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.
Sabellius Has Entered the Building
From the earliest days of the church Christians wrestled with the wonderfully mysterious nature of our triune God. The truth, as taught in the Bible, is clear enough:
1) There is one God
2) There are Three Persons: The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit
3) The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God
4) The Father is not the Son is not the Spirit
But how to reconcile these truths has always been a challenge. Not that we should expect to fully understand the nature of our wonderful God. But still, we have tried as best we could.
Others have tried ‚ and gone seriously astray. In the 4th C, Arius tried to resolve this by teaching that the Son (Jesus) is not God; and implied the Spirit is not a person, just a force. He was seeking to counter another error ‚ that of Sabellius in the previous century, who taught that the Father, the Son and the Spirit are all God; but they are all just different forms of the one Person.
Arius‚ error has dominated false teachings about God and Christ in recent centuries, and is seen in modern-day liberalism, and the teaching of most sects such as the Jehovah‚s Witnesses. But, over the last hundred years Sabellius has re-entered the building where it is built by building services gold coast. Sometimes this has been obvious: since 1914 many ‚Jesus only‚ Pentecostal denominations have sprung up (there are at least seven in Australia), accounting for some 24 million followers world-wide today. These hold that that there is only one Person in the Godhead, who is especially worshipped as Jesus.
More recently, a more subtle form of Sabellianism has come to the fore. This is where a church, that may even hold to a doctrinal statement that pays lip-service to the doctrine of the Trinity, yet in its practice, worships ‚Jesus only‚. Not long ago, an acquaintance of mine (who is part of a church that confesses a faith in the Trinity in their brief doctrinal statement) posted: ‚When you think going to church is an event, and you view yourself as an audience member watching a show ‚ it is time to repent.Going to church is not based on how good the music is, how funny are the sermons or how great is the building‚‚ ‚all of which I agreed with. But then he told us: ‚‚but it is all about Jesus. We meet to hear about Him, worship Him, pray to him and express our love for Him.‚ Thankfully, I believe his personal faith is better than this personal confession.
1) Sabellianism like this dominates many worship services today. One such church has, as its four Core Values: ‚Worship Christ, Live in Community, Get Trained, Make Disciples‚. Concerning the first they say: ‚Above all else, we are about Jesus. Everyone worships something. We worship what we treasure, what we value most. As believers, we worship Christ because He is the only One truly worthy of such a high level of devotion and affection (Col 2:9). Worshipping Christ is the cornerstone of our church. If God is calling you to come on mission with us, He‚s calling you first and foremost to be a worshipper of Christ.‚ It is right to worship Jesus: there are plenty of examples of the worship of Jesus in the Bible. See, eg. Revelation chs 4-5. But it is wrong if in practice He has become ‚the only One truly worthy of such a high level of devotion and affection.‚ Where in practice there is nothing of worship directed toward the Father, or toward the Godhead, Sabellius has entered the building.
2) This is also happening in the direction hymn writing has taken today. This is subtle, because many good hymns are being written today, praising Christ. But where are the new hymns praising the Father? Where are the new hymns praising God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit? There are some thankfully; but not many.
Or sometimes hymns, based on Scriptures praising God, are being turned into praise of ‚Jesus only‚. Take the Getty-Townend hymn ‚O My Soul, arise and bless your Maker‚. It is based on Psalm 103: ‚Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name!… The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to wrath, and abounding in mercy‚ etc ‚ which is a hymn of praise to God. But their hymn goes: ‚O My Soul, arise and bless your Maker, for He is your Master and your Friend. Slow to wrath but rich in tender mercy; worship the Saviour, Jesus.‚ There is nothing radically wrong with that; except, if we keep on doing this: taking passages that praise God ‚ either God the Father, or our Triune God ‚ and turn them into hymns that worship ‚Jesus-only‚, we will end up (to all intents and purposes) worshipping ‚Jesus-only‚.
(I should say that, I don‚t mean to pick on Townend-Getty hymns here. On the whole, I love their hymns and most of the time I think they do get it right. But this is a trend that I pray they will resist.)
3) The same thing is happening in public prayer today, with prayer being offered up to ‚Jesus-only‚. When Jesus was asked by His disciples to teach them to pray, Jesus Himself said, ‚In this manner, therefore, pray: ‚ÄòOur Father in heaven‚‚‚ It is not wrong to pray directly to Jesus; there are a few (though very few) instances of such in Scripture. But normally, if we are being Scriptural, we would direct our prayers to ‚our Father in heaven‚, praying ‚in Jesus‚ name‚.
It is now almost 70 years since Loraine Boettner warned against this trend. In his ‚Studies in Theology‚ he wrote:
‚The history of doctrine shows quite clearly that those who have attempted to organize the system of theology around the person of Christ, regardless of their good intentions, have tended to slight other vital truths and to drift into a superficial system. Their system is unstable and tends to gravitate downward, relinquishing one doctrine after another until it becomes anthropocentric [man-centred].‚
We see this happening today as worship focuses increasingly on ‚Jesus-only‚, loses a sense of who Jesus really is; and ‚Jesus‚ becomes more and more just a personal friend. As a result, worship loses a sense of the transcendence of God and becomes increasingly man-centred.
Sabellius long ago entered the building.
He is now the elephant in the room.