What About The Trinity?, Pt. 3 (Articles of Faith Series)

This is a multi-part episode. If you've not listened to the previous parts, please go back and do so. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. But yeah, I really wanted to just address this YouTuber as well. You know, the argument that he makes, at first glance, it appears to be a really sophisticated argument against the Trinity. Because of the LDS perspective that all things are made out of this really fine matter called intelligence, and so he can attack the Trinity without it dismantling his own theology.

But then when you dig into it a little bit deeper, it is definitely a double-edged sword that he is playing with. For one thing, and I've told him this before, you do realize that the Holy Ghost in Mormon theology is a spirit as well, and so I guess the Holy Ghost doesn't exist. But then he comes back saying, well, the Holy Ghost is still matter. Spirits are matter in Mormonism, just a refined matter. And what that does is it really destroys Mormon theology, because what they teach is that we all came to Earth in order to obtain bodies. And if we already had physical forms of some kind, then we already had bodies and there was no need for us to come here in the first place. Because basically we've just come to receive another form of body, and I guess it's not even as nice as the one that we had before.

It's kind of a downgrade. Now we can get sick and feel pain and all those other kinds of things. But yeah, it just really does not make sense with Mormon theology, so it's just one of those things that I think it's just for the shock value, that's really all it's good for. But then once you dig just a couple of centimeters into it, you realize that it's not really an effective argument at all. There's going to be some other questions I've seen recently. Well, I will say this.

The guy that made those arguments is dead. Because like I said, if we already had a body that was pure and refined, and then in order to progress we had to take on this corrupted body of flesh and then have it redeemed and restored and glorified, it seems like a rollercoaster. It's not really a progression, like a line of progression like you would expect. So it just seems strange that in order to gain a greater spiritual state or greater spiritual status, we have to take on a corrupted body on top of our perfected material body or material spirit. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me. And it gets even worse than that, Matthew, because the theology is that children – so our spirits are adults in Mormonism, but your body can be a child. And so if you're a child and you die, you go back to your refined spirit body, but you're also an adult. But then when the resurrection happens, you go back to being a kid again. And so, yeah, it really is a rollercoaster, and it's not a progression at all.

It's a bunch of ups and downs. Well, I was thinking, too, a thought just came to mind when you read John 17, one of the passages that Latter-day Saints love to share with to prove that Jesus is not God or that Jesus and God are separate. It says, And this is life eternal, that they know you, the only true God in Jesus Christ whom you have sent. But if you continue, He says, I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave Me to do. And now you, Father, glorify Me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed. And this is clear to me that in this passage, Jesus is saying that before He took on human flesh, He had the same glory as God, as God the Father.

He was in the presence of the Father, and that's what John 1 also says. But there are various places, like Bruce R. McConkie especially, that says that Jesus, despite being, quote-unquote, the God of the Old Testament, as Latter-day Saints call Him, He had not reached a perfection in terms of what God the Father had. He still had to come to earth and earn His salvation and obey God and progress eternally. So Jesus still had to go on this line of eternal progression. Whereas Christians see that Christ has eternally been God. He didn't need to take on flesh to become something greater.

He's already God. He took on flesh to save us, to save His people. It was a covenant that God had created beforehand to send the Son to come to perform this redemptive act. But it's not as if Jesus had to do it in obedience to earn some kind of greater exaltation or something like that. So that's another fundamental problem with their understanding of God.

Good stuff. Kind of connected to that thought, something I was just thinking, and it kind of ties into some of the stuff we were discussing earlier today via chat. So the Mormon Godhead, right, in contrast to the Trinity, Christians will say that the Trinity is, you know, the God is triune, right? Holy one God, three persons, fully united in essence. And Mormons will say, no, God's unity comes in in their desires, their will.

What's the term Mormons use? My gosh, it's been too long. One in purpose. One in purpose. There we go.

