How many reviews do you need to read? A product I recently considered had 36 reviews. It is not an expensive item, so it’s unlikely I would read them all. In fact, reading 3 might be enough, maybe two positive and one negative reviews. One doesn’t quite do the trick. Too many just gets confusing.
Of course, other people will approach product reviews differently. You may be skeptical of them all or feel the need to consider every one of them carefully. But a general epistemic principle seems to be that we feel better when some bit of testimony is confirmed by multiple sources. It’s true in the courtroom as well as in on-line shopping. The Bible confirms that principle in Deuteronomy 19:15, “Only on the evidence of two or three witnesses shall a charge be sustained.”
For this coming Trinity Sunday, we our brief text from John 16:12-15 suggests that something like that testimony from multiple sources happens for us as we receive the truth of God’s revelation in Jesus. While the reality that God is three persons in one God has many other aspects to it, it means at least this: when God speaks, what He says is communicated to us in three distinct ways which help us grasp and hold to His truth in faith.
When Jesus walked on earth, what God said came almost always directly from Jesus’ mouth. Our text begins with Jesus’ own acknowledgement that not everything God wishes to say to us could be communicated in that way: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”
That limitation on the disciples’ part, on the human side of the communication, is the ground then for the fifth and final “Paraclete saying” in Jesus’ parting words to them in John’s Gospel. Instead of Jesus, the Spirit becomes the carrier of divine truth, “he will guide you into all the truth.”
Yet though Jesus is going away and the Spirit becomes the truth bearer, the connection with Jesus remains. Verse 14 says, “He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” That point both confirms that we have at least a double divine witness to Christian truth and that whatever information the Spirit provides will come from and be consistent with what Jesus has said and taught. That’s an important safeguard against theologies based on spirit revelations which contradict or fail to conform to what was seen and heard in Jesus.
Finally, though, in verse 15, the Spirit’s witness drawing on and expanding the witness of Jesus circles back to Jesus’ self-testimony that He speaks on behalf of God the Father. Jesus says what the Father says, and so says also the Spirit. “All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I declare that he will take what is mine and declare it to you.”
So this brief but somewhat baffling text on Trinity Sunday helps us remember that the Triune God is not a pantheon of separate gods doing different things and only accidentally