For followers of Christ, understanding the Trinity is foundational to everything else we believe. This is a doctrine we want to understand well. But, too often, we have trouble communicating correctly what we mean when we say the Trinity. Marilyn talks today with Dr. Tyler Wittman, our newest professor of theology, about the Trinity and how we should talk about God.
Gary Martin: Hi, my name is Gary Martin.
Joe Fondo: And I'm Joe Fondo.
Gary Martin: And we're the host of the Answering The Call podcast.
Joe Fondo: And this is the podcast where we talk to people who are answering God's call for followers of Jesus. Our understanding of the Trinity really is foundational to everything else we believe, and so it's a doctrine we want to get right.
Gary Martin: Yeah, too often we have trouble communicating what we mean when we say the Trinity. Marilyn talks with Dr. Tyler Whitman, our newest professor of theology about the Trinity and how we should talk about God.
Joe Fondo: And so here's Tyler.
Marilyn: So Dr. Whitman, you are originally from Texas, but you have lived in a lot of different places including Scotland, and that is where you got your PhD at the University of St. Andrews, but Colorado, when were you in Colorado?
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah, so we moved to Colorado when I was half way through my sophomore year of high school. My father became the pastor of a church there in Denver, and so moved out there halfway through high school, finished high school there and then went to college just about an hour and a half north of Denver.
Marilyn: Wow. Well, that's a beautiful state.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: That's right, it is.
Marilyn: You can ski in Colorado. You cannot ski in Louisiana.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: That's right.
Marilyn: Well, let's talk about some things that you do. You are teaching here. You are one of our newest professors. We are glad to have you and you are assistant professor of theology. Do I have your title right?
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: I believe so.
Marilyn: Okay and so they have you teaching several classes and we are very excited to have you here. I know you have one book out and you have another book that you will have come out next year I believe.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Well, yeah, that's out of my hands I think.
Marilyn: Of course.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: It's portion-ally out of my hands. I'm co-writing a book with a friend right now, Bobby Jameson. He's a pastor are at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC with Mark Dever who might be familiar listeners, but Bobby and I have been friends for a long time and we're writing a book on how the kind of fundamental elements of the doctrine of the Trinity and Christology are products of kind of exegetical principles and rules that emerge organically from the text.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: So it's kind of introduction to hermeneutics and exegesis. It's kind of introduction to doctrine. It's more like this. It's more like an introduction to theological to Jesus that takes its cues from the object of theology.
Marilyn: Okay, all right.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: So it makes a sustained argument. The goal of reading scripture is to behold the glory of Christ.
Marilyn: Awesome.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: As he desires for us in John:17, and so there's a lot more meat to those bones, but that's the core of it.
Marilyn: Awesome.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah.
Marilyn: Well, I'm very glad that you mentioned the Trinity, that's really what I want to talk to you about today.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Oh, okay.
Marilyn: And of course it is fundamental to everything we believe as Christians and it sets us apart from other world religions, but I find that a lot of Christians have trouble articulating what that means, saying what that tells us about God, and I'll begin with just one story that happened. This is in my life, happened to me, but when I was a child, I guess I'd been asking questions about the Trinity. My dad was a pastor, but there was a visiting pastor that came and so my dad said, "Well, why don't you talk to him too and I did." Before I tell you his answer, I need to say to anybody that might be listening, this is not the answer to give. This was an incorrect answer, but what he told me was he used himself, talking about himself. He said, "I am a son, I'm a brother, I'm a father." He said, "I'm an uncle, but I'm one person." And so I went off happy as a child and it went until later that I thought oh my goodness, he's a pastor and that's just a terrible answer.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: An unwiting Modalist maybe, or at least he uses Modalist illustrations.
Marilyn: You're right.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yup.
Marilyn: So talking about the Trinity and saying it properly is just very important. So let me ask you this. That's one instance of how we go wrong. What are some ways that believers misstate who God is as three in one.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Wow.
Marilyn: So many ways.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: There's so many ways, yeah and I talk about this with students all the time about I kind of ask for analogies or what are illustrations you've heard, and I like to shoot them down.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And it is just a kind of a pedagogical exercise and I'll redeem some of them to show you what element of truth there is in that.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: But I think it's important for us to see what elements of a falsehood are in these things and I've heard all sorts of ones. I've even heard ones I've never heard of before. Someone told me about Koolaid as a mixture of water and the package, I don't know. I didn't get it. It didn't leave me wanting to say, "Oh yeah."
