The Mystery of the Trinity: Solved!

 To hear this teaching on a podcast:
Part 1 click here.

Part 2 click here.

Trinitarian Christianity claims that the three-person-in-one God is a mystery that cannot be understood.

“Those who deny (the Trinity) place themselves outside the pale of Christian orthodoxy. Having said that, I admit that no one fully understands it. It is a mystery and a paradox. Yet I believe it is true.”[1]

 

“If this (tri-personality of God) is so (and without these truths one cannot be a Christian!), then God must be triune. As the Athanasian Creed puts it: “Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.” How this can be is a mystery, but it is a necessary mystery.”^[2]

 

So by their own admission, “mystery” is a defining characteristic of Trinitarianism.

 

Before we take a closer look at the mystery of the Trinity, it is necessary to make clear the difference between the Trinity and a triad. The Trinity means three different persons in one God. A triad means three persons or things which may consistently be together and work together, but not that the three make up one being who is God. I believe the New Testament fairly consistently describes a triad, but not a Trinity. The triad is God (the Father), the Son of God (the human Jesus, the Christ), and the spirit of God (the operative power and presence of God among us). These three are a triad sharing a unity of purpose, but not a Trinity, because they are not all the same being.

 

The Mystery of the Trinity: Solved! The Mystery is non-Biblical. The Mystery is not in the Bible

 

The Trinitarian claim goes something like this: “The Bible says there is only one God. But the Bible also says the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God - so God must be three-in-one. We are only finite human beings, so we can’t really understand how God is three-persons-in-one-God.  It’s a mystery.”

 

The Trinitarian mystery claim is faulty, and can be “solved”, for at least two reasons:

 

1)  People like me who believe the Father is the only true God emphasize that God is not a man and that who He is and what He does is absolutely beyond us, amazing, praiseworthy, and wonderful. “Great are the works of YHVH…the heavens are the work of His hands”. We do not understand how God creates a blade of grass, forms us in the womb, or keeps the universe going. Such knowledge is way beyond humans. But in believing in the transcendent wisdom, power and knowledge of God, the Bible does not require me to believe in a mysterious three-in-one paradox about who God is. Therefore, and most importantly, the mystery has been solved because,

 

2) The claim that the Triunity of God is a mystery is not in the Bible.

 

To claim that the essential doctrinal belief about the triune nature of God is a “mystery” is in fact an admission that the mysterious triune nature of God is not described in the Scriptures. The truth is that the Trinity is called a mystery because it is not described in the Bible and contradicts clear biblical declarations about who God is. It is the very lack of a biblical declaration of the triune nature of God that creates the non-biblical declaration that the Trinity is “a mystery.”

 

Can we all agree on this? There is no declaration in the Bible that the triune nature of God is a mystery. No one in the Bible declares, “The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. But God is one so he must be three-in-one. We can’t understand it. It’s only a mystery – but we must believe it.”

 

So, “mystery” as regards the Trinity is not a biblical claim.

 

And because the Bible never says that the Triune personality of God is a mystery, there are therefore no attempts in the Bible to explain or defend the tri-personality of God. The Bible is totally silent about the mystery of the Trinity. Not one word about it.

Think about that from a historical perspective. In the context of ultra-monotheistic Hebrew Scriptures and Jews whose essential creed is that “YHVH our God is one”, neither Jesus nor any apostle had to, or ever tried to, explain that in fact God is three-in-one.

 

And neither Jesus nor the apostles ever had to defend the three-in-one personality of God before their opponents - opponents who jumped on any perceived infraction against the Torah and the Prophets. For instance, the opponents of Jesus attacked him for allowing his disciples to eat with ceremonially unwashed hands (Matt. 15:2), but they never attacked him for teaching about a tri-personal deity? 

 

Historically and biblically, to claim that Jesus and the apostles never had to either explain the triune nature of God, or defend the triune nature of God, is an absurd proposition. The total silence of the biblical record is evidence that for Jesus and the apostles, the Trinity was no mystery because it did not exist.

 

All attempts to explain the triune mystery come from after the Bible was written. Actually, from hundreds of years after the Bible was written.

 

The honest historian can trace how the mystery of the Trinity developed in post-biblical centuries. In the AD 2^nd century, Gentile Christian theologians and philosophers like Justyn Martyr began to interpret a few biblical passages to be declarations that Jesus was God. But theologians like Justyn Marty did not believe that God was a triune being of three different co-equal persons. They believed that Jesus was another god, a lesser, second god who could be called god with a small “g”, who was subordinate to the one true God, the Father.

