INTRODUCTION
EVANGELICALS,
THE GOSPEL,
AND THE TRINITY

(Or, How the Trinity Changed Everything for
Evangelicalism and Can Do It Again)

I write to you, not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it. . . . Let what you heard from the beginning abide in you. If what you heard from the beginning abides in you, then you too will abide in the Son and in the Father.

1 JOHN 2:21–24

The religious terrain is full of the graves of good words which have died from lack of care . . . and these good words are still dying all around us.There is that good word “Evangelical.”It is certainly moribund, if not already dead. Nobody any longer seems to know what it means.

B. B. WARFIELD (1916)

The doctrine of the Trinity has a peculiar place in the minds and hearts of evangelical Christians. We tend to acknowledge the doctrine with a polite hospitality but not welcome it with any special warmth. This book shows why we ought to embrace the doctrine of the Trinity wholeheartedly and without reserve, as a central concern of evangelical Christianity.

How has it come about that so many evangelicals today are cold toward the doctrine of the Trinity, confused about its meaning, or noncommittal about its importance? Even though solid biblical and theological teaching on the subject is available, the doctrine of the Trinity continues to be treated as an awkward guest in the evangelical household. The very terminology of Trinitarianism sounds vaguely Roman Catholic to our ears: isn’t Trinity, after all, a Latin word not found in the Bible but devised sometime in the Dark Ages? And though it was assembled (so the story goes) by clever theologians rather than apostles, isn’t it of dubious status as a specimen of logic? Above all, isn’t it a speculative distraction from the serious business of the gospel?

Doubts like these are hardly dispelled by the haunting thought that it is mandatory for Christians to believe it at peril of damnation. Perhaps you have heard the frightful admonition:

The
Trinity:
Try to understand it
and you’ll lose your mind;
try to deny it and you’ll lose your soul!¹

Heavy-handed theological pressure like that is about as helpful, in the long run, as tying shoelaces tighter to make up for a bad-fitting shoe. Wherever this pressure is felt, it turns us from negligent Trinity-ignorers to motivated Trinity-phobes. If we know nothing else about the Trinity, we at least know that explicitly denying it will put a church on the list of non-Christian cults. To many evangelicals, the stakes of thinking about the Trinity seem too high and the payoff too low—and we are not gamblers. No wonder the word Trinitarian is conspicuously absent from the list of adjectives that leap to mind to describe the theological character of evangelicalism. No wonder many of our congregations drift from year to year with only the vaguest apprehension of the fact that their Christian life is one of communion with the Father in the Son and Spirit. No wonder we have become so alienated from the roots of our existence as evangelicals: our Trinitarian roots.

TRINITARIAN DEEP DOWN

Evangelicals do have Trinitarian roots, after all, and those roots reach deep; not just into the history of the movement but into the reality of who we are in Christ. Deep down it is evangelical Christians who most clearly witness to the fact that the personal salvation we experience is reconciliation with God the Father, carried out through God the Son, in the power of God the Holy Spirit. As a result, evangelical Christians have been in reality the most thoroughly Trinitarian Christians in the history of the church. This is a strong claim and one not often heard these days, but I hope to make good on it in the course of this book. The characteristic beliefs, commitments, practices, and presuppositions of evangelicalism were all generated by a spiritual revolution: an applied Trinitarian theology which took more seriously than ever before in Christian history the involvement of Father, Son, and Spirit in the Christian life.

Nothing we do as evangelicals makes sense if it is divorced from a strong experiential and doctrinal grasp of the coordinated work of Jesus and the Spirit, worked out against the horizon of the Father’s love. Personal evangelism, conversational prayer, devotional Bible study, authoritative preaching, world missions, and assurance of salvation all presuppose that life in the gospel is life in communion with the Trinity. Forget the Trinity and you forget why we do what we do; you forget who we are as gospel Christians; you forget how we got to be like we are.

The central argument of this book is that the doctrine of the Trinity inherently belongs to the gospel itself. It is not merely the case that this is a doctrine that wise minds have recognized as necessary for defense of the gospel,² or that a process of logical deduction leads from believing the gospel to affirming the doctrine of the Trinity, or that people who believe the gospel should also believe whatever the God of the gospel reveals about himself. No, while all those statements are true, they do not say enough, because there is a Trinity-gospel connection much more intimate than those loose links suggest. Trinity and gospel are not just bundled together so that you can’t have one without the other. They are internally configured toward each other. Even at risk of being misunderstood before the full argument emerges in later chapters, let me say it as concisely as possible: the gospel is Trinitarian, and the Trinity is the gospel.³ Christian salvation comes from the Trinity, happens through the Trinity, and brings us home to the Trinity.

