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APOLOGETICS |
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What Does the Bible Reveal About the
Trinity? - Part 6
By
Dr. John
Ankerberg, Dr. John Weldon |
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The Trinity and Early Church
History: Have the historic creeds of the Christian
church always accepted the doctrine of the Trinity?
For 2,000 years the historic Christian church has found
in the Bible the doctrine of the Trinity. This can be
seen by anyone who reads the church fathers and studies
the historic creeds. Creeds are important because they
express the beliefs of the church briefly and precisely
and made prospective converts aware of exactly what
Christians believe and teach, enabling them to make
informed decisions. Further, creeds clearly illustrated
the dividing line between orthodoxy and heresy; in fact
heresy was probably the most powerful stimulant
historically to the development of the creeds.
The historic creeds of the church declared faith in
only one God, yet clearly taught that both the Son and
the Holy Spirit were God. For example, the Creed of
Nicaea in A.D. 325 was the creed of 318 church fathers.
It reads, "We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son
of God, begotten of the Father as only begotten. Light
from Light, true God from true God, begotten not
created."1
The Constantinopolitan Creed of A.D. 381, a creed of
150 church fathers, reads, "[We believe] in the Holy
Spirit, the Lord and Life-giver, Who proceeds
from the Father, Who is worshiped and glorified
together with the Father and Son."2
Although the official, precise definition and
explanation of the Trinity codified at Nicaea (A.D. 351)
and Constantinople (A.D. 381) is lacking in the New
Testament and writings of the early church leaders, the
fact of the Trinity was clearly recognized by both the
apostles and post-apostolic fathers. Scholars of
historical theology could be cited in abundant
confirmation, for example, "The second-century Fathers
were convinced that the Godhead is a triad."3
In addition,
From the Old Testament and the Judaism of the
intertestamental period, the early church accepted the
conviction that God, the maker of heaven and earth, is
one. In addition, even before the canonization
of the New Testament books, the apostolic traditions
and popular faith of the church were indelibly
marked by the notion of a plurality of divine
persons, the idea of the triadic manifestation of the
Godhead, was present/row the earliest period as
part of Christian piety and thinking. But no steps
were taken to work through the implications of this
idea and to arrive at a cohesive doctrine of God. The
triadic pattern supplies the raw data from which the
more developed descriptions of the Christian doctrine
of God will come.4
In his book on the Trinity, God in Three Persons,
E. Calvin Beisner has provided an in-depth study of the
historic development of the Trinity from apostolic times
through the final form of the Nicene Creed, which was
adopted at the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 381. He
includes a line-by-line comparison of the Creed with New
Testament teaching, proving that the doctrine of the
Trinity as thus formulated is biblical.5
The doctrine of the Trinity itself never evolved;
what evolved was only its specific theological
formulation. As Harold O. J. Brown states in Heresies,
The facts that Semi-Arianism created only a brief
flurry and that the consubstantiality of the Holy
Spirit was accepted with little trouble are evidence
for the claim that the doctrine of the Trinity did not
evolve by stages, but was present in the church in an
implicit form from New Testament times.... As soon as
the implications of consubstantiality were recognized
in the case of the Son, they were almost immediately
seen for the Holy Spirit as well. Trinitarianism was
implicit in Christian faith from the beginning; it is
only its explicit formulation that took so long to
develop."6
Notes
1 John H. Leith, Creeds of the Churches: A
Reader in Christian Doctrine from the Bible to the
Present, 3rd ed. (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982),
pp. 30-31.
2 Ibid., p. 33.
3 J. G. Davies, The Early Christian Church: A
History of Its First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids,
MI: Baker, 1980), p. 97.
4 William G. Rusch (Trans./ed.), The Trinitarian
Controversy (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980),
p. 2.
5 E. Calvin Beisner, God in Three Persons
(Wheaton, IL: Tyndale, 1984)..
6 Dr. Harold O. J. Brown, Heresies
(Doubleday, 1984), p. 139.
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Copyright 2006, Ankerberg Theological Research Institute |
