Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of the Trinity, Part 5.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've examined the scriptural data concerning the doctrine of the Trinity and saw that the Father,

the Son, the Holy Spirit are distinct persons, and yet each is God. We now want to turn to a historical

survey of how great Christian thinkers have sought to formulate this doctrine

into a systematic package. And we're going to begin with the early Greek apologists

of the second century. These were men like Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus, Athenagoras, and so on.

Now, you might not have ever heard of these men, but these were some of the earliest Christian authors

writing in defense of the Christian faith during the second century.

And since they wrote in Greek, they're known collectively as the Greek apologists.

These thinkers sought to connect the divine word of the prologue of John's Gospel, the Lagos, whom John says was in the

beginning with God and who was God, with the Lagos as it plays a role in the thought of the Jewish Hellenistic philosopher Philo of Alexandria.

Now when we say that Philo was a Hellenistic Jew, what one means is that he was heavily influenced in his thought by Greek thought. Hellenistic comes from

the Greek word Elene, which means Greek. And so as a Hellenistic Jew, his thinking

is pervaded by the categories of Greek philosophy. He lived in Alexandria in Egypt during the same time as the

New Testament. He was born in 25 BC and died in AD 40. And the Christian apologists attempted to use the work of Philo in connection with

the Gospel of John to articulate a sort of Logos Christology or a doctrine of Christ based on

Philo's thinking. For Philo, the Logos, is the reason or the mind of God,

who created the world and who imbued the world with its rational structure. And similarly,

for these Greek apologists also believed that the

father, existing alone before the creation of the world, had within himself, imminent

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