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PreachingToday.com: What are the current debates or conversations regarding the Trinity that preachers need to be sensitive to as they preach on this subject?

J. I. Packer: The big issue preachers need to be sensitive to is, evangelicals don't talk about the Trinity, and pastors don't teach their people about the Trinity. We have the idea—one we've taken for granted and never examined—that we can get on without any knowledge about the Trinity. That is a problem.

What are some issues regarding the Trinity that are especially important as we face a postmodern, or post-Christian, culture?

The postmodern/post-Christian culture of our time has jettisoned the Trinity just as it has jettisoned the rest of supernatural Christianity. As a result, what it embraces is some sort of syncretism—this idea that all religions are more or less the same, all religions can be melded together in a sort of general, unfocused religiosity of mind. And as long as we retain this religiosity as a feeling and decency as a lifestyle, well, we're all sharers in whatever good things Christianity once offered—call it salvation if you like. But everybody's in it together.

And so there's no sense that people need to be born again. There's no sense that Christians are different altogether at root level from non-Christians in society. It's this blending and melding that we have to battle, because it isn't true. It doesn't match what God tells us in his Word. In fact, it will lead people into the delusion of supposing they're all right when they're all wrong.

Why do you think some preachers shy away from the topic of the Trinity?

I think it's because most of them have been taught the Trinity as something that Christians are supposed to spit out as part of their orthodoxy without needing to understand it very well. Preachers know that the people in the pew aren't interested in that sort of lumber for the mind, and so they try to dodge it. They're afraid their listeners will be bored if the truth of the Trinity is focused on in any way at all.

What are the essential truths about the Trinity that must accompany our preaching of the gospel of Christ? To put that another way, how is it that when we preach the gospel we are unavoidably preaching about the Trinity?

Well, that is how the gospel comes to us in the New Testament. I like the way you just expressed it. In preaching about the gospel, or in preaching the gospel directly, we must proclaim the Trinity as part of our message.

That is exactly what the Lord Jesus did, in fact, when Nicodemus came to him by night. Jesus told him about the kingdom of God, which Nicodemus and all his Jewish peers were anxious to be a part of. And he explained that, in order to enter the kingdom of God, you've got to be born again of the Spirit of God. And in order to be born again of the Spirit of God, you must attend to the message about Jesus and learn to trust him as your sin-bearer. This idea corresponds to the brass snake that Moses put at the top of a pole in the middle of their camp in the wilderness. The Israelites were to look at it when they were bitten by snakes. When they looked, the snakebite was healed. Well, that's a picture of what happens in a human life when people learn to look to Jesus.

Still, the message involves all three persons—the Father, whose kingdom it is; the Son, who was going to die on the cross and thus match the serpent on the pole; and the Holy Spirit, who brings you to new birth. And I would stress that you cannot preach the gospel without that Trinitarian frame of reference.

For example, if you leave out the Holy Spirit, you'll give people the idea it's entirely up to them whether or not they come into the kingdom, even though it's actually a work of God changing the heart that is needed to bring them in. If you leave out the cross, you're buying into this post-Christian ideology of religiosity—the religious feeling, unfocused but sobering to the heart—which people mistake for real religion. And of course you have to speak of God and his kingdom, because that's what it's all about: a relationship with a God who in fact turns out—at least, when you look with the guidance of Scripture to help you—to be three persons in unity.

This unity is beyond our understanding but is displayed in the work of the gospel and the message of the gospel. The simplest way to explain it to anybody is to say that God is a team—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—working together in all God's works, but now particularly through the gospel for the salvation of us needy sinners.

We know the Trinity is impossible for our finite minds to understand, but is it also offensive to human sensibilities? Do we resist the idea of the Trinity like we resist the cross?

Yes, I think from one standpoint it is offensive to the modern mind. The postmodern mind takes for granted that human beings can understand everything. The human mind is the measure of everything that's real. If it's real, it's intelligible. And if we can't understand it fully, then it isn't real. So the truth of the Trinity does offend the Western mind at that point.

I say the Western mind, because you don't have this particular problem if you're talking to Hindus or Buddhists. They've never been infected with the enlightenment assumption that everything real is intelligible in this way. But here in the West, just about everybody takes in that idea with their mother's milk. And so people get very uptight with the thought that there is more to God than our minds can grasp, and therefore there comes a time when we have to admit our ignorance and let God tell us what the truth is. In other words, listen to the Bible and stop arguing. That is a big modern stumbling block.

