Sanders The Deep Things of God (Second Edition)

How the Trinity Changes Everything
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4335-5640-1
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

The doctrine of the Trinity is taught and believed by all evangelicals, but rarely is it fully understood or celebrated. In The Deep Things of God, systematic theologian Fred Sanders shows why we ought to embrace the doctrine of the Trinity wholeheartedly as a central concern of evangelical theology. Sanders demonstrates, engagingly and accessibly, that the doctrine of the Trinity is grounded in the gospel itself. In this book, readers will understand that a robust doctrine of the Trinity has massive implications for their lives, restoring depth to prayer, worship, Bible study, missions, tradition, and understanding of Christianity's fundamental doctrines. This new edition includes a study guide with discussion questions, action points, recommended reading, and more.

Fred Sanders (PhD, Graduate Theological Union) is professor of theology at the Torrey Honors College at Biola University. Sanders is the author of The Deep Things of God and blogs at fredfredfred.com.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Sanders, Fred

Leseproben

Introduction

Evangelicals, the Gospel, and the Trinity

(Or, How the Trinity Changed Everything for Evangelicalism and Can Do It Again)

I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it. . . . Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father.

1 John 2:21–24

The religious terrain is full of the graves of good words which have died from lack of care . . . and these good words are still dying all around us. There is that good word “Evangelical.” It is certainly moribund, if not already dead. Nobody any longer seems to know what it means.

B. B. Warfield (1916)

The doctrine of the Trinity has a peculiar place in the minds and hearts of evangelical Christians. We tend to acknowledge the doctrine with a polite hospitality but not welcome it with any special warmth. This book shows why we ought to embrace the doctrine of the Trinity wholeheartedly and without reserve, as a central concern of evangelical Christianity.

How has it come about that so many evangelicals today are cold toward the doctrine of the Trinity, confused about its meaning, or noncommittal about its importance? Even though solid biblical and theological teaching on the subject is available, the doctrine of the Trinity continues to be treated as an awkward guest in the evangelical household. The very terminology of Trinitarianism sounds vaguely Roman Catholic to our ears: isn’t Trinity, after all, a Latin word not found in the Bible but devised sometime in the Dark Ages? And though it was assembled (so the story goes) by clever theologians rather than apostles, isn’t it of dubious status as a specimen of logic? Above all, isn’t it a speculative distraction from the serious business of the gospel?

Doubts like these are hardly dispelled by the haunting thought that it is mandatory for Christians to believe it at peril of damnation. Perhaps you have heard the frightful admonition:

The Trinity:

Try to understand it

and you’ll lose your mind;

try to deny it and you’ll lose your soul!1

Heavy-handed theological pressure like that is about as helpful, in the long run, as tying shoelaces tighter to make up for a bad-fitting shoe. Wherever this pressure is felt, it turns us from negligent Trinity-ignorers to motivated Trinity-phobes. If we know nothing else about the Trinity, we at least know that explicitly denying it will put a church on the list of non-Christian cults. To many evangelicals, the stakes of thinking about the Trinity seem too high and the payoff too low—and we are not gamblers. No wonder the word Trinitarian is conspicuously absent from the list of adjectives that leap to mind to describe the theological character of evangelicalism. No wonder many of our congregations drift from year to year with only the vaguest apprehension of the fact that their Christian life is one of communion with the Father in the Son and the Spirit. No wonder we have become so alienated from the roots of our existence as evangelicals: our Trinitarian roots.

Trinitarian Deep Down

Evangelicals do have Trinitarian roots, after all, and those roots reach deep; not just into the history of the movement but into the reality of who we are in Christ. Deep down it is evangelical Christians who most clearly witness to the fact that the personal salvation we experience is reconciliation with God the Father, carried out through God the Son, in the power of God the Holy Spirit. As a result, evangelical Christians have been in reality the most thoroughly Trinitarian Christians in the history of the church. This is a strong claim and one not often heard these days, but I hope to make good on it in the course of this book. The characteristic beliefs, commitments, practices, and presuppositions of evangelicalism were all generated by a spiritual revolution: an applied Trinitarian theology that took more seriously than ever before in Christian history the involvement of Father, Son, and Spirit in the Christian life.

