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055 | The Trinity, Modalism, and ESS
416 Plays4 years ago
In this episode we look at the importance of the Trinity to Christianity and why this doctrine is fundamental to our understanding of the gospel.
We touch on some church history (the Nicene creed and early church fathers) then look at two errant teachings of the Trinity: modalism and eternal subordination of the Son.
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Transcript
Introduction to Verity Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Verity. I'm your host, Felicia Masonheimer, an author, speaker, and Bible teacher. This podcast will help you embrace the history and depth of the Christian faith, ask questions, seek answers, and devote yourself to becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. You don't have to settle for watered-down Christian teachings, and if you're ready to go deeper, God is just as ready to take you there. This is Verity, where every woman is a theologian.
Season Wrap-up and Resources
00:00:30
Speaker
Well, we are getting close to wrapping up this season on theology. And you guys, I know we have not even dipped our toes into the full gamut of theological topics. We've only done, what, 12 episodes this season? And just, you know, skimmed the surface on everything there is to talk about within the realm of Christian theology.
00:00:53
Speaker
I just wanted to focus on the top questions so I could have these as stable resources for you going forward. And so everything in this season is something we can revisit. These will be transcribed on the blog and linked there for those who have questions further on. And all of my articles that I use in the research process, or at least the top articles I think will be the most helpful, are linked in these posts. And so this last full focused episode
00:01:22
Speaker
of this season is on the Trinity, and that's what we're talking
Doctrine of the Trinity
00:01:26
Speaker
about today. We'll have one more episode that's a quick Q&A theology episode before we close out the season. And just as an aside, you guys, I wish you could see the sunset from my office window right now.
00:01:42
Speaker
It is so gorgeous and it's over the cornfield behind our house with all of the round hay bales. The swallows are out and they're flying around in the sunset. It is so picturesque. Wish you could be here. Okay, let's talk about the Trinity.
00:02:00
Speaker
This is a topic that is so important for Christians to understand, and if you think, I've never thought about the Trinity, I didn't think it mattered that much, that's okay. A lot of Christians tend to think that it's kind of a given. It's something that we take for granted, not realizing that it actually is a fundamental doctrine to Christianity. And as we'll see in a moment, reading from Michael Reeves' book, Delighting in the Trinity,
00:02:26
Speaker
It is a fundamental to everything else, the foundation of everything else we believe about Christianity.
Challenges to the Trinity
00:02:33
Speaker
To be a Christian is to believe in the Triune God, and we're going to look today at some of the fundamentals of God as Triune, and then we're going to look at a couple errant teachings regarding the Trinity. As usual, this is a high-level overview. I'm going to have articles linked in the show notes for further research and study, but this will be a good jumping-off point for you.
00:02:56
Speaker
Okay, so let's start with a quote from Michael Reaves just about the Trinity in general because he uses some scripture that I would refer to and yet he says it better than I ever could. So this is what he says on page 37 of Delighting in the Trinity. John wrote his gospel and he tells us, so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. John 2031.
00:03:24
Speaker
But even that most basic call to believe in the Son of God is an invitation to a Trinitarian faith. Jesus is described as the Son of God. God is His Father, and He is the Christ, the One anointed with the Spirit. When you start with the Jesus of the Bible, it is a Triune God that you get. The Trinity, then, is not the product of abstract speculation. When you proclaim Jesus, the Spirit anointed Son of the Father, you proclaim the Triune God. Okay, I want to pause there.
00:03:54
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What's important to know is
Nature of God as Love in the Trinity
00:03:56
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that Christianity defended the Trinity more than any other doctrine in the first 300 years of the church. It was the doctrine that was most debated, most attacked by both the Greeks and the Jews. The Greek philosophers
00:04:15
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had issue with Jesus coming in a physical body. And we're not going to talk too much about the Aryan controversy or Gnosticism today, but we did touch on Gnosticism in the Body and Sex episode of the Women's Issue series, and we've talked about it in a few other episodes. Gnosticism says that essentially
00:04:34
Speaker
soul or spirit good, body bad. The material is insignificant to God. And then we need to just forget the material and embrace the spiritual. But that's not the Judeo-Christian ethic. The Judeo-Christian ethic is that the body is good and that it is a reflection of what's going on in the spirit. The body and soul are united.
00:04:55
Speaker
And so Jesus coming in a physical body was very consistent with the Judaic ethic of the human body. And then it fulfilled that in the Christian ethic. Jesus moved Judaism to its fulfillment as the Christian understanding. So Jesus coming in this physical body is very important. And so as we move into the second half of this Michael Reeves quote, he's going to mention a guy named Arius.
