Truth Unites - The Trinity is NOT an Accretion! (It's Apostolic)

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

In this video Gavin Ortlund argues that the doctrine of the Trinity is a faithful explication of the teaching of the apostles. 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/

This video is going to argue that the doctrine of the Trinity is a faithful explication of the teachings of the Apostles in the first century. That doesn't mean that there's no growth or development in the Church's understanding of the Trinity. It simply means the core idea is there traceable back to the teaching of the Apostles themselves and those right after them. What is that core idea? Well, I'm going to suggest that you can find these seven ideas in the New Testament itself. There is one God, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God. But, the father is not the son, the father is not the spirit, and the son is not the spirit. And basically, I just want to argue that those seven ideas are there in the first century

apostolic deposit, and the subsequent development of the doctrine of the Trinity is best interpreted as the flushing out of the church's understanding of that and of a technical vocabulary for that to distinguish it from heretical alternatives. Now, that flushing out is messy in the second century and in the third century, as we'll see, You get lots of subordinationism and modalism. I'll put definitions of those up on the screen, other errors as well. And then in the fourth and fifth centuries, you get this kind of clarifying and crystallizing around a full-blown Trinitarian doctrine.

But this 300-year process, this dynamic process in all its messiness, is the churches coming to terms with what is already present in the first century. So in other words, the Trinity is not an accretion. I use that word accretion to refer to post-apostolic developments in the church. So let's work through the data. I've worked really hard on this video. All fresh research. I hope it serves you, and I hope it promotes assurance in the gospel.

We'll go through two areas. First, the New Testament, second, the early church. If you watch to the end, what you'll get is not a treatment of all these dogmatic questions about the Trinity, like the fili-oque, inseparable operations, all those things. The goal is more of a historical walk-through, just to establish this one point, that if we could go back and resurrect John and Bartholomew and Andrew and Thomas and Peter and so forth, the apostles, and transport these men to the 5th century, have them read through the acts of the Council of Chalcedon, together with its summary of the previous three councils, they wouldn't feel betrayed by these councils.

Let's work through this. We'll start with the New Testament. Before we get into these texts, though, let me say just a word about how to approach them and to alert us to this danger. New Testament scholars often accuse theologians of importing later metaphysical categories back onto the biblical texts. And that's a real danger. We need to be alert to this. So let's highlight this. Princess Watson sums up this tendency.

Modern biblical scholarship has no great love for the doctrine of the Trinity. It likes to warn its customers that if they read a biblical text in light of what was to become the Orthodox Nicene theology of the 4th century, they will inevitably be committing the sin of anachronism, we should resist this scholarly anti-Trinitarianism. There's a real danger here. Let's call this danger, on the one hand, anachronistic imposition, meaning importing later categories back onto the text, imposing later categories, we can say, more technical, philosophical categories back onto the text. But why does Watson say we should resist that tendency?

Because this tendency often goes too far, and there's often a failure to recognize an opposite danger in the other direction, and that's disallowing any kind of organic connection between the earlier, less technical language of the first century, and the later, more technical language of the fourth century. So we can call this error, oh, I don't know, what should we call it? How about arbitrary limitation? Okay. And contemporary biblical scholarship is starting to push back in this opposite direction here, highlighting that danger as well. I don't know if this is a good metaphor or not. But think about if there's a crime and immediately you're summoned, you're a witness, you're summoned to the police station, you give you just off the top of your head, you just give

an immediate report of exactly what you saw. It's a truthful and fairly accurate report, but it's kind of ad hoc and just on the top of your head. Later on, after all the data comes in, testimony, forensic evidence, fingerprints, everything, that police have an official report based on everything together. Now, it'd be foolish to act like this initial statement is the same in every way as this later more full report, but it also is wrong to disallow any kind of connection between them, or to disallow the possibility that they're both summarizing the same event accurately and in their own way. If genuine acts of divine revelation happen in the first century, it's totally permissible for there to be less technical, sort of more occasional and pastoral language about them,

as well as more technical, kind of metaphysical interpretations of them, and to try to draw those two into dialogue with each other. The technical can be faithfully expositing the less technical. These philosophical categories might actually help us read the New Testament texts. Here's how one scholar puts it. The theological grammar in the New Testament presupposes certain basic judgments about the identity of God. The particular grammatical moves of the texts could not be made unless

larger theological judgments have been made that allow these linguistic possibilities. The development of the doctrine of the Trinity was the explication of this unless. In other words, you have here in the first century divine deposit of revelation, you have the incarnation of God, that's the proposal here, and you have the teaching about that from the apostles, something cataclysmic happens in the first century, a bomb drops in human history. A man gets out of a tomb and people start worshipping him and he starts commending that worship as belief.

That's the claim on the table. And what I want to argue is that the doctrine of the Trinity is the church is coming to terms with these data and others like them, like about the Holy Spirit. So the Trinity is, in other words, is a resolving of tensions rather than the creating of tensions. Here's how Larry Hurtado puts it. He's commenting on a different book. He says, in the New Testament, we have the problem of the relationship of God and Jesus, and in the subsequent early centuries, we have Christians developing a doctrine to solve that problem.

So is that a coherent way to make sense of the data? I think it's the best way to do so. Let me, let's work through that. Let's start with the New Testament. We'll go with five building blocks. Number one, how Jesus is described, that Jesus participates in the very identity of God, in some sense, is perhaps the first domino that falls in the trajectory of thought that gets you to the Trinity, and it's not merely mentioned here or there.

In the New Testament, instead, this is a theme or a motif of the entire New Testament deposit of Revelation. Take the Gospel of John, for example. Richard Bacham, in this wonderful book, has argued that the Gospel of John should be considered eyewitness testimony. Even if not, it's still very early testimony about Christian views of Jesus. Here you have one of the four Gospels, and the lead-off sentence says, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was God. This sentence is not tucked away in some obscure paragraph. It's front and center.

