Roger Olson asks: How important is the doctrine of the Trinity?

Theologian Roger Olson asks, How important is the doctrine of the Trinity?

He seems to hold, with many others, that

…the doctrine of the Trinity is crucial, essential, indispensable to a robust and healthy Christian view of God.

But,

The problem is, of course, that many, perhaps most, Christians have little or no understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. And they couldn’t care less.

Indeed. I suggest that Dr. Olson should consider this. Do most Christians believe that Jesus was the Messiah? That he was raised bodily from the dead? That he did many miracles, showing that God was with and in him? That he now reigns, “at the right hand” of God? Why are these beliefs universal among genuine believers? Because these have been divinely revealed, and because (to understate the case) God is a competent revealer. Why, in comparison, does the Trinity fare so poorly – that is, why do so many people who are indisputably born-again Christians not believe the creedal Trinity claims? Could it be that they have not been divinely revealed?

Dr. Olson comes close to agreeing, or so it seems to me (read the whole post at the link above).

My struggle is with modalists (Sabellians) many of who seem genuinely confused about the doctrine of the Trinity. Some of them I know simply cannot seem to grasp how the doctrine of the Trinity is not belief in three gods. I do not have that problem. My problem is with understanding how a one-person God could be eternally love by nature and even how such a “monadic God” would not need a world for self-realization.

If I understand him, Olson appeals, none too clearly, to one-self and negative mysterian ideas to ward off tritheism. But note that he seems to affirm a metaphysical intuition here, philosophical conviction, as a main or central source of his belief in a three-self Trinity. He thinks that a perfect being couldn’t be a self (a “one-person God”). Let me suggest that that problem can be solved, or rather dissolved.

Moving on,

With Brunner I affirm that the doctrine of the Trinity is not “gospel.” Nor is it part of the gospel we preach. It is a human construct and a defensive one.

If so, why think that improvements in this theoretical “defense” would have ceased about 381 A.D.? Though he is learned in the history of trinitarian theories, I have the impression that Dr. Olson thinks something like that.

That God is triune, however, is necessarily implied by the gospel we preach. The biblical story necessarily includes the existence of Father, Son and Holy Spirit and the unity of God as one God.

Necessarily implied? If so, then we must wonder why no one deduced this implication for so long – until the mid to late 300s, in my view. Either the New Testament gospel implies the creedal Trinity formulas only by a long, convoluted chain of reasoning (so that it took so long), or it simply does not imply those formulas. In my view, it demonstrably does not imply them.