00:05:22
Speaker
who started the Arian controversy in those first 300 years of the church, and it was his controversy, his arguments against the Trinity, that resulted ultimately in the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed affirmed a Triune God, and it built on the Apostle's Creed, which was established in the first century.
00:05:44
Speaker
So, all of this to say, in those first centuries of the Church, the Trinitarian doctrine was very, very important. So, let's continue with this Reeve's quote. And what Arius demonstrated was the reverse. When you don't start with Jesus the Son, you end up with a different God who is not the Father. For the Son is the one way to know God truly, only He reveals the Father.
00:06:08
Speaker
John Calvin once wrote that if we try to think about God without thinking about the Father, Son, and Spirit, then only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains to the exclusion of the true God. He was quite right, for there is a vast world of difference between the Triune God revealed by Jesus and all other gods.
00:06:26
Speaker
This God simply will not fit into the mold of any other, for the Trinity is not some inessential add-on to God, some optional software that can be plugged into Him.
Foundation of Christianity: The Trinity
00:06:36
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At bottom, this God is different, for at bottom, He is not Creator, Ruler, or even God in some abstract sense. He is the Father, loving and giving life to His Son in fellowship of the Spirit, a God who is in Himself love, who before all things could never be anything but love. Having such a God happily changes everything.
00:06:57
Speaker
So Reeves really sets us up for the magnitude and the importance of the doctrine of the Trinity, the essentialness of this. And he also touches on a point about the Trinity that we often forget, that the nature of God as love hinges on the fact that he's loving. And he actually goes into this on page 41 where he talks about
00:07:21
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how God's outward nature, His communion with the Son and with the Spirit, yet His oneness and essence proves that He is love. You cannot love
00:07:35
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If you do not ever know relationship or the only relationship that exists is that to make people serve you as we see in the pattern of the Greek gods who are completely dependent upon the worship of their people. They needed the worship of people in order to achieve glory. They were not self fulfilled or self
00:07:57
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content in themselves. So they really weren't all powerful gods because they needed people in order to achieve their ends. And so they created this relationship between gods and humans in the Greek pantheon where they were really interdependent, not actually gods. And so this distinction is important and Reeves gets into it here in page 41.
00:08:24
Speaker
He says, Everything changes when it comes to the Father, Son, and Spirit. Here is a God who is not essentially lonely, but who has been loving for all eternity as the Father has loved the Son and the Spirit. Loving others is not a strange or novel thing for this God at all. It is the root of who He is. Think of God the Father. He is, by His very nature, life-giving. He is a Father.
00:08:46
Speaker
One has to wonder if a barren god who is not a father is capable of giving life and so birthing a creation. But one can have no such doubts about the father. For eternity he has been fruitful, potent, vitalizing. For such a god, and for only such a god, it seems very natural and entirely unsurprising that he should bring about more life and so create.
00:09:08
Speaker
And he goes on to talk more about the relationship of the Son and the Spirit with the Father, but that this image of Christ is the outgoing movement of love. God is constantly outgoing in His love, and that's why we can trust everything else about Him. It is the very nature of who He is. And when you strip away the Trinity, which first of all is taught
00:09:34
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especially in the New Testament. It's essential to the New Testament. But throughout
Modalism Explained
00:09:39
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the Bible, if you strip that away, you really end up with a hollow Christianity. You really don't have Christianity anymore without the Trinity. And so it's an extremely important doctrine. We just tend to ignore it because we feel like it's so basic while it's also so complicated. The last quote I want to read from Reeves is about God's sharing of that love.
00:10:04
Speaker
He says, The Triune God can and does create. Grace, then, is not merely His kindness to those who have sinned. The very creation is a work of grace flowing from God's love. Love is not a mere reaction with this God. It's not a reaction at all. God's love is creative. Love comes first.
00:10:26
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So God, in His creating of humanity, in His creating of this beautiful world, this sunset that I'm looking at right now, this is the outgoing nature of His love. His love came first. It preceded everything we know and see. And without the concept of the Trinity, that outgoing, fulfilled nature of love, you can't have a loving God.
00:10:55
Speaker
You can't even have Christ. You can't have the Spirit empowering believers to walk with God and have relationship with Him. It all falls apart without the doctrine of the Trinity. And so we have to understand this, or at least begin the journey of understanding this concept in Scripture and how it was taught, or we're in danger of undermining our faith.
