Source: The Trinity — Evidence and Issues, Robert Morey, Chapter 2, pp. 21-37
While the battle between Christianity and humanism, theism and atheism, faith and unbelief remains the same, the battlefield has shifted from the doctrinal to the pre-doctrinal, the theological to the philosophical, the theoretical to the pre-theoretical, the precepts to the presuppositions, the biblical to the pre-biblical, and from exegesis to hermeneutics.
Most modern humanistic theologians are no longer interested in the careful exegesis of Scripture for several reasons. First, they assume that it is impossible to get back to the original text of Scripture. In other words, no one can really know for sure what Jesus or the apostles actually did or said. They do not trust the Gospels or the Epistles because they assume that the New Testament is fraudulent in content as well as in authorship.
Second, they also assume that if, by some kind of miracle, we could get back to the original text, it would not do us any good because it is impossible to know what the authors of the Bible meant by their words.
Subjectivistic hermeneutics such as deconstructionism and contextualism, in which the interpreter is encourage to "enter into" and "interact with" the meaning of the text, actually destroys any hope of discovering what the author was saying. In effect, they have reduced theology to psychology and anthropology. "What does the text say to me in the matrix of my own personal experience?" is the only politically correct hermeneutic today.
Humanistic theologians are no longer interested in debating whose revelation is "true" because they assume that there are no "true" revelations; that all religions are subjective ad relative; and that an objective, propositional, special revelation from a personal, infinite, triune God is simply not possible. The Bible has been reduced to the level of the Muslim Qur’an and the Hindu Vedas. Pay your nickel and take your choice because none of them are really "true" in the objective sense. If a religion makes you happy, it is subjectively true for you. But never forget that one man's truth is another man's lie.
Given the humanistic context of modern theology, it is no surprise to find that it has already been decided, on pre-biblical grounds, that the doctrine of the Trinity cannot be objectively "true." Thus the Trinity is summarily dismissed by shouting it down with cries of "illogical," "incoherent" or "out of the question." This cavalier approach to theology is the product of an a priori commitment to a relativistic epistemology in which man is the measure of all things including God.
It is this humanistic assumption which has led to the death of meaning not only in philosophy, but also in theology. In the history of Western philosophy, the meaning of things was first thought to exist above in the world of ideas. The meaning was then brought down to earth and mixed with the object itself. Thus, you had to grasp the essence of an object from within that object.
Then it was assumed that meaning was in the object and in the human mind at the same time. When the two came into contact with each other, knowledge happened. But it was not long before it was suggested that meaning was entirely in the mind of the beholder and not in the ideas above or in the objects below.
Once meaning was reduced to man's mind, humanistic philosophers came to the conclusion that all is subjective and relative to the beholder. There is no truth to discover, no meaning to find, no morality to follow and no justice to establish. Western philosophy has gone from Plato to Aristotle to Leibniz to Kant to Sartre and ended in the abyss of meaninglessness.
Since humanism starts with man as the Origin, it has never been able to break free from the shackles of its own inherent relativism. This is why the denial of meaning, truth, morals, justice, beauty, dignity and significance has become the new orthodoxy and any attempt to sustain any absolutes in any field is vigorously attacked as "incoherent" or "reactionary."
This is also why liberal theology has collapsed within itself. In the nineteenth century, the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man were viewed as absolute truths. But liberalism today does not claim to hold to any absolutes. The feminist's vicious attack on the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, has destroyed the old liberal ideals as well as the basis of their social gospel.
Modern theology does not really have a clue as to who or what God is. Bereft of any special revelation from their god or gods or goddesses, they have become quite schizophrenic. They pride themselves on being "non-judgmental" and claim that they do not believe in putting down any theological system as "false" because they do not believe that any system is "true." Yet, while they say that they do not judge other belief systems, they turn right around and attack the Bible and those who believe in it! This blatant hypocrisy needs to be pointed out to them.
If the feminists, the witches, the Marxists, the gays, etc., all can define God anyway they want, why is it that evangelicals are condemned for believing in the triune God of the Bible? If the feminists can pray to a mother god, why are evangelicals condemned for praying to God the Father?
Any concept of God is allowable in liberal circles today except for biblical concepts such as the Trinity and the deity of Christ. This has resulted in utter chaos where feminist, Marxist, homosexual, existential, occultic, liberationist, pagan, and process theologians will not be bound by any absolutes, not even by "liberal" ones.
