Islam Exposed My Weak Theology (Then I Learnt This) || SLP667

Glen Scrivener explains why we must be Trinitarian in our evangelism.

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Back in the day when I went to Speaker's Corner in the northeast corner of Hyde Park in London, and I was a young Christian trying to get into conversations there might be 200 Muslim apologists there on a Sunday afternoon. And to begin with, I would lose debate after debate after debate because the Muslim would come to me and they would say, Do you agree that there are two elements? There is the creator and the creation? And young Christian Glenn says, uh, sure. They would have a doctrine of God that began without Jesus. Every Sunday, I would lose these debates that I was getting into at Speaker's Corner. The earliest Christians would not have fallen for this. You can summarize Athanasius' method of theology as this: the only system of thought into which Jesus Christ will fit is the one in which he's the starting point. You can't start without Jesus and then crowbar Jesus in later. You can't start with a doctrine of God that has no room for the Son of God, and then expect the Son of God to fit in anywhere else other than underneath the one God, which is what Muslims believe. But doing theology is vitally important. And evangelists must be theologians. And if we're not theologians, we will end up simplifying our gospel into a grotesque monstrosity. Ancient Christians knew this. Modern Christians forget it. We must be Trinitarian. Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. I want to ask why aren't all Christians talking about the Trinity? Talking about it a lot, and talking about it in evangelism in particular. I'm an ordained church minister, and my day job is to work as an evangelist, which means a herald of good news. I want to tell the good news of Jesus out there in the world. But my tribe is not known for its theological depth or richness. My tribe is known for wanting to get the message out there any way possible. And so we are not inclined to press into doctrine, into church history, into theology. We are prone to boil things down as simply as we can possibly make them and to disseminate that simplified gospel as broadly as we can manage. And the point on the horizon that we're trying to move people towards is decision. We want to get people making a decision for Jesus, at which point it sounds less like the mission of the church and more like conversionism. Conversionism, the way I'm using the term, just means the reduction of the gospel down to the call to repentance and faith. We want to get people signing on the dotted line. And so actually the focus becomes less on the evangel, that is the good news that we are meant to be heralding, and it's more on the response of the sinner and making sure that they sign on that dotted line. If that's how you think of evangelism, you're not going to want to waste any time on the doctrine of the Trinity, because that sounds like it's far too esoteric, it sounds like it's far too complicated, it sounds like a distraction from the simple gospel. And if that's anywhere in the ballpark of why you want to avoid talk of the Trinity in proclaiming the gospel, I want to give you seven reasons why we simply must be Trinitarian. Here's number one. God is important. That's point number one. God is important. It's important to speak about God in our evangelism. And if we have an allergic reaction to talking about Father, Son, and Spirit in our evangelism, that can only really be because we want to talk about God in such abstract terms that lead the sinner to make a decision in the end, we're actually more interested in preaching a plan of salvation than we are in preaching God. But evangelism that's worth the name is surely the heralding of the good news of God. And the reason to speak about Father, Son, and Spirit is because that's who God is. God is a father loving his son in the joy of the Spirit. And if evangelism is anything, it's talking about God. When Patrick went to Ireland and evangelized them, uh, what springs to mind as the sum and substance of his gospel message? Well, you might have qualms about the analogy he used to teach the Trinity. You might not think that a uh a clover is uh the best analogy for the triune God, but what did he want to bring to Ireland? He wanted to bring the news of God, the Christian God, the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Why was Patrick so bold to bring the doctrine of the Trinity and we are so shy? In our gospel presentations, the Trinity is sidelined or obscured or brushed under the carpet or somehow distorted. We're embarrassed by who God is, apparently, and this should not be. We should be Trinitarian because we need to talk about God. And the question which God is really, really important. The first point is God is important. The second point is Islam is important. I don't know whether you thought that that point was coming or whether that point should be number two, but I think it's very important for our evangelism to be very sensitive to Islam as a worldview out there in the world that we are interacting with a lot. And we need to interact with Islam because Islam wants to interact with us. It is a growing faith, it is a proselytizing faith, it is an important faith, and it helps you as a Christian believer to know the compare and contrast between the Quran and the gospel. And whenever I have spent any time interacting with Muslims, I have gone away very, very pleased for the gospel of the triune God. Because the Quran is rabidly anti-Trinitarian. Say not three, says the Quran. Surah 112, which forms the first of the five prayers a day that a Muslim is meant to say, Surah 112 says, Allah