00:11:19
Speaker
So let's look at a couple of the ideas that have arisen about the Trinity over the years and we're just going to look at a couple because we don't have time to get into the super nitty-gritty, but obviously too we've mentioned that denied the Trinity were Gnosticism and Arianism. They're kind of similar. They're worth a study and anytime you read about the early church fathers you're going to read about these two heresies because the early church fathers were mostly dealing
00:11:47
Speaker
with those two heresies, and ultimately in affirming the Nicene Creed in the 300s, that's when they kind of settled that issue. The heresies continued to exist, but the church had pretty much settled that, you know, we reject these things, they are not true. Jesus was not a created being. He was one with God. He was the Son of God, equal with God of the same essence. Okay, so what's the first
00:12:18
Speaker
errant teaching. And errant is spelled E-R-R-A-N-T. It comes from the Latin to err or erro, which means to err, to go into error. And that's what we're looking at. Teachings that are an error on the Trinity.
Modalism in Oneness Pentecostalism
00:12:31
Speaker
And the first is modalism, which can also be called modalistic monarchianism. Modalism is a little easier. So this idea is a heretical view that denies the individual persons of the Trinity.
00:12:48
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So it sees the terms her father, son, and spirit as simply modes of existence or manifestations of one God, according to Stephen Nichols. And so I want to actually, I told you I was done quoting Reeves, but we're actually going to look back at another quote where he talks about modalism.
00:13:05
Speaker
He says, throwing the Father, Son, and Spirit into a blender like this is politely called modalism by theologians. I prefer to call it moodalism. Moodalists think that God is one person who has three different moods or modes. One popular moodalist idea is that God used to feel fatherly in the Old Testament, tried adopting a more sunny disposition for 30-some years, and has since decided to become more spiritual. You understand the attraction, of course. It keeps things from becoming too complicated.
00:13:36
Speaker
The trouble is, once you puree the persons, it becomes impossible to taste their gospel. If the Son is just a mood God slips in and out of, then for us to be adopted as children in the Son is no great thing. When God moves on to another mood, there will be no Son for us to be in. And even when God is in His Son mood, there will be no Father for us to be children of. And if the Spirit is just another of His states of mind, I can only wonder what will happen when God feels like moving on.
00:14:02
Speaker
The Moodleist is left with no assurance and a deeply confused God. Somehow, the Son must be His own Father, send Himself, love Himself, pray to Himself, seat Himself at His own right hand, and so on. It all begins to look, dare I say, rather silly. And he goes on to explain the difference between the Trinity and the Greek Pantheon and other religions and their views of God, but essentially he's pointed out some of the major issues with modalism.
00:14:28
Speaker
And this idea that God is one person with different modes or moods that he shifts between them like a shape shifter. Now there were two different ways of seeing modalism. There's dynamic, which said that Jesus was not God, but appeared to be. And then a modalistic view, you know, this is dynamic modalism and then just essentially modalism that said that Jesus was God, but only as a manifestation of him. So in essence, saying what Reeves just said.
00:14:59
Speaker
no separate personal existence of his own for Jesus. He was God, just God manifested in a specific way. Is your mind spinning yet? You're not alone. So this idea, this modalistic idea really started with a guy named Noetus at the end of the first century, but it was argued against by the church fathers, Tertullian in origin, even before the Nicene Council and the Nicene Creed. Where do we see modalism now?
00:15:29
Speaker
Well, one place that we do see it, unfortunately, is in oneness Pentecostalism. So the oneness churches generally make no distinction between the persons of the Trinity, and this teaching sprung up pretty early on in Pentecostalism. And one of the sad things about the history of the Pentecostal church is that, in one hand,
00:15:52
Speaker
There's the good that it has done and the growth that it has experienced. It has had an enormous boom. It's as big or bigger than the Catholic Church in the entire world. So when we talk about Christians globally, the Pentecostal Church is one of the largest representations of the body of Christ on the earth.
00:16:13
Speaker
Sadly, the sad part of this is where oneness Pentecostalism has emerged in the Charismatic Church, we have errant teachings on the Trinity. And that's very unfortunate because this was hammered out in the first 300 years of the Church.
