Chapter II: Doctrine Of The Trinity (3)

This seeming identification of the Spirit with Christ is to be
explained upon the ground that the divine essence is common to
both and permits the Father to dwell in and to work through the
Son, and the Son to dwell in and to work through the Spirit. It
should not blind us to the equally patent Scriptural fact that
there are personal relations between Christ and the Holy Spirit,
and work done by the latter in which Christ is the object and not
the subject; _John 16:14—_“He shall glorify me: for he shall take
of mine, and shall declare it unto you.” The Holy Spirit is not
some _thing_, but some _one_; not αὐτό, but Αὐτός; Christ’s _alter
ego_, or other self. We should therefore make vivid our belief in
the personality of Christ and of the Holy Spirit by addressing
each of them frequently in the prayers we offer and in such hymns
as “Jesus, lover of my soul,” and “Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly
Dove!” On the personality of the Holy Spirit, see John Owen, in
Works, 3:64-92; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:341-350.

III. This Tripersonality of the Divine Nature is not merely economic and temporal, but is immanent and eternal.

1. Scripture proof that these distinctions of personality are eternal.

We prove this (_a_) from those passages which speak of the existence of the Word from eternity with the Father; (_b_) from passages asserting or implying Christ’s preëxistence; (_c_) from passages implying intercourse between the Father and the Son before the foundation of the world; (_d_) from passages asserting the creation of the world by Christ; (_e_) from passages asserting or implying the eternity of the Holy Spirit.

(_a_) _John 1:1, 2—_“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God”; _cf._ _Gen. 1:1—_“In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; _Phil.
2:6—_“existing in the form of God ... on an equality with God.”
(_b_) _John 8:58—_“before Abraham was born, I am”; _1:18—_“the
only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” (R. V.);
_Col. 1:15-17—_“firstborn of all creation” or “before every
creature ... he is before all things.” In these passages “_am_”
and “_is_” indicate an eternal fact; the present tense expresses
permanent being. _Rev. 22:13, 14—_“I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (_c_) _John
17:5—_“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory
which I had with thee before the world was”; _24—_“Thou lovedst me
before the foundation of the world.” (_d_) _John 1:3—_“All things
were made through him”; _1 Cor. 8:6—_“one Lord, Jesus Christ,
through whom are all things”; _Col. 1:16—_“all things have been
created through him and unto him”; _Heb. 1:2—_“through whom also
he made the worlds”; _10—_“Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay
the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy
hands.” (_e_) _Gen. 1:2—_“the Spirit of God was brooding”—existed
therefore before creation; _Ps. 33:6—_“by the word of Jehovah were
the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath [Spirit]
of his mouth”; _Heb. 9:14—_“through the eternal Spirit.”

With these passages before us, we must dissent from the statement
of Dr. E. G. Robinson: “About the ontologic Trinity we know
absolutely nothing. The Trinity we can contemplate is simply a
revealed one, one of economic manifestations. We may _suppose_
that the ontologic underlies the economic.” Scripture compels us,
in our judgment, to go further than this, and to maintain that
there are personal relations between the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit independently of creation and of time; in other words
we maintain that Scripture reveals to us a social Trinity and an
intercourse of love apart from and before the existence of the
universe. Love before time implies distinctions of personality
before time. There are three eternal consciousnesses and three
eternal wills in the divine nature. We here state only the
fact,—the explanation of it, and its reconciliation with the
fundamental unity of God is treated in our next section. We now
proceed to show that the two varying systems which ignore this
tripersonality are unscriptural and at the same time exposed to
philosophical objection.

2. Errors refuted by the foregoing passages.

A. The Sabellian.

Sabellius (of Ptolemais in Pentapolis, 250) held that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are mere developments or revelations to creatures, in time, of the otherwise concealed Godhead—developments which, since creatures will always exist, are not transitory, but which at the same time are not eternal _a parte ante_. God as united to the creation is Father; God as united to Jesus Christ is Son; God as united to the church is Holy Spirit. The Trinity of Sabellius is therefore an economic and not an immanent Trinity—a Trinity of forms or manifestations, but not a necessary and eternal Trinity in the divine nature.

