Case 04 · Apologetic · The class
The Trinity
The texts that strain every simpler account of God, and why the alternatives fail.
13 claims · 36 exhibits · 50 objections answered
What this case argues
- The whole Bible, Old Testament and New, teaches that there is only one God.
- Jesus forgives sins on his own authority, which his hearers recognized as something only God could do.
- Jesus receives the worship and prayer that Scripture reserves for God, and he accepts it.
- The New Testament gives Jesus two roles the Old Testament assigns to God alone: final judge of all people and the source of life.
- The New Testament credits Jesus with creating and holding together everything, which places him on the Creator side of the Creator and creature line.
- The New Testament shows Father, Son, and Spirit as distinct from one another, speaking to and sending one another.
- New Testament writers take Old Testament passages that speak about the LORD, the God of Israel, and apply them directly to Jesus.
- The New Testament treats the Holy Spirit as a person who acts, not as an impersonal force or energy.
- The New Testament shows Jesus both submitting to the Father and possessing equality with God, so submission and full divinity sit side by side in the text.
- The New Testament identifies the Holy Spirit with God directly, not just as a person but as one who shares in what only God is.
- The Trinity is the explanation that accounts for all the New Testament evidence about God at once, while each simpler alternative works only by leaving some of the evidence out.
- The divinity of Jesus was not invented at the Council of Nicaea; Christians worshiped Jesus as divine long before any council met.
- The popular analogies for the Trinity each restate a view the early church examined and rejected as heresy.
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