It's the lead-off sentence. And we have this statement that the Logos, or Word, is both distinct from God, and yet at least in some sense, he was God. So to unpack this a little bit, these words in the beginning, right at the start of the book, would have drawn any Jewish reader back to the very beginning of the Old Testament. They would have been expecting the words like Genesis 1-1 in the beginning God, but here you get in the beginning the word. And this immediate question is, okay, well, what is this word, right?

Well, D.A. Carson explains that there's basically two ranges of meaning that you can look at here, two sort of tendencies. It can refer to, on the one hand, what he calls the inner structure of something, and on the other hand, the outer expression of something. His conclusion is to see this language as referring to the kind of self-expression of God. He even says we might almost paraphrase it as, in the beginning, God expressed himself, and God's self-expression was with God, and God's self-expression was God. Now, there's a lot to explore here.

Boy, I'm going to try to pack a lot of information into this video, but even though this is not exhaustive, trying to highlight what is most helpful for the purpose that it is intended for. Later on, we'll talk about how the early church correlates this Logos with the wisdom of Proverbs 8, and we'll say a little more about the Logos idea there. The point for now is simply to note the identification of the Logos and God. The Logos was God, even while there's a recognition of some kind of distinction because he is with God.

Now, later passages we're going to get to are going to be a little bit more open to interpret. interpretation will have language like in the form of God or the image of God. But John's claim here, right at the start of his gospel, that he wants us to read the rest of the gospel in light of is even more direct. It says the word was God. Now, some want to say that because the word God here is anarthress, that means it, boy, big word, that means it doesn't have the definite article. That just means, so in English the definite article is the word.

the, and the indefinite is the word uh or n. But so you, and you have definite articles in Greek and you don't have a definite article here. And so some people want to say, well, this is just talking about some vaguer sense of deity. The word is godlike or something like that. But that is wrong to insist upon purely from the grammar like that. Okay. Now there's lots of, you know, boy, you could go down the rabbit trail on this and get lots. Let me just give you D.A. Carson's comments on this. I'm going to quote D.A. Carson a fair amount here just because he's a fantastic biblical commentator. He basically points out that a lot of a long string of writers have argued that because Theos has no article, John is not referring to God as a specific being, but to mere

qualities of Godness. The word they say was not God, but divine. This will not do. There is a perfectly serviceable word in Greek for divine, namely Theos. More importantly, there are are many places in the New Testament where the predicate noun has no article and yet is specific. Even in this chapter, you are the king of Israel, has no article before king in the original. And he goes on, talks about this at great length. He actually goes on to point out that it would be problematic if you did have the definite article there. So, in sum, without chasing down every possible objection here, but trying to just give the primary thrust of the argument, it seems like we have a claim that the word participates in the very identity of God in some sense.

And of course, John will say just a few verses later that this word is the one who becomes incarnate as Jesus. Now, that understanding of John 1-1, where you have this explicit identification, the Logos of God, coheres with what you see throughout the rest of John's gospel. So you have, for example, now there's lots of passages we could go through. Again, not exhaustive here, but let's cover a few things. So you can see in Jesus' own teaching, this sense of an awareness of divine identity and authority. You get this most in his conflict with the Pharisees. One example is in John 8, where you have two different claims here.

First, you have the actual claims that are just amazing. Number one, he's saying, you have to believe in me to be, have your sins forgiven in John 824. And then later on, he's saying, I existed before Abraham. those claims are significant in themselves, but here's what's going on in this passage that is escalating this concern of blasphemy from his opponents. He's using this phrase, I am, Ego Ami, in the Greek, that suggests an allusion to Exodus 3 and the divine name, I am that I am. And that, of course, is drawn out in other passages in the Old Testament as well, like in the book of Isaiah. And if you've ever heard God spoken of as the great I am, you'll be familiar with

that language. This clearly seems to be intentional, especially in Johnny 58, because just grammatically, the past tense would be more natural if you were merely claiming pre-existence generally, as opposed to divine pre-existence, it would be more natural to say before Abraham was, I was. But the statement before Abraham was, I am, was not lost upon his contemporaries. and you can see how they respond to verse 59, they're picking up stones because this is the concern about blasphemy. Here's how one commentator explains that reaction, drawing from both Exodus 3, and then also Isaiah 41 and Isaiah 44.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, in the book of Revelation, we find these similar sort of titles for God being applied to Jesus, the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, etc. Just a few chapters later, Jesus declares, I give them eternal life. Now, those words already are pretty amazing, and they will never perish. No one can snatch them out of my hand. My father, who has given them to me is greater than all. No one is able to snatch them out of my father's hand. I and the father are one. Now, again, you could look at this statement and you could think you could knock it down pretty easily by saying, well, he just could mean something like, I and the father

are one in spirit or something like that. Doesn't Jesus himself pray in chapter? for a kind of oneness among believers and believers being sort of participating in the unity of the Godhead in some sense and so forth. But in the context here, Jesus is claiming to have the same role as God in preserving and protecting believers. So you have the repetition of the no one can snatch them out of my hand with then God's hand, and then right after that you have the I and the Father are one. So it's kind of like saying, the father protects them, I protect them, we are one. The implication seems to be we are one in our saving activity. So when people try to take these claims as though there's something short of a claim to divinity, they're departing from how

John tells us Jesus's Jewish contemporaries responded to him. And you can see that right there in John 1033 with how they took this. If we take these claims at face value, as the Pharisees did, sure seems like Jesus is claiming to, in some sense, participate in the divine identity. We have similar claims in Paul's writings. He is in the form of God. Romans 9. Christ who is God. Colossians 1. He is the image of God. Colossians 2.9 and him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Now, look, whenever you come to one of these passages, if someone is expecting me to hammer down every nail in the house here. They're going to be really disappointed with this video. The intent is not to be exhaustive and sort of canvas every possible objection to every passage,

but rather to kind of put the main thrust of the argument forward and see it in its cumulative weight and power. So there's different ways you can construe some of these particular passages, especially if you just look at them in isolation, okay? The exact way that Jesus participates in the divine identity is not totally clear in any one of them, and we don't want to overpress any one passage. But when we're putting them all together, you're starting to get a picture here that's hard to get away from. Let's unpack just the Philippians 2 passage for a moment.