Some have interpreted Sabellius as denying that the Trinity is eternal _a parte post_, as well as _a parte ante_, and as holding that, when the purpose of these temporary manifestations is accomplished, the Triad is resolved into the Monad. This view easily merges in another, which makes the persons of the Trinity mere names for the ever shifting phases of the divine activity.

The best statement of the Sabellian doctrine, according to the
interpretation first mentioned, is that of Schleiermacher,
translated with comments by Moses Stuart, in Biblical Repository,
6:1-16. The one unchanging God is differently reflected from the
world on account of the world’s different receptivities. Praxeas
of Rome (200) Noetus of Smyrna (230), and Beryl of Arabia (250)
advocated substantially the same views. They were called
Monarchians (μόνη ἀρχή), because they believed not in the Triad,
but only in the Monad. They were called Patripassians, because
they held that, as Christ is only God in human form, and this God
suffers, therefore the Father suffers. Knight, Colloquia
Peripatetica, xlii, suggests a connection between Sabellianism and
Emanationism. See this Compendium, on Theories which oppose
Creation.

A view similar to that of Sabellius was held by Horace Bushnell,
in his God in Christ, 113-115, 130 sq., 172-175, and Christ in
Theology, 119, 120—“Father, Son and Holy Spirit, being incidental
to the revelation of God, may be and probably are from eternity to
eternity, inasmuch as God may have revealed himself from eternity,
and certainly will reveal himself so long as there are minds to
know him. It may be, in fact, the nature of God to reveal himself,
as truly as it is of the sun to shine or of living mind to think.”
He does not deny the immanent Trinity, but simply says we know
nothing about it. Yet a Trinity of Persons in the divine essence
itself he called plain tritheism. He prefers “instrumental
Trinity” to “modal Trinity” as a designation of his doctrine. The
difference between Bushnell on the one hand, and Sabellius and
Schleiermacher on the other, seems then to be the following:
Sabellius and Schleiermacher hold that the One _becomes_ three in
the process of revelation, and the three are only _media_ or
_modes_ of revelation. Father, Son, and Spirit are mere names
applied to these modes of the divine action, there being no
internal distinctions in the divine nature. This is modalism, or a
modal Trinity. Bushnell stands by the Trinity of revelation alone,
and protests against any constructive reasonings with regard to
the immanent Trinity. Yet in his later writings he reverts to
Athanasius and speaks of God as eternally “threeing himself”; see
Fisher, Edwards on the Trinity, 73.

Lyman Abbott, in The Outlook, proposes as illustration of the
Trinity, 1. the artist working on his pictures; 2. the same man
teaching pupils how to paint; 3. the same man entertaining his
friends at home. He has not taken on these types of conduct. They
are not masks (_personæ_), nor offices, which he takes up and lays
down. There is a threefold _nature_ in him: he is artist, teacher,
friend. God is complex, and not simple. I do not know him, till I
know him in all these relations. Yet it is evident that Dr.
Abbott’s view provides no basis for love or for society within the
divine nature. The three persons are but three successive aspects
or activities of the one God. General Grant, when in office, was
but one person, even though he was a father, a President, and a
commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States.

It is evident that this theory, in whatever form it may be held, is far from satisfying the demands of Scripture. Scripture speaks of the second person of the Trinity as existing and acting before the birth of Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit as existing and acting before the formation of the church. Both have a personal existence, eternal in the past as well as in the future—which this theory expressly denies.

A revelation that is not a self-revelation of God is not honest.
Stuart: Since God is revealed as three, he must be essentially or
immanently three, back of revelation; else the revelation would
not be true. Dorner: A Trinity of revelation is a
misrepresentation, if there is not behind it a Trinity of nature.
Twesten properly arrives at the threeness by considering, not so
much what is involved in the revelation of God to us, as what is
involved in the revelation of God to himself. The unscripturalness
of the Sabellian doctrine is plain, if we remember that upon this
view the Three cannot exist at once: when the Father says “Thou
art my beloved Son”_ (Luke 3:22)_, he is simply speaking to
himself; when Christ sends the Holy Spirit, he only sends himself.
_John 1:1—_“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God, and the Word was God”—“sets aside the false notion that the
Word become _personal_ first at the time of creation, or at the
incarnation” (Westcott, Bib. Com. _in loco_).

