Doctrine of the Trinity

Doctrine of the Trinity ST506 LESSON 07 of 24 Peter Toon, DPhil Cliff College Oxford University King s College University of London Liverpool University I want to begin with an ancient prayer, Veni Creator Spiritus, which goes thus: Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire, and lighten with celestial fire. Thou the anointing Spirit art who dost thy sevenfold gifts impart. Thy blessed unction from above is comfort, life, and fire of love. Enable with perpetual light the dullness of our blinded sight. Anoint and cheer our soiled face with the abundance of thy grace. Keep far our foes, give peace at home: where thou art guide, no ill can come. Teach us to know the Father, Son, and thee, of both, to be but one, that through the ages all along, this may be our endless song: Praise to thy eternal merit, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. That famous prayer was prayed when I was ordained a presbyter, or as the old English puts it, a priest in the Church of England back in 1973. Today I want to ask you to reflect with me upon the Holy Spirit. If you can think back to the two previous lectures, you will remember that we thought of the one God, the one God who is identical with and is the Father. But then we ask, The father of whom? And the answer is the Father of the only begotten Son, begotten of His Father before all ages, that is, the one who is the Son who for us became incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and we know Him as our Lord Jesus Christ. Thus we have thought of the one God who is the Father and of the Son of the Father, the only begotten Son of the Father, and now we move on to reflect upon the one God and His Spirit, who in later terminology is said to be breathed out by the Father and to precede from the Father and rest upon the Son. We begin our reflection in the Old Testament. Spirit in the Hebrew, ruach in the books of the Old Testament, is neither a person nor any definable object or substance. Spirit, literally breath or wind, is a word and a mode for describing how the holy and majestic God, Yahweh, is active in the world, which is His creation, and is active in persons who have a special place in His purposes and will. By Spirit, the God who is beyond the world, the 1 of 11

God who is the transcendent, majestic one, He is present within the world. From our vantage point, it is perhaps straightforward to distinguish between the Ruach or the Pneuma of God, that is, the Spirit of God, and on the other hand the ruach and the pneuma of a man. However, in the Old Testament and to a less extent in the New Testament, the relation of the two is sometimes less than clear or is not as explicit as we would like it to be, and it is so for a very good reason. The human spirit is the point or place where the Spirit of God interfaces with man. Thus, in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, Spirit refers both to the action of God upon man and the result of that action upon man. This will become clearer if we look at Psalm 51 and then at 1 Corinthians 2, verse 10 and following. First of all then, Psalm 51: Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit [ruach] within me. Do not cast me from your presence or take your Holy Spirit [Ruach] from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and grant me a willing [ruach] to sustain me. And from the same psalm, verse 17, The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit [ruach]; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. What is significant here for our purposes is that the psalmist sees ruach as within himself and as part of himself, and yet at the same time he recognizes that ruach belongs to God and may even be taken away from him by God. Thus a man s spirit is not inherently his own. It is or may be God s own Spirit within him. Further, spirit is used in parallel to heart, which is often near to meaning mind or intelligence in Hebrew. Thus while God and man are entirely separate as Creator and the created, there is a kinship between them, for the transcendent God is also the imminent God, present in and unto His creations. Turning to the teaching of Paul, we see again the kinship between God and man as this is revealed through pneuma, spirit. The pneuma searches all things, even the deep things of God, for who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man s pneuma within him. In the same way, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Pneuma of God. We have not received the pneuma of the world, but the Pneuma which is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught as by human wisdom, but in words taught by the Pneuma, the Spirit, expressing spiritual (pneumaticos) truths in spiritual (pneumaticos) words. The man without the Pneuma does not accept the things that come from the Pneuma of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them because 2 of 11