Wow. I've been out too long, boys. I was about to say, like, were you really LDS if you couldn't remember that? Okay, people have been asking me that for a long time. But yeah, so one in purpose, right? But if you think about that, isn't that being one in purpose voluntary, right? So if Jesus in the Incarnation had decided not to obey, not to drink the bitter cup, then what? Or if one of the three decided not to be one in purpose now, then what, right? Whereas on the Christian view of God, God's unity is essence, is in essence, and I'm trying to put into words where I'm going with this. So God is holy, and God is just, and everything that God does is holy. And so there's not that risk that I see on the Mormon Godhead view of one member of the Godhead deciding to just not go with the plan. Does any of that make sense? You're basically saying that there is the potential for there to be disunity within the LDS view of the Godhead.

There seems to be. Well, especially when you tie that with their view of free will, where I mean, I remember distinctly when I was heading out of the church, you know, mentally and spiritually, you know, I was learning things about the Bible and about God, where, and this was one thing that pushed me out even further was I was in an institute class, and we were talking about God and, and one of the elder missionaries who teaches a class that the Bible study or the scripture study class, he said, God does not touch free will, he cannot touch free will. And that just really stuck out in my mind because I'd been reading about Pharaoh, I'd been reading about when Joseph's brother sold him into Egypt, he said that their evil was, was, you know, what they did was for evil, but what God did or meant for it was for good. So God had a purpose in that happening. And Psalm 115, where it says that whatever is in heaven and on earth, you know, God, whatever God wants is what happens in the heavens and in the earth.

He has complete sovereignty. So when you, when you view that view of free will and LDS theology as being like the ultimate thing that even God must bow to this free will. Yeah, I don't know how you can counter the idea that one of the members of the Godhead could rebel. And I've even heard Latter-day Saints say that even in heaven, we will have free will. So it is even possible in heaven to sin. And that's a really scary thought because where is our assurance of salvation?

Where is our, where is our, how can we know that we'll be in heaven with God forever if we can still sin? That's a, that's a terrifying thought to me. Yeah. And something else that just jumped into my mind, just listening to you guys talk too, you know, there's that moment in, in Gethsemane where Jesus says, if it'd be possible, take this cup from me. And it seems like according to the LDS view, like for a second there, they wouldn't have been one in purpose.

Yeah. And that's, that's, I was actually thinking of that passage when they say, well, if Jesus is God, why did he say to submit to God's will, you know, why did he pray for God to strengthen him? Well, going back to Christ's incarnation, he was, he was, he willingly took upon himself the limitations of humanity, which meant he got hungry. He got thirsty. I honestly think that he was just wracked with this, this, this knowledge that he was going to take the sins of the world upon him the following day. And like that was just such a huge burden on his shoulders and brought him to such a depth of, of just agony that he sweat.

And what it means by, you know, sweating drops of blood, it's possible that he could have had so much stress that there was sweat mixed in with blood. But yeah, there's, there's, it wasn't saying that Jesus was going against the will of the father or could have the possibility of going against the will of the father. Okay. So I'm going to answer this question first. The question is what helped you to embrace the Trinity? So a lot of it for me was initially I was fighting against the Trinity a lot. And so I was learning about all the different passages that Christians like to use to support the Trinity.

And I was looking at those and trying to figure out ways around them. And one of the things I realized was that the Trinity was a very strong, a very strong doctrine, that it was superior to modalism and the other positions that people take. I didn't think that it was as strong as the Godhead, but I did notice that a lot of the verses that Mormons take literally to support the Godhead can also be understood metaphorically and they work really well for the Trinity or vice versa. And I kind of thought that that the first vision just really sealed the deal. But even without the first vision, I believed that my understanding of the LDS Godhead was founded very strongly in the Bible, that it was a better position than the Trinity and that my understanding was biblical. Now, I came to doubt that Joseph Smith was a prophet, and I realized that the church wasn't true. And I was very surprised to find that once I didn't find Joseph Smith credible and the first vision was no longer that cherry on top, the whole position crumbled immediately. And I thought it was the cherry on top, but it was actually the whole foundation was that first vision. And the minute that that first vision crumbled, I was like, okay, well, the Trinity is really all that's left.