For the purpose of this video, Larry Hurtado convincingly argues that this passage was a hymn predating Paul. And he notes that a lot of the scholarship goes this way. So basically, in other words, Paul is actually quoting words that were used very, very early on in the context of Christian worship. And so you can find even very liberal scholars like Bart Ehrman admit that Philippians 2 is pre-Pauline. And this is significant because what that means is extremely early on, decades from his life, very early on, years from his death. We have not only this provocative language about Jesus being in the form of God, but we also have what

what Larry Hurtado notes. In Philippians 2, 9 through 11, Jesus' exaltation by God even involves him being given the name that is above every name and being designated as the one to whom all creation is to acclaim as Lord. So just think about this from the climax of Philippians 2 in this wonderful hymn in Philippians 2 that goes back way early on. We have someone who's in the form of God, and then we have this description of the incarnation and so forth, and then we have him given the name above every other name, and everyone will bow the need to him and confess he is Lord. So it doesn't take a lot of curiosity to start to ask some basic questions, like, well, what is that name that is above every other name? And a lot of people will say, this is the name of God

himself. Here's how Peter Toon summarizes, for Paul to call Jesus, the Lord, was to identify him in the closest possible way with Yahweh, the Lord, and in so doing also identify Jesus in the closest possible way with God, the Father, who is Yahweh. This is the language being applied to Jesus in corporate worship settings, even prior to the writings of much of the New Testament. That is significant, and we need to let that wash over us. Okay, if we're thinking this is an accretion. I know in dealing with the full Trinity right now, but the deity of Jesus right now. Hebrews 1, another very powerful passage. You have this explicit identification of Jesus as God in some sense, the exact imprint of his nature. So this is Hebrews 1, 2 to 3. One of my commentaries helps unpack this

word, by the way. This Greek word translated as exact representation or exact imprint here was used in classical Greek of an engraver minting coins or tools. So the word can be used with reference to a stamp or a branding iron or a mark engraved on coins or seals or something like that. So it's pretty remarkable claim to speak of the exact imprint of the nature of God. Kind of fits with Colossians 1, the image of God. But what is, I'm not even going to try to chase down how to interpret anything that's ambiguous. Let's kind of leave that off the table and not put the full weight on any ambiguous language. Here's something that's a little bit more direct, and that is the application in Hebrews 1, in the immediately following verses of Old Testament passages,

like Psalm 45 and Psalm 102, speaking of the Lord and of God, and then being applied to Christ. And so you can see these words here at the start, but of the sun. says. Now those introductory words tell us the author of Hebrews thinks that Psalm 45 and Psalm 103 can be legitimately interpreted as speaking of the Son of God. By the way, that raises this fascinating question of how do you understand the Trinity in relation to the Old Testament? And I've done a whole video on that because I find that topic so interesting. I'll show the thumbnail here if you're interested in that. You can hunt it down. So we also have to reckon with this. In the New Testament, Jesus is worshipped. You actually see that in a lot of different passages, like Matthew's

account of the calming of the storm or his resurrection account, but one of the clearest is in John 28, where Thomas, who is just doubted, sees Jesus and explicitly calls him his Lord and his God, and then Jesus commends that as belief. Now, there's a couple different ways people try to interpret that differently. But I think D.A. Carson is right. I'll put up his statement that just grammatically, this doesn't look like Thomas is taking the Lord's name in vain. A lot of these other readings are very unnatural. The most natural reading of this passage is that Thomas is speaking to Jesus and saying, my Lord and my God. Now, if there was any concern, if Jesus thought that such language was inappropriately applied to him, he could have very easily rebuked Thomas for that and said,

worship God alone, the way other apostles will do that when they are worshipped. But instead, Jesus commends this as belief. Now, this is not an exhaustive survey, and we've not covered every possible objection or alternative interpretation of these passages. Nonetheless, we're trying to get an overall sense here, and the fact is, you get to a point where I think what we've surveyed thus far, though, raises the legitimate question. Supposing you did want to say that Jesus is God, how else do you say that than having people worship him, calling him God, calling him the king of kings and lord of lords, the alpha and omega, and so forth? So this is the first building block. The New Testament states that Jesus is God. However, second building block is it's not just sort of

what is explicitly stated here and there, it's sort of the implicit undercurrent everywhere in the New Testament. You could put it like this, it's almost the whole aroma of the New Testament. Think of like the tip of an iceberg, and you've got, you can see that, and it's clear, but then there's this huge substructure that you can't see. I think we can also say, secondly, that how Jesus acts sort of presupposes divine identity and it's implicit in how he functions, specifically in his ministry, and how he wields divine authority in his ministry. So in other words, and in many of his statements, you know, we have explicit statements like

some of the ones we've looked at, but we also have so many statements that might not strike you immediately, but when you think about them, it is sort of an implicit claim to deity, or at least if you don't think it's that, you have to find some other way to understand it. I'll put up a favorite example of mine from Matthew 1820, where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them. Now, you think about that. It seems like it's kind of a claim of omnipresence of a kind, unless you try to take this as, you know, very metaphorical or something like this.

And these kinds of implicit testimony, to me, these implicit testimonies are even stronger because it's sort of like the background context that makes everything makes sense. And I would say the simplest way to get at this is to note the plot of the New Testament. What is basically happening? Like what's the narrative structure of the New Testament? Well, it's this escalating conflict between Jesus and the Jewish leadership resulting in his crucifixion and then his alleged resurrection. And if you say, well, why is he crucified?

