The Trinity is Not in the Bible [DEBUNKED]

(Billy Graham clip)

That’s where I come in. I am gonna try to explain it. And I’m gonna defend it as well. So stick around if you want to hear the Trinity explained.

(Intro Video)

Critics of Christianity will say “nowhere in the Bible does it explicitly mention the Trinity.”

(Paul Williams clip)

They are right.

Well, sorta.

Actually, not really.

The word Trinity itself is not in the Bible, no. They are right about that. But the concept of the Trinity, as Christians understand it (zoom in on t-shirt image), is mentioned time and time again. As a matter of fact, the Trinity is the first thing mentioned in the Bible. The first three lines of the bible are each dedicated to a part of the trinity. Line one: In the beginning GOD created the heaven and the earth. So, in the first line, we have the first part of the Trinity God the father. Line two: And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. In the second line we get the Spirit of God, which is to say the Holy Spirit. And line three: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And this line has the Son, Jesus. You are probably thinking, you can see how I got God the Father in the first line (In the beginning God) and the Holy Spirit in the second (the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters), but how did I get Jesus in the third line: And God said, Let there be light and there was light. Do I mean that Jesus is the “God” in the line? Nope. Then is he the light? Kind of, but that’s not what I mean.

He’s actually mentioned in the third word of this third line. Jesus is present in the word “said.” How is Jesus present in the word “said”? For the answer to this we must turn the opening of John’s Gospel. We read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

So to compare these two lines side by side,

we have Genesis that opens: In the beginning GOD

And we have John’s Gospel that opens: In the beginning was THE WORD

These openings are exactly the same, because as John says “the Word was God.” So, in the beginning God, and in the Beginning the Word are saying the same exact thing.

The Word was not just God though, according to John, he was also with God. (Now go back to t shirt concept) How can two things be the same thing and, also, somehow separate? Let us continue with John’s Gospel to get a bit more clarification:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men.

In John’s Gospel, we read of the Word of God, who is God and was with God in the beginning, through whom all is created, and who is the light within men. So now let us return to the third line of Genesis to see how Jesus is present in the word “said.” “And God said, let there be light and there was light.” Or to put this another way, using what we’ve just learned, God used his Word to create, and spoke (i.e. said) light into creation. Jesus as God’s Word, “the Word made flesh” as John puts it, who is God and was with God in the beginning, is clearly present here – God said let there be light, he used his Word to create which is the light within men. And if that were not enough to convince you of Jesus’ presence with God at the very beginning as his co-equal, (which is what Trinitarians claim, what the Nicene Creed declares, and what is meant by John’s word when he says “the same was in the beginning with God”) then perhaps when God creates man surely will. After all, when God creates man, he says “Let us create man in our image and likeness.” The use of the plural “us” and “our” is clear Biblical evidence of the co-eternal and co-equal nature of God, which is to say, clear evidence for the Trinity.

So, as we can see, the Old Testament begins with the Trinity. What is more, so does the New Testament. We already saw how John’s Gospel harkens back to Genesis. Well, Matthew’s Gospel, the first book of the New Testament, does this as well. Matthew begins with the genealogy of Jesus. What must be realized here is that Genesis and genealogy mean the same thing – they each represent where one comes from, one’s roots. They share the same root no pun intended) So, much like John, Matthew’s Gospel presents us with another look at Jesus’ genesis as it were. We read:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost…and they shall call his name Emmanuel which being interpreted is, God with us.

Once again, the Trinity is on full display for us. We read that by the power of the Holy Spirit the Son is conceived in Mary, and this Son shall be called “God with us.” The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are united within the holy mother. As a vessel of the Father’s will, the Spirit’s power, and the Son’s earthly life, the Virgin Mary perfectly exemplifies the unity of the Trinity. A unity, that many critics of the Trinity, cannot quite seem to grasp. Perhaps this is why they challenge the concept in the first place – their opposition comes from a simple lack of understanding.

We have seen how two of the four gospels, Matthew and John, demonstrate the Trinity for us, but what about the other two Mark and Luke?

Let us first go to Luke’s Gospel, because its invocation of the Trinity is closely aligned with that of Matthew’s. For he, too, views Mary as a vessel for the Triune God. We read that when the angel came to visit Mary, he said, “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee, therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). The Holy Ghost, that is, the Holy Spirit, shall come upon her, the Highest, which is to say God the father shall overshadow her, and that Holy thing inside of her is the Son of God. As I have already said, Mary is the vessel of the Trinity, but even more interesting is that she is also the Ark of the New Covenant. (Clip)

[Use Ark of Covenant and Mary to explain what the video just said]

To say the Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant and that she is a vessel for the Trinity is tantamount.