Because the gospel is Trinitarian, evangelicals as gospel people are by definition Trinity people, whether or not they think so. It only makes sense that if the gospel is inherently Trinitarian, the most consistently and self-consciously Trinitarian movement of Christians would be the movement that has named itself after the gospel, the evangel: evangelicalism. This is not the conventional wisdom we usually hear. We are more likely to hear the kind of lament this introduction began with, the lament that evangelicals have at best a precarious and tentative grip on the Trinity. But the lamentations and warnings derive their force from the fact that our recent poor performance as Trinitarians stands in such stark contradiction to our actual existence as Christians who are in fellowship with the Trinity. Evangelicals are too Trinitarian to be so un-Trinitarian!

Although not everybody knows that evangelicals are Trinitarian deep down, it has not been a complete secret. One of the theologians who has, in recent decades, most faithfully and articulately insisted on the essentially Trinitarian character of evangelicalism is Gerald Bray, who says that “the belief that a Christian is seated in heavenly places with Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:6), sharing with Him in the inner life of the Godhead, is the distinctive teaching of Evangelical Christianity.” No matter how much the doctrine may have become nonfunctional in the self-understanding of contemporary evangelicals, a robustly Trinitarian view of salvation has been the core, “the distinctive teaching” of the historic evangelical faith, according to Bray. In fact, though we have no grounds to be smug or triumphalist about it, we ought to testify clearly to our distinctively evangelical Trinitarian roots:

Without pride in our own tradition or prejudice against other forms of Christianity, we must surely proclaim that the experience of a personal relationship with God, sealed by the Spirit in the finished work of the Son fromWhom He proceeds, is a deeper and more satisfying faith than any other known to man. . . . Evangelical Protestants are not wrong in insisting that theirs is a deeper, more vital experience of Christ than that enjoyed by Christians of other traditions. We have not received the grace of God in vain and we must not be ashamed to own the Christ we know as the only Lord and Saviour of men.⁴

Bray is a historian of ideas, so he is taking the long view of evangelical history. When he says that evangelical experience is marked by “a deeper and more satisfying faith than any other known to man,” he is thinking in terms of five centuries of evidence, not the most recent five decades. He is not reporting current events but history; not today’s headlines but the volumes and volumes of spiritual theology that fill well-stocked Protestant bookshelves. Similarly, the argument of this book is that evangelicalism is Trinitarian deep down, even if surface appearances are less promising.

OUR RELATED PROBLEMS: WE ARE SHALLOW AND WEAKLY TRINITARIAN

Anybody who stays on the surface of contemporary evangelical Christianity is unlikely to encounter profound Trinitarianism, either in teaching or in spirituality. Though most of this book will be about what evangelical churches do well, perhaps it’s best to start by admitting two problems that any observer could see. First, evangelicals are not currently famous for their Trinitarian theology. Second, the evangelical movement is bedeviled by a theological and spiritual shallowness.

First there is evangelical coldness toward the Trinity. Above, I said that everything about evangelicalism presupposes that life under the gospel is life in communion with the Trinity, and that if you forget the Trinity, you forget why we do what we do, who we are as gospel Christians, and how we got to be like we are. Forgetfulness on that scale is, however, both possible and widespread. Forgetting where our evangelical commitments and practices originated, our churches are in constant danger of forgetting why we do any of the things we do. Our beliefs and practices all presuppose the Trinity, but that presupposition has for too long been left unexpressed, tacit rather than explicit, and taken for granted rather than celebrated and taught. We have systematic theology books that argue for the fact that God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but that fact seems like an item on a list, one of the many affirmations we make when summarizing the Bible. In every area of evangelical existence, our tacit Trinitarianism must be coaxed out, articulated, and confessed. We may be the most consistently Trinitarian Christians in the world, but it does us little good if we continue to be radically Trinitarian without knowing it. We are at risk of denying in our words and actions the reality that our lives are based on. We are at risk of lapsing into sub-Trinitarian practices and beliefs, of behaving as if we serve a merely unipersonal deity rather than the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit of the Bible. We are at risk of staying in the shallows when God calls us to the deep things.

