Magyar Egyház, 1955 (34. évfolyam, 1-10. szám)

1955-06-01 / 6. szám

10

MAGYAR EGYHÁZ

ENGLISH

SECTION

GOD IN THREE PERSONS, BLESSED TRINITY.

At the conclusion of the gospel according to Matthew we read that the risen Lord called His disciples together to a certain mountain in Galilee, and there He commanded them, “Go . . . and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

Paul, the foremost among those who obeyed this commission of Jesus, has this blessing at the end of his second letter to the Corinthians, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

Thus, both in the gospels and in the epistles we find a new name for our God, a threefold name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (or, as older translations and hymns have it, Holy Ghost). This does not mean that there are three gods in the New Testament. The monotheism (belief in one God only) of the Old Testament, expressed by Moses in Deuteronomy 6:4-5, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might,” remains unshaken in the New Testament,which is the completion, the fulfilment of the Old. But this one God is now seen in a new richness and glory, which had been but dimly surmised before. No wonder Paul now exclaims: “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Romans 11:33). We join him and the faithful of all ages in saying, “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

I say that we join with the faithful of all ages in this confession of God as tri-une (three-in-one). The grateful acceptance of the doctrine of the Trinity has been the distinguishing mark of the faithful church, the true catholic church, since the beginning of the Christian era. Its rejection has been characteristic of unfaithful and heretical groups just as consistently.

Thus, in the year 325, a council of the whole church met at Nicaea, a suburb of Constantinople, to deal with the followers of a teacher named Arius, who had denied the deity of our Lord Jesus Christ. This council formulated a creed of three articles saying, “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty . . . and in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . and in the Holy Spirit.” Their formula, known as the Nicene Creed, is still accepted by all Christian bodies, Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant. It is the Ecumenical Creed, because it belongs to the whole household of the faith.

The Protestant Reformation made no alteration in the traditional Christian belief in the Trinity. The Augsburg Confession, which Philip Melanchthon wrote in 1530, states, “Our churches, with common consent, do teach, that the decrees of the Council of Nicaea concerning the unity of the divine essence and concerning the three persons, is true and to be believed without doubting.’ And the Heidelberg Catechism, written by Zacharias Ursinus in 1563, maintains in answer to question 25: “Since there is but one divine essence, why speakest thou of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost? — Because God hath so revealed Himself in His word, that these three distinct persons are the one, only true and eternal God.”

We see, therefore, that unfaithful pastors, sometimes called “Liberals” or “Modernists”, who often reject the doctrine of the Trinity, as well as churches like the Unitarian or Universalist denominations, or sects like Jehovah’s Witnesses, who ridicule and deny the perfect unity in trinity of the Godhead, oppose themselves to the continuous and universal teaching of the whole church, as well as to the Word of God. We must therefore look upon every denial of our Trinitarian faith as soul destroying heresy, to be resisted to the end by every faithful Christian.

But, we may ask, why has this doctrine of The Trinity, admittedly a mystery, and admittedly difficult to understand, been held to be so important by the faithful of every age and evry nation? The proper answer is suggested by the phrase of the Heidelberg Catechism, “because God hath so revealed Himself in His word.” The doctrine of the Trinity is not an ancient superstition, or a theory of theologians, or even a philosophy, but an integral and necessary part of the revelation of God given in the Bible.

For the Christian, this, in itself, is sufficient. Christians believe that the Bible was written under the guidance and inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and that it is perfect in all its religious teachings. Therefore we believe in the Trinity, because the Bible teaches it.

It is true that the Old Testament has only the barest hints of this doctrine. No Jewish theologian, basing his conclusions solely on the Old Testament, has ever even suggested this idea. Dr. B. B. Warfield has this say about it, however: “The Old Testament may be likened to a chamber richly furnished but dimly lighted: the introduction of light brings into it nothing which has not been in it before; but it brings out into clearer view much of what is in it but was only dimly or even not at all perceived before.” Thus, even though the Old Testament leaves us in the dark about the Trinity if taken by itself, still when it is rightly read in the light of the New Testament revelations, we perceive even in it the evidences of our doctrine. The otherwise mysterious use of the plural form in Genesis 1:26, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” for example, receives a beam of illumination. So also the solemn priestly benediction in Numbers 6:24-26, “The Lord bless you and keep you: the Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you: the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace,” with its threefold invocation of Jehovah, receives an even richer meaning.