Marilyn: It's the one I've been waiting for.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: I'm also a pupil of bad jokes.
Yeah, but no, obviously one that most people have heard of will be like water, it can be a liquid, it can be ice. It can be mist or steam and gas, yeah, and obviously that's wrong because the same molecule water cannot simultaneously be all three of those things at once.
Marilyn: True.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Right? Another one might be a Clover or something like that. If you find a three leaf clover or an egg, it's got the white and the yolk and the shell. Well, but it's one egg, right? But the shell is not the egg.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: But the yolk is not the egg.
Marilyn: That's right.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: So all of these things fall apart at some point and it can leave people feeling kind of hopeless. They're like, "Well, what is the Trinity like?" It's like itself, and so I think one of the things that's important to kind of bring in and I lead off talking about theology in our introductory classes, we really lead off by talking about how mystery is at the heart of theology, and especially so when it gets to this doctrine here.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Such a difficult doctrine. So we have to understand that our understanding falls apart at some point and because God is incomprehensible, and so there's only so much that we can understand about him before you just realize he's bigger than the thoughts I'm capable of thinking, right? And bigger than the categories that I can think in. So that's why inevitably, any kind of analogy with created things falls apart is because he's not a creature.
Marilyn: Sure. Now, that's very interesting. I ran across something that Alistair McGrath had written in a book on the Trinity just the other day and I think it's kind of saying the same thing, but I do want to ask you about it. McGrath basically said we are incapable of understanding the Trinity because we are finite, fallen, and sinful and that bothers us. He called these three anxieties that we have about the Trinity. He also said we are accused, others accuse us of believing something irrational when we talk about the Trinity and so that bothers Christians. We have trouble then with that, but then he also said this and I thought this was interesting. We are uncomfortable with not understanding something because of our own innate desire for control or to master and dominate, and what's your response to all that we can't understand it completely. We don't like being called irrational and then we like being in control. That's just something he said.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah, I think there's an element of truth to that. Obviously we don't like things that we can't understand. We usually are afraid of them and so forth and so on. When it comes to talk of Trinity, I think manifests itself in a number of ways that most people can kind of think of, right? The charge of irrationality or something is obviously present. You get that from Muslims, talking about this stuff, but really one of the ways it kind of hits probably most home in our circles is just the tendency for people to say, "Well, it's not a very practical doctrine." And so there's that jump to kind of remake the Trinity in the image of some kind of practical exigency, and so debates over the subordination of the son, to the father, within evangelical circles, really, I think reflects this kind of tail wagging the dog approach of theology.
Maybe it arises out of that anxiety. I don't really know. I don't like the psychologize about why people go certain places. I just kind of talk about the doctrines and say I think this is wrong for these reasons, but I think it's important, and I think McGrath would probably agree with me to distinguish between comprehending something and understanding something.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Right? Because this is another really crucial thing to get out in as a kind of one of those basics in theology. We can understand the Trinity to an extent. We cannot comprehend.
Marilyn: All right, and by that, go ahead.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: The distinction is basically, if I can comprehend something, I can more or less get my hands around the whole thing and I can kind of observe everything and I can classify it, lets put it that way. I can define it in a classical sense. I can say, "Well, it belongs in this genus and this species and I can kind of divvy it up according to its kind of constituent features and so forth." And an element of theology that's just been there from the beginning is that God is not something that fits into such classificatory schemes. We can't fit God into some kind of taxonomy. Even at the top of the chart, right? You got God and then the world and creatures and so forth. He's just qualitatively, not quantitatively different. In other words, he's different. He's in kind, because he's not even a kind, you know?
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: He's not a kind of thing. He's not a thing, but that doesn't mean he's nothing, right? A book out there with a title or something like that, but I think it's a clever device to kind of get across the point that he's God, and so he's unique in that sense. He's unique without being one of a kind is a kind of maybe a good way of saying it, but we can understand him to the extent that he's revealed himself, right? So our understanding is capable of being adequate to God's revelation of himself.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And he reveals himself truthfully, but there's no way since God is infinite and holy that even our understanding of revelation can never be, I think exhausted.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Much less can it exhaust or be adequate to God's own knowledge of himself.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: So does that make sense?
