Devotional 13: Of God, and of the Holy Trinity: There is a moment in every Christian's pilgrimage when the familiar words of fai

The Confession

In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost: the Father is of none, neither begotten, nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 2, Section 3

Introduction

There is a moment in every Christian's pilgrimage when the familiar words of faith suddenly turn strange, and the strangeness unsettles the soul. Maybe it comes when Christ speaks of His Father as One who sent Him, yet declares, "I and my Father are one." Maybe when the congregation confesses the Creed and the minister pauses at "begotten, not made." Maybe in the quiet of prayer, when the believer calls upon the Father in the name of the Son, feels the inward stirring of the Spirit, and wonders at addressing Three who are yet One. At such moments the soul does not stand before the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as a puzzle to solve. It stands before a depth to adore. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a late theological accretion laid upon the simple faith of the apostles by Greek-speaking bishops with too much time and philosophy on their hands. It is not, as the Socinians alleged and as Islam charges still, a corruption of primitive monotheism. It is the logic of the gospel. Take away the Trinity, and you do not simplify Christianity. You destroy it. If Christ is not truly God, no merely human obedience can satisfy infinite justice, and His death avails no more than any other martyr's. If the Spirit is not truly God, then the sanctifying, illuminating, indwelling presence by which sinners are made new is a creature rather than the Creator, and the church is left with a power less than omnipotent to accomplish a work greater than human. If the Father alone is God in the full sense, the Christian religion is a form of unitarianism with an exalted prophet and a mysterious influence, and the baptismal formula with which Christ commissioned His church — baptising in the one name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost — becomes an inexplicable anomaly. The Westminster Divines understood that the Trinity sits at the centre of the Christian faith. Every major doctrine (creation, redemption, sanctification, adoption, the church, the sacraments, the last things) is irreducibly Trinitarian in shape. The Father elects, the Son redeems, the Spirit applies. The Father sends, the Son obeys, the Spirit seals. The Father creates, the Son upholds, the Spirit perfects. To lose the Trinity is not to lose a single article of the creed. It is to lose the creed itself, for every line of it — "I believe in God the Father Almighty," "and in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord," "I believe in the Holy Ghost" — is an act of Trinitarian confession. The section before us is among the briefest in the entire Confession: a single sentence, astonishingly compressed. Yet within it lies the accumulated wisdom of nearly seventeen centuries of the church's reflection upon the deepest mystery of the faith. God is one in being and three in person. This is not a contradiction to manage but a revelation to receive — with adoration, humility, and joy.

