I’m strongly of the opinion that these are the kind of stories we need to keep on telling and retelling - that these memories are our spiritual inheritance as the one people of God.

Furthermore, it’s my c…

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Wayne Grudem, R.C. Sproul, J.D. Greare, John Piper, etc.

I’m thankful for the foundation they gave me. I wouldn’t change it!

But there’s something a lot of fellas in that crowd share that I’ve become …

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At this point, I’m not sure how long it will take me to finish writing. What was once planned to be a cute little devotional writing, a sermon on paper, has grown into a real behemoth of a research project.

I’ve read more books than I can count and the stack of need-to-read’s keeps getting taller. I’m a bit overwhelmed, but I’m having a ton of fun.

Currently, my research is focused on the doctrine of the Trinity. And, let me tell you, there is no shortage of material to sift through on the subject.

Six months ago I knew enough of the basics to help youth students not be heretics. Nowadays it feels like my brain is gonna burst out of my skull any minute. It’s epic!!!

Most recently I’ve been reading and re-reading through a small sampling of the work of a few theologians: Karl Barth (1886-1968), Herman Bavinck (1854-1921), and Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988).1

In the process, I stumbled upon a basically identical argument concerning the Trinity and creation in all three of them.

This article is my best attempt at synthesizing the sources (it will mostly be a quote-dump). Wish me luck!

While articulating what exactly the church stands to lose if she abandons the doctrine of the Trinity, Herman Bavinck said something that made me scratch my head: “Apart from the Trinity. . .the act of creation becomes inconceivable.”2

Balthasar opens his chapter on the subject basically the same way, citing a thousand-year-old scholastic axiom: “The possibility of creation rests in the reality of the Trinity. A non-trinitarian God could not be the Creator.”3

Although at first I was pretty confused (for Bavinck, because he waits another 15 pages to explain what he means, and for Balthasar, because he’s just kind of hard to understand in general), I was interested. I just needed to hear them lay out the whole argument.

Here’s the gist, starting with my man, Hermy:

In his work, Bavinck wanted to make sure that creation was not imagined as “happenstance” or as the “outcome of self-development” in God.4

For him, a Christian doctrine of creation cannot frame the ‘why’ behind the fact that we exist as something like ‘God randomly decided he wanted to create’ or ‘God grew to become the kind of being who makes stuff.’ Neither of those are solid options.

The ‘why’ behind creation has to have its foundation in God himself—in his ‘inner life.’

Without the Trinity God is a “darkened light, a dry spring, unable to exert himself outward or communicate himself to creatures,”5 an “extramundane God lost in the silent emptiness of His solitary self existence, a merely, so to speak, slumbering divine monad.”6

And this kind of being cannot be the creator. Or, at the very least, lacking the powers of “self-communication,” he cannot be our creator. A “slumbering divine monad” cannot account for a world like ours, where everything around us is dripping with divine revelation, where all that is exists to be a temple for the presence of God, and where the center-piece of creation (us) are persons capable of love.

If God is not triune, then we must imagine that he “first arrives at a waking state. . .at the creation of the world,” and, on coming to, cannot make a world with creatures like us. Nor can he ever be but a faint voice, a fading echo, unable to be discerned or known. This certainly isn’t the God of Scripture!

Alternatively, should we look to resolve this crisis by imagining a more ‘involved’ God, we’ll be backed into one of two troublesome corners, both of which lead us to a deity who is contingent upon the world in some way.

Option #1: God becomes himself on account of the world’s existence. In creating, God gains the ability of self-communication—we help God to change for the better. This is problematic since, on a classical definition of the divine, God cannot change, he has no ‘room for improvement.’ Or in fancy terms: God lacks any ‘unactualized potential.’ A God who becomes more like himself when he makes us, by definition, is not God at all.

Option #2: God is himself on account of the world’s existence. If we want to imagine a solitary deity who is able to communicate and give himself to others without needing to change, then the ‘other,’ namely the universe, must be as old as he is. It must be eternal and, in some sense, identical with divinity, equal with God (Pantheism). In a system like this, the world is necessarily uncreated, and this means that God, obviously, cannot be the creator.

