C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 86 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
At last, the Trinity. The teachers begin not with a formula but with a story: how a church of convinced monotheists, holding a Bible that calls the Father God, the Son God, and the Spirit God, was driven by four centuries of attack and error to say what it believed. Every heresy in this session came from someone reading the same Bible you hold. Listen for the closing warning: if you ever feel you have finally solved the Trinity, you have just become a heretic.
The session opens with the tension that makes this doctrine necessary. In the Old Testament, God reveals himself to Moses as I AM, and the church always understood the Father to be God. Then the New Testament arrives: Jesus claims what belongs to God alone and accepts worship, John 1 says the Word was with God and the Word was God, and in Acts the Holy Spirit comes and is treated as God. Yet Scripture insists there is one God: the Shema, Isaiah’s there is no God besides me, Paul’s one God and one mediator. Three called God; one God confessed. Augustine, writing his great work on the Trinity in the fourth century, asked his readers to walk with him, to correct him where he erred and be corrected where they erred, because in no other subject is error more dangerous, inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more profitable. The teachers take up the same compact with the class.
The doctrine of the Trinity has defined Christian orthodoxy from the church’s first great controversies, and the groups that deny it today show what is at stake: Mormons teach a Christ who is an offspring of the Father and a heavenly mother, with Satan for a brother; Jehovah’s Witnesses make Jesus a created archangel and the Spirit a force; Islam’s more than a billion adherents honor Christ as prophet only, precisely because there is one God; Oneness Pentecostals hold that Father, Son, and Spirit are one person in three manifestations; theological liberals keep a good man and lose God incarnate; and many sincere but untaught Christians hold unorthodox views without knowing it. The teachers state the historic verdict plainly: by the church’s own definitions, one cannot deny the Trinity and remain orthodox, however warm one’s devotion to Jesus.
The apostles were monotheists who worshiped Jesus; the New Testament everywhere presupposes the full deity of Father, Son, and Spirit without ever printing the later formula, one God in three persons. That articulation took four centuries, and it developed the way doctrine usually does: under attack. Critics of the young, friendless movement, a thorn to Rome and an aberration to the synagogue, pressed the obvious question: your Father is God, your Jesus is God, and you call yourselves monotheists; which is it? The church was forced to fine-tune its language, draft after draft, the whole believing community rereading the text and rejecting wrong answers until what remained could be stated. The session walks the wrong answers in order, because each one narrowed the field.
The first proposal came from within Judaism, in the generation that could still say my friend saw Jesus. The Ebionites denied the deity of Christ while honoring him as the prophet Moses promised in Deuteronomy 18. His existence was beyond dispute, he sure looked like Mary and Joseph’s boy from Nazareth, so the earliest question was not his humanity but his deity, and the Ebionites answered it the simplest way: one God, therefore Jesus is not God. The church, though it could not yet say what Christ was, knew that answer was wrong: he was more than a prophet, more than a man. The first option fell, and the field narrowed.
The opposite error arose on Greek soil. Docetism, from the Greek word for to seem, grew from Gnosticism, the worldview in which spirit is good, matter is evil, the true God is remote, and the world was made by a lesser, ignorant power at the bottom of a ladder of emanations, so that a divine Christ could not truly have taken flesh: he only seemed to have a body, seemed to eat, seemed to die. Marcion, who also cut the Old Testament and much of the New from his canon to fit the scheme, stands among its supporters; Irenaeus fought it; and the apostle John seems already to be answering an early form of it when he opens his first letter with what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands. Thomas’s demand to handle the wounds of the risen Christ became, in God’s providence, the church’s standing testimony that the body was real. The teachers add a warning label: Gnosticism’s disdain for the physical still haunts the church, in every picture of salvation as escape from the body, and the program will return to it.
