For many Christians, I think the Trinity is doctrinal baggage. I hate to say that, because the doctrine of the Trinity is a beautiful doctrine, a beautiful teaching about how God is and how the Bible talks about him. I will say, it is difficult to understand, and I don’t even think we can fully understand it, but for many people, it even seems contradictory.

I want to talk about that today, is the doctrine of the Trinity contradictory? Some people, especially non-Christians, would say yes. Some Christians even say yes, and they’re fine with that, and I think that’s extremely problematic. Often the confusion results from people saying that God is three in one. He’s three persons in one person, or he’s three beings in one being. You know what? If that were what the doctrine of the Trinity taught, that would be a contradiction.

The doctrine of the Trinity is that God exists as three coequal persons in one divine being. There are three persons in one being, not three persons in one person, not three beings in one being: three persons in one being. This is not a contradiction. A contradiction is a formal type of thing. People can’t just say, “Well, that’s a contradiction,” and not be able to substantiate that claim.

When someone says a certain belief is a contradiction, ask them to explain what they mean. Because unless their contradiction is in the form of “something is said to be this thing and not this thing at the same time,” it’s not a contradiction. Because to be a contradiction means to break the law of non-contradiction—one of the three laws of logic. That law simply says that “something cannot be what it is and what it is not at the same time and in the same way.”

God cannot be three in the same way that he is one. He’s not. He’s not three in being and one in being. He’s three in person and one in being. That is not actually a logical contradiction. Is it hard to understand? Yeah. I’ll give you that. It’s not a contradiction. That makes a world of difference.

We’ll talk about why I don’t think it should surprise us that it’s hard for us to understand that later. Now, why do Christians actually believe this thing? I’ve defined it extremely briefly: The doctrine that God is three persons in one divine being all have always existed. None were created, all are co-eternal, all are equal in power, and might, and glory. All of those things. That’s a doctrine of the Trinity. Why do Christians believe that?

Well, the Bible is full of teaching that there is one God. For instance, Deuteronomy 6, “Listen, O Israel, the Lord is our God. The Lord is one.” Jesus actually says in John 10 that “the Father and I are one.” There is this oneness here. That claim is extremely controversial, at least it was back then. Because Jesus isn’t claiming that he and the Father are the same, he are saying they are of the same “type of thing.” “The Father and I are one thing.” The actual underlying Greek grammar supports that type of idea. Not that they are identical, but they are of the same thing, that they are both God.

We even see other places in the Gospels where Jesus claims to be the Son of God, and the Jews rightly understand that he is claiming to be equal with God, to be the same type of thing as God. That he’s claiming to be God. We see this oneness, but we also see distinct persons as is evidenced by Jesus being God, and yet, the Father being God. Yet, Jesus is not the Father.

Then the Holy Spirit comes along sent by Jesus and the Father, and he is fully God. He is divine also. We see that there is one God, and there are many passages that speak to this. We see that Jesus is God; he claims equality with the Father who is also God, and yet, we see that Jesus is not the Father in the same way that the Father is not the Spi…

Most of the topics we talk about here on Unapologetic are geared towards equipping you to talk with people who are not Christians about the truth of the Gospel. But sometimes I think it's worthwhile to talk about how we should converse with others who are Christians about our Christian convictions. Because we often have different convictions than other people who are still Christians.

There's this interesting phenomenon that occurs in our Christian subculture sometimes where, if you're not in Christianity, and you say something someone doesn't like, or you have a moral point of view, they might call you a bigot or hateful or something like that. In Christianity, we take our terms from 2,000 years ago, and we might call someone a Pharisee.

To people outside of this discussion, there's often little knowledge of what a Pharisee is. But I think, even inside of Christianity, we have used that term as the analogous term of bigot or hateful because it shuts people up. Because no one wants to be called a Pharisee, right? If you pull that term out, you can get someone to back off of their point of view, back off of the statement they're trying to make, because no one wants to be called a Pharisee.

Personally, I've seen this term being used in the last week or so. You've got some people who are critiquing Disney for redoing Beauty and the Beast with an overtly gay scene. They're talking about this on social media and online, and other people are like, "Well you're being such a Pharisee." Or how about the movie The Shack, which is a movie portrayal of the book with the same title, which is coming out. There are many theological issues in this book and hence in the movie.

I think there's a legitimate concern about people seeing this movie which intends to teach you something about God. Don't be mistaken. It intends to teach something about God even though it's fiction. What it teaches about God is not accurate, so this movie can mislead people. I personally find it very hard to read history and think about history in a history book in a different way than I've seen it in movies. Movies are a persuasive medium.

But as people have critiqued The Shack, other Christians have said, "Well quite being such a Pharisee about things." How should we think about this? Let's talk about what a Pharisee is, actually.

