So we are faced with a decision. We have to choose between accepting what God tells us about Himself in His inspired Word—the Bible—and accepting a humanly devised explanation of the Holy Spirit. As we consider our choice of explanations, we need to remember that Jesus declared that God’s Word is truth (John 17:17). Doesn’t it make sense that Jesus knew what was true and that the Bible is a better source for truth regarding the Godhead than the ideas of men? As for how the Trinity came to be an integral part of Christianity, the New Bible Dictionary notes: “The word Trinity is not found in the Bible, and though used by Tertullian in the last decade of the 2nd century, it did not find a place formally in the theology of the church till the 4th century” (1982, “Trinity”). Several hundred years after the Bible was completed, religious leaders began developing and teaching that God is a Trinity. Echoing this history, The Oxford Companion to the Bible explains: “Because the Trinity is such an important part of later Christian doctrine, it is striking that the term does not appear in the New Testament. Likewise, the developed concept of three coequal partners in the Godhead found in later creedal formulations cannot be clearly detected within the confines of the canon” (Bruce Metzger and Michael Coogan, editors, 1993, p. 782). So why did church leaders develop a new, nonbiblical explanation of the Godhead? The effort to define who God was began due to a major controversy that had erupted among those professing to be followers of Christ. “In about 320 a fierce theological passion had seized the churches of Egypt, Syria and Asia Minor. … The controversy had been kindled by Arius. … He had issued a challenge which his bishop, Alexander, found impossible to ignore but even more difficult to rebut: how could Jesus Christ have been God in the same way as God the Father? Arius was not denying the divinity of Christ; … but he argued that it was blasphemous to think that he was divine by nature” (Karen Armstrong, A History of God, 1993, p. 107). Arius was an intelligent man and an accomplished debater, but he mistakenly believed that Jesus was a created being. The Roman Church selected a man named Athanasius, who was Alexander’s assistant, to counter this faulty teaching that was spreading throughout the churches. Summarizing the argument, Karen Armstrong writes: “Either Christ, the Word, belonged to the divine realm (which was now the domain of God
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GETTING TO KNOW THE GOD OF THE BIBLE
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