Marilyn: I think so. Let me ask you some specific questions about that, but we have to be able to talk about God. We have to be able to in a sense in our mind, visualize God, and I think that's kind of where we run into trouble because a lot of times humans need to relate it to something. Oh, it's like such and such, and it almost sounds to me like trying to explain what a color looks like to someone who's blind, that's really difficult, but yet all we have is our language to express who God is. So how do we do that? Give us some ways that we do need to talk about when we're talking to children or Muslim or just anybody, how should we talk about God and the Trinity?
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Right. I think the clearest way of talking about the Trinity is to talk about the gospel.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: So because that's really how it's set forth for us in the new Testament.
Marilyn: Yeah.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: When Paul talks about the mystery that was hidden, but now revealed, he's really kind of mapping on to the whole history of God with his people in which he progressively reveals himself slowly, right? First as the one God, right? I'm Israel.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And then there are intimidations of something more to that in the prophets and so forth and well, in the new Testament that gets picked up and then there's this kind of strong revelation of this intimate unity between the father and Jesus. And Jesus is making very strong claims in the gospels to being the one God of Israel, already from the beginning of the four gospels in Matthew and even in Mark, I think all of them have a very high Christology, right? They're all making startling claims here.
And then after Jesus's Ascension, obviously you have the outpouring of the gift of the spirit.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Okay, and so throughout the rest of your Testament, can you start to see, is the people of God having experiencing the gift of the new covenant, the in dwelling presence of the spirit, there begins to arise an even greater apprehension of the fact that God is father, son, and spirit, and so I think that a good way of narrating it is just to kind of narrate the structure of our salvation and showing how that and how basically how we relate to God is itself kind of patterned after or structured after, if we could speak of it, the structure of God's own life. And so we are adopted by the spirit who is God himself at work in us, the holy spirit sanctifying us, we are made adopted sons, okay?
Through the natural son so that we may relate to God, our father, and so we're brought into the family of God and that the whole experience there, that people can kind of usually narrate even if they aren't a formally qualified Trinitarian theologian. They couldn't spell out all the different elements that they could tell you, I believe God is my father. I believe Jesus is his only son and it somehow, he lives within me.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And Fred Sanders is kind of is one of my theological heroes and Methodist theologian at Biola University and he's really good with Trinitarian theology and that's how he articulates it in a book of his called The Deep Things of God.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And he says so even people in your church who studied theology, they're tacit Trinitarians because they believe the gospel.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And so really, I think Trinitarian theology is really wedded to how we talk about the gospel. I don't think you can have a Christian articulation of the gospel without an articulation of the Trinity at least implicitly, right?
Marilyn: Right, that makes a lot of sense.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: I don't know and people are trying to understand the Trinity. I think well, what better opportunity to talk about the gospel, and vice versa.
Marilyn: Right.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: So we talk about the God of the gospel and we talk about the gospel of the Triune God, and kind of I think that's how we grow an understanding of these things.
Marilyn: That's very interesting. Really hadn't thought about that, taking that opportunity when somebody asked to really plug in the gospel. God, the father. God, the creator. What was done through Jesus and our salvation there and then his witness with us at the spirit is always with us, that is what you were saying, right?
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yes.
Marilyn: Basically, yeah.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Basically, yeah.
Marilyn: All right. So just some very basic terms because we do talk about God, we do say one being three persons, not three beings. Well, I don't know another way to say it, but we want to make sure that we're understanding that it is one being three persons. Tell me a little bit about what that means.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah, I mean the language of being is notoriously complex.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: We were just going over this with our kids through the night and the way we kind of instill it is just one God, three persons, and one God, three persons and so that's really how we talk about it. I'm totally blanking on the question you just asked me because I got caught up on this.
Marilyn: Just when we say one being three persons, how do we unpack that to someone who goes, huh?
