I had originally written this for Azusa Remixed and I noted the original posting here, but since this has been in my ‘drafts’ and I haven’t deleted it, I thought that I’d slightly edit it and post it on my blog.  So for those who have read it, read it again; for those who haven’t, enjoy it the first time. :-)

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I believe that salvation in and of itself is a Trinitarian experience.  I believe that this is affirmed all throughout the New Testament, but is especially evident in Peter’s Pentecost sermon.  I won’t reproduce the entire thing here, but rather for the sake of brevity I’ll quote the meat of it:

This Jesus God raised up, and of that all of us are witnesses. Being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear. (Acts 2:32-33, NRSV)

The evangelistic message that marked the birth of the Church involved God [the Father] raising up Jesus [the Son] with the resulting gift/promise of the Holy Spirit.  If this isn’t the foundation of Trinitarian theology then I don’t know what is!  Donald Fairburn noted his belief that “one of the most fundamental theological axioms is that all doctrine should be intimately and clearly connected to soteriology.”¹  I couldn’t agree more!  He continues by saying that one of the most important questions the early Church had asked was: “What does God have to be like in order to give us the kind of salvation that we Christians know (from Scripture and the Holy Spirit’s witness) we have?”²

We already know from the experience of salvation that it was the Father who drew us to his Son (Jo. 6:44), the same Son in whom we believed, and confessed as Lord (Rom. 10:9-10), which resulted in our reception of the Spirit.  In my estimation, if Pentecostal tradition, theology, and experience is to be rooted in the event of Pentecost itself, then we have no choice but to be Trinitarian Pentecostals.  This is the only adequate articulation of what we know to be true of the God we experience in salvation.

B”H

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¹ Donald Fairburn. “The One Person Who Is Jesus Christ: The Patristic Perspective” in Jesus in Trinitarian Perspective: An Introductory Christology (eds. Fred Sanders and Klaus Issler; Nashville, TN: B&H, 2007), 92.

² Ibid. – Franz Dünzl also highlights this connection in his recent volume A Brief History of the Doctrine of the Trinity in the Early Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2007), 56.  Cf. Stephen J. Nichols’ For Us and For Our Salvation: The Doctrine of Christ in the Early Church (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2007).