they are spiritually [again, referencing a pneuma] discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man s judgment, for who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ. Here we have spirit used in three ways as belonging to man, to the world, and to God. While the Pneuma of God and the pneuma of man are closely linked, the pneuma of the world is hostile to both. In God s self-revelation to man, the divine Pneuma and the human pneuma are involved. Divine mystery or heavenly truth is imparted from Pneuma to pneuma. Compare Romans 8:16, The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God s children. Insight, illumination, and enlightenment concerning the living God occur when the Holy Spirit encounters the human spirit. Such revelation, however, occurs only because of the Lord Jesus Christ. Through Him the impossible becomes possible. Man comes to know the mind of the Lord. In other words, by the Spirit s revelation to spirit, a man has the mind of Christ, for the Spirit has communicated God s mystery or truth concerning Christ crucified to him. Our spirit and heart are parallel in Psalm 51, so Spirit and mind (nous) are parallel in the Pauline passage. God reveals Himself both to pneuma and to nous, spirit and mind. Old Testament scholars tell us that a variety of ways is used in the Old Testament to communicate the belief that though Yahweh is high and lifted up as the transcendent Lord of majestic glory, He is also present unto and among His covenant people. We read, for example, in the Old Testament of the angel of the Lord, of the glory of the Lord, of the Word of the Lord, of the face of the Lord, and of the Ruach, the Spirit of the Lord. All are ways used to say that God is present unto and with His covenant people. You will also remember that we used certain of these ideas to suggest in our lecture upon the Old Testament that they also indicate that within the absolute basic unity which is God, there is the hint of plurality, but at the moment, our thoughts are on the Ruach of the Lord as one way used to say that God is present unto and with His covenant people. Specifically in terms of the Ruach of God, we note first of all that the presence of this Ruach establishes and upholds the ruach of man. Without the divine Ruach, man returns to the dust from which he is made. Further, when the Ruach of God comes upon a man, for example, upon Elijah or Elisha, then this visitation and all this presence of Ruach make him a prophet. However, without this visitation, he still is a man sustained by the divine Ruach. 3 of 11

Thus the biblical writers distinguish between the human spirit, which owes its existence to God, and the extraordinary divine Spirit that comes from God and rests upon or abides in a man. Furthermore, we may claim on the basis of Psalm 104, verses 29 to 30, and [Psalm] 139, verses 7 to 10, that the divine Ruach or Pneuma is present everywhere whether or not we are aware of this holy presence. We can go nowhere in the universe and not find that the Lord God as Spirit is present unto us there. The points we need to emphasize then, I think, in the modern context are one, that the human spirit is not identical with the divine spirit. Second, that the divine Spirit is the presence of the Lord, Yahweh, one God, here with us, both in the order of creation and the order of grace, and three, that the presence of the divine Spirit in the old and new creations does not exhaust who God is, for God is first and foremost the transcendent glorious one before He is in a secondary way, but a very important way for us, the imminent or the omnipresent one. In other words, God minus the world is still God, and we as Christians can say that, but of course a pantheist or a panentheist cannot say that God minus the world is still God. Further, the reference to the spirit of this age or the spirit of this world in 1 Corinthians 2 that we read provides a clue to where the claims that the Zeitgeist, to use the well-known German word, the Zeitgeist is the work of the divine Spirit, are truly coming from. Today in the church, as you probably noticed, there are many claims that the Spirit is working here and the Spirit is working there, and it seems to me that in not a few cases there is a confusion of the divine Ruach with the spirit, which is the spirit of the world, and which the Germans so well call Zeitgeist. When religious men and women whose minds are darkened through unbelief and absence of heavenly illumination think about God and want to accommodate God to their thinking and worldview, they equate God with the invisible source of their culture and their views. Thus this spirit justifies, this Zeitgeist, justifies their thoughts and ways. But to move on, we now want to reflect specifically upon Jesus Christ and the Ruach, Jesus Christ and the Pneuma, Jesus Christ and the Spirit. Jesus being truly man had a human soul. Therefore, it was His spirit as man wherein and whereby He was perfectly suited for encounter and infilling with the Holy Spirit. In the four Gospels there are a few references to His human spirit. If you want to look them up: Matthew 27:50, Mark 8:12, Luke 23:46, 4 of 11

