"The mind of man cannot fully understand the mystery of the Trinity. He who has tried to understand the mystery fully will lose his mind; but he who would deny the Trinity will lose his soul."
(From A Handbook of Christian Truth by Harold Lindsell and Charles Woodbridge, pp. 51-52) This line of reasoning is in direct opposition to Christ's statement in Matthew 13:11, where He says that it was given to the disciples—and by extension, to us—to understand the mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven. Paul writes in I Corinthians 2 that we were given the Spirit of God so that we might understand the things of God, and yet some scholars assert that the Trinity is a mystery—to the point that one will go crazy trying to understand it. In reality, their concept of the Godhead does not align with the Scriptures, and so they have to resort to a convoluted argument to try to convince others, who are looking to the Bible, that their explanation is correct. These scholars admit that nobody will ever understand the Trinity. What they are trying to palm off is not truth at all but an error. It is beyond them to comprehend the true nature of God simply because they do not have God's Spirit and do not believe what the Bible says. The nature of God is not hard to understand at all. He gives His children the ability to understand it. The world, however, tends to take simple biblical truth and make it into a complicated and confusing false teaching. Early in the discussion of the Trinity in the book quoted above, the authors admit that the Old Testament has no teaching on the Trinity at all and that the New Testament had no clear statement affirming it. They admit that the doctrine of the Trinity is developed by what they called "Christological speculation." "Speculation" means they are guessing. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt by saying that this central doctrine of the church has been arrived at by deduction does little more than point out that it was arrived at by plain and simple human reason and not from clear scriptures in God's Word. This doctrine did not come into the church easily, but rather through a great deal of dispute. It was first introduced at the Council of Nicea in AD 325, presided over by the Roman Emperor Constantine, but it did not become firmly entrenched within the Catholic Church until the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. This is a striking contrast to the Council that was held in Acts 15, in which it took God only a couple of days to get a true teaching into the true church, as compared to 125 years for the false church to pick up a false teaching. It is apparent how confusing this doctrine was to them. It was not until a majority of the people were finally convinced into believing it that they were able to force it into the doctrines of that false church.
John W. Ritenbaugh
The Nature of God: Elohim
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