This brings us, second, to evangelical shallowness. The evangelical movement is booming, but it often seems to be ten miles wide and half an inch deep. This shallowness is not only how things look from the outside, to the cultured despisers of evangelical religion. It also describes the way many evangelicals feel about their own churches and spiritual lives. Many evangelicals seem haunted by a sense of not being about anything except the moment of conversion. When they stop to ask themselves where they are taking their converts, they fear that when they get there, there will be no there there. When they sense that God is calling them to a deeper communion with him, they are unable to say what that would be. After all, you can’t get any more saved than saved. When serious-minded evangelical Christians feel the desire to go deeper into doctrine or spirituality, they typically turn to any resources except for their own properly evangelical resources. A strange alienation of affections sets in. They cast about for something beyond what they already have, which leads them to look for something beyond the gospel. What sounded like such glad, good news at the outset (free forgiveness in Christ!) begins to sound like elementary lessons that should have been left behind on the way to advanced studies. What they embraced as the sum of wisdom when they first turned to God (“cultivate a personal relationship with Jesus by reading your Bible, praying, and going to church”) begins to sound like Sunday school answers that never quite address the right questions. What has gone wrong when evangelicalism not only looks shallow from the outside but feels shallow from the inside?

These two problems, our forgetfulness of the Trinity and our feeling of shallowness, are directly related. The solutions to both problems converge in the gospel, the evangel which evangelicalism is named after, and which is always deeper than we can fathom. Our great need is to be led further in to what we already have. The gospel is so deep that it not only meets our deepest needs but comes from God’s deepest self. The salvation proclaimed in the gospel is not some mechanical operation that God took on as a side project. It is a “mystery that was kept secret for long ages” (Rom. 16:25), a mystery of salvation that goes back into the heart of God, decreed “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4; 1 Pet. 1:20). When God undertook our salvation, he did it in a way that put divine resources into play, resources which involve him personally in the task. The more we explore and understand the depth of God’s commitment to salvation, the more we have to come to grips with the triunity of the one God. The deeper we dig into the gospel, the deeper we go into the mystery of the Trinity. The puritan theologian Thomas Goodwin taught that the proclamation of the gospel was the “bringing forth and publishing” of a mystery that God had treasured from all eternity and that “the things of the gospel are depths—the things of the gospel . . . are the deep things of God.”⁵

If the two problems of weak Trinitarianism and shallowness are related, there is also a single solution: we must dig deeper into the gospel itself. Instead of staying on the surface of it, satisfied with its immediate benefits to us and its promises of future blessedness, we can look into the essence of the gospel and find much more contained within it. Inevitably, what we will find in the depths of the good news is the character of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When we call to mind how the gospel is inherently Trinitarian, we will find that we are being called back to the depths of the encounter with God that brought about the movement called evangelicalism. The more deeply Trinitarian we become, the more Trinitarianly deep we become. We are who we are because of the triune God’s work for our salvation, and it is high time for us to grasp this truth more firmly and bind to ourselves the strong name of the Trinity.⁶

EMPHATIC EVANGELICALISM

This chapter opened with the question, “How has it come about that so many evangelicals today are cold toward the doctrine of the Trinity, confused about its meaning, or noncommittal about its importance?” If evangelicalism is really Trinitarian deep down and came into existence because of a deep encounter with the gospel of the Trinity, its alienation from those Trinitarian roots is especially puzzling. But I think it can be explained by noting one of evangelicalism’s primary characteristics: evangelicalism is emphatic.

Protestant evangelicals stand in a great tradition of Christian faith and doctrine: we are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses to the one Lord, one faith, and one baptism—the things that make Christianity Christian. No matter how defective your contemporary evangelical church experience may be, you can start there and pick up a trail to the great, confident evangelicalism of the nineteenth century and follow it back through the Wesleyan revivals and the Puritans, to the Reformation and its grounding in medieval Christendom, and behind that to the first heirs of the apostles, the earliest church fathers. All this is ours. Evangelicalism, in all its denominational manifestations, is an expression of that great tradition, and while it has nothing that is absolutely unique to offer, it does have distinguishing features. Chief among its distinguishing features is that it is emphatic. It has made strategic choices about what should be emphasized when presenting the fullness of the faith.

