This week I am attending the Jonathan Edwards Institute Conference in Annapolis and am being very well fed spiritually. I thought I would share with you some of the notes I am taking at the conference so that you might be edified as well.
The opening session was taught by Dr. Sinclair Ferguson, professor of systematic theology at Westminster Theological Seminary. The title of his message was: "The Trinity: The Life of God in the World of Eternity." His text was John 17 - the Farewell Discourse. What follows are the notes I took on his lecture.
In our evangelical circles there is the perception that the doctrine of the Trinity is speculative and impractical. For example, the original print run for the book Knowing God, by J. I. Packer was 2000 and the publisher wasn't sure they would be able to sell the 2000. This is an indicator of the a move in the spirit of evangelicals. We take it for granted that knowing God belongs at the epicenter of being a Christian, but this is not the case.
What to others may have seemed to be speculative was to our Lord Jesus Christ the very anchor of His existence. Where do you find strength for a soul that is exceedingly sorrowful unto death. Christ finds it in the knowledge of God the Trinity and all that this means.
With death closing in Christ gives His disciples some of the most rarefied lessons on the doctrine of the Trinity in the entire New Testament. The whole of the NT Scriptures are interlaced with the persons of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
Five Points about the Trinity
1. This is the greatest of all mysteries.
Mystery is the very lifeblood of our theology at this point because we are meant to admire and adore Him for the sheer grandeur and incomprehensibility of His being. This triune one has made us miniatures of Himself.
We are the lest mysterious manifestation of the ultimately mysterious and this enables us to speak of Him. In speaking of God we do not speak of God as if we are projecting ourselves unto Him, rather we speak of Him knowing that he has projected Himself unto us. God has made innumerable connections between us and Him in His creation, innumerable Jacob's ladders coming down from heaven to us.
All that we do is to be fundamentally trinitarian. God help us that we have reduced baptism to the amount of water. Baptism is the rubric of grace that towers over all of our Christian life - the love of God the Father, the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the felllowship of the Holy Spirit are represented in baptism and this encompasses our whole Christian life.
2. It is a revealed mystery that climaxes redemptive history.
We should not make the foolish error of thinking that God became trinity at the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. If He is triune, He is triune from all eternity.
God does not divulge the full nature of His tri-personal being until He makes Himself known in the person of Jesus Christ. Just as in Jesus light and immortality are fully brought to light, so it is only in Jesus Christ that divine trinity is fully brought to light.
B. B. Warfield -the OT Scriptures are like a well-furnished but dimly lit room. So it is with the trinity - at the incarnation of Jesus the light is switched on regarding what was in the Old Testament.
The Bible is about learning how you pronounce the name of God. People who know somoene and love them want to pronounce their name properly. They have a sense that a person's name is who he is. So the OT Scriptures are the story of the children of God learning to pronounce His name. All throughout the OT Scriptures the children of God are trying to find out the meaning of "I AM WHO I AM."
Then Jesus comes and says, "when you say God, pronounce His name this way - 'the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.'" This is what Karl Barth calls "God's Christian Name."
It is a problem that we are on such a first name basis in America these days. This means we never come to that time when someone says "call me (first name)" thus showing the intimacy they invite you too. God says "call me Abba, call me Father." Jesus says "know that I am the Son of God." Jesus says "know that the other helper is coming because the Father who sent me is sending Him to you in order that you might see the outpouring of love that God the Father has for you."
3. The name of the Trinity Discloses the Inner Life of the Deity.
As we try to describe the world mathematically we risk reducing it. Illustration - a colleague of Ferguson's gave a presentation one time where he put up a picture taken from the hubble telescope and he also put up a picture of it's mathematical formula. He showed what was lost in reducing the picture to a mathematical equation.
There is an intricate and beautiful choreography in the way God does everything in a Trinitarian fashion and this can't be reduced to formulas.
At all the great points of biblical revelation we see the choreographed movement of each person of the Trinity in absolute harmony with every other member of the Trinity.
The love of the Father for the Son is a love that has no conditions attached to it. Yet, while the Father has loved the Son from all eternity, there was a moment when the Father's heart burst with love for His son because of what He had done in redemption. Isn't that a glimpse of the love the Father has for the Son and a glimpse of the love that takes place within the context of the Trinity.
There are no closed off doors in the Trinity, there is no "sub-conscious" in God the Trinity - all persons are always open in love to one another.
An illustration of this is that in the being of God the Son is in the bosom of the Father and the Holy Spirit reclines in the bosom of the Son.
4. This makes sense of the the doctrine of the filioque.
The filioque is that the Spirit proceeds not just from the Father but from the Father and the Son.
This is a doctrine that helps us, as it were, to close the dance of the Trinity. Without it we know the relationship between the Father and the Son and the Father and the Spirit, but it leaves a gap in the knowledge of the relationship between the Son and the Spirit. This shows us that there is an eternal relationship between the Son and the Spirit in the mutual love and communion they have in love and admiration for the Father. They have all things in common, but the Father possesses the characteristic of paternity, the Son possesses the characteristic of being filiated, the Spirit has possesses the characteristic of being breathed by both.
5. The Trinity is foundational to evangelical Christianity.
The Trinity is the ultimate explanation of what the philosphers call the problem of the one and the many. There is a harmony between diversity and unity in the Trinity.
The Trinity is foundational because:
a. A non-Trinitarian God cannot ultimately be personal.
Could there be anything more awful than being pure love and having nothing to love.
b. A non-Trinitarian God cannot provide salvation for sinners.
God has created us in such a way that fallen men and women could be redeemed by one of these persons assuming our humanity, undergirded by another of these persons, while another of these persons pours out His wrath on human sin, while this event becomes a means of pouring out of grace.
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