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah. Well, you'll get different answers. So I can just give you my own take on this which is not idiosyncratic by any means, right? I think that's something we have to guard against if we're going to be faithful, the allergic of idiosyncrasy is a bad word, right? But one God and three persons. What we basically just mean is we mean that at the heart of this mystery, that we try to contemplate and that we grow in our understanding of, as we grow in our relation to God, right? In our own sanctifying and kind of our own sanctification as we grow, as we are perfected, right? We come to perceive God's perfection greatly, mind you. We've come to perceive it better as we grow. Well, what we come to see is that there is one God, so they're not three gods.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: It's the Athanasian Creed going to spell this out, right? There is one God, one infinitude here, right? One life, one fullness, one perfection, one blessedness, one holiness, but there are three who are, right? Infinite, three who are holy. Three who are blessed, okay? And so forth and so on. So it's kind of like two registers that we have to think on simultaneously because God is so big that we have to kind of have two registers thinking simultaneously if we're going to think about him.
Marilyn: All right.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And one of those is thinking about the divine unity and one of those is thinking about the distinctions between the persons of the Trinity, and so we think about everything that the Bible says about God. Well, that applies to them all because they are one God.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: All right? But the only thing that doesn't apply to them all are what distinguishes them from one another. Well, we say, "What's that?"
Marilyn: Yes, right.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: We say, "Well, it's really kind of slim. It's just the father's fatherhood. It's the son's sonship. It's the Spirit's spirit hood as it were." Right?
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Without getting into the Latin terms for this stuff, that's basically all it is. So the fact that the father is the father. Well, the son is not the father. The Spirit's not the father. The father's the father, and likewise for the son of the spirit, right?
Marilyn: Sure.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: We kind of say these things. That's all that distinguishes them from one another. Otherwise, the one God, right? Person, what do we mean by that? Well, that's a notoriously complex concept as well.
Marilyn: That is and that's one we have trouble with today in our culture. Go ahead.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: That's right. No, it is and actually it's one of those concepts that Christians, because of the unique kind of pressures on them to articulate the Bible's coherent vision of Christ.
Marilyn: Right.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Really, they forged a new understanding of what we mean by personhood in early centuries.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Especially the distinction between a person and their natures and not getting into a formal lecture here. It's important. I always state when we talk about person, what does it mean that we don't start from a kind of psychological framework where we kind of import all this stuff up in there, right? We're like, "Well, a person has a consciousness and a will and self-determination." And we kind of go on and on, and we kind of build up this really psychologically rich notion of personality and so forth.
And then we kind of say, "Well, that must be true if we're going to call them persons."
Marilyn: I see.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: You have to remember that the language of person isn't really in the Bible.
Marilyn: Yes.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: We use that as Augustin said so that we're not silent. When people say so there's three, but three what? Because there's not three gods and so Augustin's like, "Well, we use the language of person here." And so it's a metaphysical rather than a psychological concept, and it's just talking about what it is that there are three of other terms, there are exchangeable terms here. Some will call them subsistences or that's the link. I think just the translation of the word some people might have heard hypostasis. We just mean this kind of a center of relation. That's kind of what it is, right? So there are three centers of relationship within God's life. He has a structured relating of these three to one another. So I don't know if that's clear or if that just confuses everyone. Maybe I'm just letting them into my own confusion.
Marilyn: No, I like it. I think Tim Keller even uses the word dance when he's talking about the Trinity in this relationship and even there, language lets us down because we don't think of a dance as involving multiple people. So it is a little difficult to actually understand the relationship between each of them.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: I probably wouldn't use the word dance just because.
Marilyn: I may be misrepresenting what he said.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: No. Well, yeah. I don't know. I mean I'm not trying to say anything bad about Tim Keller. I often profited from Keller's work.
Marilyn: Sure.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: The language of dance usually gets period around in these discussions because they think it's this translation of this Greek word that gets bandied about as well [foreign language 00:23:40]. They think well, it's like a dance and so forth, and it gets kind of treated kind of sloppily by some popular authors and it can kind of insinuate this vision of the Trinity as three best friends who just get along dancingly, right? And so they all just get along really well and I try to remind my students that God, he's stranger than that. If I can say it reverently he's weirder than that. So whenever we get this overly familiar understanding of what the three divine persons are like, I think we have to kind of back up a little bit and remind ourselves it's a little bit weirder than that.
