The Trinity Is Not A Problem with Dr. Fred Sanders (Transcript)

And so the doctrine of the Trinity has just been that for me.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s interesting. I didn’t know the backstory in that. Now, let’s start with kind of what you might call certain low-hanging fruit, so to speak, the kind of questions that you get asked, and then as we work through this, we’ll get tougher and tougher questions.

But the word Trinity is not in the Bible. Why believe in the Trinity when it’s not even explicitly mentioned in Scripture?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, well, it’s a good distinction between what’s explicitly stated or summed up in a single word as opposed to what’s taught in the Bible throughout Scripture, but without the technical term.

So yeah, when you make that distinction, there’s no requirement to be an Orthodox believer in the Bible. There’s no requirement that you use the T-word, you know? And if someone asks, if someone asks, is the Trinity in the Bible, and they literally mean, is the T-word in the Bible, well, that’s a short answer. Just get a concordance, you know? And no, the word is not there. But it’s that distinction between a concept being taught or a truth being established as opposed to the one word for it.

The one word is super handy. I think it might’ve been John Calvin who said, you know, I use extra biblical terms like this to specify what I mean, specifically because it saves so much time. It concentrates a broad teaching of Scripture down into a single word.

SEAN MCDOWELL: So the word is extra biblical, but the concept is not extra biblical.

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, and I don’t want to push this too far, but when we say Bible, of course, we’re referring to the Old Testament plus New Testament canon of Scripture. The word Bible doesn’t occur in the Bible, right? As something that points to that particular canon of Scripture. But it’s a very useful word, because I say it and you know what book I mean.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s excellent. I like that. A term I often use is aseity, which means God’s self-existence is taught in the Scripture, but the word is not. So we’re talking about the concept. Okay, good.

Now I’ve heard different debate about this. Some say that Tertullian first used the word Trinitas, obviously kind of late second century, maybe early third century. Is that true? Or when was the first time this term starts showing up referring to God’s character as being Triune?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, good question. It does show up around the year 200 in Tertullian, who uses that Latin word Trinitas. A nice thing about the Latin word is you can tell that it’s kind of an abstract word. That is, it doesn’t mean three, but it means something like threeness. And so it’s one thing to talk about three, but it’s another step back of abstraction to say, I don’t mean three, I mean threeness. You can get how that’s like an abstract category. So every language is talking about three all the time, but when do you have the occasion to talk about threeness? Tertullian does that right around the year 200. He also comes up with the formula: ONE SUBSTANCE in THREE PERSONS. So he just nails it all right there in North Africa, you know, end of the second century. It’s really great.

Of course, now in Greek, you would say something like trios and one of the Greek apologists, maybe 40 years before that or 30 years had already used trios in that sense. And while we’re doing the language thing, I got curious one time about the first occurrence of the word Trinity in English. English is a relatively young language globally speaking, compared to things like Latin. I found it in an Anglo-Saxon homily way back in the — around a thousand or something like that or 800, I don’t know.

But the thing is the Anglo-Saxon word, you know, old English proper for Trinity is threeness. I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right, because I don’t really know Anglo-Saxon, but you can just look at the word and say, oh, all it says is threeness. So the first occurrence in English of the word Trinity, it comes into our language just as the word threeness, because that’s what it means, right?  Not three, but the threeness of the one God.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Okay, so anybody sitting here going, there’s no way you spent all this time to track down the first English version or use of the Trinity. I say, look behind the man, look at all the books that he has. He is a nerd just like I am, but you even have more books. This is part what we professors do.

Now, I’m curious, Christians seem to differ over this, whether or not the triune character of God is explicitly or implicitly taught or hinted at in the Old Testament. What’s your take on the Old Testament view of the character of God insofar as we mean God being Triune?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, it’s a great question. And when I teach the Trinity, so I’ve got a bunch of books on the Trinity in here, and a lot of them start with the Old Testament and then move forward to the New Testament, and they do a lot of good things. The problem is that the evidence for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the one God in the Old Testament is the least clear evidence. And I think the reason is that this is sort of need-to-know information. It’s always been true of God, that God is Father, Son, and Spirit.

But until the Father sent the Son, and the Father and the Son sent the Spirit, it would have been just sort of like an abstractly interesting thing to know about God. Until God puts it into action for our salvation, it doesn’t become sort of like insider or need-to-know knowledge. As a result, you can go back to the Old Testament and find all kinds of really interesting phenomena, like who is the Angel of the Lord? He’s not just any old angel. He’s some kind of messenger of the Lord who, he is God’s presence, but he seems to be sent from God in some way where it’s not just God showing up. Word of God and wisdom of God are, they sometimes seem like personified attributes of God, but then they seem like more than that.

When God puts His name among the people, that means God is among the people. But it’s not just God, it’s the name of God. I think all of that’s wonderful and fascinating stuff and belongs in our understanding of the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, but I never start with it.

Bottom line is the reason I believe in the Trinity is because the Father sent the Son, and the Father and the Son sent the Spirit, and we are in New Testament fulfillment mode when we talk that way.

SEAN MCDOWELL: So in a sense, you’re saying we shouldn’t expect to understand God’s character being Triune in the Old Testament because Jesus had not been sent in terms of being born of a virgin, God in human flesh to reveal this part of God. But once we have God come down to the person of Jesus, sends the Holy Spirit, and we have the scriptures, we can look back on the Old Testament and see certain maybe hints that we’re setting this up, but not as clear as like it’s going to say there’s ONE GOD IN THREE PERSONS in that kind of language. Is that as a whole how you see it?