Scripture Foundation

The word "Trinity" appears nowhere in Scripture, and the Divines, who knew their Bibles too well to be embarrassed by the fact, did not need it to appear there. What Scripture gives is not a single proof text to brandish like a slogan. It gives a pattern of revelation that runs through both Testaments and comes to full expression in the New. The church's Trinitarian language is not the imposition of a foreign philosophy upon biblical data. It is the necessary grammar that arises when the full range of that data is taken seriously together. The Bible teaches with unmistakable clarity that there is one God. It teaches with equal clarity that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. And it teaches that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are personally distinct, relating to one another in ways that cannot be reduced to different names or modes of a single undifferentiated deity. From these three biblical affirmations the doctrine of the Trinity arises as inevitably as a flower from a seed. The baptismal commission with which our Lord closed His earthly ministry is the New Testament's most concentrated Trinitarian declaration. In Matthew 28:19 Christ commands His apostles: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost." The word "name" is singular — onoma, one name — yet three persons are placed upon the same level, equally the objects of the faith into which disciples are baptised and equally the authors of the grace that baptism signifies. One is not baptised into the name of the Father as the true God with the Son and the Spirit as subordinates or accessories. The singular "name" enfolds the three persons in a unity of being and dignity that permits no gradation of deity. To worship the Son and the Holy Ghost together with the Father would be idolatry if they were not God. To baptise in a threefold name while believing in only one divine person would make the formula a meaningless incantation. The baptism of our Lord Himself provides the most vivid narrative disclosure of the three persons acting in concert, each assuming a distinct role in the inauguration of Christ's public ministry. Matthew 3:16-17 records: "And Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway out of the water: and, lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and lighting upon him: and lo a voice from heaven, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased." Here the Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends in visible form, and the Father speaks from heaven. No reader of this passage can conclude that Father, Son, and Spirit are merely successive manifestations of a single person or three names for the same reality. They are manifestly distinct: the Father is not the one being baptised, the Son is not the voice speaking from heaven, the Spirit is not the Father sending the voice. And yet the unity of purpose is absolute. The Father sends, the Son submits, the Spirit anoints. One work of redemption, three persons working. The early church saw in this scene what the Greek fathers called the theophaneia: the manifestation of God as He truly is, the Trinity unveiled at the hinge of redemptive history. The Prologue of John's Gospel takes us deeper still, into the eternal relations that precede and ground the temporal mission of the Son. John 1:1-2 declares: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God." The Greek pros ton Theon ("with God," literally "toward God") suggests not mere proximity but face-to-face relational presence. The Word is distinct from God the Father, personally oriented toward Him in eternal fellowship, while simultaneously being fully and truly God. And John presses the point further in verse 14: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth." The term monogenes ("only begotten," or better, "unique, one-of-a-kind") designates a relation that has no parallel among creatures. The Son is not a creature elevated to divine status. He is eternally the Son, deriving His being from the Father in a generation that has no beginning and no end. This eternal generation is the ground of every other truth about Christ's person. Because He is eternally the Son, His temporal mission as the sent One of the Father is not an arbitrary arrangement. It is the temporal expression of an eternal relationship. The Lord's teaching on the Holy Spirit completes the Trinitarian revelation. In His farewell discourse, recorded in John 15:26, Christ promises: "But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me." The Greek ekporeuetai ("proceedeth") is the verb from which the theological term "procession" derives, and it describes a relation of origin as real and as eternal as the generation of the Son. The Spirit proceeds from the Father, and the Son participates in His sending: "whom I will send unto you from the Father." A few verses later, in John 16:7, Christ intensifies the thought: "Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you." The Spirit's temporal mission flows from His eternal procession, and that procession involves both the Father from whom He proceeds and the Son who sends Him. This is the biblical foundation of the filioque: the confession that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Western church, following Augustine and the tradition of the Latin fathers, enshrined this in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, and the Westminster Divines faithfully echoed it in their confession. The apostolic benediction with which Paul closes his second letter to Corinth compresses the church's daily experience of Trinitarian life into a single sentence. 2 Corinthians 13:14 reads: "The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen." Here the three persons are not explained but invoked, not defined but experienced. Grace is peculiarly associated with the Son, through whom all grace comes; love with the Father, who is the fountain of all blessing; communion with the Spirit, who unites believers to Christ and to one another. The benediction assumes what the baptismal formula declares: that Father, Son, and Spirit are equally the source of every spiritual blessing and equally the object of the church's faith and worship.