Nothing we do as evangelicals makes sense if it is divorced from a strong experiential and doctrinal grasp of the coordinated work of Jesus and the Spirit, worked out against the horizon of the Father’s love. Personal evangelism, conversational prayer, devotional Bible study, authoritative preaching, world missions, and assurance of salvation all presuppose that life in the gospel is life in communion with the Trinity. Forget the Trinity and you forget why we do what we do; you forget who we are as gospel Christians; you forget how we got to be like we are.

The central argument of this book is that the doctrine of the Trinity inherently belongs to the gospel itself. It is not merely the case that this is a doctrine that wise minds have recognized as necessary for defense of the gospel,2 or that a process of logical deduction leads from believing the gospel to affirming the doctrine of the Trinity, or that people who believe the gospel should also believe whatever the God of the gospel reveals about himself. No, while all those statements are true, they do not say enough, because there is a Trinity-gospel connection much more intimate than those loose links suggest. Trinity and gospel are not just bundled together so that you can’t have one without the other. They are internally configured toward each other. Even at risk of being misunderstood before the full argument emerges in later chapters, let me say it as concisely as possible: the gospel is Trinitarian, and the Trinity is the gospel.3 Christian salvation comes from the Trinity, happens through the Trinity, and brings us home to the Trinity.

Because the gospel is Trinitarian, evangelicals as gospel people are by definition Trinity people, whether or not they think so. It only makes sense that if the gospel is inherently Trinitarian, the most consistently and self-consciously Trinitarian movement of Christians would be the movement that has named itself after the gospel, the evangel: evangelicalism. This is not the conventional wisdom we usually hear. We are more likely to hear the kind of lament this introduction began with, the lament that evangelicals have at best a precarious and tentative grip on the Trinity. But the lamentations and warnings derive their force from the fact that our recent poor performance as Trinitarians stands in such stark contradiction to our actual existence as Christians who are in fellowship with the Trinity. Evangelicals are too Trinitarian to be so un-Trinitarian!

Although not everybody knows that evangelicals are Trinitarian deep down, it has not been a complete secret. One of the theologians who has, in recent decades, most faithfully and articulately insisted on the essentially Trinitarian character of evangelicalism is Gerald Bray, who says that “the belief that a Christian is seated in heavenly places with Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:6), sharing with Him in the inner life of the Godhead, is the distinctive teaching of Evangelical Christianity.” No matter how much the doctrine may have become nonfunctional in the self-understanding of contemporary evangelicals, a robustly Trinitarian view of salvation has been the core, “the distinctive teaching” of the historic evangelical faith, according to Bray. In fact, though we have no grounds to be smug or triumphalist about it, we ought to testify clearly to our distinctively evangelical Trinitarian roots:

Without pride in our own tradition or prejudice against other forms of Christianity, we must surely proclaim that the experience of a personal relationship with God, sealed by the Spirit in the finished work of the Son from Whom He proceeds, is a deeper and more satisfying faith than any other known to man. . . . Evangelical Protestants are not wrong in insisting that theirs is a deeper, more vital experience of Christ than that enjoyed by Christians of other traditions. We have not received the grace of God in vain and we must not be ashamed to own the Christ we know as the only Lord and Saviour of men.4

Bray is a historian of ideas, so he is taking the long view of evangelical history. When he says that evangelical experience is marked by “a deeper and more satisfying faith than any other known to man,” he is thinking in terms of five centuries of evidence, not the most recent five decades. He is not reporting current events but history; not today’s headlines but the volumes and volumes of spiritual theology that fill well-stocked Protestant bookshelves. Similarly, the argument of this book is that evangelicalism is Trinitarian deep down, even if surface appearances are less promising.

Our Related Problems: We Are Shallow and Weakly Trinitarian

Anybody who stays on the surface of contemporary evangelical Christianity is unlikely to encounter profound Trinitarianism, either in teaching or in spirituality. Though most of this book will be about what evangelical churches do well, perhaps it’s best to start by admitting two problems that any observer could see. First, evangelicals are not currently famous for their Trinitarian theology. Second, the evangelical movement is bedeviled by a theological and spiritual shallowness.

First, there is evangelical coldness toward the Trinity. Above,...