 

During the centuries after Jesus was on earth Christians insisted they were monotheists by emphasizing the superiority the Father. God was one because He was one person, the Father. Even the Nicene Creed of AD 325, from three hundred years after Jesus, is not Trinitarian. The speculations and the mystery about how God can be three co-equal persons in one being did not appear on the historical Christian scene until late in the 4^th century AD, from places like Cappadocia (in modern Turkey), NOT from the land of Israel.[3]

 

And yet, even after all the attempts to explain the triune mystery using specialized, non-biblical language like homousias (same substance) - in the end it all still remains “a mystery”.

 

To emphasize, appealing to the “mystery” of the Trinity is an admission that the Trinity is NOT described in the Bible. The mystery of the Trinity is a non-biblical, post-biblical topic, never mentioned by Jesus, the apostles or by those who opposed them. From a biblical stand-point, the mystery is solved because it did not exist when the Bible was written.

 

Biblical Mysteries

 

There are “mysteries” described in the New Testament. But New Testament mysteries relate to topics that were not known completely in past times that have now been clearly revealed, understood and described in the pages of the New Testament. Biblical mysteries are not unrecorded ideas about the nature of God that contradict what has already been revealed to God’s people. In fact, to go after a god that Israel had not known, who had not been revealed to Israel on Mt. Sinai, meant death (Deut. 13:2, 13).

 

A good example of a biblical mystery is the participation of Gentiles in the plans and purposes of God.

 

The Old Testament prophets knew that Gentiles would participate in the blessings of God, but were not specific about how the blessings would come to be. According to the New Testament, the mystery is, “that through the gospel the Gentiles are fellow heirs, fellow members of the body, and fellow partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus” (Eph. 3:4-9). The mystery has been revealed, understood and described by the apostle. Paul now had insight into the mystery, understood it, and explained it - that the Gentile participation in God’s promises comes to be through the Messiah, the man Jesus.

 

A mystery in the New Testament is always something that is specifically stated in the Bible as now revealed in the New Testament itself and which can be understood. The revelation of the biblical mystery brings further clarification. The Trinity mystery is not in this category. Instead, the Trinity is a non-biblical mystery that causes further misunderstanding. No one in the New Testament ever declared: “Now you can perceive my insight into the mystery of the Trinity. Now we can understand that ‘YHVH our God is one’ really meant that He is three-in-one.” No, there is nothing like this in the New Testament and this is why when someone tries to explain the Trinity they never open to a biblical passage that describes the mystery. We have to go to non-biblical, post-biblical speculations to find a definition like “God is three persons in one being”.

 

The mystery of the Trinity has been solved. The Trinity is not a biblical mystery. The Trinity is a post-biblical, man-made mystery. It is only called a mystery by post-biblical Christians because they understand that the three-in-one-God directly contradicts clear biblical declarations about who God is.

 

From Dan Gill’s, The One: in Defense of God, pp. 207-208.

It’s a mystery! God, aren’t you too mysterious for human beings to understand? Isn’t all of this just a great mystery that no one can comprehend?

 

God answers:

“Let him who would boast take his boast in this that he understands and knows me that I am YHVH” (Jeremiah 9:24).

 

God himself testifies that his people should glory in that they understand and know him. The truth of how many compose the one God is not a mystery! It is knowable and is known to ancient Israel. Israel knows with absolute certainty: it is one! Moses says to the people:

 

“to you it was shown so that you might know that the LORD, he is God there is no other beside him“ (Deuteronomy 4:35).

 

The inherent difficulties in multi-person theology have driven some adherents to propose that the idea is simply a “great mystery“ and can’t be understood. No one would argue with that assessment. Surely it would be an incredible mystery that in the Bible there is one affirming that only “he“ is God, while at the same time there are one or two other persons who share his deity. This mystery, however, exists only for those proposing a multi-person God.

 

God is indeed the most spectacular being in the universe. He is truly unfathomable! We are finite - looking to the one who alone is infinite. Anyone who claims to fully comprehend him is surely deluded. Yet the most complex being in the universe is simple to understand in this regard: there is only one of him!

