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By Fred Sanders on Francis Schaeffer on the trinity ...

The first point in Schaeffer’s Bible study on the Trinity is that the God of the Bible is personal: God has plans which he considers in advance and then carries out with purpose (Eph. 1:4). Not only does he think but he takes action, real action in space and time (Gen. 1:1). And not only does he think and act, but he feels. He loves the world (John 3:16). “Love is an emotion. Thus the God who exists is personal. He thinks, acts, and feels, three distinguishing marks of personality. He is not an impersonal force, nor an all-inclusive everything. He is personal. When He speaks to us, He says “I” and we can answer Him “You.””

One of Schaeffer’s favorite phrases for the personhood of God was that he was “personal on the high order of Trinity,” and the next step in his basic trinitarian Bible study is to state all the biblical evidence about unity and diversity in the God of the Bible. The Old Testament teaches, and the New Testament reaffirms, that there is only one God (Deut. 6:4; James 2:19). “But,” Schaeffer goes on, “the Bible also teaches that this one God exists in three distinct persons.” His first line of evidence for this claim is the divine plurals used in the language of the Old Testament: “Who will go for us” (Isa. 6:8), “Let us make man in our image” (Gen. 1:26), “Let us go down and confuse their language” (Gen. 11:7). “In this verse, as in in 1:26, the persons of the Trinity are in communication with each other.”

These Old Testament plurals, it seems to me, would not be enough to prove the Triunity of the one God all by themselves. They are odd enough to require some explanation: Why would a consistently monotheistic revelation use words like we, us, and ours? And they might point to a certain fullness or richness of God’s inner life. But solid trinitarianism has to wait until the Son and the Spirit are directly revealed in the events of the New Testament. What Schaeffer primarily wants us to learn from these passages, however, is not triunity itself but the fact that it pre-exists creation. Combined with a few New Testament insights (”you loved me before the foundation of the world,” said Jesus to his Father in John 17:24), these plurals show that “Communication and love existed between the persons of the Trinity before the creation.” And that matters a lot to Schaeffer, because it means that when God reveals himself as Father, Son, and Spirit, he is revealing who has always been.

When he turns to the New Testament, Schaeffer highlights the baptism of Christ (Matt. 3:16-17) because of the clarity with which each of the three persons is shown there. He also points to a few of the passages where all three persons are named in a single verse: Matt. 28:19; John 15:26; I Peter 1:2.

With this biblical doctrine of God as his foundation, Schaeffer’s soteriology is explicitly trinitarian. Under the heading of salvation, the Trinity is not the very first thing Schaeffer teaches. That priority is reserved for a classic Protestant statement of the biblical doctrine of salvation by grace alone through faith alone. But from that all-important point of entry, the very next thing Schaeffer wants to say is that what this justification introduces us into is a new relationship, or web of relationships, to the Triune God:

This new relationship with the triune God is, then, the second of the blessings of salvation, justification being the first. This new relationship, as we have seen, is threefold:

1. God the Father is the Christian’s Father.
2. The only begotten Son of God is our Savior and Lord, our prophet, priest and king. We are identified and united with Him.
3. The Holy Spirit lives in us and deals with us. He communicates to us the manifold benefits of redemption.

In summary, commenting on 2 Cor 13:14, Schaeffer says “The work of each of the three persons is important to us. Jesus died to save us, the Father draws us to Himself and loves us, and the Holy Spirit deals with us.”