Once the a priori humanistic doctrine of human autonomy is granted, then it does not really matter what anyone thinks or says about God because all of theology has been reduced to mere god-talk. If someone wants to define "God" as a lesbian, black, Marxist, so be it. Theological fads come and go so fast in liberal circles today that it has become a veritable "god of the month" club.
The last bastion where objective and absolute meaning can be found is in Evangelical theology. Evangelicals believe that it is possible to find the objective "true" meaning of a given text of scripture by following the rules of grammar and syntax combined with the literary context and style of the passage and the historical, cultural context of the author. There will be only one true interpretation of a text which faithfully expounds what the author was saying. All other interpretations are false.
Evangelical beliefs are based upon the a priori assumption that the personal, infinite, triune God revealed in the Bible actually exists and that He has spoken to man in human language. As the late Francis Schaeffer put it, "He is there and is not silent."
We begin our hermeneutic with "the God of the Bible" because God and the Bible cannot be separated from each other. The only way we can explain God is through the Bible and the only way we can explain the Bible is through God. Anyone who thinks that he can begin with either God or the Bible conceived apart from each other has not thought very deeply on the subject.
This hermeneutical circle is not unique to Christian theology. The humanist begins with "man and the world" as his hermeneutical circle. The only way he can explain man is through the world and the only way he can explain the world is through man. Can humanists explain the world without recourse to their own perception of and experience in the world? No.
Hermeneutical objectivity flows out of, and is based upon, God's objectivity as the transcendent Origin of meaning. God is infinite and absolute and, thus, not relative in any sense. His knowledge, power and presence are omni-attributes because they do not have any beginning or end.
Because God is outside of, transcendent above, sovereign over, and immanent within the space/time universe, He cannot be contextualized within a human culture even when He acts within that culture as a true historical agent. In other words, God maintains His His transcendence even when He is immanent. He is the sovereign Lord of history as well as the sovereign Lord in history.
When God used human words to reveal His Mind and Will to man, He was not limiting Himself because He was using those words which He had sovereignly put into place for that purpose. Nothing was left up to chance. God sovereignly directed all the details of the lives of the authors of Scripture "from [the] womb" (Gal 1:15). Their concepts and constructs, personality and peculiarities, vocabulary and education, cultural norms and customs—all these things were pre-arranged and ordered by the God who acts and speaks. He prepared the culture of the prophet as well as the prophet of the culture to be the perfect vehicle for His revelation.
It was not by chance that the concept of "covenant" had already developed in the culture surrounding Abraham before he was born. God sovereignly guided that culture to develop the concept of the covenant because He was going to reveal His covenant to Abraham. The sovereignty of God guarantees that the recipients of revelation are always properly prepared to understand what is going to be revealed to them.
God's revelation was not limited to what Lady Luck or chance had created in Abraham's culture. There is no chance or luck. The Lord was not surprised to find the concept of covenant and exclaim, "Oh, this is a neat idea! I think I will use it." It was the other way around. The culture was guided by divine Providence to develop the concept of covenant because that is what God wanted to reveal to Abraham.
Did the birth of Christ happen on schedule according to a divine master plan? Was it by chance that Christ came to this world when the universal language was Greek? Or, that the New Testament was written in Greek instead of Hebrew? Or, that Rome had built roads throughout the empire which made the spread of the Gospel possible? Or, that the Pax Romana made traveling safe? Or, are all these things just a "lucky" coincidence?
According to Galatians 4:4, Christ came to this world "in the fullness of time" when everything including the culture with its language and customs had been prepared by Providence to be the best vehicle for the proclamation and spread of the gospel.
Evangelical theologians are not upset when a liberal theologian points out that some of the concepts found in the gospel can be found in pre-Christian culture. This is what evangelicals expect to find because God always prepares the ground before sowing the seed. He will have put in place the language, customs, religious doctrines, and philosophic terminology and concepts which He wants to use to reveal His mind to man.
It is apparent by now that there is a philosophic framework of a priori ideas that form the context of hermeneutics within the framework of certain preconceived ideas and assumptions. This is why a humanist and a Christian will often have totally different interpretations of the same text. There is more to hermeneutics than parsing verbs.
