Podcast: What Was the Trinity Doing on Christmas Day? (Matthew Emerson and Brandon Smith)

December 16, 2024 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Where Was the Trinity on Christmas?

In this episode, Matthew Emerson and Brandon Smith explain why the doctrine of inseparable operations is so foundational to an orthodox understanding of the Trinity, our approach to reading the Bible, and how it changes the way we view and worship God through this Christmas season and the whole year.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:23 - Same Essence, Same Actions

Matt Tully
Brandon and Matt, thank you so much for joining me on The Crossway Podcast today.

Brandon Smith
Thanks for having us.

Matthew Emerson
Glad to do it.

Matt Tully
Christmas is right around the corner, and we thought it would be fun to talk with you two about what is unquestionably the greatest mystery of our faith: the incarnation. At least that’s my opinion. This idea that God took on human flesh and became a man. I want to talk about that—the incarnation of the Son of God. But oftentimes, we naturally think of that as something that the Son did. Jesus the Son is the focus of our Christmas celebrations. And yet, in your new book that you two have written with Crossway, you want to nudge us in the direction of understanding the Christmas story, but not just that but all of salvation history, in a little bit of a different way than the way we often read it. So Brandon, start off by telling us a little bit more about the high-level emphasis of this book that you two have been working on.

Brandon Smith
The big idea, as it is classically called, is the doctrine of inseparable operations. Essentially, it’s the idea that every act of God is an act of the one God, even though we may see that action worked out, or terminating, on a particular person. So you bring up the incarnation. The Son is the only one who takes on flesh, but it’s the Father who sends the Son, it’s the Spirit by whom he is conceived in Mary. So even in the incarnation, the Son is, in some sense, a central figure, but it’s an act of the one triune God, because the Father and Spirit are involved in that act as well.

Matthew Emerson
The heart of the doctrine is very simply to say that all of God’s external acts are one. They’re undivided. Everything that God does, God does as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because the one God is Triune. And so when you talk about any particular act—creation, salvation, the restoration of creation at Christ’s second coming—these are all one act of one God, and we can’t divide them up and give creation to the Father and salvation to the Son and restoration to the Holy Spirit or something like that.

Matt Tully
But that’s how we often do it though. We often do speak in those ways. We assign primacy to different members of the Trinity for different parts of the work.

Matthew Emerson
Yeah. We often talk like that, and that’s exactly what Brandon and I are trying to address in the book is that in order to understand God rightly, we have to understand both his unity in essence and also his triunity in persons. He’s one God in three persons. And the way to distinguish the persons is not to distinguish them in terms of individual essences. They each share the same essence. And it’s also not to distinguish them by one of them doing an act exclusively by that one person. They each act as one as well. So they are one in essence; they act as one as the one God. When I talk about this in class, I often draw a pie chart. I say, “This is how we think about who God is.” I draw the circle, and I divide it into three parts. The Father has these attributes, the Son has these attributes, the Spirit has these attributes, the Father does this, the Son does that, the Spirit does these things. And this might be a little sacrilegious, but the example that I give is at the cross, we often think about the Father as pouring out his own individual wrath onto the Son, who is passively bearing that wrath. And then the Spirit is doing what? Taking a smoke break? What’s happening?

Matt Tully
We don’t know where he’s at in that moment.

Matthew Emerson
That’s the concrete example I can give to my students and say this is not the way actually that the Bible speaks about who God is and what he’s done. What the Bible says, again, is that God is one God. There’s one essence. He’s one in essence. And so, therefore, his acts are one. This is a really important emphasis in the early church and the development of what we would call Nicene Trinitarianism, in later developments related to how they talked about Christology, and all the way through the Council of Chalcedon. And it’s important because if the Son or the Spirit are somehow distinct in attribute from the Father, or distinct in action from the Father, then they’re not the same God. We’re not dealing with one god; we’re dealing with three gods. And really, what you’re dealing with at that point is the Father is a better or greater God than the Son and the Spirit. So this is all wrapped up in the early church’s discussion of the Son having the same essence as the Father, and the Spirit having the same essence as the Father. In affirming the same essence, we’re affirming the same actions as well.