DR. FRED SANDERS: That’s it. B.B. Warfield used this phrase. He said the Old Testament in this regard, with regard to the triunity of God, the Old Testament is like a chamber or a room richly furnished, but dimly lit. There’s a lot of stuff in there, but the lights aren’t on until the New Covenant fulfillment. Once the lights are on, you can look back retrospectively and see, now that you know who to look for, the Son and the Spirit, you can find them in various places in the Old Testament.

The other question is how much does it matter to be able to find the Trinity in the Old Testament? And a couple of things I’d want to  say there. One is if you’ve ever tried to build this case for the Trinity from scripture, if you just start in Genesis and work forward, you’re bringing out all your weakest, least clear evidence first. Because you’re looking at like, let Us make man in Our image, our, huh, huh, maybe? You know, and you can see like looking back on it, of course I understand why a Trinitarian would want to read it that way, and why it might be legitimate to read it that way.

But if you’re trying to build the case from that kind of stuff, there’s a word that old-fashioned writers use about this. They call those adumbrations. Like, is the Trinity revealed? No, no, but in the Old Testament, it’s adumbrated. It’s like shadowed forth. It’s there, but not very clearly. I feel like I can make that argument in really good conscience, because I believe in progressive revelation. That there can be something that was always true of God, but that God chose to make it known only later. And even really important stuff, like God’s eternal personal existence as Father, Son, and Spirit.

If you don’t believe in progressive revelation, you’ve gotta find everything in Genesis. No matter how hard you have to hold those verses down and torture them.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That makes sense. I even see passages like in Isaiah 6, WHOM SHALL I SEND, WHO WILL GO FOR US? It’s like, oh, is there a singularity and a plurality? Okay, given a Trinitarian understanding, this fits, but you’re not going to get the Trinity from that passage. So I think that’s a healthy, fair way to look at it. How Orthodox has the Trinity been for the church? Like all segments of the church, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant? Is this as staple of a doctrine as you will find in church history?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, it really is. One of the great things about, setting aside, my career and my life to work on the doctrine of the Trinity is this point of great ecumenical pan-Christian convergence. I’m a conservative evangelical Protestant. I have things I believe that I’m aware not all Christians affirm. But when it comes to the doctrine of the Trinity, the great thing is I can read Spurgeon on the Trinity, I can read the Pope on the Trinity. It’s not like there’s some kind of special Lutheran or Presbyterian version of the Trinity. It really is a classic central Christian doctrine.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Now, before we shift to the New Testament, I want you to lay out just a basic case for us of how you come to the conclusion that God is Triune. Feel free to challenge the premise of this question, but it seems like a lot of people are, a lot of different religions and positions are just deeply offended by the idea of the Trinity. And I can understand that somewhat in Islam because God is one, and it seems to be calling the character of God as one into play.

So two-part question, do you find that there’s a lot of people outside the Orthodox faith who are offended by the Trinity? And if so, any thoughts on why that might be the case?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, there are several reasons. So if you take the Trinity as kind of a central Christian teaching on who God is, there are multiple ways to not teach the Trinity, right? So you might think it’s too much unity and you might think it’s too much threeness. You might be a subordinationist who wants to say that the Son and the Spirit cannot be equal to the Father who is the true God. That’d be one way of making a mistake.

The other ways could be, you might think that Jesus is so fully God that the only way to affirm His full deity is to say that He is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit or something like that. So those are two totally different ways of being not Trinitarian. But I think the one you indicate, especially in dialogue with Islam or with Jewish thought is the idea that the doctrine of the Trinity is a form of monotheism. And if it doesn’t sound like a form of monotheism, then I think people get offended. Does that make sense?

So if you begin talking about the Trinity and you put it this way, like, well, some people believe in one God, but we believe in the Trinity. That’s a complete error. The Christian confession is, some people believe in one God. Christians believe in one God. The one God we believe in exists eternally as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Three persons, but one God.

Now people might still object and say, oh, that’s nonsense. Oh, you haven’t made your case. Oh, I can’t be satisfied with the way you explain that. But we ought to always be understood as making an argument within the bounds of monotheism.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s good. That’s super helpful. So let’s do that from the New Testament itself. Here’s a way I often hear a simple case made in the New Testament. Three steps. Number one, that the New Testament affirms that there is one God. So Jesus says, THE LORD OUR GOD IS ONE. In Mark 12, when he asked about the greatest commandment, references the Shema. So there’s one God.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit are each divine. And yet the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are distinct persons. So one God, but there’s three persons who share in that divine substance. That’s kind of a… Now, of course, I haven’t defended that the Holy Spirit is God, et cetera. But that’s kind of the quick response of the steps that I will work through with somebody that the New Testament teaches. Do you follow that model? Follow a different model? How do you approach when somebody says, show me the Trinity in the New Testament? Kind of from a 30,000 foot view approach.

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah. Yeah, so I do something a little different, but I do want to affirm what you just said. That’s a great model. It’s kind of, you can feel the little triangle diagram forming in your mind as you say it, right? Like there’s one God and you go to the three points and the Father is God and the Son is God and the Spirit is God, but they’re not each other. I think you can derive about seven propositions from that, right? If the Father is not the Son and the Son is not the Spirit. And sometimes people will work down through that.

So that when someone says, I don’t believe in the Trinity using the T word, you can actually then stop and say, well, which one of these seven propositions are you disagreeing with? Like, do you think there’s more than one God? Do you think the Father is the Son? Do you think the Son is not God? And so then you can kind of get your bearings and move around and decide, oh, I see you’re holding to a subordinationist view. So it’s this one of those seven propositions that you’re disagreeing with. I think that’s a good way of organizing the biblical data.