The reason is perceived blasphemy. That's the drama of the New Testament story. That's what's basically working itself out in the Gospels. and then everything else is sort of flowing out of that event, the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. And this is why you can find, you know, John 518 is one example here, lots of concerns about Jesus claiming to be equal with God or to be God himself. This is what you see throughout his ministry. This is the concern that's working itself out. So it's not just a statement here or there.

It's the whole sort of interwoven with the whole structure of the New Testament. You can see, take Mark's gospel, for example, and you trace the thread from the beginning to the end. In the beginning, in Mark chapter 2, you have a claim of divine authority to forgive sins. There's clearly a concern of blasphemy here. You've got the drama, the sort of rivalry between the Jewish leadership and Jesus right out of the gate in the beginning of his ministry. They're saying, hey, you know, only God can forgive sins. And Jesus doesn't respond to that by backing off. Rather, he says, no, yeah, you got that right.

I have that authority to forgive sins. And you trace that thread all the way to the end of Mark's Gospel and the climactic conclusion at his trial when he claims divine authority to judge the world as the son of man of Daniel 7. And once again, this is understood. His opponents are tearing their clothing and wanting to crucify him because of his claim of divine authority. So in other words, when you interpret the New Testament,

in light of the strict monotheism of the first century Jewish context and how Jesus is functioning in his ministry. His deity is sort of interwoven with the whole thing. Thomas Torrance puts it well, he says, the deity of Christ rests not on just one passage or another, but upon the whole coherent evangelical structure of historical divine revelation given in the New Testament scriptures. This is the great event that Christianity is about, that the New Testament is testifying to, A man shows up in history, gets crucified for blasphemy, claiming to be God, and then people are saying he's gotten out of the tomb, and they're worshipping him. So these are points of historical testimony that we've got to try to make sense of. And from the standpoint of accepting them as valid, this is what is going to get you ultimately to the Trinity.

But thirdly, we've got to still build the building blocks here. The third building block is that the Holy Spirit is included in the name and identity of God. And you can see this in many New Testament passages. I think maybe the most significant is the Great Commission at the end of Matthew, where Jesus commands baptism in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Now, including the Holy Spirit here with the Father and the Son, it's very significant because baptism is this important Christian right where you're expressing your identity and your allegiance to God. and the name here is singular. Simon Gather Cole notes the name here is singular even though it has three owners. Neither father, son, nor spirit exhaust the divine identity, rather each shares it.

So we need to understand how significant this is. This passage alone does a lot of work because straight from the mouth of Christ himself, in his climactic parting words, instituting this sacred Christian act that we call baptism, We have the language of Father, Son, and Spirit as the singular name to which Christians pledge their loyalty through baptism. You know, this is not a late accretion. This is from the very vocal cords of the founder of our religion. This is to whom you pledge loyalty when you become a Christian.

This name, Father, Son, and Spirit. And so you can see Trinitarian Baptisms right out of the gate from the earliest times of church history in the didache and in Justin martyr in the second century and so forth. Immediately, Christians are baptized in the name of the Trinity, the Father's Son, the Spirit. Later Christians, of course, will use this baptismal formula to show that the Holy Spirit should not be removed from the Godhead. We can also see a kind of Trinitarian structure and parallelism in many of these passages in the New Testament.

I'll just mention two. In 1 Corinthians 12, 3, we have another identification of Christ as Lord, and then we ask, Okay, what does the word Lord mean there, right? Well, in the immediately following verses, note this threefold parallelism that Paul lays out. There are varieties of gifts but the same spirit, varieties of service, but the same Lord, varieties of activities, but the same God.

So you have references here to the Spirit, the Lord, and the God. Here's how one interpreter puts it. When Lord refers to Jesus, to say, same Lord and same God, almost in the same breath, is to speak idolatrous nonsense unless the reference of the word Lord and God are understood in a non-competitive manner. Paul's argument presupposes a linguistic interconnection between God, Jesus, the Lord, and the Holy Spirit, such that to speak of one is

necessarily to invoke or imply the others. And it's very striking that, you know, multiple passages where Paul wants to emphasize the unity of the church, he will involve Jesus and the Holy Spirit as well. Another example of this is in Ephesians 4, where once again you have the Spirit and the Lord and God put in this parallel manner as the basis for Christian unity. So you have the same God, same Spirit, same Lord, therefore the Church is one. One Lord, one God, one Spirit, therefore the church has one faith. That leads naturally to a fourth observation, and that's basically just one word, monotheism. So we can say that in the New Testament, we also have monotheism, that is belief in one God. This also is very explicit, 1 Timothy 2, for example. Whatever the early Christians were saying,

it wasn't an explicit tritheism. If you want to argue it entailed that, you can't say it was explicit or that they were trying to do that. The early Christians were not saying, We worship Jesus and we baptize in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Therefore, we need to jettison Jewish monotheism. That was not their argument, even if you think it entailed that. In fact, you can see Jesus himself quoting the great Shema of Deuteronomy to identify the greatest commandment, and with these words, the Lord is one. This is as much a deposit of New Testament revelation as anything else.

There's only one God. And then fifth, you have distinctions between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. For example, you have the Son praying to the Father in John 17 and elsewhere. You have the Father sending the Son in John 3 and elsewhere. You have the Father speaking to the Son in Psalm 110. You have the Son sending the Spirit, and in fact petitioning the Father to send the Spirit in John 14. Elsewhere in the Upper Room Discourse there, John 14 to 16, you'll have Jesus saying,

oh, it's good that I go because then the Holy Spirit can come. And the actions conveyed by these verbs suggest distinction between the parties involved. We don't pray to ourselves. We don't send ourselves. You know, if you put up John 14 again here and try to understand this as if there are not distinctions between the Father's Son and Spirit, it doesn't really make any sense. And you'd have basically Jesus saying, I will ask myself to give you myself or something like this.