is one he does not beget, i.e., he's not a father, and he is not begotten, i.e., he is not a son. Islam is explicitly anti-Trinitarian. The God of the Quran could not be clearer about saying that he is not the God of the Bible. If you ask a Christian what is most foundational to who God is, we would say Father, Son, and Spirit. When you ask a Muslim what is most foundational to who Allah is, well, Allah Himself says, I am not a father and I have no son. And that non-Trinitarian framing, that anti-Trinitarian framing of the Quran sets Islam off on the trajectory that it takes. Because if Allah is not a father and if he has no son, then whoever Jesus is, if he's simply a prophet, and whoever Muhammad is, who is simply a prophet, they can only ever be outside of God. They can only ever be slaves of the one God who is Allah. Therefore, no wonder Islam is submission. What can you do with the God of Islam other than bow? There is no room for anybody to be anywhere else other than underneath this God. The domination of Allah and the submission of his slaves is written into Islam in every verse, really, because of its doctrine of God. And if you are in conversation with a Muslim about the gospel, you will be talking about the Trinity really quickly. And if a Christian says to me, I don't know why you're so interested in the Trinity, Glenn, that tells me a number of different things about this Christian. One of them, it tells me, is that this Christian doesn't deal with Muslims very much. Because if you are evangelizing Muslims, um then this is almost the first topic of conversation that you will ever have. Back in the day when I went to Speaker's Corner in the northeast corner of Hyde Park in London, I was there in the early 2000s. I would go down there a lot of different Sundays in the early 2000s. And I was a young Christian trying to get into conversations with all kinds of people, and mainly getting into conversations with Muslims. There might be 200 Muslim apologists there on a Sunday afternoon. And so it was a real training ground in being able to talk about the gospel. And to begin with, I would lose debate after debate after debate because the Muslim would come to me and they would say, Do you agree that there are two elements? There is the creator and the creation? And young Christian Glenn says, Uh, sure. And the Muslim would say, Ah, so Jesus, is he creator or is he created? Right? And and they would instantly, they would have a doctrine of God that began without Jesus, and then they would try and ask me the question, okay, having defined God without Jesus, now what are you going to do with this Jesus? And I didn't know what to do because I sort of agreed with the way that they set things up. Yeah, this creator and created. And here comes Jesus of Nazareth. So what is he? And I tried to do some stuff about the humanity of Christ, and Christ has two natures and all that kind of stuff, but it got very complicated. And what I came to see is that I should not have agreed to their opening premise. I should not have agreed to any doctrine of God that excludes Jesus from the outset. I didn't know that because for me, theology wasn't that important. And that's our third point. We need to be Trinitarian because theology is important. Every Sunday I would lose these debates that I was getting into at Speaker's Corner. And then during the week, I would meet up with various friends, people like Paul Blackham, who you should check out on YouTube anywhere you can find him. And Paul Blackham would say, Glenn, you're falling for this because you are agreeing to a faulty premise. The earliest Christians would not have fallen for this. And he took me back to church history, and he helped me to see theologically, and in particular, he took me back to Athanasius. And you can summarize Athanasius' method of theology as this the only system of thought into which Jesus Christ will fit is the one in which he's the starting point. You can't start without Jesus and then crowbar Jesus in later. You can't start with a doctrine of God that has no room for the Son of God, and then expect the Son of God to fit in anywhere else other than underneath the one God, which is what Muslims believe. Muslims begin their doctrine of God with simply Allah, who is not a father and who has no son, and then where else are they going to put Jesus? Where else could they put Jesus? Except as a prophet, a very exalted prophet, but nevertheless he is not God. He could not be God because they've already defined Jesus out of deity. And Athanasius would say, Why are you defining Jesus out of deity? And wonderfully, Paul Blackham showed me this wonderfully, Athanasius, when he was talking to the arch heretic Arius, Arius said, There was a time when the son was not. There was a time when there was just God by himself, and I guess he wasn't even father then, because he had no son. There was a time when God was like Allah, according to Arius, and then sort of he chose to have a son, right? And then I guess at that stage he became a father, and the son became a son. And the reason Arius thought that is because he began his thinking about God without thinking about Jesus. He wasn't a good theologian. Good theology does not begin its thinking with this world and then reason its way towards what God is like. That was Arius's problem. That was the Muslims at Speaker's Corner problem. Okay. Their problem was you look at the world and you say, oh, okay, because there is a created world, there must be a creator. Arius put it like this there is a world that has been originated. Therefore, there must be a God who is unoriginate, okay, who is an unmade. It's the world that's created, there is the uncreated creator. And that made sense to