There's no other position that comes close to making sense. And so I was kind of stuck immediately with the Trinity has to be true. And yet it's just such a stumbling block for me that I've just been dragged kicking and screaming to the point of finally saying, you know what, the Trinity actually does make sense and it is biblical.

So it's just been a real long process point by point. But yeah, just going through all my old arguments, I've been able to see how weak they actually are. And it didn't just happen tonight, Paul and Matthew. But Michael, the Bible doesn't contain the word Trinity. Don't you see? Yeah, that's a really good point. No, but that's basically how I've come to accept the Trinity.

I mean, the Bible is very clear that there's only one God, but that the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are also all God and that they exist simultaneously. So that's my answer. Are you sticking to it? I am sticking to it. You better. Are we going to come find you in Dallas?

No, no, no, no, no. That's not the way we roll. Oh, we don't roll that way. I guess I better go tell my posse that we're not going to travel down to Texas for the night. Just remember, if you do come for me, I live in Dallas, apparently.

Knock on some poor guy's door. I have a brother in Dallas. I have a sister and brother-in-law in Dallas. I mean, come on. There's a TV show called Dallas?

Oh, that's a good show. I'm entitled to make that mistake, right? Besides, it's like after midnight.

I thought that only millennials were allowed to entitlement. Oh, it kind of hurt. All right. I'll get going. So you don't take too long. Let's see.

All right. So what helped me to accept the Trinity? So for me, I still struggle with the view of the Trinity because as a Latter-day Saint, we're taught that the Trinity is not in the Bible. We're taught that it was probably an invention by Constantine at the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.

It's a tradition of men, et cetera, et cetera. Jesus never taught the Trinity. And really, it's not taught succinctly in one single passage of Scripture. You can't point to, for example, like somewhere in Romans where it gives an extensive lengthy treatise on the Trinity. So we have to admit that. But what we have to be willing to examine is, okay, if it's not explicitly given in Scripture in one single passage, can we arrive at it systematically?

And just watching a lot of videos from people from like R.C. Sproul and James White, just looking at how they teach the Trinity and how they were so bold in saying the Trinity is biblical. And at first I just fought against it. I said, no, it's not biblical.

It's not in there. But I was willing to learn and God had started softening my heart. And one of the very first Christian book that I ever read was The Forgotten Trinity by James White.

And I had started reading that while I was still attending my LDS ward. And so he starts off, the very first line in that book, it says, I love the Trinity. And that was really just a profound statement for him to say that. You know, most people say, I love Jesus or I love God, but he says, I love the Trinity.

And so that kind of like really hooked me. And reading through it, he does a really great job of just showing the various aspects of the Trinity bit by bit. You have to start off with a very fundamental doctrine of monotheism that, as Michael said, that there is only one God. There's no God before the God of creation. We see that in Deuteronomy 4, 35, 39, Deuteronomy 6, verse 4. We see that in Isaiah 43, 10, 44, 6 through 8, 45, 5 through 6. We see that also in the New Testament with 1 Corinthians 8, which I would love to go over that passage maybe in a future episode, but that's one that Mormons love to use to try to disprove the Trinity because it says that, you know, there's one God, the Father and one Lord Jesus Christ. But if you go backwards to verse 4 in that chapter, it says we know that there is no God but one. So why would Paul contradict himself by saying there's only one God in verse 4 and then say, though there are gods many and lords many, to us there is one God the Father and one Lord Jesus Christ. We see in the Old Testament that God refers to himself both as God and Lord. So in verse 5, when it says that the Father is God and Christ is Lord, it's not saying they're separate or that Christ isn't God. It's actually saying that Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, is both the Father and the Son. And so when we come to this understanding that there is only one God, then that is like the foundation of the doctrine of the Trinity. We have to start there.