 

The fact that only one individual is God is directly, clearly and repeatedly addressed in the Bible. On the other hand, the contradictory concept that multiple persons are the one God is never directly stated or specifically addressed. That idea is a construct. If we are to believe in a mystery, it should be one that the Bible straightforwardly identifies and describes. Otherwise, how will we know that it is a mystery from God? How will we know that it is not simply confusion or misunderstanding that has been labeled “a mystery“?

 

Appeals for people to except the idea of multi-persons as one God “by faith“ also point to the extraordinary weaknesses of the theory. Why should we strain to have faith in a concept that must be labeled “a mystery“ because it contradicts what the Bible forthrightly says?  How many the one God is, is not a mystery at all. Why not let go of the contradictory multi-person mystery and embrace the clear revelation that only one individual is God? All of our faith toward God is due to the one of whom it is said, “there is no other but him” (Deut. 4:35). This also was Jesus’s belief (John 17:3).

 

Let our appeal be that all would have the same faith in the same God that his people of old did. That faith is: only one individual is God and he is all of God there is. Let us tell the world that our Father is perfect and that to imagine there are any other persons with Deity can only diminish him in the eyes of his own creation. It can only dilute the honor that is due to him alone as God.

 

Podcast Part 2

 

Mystery, or Contradiction and Confusion?

 

It seems that Trinitarians use of the word “mystery” as a substitute-word for what is really contradiction or confusion. Using the word “mystery” puts a sugar-coating on what is really contradiction. Instead of saying, “I believe in a contradiction”, Trinitarians are taught to use language that has a more positive sound, “I believe in a mystery, something I can’t really understand.”

 

But the three-in-one God claim really is a contradiction, even though Trinitarians insist that isn’t.  And, if it is not a contradiction, then why is it a mystery? Why is there so much confusion about what the Trinity is, and why are there so many different, contradictory attempts to explain what it is? 

 

Trinitarians can’t have it both ways. If the Trinity is not a contradiction, then there is no mystery to it.

 

As mentioned above, the Trinitarian mystery goes something like this:

 

“The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God. But they, or he, is one God.

This is not a confusing contradiction, it is a ‘mystery’”.

 

Trinitarians insist that they are not saying that God is one thing and three things of the same thing at the same time. They insist that three God persons can be one God essence. Three whos can be one what.

 

But this claim is itself a kind of language trick that changes the meaning of the word “God” within the claim itself. For the sake of clarity, Trinitarians need to decide if the word “God” means one person or three (more than one person).

 

For example, a language comparison: each individual grape is a grape, but grapes together can be a cluster. A different word, cluster, which has the meaning of a plurality within it, is used for the more than one grape together. But an individual grape is not a cluster.

 

Let me illustrate the contradiction of the Trinitarian mystery declaration by making a declaration where I will use a different word instead of “God”, in which I won’t change the meaning of the word from one part of the sentence to the next. I will use the word “son”.

 

Zach is my son, Isaiah is my son, and Eitan is my son. But they, or he, is one son. This is not a confusing contradiction, it is a “mystery”.

 

If you can make three who are God into one God and call them “he”, than I can make three who are son into one son and call them “he”. Of course it would be an absurd language trick, but this is what the Trinitarian claim tries to do.

 

Mystery Promotes Ignorance, not Understanding

 

“Mystery” not only encourages and glorifies contradiction and confusion, but can promote complacent ignorance. “Mystery” gives the Christian an excuse to ignore the irrationality and contradictions of his beliefs and stay comfortable in ignorance and lies. A 2020 Lifeway Research survey found that 75% of Americans would say they believe in the doctrine of the Trinity, but at the same time a majority of that 75% held beliefs about God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit that would be considered heretical and damnable by Trinitarian theologians and church doctrinal statements.[4]

 

Complacent ignorance is not only encouraged, but is demanded, as believers dare not question the uncertainties of the supposed mysterious triune nature of God.

 

The Trinitarian “mystery” attempts to end conversation or scrutiny. To claim that the triunity of God is a mystery means it cannot be challenged. Mystery tries to a shield Trinitarian Christianity from giving an account, giving Trinitarian Christianity an excuse to not have to explain ideas about God that directly contradict clear teachings of the Scriptures.

 

Positive Mystery?