I tend to really focus on the story of salvation that the Father sent the Son, and that the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit. That sending in which of course, Jesus is God with us, Emmanuel, but He’s not the Father with us incarnate. He is the Son sent from the Father who is truly God with us. And so that question of like, HOW CAN GOD SEND GOD is to me a great question. And the answer is, if God is eternally Father, Son and Spirit, the Father can send to the Son. And then what we’ve got is the salvation historical or gospel centered basis for confessing the doctrine of the Trinity.

Now, from there, you can kind of move on to the thing you started with, which is, do I have good biblical evidence that the Son is fully God? Yes. Do I have good biblical evidence that Son is not just another word for the Father doing something different? And so then you can prove each of those points.

SEAN MCDOWELL: So I want to  make sure I understand, there are certain terms that are used here. The imminent Trinity or ontological Trinity is the character of God. The economic Trinity is a term that’s used sometimes to describe how God maybe communicates with us or expresses Himself in history through salvation. It sounds like you believe the character of God, understand who God is, can be understood through the lens of salvation history, the Father and the Son, and then the Spirit. That economic relational expression we see through scripture is revealing of God’s deeper character. That’s why you explain the Trinity in terms of salvation history. Is that fair?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, that’s correct. And the older, more classical language, because economic imminent is like 19th century language, basically. It’s fair. It helps capture some of the evidence, the constellations of some of the evidence. The older, more classical language is to talk about the sending of the Son being based on the eternal generation of the Son. In other words, the Son comes from the Father in salvation history when He’s sent or missioned, sent on a mission, because in the eternal life of God, what you refer to as the imminent Trinity, the Son was always from the Father. He existed always as the Son of the Father, that is the Son from the Father, that is the eternally generated or eternally begotten second Person. And it’s on the basis of that eternal relation of fromness that we get the incarnate Son, same Son, eternally the Son of God, and in the incarnation, the Son of God.

SEAN MCDOWELL: So I might be getting too much in the weeds here. So the relationship of Father and Son that we see expressed in salvation in history, there is something inherent about that within God’s character, Father and Son. How does this not create a kind of hierarchy within God’s character itself where the Father is supreme over the Son, and then the two of them are supreme over the Holy Spirit?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, it’s a good question. The main reason it doesn’t create a hierarchy, if you think about the revealed names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, right? We didn’t make these up. We weren’t thinking like, you know, what does Jesus kind of remind me of? He’s kind of like a son of a father, you know? No, this is like straight up, you know, fundamental revealed names of these persons of the Trinity.

And so you start thinking about Son, and you think, well, in one sense, linguistically, it’s functioning as a metaphor. Like, I am a son of a father. I am the father of a son. What do I know about sons? Every son I’ve ever met is younger than his dad, obeys his dad. What else? Has a mom. That’s just how it works, being a son.

With the biblically revealed language, you have to start thinking, kind of taking away some of those, like, okay. Jesus is the Son of God, and there’s not a God the mother that is involved in the Sonship of the second person of the Trinity. Nor is the Second person of the Trinity younger than the Father. Nor is the Second person of the Trinity obedient to the Father as His greater authority, right? They have the same authority.

So there’s these moves you have to make of saying, what does the Bible mean by giving us this language of son? What does Jesus Himself mean by giving this language of Son? And it can feel weird to say we need to take away some associations, but everything true of every created son you’ve ever met is not what God intends by revealing that he is eternally father and son. So I would also say that that power or authority or subordination is some of what God doesn’t mean by revealing this father-son language.

SEAN MCDOWELL: So father-son language is helpful insofar as it goes, but we have to be careful working from the bottom too much of our experience of Father and Son onto the character of God, rather than saying this gives us hooks or analogies or truths insofar as it goes to the character of God. Is that pretty much a fair way?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Okay. God means what He means by Father-Son. He doesn’t mean anything we might possibly associate with Sonship. It’s not a blank check to put every category of sonship onto the Second person.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Okay, so what about the Holy Spirit? Because we can get Father and Son language, but it’s not like father and son and daughter or grandchild. It’s like the Holy Spirit is like, okay, wait a minute, I get this familiar language and then the Holy Spirit is added on there. What’s that dynamic? Help us understand with the Holy Spirit.

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, I mean, I love the revealed language and names of the Holy Spirit, but I want to admit that they can be frustrating because if God starts you down a path of thinking about relational language in this way, the name Holy Spirit, let me complain about it for a minute. I’ve already confessed that I love it. Pro the Holy Spirit’s self-naming. I affirm that.

But if I were to complain about it, I’d say like, well, it’s confusing that it’s not relational and it doesn’t sound very personal, right? So Father and Son, those sound like people. Those are persons in relation. But Holy Spirit, what is that? It’s like a sanctified breath.

It doesn’t, and then here’s another complaint. The Father and the Son are both holy, and the Father and the Son are both spirit, right? God is Spirit. The Father is Spirit. The Son is Spirit. Somehow, if you take the name, the adjective Holy and the noun Spirit and put them together, they function in the New Testament as the name of the third person. But you see my semi-complaint here is, but they’re not distinctive, you know?

I think that it really keeps us from projecting too much family relational kind of language onto God, that God has sort of made that impossible for us, you know? Jesus is already careful with it. He says, when you pray, you should pray to your Father in heaven. Father means he’s like your dad. In heaven means he’s not like your dad. So we’re kind of learning how to use this revealed language.

Then Holy Spirit comes along and it’s the same thing. It’s not the expected same thing, but it’s another way of talking about this other, this third one.

SEAN MCDOWELL: I had not thought of it that way, that he was protecting by not a third familial kind of characterization of God’s character by having a different name. That makes sense. That’s helpful.