The third proposal, adoptionism or dynamic monarchianism, tried to keep one God by making Jesus a man whom God adopted: at his baptism the logos, conceived as an impersonal power of God, descended and indwelt him, and at the cross it departed, which is why he cried, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me, and, into your hands I commit my spirit. The teachers make the class feel its plausibility: every good heresy comes from our Bible, from real texts really read, and this one reads the dove’s descent and the cry of dereliction with a certain tidy literalism, sparing God the scandal of dying. Paul of Samosata championed it and a council at Antioch condemned it in 268. The church again knew more than it could yet articulate: the virgin birth, the worship, the whole shape of the story said Christ was more than an inspired man.
The fourth proposal is the one that never died. Modalism, or modalistic monarchianism, taught that Father, Son, and Spirit are three roles, modes, or manifestations of the one God: the judgment hat, the love hat, the indwelling hat, as one man can be husband, father, and son. Sabellius championed it; Tertullian and Hippolytus fought it; its logic even produced patripassianism, the claim that the Father suffered on the cross, since Father and Son are the same person. The teachers are blunt about its appeal: it is the easiest view to illustrate, and it is probably the unorthodox view most ordinary Christians unknowingly hold today, confessed openly by Oneness Pentecostalism. And it shatters on the text: at the baptism all three are present at once, acting and speaking; in Gethsemane the Son prays not my will but yours to someone; on the cross, my God, my God becomes myself, myself; and the Son ascends to send the Spirit, which is meaningless if he is only sending himself back. The relationships among the three are the very thing Scripture will not let go.
The last great proposal came from Arius in Egypt: the Son is not God but the first and greatest creature, begotten, read as made, in eternity past, through whom all else was created. Arianism opposed modalism and adoptionism and thought it had solved the problem; in fact it built subordinationism into the being of God, a greatest Father above a lesser Son and a lesser Spirit, divisions above the arch, where, as the whole course has labored to show, there can be no divisions at all. The teachers note honestly that several early fathers, Justin Martyr, Origen, and others, wrote with degrees of subordinationist language before the church’s vocabulary matured. The needed distinction is between essence and role: functional subordination is biblical, the Father sends, the Son is sent, the Son in John 17 goes to the cross in obedience to the Father’s request, as in a marriage there are differing roles with equal worth; ontological subordination is fatal, for a hierarchy of being above the arch is simply three gods ranked.
Arianism spread until Constantine, newly tolerant of Christianity and anxious for a peaceful empire, convened the first ecumenical council at Nicaea in 325, the first of seven councils gathering bishops from the whole church, of which Protestants generally receive at least the first three and often the first six. The battle came down to one Greek letter: Athanasius’s party confessed the Son homoousios with the Father, of the same substance, while the Arian side offered homoiousios, of similar substance, one iota of difference, which is where the idiom comes from, and everything hung on it. Similar substance makes the Son a second, lesser deity; same substance means Father and Son share the one undivided essence above the arch entirely. Every kitchen illustration of substance breaks down, as the teachers cheerfully demonstrate, because God is not made of anything; the point is sharing, one essence wholly possessed by each person.
The council condemned Arius and produced the creed, completed at Constantinople in 381, that the class reads together: one God, the Father almighty; one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten, not made; incarnate of the virgin, crucified under Pontius Pilate, risen the third day, ascended, coming again to judge the living and the dead; and the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified; one holy catholic, that is, universal, and apostolic church. On the contested word, the council’s move was careful: without fully defining begotten, it fenced it, whatever begotten means, it does not mean made. The teachers add the later linguistic finding that monogenes means one and only, unique, rather than only begotten, which is why modern translations of John 3:16 read one and only Son. And Patton shares, as his own position, a respectful reservation about eternal begottenness taken ontologically: he holds the Son’s sonship as an eternal relationship while insisting the Son is everything God is in essence, a view he once defended to a church history professor who finally said, fine, just believe the rest of it. The creed matters because it defines the word Christian: a shared confession by which the church knows its own faith.
