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Lesson 12 THE

1. This is the final installment in our study of Classical Christian regarding the attributes of . The object of our study has been of God Himself in the unsurpassable perfection of His Inner Being (ad______) and work as Father, Son and Holy in His outer operations (ad______) in regard to creation.

2. So what is Classical Christian Theism? It is the doctrine of God marked by a strong commitment to the doctrines of divine aseity, immutability, , simplicity, eternity, and the unity of the divine persons. The underlying concept is that God (because of His______), does not derive any aspect of His being from outside Himself and is not in any way caused to be.

3. All begins with a______. Theologians only start theologizing when a dispute arises in the life of the as to what is to be believed. In regard to the subject of this lesson the question is, how can the biblical teaching that God is one (Deut 6:4; Mk 12:29; 1 Cor 8:4; Eph 4:6; Jas 2:19) and yet three divine persons be understood (Mt 28:19; 2 Cor 13:13)? Or more specifically put, how can the one God be eternally self differentiated as Father, Son and Spirit without falling into the errors of modalism, or subordinationism?

4. Before our divine God ever created the universe, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit had perfect communion with one another as the ONE undivided Godhead with one divine______. The Father is a se, is a se, and the Holy Spirit is a se. And yet there are not three a se’s; but one a se. The insistence on the aseity of the Son is the foundation of the whole Christian and the earliest . (Lesson 2 in this series)

5. are Monotheists - the that there is only one God. Q. In what respect is God one? Answer: in respect of his nature and being; one , one divinity, one power, one______, one intellect, one consciousness, one energy, one authority, one dominion, one sovereignty. Scripture reveals that there are, in that one divine essence, three eternal distinctions that are described as “persons”, known as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All three have identical attributes, and therefore they are one; not merely one in substance or essence, but one in purpose and will.

6. Each Person of the Godhead is fully God. But God is ONE God says the shema in Deut. 6:4 “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one". The Father, Son and Holy Spirit each occupy the same divine “______”. Each shares the same eternal being. The Father dwells in the Son and the Son dwells in the Father. Father and Son dwell in the Spirit, who in turn indwells the Father and the Son. The unity of God is the three persons in their mutual interpenetration, often referred to as (Gk. Peri= around and choresis= dance).

7. The way to explain how three-ness remains one is the attribute of Simplicity which says that God is not composite, God is not divided, God is not divisible into separate components, God is not dissolvable into pieces. The doctrine of protects the integrity and unity of God’s essence, and prevents us from calling personality (personhood) a divine ______- it prevents us from collapsing into tritheism. We must hold to the unity of the divine essence as well as the distinction of persons. (Lesson 3)

8. The doctrine of the ______actually arose in order to affirm certain things about the divinity of , to answer the question “Who is Jesus?’”. And, it arose against a background assumption that God is one. The doctrine of the Trinity is revealed to us in scripture in the incarnation of and the outpouring of God the Holy Spirit.

9. Here is a simple model of the Trinity: One "______" (essence) and Three"______" (persons). Classically the Trinity was defined in these terms: God is one in essence (being) and three in person.

10. We need to understand that the acts of the Trinitarian persons in their BEING, their eternal inner relations must be sharply differentiated from their DOING, their common outward actions toward creation. >BEING: The ontological (AKA immanent) Trinity refers to the one God as He is in Himself beyond and above all created time. The Trinity as the persons exist within their eternal relations to each other, their ______life (also known as opera ad intra, a Latin phrase which means the inner acts of God). >DOING. The economic Trinity refers to the activity of each person in the external outworking of God’s plan in regard to creation (also known as opera ad extra, a Latin phrase which means the ______acts of God) - those activities and effects by which the Trinity is manifested outwardly in regard to creation, redemption and consummation. The economic Trinity is God revealed under the conditions of space & time, sin, and incarnation when Jesus took flesh. There is complete equality within the ontological Trinity, and yet there is clearly an ordering within the economic Trinity, with the incarnate Son taking the position of submission to the Father.

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11. Just as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are inseparable in their unity, so they work inseparably (in harmony) as well. So, as God is one and three in BEING, so God ______as one and three in DOING. This is known as the doctrine of inseparable operations which teaches that, because the three persons of the Trinity are one God, each person of the Trinity is operative in all of God's external works (opera ad extra) --from creation through redemption to consummation. In other words, the external works of God are undivided.