The Pharisees were an ancient Jewish sect, and they were distinguished by their strict observance to traditional and written Jewish law. They thought of themselves as very pious people, and others thought of them and regarded them as very pious people.

For an example of this, the Old Testament law mandated fasting on only one day, the Day of Atonement, but the Pharisees actually fasted twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays. Once wasn't good enough for them. They had to be more pious than that. You'll notice as you read the Gospels, that oftentimes they're the ones praying overtly and in front of everyone. They have their own laws, their own code of conduct that they've added onto the Jewish law. They tried to be very pious people.

Now on its own, doing those things isn't necessarily bad. But the term also kind of has a second connotation. It has this connotation of being a self-righteous person, of being a hypocrite. In fact, Jesus calls the Pharisees whitewashed tombs. He says, "Woe to you Pharisees, whitewashed tombs." In other words, you look good on the outside and you are dead on the inside. He also calls them sons of vipers. The critiques go on and on and on. So, no one wants to be called a Pharisee. No one wants to be put in that group of people that Jesus so strongly, consistently condemned.

But I think we need to be clear on something. The problem with the Pharisees wasn't the fact that they followed moral…

Before we get started today, I would just like to point out that this is our hundredth episode of the Unapologetic podcast. (Technically, it's the 101st. We started at episode zero but this is the hundredth “real” episode of the podcast.)

For those of you who have been along for this journey spanning two years now, thank you. For those of you who are new, thank you. Thanks for the feedback and the questions and the encouragement, I appreciate it and I hope this podcast continues to be an encouragement to you and a strengthener for your faith as we all endeavor to be faithful representatives of Christ in our culture wherever God has placed us.

Speaking of how we can faithfully represent Jesus and the gospel, let's talk today about what happens to those people in other countries perhaps or even in our own who have had no access to the gospel, who haven't heard the gospel and then die.

Well, we first have to acknowledge that this is a difficult question. For many of us, it's going to involve evaluating our feelings in light of Scripture and it's going to perhaps require some uncomfortable conclusions or at least thought processes to get there. A question I want to use to start out our time together thinking about this is, why do people go to hell?

How you answer that question will have a lot to do with how you understand what happens to people who have never heard the gospel. Now, when I ask people this question, sometimes I'll get an answer like, "Well, they reject Jesus," or they'll say, "They don't accept the gospel." Both of these answers have something in common. They presuppose that what makes you go to hell is a rejection of God's grace or somehow God has to extend this grace to you and it's only the rejection of that, that makes God just in sentencing you to hell.

What does the Bible say? There are many passages that speak to this but we're going to look at just a couple. Romans 3:23 says, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." Romans 6:23 says, "For the wages of sin, (the payout of that sin) is death." That would be a spiritual death, and physical death als. These are multiple usages of the word death in Scripture.

We see that people are punished because of their sin. There are many passages in Scripture that make this very explicitly clear. People are punished justly by a pure, just and yet loving God because of their sin. If we were to answer the question, "Why do people go to hell?" It's not because of a rejection of the gospel. It's because of their sin. They're not found righteous before a holy and blameless God. He can't accept them into his presence in that way. Ultimately (just a jump to the end of the story right) that's why we need to be clothed in the alien righteousness of Jesus—a foreign righteousness that gets credited to us at salvation. That's why we need Jesus as righteousness, because ours doesn't cut it.

The issue isn't fundamentally a belief in God or a disbelief in God. It's a righteousness/unrighteousness issue. Now, it does so happen that the only way you get that righteousness is by belief in Christ but we're getting ahead of ourselves there. To return to why do people go to hell, it's not because of rejection of the gospel. It's because of their sin. Now, rejecting the gospel is a sin. Rejecting God is sin. However, fundamentally the issue is sin. Not knowledge or lack of knowledge of the gospel.

I want to look at Romans 1 here for a little bit to show that everyone does know that God exists and they also know that the things they do are wrong. Here's what he says in Romans 1, verse 18.

“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of people who suppress the truth by their unright…

How should we address people struggling with transgenderism?

Despite the number of people who identify as transgender, being incredibly small, like fractions of a percentage point in the United States, the issue of transgenderism and gender identity is in the news. Every single day, there is some story in a prominent publication about gender identity. It's influencing all of us in direct and indirect ways. This could be from bathrooms, to religious liberty implications, to the pronouns we're supposed to use at work or at school. So, even though they're a small number of people involved, the impact is disproportionately large. I actually don't think there has been an impact this large on a social scale from such a small percentage of people. I could be wrong about that. That's not really that important of a point, but it is something at least to take note of.

