THOMAS: You know, you open the first chapter of Genesis and you're confronted with
Elohim, which is a plural. You're confronted with the idea of an act that is thought out,
that is put into action. You have references in Genesis 1 to the hovering of the Spirit. However,
there is not a single Jew in the Old Testament, not even Ezekiel or Daniel or Isaiah or David who
effectively expounded a doctrine of three persons and one God. So, whilst the evidence was conducive
to trinitarianism, (of course, God who essentially exists us triune would reveal Himself
in ways that are conducive to trinitarianism) none of them expounded a doctrine of the Trinity until
the New Testament. And so, what was latent in the Old, as Augustine said, is patent in the New.
So, there are adumbrations of trinitarianism in the Old Testament. There is no self-disclosure
of God in the Old Testament that would be contrary to trinitarianism,
but it remains the fact that trinitarianism is something that is revealed in the New Testament.
Now, what is absolutely astonishing to me, and it's one of the reasons why as a very
young believer I came to believe in the deity of Jesus, that He was more than just a man,
was that all of these Jews that you meet, like John or Matthew or Luke or Paul or Peter,
who are exclusively monotheistic, have no trouble at all in accepting the divine nature of Jesus.
There is no debate in the New Testament against trinitarianism. There is no debate in the New
Testament against the deity of Christ. There is massive debate against justification by faith,
but there was an immediate acceptance by New Testament first-generation Christian Jews
of trinitarianism. And that says to me that they immediately could see and identify that the Jesus
that the disciples had spent three years with was none other than the Son of God.
GODFREY: That was really good. Could one also add that, you know, some people have said, well,
there is not a lot of teaching on eternal life in the Old Testament, and it might be a kind
of parallel issue with trinitarianism that in the historical context of the Old Testament
where almost everyone was polytheistic there was a great need to establish monotheism amongst the
Jews and as the Egyptians, at least some of them, lived only for the eternal life they would have
in their tombs, there was a desire to stress the importance of this life lived before God.
So, historical context may have had something to do with God's timing in revealing these truths.
I don't know if that's useful.
PARSONS: I think Derek's answer is so helpful because I think too often we try to
squeeze our theology in what we understand from the whole of Scripture into a particular verse or
particular passage in the Old Testament, try to make it say something that it doesn't. We
need to allow the Bible, the whole of Scripture to speak for itself. And it also emphasizes the
need for the new covenant, the need for the New Testament. So, it's a very helpful answer because,
you know, the Old Testament gives us all the ingredients, all the paradigms.
They're all there. All the foundations are there. As you said, there is nothing
contrary to it whatsoever. But we don't want to make the mistake or the error that we
often find typically, typically I find among pastors and maybe some commentators,
where they try to fit the Trinity into a particular verse or passage,
and we just don't need to do that. We need to better exegetes, better in our hermeneutics.