The following table contrasts the hermeneutical framework of the humanist with the hermeneutical framework of the Christian. The reader will soon discover on which side of the ledger he falls.
| The Humanist A Priori | The Christian A Priori |
|---|---|
| Man starting from and by himself without any outside information can understand himself and the world around him. | God has revealed to us in the Bible the information we need to understand ourselves and the world around us. |
| Man is the measure of all things, including God. | God is the measure of all things, including man. |
| Man created god in his own image. | God created man in His own image. |
| If God actually exists, he, she, or it is unknowable. | We can know God because He has revealed Himself. |
| Theology is the study of man's feelings, hopes, wishes, and fears. | Theology is the study of God's self-disclosure in Scripture. |
| All concepts of God are relative, subjective, cultural, and existential. No concept is true or false. | To think of God in any other way than how He has revealed Himself in Scripture is idolatry. |
| The Word "God" can mean whatever you need to find self-fulfillment. | There is but one true God. All other gods are false. |
| All religions are "true" to the degree they satisfy the psychological and social needs of those who believe in them. | Christianity is the one true religion. All other religions are false and idolatrous. |
| Everything is relative. There are no absolutes. Man is accountable only to himself. | God has revealed in Scripture the absolutes by which He will judge us one day. |
| History is an evolutionary chance-driven process which does not follow any predetermined plan or path. | All things happen according to the will and predetermined plan of God. Things do not happen by chance. |
| History has no meaning other than what man projects upon it. | Everything has meaning and significance because it is a part of God's plan of the ages. |
| All beliefs arise from the surrounding culture which is the product of meaningless chance. Thus all beliefs are meaningless. | Christianity is not derived from culture, but from Christ. Its source is special revelation and, thus, it has meaning. |
| The Bible is guilty until proven innocent. | The Bible is innocent until proven guilty. |
| The Bible is not inspired anymore than the Qur'an or the Vedas. | The Bible is the inspired Word of God and all other books, such as the Qur'an, are false in content and satanic in origin. |
| We must get "behind" the text of the Bible to the psychological makeup and experience of those who wrote it. | We must not venture beyond the text into wild speculations as to who was feeling what. To psychologize the Bible is to corrupt it. |
| We must project our own subjective feelings into the text to understand what the text is saying to use today. | The meaning of the text lies in the text itself and not in the interpreter. |
| The Bible is fraudulent in its claim of authorship. Moses did not write the Pentateuch, Isaiah did not write Isaiah, Daniel did not write Daniel, etc. | The Bible was written by the authors assigned to each book. Moses wrote the Pentateuch, Isaiah wrote Isaiah, etc. |
| The Gospels were written by early Christians as a witness to what the word "Jesus" meant to them in the context of their lives. | The Gospels were written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. |
| The Gospels do not tell us anything about the historical Jesus. | The Gospels tell us who the historical Jesus was and what He said and did. |
| The Gospels are fictional in nature and contain myths and legends created by the early Christian community as a faith response to their existential encounter with the Other. We need to "get behind" those myths to get to the historical Jesus. | The Gospels give us a true historical account of the birth, life, ministry, teaching, miracles, death, burial and resurrection of Christ. There are no legends or myths in the Gospels. |
| All attempts to "get behind" the Gospels to the real Jesus have failed. No one knows anything about the historical Jesus. | The historical Jesus is revealed in the Gospels. We can know who Jesus is only by the Bible. |
| If Jesus existed, He did not think of Himself as the Messiah or as God and He did not claim such to His disciples. | Jesus knew that He was both God and Christ. He taught His disciples that He was such. |
| Jesus was "divine" only in the same sense in which we are all divine. | Jesus Christ was the only incarnation of deity. |
| Jesus was mistaken on many things. For example, He thought that the end of the world would happen in his day. | As incarnate deity, Jesus was not mistaken on anything. He did not teach that the end of the world would happen in His life-time. |
| The apostles mistakenly believed that the end of the world would take place in their life-time. | While the return of Christ could take place, the apostles never claimed that it would definitely take place in their life-time. |
| If someone uses the terminology of contemporary philosophies to express his ideas, then those ideas actually come from those contemporary philosophies. Common terms imply common ideas and origins. | You can use contemporary terminology while deriving your ideas elsewhere. It is a logical fallacy to think that common terms means common ideas or origins. |
| Since the early Church used Platonic terminology in its creeds, it derived its concept of the Trinity from Plato instead of from the Bible. | Early Christians used those contemporary terms which best expressed the teachings of Scripture. They did not derive their ideas of God from Plato, but from the Bible. |
