4. God in Three Persons— The Spirit and the Trinity
4
God in Three Persons—
The Spirit and the Trinity
Along with their experience of Christ, the experience of the Spirit as the renewed presence of God expanded the earliest Christians’ and Paul’s understanding of the one God as triune.
Rose was a nominal Christian, who in her adult years had basically abandoned any relationship to the Christian faith. One day two people came to her door with a new brand of “Christianity,” which in truth was nothing new at all. The Jehovah’s Witnesses who visited her were self-aware Arians, who not only deny the deity of Christ but have no knowledge or experience of the Spirit as the personal presence of God. They offered Rose a simplistic faith, one in which the mystery of the Trinity was removed; and in her own spiritual emptiness she bought it—hook, line, and sinker.
In a long afternoon of conversation with Rose and two of the leaders from her Kingdom Hall, my son Mark and I carefully went through all the christological texts with them—texts with which they were familiar, albeit in a superficial and rote way—but continually reached dead ends. Toward the end of the afternoon, however, Mark asked them about their experience of the Holy Spirit. They drew a total blank. The “holy spirit” was for them no person at all, but only an “influence” from God in our behalf. When we began to describe our life in the Spirit, they became noticeably ill at ease, and the conversation came to a speedy end. Not only had we begun to enter an area where they had no trained response; the one essential ingredient to their becoming believers in Christ was also clearly missing—the pouring out of the Spirit into their lives so as to cry “Abba, Father” to Jehovah.
Through that experience I became convinced that the reason Rose, and so many others like her, get trapped by this present-day Arianism is only in part because the Trinity is a mystery (most people, after all, prefer to reduce God to a size that their own minds can grasp, and thus control); it is also because they have been let down by the church, which continually treats the Spirit as a matter of creed and doctrine, but not as a vital experienced reality in believers’ lives.
Indeed, on this matter, the Jehovah’s Witnesses are abetted by a large number of New Testament scholars. Some deny that Paul was a trinitarian at all; others, even among those who are very orthodox, are skittish of using the language of “Trinity” to describe the New Testament witness. Part of the problem here is one of definitions. “Trinity” is the language of later thinkers, who landed on this word to express the church’s faith in the one God, whom they knew to be a unity of three divine Persons. Thus it is common to assert that if the New Testament reflects “trinitarianism,” it does so in an embryonic way, so that, whatever else, it was not the trinitarianism of a later day such as Chalcedon. But that seems so self-evident that one wonders why it needs to have been repeated so often. The problem with such wariness is that its frequent repetition finally comes home to roost—such protests too often lead to practical denial.
We are led to wonder, then, whether our difficulties with the Trinity do not stem in part from our own experience of the church and the Spirit, where the Spirit is understood not as person but as divine influence or power. After all, it is a short step from our experience of the Spirit as a “gray, oblong blur” to our becoming practical binitarians. As noted earlier, the practicing creed for many Christians goes something like, “I believe in God the Father; I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s Son; but I wonder about the Holy Ghost.” The Spirit has become God’s specter, if you will, an unseen, less-than-vibrant influence, hardly “God very God.”
The concern of this chapter is that Paul was trinitarian at the core of his experience and theology, and that such a trinitarian understanding makes a difference in our own relationship to God.
Paul and the Trinity
To be sure, Paul’s experience and understanding of the Spirit as God’s personal presence inevitably leads us into some deep theological waters. At issue for us is how God exists in his essential being as triune. How can God be known as Father, Son, and Spirit, one being, yet each “person” distinct from the other? We tend to think that a person is not a true trinitarian unless that person has a working formulation in response to this question.
To put the question this way, however, is to get ahead of Paul, not to mention to define trinitarianism by later standards. What makes this an issue for us at all is that Paul, the strictest of monotheists, who never doubted that “the Lord thy God is one,” wrote letters to his churches that are full of presuppositions and assertions which reveal that he experienced God, and then expressed that experience, in a fundamentally trinitarian way.
That he does not deal with the theological issues this trinitarianism would pose for a monotheistic Jew only points again to Paul’s letters as practical rather than theological documents. Paul was writing not to present a study of God but to build up churches and address gut issues about their being God’s people in a totally pagan environment. He was too busy being a missionary pastor to have the luxury of purely reflective theology. Thus Paul affirms, asserts, and presupposes the Trinity in every way; and those affirmations—that the one God known and experienced as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each distinct from the other, is yet only one God—are precisely the reason the later church took up the question of how.
The affirmations stem first from his experience of the risen Christ as “Lord,” the Old Testament language for God, about whom he spoke as the preexistent Son of God (e.g., 2 Cor. 8:9; Gal. 4:6–7) and to whom he attributed every imaginable activity that Paul’s Judaism reserved for God alone. In contrast to pagan polytheism, Paul asserts, “for us there is only one God, the Father, and only one Lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 8:6); yet at the end of the ages, when the final victory of death is won through our resurrection, the Son turns it all over to the Father so that the one God “may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28).
