What Does it Mean That Humans Are Made in the Image of God? with Gray Sutanto

Okay.

For those who want to dig more into the doctrine or the Christian beliefs about the Trinity, this idea of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I recorded an episode a couple of seasons ago with Christy Thornton, whose PhD is on that topic.

So if you guys want to dig back into that because I'm not going to major on the doctrine of the Trinity in this conversation.

But I do want to just pose one question to you, Gray, about that because I know there are some people who think, okay, the Nicene Creed, written let's say three or so hundred years after the events of Jesus' life, death, and claimed resurrection well after the writing of the New Testament, so the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life and the letters that were being sent around to New Testament period churches.

Some people will say, well, this idea of the Trinity was actually made up by Christians later on.

This is something that's kind of been concocted.

Some people have this sense that sure, Jesus was a charismatic teacher and maybe a prophet sent by God, but this idea that he was in fact fully God, as the creeds would testify, and also fully human, that's something that Folks came up, you know, a committee devised later on.

So curious for your thoughts on that, Gray, whether that's an accurate take or not.

That's a good question.

You know, we've got to remember that in the early church, this was the time before the printing press, before ease of access of travel.

This is before mass communication, before the internet, right? And so churches would have more piecemeal receptions of the Bible at the time.

And communication between churches is really difficult.

So to actually convene and to collect together a delegate committee to have a consensus document was hard work.

And it took a couple of generations for them to actually be able to do that, for the church to be in a peaceful condition enough that it was able to do that, that it would be able to, again, convene just people.

It's really hard to do that.

So I think we've got to be really gracious towards the early church.

It's hard work to summarize what the Bible says about this.

And I think that's exactly what the Nicene Creed is trying to do, is trying to summarize what the whole of the Bible says, taking it within their context, taking a look at it as a whole.

And what we're going to see when we take a look at it as a whole is that the Old Testament prefigures the doctrine of the Trinity, and the New Testament shows in clearer light that God is triune.

Even if the word Trinity isn't there, conceptually, it's definitely being taught.

Let me just show two examples from the life of Jesus.

Jesus' own baptism is a really good example of this.

where you have three different persons there.

You have the Father who says, this is my son in whom I'm well pleased, commissioning him.

You have Jesus himself who's being baptized.