Transcript

Hi folks, welcome back to The Original Church.

You know, one of the biggest ongoing religious arguments on the internet is over the doctrine of the Trinity.

You can find websites that will tell you that the doctrine of the Trinity is not biblical, and even that it's not Christian.

But is that true?

Now to answer that question, is that true, you sort of have to back up a step and ask, true to whom?

In other words, who gets to decide what's true?

Well, the whole point of getting back to The Original Church is based on the assumption that the original Christians have some kind of priority when it comes to determining what is and isn't Christian, because they are closer to the source, Jesus and the Apostles.

So that brings us to the question, did the original Christians believe in the Trinity?

In other words, did they understand God as Trinity?

And did The Original Church teach the doctrine of the Trinity?

Now like a lot of these questions, we can actually start with, did Jesus believe in the Trinity?

Now remember that Jesus' Bible is what we call the Old Testament.

But when Jesus' people read their Bible, they would not say the name of God.

They would substitute something else, like Lord.

But Jesus, when he came along, he gave us a new substitution for the name of God, and it comes from the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament, God is described as being like a father.

And so Jesus called God his father, and said that God could also be our father.

As I showed you in another video, Jesus saw himself as the Messianic Son, promised through Moses and Daniel, among others.

And Jesus also talked about the Holy Spirit, and promised to send the Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the divine Spirit of God.

We see this in the Old Testament.

And in the New Testament, St. Paul tells us that the Holy Spirit is also the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

And yet the Holy Spirit is not the Father, and the Holy Spirit is not the Son.

And so when Jesus told his disciples to baptize people, he told them to baptize into the one God as Trinity.

To baptize in the name of God, the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So it all starts with Jesus himself explaining God in terms of three persons, himself being one.

Now, I can't really do justice to the doctrine of the Trinity in 15 minutes or less, so rest assured that there will be more videos on this subject.

For now, it's enough to emphasize what you probably already know, that the one God exists eternally as three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

The three persons are distinct, but not separate, because they are one God.

They are one, but not identical.

One but not one and the same, because they are three persons.

Now this is a paradox, but it is also the most important doctrine in our Christian faith.

And to get this wrong is to get everything wrong.

Now, even though Jesus had taught about his Father, referred to himself as the Son, and had given the Holy Spirit, after the Ascension, people were still confused.

Who was this guy?

Who is this guy?

Is he God?

Is he a God?

Is he human?

If he's God, does that mean there are two gods?

Spoiler alert, no, it doesn't. But if he's human, what is his relationship to the one whom he called the Father?

Now I said in another video that the primary revelation of God is the Incarnation.

But like all revelation, the church still had to interpret it and explain it and figure out how to teach it.

And so the earliest Christians were there saying, what was that, this thing we call the Incarnation?

But never forget that when they asked these questions, they knew where to go for the answers.

They went to the apostles.

And then they went to the disciples of the apostles.

So to the question of whether Jesus Christ is divine or human, the original church answers, yes, both, God, but not the Father, human, but unique among humanity.

So here's where the paradox of the whole thing becomes apparent.

If God is three, how can he still be one?

And this is the problem, the paradox of what we call Christian monotheism.

Monotheism means God is one, God must be one.

We can never let go of that.

There can only be one God.

And yet with the revelation of Jesus Christ in the Incarnation, the Christians understood God as also being three.

How is this possible?

It's a mystery.

But just because something is a mystery does not mean it isn't true.

And so the doctrine of the Trinity is the answer to the paradox.

The doctrine of the Trinity became the very definition of Christianity.

Whatever is not Trinitarian is not Christian.

So the majority of the church, what we can call the mainstream of the original church, they followed the teachings of the apostles and their disciples, the bishops.

But there were people on the fringes of the original church who gave alternative answers to the question, usually on one extreme or the other.

So rather than saying that Jesus was both human and divine, they picked one and rejected the other.

And eventually, even some bishops fell into one of these extremes.

You see, the mistake that some people made and still make was to hang on to one and reject the other because they couldn't hold them both together.

Some could not get their heads around the paradox, God as three, but still one God.

And so they thought that in order to protect monotheism, they had to reject Christ's divinity.

But to deny the divinity of Jesus is to take away his ability to be the savior.

Others were actually fine with the idea of Jesus's divinity, but they could not get their heads around how the divine word could become human.

They thought that divinity had to be kept separate from the material world and from humanity and that the incarnation itself was impossible.

And so they denied the humanity of Jesus.

And they said that he was one God among many.

But then you lose the humanity of Jesus and he's no longer one of us.

And if he's not one of us, he might be a savior, but he can't be our savior.

And so these are the mistakes that people made, falling to one side or the other, rejecting one or the other of Jesus's two natures, his humanity and his divinity.

And when you find people on the internet who reject the doctrine of the Trinity, they are still making the same mistakes that these fringe groups were making during the time of the original church.

And so the doctrine of the Trinity is the only answer to the paradox that preserves the both and answer to the question of the original church, that Jesus Christ is both divine and human.

And by the end of the time that we're calling the original church, the doctrine of the Trinity was spelled out in what we call the Nicene Creed.

Now I can't stress this enough.

The Nicene Creed is the historic definition of Christianity that explains what the original Christians believed.

To reject the Nicene Creed is to be something other than Christian.

And so is the doctrine of the Trinity biblical?

Yes, it is.

And for a deep dive into the scripture behind the doctrine of the Trinity, see my book, Trinity 101. Did the original Christians believe in and teach God as Trinity?

Yes, of course they did.

It is not some corruption, but it is the result of accepting all of the scriptures, even when they seem hard to fit together.

And again, I'm going to have more videos on this later.

But those who reject the doctrine of the Trinity are doing so because they are rejecting or ignoring or explaining away some of the texts of scripture.

The crowning achievement of the original church was to clarify the very definition of what Christianity is and what it isn't. So if you hear someone saying that the doctrine of the Trinity is not biblical, they are picking and choosing which texts to read, rejecting some in favor of others, rejecting the divinity of Christ in favor of his humanity or vice versa.

And if you hear someone say that the doctrine of the Trinity is not Christian, well, they are actually trying to redefine Christianity without taking into consideration the beliefs and teachings of the mainstream of the original church.

And that's how it was in the original church.

Thanks for joining me.

See you next time.

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