Do Christians Worship One God or Three?

Muslims charge that Christians worship three gods. Unitarians and Jehovah’s Witnesses make the same accusation. The word, Trinity, offends them.

Even some Christians are vague about what Trinity means because it seems mysterious. Mysterious indeed: God reveals himself first as one God, and, at the same time, as three Persons in one Godhead.

When God addressed Moses at the burning bush (Ex. 3) Moses’ world reeked with many gods. He knew that. Yet, Moses did not ask, “Which God is this now?” From the beginning, it was revealed to him that there was only one true God to reckon with.

Listen to the Shema of the Old Testament: “Hear O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4). In that ancient world teeming with gods, the Old Testament holds Jehovah to be “the Sovereign Lord” (Hab. 3:19).

The New Testament continues the claim. During Jesus’ forty-day fast, Satan tried to entice Jesus to worship him. Jesus said, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve him only’” (Lk. 4:8).

At the same time, Scriptures show that this One God manifests himself in three persons, and this reality is set forth repeatedly.

After the resurrection, Thomas worshiped the risen Savior. He exclaimed, “My Lord and my God.” If this declaration had been false but Jesus had accepted it, his acceptance would have been blasphemous. Instead, later the Apostle John reinforces Thomas’s declaration. He testifies of Jesus, “the Word was God” (John 1:1).

But what about the Holy Spirit? In the early church, when a couple named Ananias and Sapphira tried to deceive Peter over a money gift, Peter saw through their ruse. He said to Ananias, “… you have lied to the Holy Spirit” (Acts 5:3). Then he added, “You have not lied to men but to God” (Acts 5:4). It is not possible to lie to a mere influence. The Holy Spirit is obviously more than a feeling or an influence. He is “personal.” He is God, the Spirit.

So, Jesus, at his baptism “saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove” and heard the voice of the Father saying, “This is my Son whom I love” (Matt.3:16, 17). In that moment we have the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in one event of revelation.

During the first four hundred years of the early church, the church fathers wrestled with these affirmations made in both Testaments. To give them order, they formulated this precious truth under the title of the Trinity.

They said, God is one in “essence” and three in “persons.” He must be worshiped without dividing the essence or confusing the persons. God the Father rules over all; God the Son is our Redeemer; God the Spirit is our sanctifier.

He is one God manifesting himself in three persons. The hymn our congregation sang to conclude worship on a recent Sunday morning included the following words:

Laud and honor to the Father,/ Laud and honor to the Son,/

Laud and honor to the Spirit,/ Ever Three and Ever One./

We sing this 700-year-old hymn in praise to our God who is revealed to us as the Three-in-One – the God who creates, redeems and sanctifies us.

If this truth still mystifies you, remember that it is in our worship of the God who is three-in-one that we come closest to grasping the reality of this great mystery of the Christian faith.

When we pray, “Our Father which art in Heaven” we worship the one and only God. When we say of Jesus, “He is Lord and Savior,” we acknowledge the one and only God. When we entreat the Holy Spirit to intercede for us, we entreat the one and only God. Three persons in one Godhead!

Let us worship our God!

When the Church is Grounded in Truth

Kathleen and I read and discuss a chapter from the Scriptures together every morning. I wish you could have been with us for that exercise today.

The passage was Acts 6, telling how the young church resolved a social problem. The church at that time was made up of Jews, but some of them spoke Hebrew and others spoke Greek. Among both groups there were widows who were being supported by the benevolence of the church. But the Greek-speakers complained that their widows were being overlooked when the food was distributed.

The early church was a vigorous movement, not shackled with the complexities of today’s more institutionalized church. Nevertheless, they showed focus in the church’s primary duty — to proclaim — and administrative savvy — to respond — when an internal problem arose that needed addressing.

Here’s how the Apostles engaged the whole body of new Christians:

They themselves clearly held primary authority, but they did not rule autocratically. Instead they called the believers together to seek their assistance. This displayed a wonderful example of openness and shared responsibility.

