How Biblicism Leads to Trinitarianism

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An apparently common criticism of Biblicism, the belief that the Bible, being God's Word, is the sole rule of Christian doctrine and practice, is that it leads to the denial of the Trinity, the doctrine that God is one Being who eternally exists in three coequal and coeternal Persons, who are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I've even heard critics of Biblicism assert that anti-Trinitarian heretics (including Arians and Mormons) used Biblicist reasoning to justify their views. Whether or not those false teachers and/or other anti-Trinitarians actually use/used Biblicist reasoning to justify their heresies is not the purpose of this article, so I will not answer that question here, though I will say that any attempts to use Biblicism to justify non-Trinitarianism are perversions of Biblicism, and, in this article, I will give one example to prove why that is the case. And that example is Matthew 28:19!

Matthew 28:19 says: "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:" (KJV). This passage is often, and rightly so, brought up as an instance where the New Testament teaches the Trinity. But, in this article, we'll see how much information about the Trinity we can glean just from this passage. First, notice that Jesus here says that His disciples are to be baptized in the SINGULAR "name" of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As anyone who has a sufficient knowledge of Bible times is aware, names were meant to be character descriptors (whether real, ideal, or both) of the people bearing them. And, since God's perfections prove that He eternally lives up to His name, we know that the name of God is the actual character of God. Second, notice here that this singular name is EQUALLY possessed by THREE Persons: again, who are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So, just going by this one Bible passage, we see that God's name is singular (i.e., He is one God), but His name is equally the name of the three Persons of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So, we see, both with this passage and the rest of the Scriptural information about God, that God is Triune, contra the protests of extra-Biblicists and the apparent pseudo-Biblicist rationalizations of Trinity-denying heretics!