10 Things To Know About The Trinity
1. The Trinity is something God wants us to know: If you believe the Bible reveals that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then you ought to believe that God made this known because he wants us to know it. "The secret things belong to the LORD," but God's triunity is not among those secret things, or he wouldn't be talking about it and neither would we. "The things that are revealed belong to us" (Deut 29:29).
2. The doctrine of the Trinity is not illogical: It doesn't teach that God is three persons in one person, or three beings in one being, or three in one in some abstract sense. It teaches that God is three persons in one being. Partly because there are no other examples of such a thing, God's triunity transcends our rational comprehension. But it doesn't violate logic or make a claim that it is nonsensical.
3. You should give up on looking for an illustration of the Trinity: God's triunity is one of those divine realities that have no parallel, like "being the creator of everything from nothing," or "being omnipotent." Any illustration you think of for such realities is vastly more unlike God than like God.
4. The Father sent the Son and the Holy Spirit to save us; that is why we know about the Trinity: God didn't make his triunity known to us by informing us of facts about it. Instead, he made it known through the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The revelation of the Trinity took place in those acts, which God then explained.
5. God would have been the Trinity even if nothing existed but God: The doctrine of the Trinity is a teaching about God's eternal, essential being. So even if everything we know about the Trinity is derived from God's outward works as creator and (especially) redeemer, the Trinity would have been itself even without having done these things.
6. The Trinity is always bundled with the gospel: It's the doctrine of who God must be if salvation is what we think it is. The Father who gave his Son and Spirit to save us must be a Father who always had a Son and Spirit. If you describe the Trinity and then have to tack on the fact that the Trinity saves, you probably described it too abstractly in the first place. The Bible bundles Trinity and gospel, and so should we.
7. You're already soaking in it: Whether you have been attending to it or not, everything about the Christian life works only because there is a Trinitarian reality underlying it. If you got saved, you got picked up by the Trinity and brought into God's own fellowship. Learning about the Trinity is a matter of learning the deeper reasons why this Christian life works.
8. Prayer and worship have a Trinitarian structure: Every time Christians approach God, they come before God (the Father) in the name of Jesus (not in their own name) by the power of the Spirit (not by their own power). Again, this is true even if they're not consciously thinking about it.
9. You don't have to choose between being Christ-centered or being Trinity-centered: The simple reason for this is that Christ is Trinity-centered, right in the middle of the Trinity as the Son sent by the Father and filled with the Spirit. If you focus on Jesus properly, you will find yourself necessarily focusing on the Trinity—as long as you don't focus on Jesus in a Father-forgetful or Spirit-ignoring way.
10. You can be a good Trinitarian without talking about the Trinity all the time: The doctrine of the Trinity is the vast, deep background behind all our theology, and when we explicitly talk about it we make a comprehensive claim about who God is if the gospel is true. But often the background stays in the background, and enables us to say particular things about Jesus, discipleship, the cross, the Holy Spirit, and so on, without making the big picture explicit. That's how the New Testament mostly does it, so you're in good company. Go ahead and talk about the Trinity sometimes and think about it deeply sometimes. Praise the Trinity at all times, and when necessary, use the word "Trinity." But don't feel like you have to focus mentally on this gigantic doctrine at all times in order to be a good Trinitarian.
10 Things You Should Know about the Holy Spirit
1. If you know the doctrine of the Trinity, you already know the most important things about the Holy Spirit: Christians confess that the one God eternally exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is the classic, creedal, doctrinal way of stating what Scripture teaches about God (Matt. 28:20; John 1:1–3; Gal. 4:4–6), and one of its benefits is that it organizes our understanding of the Holy Spirit. When you find your mind wandering or getting lost in the details of pneumatology (the doctrine of the Holy Spirit), just call back to mind the basic Christian confession that there is one God in three persons. Securely locating the doctrine of the Spirit inside the doctrine of the Trinity automatically grants you the next three things you should know.
2. The Holy Spirit is God: The most obvious truth that emerges from locating the Holy Spirit in the Trinity is that the Spirit is fully God. He is not a mere impersonal force emanating from God, or a poetic way of talking about God in action, or a creature commissioned by God to do his work for him. Nor is the Holy Spirit a slice of God, one third of God, or part of a team that adds up to be God. He is one of the persons who fully possesses the entirety of the divine essence. Sound Trinitarian theology is a constant, helpful guide that keeps us from thinking unworthy thoughts about the Holy Spirit.
3. The Holy Spirit is principally from the Father: God the Father’s plan, announced in the Old Testament, was to pour out his Spirit on all flesh (Joel 2). In the fullness of time, the Spirit came forth into the history of salvation (Luke 24:49, Acts 2, Gal. 4:6, John 14:26), manifesting the truth that he had always existed as the one who is breathed forth by the Father within the divine life. You may have heard that it is only the Eastern Orthodox churches that affirm this, but in fact the churches of the Western traditions agree about the fundamental point: “The Father is called the one from whom . . . the Holy Spirit principally proceeds,” as Augustine said. The Father-Spirit connection is something that should always come to mind when thinking of the Holy Spirit. It expresses the tremendous depth and intimacy with which the Spirit lives in the heart of God, and this, in turn, resonates with the Spirit’s deep dwelling in the heart of believers.
