![]() The Trinity underscores the importance of relationships Without the doctrine of the Trinity, we couldn’t claim that God is righteous in any meaningful way.ģ. And this is active righteousness this isn’t simply potential righteousness as a unitarian God would have. Those relationships have the characteristic of righteousness. They are faithful in those relationships they are just in those relationships. How can a righteous God be truly righteous, actively righteous, if he is only one person? The righteousness of God is the righteousness of the relationship of Father, Son, and Spirit. Define righteousness as faithfulness in relationship. The most you could say is that such a one is “potentially righteous.”ĭefine righteousness however you like. Leithart says that no matter how you define it, the very concept of “righteousness” implies the existence of more than one person. If righteousness is meeting one’s obligations, and If God is only one person-what’s known as a unitarian view of God’s being-how could God be truly righteous? How could God be “righteous” before any other person existed? But let’s imagine for a moment that God does not exist as a Trinity. And unless we do, we are missing a large part of what these attributes mean.įor instance, Christians everywhere describe God as eternally righteous. attributes the Bible talks about are attributes of the triune God, and we can reason about all of these attributes in the context of Trinitarian theology. But he goes on to argue that our understanding of every single attribute of God should be informed by the Trinity:Īll the. Augustine before him-roots the divine attribute of love in the very nature of the Trinity. The Trinity enriches our understanding of righteousness What’s more, we’re left with a conception of divinity that fails to account for one of the most fundamental aspects of God’s being: love. If we jettison the doctrine of the Trinity, we forfeit one of the key doctrines that distinguishes Christianity from other monotheistic religions. Why does it make any difference if we say God is Father, Son, and Spirit, instead of just one person-like Allah? In his Mobile Ed course on Trinitarian theology, Leithart argues that the doctrine of the Trinity underscores the differences between Christianity and other religions. The Trinity distinguishes Christianity from other religions Here are five ways the doctrine of the Trinity is surprisingly practical, all drawn from Peter Leithart’s Mobile Ed course on Trinitarian theology and his book Traces of the Trinity. As we understand more and more what the Bible reveals to us about the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, the more practical this doctrine becomes. It tells us what God is like, it tells us what to be like, it says something about the kind of God we worship and the way God interacts with us and with the world. And not just for the way we think about God the Trinity should affect the way we live the Christian life. Pastor and theologian Peter Leithart says that, far from being an abstract theological concept only for the most pedigreed theologians, the doctrine of the Trinity has profound, practical implications. In fact, when Christians attempt to explain the Trinity, they often stumble into metaphors that sound suspiciously like the very heresies Trinitarian theology was developed to counteract!īut even if you conquer the intimidating task of explaining the meaning of the Trinity, you may face an even more momentous challenge: demonstrating why it matters. Facebook Twitter Reddit Pinterest Email LinkedInĮven the best metaphors fail to capture the complexities of God’s being.
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