Bored Monks on Rainy Afternoons

There is one other problem people can have with the Trinity: that the word never appears in the Bible. Now that doesn’t sound good, and it’s given rise to the legend of the Trinity as the invention of some cloister-bound theologians with too much time on their hands. The story goes that the Bible knows only a simple, boiled-down monotheism, but that with some ingenuity, wild speculation and a whole lot of philosophical rigamarole, the church managed to cook up this knotty and perplexing dish, the Trinity. That just isn’t how the history goes, though.

The apostle Paul, for example, didn’t show any sign of struggle to confess “that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:11). You don’t see a cloudy ignorance of the Father, Son and Spirit in A.D. 50 which is all cleared up by A.D. 500. And while later church theologians would use philosophical terms and words not seen in the Bible (like Trinity), they were not trying to add to God’s revelation of himself, as if Scripture were insufficient; they were trying to express the truth of who God is as revealed in Scripture. Particularly, they were trying to articulate Scripture’s message in the face of those who were distorting it in one way or another—and for each new distortion a new language of response was needed.