4. The Holy Spirit is also from the Son: Though the Spirit is principally from the Father, he has never, at any level, been apart from the Son. Just as the Father and Son together send the Spirit into salvation history (John 14:16, 14:26, 15:26, 16:7), so the Spirit in the divine life comes from both the Father and from the Son. You may have heard that it is only the Western churches (with their filioque clause glossing the Nicene Creed) who affirm this, but in fact the churches of the Eastern traditions agree about the fundamental point: the Spirit eternally flows “from the Father through the Son,” as Maximus the Confessor said. The Son-Spirit connection is something that should always come to mind when thinking about the Spirit. It expresses the way the Spirit comes to us as the perfect communicator of what is in the Father and the Son. Jesus said, “All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he [the Holy Spirit] will take what is mine and declare it to you.” (John 16:15)
5. All God’s actions are from the Father, through the Son, and finally reach their conclusion in the Holy Spirit: Everything God does, God does in a unified way as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The works of God are not divided up and shared out among the persons of the Trinity, but are “inseparable operations” in which the Father is the source, the Son is the center, and the Holy Spirit is the end. This “from-through-in” structure of Trinitarian action means that when we encounter the Holy Spirit, we are not just experiencing the isolated action of one person of the Trinity—as if there were such isolated actions! Instead, when we meet the Holy Spirit we are caught up into the consummating work of the Spirit doing what he does from the Father through the Son. Conversely, when we approach God in the Spirit, we are moving experientially back along that same trajectory: in the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father (Eph. 2:18). There is a comprehensiveness in the Spirit’s work, to which we should be alert. It stems from his place in the Trinity, and works its way out in our relation to God.
6. The Holy Spirit has several names in Scripture: From cover to cover of the Bible, the third person of the Trinity is referred to by a wealth of different names. In the Old Testament we hear Spirit of God, Spirit of the LORD, “my Spirit,” the Spirit, Spirit of grace and supplication, and finally, “the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.” (Gen. 1:2, Ex. 28:3, Ex. 31:3, Zech. 12:10, Isa. 11:2). In the New Testament it is Spirit of the Father, Spirit of the Son, Spirit of Christ, Spirit of promise, Spirit of adoption, and so on. A fundamental decision of basic, biblical theology is to recognize that all these names pick out the same person. The alternative would be to populate the Bible with a dozen or so spirits all differently related to God. Instead, though, the great variety of Spirit names in Scripture is an invitation to recognize the depth and wealth of its pneumatologically teaching. The Bible speaks of the Spirit differently in different contexts, drawing out his significance for different aspects of God’s work.
7. The Holy Spirit’s primary name is a canonical masterpiece: The one name that stands out for the third person of the Trinity is the classic name “the Holy Spirit,” with the definite article, the adjective Holy, and the noun Spirit. It is by far the most common New Testament name, strikingly enshrined in Matthew 28:20, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” We only find it two or three times in the entire Old Testament, but when it does occur (Isa. 63:11), it is when God speaks through a much later prophet to account for how he was with his people in the Exodus, putting “in the midst of them his Holy Spirit.” This wonderful name thus reaches out to embrace the entire Old Testament, exodus to exile, before being taken up by Jesus and the apostles as the primary and definitive way to pick out the one who (as we have seen) has many names. And further depths of mysterious truth lie waiting in that name itself, which combines a divine attribute (holiness) with the divine substance (spirit) so consummately.
8. The Holy Spirit has made himself known perfectly in Scripture: When we say the Bible speaks of the Spirit in certain ways, we mean that the Holy Spirit who inspired the Bible bears witness of himself in these particular ways. He has done so exactly as he wanted to. This is worth remembering because we often find ourselves wishing that the Bible were clearer about the Spirit. We would like to hear about him more concretely, more precisely, more elaborately. We wish he were as clear and definite as Jesus, and that more pages were devoted to describing his personality and actions in sharper detail. But the Holy Spirit has made himself known in Scripture just as he wished to. Our task is not to squeeze more out of his self-revelation than is really there; our task is to adjust our expectations—and where did those expectations come from anyway, if we think we can use them as grounds for critiquing Scripture?—to fit what God the Holy Spirit has actually revealed about himself.
9. It is not necessary to talk about the Holy Spirit as much as we talk about the Father and the Son: A particular application of the previous point is that there is no need to artificially elevate the Holy Spirit to a place as conspicuously prominent as God the Father and Jesus Christ the Son. Time after time in the New Testament, Jesus and the apostles are perfectly satisfied to mention the Father and the Son without going on to complete the verbal triangle by naming the Holy Spirit distinctly. It would hardly do for us to interrupt Jesus and point out to him that he failed to mention the Spirit! Perhaps we are tempted to do this because we sense that we have not reflected deeply enough or often enough about the Holy Spirit. If we do have a theological and spiritual deficit of that kind, then by all means let’s overcome it. But we will overcome it by humbly following the Spirit’s own lead, speaking mostly about Jesus, much about the Father, and—following the Bible’s clear pattern—rather less, by volume, about the Spirit.
10. The Holy Spirit is always already at work in our coming to understand him: If the Holy Spirit is who he says he is, then believers can rest confidently in the fact that he is the one doing the work of helping us come to real knowledge of him. He is the prevenient person, going ahead of us to prepare the way of our knowledge of him. This may give to our awareness of his presence a kind of surprising or elusive character. Our first steps in knowledge of the triune God are toward Jesus Christ, who is the way to the Father. Only when we take those steps with our attention focused on Jesus do we begin to realize that the Holy Spirit is within us, alongside us, behind us, making possible those steps and that focused attention. He dawns on us, bringing knowledge of God to its perfection.