Godhead Statements by Well-known theologians

mfblume · #1 01-26-2012, 01:25 PM

Dr. Frank Stagg, retired professor of New Testament interpretation at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. The following quotes are from the first chapter of his book, The Holy Spirit Today. The chapter is titled, “The Holy Spirit and the Oneness of God.”

The New Testament is content to know God as the eternal Father, as the Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, and as the abiding nearness of the Holy Spirit. It does not attempt to work out a formal doctrine of trinity. This is the work of later generations of Christians....

It was first in the second century that the “trinitarian question” was raised as such. The word “trinity” does not appear in the New Testament, and it is to be recognized that there is no formal doctrine of trinity in the New Testament....

The formal doctrine of trinity was rounded out in the fourth century, but its roots are older. Tertullian (A.D. 160?-230?) is credited with coining the word “trinitas,” the Latin for “trinity” ... But what began as insistence upon tri-unity eventually became an emphasis upon the threeness and increasing jeopardy to the belief in oneness.2

To the term trinity were soon added the terms “persons,” “three persons,” “three persons of the Godhead,” and even the ranking of the persons as first, second, and third. Thus trinitarianism was fast on the way to tritheism, a de facto belief in three distinct gods. This the New Testament never anticipated and does not support.3

Dr. Stagg’s “attempted restatement”:

Jesus Christ is God uniquely present in a truly human life, but he is not a second god nor only one third of God. Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh (John 1:1). The Word which became flesh was God, not the second person of the trinity. John does not say, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was the Second Person of the trinity” (1:1). He says that “the Word was God.” Jesus Christ is more than “the Second person of the trinity”; He is Immanuel, God with us. Immanuel does not mean “the Second person of the trinity with us.” Immanuel is God with us.4

In reference to the Holy Spirit, Dr. Stagg affirms:

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, not the Spirit of the third person of the trinity. The Holy Spirit is God in his nearness and power, anywhere and anytime, the very divine presence incarnated in Jesus Christ now present in his people. He is not a third God nor one-third of God. He is God himself relating to us in judgment, guidance, strength, redemption, or otherwise.5

mfblume · #2 01-26-2012, 01:26 PM

Professor Alister McGrath is the Principal of the Hall, and Professor of Historical Theology at Oxford University. He studied at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and served in a parish in Nottingham before joining the staff at Wycliffe. He is one of the most widely read and influential Christian writers in the world, and travels extensively to speak at conferences and missions.

If you look at the doctrine of the early church during the first two and a half centuries or so, you find that the doctrine of the Trinity has yet to be developed....That development took place in the third or fourth centuries.8
... the New Testament tends to think of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Christ as much as of God. The Spirit is understood to stand in the closest of possible relationships to Christ, so that his presence among the people of Christ is equivalent to the presence of Christ himself, just as the presence of Christ is treated as being that of God himself. In other words, to encounter the Son is really to encounter the Father and not some demigod or surrogate. To encounter the Spirit is really to encounter the Son and hence the Father. ... To affirm the divinity of Father, Son and Spirit is not to suggest that there are three gods, but simply that the one God can be encountered in these different ways, all of which are equally valid.11
It is not the doctrine of the Trinity which underlies the Christian faith, but the living God whom we encounter through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit ... when we think of God, we don’t think of three individual gods, but of one God whom we experience and encounter in a three-fold manner.18
When you’re trying to explain Christianity to someone, the last thing you’d want to talk about is the trinity. Instead, you might begin by talking about Jesus Christ, about his death on the cross and resurrection, or you might talk about the possibility of encountering or experiencing God here and now.20

mfblume · #3 01-26-2012, 01:28 PM

Karl Rahner was the leading Roman Catholic theologian of the 20th century.

. . . the use of the term ‘person’ in the doctrine of the Trinity becomes increasingly problematic . . . . We might wonder if it would be more appropriate to speak of three hypostases in God (or, to express it in a more modern form, of three modes of subsistence of the one God in his one sole nature) and in this way more easily to prevent popular misunderstandings of the doctrine of the Trinity and also in what really amounts to indiscriminate speculative interpretations of this doctrine in current theology.

