The Arguments for the Trinity

I’m starting a new series today, as a sort of flip-side to the series on answering Unitarian arguments. In this series, I will be presenting what I take to be the best arguments for the Trinity and its supporting doctrines. As a flip-side, it will spend most of its time and word count arguing for those aspects of the Trinity that Unitarians find objectionable, and less on what is not controversial. However, unlike the previous series, since this will be a positive presentation of all aspects of the Trinity, it will, appropriately, also address responses to these arguments from other groups as well. The arguments/topics will be outlined thus:

1. The Uniqueness of God: The Revelation of Yahweh
2. Three Distinct Persons: the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit
3. Where Deity is Found
4. • In the Father
   • In the Son: The Two Natures of Christ
   • In the Holy Spirit
5. How the Hebrew Scriptures prepared God’s People for the Revelation of the Trinity
6. The Proper Understanding Defense: How Virtually All Challenges Miss the Mark

I do not know exactly how these points will be distributed among articles, so I don’t know exactly how many parts this series will be comprised of. What I hope to have at the end is a rather straightforward compilation of the Scriptural evidence to more fully support my previous “Biblical Definition of the Trinity” article.

I wanted to write this introduction to make a few points to get things started. In my previous series you will note that in the categories of Unitarian arguments, not all of them are arguments from Scripture, strictly speaking. Nor are all the defenses. As you read this series, I want you to take note that every section is based on Scripture. In a video series answering Jehovah’s Witnesses, Dr. James White begins by making the statement that a study of the Trinity only makes sense for people who have a very high view of Scripture. I agree. This is not the result of pagan or gnostic philosophy, no matter how much opponents of the Trinity try to paint it that way. In the following articles, you will not read me leaning on the definitions of creeds and councils, or attempting to fit philosophical language into the Scriptures. I know what the words mean and I believe that for a student of the Scriptures, further study will show why they are valuable, but for my purposes, I won’t need them. This is to be a Scriptural study.

Also, I want to make clear that I am aware of how presuppositions impact how different people look at what is in front of them. Where appropriate, I will point out how a consistent method of interpretation leads to support of the doctrine of the Trinity, and how other belief systems force their adherents to override sound interpretive principles in order to maintain their errors. If you have to change how you interpret Scripture in order to make your theology work, then your theology doesn’t work.

This will also be true when discussing how the Trinitarian defense I’ll be examining, the “Proper Understanding Defense”, reveals that virtually all arguments aimed at the Trinity simply cannot get going without misrepresenting the Trinity at some point. If you cannot argue against something without misrepresenting it, then you cannot argue against it at all.

To get some background to what I will be posting, I offer some recommended links to check out.

The Biblical Basis of the Doctrine of the Trinity: An Outline Study -Dr. Rob Bowman

This is a multi-page document basically providing over a thousand Scriptural citations supporting all of the definitional aspects of the Trinity.

This is a video of a multi-session talk given by Dr. Michael Heiser on the fact of “two powers” theology in the Jewish religion of Jesus’ day, showing how His claims to deity did not conflict with the actual, historic Jewish monotheism as expressed in the first century.

I pray this will be enlightening.