J. C. Ryle, the Anglican bishop of Liverpool, tried to put his finger on this distinctive trait in a tract called “Evangelical Religion.” First he presented a list of the various doctrines that characterized the evangelical side of the Anglican tradition: the supremacy of Scripture, the depth of sin, the importance of the work of Christ, and the necessity of both an inward and outward working of the Holy Spirit. But second, he admitted that many Anglicans who were “outside the Evangelical body, are sound in the main about the five points I have named, if you take them one by one.” What was missing, according to Ryle, was the emphasis:

Propound them separately,as points to be believed,and they would admit them every one. But they do not give them the prominence, position, rank, degree, priority, dignity, and precedence which we do. And this I hold to be a most important difference between us and them. It is the position which we assign to these points, which is one of the grand characteristics of Evangelical theology.We say boldly that they are first, foremost, chief, and principal things in Christianity, and that want of attention to their position mars and spoils the teaching of many well-meaning Churchmen.⁷

Especially in times of religious uncertainty, it is emphasis that makes all the difference. The evangelical laymen who edited The Fundamentals knew this. In the twelfth and final volume of the series, having published eighty-three chapters on important contemporary doctrinal issues by an all-star team of authors, they published an essay by evangelist L. W. Munhall, entitled “The Doctrines That Must Be Emphasized in Successful Evangelism.”⁸ Munhall’s list was not reductionist. It included the doctrines of sin, redemption, resurrection, justification, regeneration, repentance, conversion, obedience, and assurance. Beyond these ten points of emphasis, Munhall obviously believed a great many other things and was prepared to defend them in feisty style against all opponents. But not everything can be said at once, and Munhall, speaking for those early fundamentalists, knew that the most strategic decision we ever make is the decision of what to emphasize.

Evangelicalism has always been concerned to underline certain elements of the Christian message. We have a lot to say about God’s revelation, but we emphasize the business end of it, where God’s voice is heard normatively: the Bible. We know that everything Jesus did has power for salvation in it, but we emphasize the one event that is literally crucial: the cross. We know that God is at work on his people through the full journey of their lives, from the earliest glimmers of awareness to the ups and downs of the spiritual life, but we emphasize the hinge of all spiritual experience: conversion. We know there are countless benefits that flow from being joined to Christ, but we emphasize the big one: heaven.

Bible, cross, conversion, heaven. These are the right things to emphasize. But in order to emphasize anything, you must presuppose a larger body of truth to select from. For example, the cross of Christ occupies its central role in salvation history precisely because it has Christ’s preexistence, incarnation, and earthly ministry on one side and his resurrection and ascension on the other. Without these, Christ’s work on the cross would not accomplish our salvation. But flanked by them, it is the cross that needs to be the focus of attention in order to explain the gospel. The same could be said for the Bible within the total field of revelation, for conversion within the realm of religious experience, and for heaven as one of the benefits of being in Christ. Each of these is the right strategic emphasis but only stands out properly when it has something to stand out from.

When evangelicalism wanes into an anemic condition, as it sadly has in recent decades, it happens in this way: the points of emphasis are isolated from the main body of Christian truth and handled as if they are the whole story rather than the key points. Instead of teaching the full counsel of God (incarnation, ministry of healing and teaching, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, and second coming), anemic evangelicalism simply shouts its one point of emphasis louder and louder (the cross! the cross! the cross!). But in isolation from the total matrix of Christian truth, the cross doesn’t make the right kind of sense. A message about nothing but the cross is not emphatic. It is reductionist. The rest of the matrix matters: the death of Jesus is salvation partly because of the life he lived before it, and certainly because of the new life he lived after it, and above all because of the eternal background in which he is the eternal Son of the eternal Father. You do not need to say all of those things at all times, but you need to have a felt sense of their force behind the things you do say. When that felt sense is not present, or is not somehow communicated to the next generation, emphatic evangelicalism becomes reductionist evangelicalism.

Emphatic evangelicalism can be transformed into reductionist evangelicalism in less than a generation and then become self-perpetuating. People who grow up under the influence of reductionist evangelicalism suffer, understandably, from some pretty perplexing disorientation. They are raised on “Bible, cross, conversion, and heaven” as the whole Christian message, and they sense that there must be more than that. They catch a glimpse of this “more” in Scripture but aren’t sure where it belongs. They hear it in the hymns, but it is drowned out by the repetition of the familiar. They find extended discussions of it in older authors, but those very authors also reinforce what they’ve been surrounded by all along: that the most important things in the Christian message are Bible, cross, conversion, and heaven. Inside of reductionist evangelicalism, everything you hear is right, but somehow it comes out all wrong.

