A thoughtful comment by Rev Chris Balzer, a former moderator of the Presbyterian Church of New South Wales. This article originally appeared in ‚AP‚ (Australian Presbyterian)
It was a January about four decades ago when my wife, our small children and I were on our annual vacation ‚ travelling by car and camping. One Saturday evening we ended up in a small Victorian country town. A quick survey of the town told us that there was one Protestant church there that might be OK for us on Sunday.
We turned up in good time to discover a notice on the closed church door to say that we should go to the river where there was to be a baptism ‚ so we did. The only thing that I remember about that service was chat the pastor baptised only in the name of Jesus. I was shocked. Didn‚t he know the contents of Matthew 28:18-20? Was he Trinitarian? I don‚t know because I consider it impolite for a visitor to engage in a theological debate with the pastor after church.
All I could think of that day were the words of our Lord Jesus Christ: And Jesus came and said to them, ‚All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.‚
In my church experience since that memorable day, I have noticed a discernible trend for many Evangelicals perhaps to be Trinitarian in theory but ‚Jesus only‚ in practice. This can often be seen in the prayers in public worship, and in a neglect, almost an avoidance, of mentioning the Trinity in any way in the sermons. Certainly whole sermons on the Trinity are extremely rare in my experience.
Is this because we Evangelicals are now embarrassed by the doctrine of the Trinity, or is it perhaps because we can‚t get our minds around the subject and are functional Unitarians? Contrast this with the stance of the Unitarians, the Jehovah‚s Witnesses, the Christadelphians and the Mormons. They are not embarrassed in being Unitarian. In fact, they are quite proud of their theological position.
In my experience in the Presbyterian Church of Australia, I have met, unfortunately, a few ministers who had great trouble handling the Old Testament, and therefore hardly ever dealt with it. One even said to me, sad to report, that the God of the Old Testament is a different God to the God of the New Testament. Functionally, he was following the early Church heretic Marcion, and metaphorically cut out of his Bible those parts which, in his mind, did not fit with the ‚Gentle Jesus, meek and mild‚ idea of the deity.
It seems to me that only if a Christian is thoroughly Trinitarian can he or she handle the ideas which we find in both testaments. The God of the Old Testament is the same God as the God of the New Testament. The Trinitarian God created the universe; the Trinitarian God led God‚s people out of Egypt; the Trinitarian God was there and active in the New Testament period; the Trinitarian God is here and active today.
One advantage of being relatively old in the tooth is that I have seen and been involved in Evangelicalism for about 55 years and have seen many trends and various moves in one direction or the other. An advantage of being a Confessional Evangelical is that I have had the early church creeds and the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms to consult which can act as a corrective if I go off on this theological tangent or that. I pray that this applies to you also.
Why was it that the early Church Fathers and, after them, the Reformers, wrote things like the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, and the following: ‚In the unity of the Godhead there are three persons, having one substance, power, and eternity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Father exists. He is not generated and does not come from any source. The Son is eternally generated from the Father, and the Holy Spirit eternally comes from the Father and the Son‚ (Westminster Confession of Faith, ch. 2 para 3)
Is the current trend that I see a result of a neglect of the reciting the Apostles‚ or Nicene Creed in our services of public worship? Perhaps. Certainly I think that those of us who grew up reciting these early church statements of faith had more difficulty being functionally non-Trinitarian. We may never have understood completely the ins and outs of the doctrine of the Trinity, but we were in no doubt of the historic Christian position on the nature of the Godhead. We were then driven to read what we could on the subject, to think about the inter-relationship of the Old and New Testaments, and consciously to drive our thinking in a Trinitarian direction.
If you agree with my observations about the current state of Evangelical Christianity, what can we do about this situation? A good start, I suggest, is that those of us given the great privilege of leading congregational prayers on a Sunday morning or evening consciously pray using Trinitarian language.
Have you ever tried praying to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, and then summing up with words like ‚Oh Trinitarian God, please be with us, save your people, sanctify us truly, lead us in the way of righteousness‚. This performs a dual purpose: it concentrates the mind of the person leading the prayers and also the minds of those present who are invited to say ‚ÄòAmen‚ at the end.
Now, we and they will inevitably have questions in our minds about how the Trinity works in practice. This should drive us to read more on the subject. In my reading of recent years, I have found extremely helpful a little book by Tim Chester, Delighting in the Trinity. And guess what the sub-title is: ‚Why Father, Son and Spirit are Good News.‚ Buy it, try it. Your thinking might be changed.