Avoiding all of this, these three theologians turn to the Trinity. The reason, they say, that God can create, and be in and with his creation while remaining distinct from it, is because his inner-life is “divinely rich, it is fecund; it implies action, productivity.” God is internally and eternally fruitful.

Specifically, this refers to the relations of the Immanent Trinity (God in Himself, ‘on the inside’; distinct from the Economic Trinity): Paternity, Filiation, and Spiration.

According to Christian theology, the Father eternally ‘generates’ or ‘begets’ the Son, and the Father & Son ‘spirate’ or ‘breathe forth’ the Spirit, such that He eternally ‘proceeds’ from them (or ‘from the Father through the Son’).

The Son ‘comes from’ the Father in a fashion that bears similarities to how a word comes from someone’s mouth or how a son comes from a father. Similarly, the Spirit ‘comes from’ the Father and the Son in a manner analogous to how breath comes from a person’s lungs.

(To be clear, this does not suggest that the Son & Spirit are less divine, glorious, powerful, or eternal than the Father. All three Persons are equally God; they’re of the same substance).

In this consists the eternal ‘movement,’ ‘activity,’ and ‘happening’7 of God. This is what God has eternally been ‘up to,’ as it were.

And, they say, it’s these relations, this productivity/activity/flowing-forth-ness, that make the act of creation sensible and possible.

For Bavinck, “Generation and procession in the divine being are immanent acts of God, which make possible the outward works of creation and revelation,” and, following Augustine and Athanasius, he says that “the self-communication that takes place within the divine being is archetypal for God’s work in creation.”8

Balthasar finds this in Aquinas: “If, according to our faith, we assume the procession of the Divine Persons. . .this perfect procession must be the cause and ground of the procession of creatures.” And more strongly in Bonaventure: “God could not have brought forth the creation on the basis of his will if he had not already brought forth the Son on the basis of his nature.”9

Let me break this down.

‘Mere monotheism’ would have us imagine a God who was eternally ‘sitting still,’ abruptly got the idea to create, and then began to ‘move.’ According to Barth, this would “signify an alien or contradictory expression of God’s being.”10

For Trinitarianism, on the other hand, this is not an issue. What we find God doing in our history is the kind of thing God has always been ‘doing,’ it’s who he’s always been. The acts of creation and redemption are a “natural expression” of his being ad extra (outside of Himself), and an “overflow of His essence.”11

To be clear, Barth does not mean that God’s actions toward us are “natural” in the sense that they are “demanded or presupposed by. . .necessity, constraint, or obligation. . .from outside.”12 He’s very careful to protect God’s absolute freedom.

He doesn’t mean that God has to create, only that it makes sense for God to create, that God has always been the kind of God who would do something like create—not just by virtue of his character, but by his very nature.

Basically, when we see God “creating and seeking fellowship with mankind,” that isn’t weird. It’s not strange for God to ‘busy himself’ with creatures and to approach us in love because, contrary to ‘mere monotheism,’ the Triune God has never been inert/motionless, he has never been just a thing doing nothing.

His internal life has always looked like loving, giving, generating, begetting, and so on. God doesn’t start doing those things when he makes us—creation, in this view, is something like a continuation of one eternal movement.

And this is where Balthasar is really helpful. He helps us see how exactly the two dynamics (God in Himself and God toward us) correspond. Basically: what are the intra-Trinitarian relations (begetting, being begotten, spirating, proceeding) and what in the world do they have to do with creation? Here’s what he says:

When we speak of God ‘begetting’, we must envisage him sharing his full divine freedom with the Begotten, and sharing it ultimately, irrevocably and forever. And since this ‘begetting’ is timeless, the Son’s turning to his Father-Origin in gratitude is equally eternal.13

In Balthasar’s thinking (which is dependent upon a statement from the Fourth Lateran Synod), the act of begetting means that the Father gives his very own freedom, his divinity, his substance, his being, his life to the Son. Or, in other words, he gives Himself; “the Father does not give something (or even everything) that he has but all that he is—for in God there is only being, not having. So the Father’s being passes over, without remainder, to the begotten Son.”14

But this ‘event’ is not something that began, such that the Father made the Son, but is eternal, an always happening and ever-present reality.

