The Immutable God: God is a Trinity in both the Old and New Testaments
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Many of Christianity’s staunchest opponents point to the doctrine of the Trinity as not only irrational, but a wholly novel Christian invention that even the Apostles didn’t hold.
Predictably, I disagree with this position. Instead, in both the Old and New Testaments, God is the same eternal, triune creator whose character is perfectly holy, righteous, just, merciful, gracious and above all, loving. In both testaments, he acts to judge, bless and redeem all of creation.
The classical formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity states there is one God who exists as three distinct persons who are fully God, both severally and collectively, because the Bible says there is one God and describes three different persons as being the One God.
While the Bible does not use the word “Trinity,” the Apostles identified three distinct persons as God. They understood Jesus clearly when he talked about God the Father. They understood Jesus as a person who was God. Thomas, one of the 12, exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28) when he saw the risen Jesus. Jesus praised him for this declaration instead of rebuking him. After Ananias and Saphira lied about the amount of money they had given to the church, Peter pleaded with Ananias, “Why has Satan filled your heart to lie to the Holy Spirit ... You have not lied to men but to God” (Acts 5:3-4). The Holy Spirit is a person who can be lied to, and he is God.
The Apostles seem to have gotten this idea from Jesus himself. Jesus affirmed the radical Jewish monotheism of his day. When asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus quoted the Shema, a portion of Deuteronomy that formed the twice-daily Jewish prayer. “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).
But Jesus also recognized divine attributes of the Holy Spirit, whom he called the Helper. He claimed blasphemy against the Holy Spirit was worse than blasphemy against God the Father (Mark 3:28-29) and that through believers, the Holy Spirit would accomplish greater works than Jesus himself (John 14:12). He also talked about the Holy Spirit as a distinct person, talking about him with a personal pronoun and attributing to him personal work like teaching believers (John 14:26).
Jesus also understood himself to be God. When questioned about his authority to speak about the life of Abraham, Jesus said, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58). While the Western reader would simply identify a grammatical error, the original Jewish audience understood that “ego eimi” (Greek for “I am”) was also the Greek translation for Yahweh, God’s name, which they had been reading in their Greek Old Testaments their whole lives. The Western reader might say, “Hmmm, weird that Jesus can’t use proper grammar,” but the original Jewish audience understood that Jesus was applying the divine name to himself and making a pun with it on top of that. They responded by trying to stone him.
Jesus also called himself the “Son of Man.” While we think about this as a human title, the Jews of Jesus’ day understood it as a divine title. The critical turning point in Jesus’ trial was when he claimed to be the “Son of Man.” Upon hearing the diving title, the Jewish leaders said, “What further testimony do we need? For we have heard (his blasphemy) ourselves from His own mouth” (Luke 22:71).
I’ve talked a lot about the New Testament formulation, but the Jewish leaders trying Jesus didn’t have the New Testament. How could they have understood that Jesus was calling himself God? The ancient Jews themselves had a basic Trinitarian view of God, though the word Trinity is younger than their views. Recent scholarship in ancient Jewish theology is beginning to recognize that the earliest Christians — Jews themselves — did not make up the idea from thin air, but that Trinitarian thinking was already familiar to them. In Daniel 7:13-14, Daniel describes a vision in which the Ancient of Days (God the Father) gives the dominion and power of the whole world to “One like the Son of Man.” The angel who explains the vision to Daniel later in the chapter says, “His kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey Him” (Daniel 7:27). That word “serve” is “pelach” in Hebrew. “Pelach” is also translated, “worship.” All dominions shall worship and obey this Son of Man. There was also the Angel of the Lord, most prominently throughout the book of Judges, who appeared and accepted human worship and sacrifices.
Also in Judges, the Spirit of the Lord is what conferred authority and power upon Israel’s Judges. He also came upon Israel’s kings to empower them. Isaiah promised that the Spirit of the Lord would rest upon the Messiah (Isaiah 11:2). And in Ezekiel 11:5, the Spirit of the Lord speaks directly to Ezekiel, demonstrating the quality of being an individual person. The prophet Micah gave the Spirit of the Lord credit as the source of God’s activity among the people of Israel and empowering the prophets Israel rejected.
So in the Old Testament, too, we see three distinct people exercising God’s attributes alongside the firm insistence that there is only one God just like we see in the New Testament. The only logical conclusion is that God is the same in the Old and New Testaments. He is even a Trinity in both the Old and New Testaments.