It doesn't make any sense. So all of that is such that without ironing out every wrinkle here, nonetheless, we put this some information on the table here that makes it legitimate to ask, how do we make sense of all of this? You know, here in the New Testament, we have worship of Jesus, calling Jesus, King of Kings, and Lord of Lord, Zalpha and Omega, et cetera, et cetera, explicitly identifying him as God. We have baptism in the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. We have a lot of Trinitarian parallelism.

with those three labels in various passages. We have clear teaching. There's only one God, but we have some kinds of distinction between these three parties. So in other words, what generates the doctrine of the Trinity is right there in the New Testament.

Hopefully this is clear, how different this is, from other things that I argue are accretions like the bodily assumption of Mary or the veneration of icons. We've got explicit identification of the Son of God as a theme of the intent.

entire New Testament, and then you get inclusion of the Spirit into the name of God and monotheism and these distinctions and so forth is all right there. It's not all fleshed out with philosophical precision, but the basic mechanics in terms of how you're to function as the church are there. But let's now look at how it does get fleshed out. Okay. What is, what do you see in the early church as you see this moving forward? Well, earlier I made a distinction between a very broad conceptual distinction between a lot of confusion in the second and third centuries versus clarification in the fourth and fifth centuries. That's a very broad distinction. Now let's get a little more granular, and John McGuckin's brilliant metaphor will help us. He speaks of Trinitarian

development as five different acts in a play, which he uses to highlight the progressive variations upon biblical premises mediated through the lived experience of the church. And here are the five acts he notes. Number one, sparse collection of New Testament, or sorry, second century theologians. Number two, the quickening of pace that occurred in the third century apologists. Number three, the towering genius of origin of Alexandria. Number four, the Nicene and post-Nicine reactions to origin. And number five, the bemused aftermath. A long quieting down as the Trinity becomes a fixed dogma, a quieting that often lapses into silence. Fascinating. He's a really good writer, and good theologian.

At that fifth point is interesting, because it is true. You know, that's why I'm making this video on this. I think we sometimes fail to really work at the Doctrine of the Trinity not nearly as much as we should. We sometimes overlook it. It's also interesting the way he cashed that out, the significance he attaches to origin, which I think is really valid. If you think of early, you know, major theologians in the early church, you could think

of origin as the first, if you think of a built, like, think of the city of Chicago and the first time, like the Sears Tower is tallest at one point, and then, Eventually everybody forgets about that because there's another skyscraper that's even taller. You can think of origin as like the first skyscraper in the early church. He's just massive in his influence. But then Augustine is so much taller that he gets eclipsed by Augustine. But origin is so important. So what some people want to argue is in that in McGuckin's schema here, you don't get the Trinity until Act 4.

I want to argue, and I want to say this very carefully, in Acts 1 through 3, no, you still have belief in those core ideas of the Trinity that we've already surveyed in the New Testament, even if that belief was not accepted by everyone and even if it was confused and incomplete in others. Okay. So we're trying to set the expectations here. We're not expecting clarity right away. We're not expecting unanimity.

What makes something not an accretion is not that there's perfect clarity about it. We're simply looking for evidence from the historical data that supports this idea that the core essence of the doctrine of the Trinity was taught by the apostles. Let me just explain this a little more, and then we'll dive into the data. So Peter Fan recounts much of the Trinitarian data of the New Testament. He says it's not limited to triadic formulae in passages like Matthew 2819, but also includes the exceedingly numerous texts that speak of the relationship between Jesus and the Father, between Jesus and the Spirit, between the Father and the Spirit, and among the Father,

Jesus and the Spirit. He says, indeed, the literary structure itself of the New Testament books is arguably Trinitarian. He also points to Jesus' life as pointing to the Trinity. He even mentions Old Testament precursors, but then he writes this. This does not mean that a full-fledged doctrine of the Trinity is already developed in the New Testament. The road that leads from the New Testament embryonic affirmations on the Trinity to contemporary Trinitarian Theologies is, note these words, a long, meandering, and tortuous one, at times disappearing and reappearing in the thicket of Christian doctrines, the history of Christian doctrines often exhibits a recurrent pattern of growth, decline, eclipse, retrieval, and possibly growth again. Now, I'm not fully

endorsing all of that language myself, but I just want to draw attention to this idea that this is not neat and tidy, and so we want to set our expectations right. As you're going through the second and third centuries, we're not going to find neat and tidy linear progression toward clarity. On the contrary, we're going to find a lot of errors, a lot of subordinationism, for example. A lot of things that it's not clear, you know, it's kind of on the border between two different views. But we're also going to find all these same basic building blocks that you get in the New Testament. Sometimes put together better, sometimes not as well, sometimes maybe not, as all, but all those basic building blocks that comprise the core idea are still there.

Okay, let's document that. Starting early on with the Apostolic Fathers, these are the Christians immediately after the apostles in those first generations right after the apostles are off the scene. So let's talk about Polycarp. One of my favorite Christians ever, if you just want something edifying to read for your devotional life, read his epistle to the Philippians. Wonderful document. But he's reporting. to have been one of John's direct disciples. He's one of the earliest martyrs in church history, and his recorded prayer offered at his martyrdom concludes by saying, I praise you for all things, I bless you, I glorify you, along with the everlasting and heavenly Jesus Christ, your beloved son,

with whom to you and the Holy Ghost be glory, both now and to all coming ages. Amen. So basically, as we get an account of something immediately into church history, from among those personally disciples you have perhaps the most prominent martyr right out of the gate along with Ignatius who we'll talk about next concluding his climactic prayer

by giving worship praise and glory to the father, the son, the Holy Spirit for all ages now and for all ages. One of the things that I think we need to emphasize is that you don't need to have a fully fleshed out

philosophical construal of the Trinity to detect its presence in the actual worship and prayer and liturgy and piety of the church. We're going to see this over and over that even while the philosophical categories are hazy or even have mild forms of error, nonetheless, you can kind of detect the living impulse there in the life of the church. And that's, you know, it's sort of pretty much guaranteed by the baptismal formula that you're going to get a lot of language like this. But if you know language like this, here we have worship to the Trinity.