Shop Launch Announcement
00:16:30
Speaker
But because the weakness of the Charismatic Church is a lack of theological grounding, a lack of historical understanding, a lot of times they don't realize
00:16:41
Speaker
that they are in error. And so I grew up in the Charismatic tradition. My grandparents were Assemblies of God. I'm still very open to the Charismatic Church and love what they are doing in many ways, but my encouragement to believers who are in the Charismatic tradition is to seek out theological grounding, press into the teachings of your church and check them against scripture, check them against what the church has historically taught up until
00:17:11
Speaker
the turn of the 20th century, which is when the Pentecostal church began. So the Pentecostal church is very young and that doesn't mean that it's always wrong, but it does mean that you need to make sure that the teaching you are under aligns with the Orthodox teaching of the church before it. And so oneness Pentecostalism strays into modalism and does not uphold what Christianity has traditionally taught about the Trinity.
00:17:41
Speaker
Heads up you guys, the next every woman a theologian shop is coming to you September 2nd through 5th, 2021. Our shop operates on a pre-order basis, which means you place your order and four to five weeks after that we ship it out.
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Speaker
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00:18:15
Speaker
In September and October, as Halloween approaches, there can be a lot of focus on death and darkness. And so we want to shed some light on that season and talk about the power of the gospel over death. We have some brand new shirt designs with this theme, some posters, and an ebook teaching you how to think critically through Halloween and what you want to do as a family or as an individual for the holiday as a Christian.
00:18:42
Speaker
I'm excited for this new launch. I hope you are too.
Eternal Subordination of the Son (ESS)
00:18:45
Speaker
Stay tuned to my email list as well as to our social media in order to pay attention to the launch and place your order when it opens September 2nd. So modalism is the first errant teaching that we wanted to look at. The second one is eternal subordination of the sun or ESS.
00:19:06
Speaker
So what's interesting here is that this is almost on the opposite end of the spectrum. This is like another extreme. It creates such a distinct hierarchy in the Trinity that we end up with a Jesus who no longer appears to actually be God. But what's concerning about ESS
00:19:31
Speaker
is that it really arose as a way to defend gender distinctions in marriage and church.
00:19:41
Speaker
And there are some big names that have gone to bat for ESS. This blew up about five or six years ago on a couple of different theological blogs. One of them was Amy Bird's housewife theologian blog. She kind of led the charge against ESS pointing out the error and the threat that it posed to the Trinity.
00:20:04
Speaker
And so I want to read 10 different issues that arose from the concept of eternal subordination of the sun, because if you're wondering, okay, what does this look like? What does it mean, eternal submission or subordination of the sun? This will help explain kind of what is at stake with this theological viewpoint. And it will also show you why it resulted in so much chaos, because it touches on so many different
00:20:34
Speaker
aspects of Christian theology. So these are 10 issues by Andrew Wilson that arise out of the ESS argument. So the first issue is, the first question you have to ask is, is the eternal submission or subordination of the Son taught in Scripture? We know that Jesus submitted to the Father while he was in ministry, but ESS teaches that he has always been in submission to the Father.
00:21:04
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specifically as a template for male and female roles. So not just in marriage, but the idea that is being taught in ESS is that females inherently are to submit and be in submission to males because of the example of Jesus eternally being in submission to the father.
00:21:29
Speaker
So this is no longer just in context of a Christian marriage. This is in context of the entire world. And that creates some difficulties, as you might imagine, and changes a lot both in the Trinity and in the family and in the church. So is this taught in Scripture is the first question that we have to ask.
00:21:51
Speaker
The second question is, is ESS a new idea? Was it articulated by the church or is it completely new? Is it a new defense for hyper-complementarianism?
Critique of ESS Doctrine
00:22:05
Speaker
And if you don't know what that is, you can go back and listen to the marriage and church episodes. Or is it something that's always been here? The third question is, is ESS a heretical concept? Is it a heresy?
00:22:19
Speaker
Is this reinventing God, as some people have said? Or is it something that can be held as an Orthodox Christian? Fourth, is there a separation of the divine will? So is it possible that the will of the Father and the will of the Son are different? Because if they're different, that's the only way that submission could then make sense. So
00:22:45
Speaker
Jesus in the incarnation, for instance, when he's praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, he says, Father, take this cup from me, but not my will, but thine be done. That's an example of him submitting to the Father's will, even while having a human will as the incarnate son. But was Jesus doing that before his incarnation? That's the question that has to be asked. Does ESS imply that Christ only had one will? That's the fifth question.
00:23:13
Speaker
So does he have one will? Does he have two? Sixth, does ESS involve denying the eternal generation of the son? Okay, now we're getting into some complicated stuff, but essentially what we're seeing here is that Jesus was eternally generated by God right alongside God. So he was not a separate creation of God like Arianism taught.