That is because when emphatic evangelicalism degenerates into reductionist evangelicalism, it still has the emphasis right but has been reduced to nothing but emphasis. When a message is all emphasis, everything is equally important and you are always shouting. Your powers of attention suffer fatigue from the constant barrage of emphasis. The other problem is that a gospel reduced to four points ceases to make sense unless its broader context can be intuited. “The Bible says Jesus died so you can get saved and go to heaven” is a good start, the right emphasis, and a recognizable statement of the gospel—provided it is securely lodged in the host of other truths that support and explain it. The comprehensive truth of the Christian message needs to be sharpened by having these points of emphasis drawn out, but these points of emphasis need the comprehensive truth of the Christian message to give them context.

Knowing what to emphasize in order to simplify the Christian message is a great skill. It is not the same thing as rejecting nuances or impatiently waving away all details in order to cut to the main point. There is a kind of anti-intellectualism that is only interested in the bottom line, and considers everything else disposable. Certainly that kind of anti-intellectualism can be found in evangelical history, but it is a deviation from the true ideal. Emphatics are not know-nothings. The emphatic approach to Christian witness has a different impulse. It knows that the only way to emphasize anything is precisely to keep everything else in place, not to strip it away. The most proficient communicators always know that they are leaving something out to make their point more clearly and have a residual awareness of what is being left in the background as they direct attention to the foreground. The whole vast network of interconnected ideas left in shadows in the background is what makes the bright object of our focused attention stand out so strikingly, make so much sense of everything else, and point us to the total truth.

The best evangelical communicators have always been skillful emphasizers. John Wesley, for example, pointed to the sufficiency of Scripture by describing his desire to be homo unius libri, a man of one book⁹—although as an Oxford graduate, the author of dozens of works, and the editor and publisher of a comprehensive Christian Library, he was conspicuously a man of many books. “Man of one book” was a motto that emphasized Scripture, not a slogan for anti-intellectualism.

The best example of someone who struck the right balance between depth and emphasis is the apostle Paul. When the jailer in Philippi asked him, “What must I do to be saved?” he did not hem or haw, mumble or ramble. He did not stop to search his memory, pondering which passages of Scripture or trajectories of argument might be relevant to this question. He did not correct the jailer by saying, “It would be better if you asked me, ‘What has God done to save me?’” He did not take out a piece of chalk and diagram the history of salvation on the walls of the prison, or talk about predestination, or explore the spiritual dynamics of the jailer’s quest for meaning. He said, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31). On the other hand, when writing to the Ephesian church, to whom he had declared “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27), he did not just keep repeating “Believe in the Lord Jesus” over and over, as if he had nothing more to say. For them, he described the eternal purposes of God the Father in choosing us to receive redemption through the blood of his beloved Son and to be sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise (Eph. 1:3–14).¹⁰ Paul was hardly a know-nothing, even when he resolved, for strategic reasons, to “know nothing” in Corinth “except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2). Paul knew how to be emphatic, but he also knew how to lead believers deeper into the mystery which had been made known to him by revelation (Eph. 3:3). He could make the simple point about salvation in a few words, and he could describe the deep background of that emphatic message in all its features. When he turned to the task of exploring that background, he turned to the doctrine of the Trinity: the Father’s choosing, the Son’s redeeming, and the Spirit’s sealing.

The doctrine of the Trinity is the classic statement of the comprehensive truth of the Christian message. It is a summary doctrine, encompassing the full scope of the biblical revelation. When the early church tried to summarize the main point of the Bible in short creeds (such as the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed), they inevitably produced three-point outlines about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When emphatic evangelicalism degenerates into reductionist evangelicalism, it is always because it has lost touch with the all-encompassing truth of its Trinitarian theology. What is needed is not a change of emphasis but a restoration of the background, of the big picture from which the emphasized elements have been selected.

A blade is not all cutting edge. In fact, the cutting edge is the smallest part of the knife. The rest of the knife is the heavy heft of the broad, flat sides and the handle. Considered all by itself, the cutting edge is vanishingly small—a geometric concept instead of a useable object. Isolated from the great storehouse of all Christian truth, reductionist evangelicalism is a vanishingly small thing. It came from emphatic evangelicalism, and it must return to being emphatic evangelicalism or vanish to nothing.