Even earlier than Polycarp's martyrdom, though, you have Ignatius. Of course, this depends upon a little bit when you date these texts. But Ignatius is reported to also have been a disciple of John, and he's dying maybe somewhere 107 to 110, somewhere in there, early second century. And like the New Testament, he repeatedly calls Jesus God. I'll put up five examples in various language here from his letters. Note that he's not arguing that Jesus is God. He's just throwing it out in casual language.

He's just assuming that. This is why it's just, oh, man, it's frustrating. When we see a movie like the Da Vinci Code or we read the book, did you ever read The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown? Remember this, like 20 years old now. But you have this idea. I'll put up one passage from the book where one character is saying this, that the deity of Christ is first coming in with the Council of Nicaa in the 4th century.

And up till then, he's just a human being. and this kind of thing. And this is a real problem, because it's, to the contrary of that, the deity of Christ is immediate and explicit in the decades after the apostolic age has concluded, as well as in the New Testament itself. And you find a lot of triadic language in these early Christians like Ignatius about the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, even though that is not fully fleshed out yet. It's often ambiguous or just underdeveloped. You'll just find that language. So again, as you're right out of the gate, okay, you've got the same basic building blocks, even if they're not all put together yet. As you move forward into the

second century, you get to these apologists who are defending Christian worship of Jesus over and against criticism from pagan critics like Celsius. And let's talk about Athenegorus, one of my favorite Christians of all time. He's writing to defend Christians from this charge of atheism because in their culture they were they rejected all these deities so they were called atheists and he says that Christians are not atheists because we acknowledge one God and that God has a son. Now he is going to use this term logos, the logos again that we've seen in John 1. This was a common term among Jewish and Stoic philosophers. The Jewish writer Philo had used it to describe the pre-existent power of God.

So early apologists like Athenagoras and Justin Martyr are going to use this term and kind of draw it from that broader milieu and put it to the end of developing their Christology, their doctrine of Christ. Here's what Athenegoras says. The son of God is the logos of the father in idea and in operation, for after the pattern of him and by him were all things made, the father and the son being one. and the son being in the father and the father in the son in oneness and in power of spirit the understanding and reason of the father is the son of God. So here we have some kind of unity between the father and the son. They are one, they are in each other, and the relation here is teased out in terms of an idea or understanding or reason. Then Athenagoras moves on to make it very clear, he's not a proto-Aryan. I'm going to talk about Arias later a bit. Arius dies early, like

336, early 4th century. He's the one who teaches that the son is a creature. He fully denies the deity of Jesus. This is not where Athenagoras is at. He says, if in your surpassing intelligence, it occurs to you to inquire what is meant by the son. I will state briefly that he is the first product of the father, not as having been brought into existence. For from the beginning, God, who is the eternal mind had the logos in himself, being from eternity, instinct with logos. So we're going to come back to this idea of the logos as coming forth at creation in a moment. This is a little bit of a problem we see here in some of these figures. But the point for now is just to see Athenegra says the word is eternal.

He's not created. That seems to be evident in the language here of he's the product of the father, but not having been brought into existence because the father had the logos in himself from the beginning, from eternity. Then Athenagoras incorporates the Holy Spirit, and he calls him the prophetic spirit, which is a title that suggests his personality, and you'll see that title in Justin Martyr as well. And he uses Proverbs 8 to do this. This is a huge passage for the early Christians. He speaks of the prophetic spirit here, and I'll let you read that. quote, if you'd like to. Later on, speaking of Christians, he says, they know God and his logos.

What is the oneness of the son with the father? What the communion of the father with the son? What is the spirit? What is the unity of these three? The spirit, the son, and the father, and their distinction in unity. Now, the fact that we will get other areas in Athenagoras where there's ambiguity or potentially error does not take away from the significance of a passage like this. Here you have an early Christian in the second century responding to the charge of atheism, and he's saying, no, that's ridiculous. We worship, we acknowledge the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, and he specifies various ways that they are united and yet distinct.

And he sees that as a species of monotheism because he speaks of one God. So again, now here's the thing is we're not saying that Athenagoras is the exact same as like Gregory of Nazianzis in the fourth century. These early apologists are in their own context. They really emphasize the unity of God, and they have some problematic ideas. J. N. D. Kelly argues that they'll often use the term God the father for the entire godhead. This is problematic. He argues that they'll date the generation of the Logos and the application of the term son to him to his role in creation and redemption. So these are problems. Nonetheless, he points out that the Logos was one in essence with the father, inseparable in his father.

fundamental being from him, as much as after his generation as prior to it, the apologists were never weary of reiterating. And after discussing their view of the Holy Spirit, he says, in spite of incoherencies, however, the lineaments of a Trinitarian doctrine are clearly discernible in the apologists. The spirit was for them the spirit of God. Like the word, he shared the divine nature. So he's talking about Athenagoras, but also others. like Justin Martyr. Let's talk about Justin for a little bit. He's very similar to Athenagoras. He takes this term logos. He applies it to the sun, and he claims we can worship the sun and call him God. In his dialogue with Trifo, he quotes Hebrews 1 and its application of Psalm 45 to the sun,

and concludes, therefore, these words testify explicitly that he is witnessed to by him who establish these things as deserving to be worshipped as God and as Christ. In his first apology, he speaks of the Son and the Spirit as both being worshipped. I won't read through that passage, but you can pause the video and read through it if you like. Here's more language about the prophetic spirit. Interestingly, he also identifies the Son of God with the agent involved in Exodus 3, the Burning Bush. That's a fascinating move that's surprisingly common in these early Christians. Now, applying the term God to Jesus and worshiping Jesus raises questions, and the early Christians did not always answer these questions well. So Justin, for example, seems to at times