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 50, 51—“Sabellius claimed that the
Unity became a Trinity by expansion. Fatherhood began with the
world. God is not eternally Father, nor does he love eternally. We
have only an impersonal, unintelligible God, who has played upon
us and confused our understanding by showing himself to us under
three disguises. Before creation there is no Fatherhood, even in
germ.”

According to Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:269, Origen held that
the Godhead might be represented by three concentric circles; the
widest, embracing the whole being, is that of the Father; the
next, that of the Son, which extends to the rational creation; and
the narrowest is that of the Spirit, who rules in the holy men of
the church. King, Reconstruction of Theology, 192, 194—“To affirm
social relations in the Godhead is to assert absolute
Tritheism.... Unitarianism emphasizes the humanity of Christ, to
preserve the unity of God; the true view emphasizes the divinity
of Christ, to preserve the unity.”

L. L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 141, 287, says that New
England Trinitarianism is characterized by three things: 1.
Sabellian Patripassianism; Christ is all the Father there is, and
the Holy Spirit is Christ’s continued life; 2. Consubstantiality,
or community of essence, of God and man; unlike the essential
difference between the created and the uncreated which Platonic
dualism maintained, this theory turns _moral_ likeness into
_essential_ likeness; 3. Philosophical monism, matter itself being
but an evolution of Spirit.... In the next form of the scientific
doctrine of evolution, the divineness of man becomes a vital
truth, and out of it arises a Christology that removes Jesus of
Nazareth indeed out of the order of absolute Deity, but at the
same time exalts him to a place of moral eminence that is secure
and supreme.

Against this danger of regarding Christ as a merely economic and
temporary manifestation of God we can guard only by maintaining
the Scriptural doctrine of an immanent Trinity. Moberly, Atonement
and Personality, 86, 165—“We cannot incur any Sabellian peril
while we maintain—what is fatal to Sabellianism—that that which is
revealed within the divine Unity is not only a distinction of
aspects or of names, but a real reciprocity of mutual relation.
One ‘aspect’ cannot contemplate, or be loved by, another....
Sabellianism degrades the persons of Deity into aspects. But there
can be no mutual relation between aspects. The heat and the light
of flame cannot severally contemplate and be in love with one
another.” See Bushnell’s doctrine reviewed by Hodge, Essays and
Reviews, 433-473. On the whole subject, see Dorner, Hist. Doct.
Person of Christ, 2:152-169; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:259; Baur,
Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit, 1:256-305; Thomasius, Christi Person
und Werk 1:83.

B. The Arian.

Arius (of Alexandria; condemned by Council of Nice, 325) held that the Father is the only divine being absolutely without beginning; the Son and the Holy Spirit, through whom God creates and recreates, having been themselves created out of nothing before the world was; and Christ being called God, because he is next in rank to God, and is endowed by God with divine power to create.

The followers of Arius have differed as to the precise rank and claims of Christ. While Socinus held with Arius that worship of Christ was obligatory, the later Unitarians have perceived the impropriety of worshiping even the highest of created beings, and have constantly tended to a view of the Redeemer which regards him as a mere man, standing in a peculiarly intimate relation to God.

For statement of the Arian doctrine, see J. Freeman Clarke,
Orthodoxy, Its Truths and Errors. _Per contra_, see Schäffer, in
Bib. Sac., 21:1, article on Athanasius and the Arian controversy.
The so-called Athanasian Creed, which Athanasius never wrote, is
more properly designated as the _Symbolum Quicumque_. It has also
been called, though facetiously, “the Anathemasian Creed.” Yet no
error in doctrine can be more perilous or worthy of condemnation
than the error of Arius (_1 Cor. 16:22—_“If any man loveth not the
Lord, let him be anathema”; _1 John 2:23—_“Whosoever denieth the
Son, the same hath not the Father”; _4:3—_“every spirit that
confesseth not Jesus is not of God: and this is the spirit of the
antichrist”). It regards Christ as called God only by courtesy,
much as we give to a Lieutenant Governor the title of Governor.
Before the creation of the Son, the love of God, if there could be
love, was expended on himself. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism: “The
Arian Christ is nothing but a heathen idol, invented to maintain a
heathenish Supreme in heathen isolation from the world. The nearer
the Son is pulled down towards man by the attenuation of his
Godhead, the more remote from man becomes the unshared Godhead of
the Father. You have an _Être Suprême_ who is practically
unapproachable, a mere One-and-all, destitute of personality.”