 

Many Christians think it is good that we can’t understand how God can be three-in-one. This supposed paradox or contradiction is actually a “positive mystery”. The claim is: “We shouldn’t be able to understand the nature of God. We believe in it because it is a mystery. If I could understand it, I wouldn’t believe it, because I can’t understand God.” I admit to rationalizing away the contradictions of a Triune god this way in my past - in this kind of glorification of the logic of ignorance. But as I noted above, I was confusing the transcendent wonders of the one individual God with a non-biblical impossible-to-understand, man-made contradiction.

 

To make the triunity of God a positive mystery is really to glory in non-sense, contradiction and confusion. Again, believing in the mystery of the Trinity is not something the Bible requires. The Bible never encourages glorying or boasting in the three-in-one-God mystery. It was only centuries after the Bible was written that Christians began to boast in the mysterious, non-clarity as to who or what the triune God is.

 

Gate-Keepers of the Mystery Religion

 

The “mystery” of the Trinity was a concept created by theological elites, and the mystery claim tends to benefit the ecclesiastical authorities. The “mystery” can keep common people under the authority and power of Gate-Keeper guardians.

 

The parishioner’s role is to accept by faith what the Gate-Keepers declare. And woe to anyone who in the least way questions the Gate-Keepers non-biblical assertions.

 

As my friend Forrest Maready stated in his book, Red Pill Gospel, Christianity before it was Ruined by Christians,[5] (see podcast #22) God went to great pains to reveal himself to mankind; but mystery wants to put God’s clear revelation into unclear fog. The beautiful, pure, compelling story of the Gospel of God’s work through the man Jesus of Nazareth is perverted by man into non-biblical, foggy mystery.

 

Theological elites, be the popes, pastors, priests, or professors can maintain their own positions and status by asserting this great triune mystery and require the “common person” to accept the mystery or face intimidation, social and economic expulsion, and historically, sometimes even death.

 

Having Gate-Keepers to a mystery is a recipe for control, manipulation, subjugation, greed and pride.

 

Even though it’s a Mystery that can’t be understood, Listen to the Explanations of it!

 

Despite claims that the Trinity is a mystery and impossible to understand, thousands of hours have been spent over hundreds of years to explain it and understand it. These intelligent folks use logic to discover and proclaim the triune divine mystery, and then condemn logic for questioning the mystery. The effort to explain the triunity of God by some of the brightest Christian minds is evidence that Christianity is not really comfortable with the triune mystery. So much effort to explain and understand something that is not understandable - and still there is no agreement over what the Trinity is; and, the majority of average Christian hold heretical views about what the Trinity is![6]

 

Listen to the experts try to explain the Trinity! They mumble and jumble without any real help from the biblical text. Instead, they are reduced to Greek philosophical jargon and contradiction.

 

Ravi Zacharias: “…the only way to explain unity in diversity in the effect is if you have unity and diversity in the first cause. And only in the Trinity is there unity and diversity in the community of the Trinity.”[7]

 

Dizzying intellect, but presenting something totally foreign to the Bible.

 

R.C. Sproul: “…Christ is one in person. That Jesus is one in person, two in nature – two in essence. This one person has a divine essence and a human essence. Right? So there you do have two essences in one person. Just the opposite of the Trinity: one essence, three persons. Got it?”[8]

No, R.C. I don’t quite get it. Can you show us in the Bible where a dual-essence-in-one-person Christ is described as being “just the opposite” of the three-person-in-one-essence-Trinity?

 

Not only the average person does not understand the triune mystery, but, even though they try hard, theological elites don’t understand it either – that’s why it is a mystery.

 

Should we really trust someone who declares that we must believe a theory about God that the person himself does not understand, especially when the theory about God is not described in the Bible and directly contradicts clear biblical declarations about who God is?

 

I suggest 1 Timothy 1:5-7 is pertinent: “Some have strayed…understanding neither what they say nor what they affirm.”

 

Clarity about who God is, is biblical, not uncertainty and mystery.

 

Putting Faith in the Wrong Place

 

Mystery removes the requirement of saving faith in the one individual God who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead. Instead, peoples’ faith is diverted to a contradiction, to faith in a less than clear mystery itself.

 

To “be saved”, a person is required to believe in something the Bible does not require, what one doesn’t understand and what one perceives to be a contradiction.

 

But the Bible is crystal clear about what belief is necessary for salvation: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Rom. 10:9). No mention at all of a Triune-God, or of God-becoming-man mystery.