confuse the second and the third members of the Trinity. So sometimes he will sound binitarian rather than trinitarian. You can find passages like that. This is tricky. When these anti-Nicine writers conflate, the sun and the spirit. That might be because they're using the word spirit in an eschatological sense, meaning referring to the end times. This is how Paul speaks in 1st Corinthians 1545, for example, and elsewhere. So that's what McGuckin argues in his chapter in the Cambridge Companion to the Trinity. That's part of what makes it hard to evaluate these early anti-Nicin Christians because they're operating in a different context, responding to different concerns and their terminology is different. So words like begotten and created are being used

differently back then than their technical meaning will come to be. So it's really easy to exaggerate the differences between them and later development because of these differences of language. Another factor that requires caution in interpreting these early Christians is that they're often emphasizing the economic trinity rather than the ontological trinity. By that I mean God in his work in salvation history rather than in his nature. So, you know, read carefully, some of this language can be reconciled to what will later become orthodoxy, but not all of it. So let's just be really clear to acknowledge. We find a lot of ideas in this early period that will ultimately come to be rejected. People like Athanasius are summoning councils in Alexandria,

and they're going to reject a lot of the language that we can find here. Nevertheless, where we find errors, that is not a falsification of the idea that the Trinity is a part of the apostolic deposit. All that means is the early church fathers and other early Christians are not inerrant. They make errors. They're not always putting all the pieces together correctly. It doesn't mean those pieces were not there in the apostolic deposit. Later in the second century, you find perhaps the most important theologian of the second century,

and that's Ironaeus, and he makes a similar identification of Jesus with God. This is from early on and against heresies, and he's giving basically kind of a fairly typical summary of the rule of faith as it's been handed down, and it's in Trinitarian structure. You can pause and read through this entire passage. It's amazing. I'll just highlight what I put in bold here at the end, where he references Jesus as our Lord and God and Savior and King. And you can find many other passages in Ironaeus where you'll find this identification of Jesus as God. I'll put up another example here. He speaks of, he says,

for this reason, all spoke with Christ when he was present on earth and they called him God. In two areas, I'm not going to try to canvas every relevant passage here, try to summarize. In two areas, Ironaeus makes a clear advance over the earlier apologists with respect to the Trinity. First, he has a very clear distinction between the Spirit and the Son. So Ironaeus speaks of the Spirit as God's wisdom and the Son is God's speech. Like another early Christian named Theophilus of Antioch, he sometimes uses the imagery of God's two hands for the Logos, or Wisdom, Our Speech, and the Sophia. So speech, logos, wisdom, Sophia.

And he'll speak of both the Logos and the Sophia, the Son and the Spirit, as having distinct roles in the economy of salvation, and they're both generated from God the Father, and they are both eternally existing with God and in God. The other point of contribution that Ironaeus makes over the earlier apologists is that, and this is a key point, the early apologists make the separate existence of the Logos dependent on his work in the economy of salvation. And they're drawing from platonic thought in which the Logos is the power of God in the world. So they do get into some trouble at times, it seems. Ironaeus very much emphasizes the eternal generation of the sun, even if he doesn't use that language all the time.

Now, let's try to be accurate here and fair-minded, even though I love Irenaeus. He's one of my favorites. I want to defend him. But I'll try to be accurate to say scholarship is divided about how exactly to interpret Ironaeus on the Trinity. Some emphasize his criticisms of speculative theology and certain passages that could be taken in a subordinationist direction. Others point to his emphasis upon the unity of God and the roles of the Son and Spirit in divine actions like salvation. From what I can tell, Iernaeus seems

very much consistent with later Trinitarian theology, even if his own thought is not fully developed at every point. I think the charges of subordination come in because Irenaeus has this hierarchy within the godhead, the father first, then the son, then the spirit. But many people argue that this isn't a hierarchy of ontology or being, but rather of function and the roles of the father, son, and spirit in redemptive history. So we're not talking about gradations of divinity, but it has to do with God's work and history. So again, it's easy to mix up statements about the economic and ontological. Man, I'm using those big words. I hope you understand what I mean by that, with God in his actions in history versus in his eternal nature. If you want a fuller

treatment of that, you can see this dissertation. I'll put a link in the video description. It's all about Ironaeus on the Trinity. Also in the second century, looking more to the west, we have Trotullian. Trotullian is very eager to emphasize that the works of the Son of God reveal his divine identity. So you'll find this emphasis that many Old Testament theophonies are manifestations of the son of God. And the goal, we saw that a little bit already with some others, but the goal is to show there's only one God and yet we can make personal distinctions in God. So Tertullian writes this work against Praxius, who taught that the unity of God means God can't have personal distinctions. If God is one God, then there can't be three persons in the godhead. And Tertullian categorizes this

view as heresy and speaks instead of the mystery of the dispensation, which distributes the unity into a trinity, placing in their order, the three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Three, however, not in condition but in degree, not in substance, but in form, not in power, but an aspect, yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, in as much as he is one God, from whom these degrees and forms and aspects are reckoned under the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. So what you have here is not all the later terminology and clarity and so forth, but you do get pretty clearly this idea that there's one God,

you see that throughout and at the start of this passage, but this one God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And Turtullian binds this up with the basic gospel narrative as apostolic tradition. I won't read through this following passage in its entirety, but you can see from what I have emboldened how he summarizes this. This is the rule of faith that's come down from the apostles. And here Tertullian affirms that there is only one God, but there is his word who proceeds from him, was sent into the world, to be born of a virgin, to die, to be resurrected, et cetera, and that entity is both man and God. There's also a discussion of the Holy Spirit's role in the historical events of the gospel, though there's not an explicit identification of the Holy Spirit as God here.