And, further, it happens in both (or rather all three) directions. Here Balthasar pulls on Aquinas who reminds us that processions are not just a ‘flowing forth’ or ‘going out’ but also, necessarily, a “return to him.”15 The Son and the Spirit respond to this gift with an equal and simultaneous self-giving to the Father.

Now, we shouldn’t imagine this like the three Persons are playing a weird game of eternal hot potato with the divine essence. It’s not as if the Father gives his whole substance to the Son and, because of this, loses it—ceasing to be God for a beat until the Son gives it back. Nor is it as if the Father gives a part of His substance to the Son and retains a part for himself, dividing up the divine essence into pieces.

Instead, it’s more like a fountain overflowing to an infinite degree from the Father to the Son, and through the Son to the Spirit.

Bavinck puts it like this: God is “a plentitude of life. . .capable of expansion, unfolding, and communication. . .[He] is an infinite fullness.”16 In God, there is an eternal and infinite life opening “itself up in a threefold sense,”17 ‘unfolding’ from the Father to the Son, and from the Father and the Son to the Spirit.

And this is why, even though creation is ‘from nothing,’ it certainly does not come from ‘out of nowhere.’

Creation is what God’s inner-life-giving act looks like when the overflow keeps on trickling down. When God’s eternal activity, naturally, turns external. We’re in the splash zone.

Of course, the relationship between us and God has to be substantially different from his immanent relations because it involves those who are not God. But God doesn’t stop acting like Himself! The eternal pattern extends outside of God in a familiar form: the gift of life, being, freedom, and love.

The eternal generation of the Son is, in a way, enacted into our history; “human generation is an analogy and image of the divine deed by which the Father gives the Son ‘to have life in himself.’”18

So, even though we hold, as all three of these men remind us to, that God is utterly satisfied in the bliss and blessedness of his interior/immanent relations, super-abundantly active and totally independent, we can still understand how God’s inner-life would naturally result in creation. That God’s inner gift of life might extend to the outside.

And this is not by accident, not by force, not by obligation, not by happenstance. Not because of boredom or tiredness or loneliness, but simply because of who he is. Because his love is of a generous kind that is always sharing.

As the scholastics put it, goodness is self-diffusive. And this is the model shown to us by God. He is supremely good so he supremely gives—always on the inside, and in our time on the outside.

Creation, in this view, is a procession, a flowing-forth from God that mirrors the first two (eternal generation and spiration), despite, in substance, being different. Basically: it’s the same shape in a novel context.

Which is why the world is made “through the Son/Word” and why Jesus is the “firstborn from the Father.” Our existence follows an eternal pattern.

And although there is a distinction between the eternal generation of the Son and creation, the spill-over is not a sudden innovation or contradiction in God. Creation is not a sudden spark of creativity or a solution to God’s appetite.

It’s just God acting like God.

“The world is, because and as the Son of God is.”19

I wasn’t aware of this, of cowardice being a recurring vice for me, until a few years ago. And then, in his gentle-kindness, the Spirit began to show me how deeply fear had been permeating my life.

Honestly, that came to me as a massive shock. I’ve always thought of myself as a dare-devil, a risk-taker, a fear-facer.

For as long as I can remember I’ve had no issue doing wild (and often stupid) things like backflipping off of 70 foot bridges into rivers or getting on a stage and speaking in front of packed crowds. That stuff is no big deal.

I’ve never been the kind of guy who walks around carrying loads of anxiety about the bad things that might happen to me. I’m like obnoxiously optimistic. I think everything is gonna go well for me basically all the time.

So... Me? Chronically afraid? No way.

But then I started to see it.

The constant decision paralysis, the always seeing everything through the lens of failure, the non-stop striving to avoid rejection. My whole life was being shaped by a debilitating fear of messing up.

It comes up in all sorts of ways. It’s why I act like a strange, insecure version of myself around people I want to impress. It’s why I can sometimes resist leading in moments when it’s really necessary. It’s even why a good chunk of me really hates putting anything on the internet (including these articles; I had anxiety for like 3 hours today because I was worried about my last article being misunderstood).

I am constantly facing the temptation to ‘hide’ from my wife, my pastors, my church, and my friends. I’d really like to be perceived as impeccable (unable to sin) and infallible (unable to fail). I’m terrified of blowing it.