Does the doctrine of the Trinity belong to the cutting edge of emphatic evangelicalism? No, it does not. It constitutes the hefty, solid steel behind the cutting edge. We do not need to use the T-word in evangelism or proclaim everything about the threeness and oneness of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in every sermon. But the Trinity belongs to the necessary presuppositions of the gospel. In this book, we will emphasize the doctrine of the Trinity constantly. It will be the continual focus and the explicit subject of our study as we examine how the Trinity changes everything. We will triple underline it. The reason for doing this lies in our current plight of Trinity forgetfulness. Because current evangelicals have ceased to be aware of the deep Trinitarian background that previous generations of evangelicals presupposed, an extended exercise in calling the Trinity back to remembrance is necessary. But if the exercise is successful, the doctrine of the Trinity can and should subsequently recede from the foreground of our attention, back into the background. When evangelical Christianity is functioning properly, and its Trinitarian roots are nourishing its life, the evangelicals are busy telling the gospel, not talking constantly about the doctrine of the Trinity. May that time come! But it is not now; for the foreseeable future, we have a lot of remembering to do if we are to strengthen the bruised reed, or rekindle the smoking flax, of evangelical Trinitarianism.

It would be a false dichotomy to say that we will talk either about the gospel or about the Trinity, but as the genius of evangelicalism instructs us, we know that we can’t emphasize everything all at once. We will continue to emphasize Bible, cross, conversion, and heaven. But in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we will do it without forgetting the dimension of depth behind it, and without lapsing into reductionism.

GOING FOR GOLD AT THE ECUMENICAL OLYMPICS

Imagine an ecumenical Olympics in which all the branches and denominations of the Christian church came together in friendly, worldwide competition. Some churches would be naturally positioned to take home gold medals in certain categories, leaving other churches to take gold in their own natural strengths. How would the evangelical churches fare? Most of them would probably be well advised not to try for the gold in categories like stately liturgy, historical awareness, or sacramental saturation. It might even be sardonically amusing to watch badly trained and disadvantaged teams do their pitiful best in sports they have no chance of winning, like snowless nations fielding bobsled teams. The literature of contemporary evangelical self-mockery is full of that sort of humor.

But what about the contests in which the evangelical teams would do well? What about the categories in which the evangelicals would, in fact, dominate all other competitors, sweep the field, take home the gold, and show the world what excellence looks like? The list of possibilities is a fun one to make: evangelicals have traditionally excelled in areas like conversion to a personal relationship with Jesus, devotional Bible study, conversational prayer, world missions, biblical literacy, and cooperation across denominational lines for the work of spreading the gospel. This list is neither exhaustive nor uncontroversial. But these six, among others, would be the strong categories for evangelical competitiveness in the imaginary ecumenical Olympics.

In my opinion, Trinitarianism belongs on that list. When evangelicals are being true to the underlying realities that brought the movement into being, they are the advocates of a particularly intense variety of Trinitarian knowledge and experience. When they are not self-forgetful, they know that participation in the life of the triune God is “the distinctive teaching of Evangelical Christianity,” as Gerald Bray said. But we cannot simply add Trinitarianism to the list of evangelical strengths as a seventh category, mainly because in the current situation it is not among our conspicuous strengths. Nobody would believe it to be true, least of all most evangelical Protestants with their current self-understandings.

The Trinitarian theology that drives evangelical experience, however, is to be found deep down, underneath each of the half-dozen strengths that are characteristic of evangelical Christianity. In fact, each of the strengths is inherently Trinitarian and can only be explained by reference to the way evangelicals experience the work of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When we read the Bible as if these inspired words carry the living voice of God, or when we pray to the Father in the name of the Son, or when we testify about Jesus in the power of the Spirit, we are always encountering a Trinitarian reality. This book is an excavation into the ground of each of these practices, digging into each until we find the Trinitarian gold buried beneath them. Above all, since the gospel itself is so Trinitarian that the Trinity simply is the gospel, salvation in Christ is an immersion into a Trinitarian reality. When it becomes evident that the factors which most clearly mark evangelicals as evangelicals are also the most elaborately Trinitarian, it will also become evident that the people of the gospel are the people of the Trinity.

CALLING ON EVANGELICAL WITNESSES

Before outlining the chapters of the book, I want to explain something that is unusual about the method I follow here. Whenever possible, I have quoted, appealed to, and engaged authors who are evangelical Protestants. I have gone out of my way to bring in as many evangelical witnesses as I could find, and I have usually avoided interaction with thinkers from other traditions within Christianity. I did not do this because I am unaware of or unimpressed by those other traditions, or because I think that only evangelical voices are worth listening to. No, the reason for giving preferential treatment to these authors rather than others is that I am trying to reintroduce evangelical Protestants to what is best in our own tradition. Here in the Introduction I have asserted that the evangelical tradition is a profoundly Trinitarian tradition within Christianity. The book presents an argument to support that assertion, and along the way, the witnesses that I call will also help build the case, example by example, that evangelicals have historically been not only subliminally Trinitarian but often self-conscious in their passionate commitment to the doctrine of the Trinity and their spiritual experiences with the three persons. The result, I hope, is an extended testimony service in which five centuries of evangelical Protestants stand up and bear witness to the gospel of the Trinity. Every reader can close this book with a long list of great, older evangelical authors on the Trinity that they can go and read.

