at their own great peril.

One of my great interests in my academic work is the Christianization of Scandinavia in the 9th, 10th, and 11th centuries. I just talked about this at church yesterday, so it's fresh on my mind because I'm doing a seminar in church history we're going through. And I have a video on this if you're interested in that. I know it seems kind of a niche topic, but it's actually fascinating. The courage of these men going up to the Vikings and just getting slaughtered for about 250 years before Christianity really took root. It's just amazing. You know, there are these stories. I'll put up one on the screen. You can read. This is from Adam of Bremen's account of Wolfred, smashing statues of Thor with a battle acts to show that the Trinity is the real God, not Thor.

And this is from the medieval historian, Adam of Bremen, who I argue we have reasons to trust his account, basically. And he gives all these amazing stories of Christians going up, and basically the contest is, who's the real God, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, or Thor and Odin, and so on and so forth, and the Christians are being slaughtered for their zeal in spreading what they believed is the true God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. they're doing so at incredible cost to themselves, incredible courage. So Christians are advancing the doctrine of the Trinity, not just by power and pressure,

and they're also giving arguments. I mean, there's a massive tradition of reflection about the Trinity. For example, in the medieval era, one of my, actually my favorite theological book of all time is Anselm's pro slogion. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on this book. It's written in the 1080s, and he's building this conception of God as that than which nothing greater can be thought. and part of his argument is that the word by which God speaks of himself must himself be God

and so also the love that exists between God and His Word. And he builds the case there. Now you can push back and say that's a bad argument. A lot of Christians even don't accept that kind of argument. But the point is he's not just putting pressure on people. And this is what Christians have generally done. They've given arguments for why the Trinity actually explains problems like the one and the many problem and things like this. So even if you don't like those arguments, they are giving those arguments.

And the biggest thing is they're saying this makes sense of the New Testament, and it even makes sense of the Old Testament in certain ways, too. So this gets into the response that Alex anticipated that Ruslan might give, as this came up in their discussion. He might say, like, yeah, but it's not just like, you know, well, I'm a Trinitarian and I've decided that, and that means you don't count. But rather, I have good reasons to think that Christianity requires the Trinity, that you have to believe in the Trinity in order to be a Christian. And so when I say that you're not a Christian because you don't believe in the Trinity,

it's a shorthand for saying you're not a Christian because you don't align with what I consider to be fundamental to Christianity for good philosophical reasons, not just because it's decided by some ancient doctrine. And I would, for any Christians watching, I'm very open. One of the debates I would love to have publicly is, is the Trinitarian doctrine necessary to be a Christian or something along those lines? Like, is the doctrine of the Trinity compatible with the Bible, for example, which I think it's not in any way, shape, or form? I think the Christological debates, like I said, they weren't resolved because they're not resolvable. No, I have a longer video on whether the Trinity is biblical. It's called the Trinity is not an accretion, or I think that's maybe that's in the thumbnail.

But the argument there is that the doctrine of the Trinity is the best way to make sense of the data of revelation. So Christians believe God has spoken. He's revealed himself, for example, in Jesus. and we're trying to make sense of how he has revealed himself because we're not smart enough to figure out the divine nature on our own, so we're responding to Revelation. And it's true that you don't have the Trinity fully fleshed out in Revelation. You don't have it like, you know, technical terms in the first century and this kind of thing. But what I've argued for is it's the best way to make sense of what we find there. The building blocks are all there. And that

distinguishes this doctrine from other things like I've argued against things like Mary's assumption, because I say you don't even have any building blocks for hundreds of years. But in the New Testament, we have data that we have to interpret. Jesus is being called God. He's being worshipped. He's regarded as participating in the identity of God in some ways. I just did a video on this from Philippians 2, which is very early prior to most New Testament books. And then we have other points of data in the New Testament that we have to work through like Trinitarian Baptisms, which Alex brings up, monotheism, and so on and so forth. And so the debate becomes, how do we make sense of this data?

How do we make sense of how God has revealed himself in Jesus of Nazareth? For example, in what sense is Jesus divine? And that's a complicated question. As that debate is working itself out in those first several centuries of church history, all different views are forced to use more technical, and more philosophical vocabulary, as opposed to the more idiomatic, plain language of the Bible, to elucidate where the differences really lie. But that doesn't mean that the Trinity, as more technically defined in, say, the fourth century, is incompatible with the New Testament,

because the same reality can be spoken of with different kinds of language and with different levels of technicality. For example, I can talk about my children by using their first name, or by using a term of endearment, or I can also communicate about them in an email with the government by giving their social security number. You know, I can call my son Elijah, or I can call him Ligie. I won't tell you all my nicknames for him. But the point is, he's still the same person, even when I'm speaking with different registers of technicality for that person. And Christians can do the same thing with God. What basically, what Trinitarian Christians like myself believe is that words like Homo Ucian, the technical term that came to be for the idea that the son is of the same essence as the father. This is simply a more

precise way of capturing what's going on in the heart of Thomas in the climactic passage of John's Gospel where he says, my Lord and my God to Jesus. And Jesus doesn't respond by calling that blasphemy, but rather by calling it belief. Now, to fully develop this would be a longer task. But for the sake of this video, I just want to defend this idea that the Trinity is an essential doctrine, that it's okay to see this as setting the parameters of what Christianity is. There's nothing wrong in principle with coming to believe that this understanding of God is the correct one. Without this central sort of adjudicating authority, it's all kind of a mess until Constantine adopts this divided movement as the official religion of the Roman Empire. And so now as the official religion, you have to have an official, like, what do we believe? What is within the bounds of orthodoxy and what is outside the bounds of orthodoxy?