Now, let’s move to a definition of this. And I want you to tell me where I’m getting this wrong. So one of the things I do, Fred, is sometimes in Christian audiences, I role play an atheist and I invite questions back and I kind of shoot down, do my best atheist response. Then I help Christians unpack what happened. And one of the things I’ll often say as I’m role playing is you guys believe in a hopelessly contradictory God. And I’ll say to Christian audiences, how many of you believe in one God? All hands go up. How many believe the Father is God? And the hands will go up. And I’ll put my hand up and I’ll say, that’s one. How many believe Jesus is God? And they’ll raise their hands and I’ll say, that’s two. How many believe the Holy Spirit is God? And their hands will go up and I’ll say, that’s three. You said there’s one God. Now you’re saying there’s three gods.

You’re telling me I gotta give up basic math and logic to believe in your God? I’m out. Now, later I unpack for them why that’s too simplistic and not accurate. But tell me where that falls short.

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah. So here’s one of the great things about the one God. There is one divine nature, one Godness, one divine essence. And there are three who have that very same nature. They don’t have three of the same kind of nature. They certainly don’t have just similar natures. They have the numerically same nature. So when we say one God, we are referring to Godness. There’s only one of those, Godness. It’s not like there are three separate entities who are each in sort of the category of God or something. Like as if I said, define God and give me three examples. And I gave you three different examples of God. That’s not what’s going on with the Trinity.

When I’m naming the Father and the Son, I’m naming twice the same divine essence. But there, and then let me make this worse before I make it better. You could say, so any divine attribute I think of, any of the perfections of what it is to be God, I’m going to  have to say the Father has it and the Son has it and the Holy Spirit has it. So it’s not going to  help me tell them apart. Like, well, which one’s merciful? Well, the Father’s merciful, the Son’s merciful and the Spirit’s merciful.

Let me quote the Athanasian Creed here, which says, the Father Almighty, the Son Almighty and the Spirit Almighty, but there are not three Almighties but one Almighty. And if you know the Athanasian Creed, it rehearses that like four or five times. So you get that practice of, you seem like you’re counting to three, but you’re not counting to three. You’re enumerating the three persons who are the one. I hope that doesn’t sound like double talk.

When I say I want to make it better, what I mean is Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century talks through this and says, here’s the thing. If you want to  distinguish the Father and the Son, you could spend all day naming divine attributes. That’d be a wonderful thing to do. It sounds like a worship service, right? Just rehearse all the divine attributes, but each one of them refers to the Father and the Son and the Spirit. You’ll never find a quality or an attribute that distinguishes them, unless you quit talking about the essence and start talking about their personal relation.

So Son of the Father, well, that picks out a person of the Trinity, Father of the Son. But notice what I’m doing. I’m shifting to relational ways of talking. Relationally, I can distinguish them. Which by the way, is why they’re not separated. In the very act of telling them apart, I’m uniting them. Father of the Son, Son of the Father. So that’s why relation is a key category.

Sometimes when people say Trinity is not in the Bible, how can you use it? I want to  say, you know what’s really not in the Bible is the word relation. And that’s very important. That’s what we’re talking about here.

SEAN MCDOWELL: So when you distinguish between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you’re distinguishing it in a relational fashion. Are you comfortable if I take people and I say, look, when I say the Father is God, there’s one person who is divine. Jesus is God. That is a second person who is divine. The Holy Spirit is God. That’s the third person who is divine. One divine being, three persons who share that divine essence. Are you comfortable with that language?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yes. In one sense, the sort of easy straightforward way to put it is there’s one what and three who’s. Or if you’re to ask God, what are you? The answer is God. You know, the divine essence. What it is to be God, you know, Godness. If I ask, who are you? I’ll get three answers. The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

SEAN MCDOWELL: I like that. I think I’ve heard Millard Erickson use that, if I’m not mistaken. One what and three who’s. Now I can hear some people saying, you’re not walking through the biblical passages. I get that. We are clarifying a Christian doctrine, showing that it doesn’t contradict.

But one of the questions that comes up, Fred, regularly, is that this idea of the Trinity is not only not in the scripture, but it’s an example of later Greek and or pagan thought seeping its way into the church. And some will even point towards like the Council of Nicaea as solidifying this faulty idea, of course, we’re now into the fourth century. Is there any validity in this claim?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah. So first of all, let me affirm sort of the origin of that claim. The idea that if the doctrine of the Trinity weren’t in scripture, but were later added by readers of scripture, by the early church, that would be invalidating in my view. I can accept certain things that are traditional from the early church and think like, oh, that’s cool. Let’s celebrate Easter that time of year. That’s awesome.

But when we’re talking about the doctrine of God, I think, no, that’s gotta be, if Trinitarianism can’t be established sola scriptura, I don’t want it. And neither did the church fathers. You don’t see the early church saying like, we believe this because we believe it, or we believe it because grandpa believed it. They all say it is straight from the Bible, right? The most patristic thing you can do is not accept the church father’s authority for what the doctrine of God is. They are constantly pointing back to scripture. It’s not biblical. We can’t go with it.

So I want to affirm that part, that spirit of the challenge. In terms of whether it was sort of like the corruption of Greek thought flowing in at the Council of Nicaea or something like that, two things I want to say. One is people who think that generally need to go and read something from before Nicaea. And I want to say this in a non-condescending way, and I’m talking about most people. You know, a lot of people have already read a lot of stuff, but most people who make that charge really need to read anything from before Nicaea, right? That sounds snotty, but I mean,

I teach in a great books program, Torrey Honors College at Biola. We read Irenaeus, we sometimes read Tertullian. He’s not in the regular circulation for us, but you could read Cyprian. You could read the Apostolic Fathers. You could read any Christian document from before the year 325, and you’ll just be struck. You’ll be bowled over by how much they’re talking about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and how they’re using the word Trinity, and they’re just doing a lot of the work.

