Welcome everyone to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. We’ve lately been going through the Watchtower booklet of “Should You Believe In The Trinity?” We’ve been going through the section on the development of the doctrine of the Trinity and tonight, we’re going to look at the Watchtower question of why did God’s prophets not teach it?
The Watchtower begins saying this:
WHY, for thousands of years, did none of God’s prophets teach his people about the Trinity? At the latest, would Jesus not use his ability as the Great Teacher to make the Trinity clear to his followers? Would God inspire hundreds of pages of Scripture and yet not use any of this instruction to teach the Trinity if it were the “central doctrine” of faith?
You know what? These are great questions. I have some of my own to ask.
Why did God’s prophets not teach that the Messiah would have to be crucified?
Why did God’s prophets not teach that he would be raised from the dead?
Why did God’s prophets not teach about the practice of baptism?
Why did God’s prophets not teach about the New Testament church?
Why did God’s prophets not teach about the New Testament?
Why did God’s prophets not teach about the return of the Messiah after his leaving?
Why did God’s prophets not teach about the Watchtower’s 1914 generation?
We can imagine the Watchtower saying “Well these things were hinted at in the Old Testament but not explicitly taught.”
Well we can say the same thing about the Trinity.
In fact, it makes sense seeing as the Watchtower misunderstands the Trinity to be polytheistic. Israel’s great danger in the past was polytheism. What does the Watchtower expect? Was God supposed to say “Abraham. I am your friend. By the way, I’m also one God in three persons.”
To which Abraham would say “Um. What?”
Looking on it as a whole, God’s way of revealing it was best. Had he announced that he was going to come down Himself one day explicitly, then history would be quite different. Would the true followers have known Christ? Would they not have been instead trying to understand who the Son is in light of the Father instead of focusing on his ministry?
Remember, Jesus did not come to teach the Trinity. He came to bring God to the people and He did that in His own person. The Watchtower thinks that if something is to believed, it must be taught explicitly in both testaments.
That is, unless they believe it.
Are Christians to believe that centuries after Christ and after having inspired the writing of the Bible, God would back the formulation of a doctrine that was unknown to his servants for thousands of years, one that is an “inscrutable mystery” “beyond the grasp of human reason,” one that admittedly had a pagan background and was “largely a matter of church politics”?
Note how much language is loaded. We’ve already seen that this was not centuries after the coming of Christ. The church fathers have done that. Now have we seen Scripture yet? No. To be fair however, the reason we haven’t is because the Watchtower hasn’t even brought forward a single verse of Scripture to make their case.
One wonders also if the Watchtower thinks they have a complete handle on God seeing as since something is a mystery, it must not be true. Is their God also fully understandable by human reason? Well that must be a small God.
And as for admittedly pagan, note the admittedly part. Ripping quotations out of context is not an admission. This is especially so in light of the fact that some who are “admitting” this are anti-trinitarians. It would be like saying I’m admitting the new atheists have terrible arguments. Of course I am. However, what does that prove? Nothing in itself. Now if Richard Dawkins said it, that would be something.
The Watchtower is ready to say that it’s clear that the Trinity is a deviation. Amazingly, they did this without once looking at the Bible itself!
Well they’re finally getting ready to. We’ll be ready to engage them also.
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