As I noted in my previous post on the 2025 Ligonier/Lifeway State of Theology Survey, the statement to which most evangelical church members strongly agreed was the one affirming the doctrine of the Trinity:
- There is one true God in three persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that responses to two other statements of relevance to the Trinity were not as affirmative.
- Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.
- The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being.
According to the Survey, 22 percent of evangelical church members strongly agreed, and an additional 12 percent somewhat agreed, with #7, while 31 percent strongly agreed and 21 percent somewhat agreed with #9. Taking into consideration those who said they were unsure, only 62 percent disagreed with #7 and 38 percent with #9. Previous versions of the Survey produced similar results.
The “correct” responses would be to disagree with both statements. Jesus was a great teacher, but he was much more than that—he was God the Son incarnate. It appears to be quite contradictory for 95 percent of evangelical church members to affirm “God the Son” as one of the three divine persons (#2) and for 34 percent of those same respondents to agree that Jesus was not God (#7). Likewise, affirming that God the Holy Spirit is one of “three persons” (#2) seems to be contradicted by agreeing that the Holy Spirit is a force rather than a “personal being,” as a slim majority (52 percent) did.
All of the comments I have seen about these results have attributed the discrepancies to theological confusion on the part of the respondents. Admittedly, this may be a factor or even the main factor. However, I don’t think we should exclude the possibility that the statements were worded in ambiguous or accidentally misleading ways.
Statement #7 gives respondents two choices for characterizing Jesus: either as “a great teacher” or as “God,” such that agreeing with the statement means denying that Jesus is “God.” The trouble here is that evangelicals, like Christians generally, routinely use the title God in reference specifically to the Father and less commonly to the Son. Indeed, that is the New Testament pattern as well. The Father is called “God” 1,291 times while Jesus is called “God” only about eight times (John 1:1, 18; 20:28; Rom. 9:5; Titus 2:13; Heb. 1:8; 2 Peter 1:1; 1 John 5:20).[1] It seems at least likely that many of those evangelical church members who agreed with the statement did so not because they disbelieved in the deity of Christ but because they construed “God” in the statement to refer to the Father. There are many statements they might have been presented to which it seems highly likely they would have agreed and that would have confirmed them as holding a trinitarian view of Christ:
- Jesus was God the Son incarnate.
- Jesus was the eternal Son of God who became a man.
- Jesus was truly divine as well as truly human.
And so on.
Statement #9 asserts, “The Holy Spirit is a force but is not a personal being.” By not using wording matching statement #2, such as “. . . but is not a person,” the Survey leaves the door open for respondents to construe “personal being” to mean something a little different from “person.” Perhaps they took “personal being” to mean something like a human. It is also possible that they didn’t process the significance of the term “force” in this context. Here are two examples of other ways the statement could have been worded:
- The Holy Spirit is an impersonal force, not a divine person.
- The Holy Spirit is God’s power in action, not a person distinct from the Father.
Tightening up the wording of statements #7 and #9 might have helped avoid misunderstandings and allowed us to be more confident in the results.
Again, by no means am I suggesting that there is no confusion on these issues among evangelical church members. It seems likely that there is. My guess is that confusion is especially likely regarding the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit did not become human, as did the Son, and the terms Father and Son are overtly relational (and familial), making their personhood obvious. The fact that the Holy Spirit manifests himself in ways that are not anthropomorphic (e.g., looking something like a dove, or manifesting as wind or fire) is often misunderstood, implicitly or explicitly, as indicating that the Holy Spirit is impersonal. Nevertheless, in biblical theology (especially developed in the New Testament), the Holy Spirit is a divine person.[2]
NOTES
[1] For a thorough discussion of the exegesis of these texts, see Robert M. Bowman Jr. and J. Ed Komoszewski, The Incarnate Christ and His Critics: A Biblical Defense (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2024), 411–67.
[2] I have several articles on IRR’s website about the person of the Holy Spirit.