Now, you can always go in and nuance it and say, you know, is the way Irenaeus uses it in the year 190 the same way that Augustine uses it in the year 430? Okay, fine, we can have a detailed discussion, but I promise you, read any Christian document from before 325, Nicaea, and you will notice Trinitarian thought patterns in it. They’re really right there, so.

The other thing I want to say is Nicaea is great. So one reason people will focus on it and say, that’s where the Trinity stuff started, is because there is a real breakthrough or step forward in the clarity of how we talk about Christian doctrine there. It’s not progressive revelation. God didn’t speak at Nicaea, but the church just had a breakthrough where they said, you know, you can go a long time trusting Jesus as Lord and never ask the ontological question about His essence.

You know, millions of Christians have lived faithful and deep lives of discipleship without raising an ontological question about the being of the Second Person. As soon as you raise it though, you’ve gotta get it right. You can’t raise the question, what is the Son? What is His essence? What is His ontology? And come up with the answer, He’s like God. You’ll be fine not raising it, but once you’ve raised it, you have to get the right answer. And Nicaea is where we got the right answer to the isness question.

And the key teaching of Nicaea is that THE SON IS OF THE SAME ESSENCE AS THE FATHER.

SEAN MCDOWELL: And this is a Greek kind of careful language to express and articulate what it was believed to be in the Scriptures itself. So the language is fresh and clarifying, not inventing the Trinity, drawing out what was in the Scriptures. And of course, it’s still in the Scriptures.

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, yep. Some scholars use the category of a judgment that you can make. So there’s concepts that you work with, but then you use those concepts to render a judgment about something. And so you could talk about the Nicene judgment about the identity of Christ.

It’s made with Greek concepts. Everyone’s talking Greek. Well, not everyone in Nicaea is quite international, but the central language is Greek. The nice thing about that is you can think multiculturally in our world and think, what if you had an African sort of discussion about the being of the Second Person? And I’m talking about like deep Africa, further South, because if you get to North Africa, well, it is Alexandria, it is Greek and Latin.

But if you go further South and you’re dealing with traditions like ancestors and things like that, not so much directly being categories, or if you go East, if you go into China and Asia and you’re talking about the Tao and things like that, you could use those concepts from those cultures to render the same judgment that was rendered using Greek concepts at Nicaea.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Do you have any thoughts on why doesn’t Scripture, given that the Trinity is so just ecumenical throughout church history and so essential, Paul just doesn’t articulate it and doesn’t just teach it and say, hey, guys, let me just make this simple on us and lay it out. Why wouldn’t we have that more so in Scripture? Why do you have to wait till the fourth century to have it really codified and have this breakthrough?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s true, there’s no single verse or short passage that brings together all the different elements that it would take to totally nail down the doctrine of the Trinity. I think, I mean, I want to pitch this as an advantage, that this is a doctrine about who God is on the basis of all that He’s revealed and all that He’s done.

So that when at the end of Matthew, Jesus says, baptize in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. So in one sense, the whole Trinity is right there, right? If you ask me to give you one verse with the Trinity in it, I’d say, well, Matthew 28:19, it’s right there. It’s magisterial, the risen Lord says this. And it’s why we say exactly that phrase when we’re speaking well of the Trinity.

But of course, you have to interpret it correctly. And the interpretation of it is spanned out across the right construal of the entirety of Scripture. So, you know, I want to  be honest about that. In one sense, threeness is in Matthew 28:19. Like if you ask me if the word Trinity is in Scripture, and I say, well, Trinity means threeness. And there are certainly three in Matthew 28:19: the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are stated absolutely in that way under the heading of the name, you know, the one name, which has within it these three that are named.

SEAN MCDOWELL: I like how you frame that as a positive. I’ve heard Greg Koukl give a talk and my dad did too. The same words, they both said, Trinity is not a problem, it’s a solution. And I think we’ll get to what some of that means. How helpful do you find illustrations and do you have a favorite one? And I asked because I used to have my students when I did theology in high school with juniors. We’d walk through the Trinity and they’d come up with the egg and the husband and father and coach, you know, et cetera. And I remember one time a student said, he goes, I got it, a peanut M&M. There’s the shell, the chocolate and the peanut. And I stopped and I thought, okay, we’re talking about God’s character and we’re using the analogy of a peanut M&M. Something has gone really wrong. So should we not use illustrations at all? Should we use some insofar as they go? What’s your take on that?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, I’ve got kind of a cottage industry of being an anti-illustration guy on the doctrine of the Trinity. So I bring a wet blanket with me to all the conferences and throw it on anyone who thinks they have a great idea. Temperamentally, I’m not that way. I’m an artist, I read a lot of poetry. I love illustrations and examples. I just find that when you’re talking about the one God as FATHER, SON AND SPIRIT, there’s not a great illustration that covers all that’s going on there.

So if you think about how does the Son come from the Father, well, you can talk about a stream flowing out from a source or you can talk about light streaming forth from the solar disc. There’s all kinds of illustrations you can use for individual sort of distinct parts of what goes into the doctrine of the Trinity.

But when you build up the entirety of the doctrine of the Trinity with all the claims that go into it, it’s no surprise that there’s nothing quite like that. Yeah, so analogies for the whole package, I find are what are really lacking. They all give you a tiny little instance, a tiny little insight into how three could be one without contradicting yourself or something like that. But most of them perfectly illustrate a heresy. They slightly suggest the truth, but they perfectly illustrate a heresy. You know, one man who is a husband and father and coach, that’s perfectly modalism. Like that’s a non-Trinitarian, it’s a great illustration of modalism.