John 11:33, 13:21, and 19:30. We may note also that His bodily resurrection from the dead is presented in the New Testament, Romans 1 specifically, as occurring by the action of the Holy Spirit upon Him, and thus we may surmise upon... His spirit, which you will remember, He had commended in His dying on the cross into His Father s hands (see John 19:30; Luke 23:46). According to the gospels, the Holy Spirit was intimately related to both the identity and the mission of Jesus, the Messiah. Matthew and Luke begin their gospels with the miraculous conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary, who conceives Jesus by the immediate action of the Holy Spirit (Matthew 1:20; Luke 1:35). A new creation occurs with the conception of Jesus, who is to be the Messiah and the head of a new people, a second Adam. The Holy Spirit is present unto and in Mary as He, the Holy Spirit, was also at the creation of the world (compare Genesis 1:2 with Luke 1:35). What is now formed in the womb of the Virgin Mary will eventually replace the old age and the old creation. We have no information as to the specific relation of the Holy Spirit to Jesus in His years living in Nazareth; however, in the light of what we know of Jesus as Messiah, perhaps we may claim that He experienced the fullness of the Spirit s presence in His life. That is, the fullness of which the Old Covenant speaks in terms of personal holiness and communion with the God of Israel, but not yet in terms of prophetic inspiration or messianic power and authority. We do know that all four Gospels make a connection between the Holy Spirit and the beginnings of the public ministry of Jesus. As Jesus is baptized by John the Baptizer in the River Jordan, He experiences the descent of the Holy Spirit to rest upon Him and to be in Him (Matthew 3; Mark 1; Luke 3; John 1). His reception of the Spirit both declares and confirms that He is the Messiah, the Son of God. The Messiah meaning, of course, the Anointed One of God, in this case, anointed by the Ruach of God. Then you will remember He is led by the same Spirit first into the wilderness to be tested by God through temptation from Satan, and second, He is led by the same Spirit into Galilee to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom of God to His fellow Jews (see, for example, Luke 4:1 and following). In their differing ways, all four evangelists then portray Jesus as being guided, empowered, and filled by the Spirit of the Lord God throughout His threeyear ministry. His preaching, His healing, His exorcisms, and His empowering of His disciples are by the Holy Spirit, by the Ruach of Yahweh. Without the presence of the Spirit of the Lord, there would have been and could not have been a messianic ministry, for 5 of 11

as we ve said, the Messiah means the Anointed One, anointed by, with, through, the Spirit of Yahweh. But we do know how Jesus Himself during His ministry in Galilee and Judea understood His relation to the Spirit. That is, we can separate His understanding then from the important later reflections and interpretations of the evangelists and the apostles. First of all, Jesus, it would seem, understood His battle with and victory over Satan and demonic powers or spirits in terms of the presence of the Holy Spirit within and upon Him. He said, Since it is by the Spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you (Luke 11:20). Thus by His ministry, the kingdom of God is already here, but not yet in its fullness. The defeat of Satan and the demons, the exorcism of evil spirits is a sign that the kingdom has come and the kingdom is yet to come. It is here and it will come. Second, since Jesus spoke with such calm and profound authority, it has been said, That I say unto you, He must also have been conscious of the spirit of prophecy. The Spirit who inspired the prophets of the Old Covenant from Moses through Elijah to Malachi saw Isaiah 61 fulfilled in His own ministry. He quoted it, you will remember at the synagogue (Luke 4:18 following), [The Spirit of Yahweh] the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. Again, we may say, This claim is eschatological, the new age of righteousness, the time of the kingdom is being realized through His authoritative proclamation. Furthermore, the Synoptic Gospels present Jesus as the Dispenser (I don t like that word, but using it in its technical sense), the Dispenser of the Spirit (Matthew 24:20; Mark 13:11; Luke 21:15). This is heightened in the gospel of John where the promised Spirit is called the other Paracletus or the Counselor whose functions in the church will be those of witness, revealer, and interpreter. This is all set out there in those beautiful chapters, chapters 14 to 16 of the gospel of John. This work of the Paracletus the Counselor, the Advocate, the Witness, the Revealer, the Interpreter includes both the recalling of the teaching of Jesus Himself and the leading of the apostles into new truth, that is, truth shared in the Paracletus, the Spirit, with them from the resurrected, exalted Lord Jesus. 6 of 11