 

Attack on the Fatherhood of God

Trinitarianism tries to make the one God YHVH into an impersonal abstract “essence”, an “it”, shared by three persons. But the biblical YHVH is one individual, a “he”, who speaks, acts, loves, gives life, and destroys. The Bible makes confession of the single personhood of God a requirement for saving faith (Deu. 6:4, Mark 12:29-33, John 17:3, I Cor. 8:6, 1 Tim. 2:5)

 

And the single individual who is God in the Bible is described as “The Father”.[9] The mystery of the Trinity is therefore an attack on the Fatherhood of God as it attempts to replace the one true God of the Bible, the Father, with something else, a tri-personal composite "it", an essence, that is not Him.

 

Contradicting the Bible. What the Bible Says about who God Is - It’s No Mystery:

 

The Scriptures do not proclaim a “mystery” faith concerning how many persons God is. Nor does the Bible require a belief in a Trinitarian mystery. Acceptance and belief in the “mystery” proclamations concerning a multi-person god are only the speculations of later, non-apostolic Trinitarian theologians. In contrast to triune-God mystery claims, the Bible proclaims a God that we can understand and know.

 

Deuteronomy 4:35 To you it was shown, that you might know that YHVH is God; there is no other besides him.

 

Deuteronomy 4:39 know therefore this day, and lay it to your heart, that the YHVH is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.

 

Deuteronomy 32:6 Do you thus repay the YHVH, you foolish and senseless people? Is not he your Father, who created you, who made you and established you?

 

Jeremiah 9:24 but let him who glories glory in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am YHVH who does steadfast love, justice, and righteousness on the earth; for in these things I delight, says YHVH."

 

Malachi 2:10 Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?

 

Psalm 100:3 Know that the YHVH, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

 

John 17:1-3: “Father…this is eternal life, to know You (singular), the only true God, and Jesus the Messiah whom You have sent”.

 

Paul prayed: Ephesians 1:17-18   that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, 

 

1 Timothy 2:4-5   (God) desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.  ⁵ For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, a man Christ Jesus,

 

Paul attempted to move the Gentiles in Athens from belief in an unknown what deity to belief in a singular personal who God, and to know God’s human Messiah, Jesus of Nazareth whom God raised from the dead.

 

Acts 17:23-24  What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.  The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man….

Acts 17:31  because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.

 

1 John 5:20 the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, to know him who is true

 

I’ve traded “mystery” for reality and confidence in the clear declarations of Scripture.

 

Understanding from the Bible that God (YHVH) is one, and that Jesus is His (God’s) human Son and Messiah, gives me a renewed and more certain confidence in the word of God. Our confidence is not in some human constructed “mystery” - the three-persons-in-one nature god[10] that the word of God does not describe. But my confidence is in the reality of the clearly described One God (YHVH), the Father, and His resurrected, glorified human son the Messiah Jesus.

 

 

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[1] https://www.christianity.com/wiki/god/god-in-three-persons-a-doctrine-we-barely-understand-11634405.html

[2] https://heidelblog.net/2014/03/the-mystery-and-necessity-of-the-trinity/

[3] When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome. Richard E. Rubenstein
“Evolution of the Trinity, Interview with Dr. Dale Tuggy”.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE1MrKQUUBM&list=PLUqWXumvcp5oTwoiZNb7bq-HG8-rHGxgS

[4] https://research.lifeway.com/2020/09/08/americans-hold-complex-conflicting-religious-beliefs-according-to-latest-state-of-theology-study/

[5] Maready, Red Pill Gospel.
https://spotifyanchor-web.app.link/e/U4GZpBWYuxb

[6] https://research.lifeway.com/2020/09/08/americans-hold-complex-conflicting-religious-beliefs-according-to-latest-state-of-theology-study/

[7] Video, The Trinity Beautifully Explained by Dr. Ravi Zacharias, https://youtu.be/788hMI1Lc-s?t=287 (4:47)

[8] Video: For the Doctrine of the Trinity. https://youtu.be/Sh72wgZEcKk?t=3041 51:05

[9] Deu. 32:6; Exo. 4:22; Isa. 63:16, 64:7; Jer. 3:19; Mal. 2:10; Matt. 6:9; Mark 14:36; John 17:3, 20:17; Rom. 15:6; 1 Cor. 8:6, 15:24; Eph. 1:3, 4:6; Heb. 12:3-11, etc.

[10] The same applies to the “mystery” claims about the two-natures-in-one person Jesus, which like the triune nature of God, is not a biblical mystery.