Why we can't be Christians without the Trinity
3/22/2012
Bear with me; this is a blog entry, not a journal article. This subject obviously deserves far more attention than I can give it in an hour in the morning. I've been reading through Church History in Plain Language by Bruce Shelley, and the weight of the Nicene Creed was again impressed upon me. You hear people today question whether such a mysterious and metaphysical concept as the Trinity is really necessary for our faith. People were asking the same thing in the 300s. Out of all the councils and definitions that came out of this period, never did the world-wide church speak with such a forceful and unified voice as on this question.
The heart of the question of the Trinity comes down to whether Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are distinct (and lesser) beings from the one true God or are in fact one with God himself. Muslims believe that Jesus is a great prophet; Mormons that he is "a god," the spirit child of God the Father and his wife; in the fourth century a teacher named Arius taught that he was the highest created being, somewhere between God and the angels. Today of course many people want Jesus to be their teacher but not their God. But as Christians, we believe "in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all world. God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father" (Nicene Creed).
What do we lose if we believe Jesus is a separate being from God and not one with the Father as he claimed to be (John 10:30; 14:9-10)? For one thing, God is not our Savior; our salvation, and so our gratitude and adoration go to a creature and not God, which is idolatry. God alone is our savior (Isaiah 43:11). Besides being idolatry, if a creature less than God and less than all-powerful is responsible for our salvation, there is no way we could trust him alone for the forgiveness of our sins before God. Any other religion that regards Jesus is less than God--Islam, Mormonism--ultimately looks to human performance as the criteria for our salvation instead of faith in Christ. A Christian trusts in Jesus alone, not Jesus plus our own good works, to save us from our sins, because Jesus is the Almighty God who died to redeem us. Another problem if Jesus is not God himself is that the coming of Christ into the world really doesn't bring God any closer to us. God is still the distant spiritual power, awesome in his holiness but unable to relate to us in our sufferings or temptations and utterly inaccessible to us limited and broken creatures, who strive helplessly to know him. The awesome truth of the Incarnation is that God himself became flesh and came to us when we were helpless to get to him, that he lived as a man on earth and experienced the life that we experience with all of its pleasures and sufferings, so that in everything he can be Immanuel, God with us.
If Jesus is not God, our whole faith falls apart. And of course if we believe in more than one God, we become polytheists and that causes a whole separate set of problems. (It's philosophically impossible to have more than one almighty being, because each would limit the other. So you can't actually believe in more than one God in the big "G" sense; just several little "g" gods.) And so we have one God expressed in three "persons" Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who relate to each other and interact with each other. Okay, so I didn't actually get into the question of the Holy Spirit or the nature of the Trinity or really the biblical foundation for believing that Jesus is God. It's well worth getting into, but I defer you to Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology, which he really wrote so you wouldn't need a seminary degree to understand. And of course you're at liberty to read the Bible and disagree that Jesus is one with God the Father. Just recognize that Christians disagree with you and they always have.