Does it give you a tiny insight into something about the Trinity? Yeah. The other thing I say about using illustrations for something about God, that’s kind of that tone you hit there at the end, right? Like we’re talking about the character of God. When I’m thinking about one of these really big and central notions about God, there’s not going to be something like it. Like I can’t define God and give you two examples or tell you what that’s like. I believe God made everything out of nothing. What’s that like? Well, what is it like to make everything out of nothing? I don’t think it’s like anything.

I mean, it’s kind of like I went to the kitchen and I was hungry, there were no sandwiches and I did something and then there was a sandwich at the end of that. Like I created a sandwich for lunch. And you hear that and think, I mean, kind of, but that’s a tiny bit like creation and infinitely unlike creation. And I want to  say like, yeah, if that will satisfy you, like that analogy, God making the universe is like me making a sandwich. If that’s your standard for what analogy is going to  be, then we got some great ones on the Trinity. They’re like, they’re about that similar.

SEAN MCDOWELL: I think that’s really interesting because that’s where I kind of started teaching theologies. We’d only talk about illustrations to show how all illustrations fall short. So father, son, and coach, there’s one person, three modes, like you described, hence modalism. So there’s a kind of threeness in terms of role, but not in terms of personhood. There’s the three leaf clover. There’s the egg, you know, like we walk through why they fall short, but when it’s all said and done, if we’re talking about the infinite, all good self-existent God, maybe we should be struggling to understand God’s character in some fashion.

So to me, it seems like the goal is to show there’s no logical contradiction in this. It’s faithful to Scripture. There’s a mysterious element here that we should expect of God’s character. And I’m okay with that. That tends to be how I frame it with the folks. Do you frame it that way or do you add anything to that?

DR. FRED SANDERS: No, I frame it that way. And also I’m always pressing for the connection between the Trinity and the gospel. Because I think the analogy question often comes out of this felt sense that it doesn’t matter. Like, okay, so sure, it’s not illogical and it’s in the Bible, but why does it matter? And there’s that gap kind of opens up where people start wanting to ask questions to try to get to the meaning or the significance of it.

And basically analogy is an answer to the question, what’s that like? And so when you have no idea why something matters, you might ask like, well, here’s a good question that sometimes helps me understand things. What’s that like? The bad news is it’s not going to  help you very much with the Trinity because the Trinity is not like very much. I would rather go back and try to scratch that itch before it generates the, can you please give me an illustration question. So if someone is convinced that like, I believe in the Trinity because the Father sent the Son and the Father and the Son sent the Spirit.

And I guess a presupposition I didn’t mention is God doesn’t change. Like God didn’t turn into the Father and Son and Spirit, but if the Father sent the Son, who is God, and the Father and the Son sent the Spirit, who is God, and God doesn’t change, then God must inherently essentially be Trinity.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Now let’s go down the road of what you’re suggesting is relation to the gospel. Obviously to be saved, somebody has to believe in the gospel. You also mentioned that the Trinity is an essential doctrine throughout church history. So central historically, but also central theologically. Does somebody have to believe in the Trinity in order to be saved? And I had somebody ask me this week when I was having a conversation with somebody, he said, clearly there were people, like even the thief on the cross couldn’t articulate the Trinity. Obviously he might not have even understood the Spirit, but that knew Jesus is God sufficient to be saved. So how much does somebody have to believe in the Trinity to have salvation?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, it’s a great question. So one thing to say about it is first of all, to raise the stakes a little bit and say, we can talk about lots of information that’s not necessary for salvation, but with the doctrine of the Trinity, we are talking about the character of God. Like this is the official Christian answer to who is God. And so it gets you into this ballpark and it’s a little bit of scary ballpark. It’s like, it gives you the ballpark of how wrong can you be about the identity of the Savior and still be saved?

Because if someone tells me they’re trusting Jesus for salvation, my first instinct is to rejoice. If they then say something weird, like Jesus was a space alien on a grand tour to bring us laser guns, then I think like, oh, okay, you said Jesus and I thought we were saying the same thing, but it turns out you’re using the J word not to refer to the right individual. So I don’t know how wrong you can be. I got some definite wrong answers where I think, oh, well, the space alien guy just clearly is not talking about Jesus. He’s just saying the same syllables.

Something like that’s going on with the Trinity. We’re talking about the character and the identity of the God who Christians worship. The question about do you have to believe in it to be saved is it’s a legitimate question. I’ve got an answer, but I do want to point out that it’s sort of a question asked on the outside of the doctrine. What I mean is from the inside of the doctrine, you’re confessing a gospel-based revelation of the eternal identity of God. That is that the Father sent the Son, the Father and the Son sent the Holy Spirit. This is who God is. This is who we know. And this is how we know Him, right?

One of the beautiful things about seeing the gospel Trinity connection is it doesn’t just pick out and identify who God is, but it also rehearses how we are unified with God, right? I’ve told a little tiny gospel story when I say the Father sent the Son and the Father and the Son sent the Spirit. And so once you’re inside of that, you see, oh, Trinity and salvation go together. They harmonize. You can’t, they inform each other. An understanding of the Trinity raises your understanding of the gospel to a much higher level. And understanding the gospel helps you understand who God is, the God of salvation.

You can go to the outside then and say like, not having understood that gospel Trinity connection, you can ask, do I have to believe this to be saved? And you can kind of feel how, oh, well now we’re kind of at arm’s distance with it. I would give the same basic answer, which is it’s possible like the thief on the cross, like millions of faithful Christians down through history, it’s possible to never raise the question of the being of Jesus Christ and what is His ontic status. But once you raise it, it really is crucial to get it right.