Throughout the book there are a number of brief case studies of influential evangelical figures, usually entitled “The Trinitarian Theology of . . .” At thematically appropriate places we will explore the Trinitarian theology of C. S. Lewis, Francis Schaeffer, Susannah Wesley, J. I. Packer, Oswald Chambers, contributors to The Fundamentals, and so on. Some of these authors have been quite eloquent about the depth of their Trinitarian commitments, and these authors need only to be quoted. J. I. Packer does not need anybody else to write out his Trinitarian theology for him! Billy Graham, on the other hand, has been an active evangelist who was too busy doing his life’s work to stop and explain, at a theoretical level, how everything he did in his evangelism and discipleship presupposed the Trinity. He did, in fact, have more to say about the Trinity than most people would expect, and following the lead of what he said on the subject, it is easy enough to connect the dots in his practice. The Trinitarian presupposition is there to be seen just below the surface. Graham is a perfect example of an evangelical who is focused so much on being Trinitarian in practice that he somewhat under-explains the theological presuppositions of what he is doing.

The evangelical heritage, in other words, already has all it needs in order to be robustly Trinitarian. Speaking for myself, what I am teaching here is a doctrine of the Trinity that I first learned in a variety of evangelical settings: a Foursquare Gospel church, then a Methodist youth revival, followed by a Community church, nondenominational charismatic retreats, and parachurch groups like Campus Crusade for Christ. I have honed, deepened, and enriched that theology quite a bit, through graduate studies and broader reading, but the thing itself did not come to me from academic study of theology. It was given to me at an early age by my evangelical church culture. I do not want to cover those first tracks, lest I throw today’s young evangelicals off the scent of the Trinity at the point where they are most likely to pick up that trail. That is why quotations from evangelical authors dominate this book. Consistently pointing out these “local” saints is another way of showing evangelicals that they are already surrounded by the Trinitarian reality. The books we already have on our shelves are sufficient to teach us this Trinitarian way of being Christian, and they always have been. The word of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is not far from you; if you are an evangelical Christian reading this book, you are soaking in it.

The term evangelical is, everybody knows, a disputed one historically and sociologically. Whatever else it may mean, and whatever extended meanings it may accommodate, one of the things I mean by it is “Protestant.” As a result, the decision to interact primarily with evangelical witnesses means that few of my sources are older than the Reformation of the sixteenth century. The limitation to evangelical sources, remember, is only to make a point. But even to make my point about the depth and richness of evangelicalism, the restriction to the past five hundred years was a little too restrictive. So here and there in the book I have cited some older sources that predate the Reformation. It would be shortsighted to limit ourselves to the most recent one-fourth of the great Christian tradition, even if this is where we are most at home. My principle of selection is clear enough, but “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and the doctrine of the Trinity is no place for small-mindedness. There are 1,500 more years of great Christian thought and life stretching off behind these recent centuries (as the Reformers themselves, those great interpreters of the patristic and medieval heritage, were quick to point out).

Even to make a point, there is no avoiding Irenaeus (second century), no getting around the great Athanasius (fourth century), and no skipping Augustine (fifth century). Thomas Aquinas (thirteenth century) is so illuminating that it would be obstinate and sectarian to refuse his help in our contemporary project. These classic theologians are important as background for evangelical Trinitarianism, but I have left them mostly in the background, unquoted. Even in more recent centuries, I have occasionally accepted help from nonevangelical authors whose contributions are irreplaceable. The better grasp we have of the Trinity, the more at home we will be in the great Christian tradition, and the more all those Christians from all those centuries will belong to us.

Because the word evangelical is disputed, it has become customary to say it can hardly mean anything. Certainly the poor word has been abused and stretched. It has been pressed into service to maintain social boundaries. It has been deconstructed, and its redefinitions have been redefined; it has been co-opted for political uses in the stylebooks of the secular media. It continues to be used as a badge, a thought stopper, a sneer, a weasel word, a self-congratulation, a marketing gimmick, and a billy club. Is the poor word dead, then? No, it is no more dead than usual. In fact, it is not even especially sick. We can take some comfort in knowing that B. B. Warfield declared it “moribund, if not already dead” from “lack of care” as long ago as 1916. “Nobody any longer seems to know what it means.”¹¹ Yet Warfield himself left a legacy of great evangelical writing, and however we may draw the confessional boundaries, we recognize evangelicalism when we see it.

