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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of THE Definitive Books on the Trinity, May 6, 2002
This book is about 100 years old now, but the many truths expressed in this book are truly timeless. I found much of the material in this book to be just as relevant today as it has ever been, with almost none of the material being dated at all. This is truly one of the preeminent books on the truth of Trinitarianism.In this book, Bickersteth attempts to demonstrate the truth of the Trinity by showing the personhood and deity, as articulated in Scripture, of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In this book, Bickersteth brutally refutes various objections to Trinitarianism, mainly voiced by the Unitarians of his day. In the end, the reader is left with a comprehensive sense that to deny Trinitarianism is to make a mockery of Scripture, since the Bible exhaustively demonstrates the truth of the Trinity. Among many highlights in this book, the biggest is clearly Bickersteth's exhaustive Scripture examination and comparison. In the chapters where he attempts to establish the coequal deity of the Son with the Father, Bickersteth analyzes and compares over 100 Scripture passages to show that the same phraseology that is used in Scripture to establish the divinity of the Father is also used to establish the divinity of the Son. Bickersteth goes on to conduct a similar Scripture comparison in demonstrating the divinity of the Holy Spirit. Bickersteth, in addition to establishing the divinity of the three persons of the Godhead, also effectively demonstrates that each Person is unique, personal, and in possession of an individual will, though the wills of all three are in perfect unison. This effectively heads off the assertion that Father, Son, and Spirit are merely three manifestations of the same person, rather than "three who's of one what". Oneness pentecostalism is one of the many movements that argues in favor of the three manifestations concept, but this book effectively shows that in order to truly embrace this idea, one has to conduct major spiritual gymnastics in order to get away from what Scripture clearly teaches on this point. The only area of this book that I thought could have been improved concerned the functional subordination aspect of Trinitarianism seen in Scripture. Bickersteth does touch on this in a couple of places, but not exhaustively. The coequality aspect of Trinitarianism is a difficult concept to understand in light of the offices each Person appears to hold. But what should be clear from Bickersteth's book is that without regard to roles, each Person of the Godhead is equally divine and equally due our worship as a matter of ontology. But with the exception of this one regret where I wish Bickersteth had been more thorough, this book is truly a classic on Trinitarianism that has stood the test of time, mainly because the truths it depicts are timeless and eternal. This is a must read for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of the truth of Trinitarianism and how to combat objections with massive amounts of Scriptural support.
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by Millard J. Erickson
by Richard Bauckham