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Assembly met at a time when the doctrine of the Trinity was under assault from within Christendom as fiercely as at any point since the Arian crisis of the fourth century. The Socinian movement, originating in the writings of Faustus Socinus and spreading through the Radical Reformation, denied the Trinity root and branch. For the Socinians, the doctrine of the Trinity was a corruption introduced by Platonising church fathers who had imported Greek philosophical categories into the simple monotheism of the Bible. Christ, in their view, was a mere man: uniquely exalted, miraculously conceived, raised to divine honour, and worthy of a kind of religious veneration, but not God in the proper sense. The Holy Spirit was not a distinct person at all but the power or influence of God, an impersonal force emanating from the Father. The doctrine of Christ's satisfaction for sin — the very heart of the gospel — collapsed along with His deity, for if Christ is not God, His death cannot possess infinite value meriting the salvation of the elect. Against this background the Divines drafted their confession, and the care with which they chose their language shows how earnestly they sought to confess the catholic faith without surrendering to speculation. They open with a declarative thesis: "In the unity of the Godhead there be three persons." This is the foundational claim of Trinitarian orthodoxy. Not that there are three Gods. Not that the one God merely appears in three modes. But that within the one undivided divine being there exist three who are truly and eternally distinct. The term "persons" translates the Greek hypostasis and the Latin persona, neither of which means exactly what the modern English word "person" suggests. The Divines were not teaching that God is three independent centres of consciousness in the modern psychological sense — that would be tritheism. They were affirming that the distinctions within the Godhead are real, not merely nominal or functional. Father, Son, and Spirit are not three names for the same subject. They are three subjects who share one indivisible being. The phrase "of one substance, power, and eternity" is the homoousios of Nicaea rendered into English and expanded. The key word is "substance," which translates the Latin substantia and the Greek ousia. To say that the three persons are of one substance is to say that they share the identical divine essence — not merely similar essences, as though the Son were a kind of junior deity made of slightly lesser divine stuff, but the one undivided being of God. The Son is not homoiousios (of similar substance), as the semi-Arians proposed in the decades following Nicaea, but homoousios (of the same substance). That single iota — the difference between homoiousios and homoousios — was the boundary between orthodoxy and heresy, between confessing Christ as true God and reducing Him to a creature, however exalted. To this the Divines add "power" and "eternity," insisting that what is true of the divine essence is true of the divine attributes. The Son and the Spirit are not less powerful than the Father, not younger than the Father, not inferior to the Father in any perfection of deity. All that it means to be God belongs equally and entirely to each of the three persons. The second half of the section unfolds the eternal relations of origin that distinguish the persons from one another. "The Father is of none, neither begotten, nor proceeding." The Father is the fountain of deity — not in the sense that He creates the Son and the Spirit (that would make them creatures), but in the sense that He alone is unoriginate, having His being from no other. He is the principium of the Trinity, the source without source. "The Son is eternally begotten of the Father." The word "eternally" bears the whole weight of orthodoxy. The begetting of the Son is not an event that took place at some point in the remote past, as though there were a time when the Son was not. That was the Arian heresy: "There was when He was not." Against this, the Divines insist that the generation of the Son is eternal: without beginning, without succession, without change. It is a relation, not an event. It is a communication of the whole divine essence from the Father to the Son in an eternal act that has never not been occurring. And "the Holy Ghost eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son." Here the Divines, in keeping with the entire Western tradition, confess the double procession: the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as from one principle. This is the filioque that the Eastern churches have historically contested, and the Divines were well aware of the controversy. But they judged, with Augustine and the entire Latin tradition, that the biblical pattern of the Son's participation in the sending of the Spirit (John 15:26, 16:7) reflects an eternal relation, not merely a temporal mission. The Spirit is the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of the Son, and His proceeding from both is the ground of His being sent by both. Robert Shaw, in his Exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith, captures the Divines' intention with clarity: "The design of this section is not to explain the manner in which the Son is begotten or the Spirit proceeds — for these are mysteries which no created intellect can fathom — but to affirm that such relations exist, that they are eternal, and that they alone distinguish the persons from one another. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not three Gods because they possess the same undivided essence. They are not one person because they are distinguished by personal properties. To deny either truth is to fall into error; to affirm both is to stand within the circle of catholic orthodoxy."