For the purposes of this book, I have no intention to fight about what an evangelical is or even to define the term very closely, except to alert the reader here that I am indulging in an expansive use of it within certain boundaries. I include in my cast of characters all sorts of pietists, revivalists, charismatics, Pentecostals, Baptists, and holiness preachers, right alongside the magisterial Reformers, the high Reformed, and the evangelical Anglicans. It may be hard to imagine a conversation between the Princetonian B. B. Warfield and Amanda Smith the holiness preacher, but here it is, and it’s a conversation about the Trinity. The Calvinists and the Arminians are in league here, along with the strict old Fundamentalists and their neo-evangelical descendants who would prefer not to be seen with them in public. Some readers may wish to exclude some of these witnesses from the category of evangelical, and that is their right. But we will cast the net as wide as possible first, with less interest in defining evangelicalism than in carrying out a public performance of it, especially in its Trinitarian character.

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

The Deep Things of God explains how the Trinity changes everything, and it does this by explaining how the Trinity and the gospel are connected. After some introductory matters (chapters 1–2), the book has two major sections. The first major section is a three-chapter study (chapters 3–5) of the Trinity and salvation, showing salvation’s size, the gospel’s shape, and our point of access into it. Chapter 3, “So Great Salvation,” shows how the Trinity expands our ideas about the sheer size of salvation by exploring the biblical idea of God’s self-giving love. Chapter 4, “The Shape of the Gospel,” traces the Christian experience of salvation back from our own lives into the life of God as the Father who begets the eternal Son and breathes the eternal Spirit. The Trinitarian shape of the gospel comes from the fact that God, by grace, gives himself to us by opening that eternal triune life to us. Chapter 5, “Into the Saving Life of Christ,” shows how the emphasis of this Trinitarian view of salvation rightly falls on Jesus Christ, in whose life and death we find salvation. This three-chapter core of the book is the most important section because it is devoted to the “things of the gospel,” which, Thomas Goodwin has reminded us, are “the deep things of God.”

The last two chapters take up, from among the many practices that characterize evangelical churches, the two that are most marked and most profoundly Trinitarian: Bible reading and prayer. Because this part of the book is about Christian practices, both these chapters begin with a verbal form: hearing and praying. Chapter 6, “Hearing the Voice of God in Scripture,” begins with the practice of reading Scripture as the word of God and argues that whenever believers handle the Bible as a means of grace, the Spirit is carrying the word of the Father to them. Chapter 7, “Praying with the Grain,” is a meditation on what is actually going on in Christian prayer and an encouragement to pray intentionally in a way that lines up with that underlying reality. These two chapters, on hearing from God and speaking to him, belong together as an essay on communion with the Trinity. Each of these evangelical practices could be engaged in without any attention to the presence of the Trinity in them, and, in fact, this is how too many evangelical churches currently engage in them. Each is inherently Trinitarian, though, and to direct our attention to this fact is to see what is really going on. Attending to the work of the Trinity restores the dimension of depth to these practices. That is how the Trinity changes everything.

Before the section on the gospel (chapters 3–5) and the section on evangelical practices (chapters 6–7), there are two preliminary matters that demand our attention. For one thing, in a book about how eminently practical the doctrine of the Trinity is for Christian experience, it is important to take a step back and remind ourselves that God is first and foremost Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for himself, not for us. So chapter 2, “Within the Happy Land of the Trinity,” is a meditation on what triunity means for God before it makes any difference to us.

And even before beginning that meditation, we can take one further step back and remind ourselves what we are doing when we take up the task of thinking about the Trinity. So chapter 1, “Compassed About by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” is an opening reflection on the methodology of doing Trinitarian theology. Like all methodological discussions, it is either the most important part of the book (because it lays out the entire subject in the most general and abstract way), or the best part to skip over (because it is not the main subject, but the approach to the main subject) and perhaps come back to. Whether you read it in order or not, the first chapter reminds us that Christians are never starting from scratch when they begin doing Trinitarian theology. A Christian, and especially an evangelical Christian, is somebody who is already immersed in the reality of the Trinity, long before beginning to reflect on the idea of the Trinity.