I grew up in a Presbyterian church. Each week we recited the Apostles Creed and sang the “Gloria.” They made no sense to me. The liturgy created a bad taste.
When I came to real faith in Christ in high school, I mistook prejudice created by that bad taste for educated conviction. Ignorance fed my perspective. I became a sectarian (mistaking a small tributary for the whole river). Church history began with Paul and James and Peter. The next significant figure was Billy Graham. There was not much to learn in between.
I was a member of the “holy fellowship of reinventing the theological wheel.” Neither written prayers, nor creedal affirmations, nor common liturgy could find entrance into our appointed rounds of worship. Indeed, I was suspicious of them. And where I was not suspicious, I assumed they agreed with me.
That can produce very little but loose ends. I was theologically rootless, drifting on the sea of history without a family tree.
As an elder, I studied my Bible. But in study and preaching I found texts that did not fit my sectarian system. I tried to make them fit, but they did not. My allies within my school of thought seemed awkward around these passages. I became desperate at times. I would venture into reading those “outside the camp.” How humbling it has been to find the best and clearest help in those theologians and exegetes I once despised and held in suspicion. They addressed my loose ends.
One of those loose ends is the doctrine of the Trinity. I was orthodox, but it was a bookshelf doctrine for me. It did not function in my life. I saw no relation between it and my worship or prayers. I was a tacit Trinitarian but not an explicit and practicing Trinitarian.
I could say I was a functional modalist. I loved learning about the nature of Christ, the God-man, and resting in his finished work. I loved considering and calling upon God as my Father. I increasingly delighted in fellowship with the Spirit. But I treated them as isolated individuals. I did not relate to the Godhead as the Godhead. I related to them serially not in parallel. I did not consider I was in fellowship with Father, Son, and Spirit at one and the same time. I was not consciously Trinitarian.
There were Trinitarian passages in the Bible that stood on their head and begged for attention. I preached through John multiple times. John 17 blocked my path repeatedly. Jesus view of salvation is explicitly Trinitarian, but mine was not, except in passing.
The greeting portion of NT letters was of little interest to me, except that they were usually Trinitarian. There were multiple key texts in the epistles that were clearly Father, Son, and Holy Spirit texts, but I treated them as persons in isolation rather than in relationship. Today I am trying to figure out how I missed them!
My doctrine was what theologians call the Economic Trinity, a description of what each member of the Godhead does in creation and redemption. I had no clue as to meaning of the eternal relation of Father, Son, and Spirit world without end (the Immanent Trinity).
Here is where Sanders has helped. In his Introduction, he states that his goal is to show is that in the Trinity we find the deep things of God. The Gospel is the Trinity and the Trinity shapes the Gospel. He wants to show sectarian Protestants like myself that our own Protestant tradition is rich with Trinitarian reflection and application.
He insists that the emphases of evangelicalism only have meaning when set against the grand truth of the Eternal Triunity of God. When we miss the Trinity our emphases on creation, sin, redemption, justification become only that – emphases. They lose the deep structure of the Godhead. When we forget the deep structure of the Gospel in the Godhead, our emphases becomes reductionistic, and our simplistic reductions become a very small thing (19).
Sanders wants someone who is Trinitarian in theory to see that they are immersed in Trinitarian reality (34). He wants a functional Trinitarianism. Those who are in Christ know about the Trinity and may assume the Trinity – but “not everybody in this position knows they know the Trinity.” (45) I did not.
So what difference does it make? Let me give one at the outset.
I have always begun the Gospel with, “There is a God and he is your Creator.” I now think that is the second thought. The first is, “There is a God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They have lived in love and joy and delight forever. They have acted to bring us into this fellowship of love and joy. That is the reason what I am telling you is good news.”
That may sound ethereal. But not really. If Christ died to bring us to God, it makes a difference what that God is like. And if God is alone, a monad as the Muslims say, then to know him may be overwhelming but it is not a relationship, nor is there joy or love in Him.
But if God is and always has been One God in essence but three persons, who live in love and delight forever, then the end of salvations is entering into the happy land of the Trinity, being lifted up into this circle of fervent love and joy. And that is good news. But more on that in the next post.
A couple of good resources you might want to check out:
http://spreadinggoodness.org/?cat=5 (he has a section on trinitarian theology - I've been reading him for a couple of years now and he has provoked my thinking on the trinity and affectional theology and the relationship between the two)
and http://www.theologynetwork.org/search/ (search on trinity)
Posted by: Rick | October 05, 2010 at 04:05 PM