Thoughts

I have been thinking about the trinity recently and it is because in the space of a week, I saw two articles, one written by someone whom some address as pastor and another who does not claim to be a Christian but claims to be looking at the issue of the trinity from a “historical” perspective.
I won’t be attempting to refute each of them line by line because there is nothing new about what each of them is saying.
Christianity has suffered and suffers from both within and without. On the matter of internal suffering it is either a case of trying to help the discussion through some ingenious analysis or through a deliberate attempt to deceive. For those outside, the aim is simply to discredit Christ and thereby discredit every other thing that is built on him.
Two issues that amused me about both writings, one from each are, in the first case, the guy who claimed to be Christian and was “telling the truth” about why trinity is a lie and why the early church fathers and Rome and one of the councils decided to impose on all Christians the pagan idea of trinity. My amusement is how does that help his Christian brothers and sisters to grow in grace and in Christ. My answer to him is the Bible speaks of Christ having a divine nature and of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of God. Concerning the son in the Old Testament, Isaiah 9:6 speaks of the name of the child that will be born as Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace whom the government shall be upon his Shoulder. Of the Holy Spirit, Job in his predicament speaks of the spirit of God being his maker, Genesis 1:27 says “God created man in his image”. Any Christian who reads his bible and is growing in the faith knows the Bible does not use the word trinity but the idea of one God and three persons is there. It is something we will never fully comprehend in this side of heaven because our finitely small human minds can never fully grasp the majesty and splendor of God and so we rejoice in that which he has given to us in His Holy word. So to refer to this idea we can call each person by name or follow in the path of those whom have gone before us. The interesting thing is that whenever the issue comes up, everyone listening or reading knows that the issue being referenced is the deity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. From this view, it means the word conveys the idea it seeks to communicate in a language people can understand And do understand when it is used.
The second concern is from the second article, where the author seeks to communicate some element of New Testament criticism and also claimed to look at the issue from the point of an historian and based on his historical analysis, Jesus does not call himself God rather it is something his followers chose to do as a result of the influence of the Roman culture of the time where the emperors were addressed as gods. For him, the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke did not speak of Jesus as such rather it was John that took it upon himself to call Jesus God by some of the statements he made.
Like I said I was amused and the amusement here is that he chose to be historical by selection. Some books he will accept as historical because they see things in the same way, which the Christian church has always known and which is why those gospels are called synoptic. And refuse to accept the fourth as such because it does not see things the way the others do, which the Church has known since the second century and is the only book that records Christ saying he is God which supports his pre-existing bias. Of course he highlighted where they did not agree for they were written with different goals And immediate audience in mind, he did not speak of those areas where they agree and I think it is obvious why. The issue with this view is, following to its logical conclusion, that everything that the book speaks about and is not harmonized in the other books should be rejected. It is like saying because John reports that Jesus attended a wedding a Cana and others did not report it we can conclude that Jesus did not really attend any wedding as only John records it in his gospel.
Paul in Philippians 2:6 says “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped”, some will say grasped means in this context something to be held on to for an advantage. Christ’s equality with God was not something he was snatching at or seizing or forcibly holding on to it.
This is so because he was always God. Moreover, Paul in his letters greeted the recipients by the grace of the Father and the Lord Jesus, Paul was not confused about the matter. Jesus in Matt 28:18 claimed that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. That is a claim that…

“Now he has received the fullest possible authority, for it is authority in heaven and on earth. He is making clear that the limitations that applied throughout the incarnation no longer apply to him. He has supreme authority throughout the universe”.[^1]

The disciples understood this and what it meant, this was a claim that could only mean one thing, they heard him claim to be God.

On the idea of accepting Jesus to be a good teacher and someone whom can be a source of good and upright teaching but not accepted as God C.S. Lewis has the following to say

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’ That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. [^2]

[^1] Leon Morris, The Gospel according to Matthew, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, MI; Leicester, England: W.B. Eerdmans; Inter-Varsity Press, 1992), 745–746.
[^2] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 52.