The Trinity in Scripture

Start where Israel starts, because a Christian doctrine of God that begins anywhere else has already gone wrong. 'Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One.' The Shema, Deuteronomy 6:4, recited morning and evening by observant Jews for something over two millennia, is followed at once by a total claim: love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. The oneness of God and the wholeness of the love owed him are stated in one breath, and the second is grounded in the first.

The Hebrew of the verse is famously compressed, and a careful student should know the options. Four words, with no verb, can be read as 'The LORD our God, the LORD is One', which is the BSB's text (the capital O is the translators' choice, since Hebrew has no capitals), or as 'The LORD is our God, the LORD alone', which stresses exclusive allegiance. The BSB footnotes both that rendering and two others, 'The LORD our God is One LORD' and 'The LORD is our God, the LORD is One', so its own page admits the verse can be construed more than one way. The difference is real but it does not open any door here. On either reading Israel is bound to one God and to no other, and the text is not hinting at internal complexity. Arguments that lean on the word echad, one, because at Genesis 2:24 a man and wife become one flesh, are overreaching: echad is the ordinary numeral, and it is the word you would use for one loaf. Do not build on it.

The prophets press the point harder than the Torah does. Isaiah 44:6: the LORD is the first and the last, and there is no God but him. Isaiah 45:5: 'I am the LORD, and there is no other; there is no God but Me.' Isaiah 44:24 has him stretch out the heavens alone and spread out the earth by himself, with no assistant. And Isaiah 45:23 has God swear by himself, 'Every knee will bow before Me, every tongue will swear allegiance,' which is worth marking now, because Paul will do something startling with it.

This monotheism was not abstract. It was a boundary and people died on it. The Maccabean crisis, the refusal of Jews to place the emperor's image in the temple, the daily recitation of the Shema, all of it says that the people among whom the first Christians appeared had a settled, costly, exclusive worship of one God. Whatever the New Testament is doing, it is not doing it casually, and the first Christians were Jews who kept saying the Shema.

So the question this lesson answers is not whether the Bible teaches that God is one. It does, everywhere, and the New Testament repeats it: 'there is no God but one' (1 Corinthians 8:4); 'God is one' (Galatians 3:20); 'You believe that God is one. Good for you!' (James 2:19). The question is what happened when men who believed that met Jesus of Nazareth and then received the Spirit, and what they wrote afterwards.

Three bodies of material in the Hebrew scriptures put strain on a simple picture. None of them teaches the Trinity. All of them are places where later readers found the categories they needed already stretched, and an honest teacher presents them as strain rather than as proof.

First, the angel of the LORD. In Genesis 16 the angel finds Hagar, promises her offspring too many to number, which is a divine promise and not a message carried, and then verse 13 says Hagar gave this name to the LORD who had spoken to her: 'You are the God who sees me'. In Genesis 22 the angel calls from heaven and says Abraham has not withheld his son 'from me'. In Exodus 3 the angel appears in the flame and then God calls to Moses out of the bush and identifies himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In Judges 6 Gideon is terrified because he has seen the angel of the LORD face to face, and in Judges 13 Manoah tells his wife they are going to die, 'for we have seen God!' The texts move between the messenger and the sender with no seam.

Three readings of that pattern have long histories. The agency reading, standard in Jewish interpretation and held by many Christian scholars, appeals to the ancient convention that an authorised messenger speaks in the first person for his sender and is treated as his sender's presence; the shifts are then idiomatic, not ontological. The theophany reading takes the angel to be a mode of God's own appearing, neither a separate creature nor a second God. The christological reading, common among the early Fathers and pressed hard by Justin Martyr in the Dialogue with Trypho, takes these to be appearances of the pre-incarnate Son, which for Justin explained how the invisible Father could be seen. It is worth knowing that Augustine resisted the third reading in books two and three of De Trinitate, preferring created angelic mediation, and his reason was theological rather than exegetical: if the Son is the one who appears because the Father cannot, the Son's invisibility is less than the Father's, and subordination follows. That is a live methodological lesson. A reading that helps with one doctrine can cost you another.