Marilyn: I actually like that. Weirder, I like that.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: I don't know if it's very elegant, but it's at least helpful to me.
Marilyn: It kind of communicates.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah, it kind of just reminds people to slow down thinking about these things and to realize that it's not supposed to be easy to think about, right? It's supposed to help us think about the gospel, and the gospel's supposed to help us think about it, but it's not supposed to be very intuitive.
Marilyn: Right.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Does that make sense?
Marilyn: Yeah and I think that's what people accuses of that it's not intuitive and perhaps we have not done ourselves favor with we talk about the story of baby Jesus. We have different things, not icons, but we have these stories that we tell and we talk about, and I think we give that impression that they are three separate persons that don't make up one being, but something different, but so I do like that idea of where that we probably need to recapture that the God we believe in is rich and communicates himself. He's personal, but we can't fully comprehend.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Oh yeah.
Marilyn: And that would be good.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah.
Marilyn: All right. So I do want to ask this because you mentioned this word a minute ago, mystery and yet I have run into non-Christians who they get irritated. They say, "Oh, you Christians, when you have something that's just too hard for you to explain, you just call it a mystery." Help us with that.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: It's pretty handy.
Marilyn: Yeah.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: I should try it.
Marilyn: Help us defend that, yeah.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Well, so another one of my theological heroes is Herman Bavinck, and he's no longer living. He wrote in the end of 19th century, early 20th century, and his kind of Magisterial four volume work of theology is called the Performed Dogmatics and in volume one, I think it's maybe the first thing he says, but he says that mystery is the lifeblood of dogmatics. Dogmatics is just a fancy word for theology for those people listening. Well, I think that's just true. I mean if you look at the fourth century debates in particular. Downplaying of the mysteriousness of God's life is kind of one of those telling features of what we loosely call Arianism. They definitely ambitioned I think more knowledge of God than the Orthodox party countenance. So a recognition that here, we run up against a reality.
That we have trouble thinking about the recognition that we are approaching the mountain, and that only those who the Lord summons to ascend the mountain should ascend. That has to impress itself upon us. When Gregory of Nazianzus is preaching kind of at the tail end of these fourth century debates and he's in Constantinople, and he's preaching his theological orations as it were, he has this really evocative imagery of the mountain, right? He's like, "Okay, so his first oration is kind of talking about how we can't just assume that we are the type of people who can think about God like this." Theology isn't for everybody or at all times or in all audiences and so forth. It's not a parlor trick. It's serious business.
And so then the second one, he's like, "All right, well here I am, I'm about to start thinking about God." He's like, "And I'm going to be like Moses, kind of walking into the dark cloud." And he's like, "Some of you might be like the elders of Israel and you can come up part of the way, but you got to kind of stay back." He's like, "Some of you might be a Nadab or a Abihu." And that's implicitly saying some of you might be a little too cocky here. Don't draw near to God in an unworthy manner because we all know what happened in Nadab and Abihu. If our listeners don't know, go Leviticus 10, but it doesn't turn out well and so he's saying that and he's like, "Some other of you are going to be kind of like those Israelites and mentally at least you're going to be building calves of gold so stay back."
Marilyn: Sure.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And the point there is just to recognize that he's obviously calling attention to this rich scene in the book of Exodus that is really generative of a lot of metaphors for how we come to know God contemplatively. It's not to say that we're kind of no God without the Bible mind you, contemplation happens as we are reading scripture. We're thinking deeply about it, but what he's meaning there is that we have to realize that there are going to be elements here of knowing and of ignorance and that's why when people kind of ask me well, what's your area of expertise in theology? I don't have one. I'll say I have areas of learned ignorance and I'm not being facetious, I mean it.
The more you come to know about these things, really the more you're able to kind of identify what you don't know.
Marilyn: That's interesting, yeah.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And so when people say, "Well, that's just a cop out. You're just appealing to mystery because you are lazy." The easy response to it is to say, "Well, just hold on there cowboy or cowgirl. If you can think just a moment, just assume for a moment that I'm right. That there is a God, and that he is a creator of all things out of nothing and he is qualitatively different from all things, and he really is what the Bible says he is. The beginning and the end, he's eternal, infinite." Well, don't you think he'd be hard to think about?