My way around this is to say what I was beginning to say in answer to your last question about the essential truths of the Trinity. Look at the gospel and you will see there is a divine team effecting all that the gospel effects. The Father sent the Son to take away our sin on the cross. The Son sends the Holy Spirit at the Father's will to renew our hearts. So Christians are people who know the ministry of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in their own lives. And the doctrine of the Trinity is simply the formal way of stating, "Yes, that's the divine team that I'm talking about—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working together for my salvation and the salvation of all who put faith in Jesus."

When we think about preaching on the Trinity, one of the first things that may come to mind is the doctrinal distinctions that have been so important in church history. What part should those distinctions play in our weekly preaching service?

I don't think they should play much of a part, directly, because I think those were debates from the early Christian centuries about the nature of God. But those debates assume the subject for thought and discussion should be the nature of God. I believe the question of the inner nature of God should only be approached in terms of clarity about the language of the gospel. Once you are clear that the Christian gospel is the message of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working together for your salvation and mine, then you can say, "We don't claim to understand how the Father, Son, and Spirit are together as three persons and yet one God in their own inner being. But what the Bible helps us to understand is how the team fulfills its ministry towards us sinners."

The truth of the Trinity is present in the gospel as a corollary. It's something that is naturally inferred by the gospel rather than the first thing you try to tell people before getting on to salvation from sin through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working together.

That, I think, is what makes it so hard for the many clergy who have difficulty on Trinity Sunday. They think that, in talking about the Trinity, they must leave behind for the moment talk about the gospel. And I believe that is incorrect. If we would just say to our people, "Look at the gospel and you'll see the Trinity," then the problem would be solved straightaway.

PreachingToday.com: Concrete metaphors explaining the nature of the Trinity invariably break down and perhaps mislead us as much as they teach us. So preaching at an abstract level is the first challenge we face. Is there a way to overcome this? Or is it simply a reality that we must challenge people to deal with some of these abstract ideas?

J. I. Packer: If the approach I'm trying to spell out is right, then the question doesn't need to be put quite that way. It's certainly true that all the classic illustrations of the Trinity break down. You only have to look at them twice to realize that. The Trinity is not like water, which at different temperatures can be liquid, solid, or steam. The Trinity is not like a cloverleaf, where you have the three little leaves making one big leaf. The Trinity is not like a cube, which has a number of sides but nonetheless is one cube.

What's so bad about all those illustrations is they lose sight, from the word go, of the truth that the Trinity is three persons—persons who are more personal than we are, persons whose personhood ought to be highlighted and shouted from the housetops. Neither the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Spirit is inanimate or a thing. Each of the three is he.

You have to say "he" because that conveys to people's minds straightaway the image of a stronger Person than the word she would do. It isn't that you're giving sex to either the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit either way. It's that you're using the strongest personal pronoun that you've got to express the thought that here is the strongest personhood that we've ever confronted, stronger and fuller and more thrustful than your personhood or my personhood or anybody's personhood. We talk about strong personalities. Well, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are way stronger than any of our human strong personalities. God is the Creator, after all.

If we have to use a formula, the best formula is that he—that's God—is they; and they—that's the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—are he. Three persons, one God. But you're highlighting the fact that we are talking about persons. Because the illustrations don't catch any of that, I would say throw them away.

I've often been asked: What then do you teach kids in Sunday school? (Which is where these illustrations are commonly used.) And I say, when they can begin to understand this at age two or three, start telling them about three friends who, in a wonderful way they can't understand—and Dad and Mom can't understand and nobody can understand, yet it's true—are one Being. Teach them to think of what the Father does for us. Teach them to think of the Lord Jesus as the friend who sticks closer than a brother—the friend who has saved you and is saving you, taking you along the path that leads to a heavenly home. And teach them to think about the Holy Spirit, the helper inside. Here they are: your three friends, your one God.

It's important to focus on the relationships between the three.

I think children can understand that. They know what it's like to have a person coming alongside to help them and serve them and lead them and direct them in one way or another. And if people teach that way, the need for unhelpful illustrations simply dissolves away, and you don't at any point need to run into abstractions. In fact, talking about the three friends means turning your back on abstractions just as it's turning your back on impersonal illustrations. So to answer the latter part of your question, abstraction doesn't enter into it. It's the doctrine of the three heavenly friends.

When we preach on the Trinity, we can talk about their collective unity and relationships, and we can talk about the individual members of the Trinity and their uniqueness as persons. What are the unique opportunities of preaching on the Trinity collectively?

The way into preaching on the Trinity collectively is to pick up and run with the idea of the Team and go on from there. In all human teams, of course, the players are separate persons, even though they work as a team. But in this particular team exercise we're talking about—in conversion, in just about every experiential reality of the Christian life—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all involved. The New Testament says so.

