There’s No “Trinity Verse”—And That’s a Good Thing

Fred Sanders, author of The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything, writes:

The Trinity is a biblical doctrine, but let’s admit it: There’s something annoying about how hard it is to put your finger on a verse that states the whole doctrine.
The Bible presents the elements of the doctrine in numerous passages, of course: that there is only one God; that the Father is God; that the Son is God; and that the Spirit is God. We can also tell easily enough that the Father, Son and Spirit are really distinct from one another, and are not just three names for one person. If you hold all those clear teachings of Scripture in your mind at one time and think through them together, the doctrine of the Trinity is inevitable. Trinitarianism is a biblical doctrine and all the ingredients are given to us there: Just add thought and you have the classic doctrine.
Like most evangelicals, though, I would prefer to have a doctrine be stated clearly and concisely in one place. I like my doctrines verse-sized. I sometimes wish there were one verse that said, “God is one being in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” The doctrine of the Trinity, though, is simply not verse-sized. Sometimes that feels like a disadvantage, but in fact it’s an advantage. The doctrine of the Trinity is a massive, comprehensive, full-Bible doctrine that serves to expand our minds as readers of Scripture. In Scripture, God is leading his people to understand who he is as Father, Son and Spirit.

Sanders goes on to sketch how a 3-verse, 5-verse, and 12-verse passage presuppose and show the Trinity. Entire book of the Bible—and the biblical storyline itself—show the same.
His conclusion: “The Trinity is a biblical doctrine, therefore, in a very special sense: not in any one verse, but as the key to the entire book.”
You can read the whole article here.
Justin Taylor

Do You Know that You Know the Trinity?

Fred Sanders, The Deep Things of God:

If you trust Jesus to be your salvation, you already know the Trinity. But it’s a great benefit to know that you know the Trinity. It’s a great benefit to know that you’re a Christian because you’ve received a Spirit of adoption from the Father, a Spirit that lets you call God “Abba, Father.” The Trinity is lurking in the gospel, just as it is lurking in the life of every believer. This Trinitarian reality is going on in our Christian lives whether we know that we know it or not. (p. 46)

Sanders goes on to show that that the formalization of the doctrine of the Trinity in the early church was a matter of making explicit what was already implicit in the lives of believers, bringing to the foreground what was there all along in the background:

Vital Trinitarianism, the kind that matters and changes everything, does not occur in a vacuum. The doctrine of the Trinity, although it can be stated as a series of propositions embodying truth claims about God (“God is one being in three persons”), involves much more than that. Trinitarianism is the encompassing framework within which all Christian thought takes place and within which Christian confession finds its grounding presuppositions. It is the deep grammar of all the central Christian affirmations. Therefore, when the theologians of the patristic age finally stated it explicitly as an article of faith (beginning with the Council of Nicaea in 325, though with obvious precursors), they were not simply adding an item to a list of beliefs but performing an act of intellectual foregrounding, bringing a background element from the periphery to the center of Christian attention. By doing so, they were equipping later theologians to think coherently about the entire structure of our saving knowledge of God in a single act of focused inquiry. In the passage from implicit awareness of God’s triunity and an inarticulate experience of salvation, to explicit confession of faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Christian theology came of age epistemologically. Having always known the Trinity, Christian thinkers now knew that they knew the Trinity. (p. 46)

Justin Taylor

Simplicity and Trinity

Divine simplicity means that God is not composed of different parts, but utterly whole and indivisible.  Its opposite is not “complex” but “composite.”  To affirm divine simplicity is to affirm that each of God’s attributes is identical with his essence: God is not merely loving and righteous and holy, but Love and Righteousness and Holiness.  Whatever God is, He wholly is.
I used to really struggle to understand how the doctrine of God’s simplicity fits together with the doctrine of the Trinity.  After all, if God has no parts, how can we say that He exists in three Persons?  How is it not inconsistent to affirm both that God has distinct relations within Himself and that He is simple and indivisible?  Lately I have come across some helpful treatments of this problem in some older theologians.
First, Anselm in chapter 23 of Proslogion: “you are so simple that there cannot be born of You any other than what You are.  This itself is the Love, one and common to You and Your Son, that is the Holy Spirit, proceeding from both….  Whatever each is singly, that the whole Trinity is altogether, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; since each singly is not other than the supremely simple unity and the supremely unified simplicity which can be neither multiplied nor differentiated.”
Second, Basil the Great (On the Holy Spirit, 18.23): “how does one and one not equal two Gods?  Because we speak of the emperor, and the emperor’s image – but not two emperors….  Since the divine nature is not composed of parts, union of the persons is accomplished by partaking of the whole.”
And finally, Bavinck (Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, 149): “nor is simplicity inconsistent with the doctrine of the Trinity, for the term simple is not an antonym of ‘twofold’ or ‘threefold’ but of ‘composite.’  God is not composed of three persons, nor is each person composed of the being and attributes of that person, but the one uncompounded (simple) being of God exists in three persons.”
These passages have helped me to see not only are divine simplicity and trinity compatible, but they stand in the closest possible relation and inform one another.  The crucial insight that helped remove any sense of inconsistency was seeing that there is a difference between divisions in the Godhead and distinctions in the Godhead.  The Father, Son, and Spirit are not divisions, or composite parts, in the Godhead – they don’t combine together to add up to God.  Its not as though the Father equals 33.3% of God, the Son another 33.3%, and the Spirit the remaining 33.3%.  Rather, the three Persons are distinctions, or relations, in the one God, each one being fully God Himself.  As Anselm puts it: “whatever each is singly, that the whole Trinity is altogether.”  And how is this?  Because of divine simplicity.  If God were divisible, it would difficult not to veer of into tritheism.  But because God has no divisions or parts, the Son who is begotten by the Father is not other than the Father, and the Spirit who is generated from both is not other than the Father or the Son.
In other words, simplicity —> trinity.  Far from the two being incompatible, without simplicity there could be no trinity.  Simplicity is not the enemy of trinity, but its guardian.
Soliloquium