No One Like Him: The Doctrine of God (Foundations of Evangelical Theology) by John S. Feinberg

Author:John S. Feinberg [Feinberg, John S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2006-04-26T07:00:00+00:00

HISTORY AND THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

As we have seen, the doctrine of the Trinity is nowhere in Scripture stated as such, but biblical teaching implies it. It is always difficult to construct historical explanations of why certain events or movements of thought arise. Still, we can offer some idea of what motivated the development of this doctrine.

Roger Haight argues that the question about the Trinity initially arose out of early Christians’ experience of salvation in or through Jesus and in the Holy Spirit.16 Jesus’ disciples during his life on earth came to view him as Messiah and Lord. Moreover, as the gospel spread in the decades after the life of Christ, more people came to experience the salvation and lordship of Christ. It was natural that Christians would begin to ask about Christ’s exact relation to God.

Questions about Christ raised problems from two perspectives. On the one hand, most of the very first Christians converted from Judaism. With their intensely monotheistic background, there must have been some cognitive dissonance between their belief in one God and their belief that Jesus is divine. The monotheism of these Jewish-Christians plus the NT guarded Christianity from moving too far in the direction of a tritheistic view of three divine beings.

On the other hand, as the gospel began to spread throughout the Greco-Roman world so that significant numbers of Gentiles turned to Christ, there were several tensions upon Christian thinking from the Greco-Roman milieu. Gnostic thinking was one of them. Gnostics held that there were a series of emanations from the primal reality, and each emanation was of a different order or rank. Some joined this idea with Christian belief about Christ and viewed him as one of those emanations. Of course, this could not match biblical teaching, for Scripture does not suggest that Christ is just one of a series of emanations. Nor does biblical language about Jesus as God and equal with the Father fit the Gnostic idea of a being dependent on a higher being.17

In addition to Gnostic pressures, there were also influences from Platonism and Stoicism. According to various forms of Platonism, God’s mind contains the forms or archetypal ideas for all things. He created specific things in the world after the pattern of their perfect archetype. Divine reason that contains such ideas and created according to them was the Logos. In Philo’s philosophy, the Logos in creating all things is born or projected into the world. As Hodge explains, Philo called the Logos as manifested in the world in this way “not only lovgoy, but also ui[oy, eikwvn, ui[oy monogenevy, protovgonoy, skiva, paravdeigma, dovxa, ejpisth;mh, qeou`, and deuvteroy qeovy.”18 The concept of the Logos was easily connected to Christianity by transferring it to Christ. Of course, this makes Christ’s deity subordinate and his generation less than eternal.

There was also a third pressure from Greco-Roman thinking that is not often noted. William Schoedel argues persuasively that in confronting the Greco-Roman world, Christianity, on the one hand, had to answer

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