| Paul created Christianity out of the pagan Greek mystery religions. | Paul did not derive the Gospel from the mystery religions. God revealed it to him through special revelation. |
| The attributes of man determine the attributes of god. What man is, God can be. What man is not, God cannot be. | We must not make the error of thinking that God is like us. |
| Christianity as a religion was not created by Jesus but by Paul. If Jesus were alive today, he would not be a Christian but a Jew. | Christianity is the religion based upon the person and work of Christ as interpreted by the apostles. There is no conflict between what Jesus and Paul taught. |
| Since god is created in the image of man, no god should be conceived of as being greater or better than man or as having greater capabilities than man. | God is better and greater than man in all respects. Any god made by man is not worthy of respect or worship. |
| Since man is personal and finite, then God must be finite and personal. | God is both personal and infinite at the same time. |
| Since man is not a person or being but only a process, then God must be a process as well. | God is a perfect Being and not just a process. The continuity of God's Being is the basis of His personhood. |
| Since man cannot know or control the future, then God cannot know or control the future. | God both knows and control the future. |
| Since man is not omniscient, omnipotent, immutable or perfect, the neither is God. | The one true God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable and perfect. Any god less than this is not GOD. |
| Since any god which man creates would be comprehensible to the man who created him, the doctrine of the incomprehensibility of God is false. | God is incomprehensible in the sense of man's not being able to fully understand or explain God. Any god that we could fully understand and explain would be less than what we are and hence no God at all. |
If anyone doubts that liberal theologians today actually believe and teach what is stated on the table above, all they have to do is to read the magazine articles on Jesus which usually show up around Easter and Christmas. One example is the April 4, 1994 edition of Newsweek magazine which featured a special edition on Jesus. In the section dealing with the "Jesus Seminar," we are told that these seventy-seven liberal theologians:
... believe that the Biblical Jesus was a myth created by church-building Christians decades after the Crucifixion. The real Jesus, many of them say, was no more the child of God than anyone else. He was a Jewish peasant—possibly not the firstborn in his family and probably illiterate.
The members of the Seminar believe and teach that the Gospels are untrustworthy because they are fictional in nature and do not represent the real historical Jesus. Thus, they have to get "behind" the Gospels to find the "real" Jesus. But, at the same time, they acknowledge that no one will ever find the historical Jesus and , thus, everyone is free to make up any "Jesus" they want.
This is why the members of the "Jesus Seminar" have conflicting views as to who Jesus really was. Some teach the "sage Jesus" view while others proclaim the "apocalyptic Jesus" view. Some fight for the "Marxist Jesus" while others hold the "rabbi Jesus" view. But in the end, they all looked into the well of their own soul and as soon as they saw their own reflection, they cried out, "I have found the real Jesus!"
It is also clear that the humanist position actually contradicts itself on numerous occasions. For example, after dogmatically saying that no one can really know anything about the historical Jesus, the typical liberal theologian will turn right around and state that the historical Jesus did not claim to be God or Christ! Liberals have an unbounded capacity for self-contradiction on such issues.
Another example of the liberal capacity for the absurd as well as the heretical can be found in Karen Armstrong's book, A History of God (New York: Knopf, 1993). She dogmatically states that all the gods of all religions are simply the product of an overactive imagination.
Now, if, as Armstrong claims, all gods are created equal and, thus, it is perfectly proper for feminists to worship a mother goddess or for the Muslims to worship Allah, then one would expect that she would extend this same right to Christians to worship the triune God of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. But her vicious attack on the Christian God reveals that any god or goddess will do except the Christian God!
We must also point out that her hatred of Christianity is also fueled by her naive love of Islam. In fact, her enthusiasm for Islam is so strong that the Muslims have granted her an honorary membership in the Muslim Association of Muslim Social Scientists! Of course, the readers of here book are not told of this hidden Islamic agenda.
Evangelical theologians use the historical, grammatical method in their exegesis of Scripture. They do not attempt to "get behind" the text, not only because all such attempts have proven futile, but also because the text is what God has revealed.
Evangelicals are not interested in demythologizing, deconstructing or psychologizing the text because any attempt to do so would destroy what God has revealed in the text of Scripture. When the Christian looks at Scripture, he is not seeing his own reflection as in a mirror. He is meditating upon the revealed mind and will of God.