06:16 - God’s Oneness and Threeness

Matt Tully
Brandon, as you think about the evangelical church today (maybe this is an unanswerable question), do you think the church tends to focus more on the three-ness of God— sometimes to an extreme that actually starts to violate what we know of the Trinity—or do you think the tendency tends to be to overemphasize the oneness of God? Do you think there’s a clear answer to that question as you think about the church generally today?

Brandon Smith
Generally, I think there are probably errors on both sides, depending on who you’re talking to. You’ve got groups like Oneness Pentecostals who get folded into evangelicalism. T. D. Jakes is a very big, well-known person in that world. And that is just what has classically been called sabellianism or modalism—there’s not three persons; there’s one God. And what that means is that Father, Son, and Spirit are different modes of God. So they’re not distinct persons, just different iterations of God revealing Himself in Scripture. So there's a lot of that floating around. Even in teaching in the church, I’ve seen that come in.

Matt Tully
There’s an intuitive sense to that. Modalism makes more intuitive sense to us, right?

Brandon Smith
Because it feels like three gods if you say what we’re saying, what Trinitarian theology says. To them it would feel that way. But then on the flip side, at least in my experience and pastoral ministry with students, I think the tri-theism, three-God problem is pretty rampant, partially because the way that we think as modern people is very individualistic. It’s my will, it’s my brain, it’s my decision, and so the persons of the Trinity must be that way. So there’s always this individualizing them at the expense of the unity. I always tell students you should feel like one in three are a guardrail on the road, and you just ping off of them. You start to focus a little bit too much here, and then you ping back to one. And that’s what the Bible is actually going to cause you to do. It’s going to cause you to always live in that space between there’s one God, and they are these three persons who are the one God. But I think a lot of our modern thinking of individualizing everything tends toward more of a tri-theistic separation type view.

Matt Tully
Is it possible to emphasize the doctrine of inseparable option to such an extent—too far—where it starts to actually call into question the threeness of God?

Brandon Smith
Like I said, I’ve heard the critique that inseparable operations is just fancy modalism. At its best, it’s not doing that. At its best, it’s trying to protect, in some sense, the unity and the distinction. In all the chapters in our book, we have a unity and a distinction in each chapter to show this is how the church has talked about this. They’re equally important. You don’t really overemphasize one over the other. God is one and three, and that’s important.

Matt Tully
And that’s important to emphasize. You would say that when it comes to Trinity, God’s oneness and threeness, neither of those has priority or precedence over the other. Is that correct?

Brandon Smith
They don’t need to be pitted against each other in some way. In some sense, as Christians we’re monotheists, so we always want to say one God. It’s always going to be something we want to focus on. But when you read the Bible, when you talk about the unity of God or the oneness of God, you have to talk about it in the way the Bible does. And when you start reading how the Bible talks about it, you have these three persons who share these attributes and share these actions and even share titles. Jesus is called the Alpha and the Omega in Revelation, for example. And so those kinds of things are always at play. And so what inseparable operations tries to do and I think what is so helpful, especially when you’re reading the Bible, is it’s that tool in your mind to say, I always want to make sure I don’t overemphasize one or the other. When I talk about the persons, I’m talking about their unity, and then I understand what that unity is, what that’s supposed to be.

Matthew Emerson
I think it’s important to add as well, and I’m trying to look up the Latin here because I can’t remember off the top of my head, the doctrine of inseparable operations is always accompanied by a very clear statement about the doctrine of appropriations. “The external works of the Trinity are undivided” is the doctrine of inseparable operations, but that’s always followed by “while also appropriating appropriately actions to each person.” I’m not getting that quote exactly right, but that second half is equally important. And like Brandon said, it’s one in three. Inseparable operations is emphasizing the oneness of God, but it’s always accompanied by an emphasis on appropriations, which is emphasizing the threeness of the persons of the one God. In the book we talk about this. It’s not just about inseparable operations, because you can’t talk about inseparable operations without talking about appropriation. So we define appropriation in the book. And in the Bible, particular actions of God are appropriated to particular persons of God, but that doesn’t mean that the other two persons are uninvolved, not acting, not a part of that action. It’s just appropriate to speak of that action in relation to that particular divine person.

