Avoiding Heresy When Explaining the Trinity
Trinity Pie Chart
There are better and worse ways to explain the Trinity. We can have a pie chart idea where we split God up into parts, and this is one of the worst ways to explain the Trinity. There is something to the fact that the biblical material talks about the actions of God sometimes in ways that appropriate that action to a particular divine person.
Think about Ephesians 1, for instance, and this long statement by Paul about how the Father is doing this and the Son does this and the Spirit does this. So it’s not wrong to talk about certain actions of God with reference to just one of the divine persons, as long as that’s in the context of a wider understanding of the fact that God’s actions are actually inseparable.
The problem comes when we forget that wider context where we’re not teaching our people the doctrine of the Trinity, we’re not teaching them about God’s unity, and we’re not teaching them the grammar of the doctrine of the Trinity. And then we start singing songs like that or speaking that way, and they have no context for that statement, and they assume that pie chart in their head, even if we’re not teaching that.
Beholding the Triune God
Matthew Y. Emerson, Brandon D. Smith
This concise introduction to the doctrine of inseparable operations explores the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in relation to salvation, revelation, communion, and more.
So that’s the particular kind of analogy that we want to avoid, where the Father is doing this, the Son’s doing that, the Spirit’s doing this, and the three of them are not actually doing anything at once. They’re each doing their own thing.
The illustration I often use in class is the cross. When we talk about the cross, we talk about how the Son bears the Father’s wrath, which is a true way of speaking about what’s happening at the crucifixion, but we can talk about that in such a way that what we’re really communicating is the Son is the only one who experiences anything in terms of the crucifixion. And then the Father is the only one who’s pouring out wrath.
There are appropriate ways to describe that, but what we’re doing is we’re separating out an attribute of God—namely, wrath—and saying it’s only the Father that is doing this. That’s that pie chart. When we talk about the cross, we’re almost pitting the Father and the Son against each other—both in their attributes and their actions.
I ask my students, “What’s the Spirit doing? Is he on a break, taking his fifteen minutes? What’s happening with the Spirit?”
That’s the unhelpful way of talking about the Trinity. I want to help us change and grow in our understanding of how we talk about God, especially in terms of the oneness and the unity of his actions.
Matthew Y. Emerson is coauthor with Brandon D. Smith of Beholding the Triune God: The Inseparable Work of Father, Son, and Spirit.
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