That's the way to take off, and then we can stress the fact that we are not tritheists, because the Bible all the way through insists that there's only one God. That's as much New Testament as it is Old. The New Testament all the way through holds to the relational pattern of the Son doing the Father's will, the Spirit doing the will of the Father and the Son, and the three being together in every stage of everyone's Christian life. But each is still distinct in the ministry that he has to the Christian, and in the relation that he bears to the other two persons.

And there are plenty of Scriptural texts that can be used to illustrate this. The Son completely and at every point does the will of the Father, according to John 6. He came into the world because the Father sent him, and lives in closest communion with the Father every moment. The end of the prologue in the first chapter of John's Gospel says the Son is in the Father's bosom, as the Greek is translated; the English Standard Version says the Father's embrace. Therefore, the Son, who is in the Father's embrace, has expounded and revealed the Father—that is, shown us fully what he's like because the Son is the split image of the Father.

You've got John four times in the early chapters of his Gospel speaking of the Son as the only Son. That phrase "only begotten"—as we now realize better, I think, than some of the earlier Christian theologians did—is a phrase that in Greek has the emphasis on the only. The idea is to emphasize the special affection that a father gives to an only son as distinct from one of a whole range of sons.

Well, you can preach whole sermons on the uniquely close relationship between the Father and the Son, and that is one side of the doctrine of the Trinity. Or, you can preach a whole range of sermons on the relation of the Holy Spirit to both the Father and the Son. There are a half a dozen texts you can pick up for this in the Lord Jesus' farewell discourse in John 14–16. He says that he will ask the Father, and the Father will send the Holy Spirit; that he will send the Holy Spirit; and that "when he comes, he will glorify me." He'll take of what's mine and show it to you.

And he will come as the second paraclete. Jesus is the first paraclete. Now, paraclete is a Greek word for which there isn't a single English equivalent. It does mean all the different things the translations offer as renderings—comforter and advocate and helper and supporter, and there are two or three more. Paraclete, paraklētos in the Greek, actually does mean all those things lumped together. Now, says Jesus, "I will ask the Father, and he'll send you another paraclete." The implication is, he is the first. So the one who comes to replace him will carry on his paraclete ministry. So one can preach in detail about the way in which the Holy Spirit carries on the personal ministry to needy persons, which the Lord Jesus began in his earthly life.

In the same way, one can collect texts about the Father sending the Spirit of his Son. Galatians 4 immediately comes to mind: Because you are sons—sons of God by adoption—God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, so that you cry—by instinct, as a spontaneous expression of what's in your heart—Father, Abba. It's the intimate family word for father in the first-century Jewish family.

So the Holy Spirit in your heart has so changed your nature that that's what is natural for you now. When I'm teaching about the new birth, I tell people one of the signs you're born again is that now it's natural for you to treat the God whom you once acknowledged, but didn't yet know, as your Father. You call on him as Father; you look to him and trust him as Father in the way that it's natural for a young child to do with his or her earthly father.

So it's important to focus on the relationships between the three: the Father and the Son, the Father and the Spirit, the Son and the Spirit, the Son and the Father, the Father and the Son together sending the Spirit, and the Spirit appearing therefore as both the Spirit of the Father and the Spirit of Christ. There's just so much there in the actual Scriptural texts to tease out and explain. It shouldn't be difficult for us preachers to say some really illuminating gospel things about the three persons of the Trinity.

PreachingToday.com: Is preaching about the Trinity essentially about describing relationships?

J. I. Packer: Yes, describing relationships and describing the relationships within the reality of gospel grace at every stage. As I said earlier, conversion is one stage. It's a process, and there is a lot to say about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the process of conversion.

Sanctification is another stage. It's seeking to do the will of the Father in the knowledge that the Lord Jesus is with you always—he is beside you to encourage you. And the Holy Spirit is in your heart to strengthen you and enable you to understand what all this requires of you, what you need to do. So it's the Father, Son, and Spirit together.

In Christian witness, it's the same story. The Father and the Son both send us to be the Lord's witnesses in the world. And they promise that the Holy Spirit in us will be prompting us about what to say in witness situations. And we witness to Christ in the power of the Spirit of Christ. We witness to the Father in the power of the Spirit who comes from the Father and the Son. It's a Trinitarian reality.

All the power and all the ability to witness, along with the summons to do it, comes from God. So, at the end of a witnessing or preaching situation—which are just two instances of the same thing, really—every sermon should be a witness to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit from the Scripture that's being expounded and taught. When we see that the witness was done well, we thank the Lord because it was the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit who made it happen the way it should have happened. And if we see, in retrospect, that there was anything inadequate about the sermon or anything inadequate about the personal witness—well, we confess that. We ask for more wisdom and more strength to do it better next time around, and on we go. But the witnessing situation is a Trinitarian situation.