Matt Tully
Beyond even just appropriation, is it correct to say that all three persons of the Godhead are involved with every action that God takes, but maybe involved in different ways? Is that correct? Because only the Son of God took on human flesh. God the Father did not take on human flesh in the same way or to the same extent. How would you talk about that?

Matthew Emerson
There’s a word that is used in this conversation: terminate. Particular actions terminate on a particular divine person in a particular way. And also particular divine actions terminate on creaturely realities in particular ways. And so in the incarnation, both of those things are happening. And it is particularly the person of the Son who becomes incarnate, but it is not only the Son who is acting in the incarnation. As Brandon said in the beginning, it’s the Father who sends the Son; it’s the Son who is sent; and it’s the Spirit by whom the Son is sent in the miraculous conception.

Brandon Smith
Another example I always think of biblically is the indwelling of the Spirit. That terminates on the Spirit. We are temples of God by the Spirit, but Jesus says in John, “When the Spirit comes, my Father and I will make our home with you.” Or Paul talks about Christ living in us: “It’s no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me.” So it’s fair to say that the Spirit indwells us, but where the Spirit is the Father and Son are also. This is the way I always do it with students: Does the Holy Spirit indwell you? Or does the Father indwell you? Or does the Spirit indwell you? The answer, really, is yes. Technically, you would talk about the Spirit indwelling us, but you would never say the Father and Son are not there or not part of it or off doing something else, waiting for us to come back or something. Because, actually, that’s the way the Bible talks. That’s what Jesus says: “When the Spirit comes, my Father and I will make our home with you.” So even biblically speaking, if you’re paying attention to the patterns of language in the Bible, you’ll find the resurrection is an example of this, where Jesus is the one who raises, but the Father raised him from the dead. The Bible says the Spirit raised him from the dead. And at one point, Jesus says, “I lay my life down, and I take it up again.” So who raised Jesus from the dead? The Father, Son, and Spirit. So if you read the Bible and you pick up on the patterns of the way the Bible speaks, even where those actions terminate, you’re always going to be able to find pretty easily how those things all work together among the persons.

13:34 - The Father’s Role in the Incarnation

Matt Tully
Let’s actually get into the incarnation story itself, the Christmas story. I think sometimes people can have the sense that these are theologians, like yourselves, imposing these extrabiblical categories and nuances on things, and it’s an imposition on the biblical text. But I hear you saying, Brandon, that this is really an effort to try to be faithful to restate in a clear way what Scripture actually is teaching on these things. We’re trying to do justice to these different passages that give us different angles on a single reality, namely God himself. And so what are some of the key passages that you’d point to that speak to—I’ll start with the Father—the Father’s role in the sending of a Son in the incarnation?

Brandon Smith
A little clarification: I’d say that there are specific passages and there are also theological patterns that you have to hold in. Throughout the Gospel of Matthew, he talks about, “I have come to X, Y, Z.” The Father has sent him to do these things. So even if in Matthew 1 and 2 there’s not a specific “the Father sent the Son into the womb of Mary,” that kind of thing, that’s going to come up really quickly. Now, of course in Matthew you have the phrase “conceived by the Holy Spirit.” It’s very specific. But that the whole story of Jesus is the idea that “I have come to do these things that my Father has sent me to do.”

Matt Tully
Sent by the Father.

Brandon Smith
So that should just always be in your mind. So I think that’s where it’s not just the passages, although there are passages, obviously, where he talks about being sent, but also you have to have those things in mind to be able to apply the passages where it’s not as clear. With the Father and the incarnation, that’s a good example of that.

Matthew Emerson
I think also, along with the “I have come to . . . etc.,” which speaks to both the Father and the Son, but if we’re talking specifically about the Father, this “I have come” language is implying being sent to do something. That language is then explicit in John. “The Father has sent me into the world to do X, Y, Z.”