Second, Daniel 7. In the night visions the Ancient of Days takes his seat, and then, in the BSB's words, 'I saw One like the Son of Man coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into His presence.' What is given to him is 'dominion, glory, and kingship, that the people of every nation and language should serve Him', and a dominion that will not pass away. Two details do the work. Coming with the clouds is elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible what God does, not what a man does. And the Aramaic verb behind 'serve' in verse 14 is the word regularly used for religious service. Against that, verses 18 and 27 say the kingdom is given to the saints of the Most High, and a large body of scholarship reads the figure as a corporate symbol for faithful Israel. The chapter genuinely supports both readings, and it is not honest to teach one and hide the other. The BSB's capitals ('One like the Son of Man', 'Him', 'His') read the figure as an individual, and its footnote at 7:13 ('Or one like a son of man') is the form that keeps the corporate reading open; the Aramaic has no capitals, and the corporate reading is held by serious scholars on the grounds already given.

Third, Psalm 110:1: 'The LORD said to my Lord: "Sit at My right hand until I make Your enemies a footstool for Your feet."' The BSB capitalises My and Your in the second line, but the Hebrew has no capitals; that is the translators' reading of who is being addressed, and the court-psalm reading below stands at full strength. In Hebrew the first is the divine name and the second is a term of honour for a superior. Read as a court psalm, the second figure is Israel's king, and the psalm is enthronement language. Jesus makes it the sharpest question in the temple in Mark 12:35-37: how can the Christ be David's son when David calls him Lord? And at his trial, asked whether he is the Christ, the Son of the Blessed, he answers, 'I am,' and 'you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of Power and coming with the clouds of heaven' (Mark 14:62), fusing this psalm with Daniel 7 and producing the charge of blasphemy. Psalm 110 is the Old Testament text the New Testament quotes and alludes to more than any other, and that fact alone should be on a student's map.

What the New Testament writers do with these materials is the thing to watch. They do not argue from the angel of the LORD to the deity of Christ in any sustained way. They do reach constantly for Psalm 110 and for Daniel 7, and, most strikingly, they take texts whose whole point is that the LORD alone is God and apply them to Jesus. Philippians 2:10-11 takes Isaiah 45:23, where God swears by himself that every knee will bow before him, and has every knee bow at the name of Jesus. Paul, a Pharisee, does that in a letter, without argument, as though it were obvious. Richard Bauckham has built an influential account on this pattern, arguing that the earliest Christians did not add Jesus to God as a second being but included him within the unique identity of the one God of Israel, which is why they could worship him and go on saying the Shema. Larry Hurtado, working from the evidence of early Christian practice rather than from titles, argued the same conclusion from the other end: devotion to Jesus alongside God appears within the first two decades and is far too early to be explained by later Gentile influence, which was the older account associated with Wilhelm Bousset. Those accounts are contested in their details, and other scholars read the development as slower and more gradual, but the evidence they assembled is not seriously in dispute.

Here is the New Testament material, and here also is where a teacher's honesty is tested, because several of the strongest texts have a genuine grammatical or punctuational question attached, and students who are told these are open and shut will be ambushed by the first well-read sceptic they meet.

John 1:1: 'In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.' In Greek the first occurrence of God has the definite article and the second does not, and the second stands before the verb. That is the whole basis of the Jehovah's Witness rendering 'a god', and it is also the basis of a great deal of bad defence. Many popular apologists appeal to a rule published by E. C. Colwell in 1933, but Colwell's rule says that definite predicate nouns preceding the verb usually lack the article, and it does not license the converse inference that an anarthrous predicate noun before the verb is therefore definite. Using it that way is a logical error, and the student should not repeat it. The better-grounded argument is Philip Harner's, in a 1973 article, that the construction here is qualitative: the Word has the nature of God without being identical with the person just mentioned, which is exactly what the clause before it, 'the Word was with God', requires. On that reading John has written a sentence that is impossible to improve if you want to say both that the Word is distinct from the Father and that what the Father is, the Word is.