Arius, and it makes sense to a lot of Muslims. It makes sense to Christians too. A lot of Christians sort of begin their theology by saying there are two elements, creator and and creation. We must never begin our theology there. That is to be Aryan, okay? Athanasius said this to Arius. It's a game changer. Check it out. It is more pious and accurate to signify God from the Son and call him Father than to name him from his works only and call him unoriginate. Do you see what he's saying? The way you do theology is not by looking at the world and reasoning towards God, it's by looking at Jesus and understanding his Father. That is good theology. And when you begin like that, then you begin with a Father who has always been loving his son in the joy of the Holy Spirit. And then the question of, well, who is this Jesus of Nazareth? Well, he's God the Son, who's become God our brother, he's full of the Spirit, so that he can unite with us and bring us back to the Father, right? It's a good gospel, it's a rich gospel, it's an attractive gospel, it's a compelling gospel. We'll get to that in a second. But doing theology is vitally important. And evangelists must be theologians. And if we're not theologians, we will end up simplifying our gospel into a grotesque monstrosity. We'll strip everything back to apparently just this simple God who is not triune. But such a God ends up being a monster. Such a God ends up being nothing like the biblical God. And such a God means that actually, fourthly, we can't honor Jesus as important. That's the fourth thing that we really need. We need to realize God is important, Islam is important, theology is important. Jesus is important. Imagine you wanted to preach a gospel that just begins with God and then brings Jesus in later. Imagine you wanted to do that. I'm sure you don't want to do that, but imagine you wanted to define God outside of any kind of father-son-spirit relationships. And you wanted to say a whole bunch of stuff about this God, how he's made the world, how we've rebelled against it, we've fallen, we're accountable to him, he'll judge us, or whatever it is. You said a whole bunch of stuff about this God, but this God is not defined in relationship to son and spirit. There's just God, right? And then you introduce Jesus. What is going to happen at that moment? Well, either Jesus is going to exist alongside this God and you're a tritheist because maybe the spirit also just exists alongside this God and you just got three gods, or you just say, God made the world, and then God came to the world as Jesus, and he died on the cross and he rose back again. And at that point you are what's known as a modalist. Um basically Jesus has dissolved into the one God, and God just becomes Jesus, who then just becomes the Spirit. These are just different modes of who God is. That's another problem you might have if you want to define God without Jesus at the outset. A third problem, this is the Muslim problem and the Aryan problem, is that you've got who God is, and then you bring Jesus in, and of course, Jesus just has to be underneath, right? And in all these cases, you have not proclaimed the biblical Jesus. The Gospels, on the other hand, the evangelists, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they present Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God. That really is how all the Gospels are kind of structured. Um, they are all written so that you might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. That's what John chapter 20, verse 31 says. Mark's gospel begins the beginning of the gospel of the good news about Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God. That's who Jesus is. Jesus is the Christ, which means he is filled to overflowing with the Spirit, and He's the Son of God, He's the Son of the Father. You don't understand Jesus without understanding him in Trinitarian terms. You can't understand Jesus without understanding him in Trinitarian terms. So if you tell me you want to preach a gospel, but you don't want to get into the Trinity, that can only be because you want to preach a Christless gospel. But if you do want to preach Jesus, then you have to preach that He is the Christ, the Son of God. And focusing on His identity will force you to be Trinitarian. So we've got to be Trinitarian because God is important, because Islam is important, theology is important, Jesus is important. Fifthly, the cross is important. Preaching the cross rightly is important. We've just done a video on this very issue. The way in which so many evangelists want to proclaim the cross is simply as Jesus got zapped over there so that I can get blessed over here. And the big problem in these caricatures of the cross is that they are not sufficiently Trinitarian. That's what John Stott said in his classic book, The Cross of Christ, in a chapter called The Self-Substitution of God. He said, What we must never do is make Jesus into a third party that is thrust in between God and us. No, this is the self-substitution of God. John Stott says this at the root of every caricature of the cross there lies a distorted Christology, you could say a distorted Trinitarian theology. In particular, it is essential to affirm that the love, the holiness, and the will of the Father are identical to the love, the holiness, and the will of the Son. God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. The one on that cross is not a third party who is buying off a reluctant God so that we can receive salvation from this reluctant God. No, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Jesus says, nobody has authority to take my life from me. