Untying the Trinity: Understanding God's Tri-Unity

Untying The Trinity: Understanding and Worshiping our Triune God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit 

First Baptist Church, McLoud OK 

Sunday, November 12, 2017

I had the privilege of preaching at First Baptist Church in McLoud, Oklahoma this past Sunday - filling the pulpit for my good friend Pastor Matt Halsted, who had returned from the Greer-Heard Point-Counterpoint Forum in New Orleans VERY late the night before (2AM).  I am grateful for the opportunity to preach.  What follows is a relatively-accurate transcript of my sermon from Sunday.  

The heart of my message was: a) Christian Trinitarian belief is unique among the world's religions; b) God's Triunity is required by the biblical evidence; c) Christians cannot willingly embrace logically incoherent (impossible) beliefs; d) the Trinity is not logically incoherent; e) while we cannot fully comprehend God's Tri-unity, we can begin to rationally grasp it.  I hope it is helpful!

Throughout human history, virtually every living human being has believed in God.  Even in our current highly skeptical and secular age, around 80% of Westerners (Europeans, Americans, Canadians) believe in some divine Being.  If you survey the world at large, and especially if you investigate human history, you find that an overwhelming majority of human beings affirm the existence of God. 

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God - Part I of III

Keller, Timothy.  The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.  New York: Dutton, 2008. 293 pp.

I am, in many ways, an apologetics junkie.  I love the various aspects, topics, issues, styles, methods, approaches, insights, and personalities of Christian apologetics.  Like anyone, I have my favorite apologists.  The Apostle Paul is certainly one; St. Augustine another.  Thomas Aquinas is high up on my list, as is Thomas Sherlocke.  In the 20^th century, James Warwick Montgomery, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel, Gary Habermas, and William Lane Craig have been apologetic heroes.  But my absolute favorite 20^th-century apologist is indubitably C. S. Lewis – not because I agree with him about everything, but because he is a masterful communicator, and because his basic approaches to apologetic questions is both sound and winsome.  Lewis was a genius at grasping complex theological truths and communicating them in terms that everyone could comprehend.  Lewis was a master wordsmith who took pride in the craft of creating beautiful prose, even in argumentative form.  Lewis also understood the mind and heart of the non-Christian, and engaged them in their terms on their turf – very effectively at that.

In all of those ways, I tend to hold up Timothy Keller as a 21^st-century C. S. Lewis.  Like Lewis, Keller is a broad reader, with deep understanding of the theological truths of the faith as well as the mind of the non-Christian.  Like Lewis, Keller loves learning and language, and crafts lovely literature.  In this next series of blog posts, I intend to interact with two of Keller’s most prominent apologetic works: his 2008 The Reason for God, and his 2016 Making Sense of God.  I will have three blog posts on each book: this post covers the first half of the first half (yes, the repetition was deliberate) of The Reason for God.  

Imaginative Apologetics V - Faith & Reason Reconsidered

Apologetics, Imagination, and Imaginative Apologetics

In my past 4 posts, I have been setting the framework for the core material in Imaginative Apologetics, an excellent compilation of essays edited by Andrew Davison arguing for the centrality of the faculty of imagination in the apologetic enterprise.  I have laid out the historical and contemporary scene of Christian apologetics, and considered Vanhoozer’s and Smith’s contributions to an understanding of imagination.  It is time now for the meat: interaction with the individual articles in Imaginative Apologetics.  This material is derived from my article in Trinity Journal.[1]

Engaging Imaginative Apologetics

Andrew Davison compiles ten articles (plus a robust foreword and introduction) to promote a return to apologetic imagination. The contributors are broadly-catholic British scholars (the one exception is Craig Hovey, from Ashland University, Ohio), although each author admirably avoids sectarianism and denominational polemics. As with all edited collections, the chapters vary in perspective and strength. In this case, the authors also differ in their understanding and exposition of the two key terms of the book’s title: imagination and apologetics.

Davison’s introduction lays out the overarching vision and purpose of the work. The ten individual chapters are broken into four broad sections: (1) Faith and Reason Reconsidered; (2) Christian Apologetics and the Human Imagination; (3) Being Imaginative about Christian Apologetics; and (4) Situating Christian Apologetics.  I will post blog essays engaging with the articles in (respectively) each of the 4 major sections of the anthology, usually offering concise summaries of the content, strengths, and weaknesses of each chapter. A few chapters will receive more in-depth treatment than others, mostly marking areas of my own particular interest and expertise.