Theological Depth

John Calvin, writing in the first book of the Institutes, devotes the longest chapter in the entire work to the doctrine of the Trinity. His opening observation sets the tone for all that follows. Scripture, he notes, does not give us a naked declaration of the Triune name followed by a philosophical explanation of how three can be one. Instead, it presents the Father as the fountain of all good, the Son as the Wisdom and Order by which the Father acts, and the Spirit as the Power and Efficacy of that action. Then it bids us to distinguish the persons not by speculative inquiry into the how of eternal generation but by the pattern of God's works toward us. Calvin's so-called "economic" approach to the Trinity (tracing the distinctions of the persons through the works of creation, redemption, and sanctification) is not a rejection of the eternal relations but the pastoral application of them. "The Father," Calvin writes, "is called the beginning of activity, and the fountain and source of all things; the Son, wisdom, counsel, and the ordered disposition of all things; and the Spirit, the power and efficacy of that activity." But Calvin is careful to insist that this functional distinction rests upon an eternal distinction of persons. The Son does not become Wisdom at the moment of creation; He is eternally the Wisdom of the Father. The Spirit does not acquire power at Pentecost; He is eternally the Power of God. What God is toward us in time, He is in Himself from eternity. Calvin's treatment of the deity of Christ is particularly searching, and it addresses an error that persists in subtler forms to the present day. Some will grant that Christ is in some sense divine — divine in function, divine in honour, divine in the sense that God is uniquely present and active in Him — while refusing to confess that He is God in the fullest sense, of one substance with the Father. Calvin will have none of it. If Christ is not autotheos (God in Himself), then the worship the church renders to Him is idolatry, and the trust the believer places in Him for salvation is misplaced. Calvin marshals the Old Testament texts that the New Testament applies to Christ: the voice crying in the wilderness prepares the way of Jehovah (Isaiah 40:3), yet the Gospels apply this to Christ; the psalmist declares that Jehovah laid the foundations of the earth (Psalm 102:25), yet the author of Hebrews applies this very psalm to the Son (Hebrews 1:10); Isaiah saw the glory of Jehovah in the temple (Isaiah 6:1), yet John declares that Isaiah saw Christ's glory and spoke of Him (John 12:41). The cumulative force is overwhelming. The New Testament writers, without the slightest embarrassment, identify Jesus of Nazareth with the Jehovah of the Old Testament. Francis Turretin, the great Genevan scholastic whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology served as the textbook of Reformed orthodoxy for more than a century, takes up the Socinian challenge with analytical rigour. The Socinians argued that the doctrine of the Trinity is contrary to reason: three who are each fully God cannot be one God without logical contradiction. Turretin's response is a model of theological method. He distinguishes, first, between truths that are contrary to reason and truths that are above reason. A truth contrary to reason would involve a demonstrable logical contradiction, such as affirming that God both exists and does not exist in the same sense at the same time. But the Trinity involves no such contradiction, because the church does not say that God is one and three in the same respect. God is one in essence and three in person — one what and three whos. Affirming a distinction where there is a real distinction is not a contradiction. The Socinian objection, Turretin argues, assumes that the categories of created being (where one nature always corresponds to one person) apply without remainder to the uncreated being of God. But there is no reason to suppose that the Creator must conform to the patterns of creaturely existence. If God is infinite, incomprehensible, and transcendent, it is entirely fitting that His mode of being should transcend our categories rather than fit neatly within them. Turretin further defends the eternal generation against the charge that it implies a beginning. The generation of the Son, he explains, is not a process unfolding in time but an eternal relation without succession. As the sun has never existed without its brightness, though the brightness proceeds from the sun, so the Father has never existed without the Son, though the Son is eternally begotten. The Son is begotten, not made. His being is from the Father, but it is not after the Father in time, inferior to the Father in dignity, or separate from the Father in essence. Herman Witsius approaches the Trinity not as a speculative problem but as the fountain of every spiritual blessing. In his Economy of the Covenants, Witsius traces the distinct operations of the three persons in the covenant of redemption, showing that our salvation rests upon an eternal agreement among the persons of the Godhead. The Father, in the counsel of peace, appoints the Son to be the Mediator and promises Him a seed; the Son voluntarily undertakes to assume human nature and offer Himself a sacrifice for sin; the Spirit agrees to apply the purchased redemption to the hearts of the elect. The covenant of grace, as it is administered in time, is the execution of an eternal Trinitarian purpose. "What greater consolation," Witsius writes, "than to know that my salvation is the fruit of an eternal counsel in which each person of the blessed Trinity has taken His own distinct part? The Father has loved me from eternity and chosen me in Christ; the Son has undertaken to redeem me by His blood; the Spirit has pledged Himself to sanctify me and bring me to glory." A. A. Hodge draws out the practical weight of the Trinity with characteristic Princeton directness. The believer prays to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. He receives grace from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. He looks forward to eternal fellowship with the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. To lose the Trinitarian shape of the Christian life is to lose the Christian life itself, for there is no other way a sinner may approach God than that which God has established: through the Son and by the Spirit, to the Father. "The doctrine of the Trinity," Hodge concludes, "is not a piece of abstract theology to be learned and then set aside. It is a truth to be lived, for the triune God has so ordered our salvation that we cannot take a single step toward Him without engaging each of the three persons in their distinct operations."

