Is It Important to Uphold the Belief in a Triune God in our Pluralistic World?

             Today we are confronted with two types of theology. One anchors itself in the biblical witness to God’s salvation-historical dealings with the world, centered in the revelation of Christ and elaborated in the doctrine of Trinity as a ‘tripersonal communion of reciprocal relations.’1 The second one bases itself not on the biblical witness but an alleged shift in contemporary Christian consciousness. Paul Knitter called it a ‘paradigm shift’ in Christian thinking.2 John Hick called it a ‘Copernican revolution’ in Christianity.3 This view calls for a wider ecumenism that will integrate all the religions into a pluralistic theocentric model with none occupying the center. God is placed at the center of this universe of faiths.

            Moltmann made the new thinking clear when he stated, “If the biblical testimony is chosen as the point of departure, then we shall have to start from the three Persons of the history of Christ. If philosophical logic is made the starting point, then the enquirer proceeds from the One God.”4

            The Trinitarian concept of God was developed by the church to do justice to the story of historical Jesus the Son in relation to his Father and of their relation to their common Spirit.5 Starting with the assumption of unity in the interest of strict monotheism led to the Arian and Sabellian heresies. The Western Latin tradition began with the assumption of unity and then proceeded to inquire into the trinity. The result is an unstable record on the trinity that threatens to unravel into Unitarianism.

            The biblical account speaks of God in human terms. It identifies the living God with the crucified Jesus of Nazareth and thus reveals the life of the crucified God. But the theocentric pluralists dismiss the incarnational kenosis as a myth. The kenosis, suffering, and death of Jesus are the expression of the fullness of God’s love.

            Baarten shows that God appears in history in the way he eternally is.6 Otherwise, we could not be sure that in the history of Jesus we are dealing with God himself. There is an ontological correspondence between the internal relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Pannenberg explained that ‘the love with which the Father loved the Son and which the Son reciprocates is also the love through which God loved the world and the love which, through the Holy Spirit, is poured into the heart of believers, that they might be one with God and with one another, just as the Father is one with the Son and the Son with the Father.7 Therefore the structure of God’s love we receive through Christ in the Spirit is Trinitarian in nature.

            We need the truth of the Trinity to measure what we say throughout the whole of theology. The unity of the church is based on Trinity. According to Ephesians 4:4-6, “There is one body and one Spirit, …..one faith, one baptism, one God and father of us all.” The church is a people brought into unity from the unity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as Cyprian stated. The unity of the church is a prelude to the unity of humankind that God is working to bring about.

            The sending of the church to the world is a continuation of the father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit. The Holy Spirit leads the church to open new fields of mission and to continue the apostolic history that began at Pentecost in Jerusalem. Baarten points out that at the beginning, the church was nothing else than the mission of the gospel driven onward by the Spirit.8 Robert Jenson has pointed out that “the first gatherings of believers were gatherings of missionaries.”9 If we surrender this missionary identity of the church, we will be left to serve some other gods. Moltmann spoke about two aspects of mission- the quantitative and the qualitative. The quantitative mission is the spread of the gospel to the ends of the earth and it must always continue. The qualitative mission aims to influence the conditions under which people live, ‘directed towards an alteration of the whole atmosphere of life.’10

            We are commissioned to speak in the name of the triune God. “We are authorized to speak to this God in worship, to speak for this God in the proclamation, and to speak about this God in theology.”11 In order for the church to continue as the church, it must continue to evangelize the nations in the name of this triune God. Missionary work is participation in the works of the triune God. The church is the eschatological creation of God’s Word serving to unite all humankind. Each person integrated into this body is baptized in the name of the triune God. When we celebrate the Lord’s table, the father is praised, the Son is remembered, and the Spirit is invoked.

            The doctrine of the Trinity is the solid declaration of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is not a product of speculation that has little to do with salvation. The Athanasian Creed reads, “Whoever wants to be saved should think thus about the Trinity.”  It is necessary for the church to use the doctrine of the Trinity to discriminate between the truth of the gospel and all the competing voices in and out of the church.

            The doctrine of the Trinity also gives us a comprehensive framework for understanding the place of the church in world history, and for interpreting the forces of secularization, science, and technology.

1 Braaten, Carl E. No Other Gospel! Christianity Among the World’s Religions. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press. (1992)  p111

2 Knitter, Paul. No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes toward the World Religions. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books (1985) p165

3 Okholm, Dennis & Phillips, Timothy (editors).  Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World.  Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing Company (1995). p.51-58

4 Moltmann, Jurgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row (1981) p149

5 No Other Gospel. p112

6 ibid. p113

7 Pannenberg, Wolfhart. “Problems of a Trinitarian Doctrine of God” in Dialogue 26 (Fall 1987): 256

8 No Other Gospel. p116

9 Jenson, Robert. The Triune Identity. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers (2002) p29

10 Moltmann, Jurgen. The Church in the Power of the Spirit. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row. (1977) p152

11 No Other Gospel. p117

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