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. Jesus voluntarily is revealing the will of the Father because in the triune life, the will of the Father is expressed in the Son and by the Spirit. There is one movement of love going on at the cross. There is not a substitute over there, a God up there, and sinners over here. But it will sound like that if you are not sufficiently Trinitarian. So we must be Trinitarian because God is important, Islam is important, theology is important, Jesus is important, the cross is important. Sixthly, salvation is important. What are we even offering people as we offer them the good news of Jesus? Um we are offering them eternal life. That's true. What is eternal life? Eternal life is the triune life of God. That's what eternal life is. We're offering people God's life. That's why when John 3.16 says, God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, his one and only, the one that he has loved and poured life into from before the foundation of the world, the one filled to overflowing with the spirit of life. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. What God is giving is his son, and in his son he is giving life. Because what eternal life is, is not spiritual novicane in the ninth dimension. It is life in Christ, filled with his spirit, brought to the Father. That's the eternal life of God, which Jesus is communicating to us. And if you don't have that Trinitarian understanding of the Father pouring the life of the Spirit into the Son and offering the Son to the world, if you're not Trinitarian in that sense, you're going to preach a salvation that is basically a bunch of stuff, a bunch of it's Willie Wonker's golden ticket, essentially. And that's just not biblical. The thing that's offered in the gospel is Jesus, right? Jesus offers himself, and in Jesus we participate in the divine nature. That's what 2 Peter 1 says, that in Christ by the Spirit, brought to the Father, we call on our Abba, we are adopted by the Spirit, we are united to the Son, and in this sense, we are participating in the divine nature. Ancient Christians had it right, and modern Christians forget it all the time. And when more traditional Christians look over at modern Protestant evangelical evangelists, and they see us offering Willy Wonka's golden ticket to people, they're like, What are you doing, guys? What has that got to do with the good news of God? That that is just to offer the fringe benefit to the gospel. Whereas the benefit of the gospel is God, and salvation is to be given to God. If we're not Trinitarian, we're not really going to offer that. So we should be Trinitarian because God is important, Islam is important, theology is important, Jesus is important, the cross is important, salvation is important, and then finally and seventhly, our motivations are important. Too much evangelism is birthed out of emptiness. We feel like our churches are too empty. So we go to the world and we say, come and fill us, right? We go, we go into the world in order to gain converts. Whereas biblically speaking, the reason we go into the world is to offer Christ. And the reason why I think we're empty and we're trying to suck in the world is because we have a dead, dry, non-Trinitarian account of God and the gospel and life in Christ. And therefore, we become transactional in all things, and therefore we just want to motivate a lot of activity to get out there and to fulfill a conversionist ministry. But what does it look like when we expressly center ourselves on the triune God? Richard Sibbs, a great Puritan thinker, said this. God's goodness is a communicative spreading goodness. He's really thinking about the life of the Trinity in this context. He says, if God had not a communicative spreading goodness, he would never have created the world. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were happy in themselves and enjoyed one another before the world was. But that God delights to communicate and spread his goodness. There had never been a creation nor a redemption. God uses his creatures not for defect of power, that he can do nothing without them, but for the spreading of his goodness. There is a Father loving his son in the joy of the Spirit, and there is an outgoing impulse to creation, and an outgoing impulse to redemption. And now as we have received Christ, he breathes on us the Holy Spirit, and out we go into the world to offer Christ not to gain converts. And the motivation is entirely different. God is a fountain of sending love, so said the missiologist David Bosch. And he said that because he was thinking Trinitarianly. In eternity, there are the missions of Son and Spirit. And therefore, God is always the missionary God. It's not that the church has a mission, it's that God's mission has a church. He has us and he sends us out in the stream of his sending love. It is so important for your motivation, therefore, to be Trinitarian. So there are seven reasons to be Trinitarian in our evangelism. We need to get God right. We need to engage Islam. We need to get our theology right. We need to get Jesus right. We need to get his cross right, we need to get salvation right, and we need to get our motivation right. Are there other reasons that I have missed? Why should we be Trinitarian? Let me know in the comments. And if you want to see a Trinitarian and explicitly Trinitarian gospel presentation, um, go to 321course.com. We start with the three Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We then move on to the two, the two atoms, and then there's union with Christ. That is the one. Check out 321course.com. It's entirely free. We'd love to know what you think about it. So why don't you leave a comment, tap like, share the video around the place, and subscribe to us so that we can see you on the next video. God bless.