12. The three act in an indivisible but not an indistinct manner. And so, while their works cannot be divided, they can be distinguished. Because Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one God, every divine act is the undivided work of the three. Yet if this is the case, why does Scripture frequently attribute certain actions (e.g., creation) to one divine person (e.g., the Father) without mentioning the others? The Doctrine of Appropriation answers this question by suggesting that actions performed by all three persons may be rightly ______(or “appropriated”) to one divine person in order to reveal that person more fully. When Philip asks Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father and it will be enough for us” (Jn 14:8), Jesus responds that “the Father who dwells in me does his works.” (Jn 14:10). Throughout the of John, Jesus describes his own works as being the self-same works of the Father (Jn 5:17,19; 10:25-26,29-30; 14:10). In addition to that, to Christ is ascribed the very act of creation (Mk 4:41; 1 Cor 8:6; Col 1:16; Heb 1:2, 2:10)

13. So, the incarnation is of the Son (attributed/appropriation), but it is by the Trinity (inseparable operation). That is, Father, Son, and Spirit brought about the incarnation of the Son. The three persons of the trinity effect this work of incarnation, but only one person truly puts on the flesh. In the incarnation of the Son alone, the Son is ______alone.

14. The early church wrestled with the appropriate language, and “persons” aptly speaks to the personality of the three members of the Trinity and also their relationship with each other; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit “co-inhere” as one essence, and yet there are ______(not divisions). One isn’t the other, but they’re equal in rank, equal in power, equal in glory, equal in majesty.

15. RC Sproul: The term person does not mean a distinction in essence but a different subsistence in the Godhead. The word person is equivalent to the term subsistence. In this word, we have the prefix sub with the root word, sisto, so subsistence literally means “to stand______.” Each person subsists or exists “under” the pure essence of . Subsistence is a difference within the scope of being, not a separate being or essence. All persons in the Godhead have all the attributes of deity.

16. The term “person” ultimately indicates that “this one” is not “that one.” Hence, the term “person” signifies real distinction. So, the easiest way to distinguish the persons in the Trinity is how they eternally ______to each other: by the Father’s paternity, the Son’s generation, and the Spirit’s procession or being sent. They can also be distinguished by their names. But they exist from eternity in each other, not separate from and alongside each other. Each of the three persons is distinct . . . all the while being identical and equal to the one God. There is distinction, there is difference, and there is identity, but you wouldn’t say Jesus is part of God. We say Jesus IS God!

17. “______” is NOT the best way to speak of the eternal distinctions between the Persons of the Trinity. It can too easily undermine important doctrines like the Simplicity of God, the unity of the divine will, and the inseparable operations of the Trinity.

18. Person, in this doctrine, does not mean what person means in everyday American English. Our culture is so individualistic that to us that “person” automatically connotes “separate center of consciousness and will. The Classical position sees the divine Persons as “active subjects of the same nature”. Consciousness, will, and emotion (etc.) are all each proper to the nature, not a person. The Father does not think one thing, while the Son thinks another. The Son does not will one thing, and the Spirit another. There is no individual self-consciousness. Everything is collective, because the Persons are the same______.

19. Once we understand that the persons of the Trinity are not individuals with separate centers of consciousness and will, as human persons are, we realize that the mystery of the Trinity is beyond human comprehension; but we ______it without knowing how it can be.

20. The church has held that the Father ______the Son in eternity. This is expressed in the Constantinople-Nicene of 381 AD, and is repeated in later confessions such as the Westminster Confession of Faith (2.3). There is no text that actually says the Son is eternally generated or begotten but nevertheless there is much in Scripture that suggests this idea and nothing that excludes it. The Father eternally and incomprehensibly communicates the divine essence to the Son without division or change so that the Son shares an equality of nature with the Father yet is also distinct from the Father.

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21. The Son’s generation is beyond physical. Eternal generation is not a movement from nonbeing into existence, but rather the consequence of an unchanging activity in the divine essence. There is no generation of a new essence. Hence, the Son’s deity, being communicated from the Father, is not derived from another essence, but is ______to the Father’s essence and therefore the Son is a se in nature. John 5:26 “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself”

22. When the fullness of God’s self- in Scripture is not taken into account, is the result. Those who emphasize the oneness of God to the neglect of what Scripture teaches regarding the deity of the three persons fall into errors such as (the belief Jesus is not eternally God but became God (via adoption) sometime after His birth), Modalism aka Sabellianism or Oneness (the belief that the members of the Trinity are not three distinct persons but three different aspects or modes of the same person – a shape shifter), Subordinationism (the belief that the Son and the Holy Spirit are ______in being and nature than the Father), and /JW’s (the belief that Jesus & the Holy Spirit are not persons of the Godhead but instead later creations of ).