It’s one thing never to wonder about whether the Son is homoousios with the Father. It’s another thing to have it occur to you and say, nope, He definitely is not of the same substance as the Father. He said, and then you’ve only got a few options, right? He’s not God, he’s a lesser God. He’s just another way of talking about the Father doing something. Those all begin to diverge. And I really sympathize with how it seems like you’re only a degree off early on, but on a journey into infinity, that degree is going to matter when you’re trying to pick out the identity of God.

SEAN MCDOWELL: When I was asked this question, I said, I don’t think somebody has to be able to articulate and grasp what we mean by the Trinity, but I’m not sure somebody can be saved and deny it when it’s accurately presented. That was kind of the distinction that I made because I had a good friend of mine who’s worked with Crewe for years. And I said, hey, give me an example of Trinity. I was like, here’s my understanding. I’m like, that is a complete heretical doctrine of the Trinity. And I have no doubt about this person’s salvation. I said, hey, let me unpack this and clarify what’s meant. They’re like, yeah, that, I got it. That’s what I meant.

I’m like, okay. Just couldn’t express it, had some bad ideas, but when it’s clarified, it shows that you do know the one true God. So don’t have to positively affirm it, but can’t deny it. Is that too simplistic? Or would you kind of agree with that in general?

DR. FRED SANDERS: I would agree with that in general if we’re talking about individuals. The thing about the doctrine is it’s a very large doctrine. It takes real biblical fluency to kind of see it and be persuaded by it. So I would say with Christian organizations, I’m going to  have a higher standard. If I’m talking about a church and they’re like just refusing to do the work of being articulate about the Trinity or put it in their statement of faith, I’m going to  come down pretty hard on that.

But with individual believers, it’s like it is in everything where you have advanced knowledge versus more preliminary knowledge. Some people are not, yeah, some people are living great Christian faithful lives but are not gifted at being articulate about what they believe about anything, right? Like they can’t tell you how to fix your plumbing or they can, but they can’t tell you about something like the doctrine of the Trinity. Yeah, a lot of leeway for that, but I would really shift the burden of proof to the church or organization in which that person is trying to live an intelligent Christian life.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Now, in my experience, the Trinity comes up either when people like Jehovah’s Witnesses or maybe Mormons are critiquing Christian theology or in a Christian worship song, now and then the triune God, or it gets a quick reference tagged on, but I can’t really think of many sermons and messages that really present in a Trinitarian fashion God’s character. Is it a lack of understanding? Is it embarrassing about the Trinity? Is it too much work? What do you think drives some of this when we’re talking about, like you said, God’s very character?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, well, it is a very large doctrine. I mean, if you’re preaching from a passage of scripture, even if it’s somewhere where the Father, Son, and Spirit are mentioned, you know, or like say Galatians 4, that in the fullness of time, God sent His Son, born of a woman, and sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying Abba Father. The key word’s not there. The key formula, Father, Son, and Spirit is not there, but man, is there Trinitarian gospel stuff happening there. You could preach that passage and not really sort of go for it in the big picture. There’s plenty to talk about. There’s plenty of application to do there.

So I do think it’s a matter of learning the habit of stepping back a little bit and asking the really big question about what’s going on there.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s helpful. Do you think that Trinity, we could come to an understanding of it from general revelation and not special revelation? And I ask because the only attempt I’ve read about this, and you would know far better, is I believe it was Richard Swinburne, who said, when you look at the relationship between a husband and wife, a love for each other, there’s two. That love becomes perfected when it’s focused on another, hence a child. But then another child doesn’t add anything to that dynamic itself, not that it doesn’t add anything to the family. Of course it does. There’s a sense of loving one another and then loving a third that is a perfect understanding of love. That’s the closest I’ve heard of kind of without the scriptures saying a maximally perfect being would be loving. This is what it would mean to be loved. Hence, God is triune. Do you buy that? What do you make of that understanding?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, so I don’t buy that as a proof of any kind that the highest good must be triune. I don’t think there are such proofs. I take there to be a pretty strict distinction here between what can be known by general revelation, general knowledge of God, the kind of theology that can be built up from observing the created world, and special revelation.

Whatever else special revelation is, it’s like personal knowledge about God. God makes something known that has to be made known by the revealer. So a classic example from Christian theological history is Thomas Aquinas, who’s pretty famous for saying you can prove the existence of God five ways. Anyone who, he’s committed to the fact that anyone who reasons correctly will know that there is something behind all the things we see going on here and that that thing is called God. But then he stops there, turns on a dime and says, but it’s impossible to reason from these created things to the triunity of God, to the threeness of that first principle.

So it’s, you know, it sounds like a mixed bag. Aquinas is, so some people think you can’t prove the existence of God. Aquinas thinks you definitely can, but that you can’t prove the triunity of God. I think that’s the right answer. Aquinas even says, even once it’s been revealed, you can’t demonstrably show it even once you have the information. And I do think the argument like the one you mentioned about the nature of love, you can do the nature of consciousness. There’s a number of ways you can see into the reasonableness you know, or the kind of the coherence of triunity once it’s been given to you. But I wouldn’t take any of those to be proofs.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s fair, I like that thinking. Once we understand God is triune, you start to see it in a different way, not only scripture, but reality. But are you going to  really work from the bottom up and demonstrate this? That’s arguably a stretch.

All right, a couple more questions for you. Something that sometimes liberal Christians would argue is, Fred, why are we spending all this time talking about an abstract doctrine, homoousios and trinitas? Aren’t Christians just called to love their neighbors, feed the poor and care for them? Why all this energy on abstract theology?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, well, I mean, it’s good. I’m all for loving my neighbor as well, you know, and I think it’s really clear that that’s central and important to the biblical life conduct. But to post that as sort of an alternative to having accurate understanding of what God has made known, it’s disjunctive, right? Would you rather love your neighbor or know what God has revealed about Himself? Like, why would you pose that disjunctively? Why is that a choice?