00:23:43
Speaker
And so some people say that this should be a part of the question. I don't think this as much relates to ESS. The seventh question is, if a person denies that Jesus has eternally been generated alongside God, should they resign from their posts of authority? Should they be in pastoral positions? The eighth question is, is the language of eternal subordination helpful?
00:24:09
Speaker
or is it problematic? The ninth question is, should Trinitarian relations be used in the debate of roles of men and women? Okay, so this question I want to I want to key up here for a second. If you've ever seen the image of the umbrellas as an example of what roles in the family and marriage are supposed to look like, that is essentially what's being referred to here. So this picture is like this big umbrella
00:24:39
Speaker
and it'll be it'll say like God okay and then under that umbrella it'll say husband and father and then under him there's another umbrella and it says wife and mother and then under her is a little umbrella that says children and with this umbrella system you're seeing basically a tier of covering and a tier of authority and this is based off of this ESS idea this idea that
00:25:07
Speaker
you know, Christ submitted to the Lord and the Holy Spirit basically was dispensed by Christ. And therefore, using that analogy for the Trinity, we apply that to the family. And that is exactly how it's supposed to function with this umbrella hierarchy. And so the question that's being asked here is, should the relationship in the Trinity be used in the debate about roles of men and women?
00:25:32
Speaker
And so in 1 Corinthians 11, there's some talk about this. Should that be the entire framework through which we view gender? And the 10th question that he asks is, is the analogy between eternal Trinitarian relations and sex roles unhelpful to women?
00:25:52
Speaker
So is this helpful to us to use this analogy when it has resulted in such hyper-complementarian stances?
00:26:03
Speaker
Okay, so those are the questions that he suggested thinking about. Now, by now your head might be spinning. My point here is not to answer all these questions, but my point is to show you that ESS touches on so many different areas. It touches on salvation theology. It touches on
00:26:23
Speaker
the ontological arguments about God, it touches on gender roles, it touches on the nature of Jesus, it covers so many different things, it touches so many different things that it really is a far-reaching doctrine that in some churches it's taught without you ever really even knowing it.
00:26:42
Speaker
It can just pass for, you know, a common little passing remark in a sermon, but then it translates to what's being taught about church structure and marriage structure and when you're allowed to report abuse and when you're allowed to talk about women ministering and things like that. Okay, so Wendy Alsup makes a good comment here. She says,
00:27:05
Speaker
For some people, the debate of ESS is primarily academic and is best left to those who've spent years reading Trinitarian theology. But for others, the debate has very practical implications.
00:27:18
Speaker
Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem in particular have cultivated the doctrine of ESS in direct response to modern evangelical feminism and use it to bolster their very real world views on gender, particularly submission of women. This teaching then filters down through books, conferences, and pulpits and has significant influence on how men and women are taught to relate to each other in their churches, marriages, and society at large. And that's really the crux of where ESS has influenced the world.
ESS Impact on Church and Gender Roles
00:27:46
Speaker
It became popular
00:27:48
Speaker
as a way to essentially confront secular feminism and in so doing it went too far and continues to go too far in some churches today. And so there are some fantastic articles on Amy Bird's website, I believe I have linked it in the show notes on the blog, that will give you some resources in the debate that went on over ESS especially as regards gender roles.
00:28:14
Speaker
Now, before we wrap up this whole section, though, I do want to read some of what was being said by Wayne Grudem himself and by the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood that show that we were pulling from this ESS concept in order to support a hyper-complementarian view of women.
00:28:36
Speaker
And I say hyper because it's not your average complementarianism. Like myself, like most complementarians, this is an extreme version of it. So this is Grudem's own words, and he says, In those relationships, Scripture speaks of the Father having a unique role of initiating, planning, directing, sending, and commanding. It speaks of the Son as having a role of joyfully agreeing with, supporting, carrying out, and obeying the Father. And it speaks of the Spirit as acting in joyful obedience to the leadership of both Father and Son.
00:29:07
Speaker
Now consider, this is from Wendy, now consider the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and how it applies this to women. This is from their summary of the Complementarian position. Male and female were created by God as equal in dignity, value, essence, and human nature, but also distinct in role whereby the male was given the responsibility of loving authority over the female, and the female was to offer willing, glad-hearted, and submissive assistance to the man.