Matt Tully
I think of John 3:16–17: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” So there we get a very clear statement of God sent his Son into the world in order that the world might be saved through him. So is there more beyond just the idea of the Father sending the Son? Are there other ways in which we would say that the Father was involved in the incarnation?

Matthew Emerson
Well, I think I would say it depends on how narrowly or broadly you mean incarnation. The sending language is, I think, the major way that the Gospels describe the Father’s act in the incarnation, or appropriating the incarnation of the Father. I guess you could say it that way. I also think, though, that throughout Christ’s life, if you take incarnation more broadly, his earthly ministry—certainly his baptism and the transfiguration—are really key places to talk about the Father’s activity in the incarnation, namely his statement that “this is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” He is acknowledging Christ according to his humanity as Israel’s Messiah.

Brandon Smith
And the Father receives his obedience. He says, “The Father’s going to glorify me. I’m going to hand all these things over to my Father.” So there’s an act of the Father receiving the benefits and the point of the incarnation on the other end.

Matt Tully
“Not to do my will, but the will of the Father who sent me.”

Brandon Smith
That’s all an active work of the Father. It’s not like he sits back and waits for Jesus to go take care of everything.There’s this active element. The Father’s always there. The father’s always with him. “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” He’s being imaged by him. All those kinds of things.

17:23 - The Holy Spirit’s Role in the Incarnation

Matt Tully
Let’s talk about the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is one who, because there’s this explicit, clear passage that speaks of the Holy Spirit overshadowing Mary, coming upon Mary and causing her to be pregnant, that’s a little bit more obvious to us. But even that story can be confusing to us. What is going on here? What is the Spirit’s role in the conception and birth of Jesus? How would you describe that?

Matthew Emerson
Well, let me tell you what’s not going on. No, I’m just kidding.

Matt Tully
Well, it’s important to allude to that because I think sometimes people have gone wrong. Non-Christians, certainly, people from other religions who get confused about what it is that we believe about the Holy Spirit and Mary and what happened.

Matthew Emerson
It’s not a sexual encounter. Just to state it.

Brandon Smith
Mormons are very clear about the Father’s role in a sexual, biological encounter with the Spirit. So yeah, another thing that separates us from Mormons.

Matthew Emerson
Yes. When you talk about the Spirit overshadowing Mary, we’re talking about the creation of the human nature of the person of Jesus Christ, hypostatically uniting the human nature with the divine nature. The person of Jesus Christ exists in the moment of the miraculous conception, and that’s the work of the Holy Spirit. The hypostatic union is the work of the Holy Spirit.

Matt Tully
In that passage where it talks about the Spirit and Mary, is there an illusion back to Genesis with the Spirit hovering over the waters and the Spirit’s role in creation itself?

Matthew Emerson
In the early church, they made a very clear connection between the Spirit hovering over the face of the waters and then Christ’s three descents in his incarnation. So he descends, first of all, into the womb of Mary. Then he descends into the waters of baptism in the Jordan river. And then he descends into the waters of death in between his death and resurrection. And so I do think that language of the Spirit overshadowing is an allusion to the hovering over the waters of Genesis 1:2. Yeah. Now, if you don’t want to take the rest of it as a thing, that’s fine. But I do think that at least in the incarnation, that’s an allusion to Genesis 1, for sure.

Matt Tully
What other ways do we see the Holy Spirit involved with the earthly ministry of Jesus over the course of his life?

Brandon Smith
You have, of course, that Jesus is a Spirit-empowered man. The Spirit descends upon him. Something that also gets confused there sometimes is sometimes you get the teaching that, in Philippians 2, Jesus empties himself and becomes a man and becomes a servant. So what he does is he stops being God for a while, and now the Spirit allows him to do God stuff.

Matt Tully
He’s now doing it through the power of the Spirit, just like the rest of us.

Brandon Smith
Yes. It’s true that he is a Spirit-empowered man. It’s true that he is the true image of the Father, the true human, the true second Adam who is the Spirit-empowered man who is obedient. That’s all true. But if he stops being God, he’s not God anymore. Can God stop being God any more than you can stop being human? And people say, “Oh, he’s more powerful than us, so maybe he could stop being himself.”