23. Those who emphasize the threeness to the neglect of what Scripture teaches about the oneness of God fall into forms of Tritheism (the belief that the Godhead is three distinct Beings, therefore three separate______. Where each person has a unique (unshared) will and center of consciousness, and if there is any unity at all, it is the harmony of a three-man committee). Trinitarianism is, to quote a leading Mormon apologist, “three distinct Beings, three separate .”

24. The major Trinitarian heresy to rise up in the twentieth century was the doctrine of the Social Trinity. This doctrine took the term person way, way too far and degenerated into all out heresy. The vast majority of its advocates were Liberal Protestants. The Social Trinity doctrine essentially states, that the term person in the doctrine of the Trinity should be seen as closely resembling human personhood as possible. Social trinitarianism promotes separate centers of consciousness filled with distinct knowledge sets, separate ______that must be harmonized by agreement, and separate roles to play in a shared enterprise called the life of God.

26. You can know everything I’ve just taught, and NOT know God in a saving way. John Calvin says: Because God dwells in inaccessible light (John 6:16), Christ must become our ______– hence He calls Himself the “light of the world” (John 8:12), and elsewhere “the way the truth and the life”, for no one comes to the Father except through Him (:6), because He alone knows the Father, and afterward the believers to whom He wishes the reveal Him (Luke 10:22). To know God, is to know Jesus Christ whom He has sent (John 17:3, Eph 2:18)

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Proof Texts – (NOT an Exhaustive list) Although the word “Trinity” is famously absent from Scripture, the theology behind the word can be found in a surprising number of verses. Like most Christians I would prefer to have a doctrine be stated clearly and concisely in one place - we like our doctrines verse-sized. I sometimes wish there were one verse that said, “God is one being in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” The doctrine of the Trinity, though, is simply not verse-sized.

All Persons named in One verse: There are a handful of verses where the three persons are named in one place, such as Matthew 28:19 and :14, and :18 “For through him (Jesus) we both have access in one Spirit to the Father”. These classic passages have the advantage of being comfortably verse-sized.

Here is a pretty good 3 verse passage: Galatians 4:4-6: “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son … to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”

God’s Oneness: There are verses that speak of God’s oneness (Deut. 6:4; Isa. 44:6; 1 Tim. 1:17). Then there are the myriad of passages which demonstrate that God is Father (e.g., John 6:27, Titus 1:4). Next, we have the scores of texts which prove the deity of Jesus Christ, the Son—passages like John 1 (“the word was God”), John 8:58 (“before Abraham was born, I am”), Col. 2:9 (“in Christ all the fullness of Deity lives in bodily form”), Heb. 1:3 (“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact imprint of his being”), Tit. 2:13 (“our great God and Savior Jesus Christ”)-not to mention the explicit worship Christ willingly received from his disciples (Luke 24:52; John 20:28) and the charges of leveled against him for making himself equal with God (Mark 2:7). Then we have similar texts which assume the deity of the Holy Spirit, calling Him an “eternal Spirit” (Heb. 9:14) and using “God” interchangeably with the “Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 3:16 and 1 Cor. 6:19; Acts 5:3-4) without a second thought.

Trinity Hints of God’s Three-ness in Person: The shape of Trinitarian orthodoxy is finally rounded off by texts that hint at the plurality of persons in the Godhead (Gen. 1:1-3, 26; Psalm 2:7; Dan. 7), texts like 1 Cor. 8:6 which place Jesus Christ as Lord right in the middle of Jewish Shema, and dozens of texts that speak of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the same breath, equating the three in rank, while assuming distinction of personhood (Matt. 28:19; Gal. 4:6; 1 Cor.12:4-6; 1 Peter 1:1-2; 2 Cor. 2:21-22; 13:14; Eph. 1:13-14; 2:18, 20-22; 3:14-17; 4:4-6; 5:18-20; 6:10-18).

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