He, the Holy Spirit, the Paracletus, will also have a unique role in the mission of the church. He shall convince the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment you remember the passage, John 16, verses 8 to 11, leading hearers of the gospel to living dynamic faith in Jesus as the Lord. And importantly, I guess you ve noticed this in your meditations, in the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit is presented as the director of the missio Dei, of the mission of God, the mission of reconciliation, the mission of salvation, the mission of redemption (see, for example, in the Acts 4:31; 5:1 10; 6:10; and 8:9 13). Thus in the light of this kind of evidence and more, we may claim the following: no Holy Spirit, no Messiah; no Holy Spirit, no kingdom of God; no Holy Spirit, no redemption; no Holy Spirit, no mission; no Holy Spirit, no church, and so on. Further, we may claim that the Spirit who comes upon and dwells within the human nature of Jesus is the Spirit who proceeds from the Father in heaven. That is, the Spirit is certainly God Himself, present in God s world, but the Spirit is not of the world and is not part of the created order. The Spirit comes from outside space and time into space and time and is the living God imminent, present unto His people. Of course, in terms of the Spirit s presence in the human nature of Jesus, we are only stating one aspect of God s presence in Jesus, the Messiah, who is incarnate Son. Jesus is one person who is at one and the same time, as we confess in our Christian confessions, both man and God; both human and divine. Thus, by Him, God is present unto His people as incarnate God, as well as empowering and infilling Spirit. In discussing the doctrine of the Spirit today, we have to make clear that His origin is outside space and time and that He cannot be simply identified with either space or time or with anything in space and time. He is the Spirit who is the Spirit of the Father who comes from the Father. His omnipresence, His imminence in the created order, and in the case of Jesus, the Messiah, His unique presence with and in Him as the Spirit of the new creation, the age of grace, and the kingdom of God are not to be confused with either the evil spirits which He defeated in His ministry or the spirit of the age, this evil age, and the spirit of Satan, chief of evil spirits, which He rejected and overcame in His temptations in the wilderness. Now some reflections upon the Spirit and Christian believers. After the exaltation of Jesus into heaven, we read that the Father sent the Spirit in the name of the Lord Jesus, in the name of the Son, to the waiting apostles and disciples. Thereby, the new age 7 of 11

of the kingdom of God arrived, not in future fullness but certainly in present power, as Acts chapter 2 makes clear. The new life, the abundant life of the Spirit, was expressed in new fellowship, communion, prophetic words and speech, abundant joy, and many conversions of Jews to Jesus as the Messiah of Israel and as the Lord. It is important to note that the Spirit who arrives, as Acts chapter 2 declares, is the Spirit of the crucified and exalted Jesus so that in and by Him all believers have a personal relation with the Father through the Lord Jesus. In the words of John s gospel, He is sent by the Father in, or through, or for the sake of Jesus, the Son, and He comes bearing the name and bringing the virtues and graces and characteristics of the Son. But for Saint Paul, we note that the fundamental mark of belonging to Christ is being indwelt by the Spirit of God whom he names as the Spirit of Christ. In fact, where the Holy Spirit is, there is the Lord Jesus himself, says Paul in Romans 8:9 10. To those who believe on the name of the Lord Jesus, to them the Father gives the gift of the Spirit who is in them as the presence and the power of the glorious age to come. Thus the possession of the Spirit is called the first fruits of God s harvest at the end of the age (Romans 8:23), the first installment of the inheritance in the kingdom of God (Romans 8:15 17; 14:17), and as the down payment or guarantee that God will complete in the future kingdom the work of redemption He has already begun in giving the Spirit now (2 Corinthians 1:22; 5:5). In fact, the whole Christian life may also be called life in the Spirit or walking in the Spirit in order to produce the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:16 and following). Further, as the Spirit is one and is a shared gift by all believers, the Spirit creates koinonia, the fellowship of believers with each other, with Christ and in Christ with the Father (1 Corinthians 12:13; 2 Corinthians 13:14). To build up this fellowship and empower its members for service, the Lord Jesus by the Spirit gives spiritual gifts. Thus true worship and prayer in this fellowship do not proceed from the desires of the flesh or from the suggestions of the Spirit of this age but rather from the prompting of the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 6:18; Philippians 3:3). In fact, by the Spirit, believers are both enabled to name God as truly their Father and to pray to Him in an effectual way. In fact, so intimate is the relation created by the Spirit, through the Son, with the Father that they can call Him Abba Father. 8 of 11

Finally we note that the Spirit is the Spirit of mission and evangelism, and thus He leads and empowers the koinonia, the fellowship of Christians, to witness to and to preach the gospel and thus to support the ministry of apostles, prophets, and evangelists. In reality, as we know, few Christians truly and always are filled with the Spirit, actually walk in the Spirit, truly display the fruit of the Spirit, and in practice exercise the gifts of the Spirit and thereby commend the gospel in word and deed. In them, in us, within human nature, remains the presence of the old sinful world, the old sinful age. This flesh, as Paul calls it, resists the Spirit and needs to be conquered so that God s grace may triumph as the Spirit fully indwells the whole soul. Thus the Christian is always and continually called to be perfect, to be filled, to be continually being filled with the Spirit, and to reveal that divine love which is shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit who is given unto us. In my descriptions there of the Spirit in relation to Christ, the Spirit in relation to the Father, and the Spirit in relation to the believing fellowship to the church, to the household of faith what you have noticed is that in some cases, the form of speech and the manner of address is such as to suggest that the Holy Spirit is truly a person. Later on, I shall address myself very carefully to what we mean by person when we speak of the person of the Father, the person of the Son, and the person of the Holy Spirit, so I invite you at this stage to leave that question of what we mean by the person open and just to note that in the material I ve given you, and in the material which you are familiar with, there is the specific content within it of material wherein the Spirit is truly described in such personal ways as one is led by the use of just this regular language to come to the conclusion that the Spirit is a person. Let me give you some reminders of that point. For example, if you turn to the Acts of the Apostles and watch all the references to the Holy Spirit I won t give you all of the verses because you can look them up in a good concordance yourself I merely want to bring to your notice the nature of the verbs used to show that these verbs require that the subject of the verb be a person. Here we go: The Spirit speaks, the Spirit forbids, the Spirit thinks good, the Spirit appoints, The Spirit sends, the Spirit bears witness, the Spirit snatches, the Spirit prevents, the Spirit is lied unto you can only tell a lie to a person the Spirit is resisted, and if you turn to the letters of Paul, Paul speaks of the Spirit as if he were a person: The Spirit is grieved, the 9 of 11