Given such affirmations and assertions, there can be little question that the early church would have finally expressed itself in a binitarian way had it never done so in a trinitarian way. That the issue is Trinity, not binity, comes directly out of the church’s personal encounter with God through the Spirit as put forth in the preceding two chapters.
At issue, therefore, and our present concern, is what Paul believed about the Spirit, since the Trinity expresses the Christian conviction about God not only as one being in three persons, but as one God in three persons, including God the Holy Spirit. The question is, Did Paul in fact have a trinitarian faith, even if he did not use the language of a later time to describe God? Analysis of the Pauline data suggests that he did.
The Spirit and the Trinity
At the heart of Paul’s theology is his gospel, and his gospel is essentially about salvation—God’s saving a people for his name through the redeeming work of Christ and the applying work of the Spirit. Paul’s encounter with God in salvation, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, alone accounts for the transformation of his theological language and of his understanding of God. In light of this reality and the great number of texts that support it—with trinitarian language—these passages rightly serve as the starting point for any study of the Trinity in Paul.
The evidence here is found in two sets of texts: several explicitly trinitarian texts (2 Cor. 13:14; 1 Cor. 12:4–6; Eph. 4:4–6) and the many passages where Paul encapsulates “salvation in Christ” in trinitarian terms, sometimes in semi-creedal fashion, but always in nonreflective, presuppositional ways.
The remarkable grace-benediction of 2 Corinthians 13:14 offers us all kinds of theological keys to Paul’s understanding of salvation and of God himself. That the benediction is composed and intended for the occasion rather than as a broadly applicable formula only increases its importance in hearing Paul. Thus what he says here in prayer appears in a thoroughly presuppositional way—not as something he argues for, but as the assumed, experienced reality of Christian life.
First, it summarizes the core elements of Paul’s unique passion: the gospel, with its focus on salvation in Christ, equally available by faith to gentile and Jew alike. That the love of God is the foundation of Paul’s view of salvation is stated with passion and clarity in passages such as Romans 5:1–11, 8:31–39, and Ephesians 1:3–14. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ is what gave concrete expression to that love; through Christ’s suffering and death on behalf of his loved ones, God accomplished salvation for them at one moment in human history.
The participation in the Holy Spirit continually makes that love and grace real in the life of the believer and the believing community. The koinōnia (“fellowship/participation”) of the Holy Spirit (note the full name!) is how the living God not only brings people into an intimate and abiding relationship with himself, as the God of all grace, but also causes them to participate in all the benefits of that grace and salvation—that is, by indwelling them in the present with his own presence and guaranteeing their final eschatological glory.
Second, this text also serves as our entrée into Paul’s understanding of God, which had been so radically affected for him by the twin realities of the death and resurrection of Christ and the gift of the Spirit. Granted, Paul does not here assert the deity of Christ and the Spirit. What he does is to equate the activity of the three divine Persons (to use the language of a later time), in concert and in one prayer, with the clause about God the Father standing in second place. This suggests that Paul was truly trinitarian in any meaningful sense of that term—that the one God is Father, Son, and Spirit, and that when dealing with Christ and the Spirit one is dealing with God every bit as much as when one is dealing with the Father. Thus this benediction, while making a fundamental distinction among God, Christ, and Spirit, also expresses in shorthand form what is found throughout his letters, namely, that “salvation in Christ” is the cooperative work of God, Christ, and the Spirit.
The same fully trinitarian implications appear in 1 Corinthians 12:4–6 and Ephesians 4:4–6. In the former passage Paul urges the Corinthians to broaden their perspective and to recognize the rich diversity of the Spirit’s manifestations in their midst (over against their apparently singular interest in speaking in tongues). He begins in verses 4–6 by noting that diversity reflects the nature of God and is therefore the true evidence of the work of the one God in their midst. Thus the Trinity is presuppositional to the entire argument, and it is the more telling precisely because it is so unstudied, so freely and unconsciously expressed.
In Ephesians 4:4–6 one finds the same combination as in 2 Corinthians 13:14—a creedal formulation expressed in terms of the distinguishable activities of the triune God. The basis for Christian unity is the one God. The one body is the work of the one Spirit (cf. 1 Cor. 12:13), by whom we also live our present eschatological existence in one hope, since the Spirit is the “down payment on our inheritance” (Eph. 1:13–14). All of this has been made possible for us by our one Lord, in whom all have one faith and to which faith all have given witness through one baptism. The source of all these realities is the one God himself, “who is over all and through all and in all.”
If the last phrase in this passage reemphasizes the unity of the one God, who is ultimately responsible for all things—past, present, and future—and subsumes the work of the Spirit and the Son under that of God, the entire passage at the same time puts into creedal form the affirmation that God is experienced as a triune reality. Precisely on the basis of such experience and language the later church maintained its biblical integrity by expressing all of this in explicitly trinitarian language. Paul’s formulations, which include the work of the Spirit, form part of that basis.