If you don't start there, then you're going to just get messed up no matter where you go. And the passage that really helped me to understand that was 43 verse 10, Isaiah 43 verse 10, which says, You are my witnesses declares the Lord and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am He. Before me no God was formed, nor shall there be any after me. And that verse just like really stuck in my mind when I read that because, as Latter-day Saint, I believed that I was not going to exceed God, but I believed Doctrine and Covenants 132, which says that you shall be gods. I believed that I was going to attain a similar kind of status as the Father.

I thought I was going to become like Him. But that verse in Isaiah 43 just completely destroyed that idea. It says that there's no God before Yahweh. There's no God after Him.

There's no being even close to Him, and His status is God. And so with that knowledge, we have to understand, OK, so any time it references God, it's referencing this one God, Yahweh. But we also see in Scripture that, as Michael explained, the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. In Acts chapter 5, it says the Holy Spirit is God. For the Father being God, we have many verses like John chapter 1.

We also have John 17. And Christ is God, we have that in many places, John 1, John 17, 2 Peter 1, 1 is a great one, Colossians 1 through 2. So we just have so many passages that attest that there's only one God named Yahweh, but the Father is Yahweh, the Son is Yahweh, and the Holy Spirit is Yahweh. So all three persons are Yahweh, but that doesn't mean that we confound or confuse the persons. We always want to distinguish the persons, but we also want to say that they're co-equal, and they have their consubstantial. You won't find that in Scripture, but what that's saying is that the stuff, the stuff that makes each person God, each person of the Trinity has that stuff, that essence, that being. So we use these extra biblical terms like Trinity, being, essence, consubstantial to explain ideas that are taught in Scripture, but are not explicitly given from Scripture, but you can derive them. So all of these things, Isaiah 43, 10, the forgotten Trinity that I've been reading, also just listening to R.C.

Sproul, James White, Vody Baucom, all these Reform teachers, all of that just kind of like coalesced in my mind, and it just logically just made sense. That is why we call them nuclear. Boom! Laying the theological bomb down. Boom!

Mic drop. So what is it that helped me to embrace the Trinity? So each of you touched on the idea that as a Latter-day Saint, the Trinity is kind of like verboten.

It's like, it's anathema. And I remember even going back to when I was a kid in primary, what is presented to you as the Trinity is actually not the Trinity. We joked about that's modalism, Patrick, but that is what, modalism is what Mormons critique and think they're critiquing the Trinity, even up to Jeffrey R. Holland in conference.

And he's no dodo, from what we know. But modalism is what they critique. And I think when I realized that, it shifted things for me. But even going back to my time in the LDS church, I think I told you guys, my uncle was a born-again Christian, and my dad had converted from Lutheranism to the Latter-day Saint faith. And my uncle sent my dad a wall hanging, a plaque that had the first several, first five or so verses of John chapter one on it.

And my dad hung that in our house, and I read it all the time. And I remember reading, you know, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. And I remember just trying in my mind to get my head around that as a Latter-day Saint, like how can we know the Word is referring to Jesus, pre-existence, pre-earth life. So how could Jesus be God before he had gone through the progression that you were talking about earlier, Matthew? And just rolled that passage over and over and over in my head and realized over time that, you know, there's something about that passage that doesn't fit with Mormon teachings.

And then the question became, so where does that passage fit without having to make it say something that it does not. So then as I made my transition out of the Latter-day Saint faith, I was very much like Michael was. You know, it was like, oh, you know, yeah, I'm a Christian, don't know about that Trinity thing though. And I remember, you know, going to start, I think I've described that I started to go to a church that historically has connections to the American Restoration Movement. And although the founder, Alexander Campbell, some might argue he wasn't a full Trinitarian and there have been other leaders within that movement throughout its history that have rejected the Trinity. But, you know, one of the statements that they have is, you know, Bible names for Bible things, you know, you kind of touched on that Matthew with use of extra biblical terms and other of the statements that they use is where, you know, where the Bible speaks, we speak where the Bible is silent. We are silent and no creed but Christ, right, which kind of belies the fact that historically this movement has been a little at times anti-creedle, not in a holy negative sense, but in the sense of, you know, the Bible should be our source of doctrine, not creeds. But that's, you know, that's from a historical history of religions perspective, that's where Mormonism kind of gets that as well as kind of coming out of that same swimming in that same water, so to speak in America. So I remember hearing that no creed but Christ statement and thinking, sweet, I don't have to accept Nicaea if I'm going to going to attend this church, you know. And, you know, when I started to go to a seminary for a biblical studies degree that the seminary also has its history in the restoration movement. I remember sitting in church history class and the professor said, hey, let's recite the Council of Nicaea, the profession of faith from the 318 fathers from the Council of Nicaea.

