Heresy, Confusion, and the Holy Trinity

By Rev. David Petersen

The Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day He rose again from the dead. He ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. From thence He will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Christian church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

I had one particular old bird at seminary of the early church variety whose personal mission was to lead the students into heresy. It wasn’t quite as mean as it sounds, though it was a little mean. It was clear he enjoyed humbling the students, showing we weren’t so clever as we thought. But his real goal was to demonstrate how easily we slip into heresy. It wasn’t a difficult task. He didn’t have to work hard at it. He just asked us to talk about the Trinity. He knew that if we talked long enough, tried to say too much, we’d slip.

Perhaps this is why we find no mention of the Trinity in the Small Catechism. The catechism creed is the baptismal and daily prayer creed: the Apostles’ Creed. It confesses the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but it doesn’t use the word Trinity. The word Trinity is never used in the Church’s liturgy either. The Sunday creed is the Nicene Creed. The baptismal formula is used as a blessing or invocation at the beginning of the service, and there are trinitarian formulas in the liturgy. But there is no mention of the Trinity as such.The only place the Church hits that word is in the Athanasian Creed on Trinity Sunday and in catechesis.

If the clergy had had it their way, we wouldn’t have it there either. Trinity Sunday came about by popular demand. The people wanted a Sunday that would celebrate and confess this great doctrine, but the pastors said Sunday feasts and celebrations should be linked to the life of Christ and His saints, not to doctrines. In any case, the Trinity was proclaimed and celebrated every Sunday with the Gloria Patri, the creeds, and the like. The people got what they wanted, but it didn’t come about until the fourteenth century, which makes Trinity Sunday a newcomer in the church year.

Perhaps the clergy who resisted were not just stick-in-the-mud types against change but were akin to my old prof. Perhaps they were afraid that the average parish pastor couldn’t extol this doctrine very well or that the people would become confused by it. No doubt, there is some danger there. But what good is our doctrine if it is only for the pastors or academics? This isn’t to say that there isn’t a place and a time for the finer points and better trained or disciplined minds, but we hold no doctrines in the Church that aren’t intimately related to the doctrine of justification. We are reconciled to the Father for Christ’s sake, through faith, which is delivered to us by the Spirit. Our salvation is trinitarian.

The Father, the Son, and the Spirit are God. They are distinct persons, yet there is only one God. Our salvation has been worked and won by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not just by the Father, or the Son, or the Spirit alone. All three persons of the Holy Trinity work together, as one God, to create, redeem, and sanctify us. Yet they really are distinct persons. The Father is not the Son or the Spirit. The Son is not the Father or the Spirit and so forth. As believers, our relation to God is mainly through the Son. For there is one Mediator between God and man: the man Christ Jesus. At the same time, no one calls Jesus “Lord” except by the Spirit, and no one comes to the Father except through the Son. This works itself out for us, almost without thought, in our most common expression of prayer. For while we can pray directly to the Spirit or to the Son, most of our prayers are addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit.

And that is how you hold off the cranky prof: you pray the liturgy, and you confess the words given to you. That is also how you keep your mind from twisting in on itself as it tries to make the math work and figure out how there can be something with no beginning or how there can be three in one: you pray. For all confession is ultimately prayer or it is just academics. And trinitarian prayers, even if they contemplate the deepest mysteries of this life and the next, never lead us to confusion or heresy, but always to peace. This is also why some Christians bow during the words, “Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.” They bow in submission and humility before the mystery, but also because the name of God, for the Christian, is always a prayer.

Rev. David Petersen is pastor of Redeemer Lutheran Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and is also on the Higher Things editorial board. His e-mail address is prdhpetersen@gmail.com.

The Creed. Luther's Small Catechism © 1986 Concordia Publishing House. www.cph.org. Used with permission.