Subject: Is Belief in the Trinity Required? |
Bible Note: Holmes, Let me say that you are asking some very tuff questions that require a lot of thought. I've remained silent on your original questions for a reason. However, since you ask me specifically, I will share my thinking with your, but I ask any that read this post to realize that I'm sort of revealing a thought process more than a stance that I am of this moment ready to impose upon the consciences of another. 1. First, we must reject out of hand any notion that requires us to be able to grasp the depths of how the trinity can be. God never calls us to understand WHAT He is in depth, rather God wants us to understand WHO He is, his character. Jeremiah 9:23,24. 2. We must begin with what scripture calls us to as the means of being saved (the church membership question must follow second). Scripture places two requests upon us for salvation, though only one of them is the actually instrument of us receiving justification. These two things are repentance and faith. Faith contains two elements, one is head knowledge or belief, and the other is actually trusting upon Christ. These things are what we are called to in order to receive salvation. Now as we look more closely at Faith, we see that we are called to place our Faith in Christ, this involves both His person (who He is) and His work (substitutionary death on the cross.) Now the requirement for us to believe in the second part I assume I need not prove, the first though might be seen as both more questionable and less often stated. I offer this scripture to support it: Joh 8:24 "Therefore I said to you that you will die in your sins; for unless you believe that I am He, you will die in your sins." I take Christ's saying "I am He" to be an affirmation of his being the God of the Old Testament. So we must place our trust in Christ and His work, but we must do so in Christ as God. So here is my application, there is some knowledge needed of the trinity in order to be saved, but it is a secondary knowledge. In other words, it is not believing in the trinity that saves you, but receiving Christ as God presupposes that we grasp that Christ is God, and that is one piece of the trinitarian puzzle. With regards to the Holy Spirit, I have no such scriptural evidence, and must assume that much can be not known with regards to the Spirit and one still be saved. 3. We must believe that salvation does in fact DO something with us in order to move to a right answer in this. We see Paul affirm: 1Co 12:3 Therefore I make known to you that no one speaking by the Spirit of God says, "Jesus is accursed"; and no one can say, "Jesus is Lord," except by the Holy Spirit. So our acknowledging Christ as "Lord" (again I take Lord to be a loaded term acknowledging diety) is something that the Spirit works in us. So the next principle I want to suggest is that our being in agreement on whom or what God is, is a Spirit produced state. Nobody who is saved, denies Christ, because the Spirit of God has wrought in us a heart that recognizes and acknowledge who Christ is (2 Cor 4:1-6). Here is how I apply this to your questions. Refer back again to John 8. We see the passage state: Joh 8:30 As He spoke these things, many came to believe in Him. Joh 8:31 So Jesus was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, "If you continue in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; So we see Christ speaking to those who in some sense were "believing in Him." However, as the scene progresses, and Christ begins to teach who he is, the Jews who in some sense believed began to stumble over what Christ actually claimed about them selves. And in this context Christ tells them the formerly quoted verse about their perishing should they not believe that "I am He." The scene ends with those Jews trying to stone Jesus. So we can rest assured that whatever John meant by "believing" earlier,they had not trusted upon Christ with saving Faith. So I take this principle: Though there are some truths about the trinity that a believer might not need to know, a truely converted mind will not reject them when properly taught those truths. In other words, -perhaps- I need not know that the Spirit is a eternal person of the divine trinity, but later when it is shown to me from the word of God I will not reject it. Now the foundation for asserting this lies not merely in the principle seen in John 8, but upon the fact that our "receiving" such things is a work of God. A natural man won't receive them, but a spiritual man will (1 Cor 2). So with a saved man, we will see them growing in truth as it is taught, but with a lost man we will see increasing rejection as the truth is explained to them. (More to follow in a second post, where I will actually give my answers.) In Christ, Beja |