And I was like, oh, this will be interesting to see how this goes over among this group because, you know, kind of a history of anti-creedlism here. And, you know, we recited it and he was like, see, that wasn't so bad. And I was like, wait, what?

What do you mean that wasn't so bad? And then I got into my theology, my intro to theology course and started reading the professor's book, Bible Doctrine for Today. And I was thinking, yeah, you know, Bibles are source of truth. Bible doesn't have the Trinity in it. And then I got to his chapter on God and he has a whole section on there about God being Trinity. And I was like, wait, what?

What is this? You know, have I been sold a bill of goods? But as I read through his chapter and saw the biblical evidence that he was laying out for God as Trinity, which Matthew very skillfully covered already, so I'm not going to go into it. But all of the inhibitions that I had about the Trinity fell away because I could see that it was a biblical doctrine. Are there extra biblical terms that are used to describe biblical truths?

Yes, there are. In the descriptions of the doctrine of the Trinity, yes, extra biblical terms are used. But as Michael clearly stated, the Bible is clear that there is one God and that there are three persons who are God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. And those teachings in Scripture are undeniable. And so you reach a point where you have to ask the question, OK, so if not the Trinity, then what?

If you are a Bible believing person. And so really it was the one passage in John 1 that just wouldn't let go of my mind when I was LDS. And then it was a deeper dive into the biblical support and evidence for the doctrine that really helped me to embrace the Trinity. If you think about all the data that we talked about, the only way to systematically put it together is the Trinity, because if you say that there's only one God, but there's only one person, you get modalism. So that's the position, like you said, that LDS try to refute. They say, well, was Jesus praying to himself in the garden? Did the Father become the Son?

And then that's obviously false. We believe that there's three persons because Scripture teaches it. And then you go to the other extreme and you're left with tritheism. You're left with three separate gods. The Father is God, the Son is a separate God, and then the Holy Spirit is an entirely third God. And that's also wrong because there's only one God.

So the only way to really reconcile everything without contradicting yourself or just making nonsense of Scripture is the Trinity. Yeah, and it was an interesting suggestion that you made earlier, Matthew, that we read a creed. And when you made that suggestion, I put myself on mute and got into my file drawer and pulled out my file with all my papers from that Survey of Church History course, because I remembered one of the things that I did when I was in that course and kind of really starting into my seminary studies was to print out First Council of Nicaea, First Council of Constantinople, all of the ecumenical councils of the church, and to read through them. I remember sitting at the—I was at the gym because I was taking my daughters there.

They were in a gymnastics course. And so I was sitting in the food court at the gym, and I had in front of me these printouts of the ecumenical councils and my theology book and just going back and forth, like looking at the passages and the data in the Bible that support the Trinity and comparing it with the professions of faith. And it was just a very eye-opening experience to realize that what people generally call the philosophies of man and that kind of thing with regard to the creeds was really them wrestling with the data from Scripture and, as you said, presenting it in a systematic way. And if people—I know that some people leaving Mormonism or the LDS Church have a problem with that term Trinity. There's kind of that negative connotation to it. If they don't like that word, they can call God God or the Godhead, as long as we understand that we're not referring to the LDS Godhead, but the word Godhead can be found in Scripture.