First, the Apostles cast the problem in terms of right and wrong: “It would not be right for us,” they said, “to neglect the ministry of the word of God in order to wait on tables.”

They asked the large body of believers to choose seven men who would be assigned to deal with this disturbing problem. They were to be men full of the Holy Spirit (foremost) and wisdom (God-anointed common sense).

The seven were consecrated by the laying on of hands and put to the task of caring for the apparent inequity among the widows. At the same time, the Apostles underlined that their own first priority was to “give themselves to prayer and the ministry of the word.” Proclamation and teaching must dominate.

How the young church went about this choosing is not known since the number of converts had swelled into the thousands. Interestingly, the seven who were chosen all have Greek names and they are likely Greek-speakers. Stephen, the first-named, stands out as “full of faith and of the Holy Spirit.”

Although set apart to serve in administrative ways, Stephen is singled out as a miracle worker and a strong proclaimer of the word. This got him into trouble. First, some members of a Greek-speaking synagogue began to argue with him, but they were no match for his wisdom and the energy of the Spirit he possessed.

So they went a step further and rounded up some false witnesses, plying them with lies. This stirred up the masses and irritated the city elders and teachers of the law. Stephen was dragged before the Sanhedrin – the most influential court of the Jews.

Fearlessly he spoke to this body, and his speech cost him his life. But as they stoned him a man named Saul of Tarsus was looking on.

Here’s what appears to stand out for us today. To be effective in our world, the church must be committed to the truth of the Gospel in all aspects of its life — in preaching, administration, facing of opposition, and seizing its opportunities.

The Apostles had a keen sense of their primary duty to preach the word of God, so they could speak about that duty in terms of right and wrong. Not better or worse. Not preferred or unsuitable. What they were to do was right and to neglect it would have been wrong.

There is the same sense of “oughtness” with regard to the needs of the Greek-speaking widows. The Apostles acknowledged the need, set the number at seven, and called the community to assist in the choices. It was done cleanly, openly. In reading the account one gets a sense of clarity and truth.

The issue of truth is critical today because truth — as the Scriptures see truth — is under attack. The Psalmist prays: “Surely you desire truth in the inward parts.” Jesus said, “I am the truth.” He also said repeatedly, “I tell you the truth.” John writes that “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” The Apostle Paul encouraged the Galatian Christians to “speak the truth in love.” When we read the story of Stephen we feel like we’re reading about the embodiment of truth.

The relativism regarding truth is so wide-spread in our times that it makes it harder, sometimes even for Christians, to face many issues of life as either right or wrong. This episode from the functioning of the early church challenges us to give ourselves to God’s truth in the proclamation of his word and in the administration of his church.

To e-mail this post to a friend click here.

What is Faith — Really?

A Sunday School lad was asked what he thought the word “faith” meant. He said, “Faith means believing what you know ain’t so.”

The boy’s response may seem extreme, but not entirely off-base because, at times, what you call faith may seem almost non-existent. There is a God; of that you’re sure. But when unexpected adversity strikes, the robust faith that others seem to have is just not there for you. It leaves you asking: what is faith — really?

Here’s an answer right out of the Scriptures: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see (Heb. 11:1).

The first word of importance here is hope. We usually use the word in mundane ways: “After college. I hope to go to graduate school.” Or “I hope the doctor’s report will be positive.” What we get from such sentences is that hope means optimism about our unforeseen future, and we all need some of that.

But the author of Hebrews uses the word in a much more comprehensive way. It has to do not only with the world our five senses experience but also with the unseen world our spiritual senses engage – the world where God dwells. Elsewhere the writer says that hope is “an anchor for the soul, firm and secure,” and this anchor binds us to where “Jesus who went before us” is (Heb. 6:19,20).

Faith insists that there is more to reality than what we perceive in the moment. In fact, this broader understanding of reality makes one think of St. Paul’s caution to the Corinthian church: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men (1 Cor. 15:19). We believe that Christ was raised from the dead, and based on that belief we must hold our promised resurrection dear.