In fact, all the calls to action in the Christian life, whatever they are, are Trinitarian situations. The Father says, "This is what you have to do." The Lord Jesus confirms that and stands by you, walks with you as you seek to do it. And the Holy Spirit within empowers and enlightens you so that you can see what needs to be said and done. And you find yourself able, in some measure, to tackle it.

The whole Christian life is a Trinitarian business.

People ask me, "How are preachers ever to get round to preaching about the Trinity?" And I say, if we preach the Bible properly, the question really should be, "How can a preacher ever stop preaching about the Trinity?" Because the whole Christian life is a Trinitarian business.

We've talked about preaching on the Trinity collectively. What are the unique opportunities of preaching on the individual members of the Trinity? Especially since there really is no way to talk about any member without talking about their relations to the other?

Well, that is why it seems to me a real preacher can't stop talking about the Trinity. You can't talk about any of the three in isolation from the other two, and we shouldn't try. After all, the very names Father and Son are telling us that. The Father is so called because, in the first instance, he is the Father of the Son. It's an extension of that when he declares himself the Father of Christians.

By the way, I don't like talking about members of the Trinity. It makes it sound as if the Trinity is a club. I'd much rather stick to talking about persons within the Trinity, or persons who make up the Trinity, something like that.

Getting back to the names of the Father and Son, well, let's realize we call him the Son because the first person of the Trinity calls him the Son, and he is the second person of the Trinity. And the Bible pattern for the ideal father/son relationship is modeled on that. The Son will be respectful of, and obedient to, his Father. He will love his Father, and he will serve his Father. You've got that theme running all the way through both Testaments. It's ideal sonship. We don't always find it in this post-Christian world, but that's the ideal.

And then the Holy Spirit. Again, you look at the name. You meet "spirit" in the Old Testament. It's a word that originally meant "air moving with energy." Blowing out the candles on your birthday cake is an exuding of spirit from your lungs. The wind is called spirit because it blows. Like Jesus said to Nicodemus: The wind blows where it wants to blow.

In Ezekiel's valley of dry bones, the word for the wind is the word spirit. And the Bible translators are never quite sure whether to render God's command to Ezekiel, "Preach to the wind and tell the wind to come and put new life into these dry bones," or whether it should be "spirit" so that the reader understands right from the start that this is a picture of the Spirit of God animating dry bones.

Leaving that particular problem aside, the Spirit is the enlivening breath of the Father. It powerfully changes the situations on which that breath is blown by the Father. Indeed, in the Old Testament the logic is simply that the Spirit—the breath of God breathed out in power—is like the arm of the Lord extended in power.

Of course, there's no thought in the Old Testament directly of the Spirit as a third person. That thought comes when Jesus talks directly about another paraclete: "He will glorify me, for he will take of mine and show it to you." Jesus is unambiguously talking about another person, and so does the whole of the rest of the New Testament. In the Book of Acts and all the letters and the Book of Revelation; they're all clear that the Holy Spirit is distinct from the Father and the Son. They learned the lesson.

I'm saying this because the three names—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (holy breath, holy wind, holy energy)—they're all pointing to the distinct personhood of the three as well as pointing to their own relations to each other. Augustine, in his enormous work on the Trinity, is very clear and emphatic that, in terms of personal description, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are identical. None of them is God of a weaker strain or a different strain from the other. But you distinguish them by the relations they bear to each other, which are permanent and which are distinct in each case.

I think that is the proper way to think of it. And if you think of it that way, you'll find that you're right in the heart of the New Testament, because that's how the New Testament thinks of it. How else can one say it? The New Testament takes you straight into the truth of the Trinity. Actually, it doesn't let you get away from it.

The thing is, though, that Christians these days—of course, we are Christians in a non-Christian society, and to a certain extent we've got our backs to the wall all the time in the post-Christian West—we are encouraged by our preachers, by our teachers, by our devotional books, and perhaps by our own innate self-centeredness to read the Bible asking only: What do we find here of devotional value for my life today? And we don't read the Bible looking for the first thing that the Bible was written to set before us: namely, the reality of God in action fulfilling his plan of salvation.

And because we're not looking for what it tells us about the Father, the Son, and the Spirit—the three in one, one in three—we miss it. And then we feel that it's a special subject that has to be addressed in a special way because people are ignoring it. But it doesn't have to be addressed in a special way. I've said it in all my answers today: it's the structure of the gospel that addresses it, and you cannot proclaim the gospel without addressing it if you understand what you're doing.

J.I. Packer is Board of Governors' professor of theology at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia. He has written many books, including Knowing God (IVP, 1993) and In My Place Condemned He Stood (Crossway, 2007), and also served as general editor for the English Standard Version Bible.