00:29:32
Speaker
Genesis 1, 26-27 makes clear that male and female are equally created as God's image, and so are by God's created design equally and fully human. But as Genesis 2 bears out, as seen in its own context and understood by Paul in 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Timothy 2, their humanity would find expression differently in a relationship of complementarity with the female functioning in a submissive role under the leadership and authority of the male.
00:29:58
Speaker
Okay, so the important note here is that it's saying that the female functions under the leadership and authority of the male, not the wife under the husband. So a complimentarian, as we talk about in the marriage and church episodes, believe that male and female are functionally different. They are not the same. They aren't interchangeable in every single way. However,
00:30:29
Speaker
they are equal in dignity and in value, which is said here. But the difference between your, I would say, biblical complementarian versus a hyper-complementarian is that the hyper-complementarian view
00:30:46
Speaker
takes it further. It takes it beyond Christian marriage. It takes it beyond even the function of the church where women may minister freely using their gifts as we see in 1 Corinthians where they are speaking and prophesying and praying and teaching and leading alongside the men even under the eldership and pastorship of male leaders. Where a hyper-complementarian goes is that it's
00:31:10
Speaker
all females submit to all males and that is the entire created order for the world. This is why you'll see people say that women shouldn't be in political office or you know women shouldn't be in the military and I'm not even talking about combat or front lines, I'm just talking about working in the military. So there's a lot of implications to this idea, it's very complicated, we're only touching on it a little bit
00:31:37
Speaker
But the real issue, the real issue here, isn't where you land on a complementarianism or egalitarianism. It's when you change a doctrine of the Trinity to achieve your desired end in gender roles. And what's crazy is that Grudem and Ware are exegetical teachers. They love the Word of God. We know this. But I think when we see a pressing issue in society, it can make us so concerned
00:32:07
Speaker
that we sometimes will even compromise our very own standards for dividing the word rightly in order to defend something we love. And in this case, they love Christian marriage, but I think that through this concern over
00:32:28
Speaker
to be this extreme interpretation of Complementarianism that actually did a bunch of gymnastics with the doctrine of the Trinity in order to prove a point. And that is what so many godly sound teachers like Amy Bird, like Carl Truman, like Michael Bird and Scott McKnight have done is they have shown that this doctrine of ESS
00:32:56
Speaker
causes more problems than it solves. So I'm going to conclude this section with a quote by Carl Truman where he says, because we live at a time when good teaching on the differences between men and women is needed more than at any previous moment in history, it is sad that the desire to maintain a biblical view of complementarity has come to be synonymous with advocating not only a very 1950s American view of masculinity, but now also this submission-driven teaching on the Trinity.
00:33:23
Speaker
In the long run, such a tight pairing of Complementarianism with this theology can only do one of two things. It will either turn Complementarian Evangelicals into Arians or Tritheists, or it will cause Orthodox believers to abandon Complementarianism. The link is being pushed so firmly that it does not seem to offer any other choice.
Summary and Importance of the Trinity
00:33:45
Speaker
And so, Carl Truman wrote this, I believe, six years ago, maybe more, and I would argue that his words are almost prophetic because it is what we are seeing. When a doctrine is twisted to advance our ends, or when we start to get too concerned about defending Christianity against the attacks of secular culture, and we stop seeing that the Trinity defends itself,
00:34:12
Speaker
and that true believers who know and walk with the Lord will seek His face in their marriages and in their churches, and they will seek to be in unity with men and women in their church. When we forget that, we can become so, so quick to come up with our own solutions that we actually do a disservice to the Word of God.
00:34:34
Speaker
And so we have people today who I think are abandoning doctrines of the church, partially because of this errant and false teaching that has permeated the church over the years. So, wow, did you ever think we would touch on all this with the Trinity? Probably not, but as you can see, the concept and doctrine of the Trinity
00:34:56
Speaker
impacts so many other areas. But ultimately, it focuses on the love of God and His outgoing nature, His communal nature. It focuses on how there is submission in the Trinity, but how there is also complete unity, respect, honor,
00:35:16
Speaker
a model for how men and women in the family and church are to operate, looking at that unified loving relationship, not focusing on a hierarchy. So through the Trinity, we learn what it means to honor God, to love each other, and to pour ourselves out into the world just as God poured himself out for us.
00:35:40
Speaker
Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Verity. You can connect with fellow listeners by following me on Instagram at Felicia Masonheimer or on our Facebook page by the same name. Also visit FeliciaMasonheimer.com for links to each episode and the show notes.