Puritan Application

First, worship the triune God as He has revealed Himself, not as you would prefer Him to be. It is a persistent temptation of fallen human nature to reduce God to a manageable concept: to strip away the mystery and retain only what fits comfortably within the limits of our understanding. But the God who fits entirely within your mind is not the God of the Bible. The Trinity is not a puzzle to solve but a glory to adore, and the proper posture before it is not intellectual mastery but humble worship. When you bow your head to pray, address the Father consciously as the Father, remembering that He is the fountain of all being and the source of your election. Approach Him through the Son, consciously depending upon His mediation — there is no other way to the Father but by Him. Depend upon the Spirit, consciously yielding to His prompting, for you cannot pray as you ought apart from His assistance. Train your heart to live in the threefold Name into which you were baptised. Let your worship be Trinitarian not merely in form but in substance, for the God whom you worship is the Holy Trinity, and none other. Second, rest your assurance upon the Trinitarian foundation of your salvation. Many believers look inward for marks of grace — for evidences of faith, for signs of growth — and find their assurance rising and falling with their spiritual temperature. But the deepest ground of assurance lies not within you. It lies within God Himself. If the Father chose you in Christ before the foundation of the world, if the Son died for you and now intercedes at the right hand of the Father, if the Spirit has been poured into your heart as a seal and earnest of the inheritance to come, then your salvation rests upon a threefold cord that cannot be broken. The Father will not revoke His election. The Son will not lose those whom the Father has given Him. The Spirit will not abandon the work He has begun. When your own heart condemns you, look not within but above, to the eternal counsel of the triune God, and know that He who spared not His own Son but delivered Him up for you will with Him freely give you all things. Third, cherish the distinct work of each person of the Trinity in your daily sanctification. It is possible to believe in the Trinity doctrinally while living as a practical unitarian, calling upon God in a general way without attending to the distinct operations by which the triune God works in the believing soul. But the Scripture sets before us a richly differentiated pattern of divine activity. The Father is the source of every good and perfect gift, the One who works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, the disciplinarian who chastens you for your profit that you might share His holiness. The Son is the pattern to which you are being conformed, the living Head from whom all grace and nourishment flow into the body, the Captain who goes before you in the battle against sin. The Spirit is the indwelling power by which you mortify the deeds of the body, the seal impressed upon your heart, the firstfruits of the harvest to come. When temptation assails you, cry out to the Spirit for strength, fix your eyes upon the Son who overcame, and trust the Father who has promised not to let you be tempted beyond what you are able. When sorrow overwhelms you, pour out your heart to the Father of mercies, remember the Son who wept at Lazarus's tomb, and ask the Spirit to comfort you with the comfort wherewith you yourself have been comforted by God. Let every circumstance of life become an occasion for the exercise of Trinitarian faith. Fourth, guard the doctrine of the Trinity with vigilance and charity. The history of the church is littered with the wreckage of movements that began by slighting the doctrine of the Trinity and ended by losing the gospel itself. When the full deity of Christ is questioned, when the personality of the Spirit is denied, when the threeness of God is collapsed into an undifferentiated oneness or the oneness of God is fragmented into three divine beings, the Christian faith is not being refined. It is being destroyed. Hold fast, therefore, to the catholic orthodoxy confessed at Nicaea and Constantinople, recovered at the Reformation, and summarised in the Confession before you. Do not be ashamed that the language of homoousios and hypostasis and eternal generation is technical. Every discipline that deals with reality at depth develops technical language, and the doctrine of God is the deepest reality of all. At the same time, be patient with the doubter, gentle with the confused, clear with the inquirer. But do not confuse charity with indifference. Those who will not confess the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost as the one true God into whose name disciples are baptised have walked outside the circle of Christian confession. Fifth, let the eternal fellowship of the three persons become the pattern and the source of your fellowship with other believers. The triune God is not a solitary monad but a communion of persons united in perfect love. When He created humanity in His image, He created us for communion: with Himself and with one another. The persons of the Trinity dwell in one another in a mutual indwelling (what the Greek fathers called perichoresis), without confusion of persons and without division of essence. So the church, as the body of Christ and the temple of the Spirit, is called to a unity that preserves genuine diversity and a diversity that does not fracture genuine unity. Love one another as the Father has loved the Son. Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you. Maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, for there is one body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in you all. The Trinitarian shape of the church's common life is not a decorative flourish added to the doctrine of God. It is the natural outflow of the truth that the God we worship is Himself a communion of love, and those who are drawn into His life are drawn into that communion.

Prayer

O most blessed and glorious Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we bow before Thee with reverence and awe, for the mystery of Thy being is too deep for mortal minds to fathom and too bright for mortal eyes to behold. We bless Thee, O Father Almighty, fountain of deity, who art of none, neither begotten nor proceeding, source without source. Thou hast loved us with an everlasting love and chosen us in Thy Son before the foundation of the world. Grant us grace to trust Thy fatherly wisdom when we cannot trace Thy hand, and to rest in Thy fatherly love when our own hearts condemn us. We bless Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, eternal Son of the Father, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father. We adore Thee that Thou didst not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but didst empty Thyself, taking the form of a servant, and didst humble Thyself to death, even the death of the cross. By Thy precious blood Thou hast purchased our redemption; by Thy perfect righteousness Thou hast clothed our nakedness; by Thy continual intercession Thou dost plead our cause before the throne. Draw us ever nearer to Thyself, O blessed Mediator, and conform us to Thine image until we see Thee face to face. We bless Thee, O Holy Ghost, the Comforter, who proceedest from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son together art worshipped and glorified. We thank Thee for the new birth by which Thou hast raised us from spiritual death, for the sanctifying grace by which Thou dost mortify our corruptions and quicken our graces, for the seal by which Thou hast marked us as Thine own possession unto the day of redemption. Dwell in us ever more fully, O blessed Spirit. Produce in us the fruit of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, and self-control, to the praise of Thy glorious grace. O triune God, one in essence, three in person, forgive our shallow thoughts, our careless worship, our practical unitarianism that honours Thee with our lips while our hearts live as though Thou wert not. Teach us to worship Thee as Thou hast revealed Thyself. Let our prayers rise to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. Let our praises ascend to the One who was and is and is to come, worthy to receive glory and honour and power. And now unto Him that is able to keep us from falling, and to present us faultless before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy, to the only wise God our Saviour, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and for ever. Amen.