Matt Tully
“God can do anything.”

Brandon Smith
But there’s something there of Jesus—I talk about it as there’s a two-fold way that Jesus and the Spirit interact (for lack of a better word in there). The Father, Son, and Spirit always act inseparably, so there’s never a time the Spirit is not working with and alongside and in complete unity with the Son. And also, in his human ministry, there’s a sense in which he indwells and empowers Jesus. So according to his divinity and his humanity, there’s a unity between the Son and the Spirit. So he’s Spirit-empowered, he’s casting out demons, he’s raising people from the dead. And sometimes, for example, Luke will say he does this by the power of the Spirit. Sometimes he just does it. It’s just Jesus that does it. Or sometimes these things are attributed to the name of Jesus and not to the Spirit. And again, that’s why you need that broader picture of all the way the Bible speaks so that you can see, like in Matthew, where the Spirit doesn’t do anything for a while. He drives Jesus into the wilderness, and you don’t hear from him for a little bit. And you can be tempted to think, Well, where’d the Spirit go? Well, we already know the Spirit is with him, so everything he does is inseparable from the Spirit and also by the power of the Spirit. And so that’s where you have to have the idea that Jesus is always acting as God man at the same time, because he’s one person with two natures. And so the Spirit is always involved in that as well.

Matt Tully
When I talked with Fred Sanders on this podcast about the Holy Spirit a number of months ago, he pointed out that, “Scripture talks about the Holy Spirit less than the Father and the Son, less concretely than the Father and the Son, and later than the Father and the Son.” And because of this, he argued that it’s appropriate for Christians to emphasize the role, the activity of the Holy Spirit in a way that’s proportionate to the way that Scripture speaks of him. What do you make of that argument when it comes to Jesus’s life and ministry and just how we understand the Spirit’s role in all of this?

Brandon Smith
I think that maybe a way to think about it is that there is an ordering to the way that the Trinity acts in salvation. Students will ask me, for example, “Is it okay for me to pray to the Holy Spirit?” And I will say, “Yes, he’s God.” Or they’ll ask, “Is it okay for me to pray to Jesus?” Well, yeah, he’s God. But what is the biblical pattern of how we think about prayer? We pray to the Father in the name of the Son by the Spirit. So it’s not an elevation of one over the other, thinking that one’s more important or something like that. The way I would think about it, and this may not be exactly how Fred is thinking about it—but by the way, Fred is right. So if there’s any disagreement, just assume Fred’s right. But I think there is a sense in which there is an order to the way the biblical language works. And if you have that order right, you don’t have an overemphasis on the Spirit. It’s possible to overemphasize the Father, Son, or Spirit if you’re not reading the Bible in a proportionate and ordered way. So I think that’s maybe one way to think about it is that we pray to the Father in the name of the Son by the Spirit. The father and the Son send the Spirit so that we can come back to the Father and Son. That type of ordered language does help us regulate the way that we talk about these things.

Matthew Emerson
I want to add that that order exists because of how God exists in himself. Brandon mentioned that at the very end, but just to really draw that out, it’s the Son who is begotten eternally from the Father, who is the eternally begotten image of the Father.

Matt Tully
That’s not just a function of how God chose to reveal himself to us.

Matthew Emerson
Right. He exists in that way, and so it’s appropriate that in the economy of redemption, in order to be redeemed and restored to the Father, it’s through the Son. In order to know the Father, it’s through the Son. In order to see the Father, it’s through seeing the Son. It’s appropriate. It’s also appropriate because the Spirit is eternally spirated or eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son, that the Spirit is the person through whom we are restored to the Son and the Father. It’s the person of the Spirit who regenerates our hearts, unites us with Christ, etc. That order of things that Brandon mentioned is an order that’s not merely something that happens outwardly as God interacts with his world. It is reflective of how he exists in himself.

24:32 - Do I Need to Mention All Three Members of the Trinity All the Time?

