Warfield on the Trinity (part 4/4)

By Fred Zaspel–

 

 (for previous posts in this series go here, here, and here)

We have seen Warfield’s stress on the Trinity as specifically revealed theology. This grand truth about God is not discoverable and was never discovered but awaited the fulness of revelation recorded in the New Testament. Here we find God incarnate come from the Father and returning to the Father. And here we find God the Spirit sent from the Father and the Son. And all this while maintaining strict monotheism — one God yet three who are God.

 But Warfield presses further. The Triunity of God is not only special revelation — it is specifically gospel revelation. The Trinity is not disclosed in general revelation, because general revelation has nothing to say about redemption. And while it is true that the revelation of God as Triune could have resulted in further trouble with polytheism on the part of Old Testament Israel, this does not seem to be the reason for God’s delay in that revelation. The reason more likely, Warfield argues, was simply that God’s redemptive program was not yet fulfilled. It was revealed that God was a saving God, that he would come to the rescue of his people. And it was revealed that God’s anointed Servant would come to accomplish this rescue. But it was not clearly revealed that God is one with that Servant. “It required the fulfillment to weave together all the threads of the great revelation into one marvelous portraiture.”

 That is to say, the revelation of the Trinity awaited the revelation of the gospel.

 Moreover, Warfield argues, it was not himself as Triune that God first set out to reveal but the outworking of his promised salvation. It was only in the revelation of his saving purpose that God made himself known as Triune. Thus, Warfield says, the doctrine of the Trinity, important as it is in itself, is “incidental” to the gospel in its revelation. Its revelation became necessary only in the outworking of redemption. The promise and long hope of Israel was that God himself would come, bring deliverance to his people, and dwell with them, and it is in the fulfilling of that promise that he reveals himself and we learn of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

 This, God’s highest self-disclosure, is a gospel revelation, the outworking of his saving purpose. God the Father sends his Son. The Son comes to redeem. And the Spirit comes to apply the merits of his work to the elect. Salvation is a work of the Triune God, and in the fulfilling of this divine purpose of grace, God’s tri-unity is made known.

 Indeed, Warfield points out, apart from this there is no need for such revelation. “The doctrine of the Trinity, in other words, is simply the modification wrought in the conception of the one only God by his complete revelation of Himself in the redemptive process.”

  Pressing one step further, Warfield points out that “the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of redmption, historically, stand or fall together.” It is no surprise to Warfield that Unitarianism would teach a Pelagian anthropology and a Socinian soteriology. In the absence of a doctrine of the Trinity, there is an absence of a doctrine of redemption also. It is in this intimacy of relation between the doctrines of the Trinity and redemption that the ultimate reason lies why the Christian church could not rest until it had attained a definite and well-compacted doctrine of the Trinity. Nothing else could be accepted as an adequate foundation for the experience of the Christian salvation.

 Sabellianism and Arianism, for example, could not satisfy the biblical data regarding God’s nature and relations. But their problem goes further—they could not satisfy the data of the Christian’s consciousness of salvation. Thus, Warfield finds it only natural that as the discussions of the early Christian theologians and apologists shifted “from the cosmological to the soteriological aspect of Christian truth,” the early Logos speculations were supplanted by a clearer doctrine of the Trinity. Borrowing from Augustine’s famous prayer, Warfield states, “Here too the heart of man was restless until it found its rest in the Triune God, the author, procurer and applier of salvation.”

 For the Christian, a Trinitarian concept of God is a necessary one if this concept of God is to correspond to our own experience of salvation. This, at bottom, is what gives the doctrine its significance. For Calvin and all the Reformers, as for every Christian since the very beginning of Christianity, “the nerve of the doctrine was its implication in the experience of salvation, in the Christian’s certainty that the Redeeming Christ and Sanctifying Spirit are each Divine Persons.”  And again, “Every redeemed soul, knowing himself reconciled with God through His Son, and quickened into newness of life by His Spirit, turns alike to Father, Son and Spirit with the exclamation of reverent gratitude upon his lips, ‘My Lord and my God!’”

 (For more on this, see The Theology of B.B. Warfield: A Systematic Summary.)

Fred Zaspel holds a Ph.D. in historical theology from the Free University of Amsterdam. He is currently a pastor at the Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia, PA. He is also the interim Senior Pastor at New Hyde Park Baptist Church on New York’s Long Island, and Adjunct Professor of Systematic Theology at Calvary Baptist Seminary in Lansdale, PA. He is also the author of The Continuing Relevance of Divine Law (1991); The Theology of Fulfillment (1994); Jews, Gentiles, & the Goal of Redemptive History (1996); New Covenant Theology with Tom Wells (New Covenant Media); The Theology of B.B. Warfield: A Systematic Summary (Crossway, 2010). Fred is married to Kimberly and they have two grown children, Gina and Jim.