John 20:28 is the cleanest of all. Thomas, who a week earlier refused to believe, says to the risen Jesus, 'My Lord and my God!' Both nouns have the article, the words are addressed to Jesus, the narrator introduces the words as Thomas's reply, said to Jesus in the Greek, and Jesus neither corrects nor deflects but pronounces a blessing on those who will believe without seeing. The occasional suggestion that Thomas is exclaiming to heaven rather than addressing Jesus has to get past the 'to him' of the Greek, which the BSB's 'Thomas replied' leaves implicit. This text is also the closing bracket of the Gospel: John 1:1 says the Word was God, and the last human speech in the book before the epilogue says it again to the man standing there.

Romans 9:5 is contested, and the contest is about punctuation, which the earliest manuscripts do not supply. The BSB reads, 'Theirs are the patriarchs, and from them proceeds the human descent of Christ, who is God over all, forever worthy of praise! Amen.' So the BSB has taken the christological reading in its text, and its only footnote ('Or forever blessed') concerns the last phrase and does not mention the other reading. Put a full stop after the mention of Christ (in the Greek, after 'according to the flesh') and you get instead a doxology to the Father: the Christ came from them; may God who is over all be blessed forever. The Revised Standard Version took that route, as did the New English Bible. The argument for the doxology reading is that Paul's benedictions elsewhere put the word 'blessed' first, as Greek doxologies normally do, and that Paul nowhere else plainly calls Christ God. The argument for the christological reading is that the participle construction reads naturally as a relative clause about the Christ just named, that a doxology to the Father is abrupt at the start of a lament over Israel, and that the word order does not match Paul's other doxologies either. Bruce Metzger argued the christological reading at length, as have Murray Harris, C. E. B. Cranfield and Douglas Moo; Rudolf Bultmann and others took the doxology. Modern translations now mostly follow the christological reading, and its case is the stronger one, but a student should know it is an argument and not a printed fact.

Titus 2:13, 'as we await the blessed hope and glorious appearance of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ', and 2 Peter 1:1 ('our God and Savior Jesus Christ') turn on the Granville Sharp construction, named for the English abolitionist who published on it in 1798. When two singular, personal, common nouns are joined by 'and' with the article before the first only, they refer to one person. Daniel Wallace's doctoral work defended the rule for that restricted class of cases and it holds up well there. The objection worth knowing is that 'God and Savior' was a stock formula in the Greek world, and that a fixed phrase may not obey the rule; some have also argued that 'Savior' functions here almost as a proper name, and proper names are excluded from the rule. The reply is that the following words, 'Jesus Christ', stand in apposition to the whole phrase, which is hard to explain if two persons are in view. The majority of translations and commentators take both verses as calling Jesus God, and the case is strong; it is not beyond argument. The BSB prints both verses as one person and has no footnote at either offering the other reading, so a student using only the BSB will not see that there is one: that 'our great God' and 'Savior Jesus Christ' name the Father and the Son separately.

Hebrews 1:8 quotes Psalm 45:6 and applies it to the Son: 'Your throne, O God, endures forever and ever, and justice is the scepter of Your kingdom.' The BSB prints the vocative and has no footnote at this verse. The Greek can also be construed, in this lesson's rendering, 'God is your throne forever and ever', which some older versions printed in a margin, and behind it lies the question of what the Hebrew psalm meant when it addressed an Israelite king. The vocative reading is the majority one and fits the writer's argument, which is precisely that the Son is addressed in terms no angel is ever addressed in. But notice the shape of the writer's own case: he is arguing from a catena of Old Testament texts, and his method assumes that his readers will grant that these texts, spoken of God or to God, are spoken to the Son.