So, when the author of the Hebrews says “Faith is being sure of what we hope for” he is saying that our trust in Christ for both time and eternity gives us a certainty that anchors the life we live here and now – this life with its hurts and disappointments as well as its pleasures and surprises. This faith makes us sure of Christ; we are sure of our salvation; we are sure that Our Lord will not leave us alone in the tough times; and this faith makes us sure that our faith in Christ makes our eternal future in him secure.

The author of the Hebrews tells us also that faith makes us “certain of what we do not see” — at least what we do not see with our physical eyes. Here again reality for Christians has a broader perspective than just the here-and-now. We have eyes to see in this life and we use them with joy, but there is a larger reality that goes beyond the physical act of seeing. When Jesus promised his disciples that, “where I am you will be also” he was thinking with this larger vision (John 14:3). When this faith is fully exercised, it grounds our lives in a certainty. Call it Heaven.

We need not be in a hurry to get there. We don’t have to renounce the goodness of our present life or our challenges as God presents them in the here-and-now. The call to faith is never a call to be gloomy. In fact, our life needs this broader perspective in order for us to function with strength and joy in the present. So, authentic Christian faith makes us “certain of what we do not see.”

Is there another way to say this? Eugene Peterson in THE MESSAGE paraphrases the verse from Hebrews this way: “The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living.”

And Oswald Chambers had a fix on the realities of this kind of faith when he wrote, “Faith is a deliberate confidence in the character of God whose ways you may not understand at the time.”

Again, Rabindranath Tagore understood that faith makes us adequate and keeps us calm when the stresses of the here-and-now are severe. He wrote: “Faith is a bird that feels dawn breaking and sings while it is still dark.”

So, the faith we are called to in the Scriptures is really the opposite of “believing what we know ain’t so.” It is being assured of the reality of what we hope for (in Christ) and made certain of what we do not see (with our physical eyes but do see with our spiritual eyes). We know what faith is and, taken this way, it gives us solid footing for life!

The Courage to be Protestant

A week or so ago I posted comments about the impressive Roman Catholic funeral provided for the late Senator Edward Kennedy. In doing so I asked some questions raised by David F. Wells in his book The Courage to Be Protestant (Eerdmans). Both the funeral and the book raised critical truth issues. In this post I want to focus on the book.

David Wells believes that evangelicalism is “wounded and declining” in the West, especially in America. In making his case he says that “evangelicals have lost their spiritual status as outsiders to the culture, those who march to a different drummer and have the capacity to think about their world in ways that are completely different from what is taken as normative in it” (p. 170).

This is all the sadder because, as he points out, after the Second World War evangelicalism sprang up as a vital, thriving movement, and its spiritual energy gave birth to evangelical journals, para-church organizations, evangelical institutions, mega-churches, and new congregations aplenty. He identifies key leaders who led the movement, including Carl Henry, Billy Graham, Harold Ockenga, and others.

What happened, according to Wells, is that the movement took its leave of solid Christian doctrine as foundational to the whole enterprise. It became shaped more by culture than by revealed truth. In fact, he avers, “When all is said and done today, many evangelicals are indifferent to doctrine”. because many think it “is an impediment as we reach out to new generations” (p. 3). When he speaks of doctrine he means the great biblical teachings that sprang to life out of the Reformation of the 16th century.

He is clearly Reformational in his belief that “in Scripture alone is God’s authoritative truth found, in Christ alone is salvation found, it is by grace alone that we are saved, and this salvation is through faith alone. Only as each of these affirmations is made can we say that salvation from start to finish is to the glory of God alone” (p. 21). Those are the rallying cries of the Reformation.

Wells believes that, in its decline, evangelicalism today is dividing into three distinct constituencies: (1) those who hold to the classical orthodoxy of the earlier evangelicals; (2) the marketers, refashioning the way of “doing church” in order for their efforts to be “seeker sensitive”; and (3) the more recent emergents, whose impulses, he believes, will turn out to be a form of renewed liberalism.

