Recalibrate Our Beliefs about the Trinity

A Thought Experiment to Help Recalibrate Our Beliefs about the Trinity

September 02, 2024

by: Matthew Y. Emerson, Brandon D. Smith

The Way We Talk about God

Imagine that you’re trying to describe what God did on the cross. What do you say? Here’s how we’ve heard it described (including, at times, by ourselves!):

• The Father poured out his wrath on the Son.
• The Father turned his face away.
• The Father abandoned his Son.
• The Son felt the pangs of hell because he was separated from the Father on the cross.

Notice that in describing the cross this way, we are saying that there are two primary actors, two distinct individuals, the Father and the Son, the first two persons of the Godhead, and that each is doing something different at the crucifixion. For now, notice also that the third person of God, the Spirit, is never mentioned in these statements.

Let’s use a different example. You’re asked to describe God’s providence. What do you say? Here’s how we’ve heard it described (again, at times, by ourselves!):

• The Father chose this path for me because he cares for me.
• When we talk about election, we’re talking about the plan of God the Father.
• We have a good Father who has planned all things to work together for our good.

Notice that in describing providence this way, we’re attributing God’s “plan” specifically to God the Father, and sometimes it sounds as if it’s only God the Father who plans out providence. One last example will suffice. Imagine that you’re told to describe how a Christian receives and uses spiritual gifts. What do you say?

• The Spirit gave me the gift of [X, Y, or Z].
• I can [use gift X, Y, or Z] because the Spirit empowers me.
• I’m gifted at [X, Y, or Z] because the Spirit chose to make me that way.

Are the Father and the Son involved in the spiritual gifts? Or just the Spirit?

This concise introduction to the doctrine of inseparable operations explores the unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in relation to salvation, revelation, communion, and more.   

In each of these examples, and even in the way we’ve asked the follow-up questions, what we’re trying to help you see is that we often think about God’s acts as divisible between the persons and distributed according to their roles. So in these scenarios, sometimes the actor is primarily the Father, as in the examples about providence; sometimes the actor is the Son, as in the examples about the crucifixion; and sometimes the actor is the Spirit, as in the examples about the spiritual gifts.

Let’s return to the examples related to the crucifixion. A question we often ask our students when talking about this subject, and after we’ve described the crucifixion in the ways we gave above, is, “What was the Spirit doing while the Father was forsaking the Son?” Was the Spirit just watching from the sidelines? Was he taking a break from his divine duties? Are the Son and the Spirit also wrathful toward sin? Returning next to providence, do the Son and the Spirit sit on the bench while the Father governs his creation? And with respect to the spiritual gifts, do the Father and the Son renounce their authority and hand it over to the Spirit to let him distribute gifts to whom he wills?

These questions, we hope, help us see that the way we talk about God’s acts often divides the persons of God in a way that is contrary to our confession that God is one God in three persons. If only one divine person, or in some cases two of the three, is acting on any given occasion, how is that consistent with the Christian confession of one God, or with its roots in Jewish monotheism? Aren’t there now three Gods, each of whom acts in different ways in different times? Or is there one God who is sometimes Father, sometimes Son, and sometimes Spirit? The former example is the heresy called “tritheism,” while the latter is called “modalism.” These are ancient false teachings that the church combatted through articulating what we know as the doctrine of the Trinity. And in order to combat them, we need to recover what the early church referred to as the doctrine of inseparable operations.¹

The triune God’s work in the world enables us to behold his power and goodness.

Beholding the Triune God through His Inseparable Operations

The triune God has graciously revealed himself to us. Historically and on biblical grounds, Christians have held two affirmations about who and what God is—God is one God, and he exists as three persons. This identification of God as triune stands at the heart of the Christian faith, along with the confession that the second person of the Trinity, the Son, took on a human nature without ceasing to be God. As fully human and fully God, Jesus Christ lived a perfectly righteous human life, died a penal, sacrificial, atoning death for sinners on the cross, proclaimed victory over death during his descent to the dead, and rose from the dead bodily on the third day. All of this was according to the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:1–4) and in order to fulfill the promise that God made to Adam and Eve, that through the seed of woman he would crush the enemy’s head and thereby reconcile himself to his image bearers and restore creation (Gen. 3:15).