Philippians 2:6-11 is the richest and the most argued over. Christ, 'existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in human likeness'. The Greek noun rendered 'something to be grasped' is rare, and the BSB footnotes it 'Or something to be exploited'. The question is whether it means something not yet possessed that might be seized, or something already possessed that might be exploited or clung to; Roy Hoover's study in 1971 argued for the second, which is why several modern versions speak of not exploiting equality with God, and N. T. Wright has developed that reading. A larger dispute runs underneath: James Dunn argued in Christology in the Making in 1980 that the passage is an Adam Christology about the man who refused to grasp at equality, with no pre-existence in view. That reading has been strongly contested by Wright, Gordon Fee, Larry Hurtado and many others, and it remains a minority position, but a student should know it exists and why. The BSB's English ('existing in the form of God', 'emptied Himself') reads most naturally on the pre-existence view, so a student using only the BSB will not see that Dunn reads the same Greek differently. What is not in dispute is the end: every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord, and that is Isaiah 45:23 with Jesus in the place the LORD occupies, to the glory of God the Father.

Other material fills in the picture: John 8:58, 'before Abraham was born, I am!'; John 5:23, that all may honour the Son just as they honour the Father, with the warning attached; Colossians 1:15-17, where all things are created through him and in him hold together; Hebrews 1:3, 'the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His nature'; and the worship scenes of Revelation, where in 5:13 praise and honour and glory and power are given 'To Him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb' together, in a book that twice has an angel refuse worship. And running against all of it, in the same documents, are the texts that make the Son distinct from and in some sense subordinate to the Father: 'the Father is greater than I' (John 14:28); 'the Son can do nothing by Himself' (John 5:19); the Son handing over the kingdom and being subjected in 1 Corinthians 15:28. Any doctrine worth the name has to hold both sets, and the next lesson is about the century in which the church tried.

The Spirit's case in scripture is made in two steps, and they are different steps that people often run together. The first is that the Spirit is God. The second is that the Spirit is someone rather than something.

For deity, the decisive passage is Acts 5:3-4. Peter says to Ananias, 'how is it that Satan has filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit and withhold some of the proceeds from the land?', and three clauses later, 'You have not lied to men, but to God!' The identification is made in passing, which is what makes it valuable; nobody is arguing a case here, Peter simply moves from one to the other. Alongside it stands 1 Corinthians 2:10-11: 'The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of man except his own spirit within him? So too, no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God.' Paul's analogy only works if the Spirit stands to God as a person's own spirit stands to that person, which is to say, on the inside. Add 1 Corinthians 3:16 and 6:19, where the believer is God's temple because the Spirit dwells there, and 2 Corinthians 3:17-18.

For personhood, the evidence is a set of verbs. The Spirit speaks: 'the Holy Spirit said, Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them' (Acts 13:2), where the Spirit uses the first person and has a work of his own. The Spirit teaches, guides, hears and declares, and Jesus in John 14 to 16 refers to him with a personal pronoun and calls him 'another Advocate', the word 'another' implying one of the same kind as the one departing. The Spirit intercedes 'with groans too deep for words' (Romans 8:26). The Spirit can be lied to (Acts 5:3), grieved (Ephesians 4:30), and, in Hebrews 10:29, insulted. Forces are not lied to and electricity is not grieved. Note carefully what this evidence does and does not do. It establishes that the biblical writers speak of the Spirit as an agent with mind and will, not that they had a technical doctrine of personhood, which is a later development for later reasons.

Then the triadic patterns, which are the third strand. Matthew 28:19 has the disciples baptise 'in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit'. The singular 'name' with three genitives is the point, and it was noticed early. Be straight about the textual question, since it circulates: every Greek manuscript of Matthew that contains the end of the Gospel has the triadic form, and the only ground for doubt is that Eusebius sometimes cites the verse in a shorter form, which most scholars judge to be loose citation rather than a variant text. The formula stands. 2 Corinthians 13:14 closes a letter with 'The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you', which is a blessing pronounced on a congregation in three names. 1 Corinthians 12:4-6 arranges gifts, ministries and ways of working under Spirit, Lord and God. Ephesians 4:4-6 runs one Spirit, one Lord, one God and Father. 1 Peter 1:2 has believers chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, sanctified by the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ. These are not arguments about the Godhead. They are the ordinary furniture of apostolic prayer and instruction, which is a stronger kind of evidence than an argument would be.