It’s not as if even I, a professional Trinitarian theologian, am actually spending every waking hour only thinking about the Trinity to the exclusion of living a Christian life. Believe it or not.

SEAN MCDOWELL: I bet your wife wonders sometimes where your mind is.

DR. FRED SANDERS: I mean, yeah, I might get a little abstracted sometimes, but I certainly hope that I’m, you know, living a recognizable Christian life also in my conduct.

The other thing I want to say about that way of sort of framing what it is to be Christian is it’s just extremely loose. It’s such a, you have to sort of blur your vision and ignore every detail from the entire Bible and say, what this basically means is be kind. Like, okay, I am pro-kindness. But why is this big, weird book doing all these things and coming back and pounding over and over things about the nature of God, you know? Why do the Ten Commandments start, not even with commandments, but with God reaffirming His identity like three times, you know, I am the Lord your God. Why not just leave out the Lord your God part and say, don’t steal? Well, you could if you’re freestyling and you want to make up your own religion, but don’t tell me that’s Christianity, right?

Like biblical religion includes deep knowledge of God, revealed by God and appropriated by us according to our abilities and transformed conduct. I think about right before the whole world was about to come crashing down on Jesus and His disciples, they go on a little retreat into the upper room, turn to John 17, He just talks to them about the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit for like three or four chapters, you know? And by 17, He just quit talking to them and begins talking to His Father. So like, you could easily imagine saying, Jesus, you’re about to be arrested and terrible things are going to happen in the next couple of days. And he’s like on a Trinity retreat. So I just don’t think that these things are disjunctive in that way.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That’s really helpful. Good classic Christian living is good doctrine and good practice, one not at the exclusion of the other, but one informs the other. I think that balance is really healthy and biblical. Last question.

DR. FRED SANDERS: And if you were to say, if you were going to say like, I’m going to quit being kind to my neighbors and instead just study Trinitarian theology, I’d say like, oh, that’s a bad, that’s a bad choice. You’re going to need to make room for both of those.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Even the demons have good theology, you know, just for the record. So talk to me a little bit about, we’ll end with this, kind of the personal application of the Trinity for being a Christian. So for example, I’ve heard people say things like you pray to the Father in the name of the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. Does that mean therefore, if that’s right, then we don’t ever pray to Jesus? Like, what would that mean in prayer? What does that mean in worship? What are some practical things for how we live our lives once we understand that God is triune?

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah. Yeah, so the personal application side, it’s great that you kind of lead with prayer, right? In Christian prayer, we are coming to God, not on our own authority or in our own name, but we are approaching in a mediated way, right? That to worship God is to come into the presence of God and have access to the Father because of the work of the Son, because God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that it’s by the blood of Jesus that we have access to the Father. Every time we do that, we’re actually acting out a Trinitarian form of mediation. Like, that’s what’s really going on spiritually. In my book, Deep Things of God, I describe this as praying a prayer that is addressed to the Father in the name of the Son and is occurring in the power of the Holy Spirit is sort of making the form of your prayer go along with or harmonize with the underlying spiritual reality.

In the book, I call it praying with the grain. You know, like wood has a grain and you can cut against it, but, you know, you can cut with it too. Cat’s fur has a grain. You can pet with the grain of the cat or against the grain. So nothing goes badly wrong if you don’t pray with the grain but to pray along with and in harmony with the actual spiritual structure of what Christian prayer is. It means that every act of prayer is a little rehearsal of the overall structure of the Christian spiritual life. So that can be a deeper form of intimacy with God.

You can pray to the Son. There are several biblical examples. Prominent one is Stephen the martyr at the beginning of the book of Acts, says, Lord Jesus received my spirit, just as Jesus had said at the end of the book of Luke, Father, receive My Spirit. So there are even some theologians, I think one Baptist theologian who’s said, the real test of whether you believe in the deity of Christ is if you’ll pray to Him. Because like, if you think He’s God, but you never pray to Him, that’s a little bit suspect. Like if He’s really God, why can’t you present?

The thing about praying to the Son is we’re also praying to Him as God, not in our own name, not by our own authority, but by the mediation of the Son, right? So there’s a sense in which even prayer to the Son follows that same logic. Like we’re not directing it to the Father, but it’s through the Son and the power of the Holy Spirit that that same Trinitarian prayer is going on. There are no biblical examples of prayer to the Holy Spirit, but the rule is you can pray to any person who is God.

SEAN MCDOWELL: That makes sense.

DR. FRED SANDERS: Yeah, I do think that if you want your prayer life to be normed and governed by scripture overall, you should try to hit scripture proportions, which means mostly pray to the Father, sometimes pray to the Son. You are allowed to pray to the Holy Spirit. It’s not unbiblical in the deeper sense. It’s just that there happen to be no instances of it in Scripture.

SEAN MCDOWELL: Fred, that’s great. I have so many more questions for you. We will have to do a follow-up, but I want to encourage viewers who’ve stayed with us to check out your book, The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, for one of the best texts, in my opinion, to help non-specialists, but you certainly have some depth in that book, understand what the trinity is, how it comes from Scripture, and how it affects the way that we live. It’s a wonderful book.

For Further Reading:

Derek Prince on Father God (Full Transcript)

Knowledge of God: Paul Washer (Full Transcript)

Derek Prince Sermon: The Gifts of The Holy Spirit (Transcript)

Love The Lord Your God With All Your Mind: R.C. Sproul Sermon (Transcript)

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