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The Anti-Trinity

February 11, 2013 in Uncategorized with 48 Comments

antitrinity

Guest post by Thaddeus Williams

Immanuel Kant thought that, ”Taken literally, absolutely nothing worthwhile for the practical life can be made out of the doctrine of the Trinity” (The Conflict of the Faculties, 1798). I am convinced by Scripture and experience that the great German philosopher could not have been more wrong on this point. The one God who exists as three inter-loving Persons has everything to do with “the practical life.” The Trinity is a precious and practical doctrine, one that touches all of life—how we break anti-loving cycles in our hearts, how we pray, how we worship, how we do church, how we build relationships, etc.

Perhaps Kant’s assessment was informed by a failure of 18th century European churches to intentionally live out Trinitarian realities. As J. Scott Horrell laments, “We have done little to consciously express Trinitarian belief in our daily lives and in the community and mission of the church” (“An Ontology of Mission” in Global Missiology, Vol. 1 No. 6 [2008]). In other words, we need not only Trinitarian orthodoxy—correct doctrine of the Trinity—but also Trinitarian orthopraxy—correct practice that accurately reflects the reality of one God who exists as three inter-loving Persons. Jesus prayed for His church to form a kind of angled mirror, bonded together with the kind of love that directs the world’s gaze upward to behold the Triune God of love (Jn. 17:11-24). Are we reflecting the Triune God clearly, or do our churches often form more of a cracked mirror, fragmented shards with animosities and apathies caked like mud, refracting little light from above?

THE ANTI-TRINITY

We could list many reasons why churches fail to clearly reflect Trinitarian reality to the world. I’d like to focus, briefly, on just one reason that is rarely considered. I am convinced that one reason we often fail to reflect the Trinity is that we often do not have a robust enough doctrine of the anti-Trinity. Before sewing a scarlet H onto my tweed jacket, allow me to explain what I mean by “the anti-Trinity”:

Trinitarian heresies tend to focus on one divine Person or another while devaluing the other two. Arius from the 4th century upheld the Father’s divinity while devaluing the Son and Spirit. Many within today’s “Jesus Only” movement have done the same with the Son, at the expense of the Father and Spirit, and so on. A biblical view of the Trinity demands that our theology is not FATHER, son, and holy spirit. Or father, SON, and holy spirit. Or father, son, and HOLY SPIRIT. A biblical view exalts the one God who exists as FATHER, SON, AND HOLY SPIRIT—all equally divine Persons, each worthy of worship, love, and awe.

Yet the Bible also reveals an unholy anti-Trinity—three destructive forces at work against the Triune Creator’s mission. Protestant Reformers, like Martin Luther, saw this three-headed monster accurately as the Devil, the Flesh, and the World. I call these three “the anti-Trinity,” not because they afford us with some kind of analogy of how one God could exist as three Persons (they offer no such analogy), but because the Devil, the Flesh, and the World are set directly at odds against the redemptive mission of the Triune God. We must not downplay the reality of any of these three destructive forces as we join the Triune God’s mission.

Biblically, just who are the members of the anti-Trinity?

THE DEVIL

The Devil cannot be allegorized away as some fictional villain, like Darth Vader or the Joker. In the Bible, Satan and his legions are really there and launch daily warfare against God. Whereas the Father—the first member of the holy Trinity—is our great “Justifier,” declaring us “not guilty,” (Rom. 3:26), a God who “never lies” (Tit. 1:2) and who “gives life” (Ac. 17:25), the first member of the anti-Trinity is the great “accuser” (Lk. 22:21; Jn. 12:31), “the father of lies” who “was a murderer from the beginning” (Jn. 8:44). We must prayerfully suit up with the armor of faith, truth, and the gospel, and fight back against Satan’s power with Scripture’s power (Eph. 6:10-18). If we ignore the first member of the anti-Trinity then we live out a kind of oxymoronical “Christian naturalism,” oblivious to invisible warfare, naked on the battlefield, duped by the Devil’s great trick of convincing the world that he isn’t real.

If, however, we stop with the “father of lies” then we become a kind of inverted mirror image of the Arian who limits His concept of God only to the Father. As Arianism keeps people from engaging in worship of the Son and the Spirit as they should, so limiting our concept of evil to the Devil keeps us from engaging in warfare against the Flesh and the World as we should. With such an inadequate view of the anti-Trinity, we end up with an unhealthy, superstitious fixation on the invisible world. We find Satan in every sniffle, fear demons in every dark corner, and blame Beelzebub for our own self-induced blunders. “The devil made me do it,” we may say, when in reality, “My own stupidity and addiction to the rush of sin made me do it.” We end up more preoccupied with “the father of lies” (Jn. 8:44) than focused on “the Father of Lights from whom all good things come” (Jam. 1:17).