One passage must be surrendered, and a teacher who does not surrender it loses the right to be believed about the others. The words at 1 John 5:7-8 about three bearing witness in heaven, the Father, the Word and the Holy Spirit, known as the Johannine Comma, are not in any Greek manuscript of the first thirteen centuries, are absent from every ancient version except the Latin, and are unknown to the Greek Fathers who would have used them in the Arian controversy had they existed. They entered the printed Greek text through the third edition of Erasmus and from there the King James Version. No modern critical text and no modern translation prints them as scripture. Say so plainly and cheerfully. The doctrine never rested on them, and the willingness to let a convenient verse go is part of what makes a teacher trustworthy on the inconvenient ones.

Now the sentence this lesson has been building to, and it should be said without flinching. The doctrine of the Trinity is not stated anywhere in scripture. There is no verse that says God is one being in three persons. The doctrine is a conclusion, drawn from the whole, about what must be true if everything scripture says is true together.

That is not a concession wrung out of a Christian teacher. It is the honest account, and it is also the stronger position, for three reasons. First, it is what the church itself said it was doing. The fourth-century bishops did not claim to be quoting a verse; they argued that the scriptural data could not be held together on any other terms, and they fought over a non-biblical word, homoousios, because the biblical words alone had proved capable of being read in two ways. Second, a doctrine built on a proof text can be taken apart by a better reading of that text, while a doctrine drawn from the shape of the whole cannot be dislodged by winning one verse. Give away Romans 9:5, concede the Comma, grant every contested punctuation to the other side, and John 20:28, Philippians 2:10-11, Acts 5:3-4, Matthew 28:19 and the worship of Revelation 5 are still there. Third, pretending otherwise is a trap for students. Anyone taught that the doctrine sits in three verses will meet a well-prepared opponent who can dispute all three, and will conclude that he was lied to.

So state the reasoning as reasoning. Scripture insists there is one God and never wavers. Scripture speaks of the Father as God, of the Son as God, and of the Spirit as God. Scripture distinguishes them from one another in ways that will not reduce to one person playing three parts: the Son prays to the Father and is not praying to himself, the Father sends the Son, the Son and the Father send the Spirit, and at the baptism all three are present in distinct roles. Hold all of that and you have said, in substance, what the creed later said in technical language.

Three cautions before the next lesson. Do not read the plurals of Genesis 1:26, 'Let Us make man in Our image', as a Trinitarian proof (the BSB's capitals on Us and Our are the translators' convention for God and settle nothing, since Hebrew has none); the proposals include a heavenly court, a plural of deliberation and a majestic plural, and a doctrine does not need the verse. Do not treat the three men at Mamre in Genesis 18 as a demonstration, whatever Rublev's icon has made of it in the devotional imagination of the East; it is a legitimate and ancient reading and it is not an argument that will persuade anyone who does not already agree. And do not offer analogies as explanations: water in three states is modalism, an egg in three parts makes the persons parts, a man who is father, son and employee is Sabellianism. Every analogy that makes the doctrine easy has made it into a heresy that the church named and rejected, which is what the next lesson is about.

What should be carried into that lesson is this. The New Testament writers were monotheistic Jews who found themselves praying to Jesus, baptising in three names, and attributing to the Spirit what belongs to God, and who did all of this without ever saying that they had changed their minds about the Shema. They left the church a set of convictions and no vocabulary in which to hold them at once. The vocabulary came next, it was argued over for centuries, and it cost a great deal.