This is where the creeds come from. They begin centuries after Jesus and they begin as a orthodoxy test. Now, there were creeds that they talk about that were before, but they're, a lot of the saints don't really have problems with, you know, like the Apostles' Creed that says, you know, Jesus died and resurrected. It's more the later creeds that begin to change this notion about the identity of who God is. And they have some discussion there about Constantine versus Theodosius and those questions, so let's not get hung up on some of those historical questions precisely. But for our purposes, let's just interact with this idea that it's when the church and state get

intertwined in the fourth century, that now you need to have official boundaries of belief. and you get this urgent need for determining orthodoxy versus heresy. That distinction is, it can sound harsh, right? And it can, those very terms, orthodoxy and heresy can call up to our minds the sense of power and pressure and, like, I want to exclude certain people and doesn't feel very nice, you know. But the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy is necessary for any religion and any belief system just to define what its boundaries are. Unless Christianity just means anything, and it's just completely flexible, you need to know what are the parameters. What is Christianity? And that's what the early Christians are working through in many cases, like the doctrine of God. And the concern to oppose heresy

and have clear boundaries does not start in the 4th century. You can go by, you know, at every generation prior to that point, you can look in the 2nd century, Ironaeus's book, against heresies would be a great example of an important text like that. Christians have always right out of the gate been concerned to set the boundaries correctly. We don't always do that perfectly, of course, and it takes some time in certain areas. But even in the New Testament, there's clear boundaries that demarcate orthodoxy versus heresy. For example, you know, 1st John 4, you find John saying, this is Christianity and this isn't Christianity. You have to believe Jesus has come in the flesh. So Gnosticism is out of bounds. So creeds are not a later development. Creads are circulating even

prior to the New Testament, and they're included within the New Testament itself, in many cases. So you'll find this language of Paul, for example, where he's talking about what he's received. And most scholars think this is a prior creed of some kind that Paul is then quoting at that point. Now, perhaps, I try not to be unfair to Jacob in any way, I'm sure perhaps he would acknowledge that, but just say that the Trinity isn't one of those issues that concern orthodoxy versus heresy. And to be fair, it's certainly true. This is one of the great emphases that I'm constantly making on Twitter a lot, especially. Not every difference of theology is a matter of orthodoxy versus heresy.

But some are. And let me just finish by giving a few remarks to defend what Ruslan had said that really the Trinity is a first-rank essential doctrine. and this is a demarcating point for Christians. And I'll just give two reasons for that here. Number one is this doctrine determines whom we worship, and number two is it determines how we worship. So first of all, because this is just a way of highlighting how foundational and how important this is,

that this is not arbitrary for us to set the boundaries here. Because there's nothing more important than just who is God. Who is this God to whom we relate in this religion? right? When we worship him, who is it that we're worshipping? When we pray, to whom are we praying? Is it to the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, or is it to some other entity who's not a Trinity? And whatever view you take on that, it's utterly foundational. You can't really go even one half step forward without having some kind of answer to that functionally. The Puritan theologian John Owen used to argue that we must have communion with each member of the Godhead particularly. So,

particular feelings of adoration and worship and gratitude and praise should come up to the Father, particular feelings of worship and love and so forth to the Son and to the Spirit and so on and so forth. This is the God that we worship. So whether we accept the Trinity, it determines who is this God that we're worshiping, and it also determines how we approach him, how we have reconciliation to Him. So all Christians believe that we're reconciled to God through the death of Jesus on the cross, as soon as you start thinking about what that means, it becomes immediately important to understand who is Jesus. And Christians basically have argued that it's essential that the mediator between God and man must be a God man. Again, in the medieval era, Anselm wrote a book called

Kurt Deus Homo, meaning why the God man. And he made this appeal that essentially only God can do it, only man need to it, and therefore it must be a God man, someone who is both God and man. And in a more colloquial expression, you can see this in C.S. Louis' mere Christianity, where he's explaining that only a God man can actually save us. So this is why we believe the Trinity is an essential doctrine to Christianity. We're not being arbitrary, hopefully, we're not being mean-spirited about it. We're trying to be faithful to what we believe is true, to who the true God actually is. and how he's revealed himself, and this doctrine really does lie at the fountainhead of our religion.

If this doctrine is true, and this is how God has revealed himself, then insisting upon it is no more arbitrary or narrow than a doctor who wants to make sure he gets the medicine right to heal the patient. Because if you give the wrong medicine, then the patient won't get any better. And we believe this is just who God is as he's revealed himself in Jesus Christ. Of course, much more to say to work through this and have dialogue. Hopefully I can talk to Jacob sometime. Hopefully he won't feel like I stepped on his toes here in this response. If you're more interested in the topic of how do we distinguish essential doctrines from

non-essential doctrines, you might be interested in my book, finding the right hills to die on. It's talking about this idea of theological triage, ranking different doctrines according to their importance, which I think is a really important need in the church right now, one of the big ones I think right now. Let me know what you think in the comments. I'll read through the comments on this video very carefully. Thanks for watching, everybody.