This is the exact opposite of what goes on in modern liberal theology. When modern theologians look into the well of their own feelings and ideas about what the word "Jesus" means to them, the only thing they see is their own reflection in the water. This is why the Afro-centric theologian sees a black Jesus, the Asian-centric theologian sees an oriental Jesus, the New Age theologian sees a New Age Christ, the liberation theologian sees a Marxist Jesus and the Process theologian sees a struggling finite deity in the process of becoming what no one knows, not even God. They have all committed the supreme blasphemy of identifying and worshipping their own reflection as God and Christ.
Hermeneutics is the discovery, understanding, and use of those linguistic and literacy principles which should be followed when seeking to understand what an author is saying to his readers. Exegesis is the skill of "digging out," from the text itself, what the author was saying to his readers. It is in exegesis where the parsing of verbs takes place.
The opposite of exegesis is eisegesis which is the projection of your own feelings and ideas into the text. For example, when liberals describe what Paul was feeling in his heart as he left Lystra, they are only saying what they would have felt if they had been in Paul's shoes. But once again, the liberal is only seeing his own reflection at the bottom of the well.
Hermeneutics is the study and use of those principles of interpretation which we all follow whenever we read any piece of literature. When we read a newspaper, magazine or the Bible, we do the following:
Since there can be conflicting interpretations of any given piece of literature, either one interpretation is true and all the others are false, or they are all false. But they cannot all be true.
False interpretations usually arise because the reader is not paying attention to the text. Thus, the authors of Scripture warn their readers not to twist what they were saying (2Pe 3:16). Twisting Scripture is effected by doing the following:
The Bible cannot be interpreted just anyway one wants. This is not how we treat other literature. The Bible should be subject only to those normal rules of interpretation which we all follow when reading any piece of literature. No special rules should be used which, if applied to any other, ancient or modern literature, would be disastrous.
When incarnate Deity picked up the Bible and interpreted it on the basis of grammar and syntax (Mat 22:23-33), this is how we are to interpret the Bible (1Jo 2:6). To dismiss how Jesus interpreted the Bible as "rabbinical," does not solve the issue of how we are to interpret the Bible. On what grounds do modern theologians assume that Marx or Freud is a better interpreter of Scripture than the Lord Jesus Christ?
The way the apostles interpreted the Bible cannot be brushed aside in the name of contextualism because they interpreted the Scriptures under the infallible inspiration of the Holy Spirit who was not bound by the space/time continuum or by any human culture (2Pe 1:21). In hermeneutics, as well, in epistemology, God is the Origin of truth and the measure of all things.
The only logical alternative to the relativizing, humanistic principle of man as the measure of all things is the biblical principle that God is the measure of things. Everyone begins either with man or with God. There is no middle ground. There is no compromise. It is one way or the other.
What is so exciting is the truth that we can discover the mind and will of God by exegeting the text of Scripture. It is this glorious thought that makes Evangelical theology so dynamic and life-changing.
As we explore the pages of Scripture, we are not merely reading some dead guy's ideas of what he thought God was. No, we are actually exploring the revealed mind of God and Christ (1Co 2:16). And as we do this, we come into contact with the life-altering power of Almighty God (Rom 1:16).
The task of the interpreter is thus to exegete what the author was saying. In other words, a noun is a noun regardless of the race, creed or religion of the interpreter of Scripture.
Eisegesis is the opposite of exegesis. It is the literary error of attempting to read your own ideas, feelings, and experience into the text. It is a manifestation of the psychological illness of projecting your own problems, fears, doubts, and ideas to other people—in this case the authors of Scripture. In its worst form, eisegesis is found in the present popular fictionalized novels of biblical times in which the modern author describes in great detail what Moses or Paul was thinking or feeling as he did this or that. But can we really "get into the head of" the authors of the Bible? No! What we call "theology" today may be nothing more than self-analysis.
In the same way, most of modern theology is nothing more than a fictional account of what God ought to be according to the psychological or philosophical problems of the author. They do not ask, "What is God according to the Bible?", but "What is God according to me?"
In opposition to this fictional approach to truth, Evangelical theologians want to know what the apostle Paul believed about justification because God's revelation on justification is to be found in Paul's discussion of it. Paul's words were both his words and God's Words at the same time. Revelation is simply thinking God's thoughts after Him.