THE FLESH

The second unholy member of the Bible’s anti-Trinity was often referred to by Paul as “the flesh.” By “flesh” Paul did not mean our hundred-or-so pounds of carbon and H20. Rather by “the flesh” Paul referred to the sin nature, that deep drive within all of us to do things our own way, by our own power, for our own glory. It’s that force inside you like a giant invisible magnet pulling you back into those same old selfish sins. It is the force that the great Russian novelist (and notorious gambling addict), Dostoyevsky, knew so well when he observed that “in every man, a demon lies hidden.” Or as INXS sang, “Every single one of us has a devil inside.”

Narrowing our view of evil to demons out there causes us to ignore the the “demon” in here, the evil propensities within our own hearts, the fact that, in a sense, we are all “possessed” by that evil force Paul called our “flesh.” What are we to do with the second member of the anti-Trinity? Paul, again using warfare terminology, commands us to “kill” it prayerfully by the power of the Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:13). The Puritans used to call this sacred duty “mortification.” If we are not orthodox enough in our view of the anti-Trinity, if we limit our concept of evil only to the Flesh, then we may grow preoccupied with ourselves, morbidly introspective, and stray armorless into spiritual warfare against the Devil out there.

THE WORLD

The Bible’s third member of the anti-Trinity is “the world.” The Bible does not picture the 6.6 sextillion ton sphere of heavy elements spinning around the sun as some evil force (God called that world “good” when he made it). Rather, the World as an evil entity refers more to the “spirit of the age,” the social system that hails greedy consumption, radical self-assertion, constant pleasure-center brain stimulation, and boundless sexual exploration as seminal virtues (1 Jn. 2:16; Eph. 4:17-20; 2 Pet. 2:12-14). It is a system that measures people’s stature in terms of the cars on their driveway, the zeroes on their bank statement, and the notches on their bedpost. Friendship with this World system (again using the Bible’s warfare language) is to make ourselves “an enemy” of the God who wants so much more for His creatures (Jam. 4:4).

We are not commanded, however, to build cult compounds, stockpiled with guns behind high walls sealed off safely from this world. We are called to live in this world in a radically countercultural and redemptive way. We are to think of ourselves like Paul, as “crucified to the world” (Gal. 6:14), too dead and nailed to a cross to leap off and indulge in its falsely advertised, ultimately unsatisfying, and self-destructive pleasures. We are to be non-conformists against “the pattern on this world” (Rom. 12:2), refuting a system of self-exaltation with lives of irrefutable, self-sacrificial love.

Again, limiting our concept of evil to this member of the anti-Trinity, leaves us detrimentally imbalanced. We find ourselves on a self-righteous crusade against all the evil forces in culture, e.g., those socialist lefties out there, those God-hating pagans out there, those Christmas-banning secularists out there. We disregard the evils in here, the corruption in our own hearts. It is, after all, far easier to blame the unbelieving world than face ourselves squarely in the mirror. Is it any wonder with such an inadequate view of the anti-Trinity that the loudest spokesmen against culture’s evils are so often the same names making scandalous headlines with their own personal evils? In our battle against external evils it is all too easy to leave our internal evils unexamined and unopposed. Without a biblical awareness of the anti-Trinity, we become the very evils we are fighting.

WHICH ENEMY DO YOU IGNORE?

To echo my original thesis: one reason we often fail to reflect the Trinity well is that we often do not have a robust enough doctrine of the anti-Trinity. We reduce evil to the Devil, the Flesh, OR the World, when all three are daily at war against our joy in God and the joy of the nations. We must engage all three or we can expect no more victory than the Allies had they only fought one or two of Word War II’s Axis powers. Which malicious member(s) of the anti-Trinity do you most often ignore? On which battlefront does your soul stand unguarded? Which enemy are you not assaulting with prayer, truth, faith, and love? Do not be intimidated, overwhelmed, or discouraged. The anti-Trinity we face together is no match for a Triune God of love—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who alone can secure our victory against the Devil, the Flesh, and the World.

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Reformation Resources and Interview

November 1, 2012 in BLB News with 5 Comments

The preservation of the gospel of Christ is always worth celebrating, now as in any era. In 1517, one such notable defense was carried out by Martin Luther as he strove to return the church to purity of faith in the midst of growing corruption. His challenge to draw the church from the interference of merely human influences and back to a life founded upon the Word of God was issued in the form of ninety‐five theses. In honor of the 31st of October’s Reformation Day (a day meant to celebrate the preservation of the glorious gospel of our salvation), we present Luther’s Ninety‐Five Theses. In addition, here is an mp3 audio message on Reformation Day, by Pastor Kevin Otsuji of Reverence Bible Church.