Marilyn: That's a very good point.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah. Especially when the problem isn't just a rational problem. The problem's also a moral problem because we are east of Eden, we have inborn incentives not to think about God well, right?
Marilyn: Yeah.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Idolatry isn't just a cognitive failure. It's not just like a glitch of the software.
Marilyn: Sure.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: It's motivated. When the Psalmist talks about atheism, right? In Psalm 14, he says that the one who does not believe in God is a fool and it goes on to say they do evil and so forth, and so as I put it provocatively sometimes in my lectures, I say the Bible doesn't believe in atheists, right? It just says that they are foolish. There's no one who's an atheist or who's consciously kind of resisting Trinitarian theology and so forth who says, "Well, you know what, I've weighed all the evidence really calmly and collectively, and in a real clean clinical fashion, I've just come to the rather sober conclusion that it doesn't work." The Bible says that doesn't happen. So that's my response.
Marilyn: That's right, your emotion.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: There's motivations for not accepting it, but if God is who the Bible says he is, then he's not going to fit within our kind of finite sinful minds.
Marilyn: Well, I'm not a historian. I'm not an expert in a lot of things, but I'm old enough that I've lived through a few changes in our culture and we are a product of our culture and our culture, we're pretty self-centered and we are pretty prideful and we think we can find all answers and we depend on science, and I think that may be part of our problem that if it becomes hard to understand, we think well, then it's not true. We make that huge leap that should not be made, but that's what our culture tends to do I think, and so yes, I do think that today, often we don't fear God in the biblical sense, we don't respect God. Earlier in my lifetime, we had big movements where Jesus was your best friend and where we made Jesus your buddy, and so in doing that and trying to show people the love of God, we have crippled them in a way and understanding and fearing God is kind of what I'm afraid of.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah, I think that's a danger.
Marilyn: Yeah. So before we run out of time, you mentioned your children and talking to them.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yes.
Marilyn: That's where I want to go next.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Okay.
Marilyn: In talking about the Trinity to children, because we do want to communicate God correctly to children and I did have one four year old in Sunday school asked me, "So was Jesus praying to himself when he prayed?" And of course with a four year old, you got an attention span of 10 seconds. So I didn't get very far in trying to answer, but I want to ask you, probe in your mind about how we talk to children about God. What do you suggest in terms of the language they can understand.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah. I obviously don't get into talking about being and essence and persons and relations. Well, I do get and talk about persons, but I don't get into the technical terminology obviously because their minds are thinking about Minecraft after too long, right? Just recently now, my kids are obsessed with Minecraft all of a sudden. I don't even know what it is, but when we were just talking about this the other night at the dinner table, I don't know if I do this right. This is just my opinion man. To quote the dude for anyone listening, but the way I do it, our Catechesis as it were, we would do scripture memorization, we recite the Apostle's Creed.
And so just instilling the kind of basic cadences and kind of rhythms of the Christian faith helps them to kind of perceive this stuff and it obviously happens over a long period of time too, right? This stuff, they absorb it as it's just kind of trickled in over a long period of time, but we talk about it directly because they will ask sometimes. I hold up my fist, right?I'm like, "There is one God." And so we all start with a fist and they all do this. They're like, "Yeah, one God." And then I'm like, "And then I turn around and I hold up three fingers." And I'm like, "And three persons." Oh and three persons, and then we count off the persons, right? Father, son, and spirit.
And so I'll ask him how many persons and he'll go like, "Three." And how many Gods? "One." And so what we're basically doing is we're just kind of equipping them with the grammar and the vocabulary, and the level of understanding, well, I mean I dare say they might understand it better than some people who get caught up in all kinds of logical conundrums and so forth because there is a simplicity that was required for understanding I think children have. So they grasp it pretty quick. If you just kind of do that, and then again, we talk about the gospel. So I think it involves those kind of moments of talking about the grammar and the vocabulary. Right? One God, three persons illustrating it with bickering with my hands.