The depth of the author’s conviction on these matters is reflected in the fact that his book is really a summary and repackaging of the content of four previous books. They are: No Place for Truth, or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (1993); God in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in a World of Fading Dreams (1994); Losing Our Virtue: Why the Church Must Recover Its Moral Vision (1998); and Above All Earthly Powers: Christ in a Postmodern World (2005).

When we reflect on these titles we see what David Wells’ burden is. He believes that the Protestant church in the West (that is, North America and Europe) has been wrenched from its necessary moorings in serious Protestant/Reformational doctrine. It has thus come to seek shortcuts for doing the work of the church, substituted psychological for theological foundations, and embraced the culture rather than setting about to transform culture. The negative results both in doctrinal deviation and moral decline among believers are evident everywhere, he holds, and he backs this up with research.

As the above titles show, “truth” is a big issue for him and in chapter 3 of The Courage to Be Protestant he devotes 36 pages to the subject. He writes, “My conclusion is that absolute truth and morality are fast receding in society because their grounding in God as objective, as outside of ourself, as our transcendent point of reference, is disappearing (p. 61). He returns to the theme again and again.

By the time he has given his full analyses of modern life and the way modern life’s distortions have been taken into evangelical churches, one is ready for the final section of the book, which reviews the great Reformation doctrines that he believes must become standard fare in evangelical pulpits once again if the church is to turn the tide. His closing chapter on the church is particularly important in this regard as he reviews the marks of the church as formulated during the Reformation: the Word of God must be rightly preached, the sacraments must be rightly observed, and discipline must be restored as a function of the church. He deals with these marks clearly and compellingly.

I found the content of the book serious and engaging, though the organization sometimes was a little difficult to track. The outline given at the outset seemed more detailed than necessary, probably because this book was a restatement of the major emphases of the previous four books. Nevertheless, the issues the author raises are vital and they are raised in a prophetic way. For serious Christians who care about the decline and recovery of evangelicalism in the 21st century, the book is well worthwhile. In fact, if I were a pastor again The Courage to Be Protestant would both disturb and motivate me.

How Total Is Total Depravity? Some Thoughts and Reflections

I was asked recently about the Christian doctrine of total depravity. The questioner was a Christian brought up in Wesleyan circles.

“Don’t we believe that the depravity of man is not total?” she asked. Then she added, “If it were total, wouldn’t that leave man devoid of anything that God could appeal to in calling him to salvation?”

I replied that Wesleyans among others believe that the image of God in man (the Imago Dei) is blemished but not destroyed by Adam’s fall. All humans, however sinful, continue to bear the image of God. And there is a prevenient grace (the grace that goes before) that keeps even the vilest of sinners capable of responding when the gospel appeal is made.

Her question prompted me to write down some notes about the subject of total depravity.

The question is, how total is total depravity? Besides being a profound theological question, this is also a serious pastoral question.

In the eighteenth century John Fletcher, the Swiss-born immigrant, went from his homeland to England, was converted in a Methodist setting, mastered the English language, and was ordained as an Anglican (Episcopalian) minister. He served a church at Madeley and became known as Fletcher of Madeley. He was chosen by John Wesley to be his successor but preceded Wesley in death.

Fletcher was learned in theology and wrote Five Checks to Antinomianism, which were an answer to the extremes of Calvinism in the England of his times. Here is a statement from him on the seriousness and extent of sin — which can be regarded as a fair presentation of Methodist theology on this question.

“In every religion there is a principal truth or error which, like the first link of a chain, necessarily draws after it all the parts with which it is essentially connected. This leading principle in Christianity . . . is the doctrine of our corrupt and lost estate; for if man is not at variance with his Creator, what need of a Mediator between God and him? If he is not a depraved, undone creature, what necessity of so wonderful a Restorer and Saviour as the Son of God? lf he be not enslaved to sin, why is he redeemed by Jesus Christ? If he is not polluted, why must he be washed in the blood of the immaculate Lamb? If his soul is not disordered, what occasion is there for such a divine physician? If he is not helpless and miserable, why is he perpetually invited to secure the assistance and consolations of the Holy Spirit? And, in a word, if he is not born in sin, why is the new birth so absolutely necessary that Christ declares with the most solemn asseverations, without it no man can see the kingdom of God?”