A long tangle followed the councils because the west spoke Latin and the east Greek, and the technical terms would not line up: what carried unity in one tongue sounded like division in the other, so that the west heard tritheism in the east’s three hypostases and the east heard modalism in the west’s formulations, division fed by vocabulary while the concepts often agreed. Calvin, looking back, wished that all the technical names could be buried provided everyone confessed the reality, that the Father, Son, and Spirit are one God, yet the Son is not the Father nor the Spirit the Son, and declined to fight furiously over mere words, noting that even the ancient writers neither agreed with each other nor stayed consistent with themselves. Hold the concepts, the teachers counsel, and hold the terms loosely.
The session gathers its findings into a test chart: deny the equality of the persons and you fall toward subordinationism; deny the unity of God and you fall toward tritheism; deny the diversity of persons and you fall toward modalism. Authentic Christianity is the delicate balance of the one and the three, and the balance is tense by design: heresy’s perennial attraction is that it resolves the tension and makes God easier. But tension is not contradiction. One God and three Gods would be a contradiction; one God in three persons is a mystery, something beyond our comprehension without being against reason. The teachers commend a limited agnosticism: confess the Trinity, live in it, and do not try to solve it, because everyone who has solved it has landed in one of the heresies on the chart.
The famous illustrations are then tried and retired one by one. The egg, shell, white, and yolk, is tritheism in a shell, three parts making one thing, and, the teachers add, our God is nothing like an egg. The sun and its rays separate the Son from the Father’s essence, Arius’s move. The water molecule is tritheism again; water as ice, liquid, and steam is modalism exactly, one substance in three successive modes. Even Augustine’s body, soul, and spirit fails, for a man’s parts do not love one another or converse. The one diagram that holds is the old shield of the Trinity: the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Spirit, the Spirit is not the Father, and yet the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. So the advice for parents and Sunday school teachers is simple and countercultural: skip the analogies, which teach a heresy that must later be untaught, and teach the orthodox confession itself, tension included. The definition the church paid four centuries to state: we believe in one God who eternally exists in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all of whom are fully God, and all of whom are equal. Next session, the same doctrine from the Scriptures themselves.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Key TermsTap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What biblical tension makes the doctrine of the Trinity necessary?
2. What did Augustine say about inquiry into the Trinity?
3. How did the doctrine of the Trinity come to be articulated?
4. Why did the earliest heresy, Ebionism, question Christ’s deity rather than his humanity?
5. What is Docetism, and what worldview produced it?
6. How does the opening of 1 John answer early Docetism?
7. How did adoptionism read the baptism and the cross?
8. What do the teachers mean by saying every good heresy comes from our Bible?
9. Which scenes shatter modalism?
10. Why do the teachers spend extra care on modalism?
11. What was Arius’s teaching?
12. What is the difference between functional and ontological subordination?
13. What hung on the single iota at Nicaea?
14. How did the creed handle the contested word begotten?
15. What does the Greek word monogenes actually mean?
16. What does the heresy test chart summarize?
17. Why do the teachers advise skipping the famous analogies when teaching children?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 7 is complete.
The teachers say the unorthodox view most Christians unknowingly hold is modalism, because the illustrations we grew up with taught it. Which pictures of the Trinity were you given, and where on the heresy chart would each one land?
Every heresy in this session came from believers reading real biblical texts and resolving the tension the wrong way. What does that teach you about how to handle the passages that strain your own understanding, and about patience with people who are honestly wrong?
The counsel of the session is a limited agnosticism: confess the Trinity, live in it, and do not try to solve it. Where is the line for you between healthy mystery and lazy thinking, and how do you keep worship alive inside a doctrine you cannot fully comprehend?
The confession the church paid four centuries to state, and the witness behind it, from John 1: in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; he was in the beginning with God, and all things were made through him.
The lecture’s own directions for the week: meet with others over the group discussion questions, since theology is done in community and not alone; read the Nicene Creed slowly, and the Athanasian Creed printed in the course notes, as the church’s own mature articulation; and let the heresy test chart examine the pictures of God you carry. The course turns next to the biblical defense of the doctrine of the Trinity: the passages from which the church put the confession together.