Any hermeneutical theory which cuts it own throat is doomed. This applies to those linguistic philosophers who claim in their books that it is not possible to understand what an author is saying in his book. Why don't they ever apply what they are saying to their own books.
The same holds true for contextualists and deconstructionists. They always strenuously object when you apply their theory to their own books and lectures. When you deconstruct the deconstructionists and contextualize the contextualists, they are the first ones to claim that their theory is objectively true while maintaining at the same time that no theory is objectively true! It is just as self-refuting as those who say that there are no absolutes.
We also reject the typical cultic hermeneutic in which the cult leader has a private pipeline to God. Cult leaders often claim that they receive revelations, angelic visitations, visions and dreams which reveal to them the "secret" meaning of Scripture. They assert that they alone have the "key" to unlock the mysteries of the Scriptures. It is, thus, no surprise that most of the interpretations which cultist leaders come up with have nothing to do with the grammar or the context of the text.
It does not matter if it is Joseph Smith, Ellen G. White, David Koresh, or the Watchtower Society, the claim of infallibility is not enough. We demand to be shown the chapter and the verse, the grammar and the syntax, the context and the culture of a passage. Anything less than this is not a valid hermeneutic.
Furthermore, the Bible does not need any "keys" to unlock it because it does not come to us "locked." The Bible was written by farmers, fishermen, tax collectors, kings, priests, etc., to be understood by the common man on the street who would take their words in their simplest and most natural meaning.
Christ and the apostles did not speak in some strange esoteric language, but in the common language of their day. They used those figures of speech and idiomatic expressions which would make what they were saying absolutely clear to the general public. They did not act or teach "in a corner," but openly in the world (Acts 26:26). They went out of their way to emphasize that they were not telling legends and myths (2Pe 1:16).
Heb 1:1 reminds us that special revelation has come to us in a gradual process over a long period of time. The Bible did not drop out of heaven in its completed form. The sixty-six books of the Bible took over two thousand years to complete. Over forty different authors were involved, most of whom never knew any of the other authors. The Bible is not one book, but a library of sixty-six books.
God spoke to our fathers in bits and pieces in various ways. Each new revelation was like a new piece of some gigantic cosmic puzzle. The total picture could not be seen until all the pieces were finally given in the New Testament.
The principle of progressive revelation explains why we do not find any doctrine developed in its fullness in Genesis. While the "seeds" of those doctrines may be found in Genesis, their full development awaited the coming of other prophets and apostles who would understand more by virtue of new revelations than those who went before them. Each new revelation was like a turn of the knob on a pair of binoculars which would eventually change the initial blurred vision of the seer to the point of crystal clarity.
The principle of progressive revelation is crucial to the biblical concept of God. This principle explains why the early anthropomorphic descriptions of God in Genesis gradually disappear as more information was revealed about the nature of God. New information was released by God as man developed the capacity to understand and receive it.
Given the principle of progressive revelation as an a priori truth, what will we expect to find in the Bible when we examine it to see if the doctrine of the Trinity is true? While we will expect to find in the Old Testament a gradual unfolding of those basic concepts which make up the Trinity doctrines such as the multi-personal nature of God, the fully developed form of the doctrine will await the appearance of the Second Person of the Trinity on earth and the writing of the New Testament. This expectation is deduced from our a priori assumption of progressive revelation.
On the other hand, most anti-Trinitarians assume as their a priori assumption that, if a doctrine is biblical, then it will be clearly and fully taught throughout the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.
They begin with the assumption that, if they do not find the doctrine of the Trinity as clearly and fully taught in the Old Testament as in the New Testament, this means that it is not a biblical doctrine. In so doing, they flatten the distinctions between the Testaments and operate on the assumption that the Bible is one book with no inner progress or development of thought. But the Bible is not one book written at one time by one human author. Its progressive nature cannot be ignored or denied without fatal results.
Modern theology's rejection of the Trinity is based more upon its a priori commitment to human autonomy than on any real exegetical grounds. Modern liberal theologians are limited to what they feel or think God ought to be according to their own felt needs which arise from their cultural context and their perceived psychological well-being. The poverty and sterility of modern liberal theology is the direct result of its inability to break free from worshipping its own reflection.
Those who have turned from idols to serve the living and the true God know that they are not limited by their own ideas and feeling because God has revealed Himself in the Written Word and in the Living Word. The self-disclosure of God in the Bible and in Christ is what sets us free not only from sin, but also from ignorance.