Matt Tully
Maybe a number of more practical questions for us as we approach Christmas and approach all the Christmas hymns we’re going to be singing this season, all the celebrations that we’re going to be having, the Bible readings we’re going to be doing as families. A number of these questions could help us think a little bit more carefully about what it is that we’re singing and praying and reading about this season. Does this doctrine of inseparable operations suggest that we always need to mention all three members of the Trinity whenever we talk about Christmas or the incarnation or salvation more generally?

Matthew Emerson
Yes. Gregory of Nazianzus has a famous quote where he says, “When I think of the One, I can’t help but think of the Three. And when I think of Three, I can’t help but think of the One.” I think that’s reality that when we talk about God, when we talk about what he’s done, we are always talking about the one God who has always and will always exist in three persons—Father, Son, and Holy spirit. And so again, it’s appropriate to appropriate the incarnation to the Son. But we cannot talk about the incarnation in a thoroughly biblical way or in a faithfully theological way without also talking about the Father and the Spirit.

Brandon Smith
I think if you’re thinking about liturgy and songs and stuff like that, it’s not like every service you have to make sure that every person is always in every song, or never pick a song that doesn’t talk about three, because you actually won’t have many songs to sing. But again, going back to maybe Fred’s proportionate language, there is a sense in which you do need to make sure that you’re considering and thinking about, How do I talk about these three persons? Am I giving each person they’re due (for lack of a better word)? It makes total sense at Christmas to focus on Jesus. There’s never anything wrong with focusing on Jesus. But if you do it at the expense—

Matthew Emerson
He’s the reason for the season.

Brandon Smith
That’s right. That’s what they say. But there’s a sense in which you can overemphasize Jesus at the expense of the Father and Spirit in ways that are inappropriate. And that’s something I think you just have to be cognizant of, especially those in leadership who are writing liturgies and picking songs and preaching sermons. There’s a sense in which it’s proportionate to talk about Jesus a lot at Christmas, but we can do it too much.

26:47 - Should I Pray to All Three Members of the Trinity?

Matt Tully
Should we always pray to all three members of the Trinity, or should we only pray to the Father, in keeping with the Lord’s prayer?

Brandon Smith
I default to, like I said earlier, the biblical pattern, what Jesus says in Matthew 6: it’s Father, Son, in the name and the power of the Spirit. I’ll tell a personal story. When I was at a church, our worship guy would always pray to Jesus. He’d always start his prayers with “Jesus.” But he would oftentimes slip into, “Jesus, thank you for sending your Son.” Okay, well, Jesus doesn’t have a Son. That’s a real problem. And so there was a time where I finally had that conversation with him. “Look, if you’re going to pray to Jesus, you need to have, again, a well-ordered theology that tells you I’m praying to Jesus right now.” And so we talked about that a lot, just in terms of how we pray, because it’s such an obvious example of where you can lapse into I forget who I’m praying to or something like that. So again, he’s God. Yes, you can pray to him. He is a mediator. Those things are true. And God can overcome all of our poor, bad, heretical prayers. At the same token, though, I think if you are following biblical patterns, generally speaking, you’re able to pray in such a way that’s not just like, “Oh, I didn’t do any heresy today,” but actually you’re praying the way the Bible tells you to pray and you’re teaching people to pray in the way that the Bible teaches you to pray.

28:06 - Explaining the Doctrine of Inseparable Operations to a Six-Year-Old

Matt Tully
You both are fathers of relatively young kids, and I wonder if you could help the parents listening right now. How would you explain the doctrine of the inseparable operations to my six-year-old?

Brandon Smith
Fortunately, we’ve done this a million times.

Matthew Emerson
We’re experts at it.

Matt Tully
I imagine your family devotions around the tables: “What’s our Trinitarian lesson for this evening, kids?”

Brandon Smith
My wife did tell me that I wasn’t allowed to critique my kid’s prayers if they weren’t good Trinitarian prayers.

Matt Tully
Let them just pray a little bit first.

Brandon Smith
Let them work it out.