The way forward is, by necessity, pretty uncomfortable. I’ve gotta put myself out there, stop covering my shortcomings, and be open to learning from my mistakes instead of avoiding anything I feel like I can’t do flawlessly on the first try.

I also need a lot of grace from God, help from the Holy Spirit—because if there’s anybody I’m scared of letting down, it’s him.

Recently, one of the truths that’s been especially comforting for me comes from this passage in the sermons of St. John Chrysostom:

Man threw away everything he had—his right to speak freely, his communion with God, his time in Paradise, his unclouded life—and went out naked, like a survivor from a shipwreck.

But God received him and immediately clothed him, and taking him by the hand gradually led him to heaven.

And yet the shipwreck was quite unforgivable. For this tempest was entirely due, not to the force of the winds, but to the carelessness of the sailor.

Yet God did not look at this, but had compassion for such a great disaster. He received the one who had been shipwrecked in the harbor as lovingly as if it had happened in the middle of the ocean.

But God made the gain greater than the loss, and brought our nature to the royal throne.1

Flames.

Chrysostom reminds us that the story of theology more or less begins with God’s insistence on showing mercy to people that mess everything up. Even though they have no excuses, God doesn’t ‘look at this,’ he just has compassion. And then he carries the human race further forward, having every intention to make our final situation better than the first.

I can’t get over this line: “He received the one who had been shipwrecked in the harbor as lovingly as if it had happened in the middle of the ocean.”

Adam fails before the creation project can even get off the ground. Disobedience isn’t something that happens down the line on a particularly exhausting, difficult day. It’s one of the first things he does!

He can’t even get out of the harbor. It’s like a 16-year-old boy with a fresh license crashing his brand new car in the parking lot of the dealership.

But, according to Chrysostom, God doesn’t give attention to that.

God treats Adam like he crashed in the middle of the sea, taken out by 10-foot waves, surrounded by sea-beasts. It’s unbelievable mercy. He grabs his hand and begins to show mankind the way back to heaven.

His first response is grace.

This guy is responsible for the primal failure, the archetypal let-down. He’s the dude who blew it worse than any other human being ever, and he was clothed and cared for by God. Immediately!!!

This is our God!

He’s used to knuckleheads, butterfingers, and goofballs.

And Redemption is his only play.

The Biblical story kicks off with God forgiving the worst possible mistake and culminates with him going to the greatest possible length to make it right. I don’t need to be uncertain about how the Good Shepherd is gonna deal with me, and neither do you.

Thanks be to God.

Should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false. . .the catechism of head and heart (as contrasted with the printed catechism). . .would not have to change at all.2

Ooooooooo buurrrrn.

I think he was right. I think the doctrine of the Trinity is seen by many today as being ‘high risk, low reward’ and therefore not really worth engaging.3 If you mess it up, you’re a heretic. If you nail it, you’re a bore. So why waste all that effort?

But what if this attitude is backward? What if the Trinity is a deeply practical doctrine? And what if shelving it has some serious and immediate consequences for our spiritual lives?

This seems along the lines of what John Calvin thought about the significance of the Trinity. In the first book of his Institutes, he dropped this absolute BANGER:

While he [God] proclaimed his unity, he distinctly sets it before us as existing in three persons. These we must hold, unless the bare and empty name of Deity merely is a flutter in our brain without any genuine knowledge.4

In other words, there are two options.

Option 1: Be a “mere monotheist.” Have some abstract, impersonal, undefined concept of ‘God’ or ‘Deity’ floating around aimlessly and unattributed in your head. And because of this find yourself praying to, speaking of, and trying to a serve a metaphysical nothing-burger.

OR

Option 2: Be a Trinitarian. Know the God who really is precisely as He has revealed Himself. And therefore address and love and serve the God who is Father, Son, and Spirit, consciously living in the infinite beatitude of His very own life.

Without the doctrine of the Triune God, the Christian has no way to understand what it means to be saved or what an appropriate response to salvation would look like.

