The Trinity is a difficult thing to discuss, especially for non-Trinitarian Christians like myself. It seems as though everyone doesn’t understand it: it is a mystery of God. But different people seem to not understand it in very different ways. Some believe it’s one of the most beautiful parts of Christianity while others think it is completely absurd. I hope to clear up a bit of that confusion here.
Prerequisites: This is mostly written to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (“our Church”), but it’s a straightforward enough argument that it should be easy for other people to understand too.
Originally Written: September 2022.
Confidence Level: I am not and have never been a Trinitarian, but my mom is a Presbyterian (PCA) and has a Masters in Divinity from Reformed Theological Seminary. My understanding of the Trinity comes from discussions with her. I am much less confident in my historical account of where this disagreement comes from than I am confident in what the disagreement is. I have a paragraph about it anyway, although I would have preferred to have read a lot more from Greek philosophy, the Church Fathers, and pre-Maimonidean Jewish thought before writing it.
Many members of our Church find it hard to understand the Trinity because the question to which the Trinity is the answer does not exist in our theology.
The Trinity is not the answer to the question: What is the nature of God?
The nature of God is assumed to be already understood. God is self-existent, meaning that it is logically impossible for Him not to exist – I’ve also heard that this described as “It is more accurate to say that God is the meaning of existence than to say that God exists”. God is reason (logos) itself, as described in John 1.[1]I am not at all qualified to do a translation of the Bible. But if I did, I would probably translate ‘logos‘ in John 1 as ‘intelligence’: “In the beginning was … Continue reading The self-existent being, who is reason itself, is inherently unique – nothing can be like Him. God is omnipresent, unchanging, and eternal, so it is improper to thing of God within space and time. God does not have body, parts, and passions – He is perfectly simple.
This is in contrast to the nature of man. The existence of any particular person is a contingent fact about the world, not a necessary eternal fact. People exist within space & time and can’t understand any other form of existence. People have a body, parts, and passions.
The nature of God is entirely different from the nature of man.
Who is Jesus then? How could Jesus be both God and man when God and man are so different from each other? This is the question the Trinity is designed to answer.
Many of the debates of the Church Fathers were about this question. Modalism is that Jesus sometimes is like God and sometimes is like man. This isn’t really a good answer, because part of the nature of God is to be independent of time. Arianism is that Jesus doesn’t really have the nature of God. Jesus existed within time and had a body, so he is not the self-existent being.
The Trinity’s answer to the question is Yes. Jesus is fully God and Jesus is fully man. This appears to us to be contradictory, but that’s because we can’t fully understand God.
Our theology doesn’t have this question. The nature of God and the nature of man are not so dissimilar to each other. We believe that God is more like a person, with a body and a history, and that people are more like God, with an eternal intelligence and the possibility of eternal progression. You don’t have to reconcile human nature and divine nature if humans have divine nature and God is the Man of Holiness.
This leaves us with the question of where the Church Fathers’ understanding of the nature of God come from? It isn’t described in the New Testament, which focuses on the person of Jesus. If the first thing that you learn about God is that He has a Son who looks like a human, then it’s not obvious how you go from there to a God without body, parts, or passions. I don’t think it comes from the Old Testament or traditional Hebrew theology. Judaism seems to be the last of the major monotheistic religions to adopt this understanding of the nature of God. Maimonides (1100s AD) seems to be responsible for this: he repeatedly argues against other rabbis who take descriptions of God’s hands or God’s anger too literally, instead of believing in a God who is self-existent, omnipresent, perfectly simple, unchanging, etc. I would guess that this understanding of God comes to us from Platonism, specifically the dialogue Timaeus. I really haven’t read enough to trace the argument from Timaeus through the Neoplatonists to the Church Fathers. This is also reminiscent of how our leaders talk about the Apostasy, as a mixture of Greek philosophy with New Testament Christianity, although they don’t spell out the details like a modern theologian would.
References
| ↑1 | I am not at all qualified to do a translation of the Bible. But if I did, I would probably translate ‘logos‘ in John 1 as ‘intelligence’: “In the beginning was Intelligence, and Intelligence was with God and Intelligence was God.” |
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So I was following LDS twitter recently and someone was talking about what seemed to be fairly explicit trinitarianism in Mosiah 15. I hadn’t really ever thought about it, and somehow I missed that it was somewhat controversial. But apparently people have felt the need to speak to it. See this article from Book of Mormon Central:
https://knowhy.bookofmormoncentral.org/content/how-is-christ-both-the-father-and-the-son
(Which references a 1916 statement by the Church.)
And see this serious of posts on BCC that were offered as rebuttal (starts here):
https://bycommonconsent.com/2016/07/08/abinadi-on-the-godhead-and-the-atonement-a-response-to-book-of-mormon-central-part-i/
And yes this is a transparent attempt to offload the work of digging into this debate to you.
I have been aware of the trinitarian-sounding language of Mosiah 15 for a while now – and not just from blog posts. I agree more with the By Common Consent posts than the Book of Mormon Central post. A few additional thoughts on this:
– If you’re looking for the Trinity in the Book of Mormon, it probably makes more sense to look for the Platonic idea of God. I don’t think this appears, but I haven’t read through the Book of Mormon looking for it. Ether clearly states that spirits have fingers (etc), which makes even the spiritual realm less of a Platonic abstraction.
– Different peoples think about God in very different ways. We shouldn’t expect questions and answers to simply correspond to each other. Comparative theology is hard, and likely requires a dialogue or more than a few chapters on the nature of God.
– Abinadi’s sermon is definitely heretical from a Trinitarian perspective. It does sound somewhat modalist. But the clearest problem is “The Father, because he was conceived by the power of God”. In the Trinitarian framework, the Son is begotten / conceived by, but the Father is not begotten. To me, being “conceived by” is quintessentially son-like, but Abinadi uses it to establish Fatherhood.
– The only part of Mosiah 15 that seems weird to me is “very Eternal Father”, which seems like a title that more properly belongs to Elohim. Although we’ve already established that Abinadi has different connotations for “Father”. I’m also open to the possibility that Abinadi didn’t have a clear understanding of the nature of God.
– Everyone in the early Restored Church came from a Trinitarian perspective. What did they think of these verses? There was some backlash against departure from traditional Christianity in response to the Vision (D&C 76). Was there similar concern over the doctrine of an embodied God? I don’t know, but someone with more Church history knowledge might.
“Comparative theology is hard”. I very much agree. And you bring up an interesting avenue of further inquiry. What did early members of the Church think of those verses? I may have to look into that.
Thanks for reading the articles and reporting back!