There never was a time when the Father was not the Father, nor was there ever a time when the Son was not the Son. The eternal generation of the Son does not occur in time. It is simply a window into the eternal nature of God. It is a holy truth and one that must be treated with reverence and awe.
Social trinitarianism is a fad today and when you encounter it some big flashing red lights should go off. It is popular, it is novel, and it fits like a hand in glove into the spirit of the age. So, these are signs that one must proceed with caution. I want to offer some thoughts on some things to consider before you embrace social trinitarianism.
First, social trinitarianism is a departure from the theology symbolized in the Nicene Creed.
Many people today have an over-simplified and reductionistic understanding of what the Nicene Creed teaches. There is a tendency to think that the point of the Creed is to affirm that God is Father, Son, and Spirit over against a tendency to see God as only one in a numerical sense. Some can go so far as to see Nicene trinitarianism as a refutation of the Jewish understanding of God in the Old Testament. This drives a wedge between the testaments and can lead to anti-Semitism.
From a historical perspective, the idea that the fourth-century church needed a council in 325, followed by fifty years of intense debate, ending with another council in 381 in order to determine that God is three persons equal in glory and majesty and not a mere monolithic being is ludicrous. At the start of the fourth century, the churches around the Mediterranean Basin had been worshiping Father, Son, and Holy Spirit every Sunday in worship services for about 300 years. That was a starting point everyone took for granted. We all worship the Triune God.
So, you might think, if everyone was trinitarian what was all the fuss about? Well, the issue had to do with the question of whether the Son (and Spirit) was divine in exactly the same way and to the same extent as the Father or if there were degrees of divinity. Was the Son the first and greatest creature of the Father, like the Father in being, and thus worthy of our worship? This was a position taken by the Arians. So, it is important to understand that, in this sense, the Arians were trinitarian.
So, just being some kind of trinitarian is not enough. It is possible to be trinitarian and not be Nicene. The Arians denied that the Father and Son are homoousios – one in being. So, they were the wrong kind of trinitarian as far as the Nicene fathers were concerned.
The reason the Arian position was unacceptable to the Nicene fathers was that it denies the unity and oneness of God. In other words, it denies OT monotheism, which brings us to our second point.
Second, social trinitarianism does not take Old Testament monotheism with enough seriousness.
The church of the fourth century was stiving to be biblical in its doctrine of God and in order to do so they saw that we must do justice to both the Old and the New Testaments. We cannot have an interpretation of the NT revelation of the missions of the Son and Spirit that leads us to deny the Shema. We know that the whole thrust of the apostolic preaching is that Jesus Christ is the Messiah of Israel, the fulfillment of the OT, the climax of God’s self-revelation to Israel. So, the previous revelation God had given Israel could be deepened and expanded but it could never be contradicted or left behind by new revelation. So, however we understand the relationship of the Son and Spirit to the Father, we cannot accept any understanding in which the oneness of Yahweh, the God of Israel, is compromised in any way.
