Can a non-Trinitarian preach the gospel?

Tuesday as I walked into the church for Bible study, my pastor asked, “can a non-Trinitarian preach the gospel?” Without a hitch, I answered, “no, they emphasize experience.” Specifically, he was referring to modalists like T.D. Jakes, who describe the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as “manifestations” of God rather than as “persons.” Another man present immediately added, “yes, Tertullian [1800 years ago!] said that modalists emphasize experience and glossolalia [speaking in tongues].”

Why is this so? How can I and the other man be so sure, and judge so quickly? Why is it Tertullian said the same thing? I remembered reading about this years ago, but I had forgotten the whole explanation, so I went back to the book that I got the insight from. That book is Worship, Community & the Triune God of Grace by James B. Torrance.

Here is the reason that the gospel requires the Trinity. The gospel says that God both gives Christ to us, and in Christ presents humanity back to himself. Christ can have this double role only by being both God and a distinct person who is related to God.

Torrance stresses that in worship—in the notions of priesthood in both the Old and New Testaments, and in the liturgy of the early church—there is this double movement. He explains, further, that Trinitarianism is the grammar of the early church’s liturgy. Christians from the beginning both prayed to Christ as God, and looked to him as a high priest who was praying for them. Arius thought this a contradiction, that Christ could not be God if he was a man praying to God. Torrance writes, “Athanasius’s reply was, ‘Arius, you do not understand the meaning of grace!’”

With modalism (also know as Sabellianism), in which Christ is thought of as a manifestation of God rather than a distinct person from the Father and Son, two consequences follow. (1) The God-man movement is preserved as a manifestation of God, but the human > God movement cannot be given to us in Christ, because he is not really distinct from the Father toward whom we must move. The gospel may continue to be a story of God’s acts to which we respond, but it cannot also be a story through which even our response is given to us through Christ the mediator.

(2) Love becomes a force, or a feeling, rather than an inter-personal relationship. The fundamental doctrine, “God is love,” cannot be interpreted in terms of a community of persons within God. Instead it has to be something expressed by the acts of manifestation of a single person, or perhaps it may be an intra-personal relationship, i.e. an attitude toward oneself.

Together, these implications of modalism lead to an understanding of salvation and worship that is individualistic and experiential rather than corporate, communal and theological. “Love” is the feeling we experience in acts of worship, in which we suppose that we are encountering the unitary “God” manifesting himself to us. Or, “love” is how one feels about oneself, based on the example of God’s self-love manifested in the Biblical record. The reality of salvation then has to be gauged by the effectiveness of the worship event in producing this experience in us. In truly Trinitarian salvation and worship, by contrast, we are made aware of what God has given us in Christ and what he continues to do in Christ for our relationship to him. Being “seated with Christ in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 2:6) is not something we experience ecstatically, but is something we grasp theologically. We are made aware of who God is and, through Christ the mediator, invited into his fellowship, which we experience with his people only when we grasp the theological reality by faith.

There is a definite sense, then, in which a modalist view of God destroys both faith and grace. Consider first Hebrews 11:1, “faith is being…certain of what we do not see.” In the modalist worship experience, faith is decidedly absent, because God is immediately manifest in the experience. The Trinitarian worship experience, however, cannot happen without faith, because the role of Christ as mediator who joins us to the community of God and the community of believers, can only be grasped by faith. Next, consider Paul’s statement in Romans 4:16, “the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace.” Lacking the element of faith, the modalist “gospel” invitation to knowing God is ungracious as well. As Torrance writes,

To reduce worship to this two-dimensional thing—God and ourselves, today—is to imply that God throws us back upon ourselves to make our response. It ignores the fact that God has already provided for us that response which alone is acceptable to him….

Only Trinitarians can preach the gospel of grace, because only we propose the experience-transcending reality of our humanity in Christ accepted by God the Father.