It has been an interesting journey lately to consider what I’ve been taught over the years about the truine nature of God, and how that has intersected with what I’ve read recently. Coming from a Church of Christ background, the doctrine of the Trinity did not appear on my radar until I was about 20, at almost the end of my college career (and at a Christian university). You see, in the churches of Christ, there is officially “no creed but the Bible,” and the Bible does not mention the Trinity as such. I was not shielded from all the relevant texts of scripture, most importantly the statements Jesus makes about himself and his relation to the Father. Nor was I kept in the dark about the biblical theology of the Spirit, though His working was confined mostly to the canon of scripture these days.

You’d think I’d be cynical toward this “no creed but the Bible” thing, as it’s patently false, for there are many unspoken creeds (such as “no creed but the Bible,” which the Bible never endorses), and at any rate is impossible in practice. But I’m not - I’m quite happy to have remained ignorant, for the first two decades of my life, about the theological formulation known as the doctrine of the Trinity. Of course I thought of God as Father, Spirit, and Son, three in one, diversity in unity. But the modernist construct that now bothers me so much never entered the picture throughout my youth.

Grenz and Franke provide fuel for thought:

The renewed emphasis on the narratives of the Christian faith as the narratives of God’s history has reinvigorated trinitarian theology by asserting that its claims are not grounded in abstract philosophical speculation but in the intellectual challenges about God and God’s relationship to creation raised by those narratives….the early Christians faced the challenge of coming to grips with the theological situation spawned by their confession of the lordship of Jesus, their experiene of the Holy Spirit, and their commitment to the one God of the Old Testament. (Beyond Foundationalism, p176-177)

I find it intensely interesting that it was experience, rather than abstract thought, that resulted in the emergence of the early church’s understanding of the triune nature of God. Only later, in the third and fourth centuries, did the problematic Greek categories for viewing God come into play. This unarticulated yet thoroughly biblical (and, I believe, accurate) concept of God’s triune nature is what I have inherited from the Church of Christ, one thing that holds true to the Restoration ideal of recapturing first-century Christianty.