the evolution of my views on the Trinity – part 1

Note: I’m re-posting and lightly revising this series… and finally finishing it!

A number of people are curious about my own views on the Trinity. My encyclopedia entry (paperback) is by design neutral, and like most philosophers I habitually decline to expose more to enemy fire than is necessary. If the argument at hand doesn’t depend on claim X, I’m probably not going to mention X, even if I think X is true and important. This is more than bum-protection – though it is that; this kind of discipline helps discussions to proceed cleanly on topic, without distractions. And it keeps the posing and grandstanding to a minimum. Yet others can perceive this way of writing, understandably, as evasive.

In this series I’m going to get a bit more personal. This will take me a while, but I’m determined to go up to the present day. 

My parents got into the Charismatic movement in the 1960s. Don’t imagine quasi-hippies – far from it. Not the Jesus-people kind of Charismatics – no, the suit and tie and almost-beehive hairdo kind. The people would look more like the denizens of, say, the Lawrence Welk Show. But with hymns. I owned a lot of clip-on ties and bow ties in those days.

Christ as Life church was founded by an unusual fellow who claimed to have an apostolic ministry. We knew him as “Brother Bill”. It was a small, close-knit church, on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Out where the land was cheap, the weeds were high, and the junebugs were plentiful, they built a new building. We went there twice on Sunday, and often on Tuesday and Thursday nights as well. Everyone knew everyone, and my dad was the chief hymnster on the piano. People raised their hands, and sang in tongues when the songs were over. But they tolerantly let little scamps like me play among the pews with baseball cards and go to the bathroom at least once every service out of boredom. Despite some similarities, we weren’t Pentecostals; services lacked that particular brand of excitement. We didn’t believe in falling down, rolling in the aisles, or any of that Benny Hinn type of stuff. There was considerable goofy legalism in the church; forbidden were rock music, not dressing up for church, long hair on men (or women!), pants on women, drinking, smoking, and apparently for awhile, wearing the color red! Oh yeah, and once we participated in busting up and burning some KISS records. 

Heck, I’d still do that, but now on grounds of musical quality! 🙂 Dancing was no good too… except for polkas! I dimly remember attending a few of those when I was very small – not at church, of course. Yes, we were cool.

On the positive side, I remember that around the start of each school year, they would line up all the school kids, and one by one each kid would go through several groups of 4-6 people, with each group laying their hands on the kid and praying for God’s blessings for that year. I remember some people saying some very encouraging things to me there, and coming out the end of the prayer gauntlet feeling invigorated.

I got saved when I was seven, going on eight. I was baptized in August 1977 in an outdoor pool at the neighbor’s house, which I think was really a big round metal watering trough from a ranch. Some family friends who had been Sunday school teachers of mine gave me a plaque that day, which I still have somewhere. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.” (Is. 26:3) At some later point they prayed for me to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, but I did not speak in tongues. Didn’t know what to make of that, but didn’t sweat it much.

What, growing up here, did I think about the Trinity? I can safely say that I didn’t think of it at all. It was an entirely non-creedal church, and we never recited anything in the services. Sermons were all Bible teaching, or what passed for it. There was a lot of talk of “the Lord” (as in the New Testament), but I never wondered whether this referred to Jesus, to God, or to both (there being one and the same). I do remember mildly puzzling at some point over the song we called the Doxology, which ends “God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity!” As best as I can recall (we left the church when I was 12), the church was very anti-intellectual. It wasn’t that they talked theology but left the Trinity out; rather, I don’t think they ever really got theological (or in any way theoretical) at all. They were about spiritually, supernaturally discerning stuff. Whatever I learned, I wasn’t able to discern that Chick tracts and comic books were off the wall – had a good collection of those. I think my parents confiscated the comic book about how the Jesuits infiltrated and corrupted the NIV translation and killed Abe Lincoln. And the one about Satanists sacrificing people too. But I digress.

Eventually the church mostly broke up, as I understand it, over claims that the pastor’s wife was manipulating things behind the scenes. Being a kid, the personal relationships in the core of the church were really over my head.

The church we landed in was very different…