Trinitarian salvation (the Biblical conception) has as its controlling concept man’s reentry into the ‘inner life of God’ through the death and resurrection of Christ such that we, by the Spirit, ‘participate in Christ’ and so become ‘partakers of the Divine Nature.’ This reality invades every square inch of life in a totalizing sense, temporally and eternally.

Conversely, should a mere monotheist attempt to describe salvation, they will be stuck trying to take what, in Trinitarian theology, is an overflowing effect of salvation in the richest sense, and make it the main thing.

Typically this looks like salvation having almost nothing to do with life in the now, and everything to do with the afterlife. And even then, the focus is not on the positive (what will be gained in death), but on the negative (what will be avoided in death; i.e. hell).5

Furthermore, since the mere monotheist has no sense of being brought into God’s very own life, their ways of approaching God will, in simplest terms, be plain and colorless. They will have a millennial grey spiritual life.

Because they will not imagine themselves as being united to the Son of God by the Holy Spirit and therefore brought into the Son’s dynamic with the Father, their prayer lives will wind up looking like thoughts mysteriously shipped off to the ominous ball of power in the sky somewhere (!??!) which they call ‘God.’ As to how exactly this works or why they should be answered they will have little to say.

Christians, on the other hand, pray Trinitarian-ly. We pray by the Spirit, in/through/with the Son, to the Father. The Spirit helps us pray, the Son joins in on and enables our prayers, the Father hears our voices and answers.

While the mere monotheist, if my interpretation of Calvin is correct, prays to the vague God of their fantasies—the Trinitarian is aware of the fact that they are praying in and with God Himself.

And that simple confession, for the Trinitarian, promotes a contemplative etiquette—a sense of how exactly one should be in the presence of God—and a profound kind of confidence and sense of God’s love. It’s a totally different level of nearness, it doesn’t even compare.

Without the Trinity, God is just whoever it is that made everything and lives at the top of the food chain. But with this historic doctrine in mind, we get to see God as He really is, as He intended us to understand Him.

Mere monotheism, in other words, is a joy-killer. It provides us with a God that we cannot be satisfied in. It expects us to settle for the bare minimum, to fall in love with a faceless, nameless other. It gives to us a God who is nothing more than the ‘unmoved mover’ and demands that we devote ourselves to Him like the Patriarchs and Saints.

That’s never going to work. Your heart will be restless until it tastes the real thing.

Emaciated Trinitarianism might not send you to hell when you die, but it will leave you with such a blurry vision of God that you’ll be clueless about how to move into His loving embrace. Your spiritual game-plan will be ill-informed, with no sense of how you got there, why you’re invited, or what the rules of engagement are.

This is why we need the doctrine of the Trinity. It’s utterly practical!

Beyond our utmost thought,
And reason’s proudest flight,
We comprehend Him not,
Nor grasp the infinite,
But worship in the Mystic Three
One God to all eternity.6

The cover of this article is a stained glass window depicting King Æthelberht of Kent, a Saxon ruler who reigned in the early 600s. He was a Christian who had been converted by a monk named Augustine (not the famous one from Hippo), who is now known as the “Apostle to the English.”

After the fall of the Western Roman Emp…

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• Harrison Ford

• Sean Connery

• River Phoenix as young Indy!?!??!

• John Williams soundtrack

• Good guys killing nazis

• Cheesy action and genius dialogue

• Genuinely good bits (THE TAPESTRIES!?!?)

• A fanatical sec…

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I’ve heard this kind of thing before, and to be honest, I’ve gotten used to…

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Not long after I started to get passionate about Jesus and theology, I got sucked into online end-times conspiracy theories. Hardcore.

I watched this one lecture about the 23rd of September maybe a dozen times and memorized all of the rhetoric (you can watch it here if you don’t believe me—the video has 10,000,000 views).

“The Revelat…

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The classical Greek philosophers set the precedent here, stating often that their key pursuit was to attain “the good life.” They weren’t just doing abstract reasoning for the sake of being nerds (usually), they wanted to…

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Pretty amazing, I know. Lol. Probably not what you pictured, but still pretty cool.

These teeny tiny fragments of (allegedly) Apostolic bones were out in the open for anyone to see! And, as I learned later on, they were only on di…

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That has been the feeling for many in the last week, as they watched frie…

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