So in Luke’s Gospel we see that Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant, and a vessel for the Trinity, much like we saw in Matthew.

And let us now finally turn to Mark’s Gospel. Opponents of Christianity love to use the Gospel of Mark in their arguments for some reason. Perhaps it stems from the misguided belief among Biblical academics and theologians that Mark’s Gospel was written first, and because it was written first, they find it to be the most reliable. To believe that Mark’s Gospel was written first undercuts Christianity in more ways than I care to go into at present. It requires a deep dive into the Synoptic Problem, which is a great debate among scholars, historians and theologians about which of the three synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, or Luke) was written first, and the ramifications that each theory brings with it are monumental and must be defended. Let us just say for now, the order of the Gospels is not germane to our current discussion. I only brought it up to illustrate my understanding of current academic thought on the matter, and why that point of view is completely misguided and is the result of poor scholarship, an anti-Christian worldview, and/or demonic sensibilities.

Back to the main point, Mark’s Gospel, the most reliable Gospel according to skeptical scholars, also begins with the Trinity. The Gospel of Mark opens with the baptism of Jesus. We read, “And it came to pass in those days, that Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee, and was baptized of John in the Jordan. And straightway coming out of the water, he saw the heavens opened and the Spirit like a dove descending upon him: And there came a voice from heaven, saying, Thou art my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mark 1:9-11).

For more on this, let us turn to the late-great pastor and best-selling author Timothy Keller. In his work, Jesus the King (which I highly recommend to anyone looking for an easy-to-read theological treatise of great depth), he perfectly encapsulates how scripture explicitly presents us with the Trinity at Jesus’s baptism much as it did “In the beginning” at the time of creation.

Keller says, “There are three parties active in the creation of the world: God, God’s Spirit, and God’s Word, through which he creates. The same three parties are present at Jesus’s baptism: the Father, who is the voice, the Son who is the Word, and the spirit fluttering like a dove. Mark is deliberately pointing us back to the creation, to the very beginning of history. Just as the original creation of the world was a project of the triune God, Mark says, so the redemption of the world, the rescue and renewal of all things that is beginning now with the arrival of the King, is also a project of the triune God.

That’s what Mark is doing with his picture of Jesus’s baptism. But why is it important that creation and redemption are both products of a Trinity, one God in three persons?

The Christian teaching of the Trinity is mysterious and cognitively challenging. The doctrine of the Trinity is that God is one God, eternally existent in three persons. That’s not tritheisim, with three gods who work in harmony; neither is it unipersonalism, the notion that sometimes God takes one form and sometimes he takes another, but that these are simply different manifestations of one God. Instead, trinitarianism holds that there is one God in three persons who know and love one another. God is not more fundamentally one than he is three, and his not more fundamentally three than he is one (Keller 5-6).

I love how Keller describes the concept of the Trinity as both “mysterious” and “cognitively challenging.” We know that the Bible does not explicitly use the word Trinity. As such, it is up to the reader to intuit the meaning in a more subtextual way. Some may think that this takes away from the Trinity; I think it adds something to it. It’s of a more mystical variety. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the Trinity is present from the very beginning. What is more, it is not only present in the beginning it is also present at the end. Which is to say, at the very end of Matthew’s Gospel, the risen Jesus returns to the apostles and instructs them, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost” (Matthew 28:19). This verse is without a doubt the best defense that Trinitarians have to justify the Trinity scripturally. Well, this and everything else I have already said.

Yet even after all this evidence is presented critics of the Trinity will say things like >>>>>>

You could literally say this about all Biblical analysis. The Bible is the most self-referential text in history – everything relates to everything else. (clip) So, to say that the Trinitarian must hunt the concept “through distant and detached parts of scripture” which is to say “picking bits from the Bible and putting them together” is axiomatic. That is less of a criticism of the Trinity and more of a simple fact of Bible Study. Nonetheless, I kept the hunting of distant and detached parts of scripture, as it were, to a minimum. I used the beginning of Genesis in the Old Testament and the beginning of each Gospel in the New Testament to illustrate just how simple, obvious, and straightforward the scriptural basis for the Trinity actually is. Any misapprehension of the concept is on the reader, not on the Trinitarian who has more than enough scriptural ground on which to stand.

That being said, I think we’re done here.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.