But my kids like to count, so when I can get them to counting, they're like, "Oh, I'm good at this." Somehow they love math. I don't know how that happened. Glad I don't like that, and then also we supplement that kind of formal talking about the grammar with just again, narrating the gospel accounts, and we're always, when we talk about stories from the Bible or reading accounts, we pause at key moments and ask them what does that sound like? And you'll be just shocked at how our little kids, all my kids are under eight years old and how they will perceive illusions and echoes and foreshadowings, and the old Testament stories that scholars with very frilled brows refused to see.
Marilyn: That's very interesting.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: It is very interesting. They'll see these things and so I think it's just a matter of soaking their minds in scripture and in how the gospel is woven throughout every book of the Bible and then also kind of giving them formal training and that grammar and that vocabulary. One God, three persons, right? Who are those person? Father, son, and spirit. Who became incarnate? Who became a man? The son, right? And he's our Lord Jesus.
Marilyn: That's fabulous.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Does that make sense?
Marilyn: Yes, it does.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah.
Marilyn: I have a friend who has young children and he's also an apologist, but when his daughter ask a question, he will give her an answer that she can understand and he'll say, "Do you understand?" Yes I do daddy, and then he'll say one more thing and maybe use a new word or something and she won't understand that, and he said, "What I want her to know is that as she gets a little bit bigger and can understand more, there's a bigger answer waiting for her."
And I thought that was also very wise that as we're raising them, they think concretely now, but as they grow, we can add to that and that we can talk about these things in a deeper way, in a more meaningful way perhaps that they can understand. So anyway, I'm always interested in children and how we talk to them about the Lord. We are just about out of time, but I did want to ask you about books that you might recommend or places maybe even in the scripture where a new Christian might start or someone who's trying to wrap their mind around God and how great he is and just wanted to hear from you on that.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yeah, I think the gospel are always a generative source for thinking through the Christian faith. So the gospel of John will kind of hit you on the head with some of these things. So as a former professor of mine and mentor says, "It's kind of the gospel for dummies, it's one of my favorites. I like all of them, but the gospels are great, but Romans 8 is also really good too. Within the gospels, John 17 is very evocative and rich, but yeah, and then in Matthew. Obviously, the first couple of chapters of Matthew are really interesting in terms of this kind of well, I won't get into it, but Matthew 3, the baptism of Christ is obviously a picture of the Trinity as it were.
And then the Great Commission passage. Well, Southern Baptist, we love the Great Commission passage. It's also a great Trinitarian passage. Why are we sent out because the father sent the son, and the father sent the spirit. So the son and the spirit are sent and that's why we are sent. In the wake of their sendings, and so there's that great Trinitarian passage to the end of Matthew as well. So those are some spots I think are good to reflect on as far as books, also Revelation 1, I'm sorry. This is the very opening of Revelation is very clear on this as well. As far as books go, I mentioned earlier, Fred Sanders's book called the Deep Things of God, a very good book on the Trinity, connects it with prayer and the gospel and the Christian life and in very rich ways.
And it really draws a lot from John Wesley, from his own tradition, but Wesley was a very good Trinitarian Theologian and connected this to the life of Piety obviously. So that's a really good book I think for people. There's also a book by another one of my kind of theological heroes, a contemporary theologian by name of Scott Swain, and he has just come up with a book called the Trinity. I think it's rather basic title, but put up by Crossway. Both of these books are put up by Crossway actually, but just that releases in a couple of days actually.
Marilyn: Okay, so it's brand new.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Yes.
Marilyn: Coming out soon.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: October 20th, it should be like anything Scott writes, fantastic. If you want to kind of get maybe a little bit more to doctrine in Trinity. So the intermediate level, there's a book by a guy named Gil Emery. He's a Catholic theologian rather and it's called The Trinity: An introduction to Catholic Teaching on the Triune God. Has a glossary, it's a little more technical, but it's also very readable. That's the one I assign in my classes actually.
Marilyn: Okay, sure.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And then Fred Sanders again has written a book called the Triune God.
Marilyn: Okay.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: And it's at a more intermediate level.
Marilyn: Awesome.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: So all those books.
Marilyn: That's a great place to start. Thank you so much and it's been good having you here and thank you for giving us a glimpse into the richness of God and the Trinity.
Dr. Tyler Whitm...: Well, thank you, it's been a pleasure.
Marilyn: Thank you.
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