The triune God has graciously revealed himself to us.

But we would be mistaken if we took the Son’s incarnation and subsequent saving actions as evidence that only he is acting in the act of redemption. On the contrary, it is the one God—Father, Son, and Spirit—who acts in the whole history of salvation, including in the incarnation. Likewise, we should remember that it is this same one God—Father, Son, and Spirit—who “in the beginning created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1), who called Abram out of Ur of the Chaldeans, who spoke to Moses in the burning bush, who brought Israel out of Egypt, who revealed himself to Moses and gave the Torah on Mount Sinai, who led Israel through the wilderness, who scattered Israel’s enemies before her as she entered the promised land, who raised up judges and kings for Israel, who judged Israel and sent her into exile through the same nations that deserve and will receive his judgment, and who, to return to where we started, brought salvation to Israel and the nations in the person of the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ. It is this same one God—Father, Son, and Spirit—who calls his church together and feeds them with word and sacrament, who governs the world and brings rain on the just and the unjust, and who will, on the last day, remake what he has made and dwell with his people forever in the new heavens and new earth. In sum, the fundamental confession of God’s people—“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4)— is still true even after the sending of the Son and the Spirit.

In articulating the acts of God this way, we are again emphasizing the unity of their action. We want to hammer this concept home at the beginning because it is one of the two major emphases of this book, and also because so much of our talk about God in contemporary evangelicalism actually cuts against God’s unity, especially as it pertains to what he does. Our songs and hymns and spiritual songs, our devotional readings, our prayers, and our sermons often isolate one of the persons of God from among the other two and speak of that one person as if he is the only one carrying out a particular act (or possessing a particular attribute). The problem with this approach, where God’s acts can be divvied up among the persons, is that it defies the logic of the Bible, Christian history, and systematic theology. The Bible speaks again and again of God acting. Systematic theology insists that for God to truly be one, his acts must be one, carried out by the one God who is Father, Son, and Spirit. And Christian history has taught throughout the last two millennia that the external works of God are indivisible.

Put simply: the doctrine of inseparable operations teaches that you cannot separate the acts of God between the persons of God. Every act of God is a singular act of Father, Son, and Spirit. So we can’t say that the Father alone creates or governs or pours out his sole wrath on Jesus at the cross. We can’t say that the Son alone saves us from our sins. We can’t say that the Spirit alone guides or comforts or gifts believers. Why? Because they are all acts of God. Thus, every act of God is the act of the one God—Father, Son, and Spirit, singular not only in purpose or agreement, but also in essence and every divine attribute. As Gregory of Nyssa explained:

Whatever your thought suggests to you as the Father’s mode of being . . . you will think also of the Son, and likewise of the Spirit. For the principle of the uncreated and of the incomprehensible is one and the same, whether in regard to the Father or the Son or the Spirit. For one is not more incomprehensible and uncreated and another less so.²

Put simply, Father, Son, and Spirit are each God but are not each other. To speak of any person is to speak of God, and to speak of God is to speak of three persons.

Notes:

1. Athanasius of Alexandria offers one of the earliest accounts of a full-blown doctrine of inseparable operations. See Epistles to Serapion 1.1.2–3 and Lewis Ayres’s discussion in Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 214. In terms of modern works expounding a helpful biblical, theological, and historical doctrine of inseparable operations, nothing currently on offer compares to Adonis Vidu, The Same God Who Works All Things: Inseparable Operations in Trinitarian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021).
2. Letter 38 3e–3f. English translation from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Series, vol. 8, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, trans. Blomfield Jackson (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature, 1895).

Matthew Y. Emerson and Brandon D. Smith are the authors of Beholding the Triune God: The Inseparable Work of Father, Son, and Spirit.