So this isn't a full-blown Trinitarianism. The focus is on the economic, the work of history, but nonetheless, this is pretty significant. Now, at the same time, I think we have to admit, then in Turtullian, as we'll see in a moment in origin, that we get traces of subordinationism, where the son and the spirit are subjected to the father in various ways. I think that's impossible to deny in Turtullian, and it also is a worry that comes in with Origin. If you're bored, I'm almost done, but we've got to finish off this historical survey. Let's talk about Origin because he's so important, as we've mentioned before. Origin definitely represents a step forward from earlier Trinitarian reflection, just in the degree of profundity in how systematic

it is and how developed it is. Unfortunately, Origin also seems to introduce some problems of his own, or at best ambiguities, which the fourth century has to then work through and in some cases seemingly reverse. So origin's whole theology, though, has a trinitarian structure. He opens his on first things with a lengthy exposition of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and he makes these remarkable statements. He speaks of the singular nature of the Father and Son and Spirit as incorruptible and eternal. He speaks of the Trinity as the fountain of all holiness and the author of all things. However, I think we'd be hard-pressed to deny that origin seems pretty solidly into the subordinationist camp. First of all, you have his rejection

of the term homo-usius to describe the identity of the son and the father, which the fourth century will reverse. Now, homo-usius is the Greek term conveying of the same essence. This will be affirmed in the Nicene Creed. And you could maybe try to argue, some have argued, that, well, he rejects the Homoosian because that word in his context has the older sense of a Gnostic emanation from one being to another. Again, we have to read these figures in their own context. That's what some have argued, I believe McGuckin argues for that. However, nonetheless, this doesn't look good. And whatever we make of that particular matter of terminology, origin does seem to be. to relegate the Son and the Spirit to an inferior status to the Father in various other ways as well.

Here's one example I'll put up on the screen if you're interested in that. Again, some will try to defend origin from the charge of subordinationism by saying, well, the gradation here is just in terms of the economy of salvation, not in terms of the ontological status of the Son and the Spirit. And they point to passages like this one, which admittedly pretty strong. Nothing in the Trinity can be called greater or less since the fountain of divinity alone contains all things by his word and reason and by the spirit of his mouth sanctifies all things which are worthy of sanctification. So then you get into the question of what does that fountain of divinity mean precisely right there. How we would situate origin in relation to what fully blossoms in the fourth century is a complicated question.

we can certainly say that in origin we see some some brilliant synthesis and insights and so forth, but I think we have to admit we see some problems and we see concerns of subordinationism that are definitely on the table. However, one thing that we can safely say is that origin is not a proto-Aryan. So Arias, of course, teaches there was a time when he was not. The son of God is created. You know, you can think of it. He wasn't there, and then he was there.

And origin rejects that idea. He's explicit that the son is everlasting. He is without beginning in his generation from the father. You can see that in the under, the emboldened part of this quote. There are some who want to make Arias a kind of arched traditionalist. And so they're wanting to say, the orthodox view that came to be in the fourth century was total innovation, but Arias is just going back. And no, that's not right. Arias is changing all kinds of things, too.

At best, both of these options in their extreme forms are innovating. Because origin and Arias are very different. Origin is very clear that although the son is subordinate to the father, he's still eternal. He doesn't have a beginning. And so you can find passages where the son will be spoken of as a creature, but if you read carefully, you realize that doesn't mean he began. He still has everlasting existence. And in fact, again, this is one of those areas where the terminology has not been developed yet.

It's for the idea of begottenness. I mean, I think it's a fascinating question to say, had this been presented to origin, this idea of begottenness, what would he have, could he have reconciled his views to that kind of language as well? And this is usually conceded by the other side, even those who want to draw attention to precedent for Arias and defend the Aryan tradition, like RPC Hansen. for example, who wrote what many people consider to be the finest study of the Aryan controversy ever written, he concedes this point, as you can see from the quote on the screen. So, let's sum up. From that historical sketch, though it's far from exhaustive and hasn't anticipated every possible

counter-argument at every turn, nonetheless, hopefully a picture emerges that can be helpful for us. we have these basic building blocks on the table in the New Testament and also in the earliest generations of Christian reflection. We have monotheism. We have the deity of the Son of God. You know, think of Ignatius on and on. Jesus is God, for example, right there in like the early 100s. We have Trinitarian baptisms right out of the gate. We have worship of Jesus right out of the gate. We have distinctions between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, right out of the gate. That's all there. You don't have Christians always putting all these blocks to perfectly, especially in the second and third centuries, you in fact have a lot of confusion

at times. Nonetheless, from all this, we can see how different. Something like the Trinity is from doctrines like the bodily assumption of Mary or the veneration of icons, which I use as example of accretions. Post-apostolic slow infiltrations, gradual infiltrations creeping into the piety and doctrine of the church. There's a difference between a full-blown Trinitarianism reaching its official form and its technical expression, overcoming alternative heretical beliefs in the 4th century, and other beliefs that come into existence in any form,

even later than that, particularly when these other beliefs involve a particular practice as opposed to complicated philosophical terminology. Let me leave you with this quote from Larry Huron, Hurtado and then one from Bacom as well. He says the origins of the worship of Jesus are so early that practically any evolutionary approach is rendered invalid as historical explanation. Here's Bacom, the highest possible Christology was central to the faith of the early church even before any of the New Testament writings were written since it occurs in all of them.

That's amazing statement. You've got to love Bacom's a great scholar. In other words, at the core of Christianity is this. A man got out of a tomb and then he started accepting worship. Well, he did it before he got out of the tomb too. And he calls that worship belief. And he told us to get dunked in water in the name of the fathered son and the Holy Spirit. Among other facts, these are the facts that the doctrine of the Trinity is attempting to make sense of. In other words, the Trinity is a way of putting together coherently what is given to us in first century revelation. That's my argument. That's my case, and I'm sticking to it. What do you think? Love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for watching all the way to the end. If you like this video,

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