Salvation in Christ as the Work of the Trinity
That the work of the Trinity in salvation is foundational to Paul’s understanding of the gospel is further evidenced by the many texts that formulate salvation in less explicit but fully presuppositionally trinitarian terms. This is especially true of passages such as Romans 5:1–8; 2 Corinthians 3:1–4:6; Galatians 4:4–6; or Ephesians 1:3–14 (cf. Titus 3:4–7).
As an example, we may take Romans 5:1–8. As everywhere, the Spirit plays a vital role in Paul’s and his churches’ experience of God’s saving grace. For Paul the “love of God” was no mere abstraction. God’s love, the most essential reality about his character and the absolute predicate of our existence, has been demonstrated historically in its most lavish and expansive expression through Christ’s death for his enemies (vv. 6–8, thus the basis for “peace with God” and “access” to his gracious presence). But such love is not merely an objective historical event. By the presence of the Spirit, God’s love, played out to the full in Christ, is an experienced reality in the heart of the believer. This is what the Spirit has so richly “shed abroad in our hearts.”
If we are not thus overtaken by God himself at this crucial point, then all else is lost, and we are without peace, groveling before God, living with little real hope, and experiencing present sufferings as a cause for complaint and despair rather than for “boasting.” What rectifies all of this for us is not simply the fact of God’s love—although in some ways that would surely be enough—but that God’s love has been effectively realized in the experience of the believer. God’s love for us has been “poured out” as a prodigal, experienced reality by the presence of the Holy Spirit, whom God has also lavishly poured out into our hearts.
But besides these grand, well-known moments in Paul, this trinitarian understanding of salvation is also evident in many other texts that portray salvation as the threefold work of the triune God, as encapsulated in 2 Corinthians 13:14:
The point of all this is that salvation in Christ is not simply a theological truth, predicated on God’s prior action and the historical work of Christ. Salvation is an experienced reality, made so by the person of the Spirit coming into our lives. One simply cannot be a Christian in any Pauline sense without the effective work of the Trinity. We will pursue this truth in greater detail in chapter 8 below. For now we offer a few concluding words about the Trinity and its further implications for our present life in Christ.
Conclusions and Implications
The upshot of all this is twofold. First, to return to the preceding chapter for a moment, Paul would not recognize the language or the theological assertions of those who consider him to have identified the Spirit with the risen Christ. His assumptions lay elsewhere, with the one God, now bringing salvation through the cooperative work of the three divine Persons: Father, Son, and Spirit. At points where the work of any or all overlaps, Paul’s language tends to be flexible—precisely because salvation for him is the activity of the one God.
Second, one may grant that Paul’s trinitarian assumptions and descriptions, which form the basis of the later formulas, never move toward calling the Spirit “God” and never wrestle with the philosophical and theological implications of those assumptions and descriptions. But neither is there evidence that he lacked clarity as to the distinctions between, and the specific roles of, the three divine Persons who accomplished so great a salvation for us all.
Moreover, that the Spirit alone knows the mind of God, “the deep things of God,” as Paul puts it, and that God knows the mind of the Spirit indicate not only functional trinitarianism but something close to ontological trinitarianism (having to do with God’s very being). So also with the clear evidence of the Spirit’s unity with Christ—in receiving a fresh supply of the Spirit, it is the Spirit of Jesus Christ whom Paul receives—yet the clear distinction remains between Christ and the Spirit.
But what does such trinitarianism mean for us? Several things. First, it means that the Spirit must be reinstated into the Trinity, where he has never been excluded in our creeds and liturgies but has been practically excluded from the experienced life of the church. To be a Pauline Christian means to take the Spirit with full seriousness as the way the eternal God is ever present with his people.
Second, God as Trinity, including the Holy Spirit, is the ground of both our unity and our diversity within the believing community. Although we will pursue this point further in chapter 6, suffice it here to say that the Trinity is the ground for the church’s much-needed unity. God himself—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is one God; and we are all his one people. The effective agent of our unity, according to Paul in Ephesians 2 and 3 (cf. 1 Cor. 12:13), is none other than the Holy Spirit.
But according to 1 Corinthians 12:4–6, the Trinity is also the ground for affirming the church’s obvious diversity within its unity. The more truly trinitarian we are in our thinking and experience, the more vigorously we should affirm our diversity and pursue our unity.
Finally, although Paul does not press this point, the triune nature of God makes clear that God is essentially a relational being. This reality, especially the relationship between the Father and the Son, is one of the special contributions of John in the New Testament. If Paul does not press this reality as explicitly as John does, the offhand mention of the relationship between the Spirit and the Father in 1 Corinthians 2:10–11 and Romans 8:26–27 comes out at the same point. The Spirit, who reveals to us the “deep things of God” (that is, the cross as God’s wisdom), does so because he alone knows the mind of God; and the Spirit is our intercessor, who prays through us in keeping with God’s own pleasure, precisely because the Spirit and the Father each knows the mind of the other.
This not only gives us confidence in our praying but should constantly remind us that the one God lives in eternal relationship within himself as the triune God. The relational implications of this for us, both toward God and toward one another, should become a primary part of our paradigm of life in the Spirit as we live together the life of the future in our postmodern world.
Reflection Questions