Today, I want to talk about what transgenderism is, briefly, and how we, as Christians, should respond and think about responding with truth and compassion. Firstly, transgenderism is a psychological type of state or issue where someone identifies and feels like they are a different gender than (some people would say) what they were assigned at birth and others would say then their biology would dictate. Basically there's some mismatch between what you are said to be, gender wise, and what you actually feel like you are, gender wise.

Now, psychology has kind of gone through and is going through somewhat of a metamorphosis, a change over the last several decades. It used to be that something was a disorder if it was out of order, if it did not match its function or how it was believed to be designed to function. So on that view, transgenderism would be a problem because you felt like you were something that didn't match your biology. Now, what we've seen is a transition, and this isn't all over the place but it's definitely there, to where something is seen to be a disorder in psychology, if it causes you a problem. If you are biologically a male and you identify as a woman, and this doesn't cause you any problems, psychologically, there's not a problem there today, in how modern thought would look at it.

This comes along with a view where truth is relative. We define what is true. Now, harkening back to what used to be, if you said you were a woman and you were biologically a male, well this is a problem because you are living out of concert with your biology. Your mental self doesn't match your physical self. That's just a brief comment on how this has changed and is changing over the years.

There's a parallel condition where people actually feel like a certain limb doesn't fit on their body. So, they might think this arm, my right arm is not actually a part of me and they want to cut it off. Psychologically, this is a problem still, but aren't they kind of saying the same thing? Their mental self doesn't identify with a part of their physical self?

I think there are some inconsistencies, even in how the modern medical and psychological establishments are handling this type of condition today.

So, in broad strokes, transgenderism is where you feel like you were a different gender than either you were assigned at birth or than matches your biology. Now, I do want to be clear, I reject the idea that gender is something that's assigned. It is something we describe, so we look at a person's physical anatomy and based on that anatomy, we say you're a man or you're a woman. You're male or female. It's not assigned, it's described. But nonetheless, this is the way how some other people are talking about it. How should we respond?

Well, the first thing to realize is that most of us do not know what it's like to…

One of the common objections and rejoinders to Christians is that they're hypocrites, and in fact, the church is full of hypocrites, people will say. This is in line with the general trajectory of our civil discourse and conversation today.

When someone doesn't like something, instead of addressing ideas and their merits, and the reasons people hold those ideas, all too often, people, including Christians, will resort to just labeling people so as to minimize their position or their legitimacy.

It's easier to say, "Oh, you're hateful," than to deal with what might be a principled position about who can use a certain restroom or another restroom. It's easier to say, "You're a bigot," than to deal with a principled reason for why marriage should be between one man and one woman for one lifetime. It's easier to apply a label than to deal with the issue.

It's the same way when it comes to this charge that the church is full of hypocrites. I want to give you four ways of addressing this, four different lines of response that you can tailor however you feel best in that circumstance and whatever fits your personality.

The first response is to use a question. You'll recall that I've talked about this before. That in Greg Koukl's book, Tactics, he recommends always asking with a "What do you mean by that?" type of question. We can do that here. If someone says the church is full of hypocrites, we can say, "Well what do you mean by hypocrite? What does that word mean to you?" You might get a variety of responses, but regardless of what the person says, you now know what definition they're using. You can work with that. You might have a different usage in mind, but we need to deal with the objection and the usage of the term as the person is using it.

They might say something like, "Well, Christians say that they're supposed to be good people but they do bad things." You might say, "Okay, well, what makes that hypocrisy? What is hypocrisy?" To be a hypocrite is to claim to do something you don't do. Or perhaps we could say that a different way: to claim to not do something that you actually do.

This gets to the heart of the issue, I think. Because, for many people who aren't Christians, they think to be a Christian is to be morally upright, and it should be. When they see people who are not morally upright, who sin, who do things that they think are wrong — they probably wouldn't use the word sin — they think that's hypocrisy.

But see, here's the difference, is if they understand Christianity, and if we as Christians understood it and talked about it correctly, we wouldn't be saying that we're perfect people. We would be saying that we are deeply flawed people who serve a perfect God. It's not that we're perfect. Thought that's our goal. We're working towards that. But all the while, we are admitting that we fall short. That's why we need Jesus.

We can explain that to the person, so at least they understand the type of position we have. We're not claiming to be perfect over here. We're far from it. We're trying to get there. We know we won't, but God is perfect. He's our standard, but we won't attain to that this side of heaven. It's totally fair to clarify that Christianity doesn't teach that Christians are going to be perfect this side of heaven.

It does teach that they should be people who are repentant about their sin and who are striving for holiness in their life. The church is, by definition, going to be full of broken people who are sinning, but who are constantly asking forgiveness. I think that's fair to clarify. That's the first way to deal with this. Ask, "What do you mean by hypocrite?" Get them to define their terms, and say, "You know, I don't claim that I …