Spirit bears witness, the Spirit cries out, the Spirit leads, and the Spirit makes intercession. And then if you recall what our Lord Himself said, for example in Mark 13:11, He warned His disciples about the tribulation which awaited them and said, But whatsoever shall be given you in that hour, that speak ye, for it is not ye that speak, but the Holy Spirit. Obviously the Holy Spirit, if the Holy Spirit is to speak, then the Holy Spirit is thought of as a person. When you turn to John 14:16, and may I urge you in a time when you ve got fifteen minutes or so to pick up John s gospel and to read John 14 to 16 because there you find probably the most wonderful teaching concerning the Holy Spirit in the whole of the Bible, and there you will notice that this word paracletus, which is translated in the various versions in different ways, but each of these different ways turns out to be personal. The paracletus is the Comforter or the Advocate or the Counselor, and when you note what is said concerning what the Advocate, the Comforter, the Counselor, the paracletus will do, then all that He is to do as the one who comes in the place of Jesus Himself is personal. That is, it is the kind of thing which requires a person to do. So there is this very important emphasis within the New Testament concerning what is traditionally called the person of the Spirit, but we would not be fair to the New Testament if we did not note also that there are other references, and perhaps the majority of references to the Spirit, which follow what we may call the Old Testament presentation and present the Spirit as a kind of dynamic force or as a divine reality which is poured out upon human beings and which fills them and which dwells in them, and in these cases, it is rather more difficult to think of the Spirit as a person. It is possible and one ought to think of the Spirit as divine, but it is more difficult to think of the Spirit as a person. That very fact ought to warn us that when we use the word person of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we are certainly not talking in terms of the modern notion of person and of the modern notion of personality. We are using the word in a very specific and classical sense which predates the modern development of the meaning of the word person. So it warns us about that, but it also tells us that when we are thinking of the Spirit, we are thinking of the one who can be envisaged and can be thought of and, in fact, the New Testament directs us to think about the Spirit in a variety of ways, but that within that variety of ways, at the very heart of them, at the very center of them, is the presentation of the Spirit as the person, the person who speaks, who leads, who guides, who testifies, who appoints, who directs, and so on. 10 of 11

And thus we have spoken of the one God who is the Father and having called the one God the Father, we have spoken of the Son of the Father, because for God to be the Father, then the question is, The Father of whom? and the answer is, as we ve earlier said, The Father of His only begotten Son, begotten of the Father before all ages, and now we have been reflecting upon the Spirit of the Father, the Ruach of the Father, the Pneuma of the Father, the One who Jesus called the Paracletus the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. If you wish to read more and want a couple of older but sound books to read, may I first of all commend to you well, it s not in this case a full book, but it s in a book it s the essay by Benjamin B. Warfield written in the nineteenth century on The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity, which has been published fairly recently by the Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company and is found in the volume entitled Biblical and Theological Studies. That is The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity by Benjamin B. Warfield. It s dated, in terms of its references, but in terms of its content and its logical power, it s tremendous. I commend it to you. It s very concentrated, so you ll need to read it slowly. And then another older book which has been reprinted by Baker Book House in recent times, The Doctrine of God, by Herman Bavinck, which again is an old-style type of book but contains much that is very, very helpful and much that one greatly benefits by studying and by reading. Thus I have finished now my brief presentation of the Trinity within the New Testament. I move on next to the early church. Christ-Centered Learning Anytime, Anywhere 11 of 11