Matthew Emerson
I think you just have to continue to press home anytime they ask a question or anytime they make a statement or anytime you make a statement, it’s always God is one. There’s only one God, and that one God exists in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The actions that God makes in the world, that God does to the world, etc., he’s one God and he acts as one. You would use a little bit simpler language, but it’s always the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit acting together as the one God. I have a hard time understanding the eternal processions. My students surely have a hard time. I’m not going to try to get in the weeds on like, “Hey, let’s talk about Proverbs 8, and let me show you how the Son is eternally begotten from the Father.” No. The Son is God. He’s fully God. The Father is also fully God. The Holy Spirit is also fully God. There’s not three gods. There’s one God.

Matt Tully
I think that’s an encouraging comment that you made just there, because I think sometimes we want to understand this, we want to understand and do justice to what the Bible teaches on these things, and yet there is a sense in which we don’t have to fully understand how this works.

Brandon Smith
We can’t.

Matt Tully
We can’t. How has that been an encouragement to you, coming to accept the fact that we can’t actually fully unpack, fully understand, even fully explain what is happening here in the Godhead?

Brandon Smith
Adonis Vidu has a great quote where he says, “What all Trinitarian theology is ultimately doing is helping you pattern your language after the Bible’s language, essentially.” So it’s not about full comprehension. That’s not possible. That’s part of the idea that you can affirm things that you can’t comprehend. You can affirm the fact that God is providential over your life and that God is sovereign over your life and that God knows the beginning from the end and God knows what’s going to happen tomorrow and God. You don’t fully understand that, but you can affirm that’s true because you know it’s true biblically and things like that. The Trinity, at the end of the day, is no different. You’re affirming what the Bible teaches as best as you can. You’re digging as deep as you can go, always recognizing that there’s not going to be a full comprehension. Even if you’re talking about kids, the analogy thing always comes up. Should we do analogies for the Trinity? And I always default—

Matt Tully
What’s your least favorite Trinitarian analogy?

Brandon Smith
I heard one the other day about a fisherman. The Father is the fisherman, the Son is the rod, and the Spirit is the hook and the bait that pulls people back.

Matthew Emerson
A heresy, Patrick.

Brandon Smith
I haven’t heard that one before. But it’s interesting because students are always asking that question. Can I use analogies with kids? And there’s almost always a heresy that falls behind the analogy. But I actually think there’s a deeper point there, for us and for our kids, which is that part of the Christian faith is an acceptance of a mystery and a belief by faith and a faith seeking understanding. And when you’re teaching your kids basically, “Hey, you can figure this all out. Let me give you this puzzle piece,” what you’re actually doing is teaching your kids that the Christian faith is something that you can put in a Petri dish and examine. I want my kids to be able to affirm these things without fully understanding them, because you’re actually preparing them for the Christian life. Again, we don’t fully understand. We struggle sometimes. I have a literal PhD on the doctrine of the Trinity, and I sometimes am like, “Wait, what am I saying?” But with my kids, I go through the New City Catechism with my kids. And my oldest, I will say, I’ll ask her the question about God, and she’ll say, “There’s one God. There are three persons, Father, Son, and Hoy Spirit.” And I’ll say, “So are there three gods?” “No.” “Is there one person?” “No.” Got it. If she’s got that in place, the other things will come. And hopefully, and going back to Matt’s point about discipleship, if you are teaching kids, your people, and yourself that here is the basic biblical way the Bible talks about God, then when the errors come up, when the problems come up, you have a grid through which you can say, “Okay, well, it can’t be this and it can’t be this. So what are my options I can work through?” So Jesus can’t not be God anymore in the incarnation. That just doesn’t work. So what are my other options? So sometimes you’re just building in that faith seeking understanding and those guardrails that can help you realize I’m never going to fully comprehend, but I can affirm these things based on how the Bible speaks.

Matt Tully
Yeah, absolutely. Brandon and Matt, thank you for helping us to do that, helping us to think more biblically about some of these tricky doctrines that we confess, we believe, we love, and especially as we enter into the most wonderful time of the year. Thanks a lot.

Brandon Smith
Thanks, Matt.

Matthew Emerson
Thanks, Matt.

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