It's not the word that we're defending. It's the doctrine. It's what it teaches.

It's what it points to. And you can go on Google, and like you said, the creeds are awesome. I thought about reading the Athanasian Creed, but I was like, man, that's kind of a long one, so maybe I'll pick the apostles. But I love the Athanasian Creed because it's just so detailed, and it's just—if you go through, it really isn't that complicated. And there's websites—you can just Google Nicene Creed with scriptural proofs or Athanasian Creed with scriptural proofs, and it'll show that these things are not new. These things, like you said, have been believed since the beginning.

And you can look at—I should have looked at this before. I have the Apostolic Fathers, and I should have gone through and shown passages where it talks about—there's often references made to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. So while they didn't have this completely thought-out, systematic, codified view of the Trinity until the Council of Nicaea, and even then, there were still Christological issues that they dealt with. Does Christ have two natures? Does he have one nature? Does he have two wills?

Does he have one will? These were things that were worked out in time, but they always went back to Scripture to find the answer. But even since the very beginning, since the first century, we see extra-biblical authors writing in very Trinitarian kind of terminology, or in the way they spoke, it was very Trinitarian, even if they didn't, in their minds, have everything figured out like we do today. One of the things I really like, too, just being on this side of the divide, is how much on the same page Christianity is when it comes to the Trinity. Because when I was LDS, we would talk about our position, and everybody would have a little bit of a different position. Some people would say that they were monotheists.

Some would say they were henotheists. I would say that I was a tritheist. And some people would look down on me for saying that, because they'd say, well, we don't worship Jesus and the Holy Ghost. But I would just challenge any Latter-day Saints listening to this to just go look at the Trinity with an open mind. I think you'll find that it is much stronger than you think it is.

And it's a stumbling block, and I know that it's real easy to look at it and think that there's weaknesses to it, and just kind of want to write it off. And I just kind of think of Pharaoh chasing the Israelites into the split ocean, thinking that that was a fight that he could win, and it wasn't a fight that he could win. And I think that just really is a good picture for me, too, of how my fight with the Trinity has gone, which is not well.

I definitely have just come to see that it is a true biblical doctrine, and I encourage you to search, ponder, and pray, and I'm sure that is what you will discover as well. All right. Amen. We thank you for tuning in to this episode of the Outer Brightness podcast. We'd like to hear from you. You're invited to visit the Outer Brightness podcast page on Facebook. Feel free to send a message there with comments or suggestions by clicking send a message at the top of the page, and we would appreciate it if you give the page a like. We also have an Outer Brightness podcast group on Facebook, where you can join and interact with us and others as we discuss the podcast, past episodes, suggestions for future episodes, etc. We would love to hear from you and hope to speak with you soon. Stay bright, Fireflies. Music for the Outer Brightness podcast is graciously provided by the talented Brianna Flournoy and by Adams Road.

Learn more about Adams Road at www.adamsroadministry.com. In the past, I believed in my own righteousness and hoped that I was worthy of the blood that Jesus shed. But now I know that all the works I did were meaningless compared with Jesus' lonely death on the cross where he bore sin. And now I have the righteousness that is by faith in Jesus' name. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus, for who's sake I have lost all things because of the cross.

Music for the Outer Brightness podcast is graciously provided by Adams Road. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus, for who's sake I have lost all things because of the cross. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus, for who's sake I have lost all things because of the cross. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus, for who's sake I have lost all things because of the cross. I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus, for who's sake I have lost all things because of the cross. But when I gave Jesus, it was worth the cost. All my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross.

Some demand a sign and some seek to realize, but we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling blood for the Son, the foolishness of God, but wiser than the wisest man, the power of the cross. May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord through which the world has been crucified to me. And I tell the world so I take up my cross and follow where Jesus leads. Oh, I consider everything a loss compared to knowing Jesus, for who's sake I have lost all things because of the cross. But when I gave Jesus, it was worth the cost. All my righteousness I count as a loss because of the cross. Because of the cross. Because of the cross.