. . . the term . . . ‘mode of subsistence’ . . . involves fewer dangers of what is in the last resort a tritheistic misunderstanding of the trinitarian dogma.
. . . we cannot be content to make use of any kind of blurred, indistinct concept of ‘person’ . . . when speaking about three persons in God, and then to assume that we have understood and correctly expressed the dogma of the Trinity.

. . . it cannot be denied that it is possible . . . to arrive at a theology of the Trinity which does not . . . have to work with the traditional concept of person, but can make use of the concepts of hypostases (as distinct from persons), or modes of subsistence of one and the same God.

. . . we Christians talk a little too ingenuously of three divine persons and then say that each one of these three is God, so that (as we should readily admit to ourselves) we are exposed to the danger of being regarded as tritheists.

. . . It is by no means absolutely necessary to speak of ‘three persons’ even in regard to the Trinity (a usage which is not to be found anyway in the New Testament) in order to explain what Christianity really means by this doctrine.

These quotes are from Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, volume 18

mfblume · #4 01-26-2012, 01:29 PM

Karl Barth is widely considered the most influential Christian theologian of the 20th century.

This distinction or order is the distinction or order of the three “persons,” or, as we prefer to say, the three “modes (or ways) of being” in God. . . .
We have avoided the term “person” . . . . It was never adequately clarified when first introduced into the Church’s vocabulary, nor did the interpretation which it was later given and which prevailed in mediaeval and post-Reformation Scholasticism as a whole really bring this clarification, nor has the injection of the modern concept of personality into the debate achieved anything but fresh confusion.[1]
[1] Barth, Church Dogmatics, 355.

What is called “personality” in the conceptual vocabulary of the 19th century is distinguished from the patristic and mediaeval persona by the addition of the attribute of self-consciousness. This really complicates the whole issue. . . .

. . . the attribute of individuality when it is related to Father, Son and Spirit as such instead of the one essence of God, the idea of a threefold individuality, is scarcely possible without tritheism.

. . . the Holy Spirit could not possibly be regarded as the third ‘person.’ In a particularly clear way the Holy Spirit is what the Father and the Son also are. He is not a third spiritual Subject, a third I, a third Lord side by side with two others. He is a third mode of being of the one divine Subject or Lord.

If it is true that God reveals Himself to us through His only-begotten Son, if it is also true that God’s only-begotten Son is no less and no other than God the Father, if it is true again that God’s revelation is also the revelation of His love, if revelation would not be revelation without the outpouring and impartation of the Spirit through whom man becomes the child of God, can it be that this Spirit is not directly the Spirit of the Son as well?

mfblume · #5 01-26-2012, 01:30 PM

Dr. Millard J. Erickson is Distinguished Professor of Theology at Truett Seminary, Baylor University, and the author of the widely acclaimed systematics work Christian Theology.

... the doctrine of the Trinity ... presents what seems on the surface to be a self-contradictory doctrine ... this doctrine is not overtly or explicitly stated in Scripture.... the formulation of the doctrine has had a long and complex history ... the Scripture ... led the church to formulate and propound this strange doctrine.21

In practice even orthodox Christians have difficulty clinging simultaneously to the several components of the doctrine. Our use of these several analogies suggests that perhaps in practice or in our unofficial theology none of us is really fully trinitarian. We tend to alternate between tritheism, a belief in three equal, closely related Gods, and modalism, a belief in one God who plays three different roles or reveals himself in three different fashions.28

In his concluding comments on the subject, Erickson asserts that the doctrine of the trinity “is so absurd from a human standpoint that no one would have invented it.”32 He closes by quoting a popular expression concerning the doctrine of the trinity:

Try to explain it, and you’ll lose your mind;

But try to deny it, and you’ll lose your soul.33