For Wesleyans, how total is total depravity? We are sometimes charged with having a casual or shallow view of sin, of being semi-Pelagians. (That is, to believe that one is saved by God’s grace but man adds something to it by his cooperation. The issue is, does Christ get all the merit for salvation or is it shared?)

Here’s an excerpt from Wesley’s Sermon 44, on Original Sin: “ ‘God saw all the imaginations of the thoughts of (man’s) heart . . .’ It is not possible to find a word of a more extensive signification. It includes whatever is formed, made, fabricated within; all that is or passes in the soul; every inclination, affection, passion, appetite; every temper, design, thought. It must of consequence include every word and action, as naturally flowing from these fountains, and being either good or evil according to the fountain from which they severally flow.”

He does not use the term “total depravity” here, but that is certainly what he is describing. When Wesley revised the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion into his Twenty-Four (plus one), he shortened the one on sin but retained the words: “. . . it is the corruption of the nature of every man, that naturally is engendered of the offspring of Adam whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil and that continually . . .”

Do the Scriptures support such sobering words? “Sin lurks deep in the hearts of the wicked, forever urging them on to evil deeds” (Psalm 36:10). “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). “There is none righteous, no not one” (Romans 3:9ff).

Twentieth century Swiss theologian, Emil Brunner writes, “Sin understood in the Christian sense, is the rent which cuts through the whole of existence.”

Here are some clarifications of the doctrine of total depravity by an American theologian of our own day, Donald Bloesch. As I see it, he is trying to bridge the theological differences in the evangelical ranks and make a statement for contemporary “evangelicalism.” I believe him to be a moderate Reformed scholar attempting to correct or clarify the extremes of Reformed doctrine. Please note the qualification he adds for each affirmation.

Bloesch writes that total depravity can be thought of as having four meanings:

“First, it refers to the corruption at the very center of man’s being, the heart, but this does not mean that man’s humanity has ceased to exist. Second, it signifies the infection in every part of man’s being, though this is not to imply that this infection is evenly distributed or that nothing good remains in man. Third, it denotes the total inability of sinful man to please God or come to him unless moved by grace, though this does not imply that man is not free in other areas of his life. Fourth, it includes the idea of the universal corruption of the human race, despite the fact that some peoples and cultures manifest this corruption much less than others.”

The goodness that Bloesch acknowledges is of a social or moral nature. It in no way contributes to one’s salvation. All saving virtue is with Christ.

One can scarcely miss the fact that among evangelicals at the present time the doctrine of sin as total depravity does not hold a compelling place in study or preaching. With perhaps the following results:

1. A cardinal doctrine of Christianity is being seriously muted. The three major issues of the Christian scriptures are God, sin and redemption. It is right to talk to our people about the love of God, but that is not enough. The seriousness of sin must also have a prominent place in our message.

2. The blessing of grace can be felt at the heart level only by those who have felt the sting of their own sinfulness. “Where sin abounded, grace much more abounded” (Romans 5:20b) A shallow view of sin means a shallow view of grace. And perhaps an anemic and watered-down sense of God’s forgiveness.

3. This neglect may account for a casual view of holiness on the part of many believers. The clear command of both Testaments is, “Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy” (Leviticus 19:2; 1 Peter 1:15,16). The consequence of casualness in this matter may be a stunting of character formation among Christians and a scarce witness to the everyday world. But as well, with this casualness may come a reduced ability to take responsibility for wrongdoing of the more subtle kind.

When we as believers remember well “the pit from which we were digged” — or the sins from which we are delivered — and beyond that the heinousness of sin in all its expressions, it gives depth to our devotional life, our love of the Scriptures, our need for public worship, and our faithful service for our Lord.