Reordering the Trinity

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Reordering the Trinity: An Interview with Rodrick Durst

Jonathan Petersen

Content manager for Bible Gateway

Trinity Sunday is June 7, 2020.
Browse resources about the Trinity in the Bible Gateway Store.

The New Testament writers present the Trinity in a variety of orders; not only “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Is the order intentional? Should it impact our understanding of God and the mission of the church? Does the order of the three names correspond to a particular purpose of God?

Bible Gateway interviewed Rodrick K. Durst (@DocDurst) about his book, Reordering the Trinity: Six Movements of God in the New Testament (Kregel Academic, 2015).

[See our Blog post, Trinity Sunday: Considering One of Christianity’s Greatest Mysteries]

What first led you to take notice of the way God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are ordered differently in various Bible verses?

Rodrick Durst: While reading the Bible in 2005, I noted the unexpected triune order in the apostle Paul’s benediction in 2 Corinthians 13:14, “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” The order of this triune reference was Son-Father-Spirit. And I asked myself, why did Paul reorder the Trinity in this verse? This set me off on a quest to discover just how many instances of identifying the three persons by name in the triune God could be found in the New Testament no matter the order of those three.

How many Scripture verses include a triadic order of divine reference?

Rodrick Durst: In my search through the New Testament, I quickly found 75 instances in which God is named in one of six different triune orders. We know that any three entities can be ordered in six different ways and the New Testament repeatedly makes use of all six possible orders of Father, Son, and Spirit.

• Missional: Father, Son, Holy Spirit (e.g., Matthew 28:19-20)
• Formational: Father, Holy Spirit, Son (e.g., 1 Peter 1:2)
• Christological: Son, Father, Holy Spirit (e.g., 2 Corinthians 13:14)
• Evangelistic: Son, Holy Spirit, Father (e.g., Acts 2:38-39)
• Ecclesial: Holy Spirit, Son, Father (e.g., Ephesians 4:4-5)
• Liturgical: Holy Spirit, Father, Son (e.g., Jude 20-21)

What is the triadic order in the majority of the verses?

Rodrick Durst: I organized all of this biblical data into an Excel spreadsheet so I could analyze it. The traditional order Father-Son-Spirit is used 18 times or 24% of the total Trinitarian references. The Son-Spirit-Father triad is used 15 times or 20% of the whole, with the Son-Father-Spirit order coming in a close third with 14 instances or 19% of the time. All of the remaining orders occurred at least eight times each.

Why is the way the Trinity is ordered in these verses important?

Rodrick Durst: This project took on a much larger significance when I began to wonder if specific Trinitarian orders were used consistently in specific contexts. I studied all of the instances of the traditional Father-Son-Spirit order and discovered that this order normally occurs in a mission will context. This order is God sending. The context of Matthew 28:18-20 is the sending out of the disciples to the nations. This same mission will order is repeated in John 20:21. Whenever the reverse order, Spirit-Son-Father, is used, the context is generally related to the church being united as one. In Ephesians 4, where the whole context is Paul’s doctrine of the church, we read “one Spirit… One Lord… One God and Father” in verses 4-6.

Explain the prayer experiment you gave your class.

Rodrick Durst: I decided to offer the students a prayer experiment based on my research into the Trinity and the New Testament. I gave them the chart of 75 instances of the six orders of the three persons in the Godhead. I pointed out that if the New Testament authors, inspired by the Holy Spirit, used all six different orders, why couldn’t we? I asked them if they would be willing to pray to God in one of the orders that made the most sense to them that night. I gave them five minutes to pray and worship and then we debriefed.

The most memorable response was the female student who shared that she had been raised in a home where her relationship with her father was so abusive that she had never been able to call God “Father” until that night. She said she prayed in the order of Jesus the Son, then to God the Spirit, and finally she was able to break through and call God Father. Her testimony made me realize that my research was more significant than I thought.

What do you mean by the “mystery of the triadic orders” and “matrix of Trinitarian consciousness”?

Rodrick Durst: We all crave simplicity rather than complexity, but God is a mystery and part of that mystery is not only how three can be one and one can be three but how the three can be in many different orders. Those six different orders make up a matrix of how Jesus taught his disciples to be God conscious. The references to the Trinity are so abundant in the New Testament that I conclude that Trinitarian thinking is the default way of thinking and writing about God used by the disciples and that they learned this from Jesus himself.

How have the triadic orders been used throughout church history?

Rodrick Durst: The doctrine of the triune God is not an easy one. There have been 2000 years of heretical attempts to deface the doctrine through either Unitarianism and rigid Muslim monotheism, which over-emphasizes the oneness and eclipses the three, or to surrender to Watchtower subordinationism, which makes the Son an incarnate archangel and the Spirit an impersonal force. The church has always retained the doctrine of the Trinity through its use at baptisms and in benedictions. Despite not giving due attention to those five other orders, the textual pressure from the New Testament, with its 75 instances of naming the triune God, called the church to retain its orthodox theology and construct the famous Trinitarian formulas like “three Persons in the one Divine substance.”

What is the significance of referencing the order of the Trinity in a particular way in a person’s everyday life?

Rodrick Durst: One of my favorite Trinitarian orders is Spirit-Father-Son. This order occurs nine times in the New Testament for 12% of the total instances. You can find this order in the narrative of the martyrdom of Stephen in Acts 7:55. There Stephen has finished his long sermon exalting Christ with the result that his audience was enraged. “But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”

Whenever we anticipate going out in the community to share Christ and serve others in Christ’s, we can call on God the Spirit, asking him to fill us so that we can see God the Father high and exalted and reigning, and asking the Father to enable us to see the Lord Jesus standing tall for us at the cross, and then we can ask the Lord Jesus to stand stall in us that we might be faithful for him. I have found that worshiping God in this biblical fashion in preparation for living for Christ in our fallen world is enormously effective.

What are your thoughts about Bible Gateway and the Bible Gateway App?

Rodrick Durst: I have the Bible Gateway App on my iPhone and have used Bible Gateway innumerable times to find the most effective English translations for my sermon preparation.

Is there anything else you’d like to say?

Rodrick K. Durst: I tried to make Reordering the Trinity as helpful as possible to pastors since I know it can often be difficult to preach on the Trinity and to say something new. I built eight sermon starters related to each of the six orders, to the triune God in the Old Testament, and also related to the doctrine of the Trinity in church history. In the appendices, I included directions for the Trinitarian prayer experiment plus a 40 day meditation experience on the Trinity orders. There are also directions on how to talk to children and to teenagers about the doctrine of the Trinity.

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Bio: Rodrick Durst (Rick) is professor of historical theology at Golden Gate Baptist Seminary in Mill Valley, California and is the director of the seminary’s new Bay Area Campus now under construction in Fremont, California. He has served the seminary in a variety of roles from vice president of academic affairs to the founding director of its online education program. Prior to coming to the seminary in 1991, Durst was a pastor in Santa Rosa and Vallejo for 12 years. He and his wife of 38 years have three children and three grandchildren. Durst is also a contributing author to the 2015 B&H publicationMinistry in the New Marriage Culture and is co-author of Church Fails: 100 blunders in Church History & What We Can Learn From Them.

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