We also ask: Is Reformation theology still relevant today?

We certainly think so. We contacted Christian apologist Thaddeus Williams (Ph.D., Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; Theology Professor, Biola University) and asked him why Reformation thinking needs to continue today. Here’s what he said:

Is Reformation theology still relevant today? Absolutely! It reminds us that we have a big God and that salvation is found in Him alone. We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for God’s glory alone. And we know this because Scripture alone is our highest standard for truth. We don’t determine what is good and true about God. God does.

I would argue that the biggest problem in the church today is that many of us have too small a view of who God is. We have shrunk an infinite being. We have diminished His glory and put Him into very small and manageable boxes. This ignores the objectively there God altogether to the point that He becomes (to us) just a projection of what we think He is like, what we feel He should be like.

We need a new reformation—a re-reformation. We, as the church in the 21st century, need to recapture a sense of the grandeur of God—how vast and awesome He is. We need a biblical view of His glory. We need a biblical view of His sovereignty. We need a biblical view of what it means to say He’s both transcendently holy and imminently relational. We need a biblical vision of His love, His mercy, His justice, His grace. If we start there, awestruck by the infinite God at the center of our worldview, then many other issues in our church world will sort of self-fix. As true worship is happening, our marriages will get better, our churches will have less scandals, and our joy will be maximized in Jesus Christ.

Allow me to give a few historical examples of this.

Way back in the first century, we find Jesus Christ championing a big view of God. Meanwhile, there are these Pharisees who had shrunk their view of God by essentially saying, “At the end of the day, our rule-keeping and our mile-long lists of dos and don’ts, that is where we get our righteousness.” Jesus confronts this man-centered view of salvation (which, by the way, is no good news at all). He reminds the Pharisees that they are not the point. The glory of God is!

The same debate breaks out later in the first century. Only this time, you have the apostle Paul on one side and the Judaizers on the other. The Judaizers were a group of Jews who were telling all the Gentiles (non-Jews) that if you want to get saved, you’ve got to supplement God’s grace with circumcision and adherence to all kinds of rituals within the Jewish culture. The apostle Paul boldly rose to the challenge, confronted the Judaizers, and revealed that their message of salvation is a different gospel altogether. After all, if salvation is a man-centered endeavor that comes down to us jumping through religious hoops, then what’s so good about that news? Paul contended for a radically God-centered view of reality.

If we move forward in church history to the 4th century, we find the same scenario. Same question, new century. Pelagius was a monk who said that man had the power in and of himself to choose salvation. Augustine contended against him, claiming that Pelagius had strayed off a biblical course and down the dead-end road of works-based salvation. Augustine fought to bring the popular theology of the day back to the Bible alone—back to a God who does the saving. What’s interesting is that at this point, the fourth century Roman Catholic Church actually sides with Augustine and deems Pelagianism heretical.

In the 16th century, however, the Roman Catholic Church had slid from a God-centered view back into a man-centered view of salvation. Under their teachings, one could buy a plenary indulgence—a little sheet of paper that was basically a sure-shot passport to heaven. One could also visit a number of sacred sites and gaze upon the relics of Saint Peter and others. It was a man-centered movement about trying to reach God by the power of human volition. Then, Martin Luther shows up on the scene standing in the same shoes that Augustine stood in the 4th century, the same shoes that Paul stood in during the 1st century. Luther contended for a biblical view of salvation in which all credit goes to amazing grace of God. Thus, Luther helped start the Protestant Reformation: protesting what had become a man-centered institution.

Now, here we are in the 21st century. A recent survey asked a large number of professing Christians how we get to heaven: Is it by good works or as an act of grace? An alarming 73% of Protestants in mainline denominations said that God let’s us into heaven based on our good works. Many of today’s Protestants have embraced the very anti-gospel doctrine that Protestantism originated to protest! It is the same pattern we’ve seen throughout history. We get pulled downward into our self-powered salvation attempts with an almost gravitational force.

So, this raises the question: Who are the Luthers, the Augustines, the Pauls of the 21st century? In other words, who are the people willing to stand up for the good news that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, for the glory of God alone? Where are the people willing to stand in those shoes?

How desperately we need God at the center! God is salvation’s author. He alone gets the glory. This is reformation thinking, and we will need it always.

(For additional articles on the contemporary need for Reformation visit Dr. Williams website: www.rereform.com)