churches—has produced many unseemly ideas about God that are
unsuitable for the Christian world, especially since that world could be
and ought to be a light revealing God and his unity to all the peoples and
nations in the four quarters of the earth.
All who live outside the Christian church, both Muslims and Jews, as
well as other non-Christians with whatever kind of worship, have rejected
Christianity solely because of its belief in three gods. Christian missionar-
ies know this. They are extremely careful not to publicize the trinity of
persons taught in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, because people
would go away laughing.
[ 2 ] The teaching that there have been three divine persons from eter-
nity has produced absurd, ludicrous, and silly mental images. In fact,
these mental images keep coming up in any of us who continue to
believe the words of this teaching. They rise up through our ears and eyes
into the visualization in our thoughts.
The images are that God the Father sits high above our heads. The
Son sits by his right hand. The Holy Spirit sits in front of them both,
listening to them and then immediately running around the planet dis-
pensing the gifts of justification according to their decision. The Holy
Spirit instills those gifts, turning children of anger into children of grace
and the damned into the chosen.
I challenge learned clergy and educated laity to check and see whether
they harbor any other picture besides this one in their minds. This pic-
ture, you see, flows in spontaneously from this teaching (see the memo-
rable occurrence above at § 16 ).
[ 3 ] This teaching also leads people to conjecture what the three
talked about before the world was created. Did they talk about creating
the world? Did they talk about predestining people and justifying them,
as the Supralapsarians would have us believe? Did they talk about
redemption? For that matter, what have they been saying to each other
sincethe world was created? What is the Father saying, with his power
and authority of assigning spiritual credit and blame? What is the Son
saying, with his power of mediating? This teaching also leads some to
conjecture that it belongs to the Son’s mercy to assign people spiritual
credit or blame, which is the same as choosing them for hell or heaven,
since the Son generally intercedes for all people and specifically inter-
cedes for some individuals. Toward these individuals the Father has an
attitude of grace because he is moved with love for the Son, having seen
the Son’s anguish on the wood of the cross.
§183 the holy spirit & divine action 255