Subject: Is Belief in the Trinity Required? |
Bible Note: Holmes, Let me try to restate in some points to tryu to clarify my answer on the murkey part. I won't apologize that I'm avoiding giving a dogmatic statment, what you are getting here is my best attempt to patch scripture together on this issue. 1.) I think denying the deity of Christ is fatal. 2.) I believe that when we are saved God grants us to receive certain truths about Him. You will not understand my answer unless you understand I work from a Calvinistic pressuposition. We only receive any saving truth in a saving way because God grants us to do so. I do not think that God grants us to "see the glory of God in the face of Christ" (2 Cor 4:1-6) and at the same time leaves us with a heart/mind that will reject trinitarian truth when shown from scripture. As salvation is start to finish entirely a work of God, even our willingness is His doing, we can not suggest a scenario of a partial Christian. I mean to say that whomever God converts, He also begins to work actual practical holiness into their lives, He keeps them in the faith until death, and many other things He does. We are not to imagine a scenario in which a man repents and trust Christs, is saved, and then chooses to live a worldly life from there onward; because the one whom God grants to receive Christ, He also grants lifelong repentance (1 John 5:18). In the same way, we are not to imagine a man who God grants to receive Christ, and then God does not grant him to believe the truth of the trinity when it is shown to him from scripture. 1Co 2:12-15 Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God, which things we also speak, not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one. So here is what I "think" is right based on my beliefs. It seems that a man can be saved without a complete knowledge of the trinity, though I think he must realise that Christ is God. But a man rejecting the trinity reveals that he was converted to a God of his own imagination and was not truely born again. 3) I reject your suggestion that a simple yes or no will suffice to this question. I would not accept a scenario that leaves a supposidly saved man openly rejecting the doctrine of the trinity. Though I would accept a scenario of a born again Christian not yet having it fully explained to him. I will attempt to clarify if that doesn't make sense, but I will not attempt to simplify it. In Christ, Beja |