Gore, Incarnation, 90, 91, 110, shows the immense importance of
the controversy with regard to ὁμοούσιον and ὁμοιούσιον. Carlyle
once sneered that “the Christian world was torn in pieces over a
diphthong.” But Carlyle afterwards came to see that Christianity
itself was at stake, and that it would have dwindled away to a
legend, if the Arians had won. Arius appealed chiefly to logic,
not to Scripture. He claimed that a Son must be younger than his
Father. But he was asserting the principle of heathenism and
idolatry, in demanding worship for a creature. The Goths were
easily converted to Arianism. Christ was to them a hero-god, a
demigod, and the later Goths could worship Christ and heathen
idols impartially.

It is evident that the theory of Arius does not satisfy the demands of Scripture. A created God, a God whose existence had a beginning and therefore may come to an end, a God made of a substance which once was not, and therefore a substance different from that of the Father, is not God, but a finite creature. But the Scripture speaks of Christ as being in the beginning God, with God, and equal with God.

Luther, alluding to _John 1:1_, says: “‘The Word was God’ is
against Arius; ‘the Word was with God’ is against Sabellius.” The
Racovian Catechism, Quaes. 183, 184, 211, 236, 237, 245, 246,
teaches that Christ is to be truly worshiped, and they are denied
to be Christians who refuse to adore him. Davidis was persecuted
and died in prison for refusing to worship Christ; and Socinus was
charged, though probably unjustly, with having caused his
imprisonment. Bartholomew Legate, an Essexman and an Arian, was
burned to death at Smithfield, March 13, 1613. King James I asked
him whether he did not pray to Christ. Legate’s answer was that
“indeed he had prayed to Christ in the days of his ignorance, but
not for these last seven years”; which so shocked James that “he
spurned at him with his foot.” At the stake Legate still refused
to recant, and so was burned to ashes amid a vast conflux of
people. The very next month another Arian named Whiteman was
burned at Burton-on-Trent.

It required courage, even a generation later, for John Milton, in
his Christian Doctrine, to declare himself a high Arian. In that
treatise he teaches that “the Son of God did not exist from all
eternity, is not coëval or coëssential or coëqual with the Father,
but came into existence by the will of God to be the next being to
himself, the first-born and best beloved, the Logos or Word
through whom all creation should take its beginnings.” So Milton
regards the Holy Spirit as a created being, inferior to the Son
and possibly confined to our heavens and earth. Milton’s Arianism,
however, is characteristic of his later, rather than his earlier,
writings; compare the Ode on Christ’s Nativity with Paradise Lost,
3:383-391; and see Masson’s Life of Milton, 1:39; 6:823, 824; A.
H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 260-262.

Dr. Samuel Clarke, when asked whether the Father who had created
could not also destroy the Son, said that he had not considered
the question. Ralph Waldo Emerson broke with his church and left
the ministry because he could not celebrate the Lord’s Supper,—it
implied a profounder reverence for Jesus than he could give him.
He wrote: “It seemed to me at church to-day, that the Communion
Service, as it is now and here celebrated, is a document of the
dullness of the race. How these, my good neighbors, the bending
deacons, with their cups and plates, would have straightened
themselves to sturdiness, if the proposition came before them to
honor thus a fellow-man”; see Cabot’s Memoir, 314. Yet Dr. Leonard
Bacon said of the Unitarians that “it seemed as if their exclusive
contemplation of Jesus Christ in his human character as the
example for our imitation had wrought in them an exceptional
beauty and Christlikeness of living.”

Chadwick, Old and New Unitarian Belief, 20, speaks of Arianism as
exalting Christ to a degree of inappreciable difference from God,
while Socinus looked upon him only as a miraculously endowed man,
and believed in an infallible book. The term “Unitarians,” he
claims, is derived from the “Uniti,” a society in Transylvania, in
support of mutual toleration between Calvinists, Romanists, and
Socinians. The name stuck to the advocates of the divine Unity,
because they were its most active members. B. W. Lockhart:
“Trinity guarantees God’s knowableness. Arius taught that Jesus
was neither human nor divine, but created in some grade of being
between the two, essentially unknown to man. An absentee God made
Jesus his messenger, God himself not touching the world directly
at any point, and unknown and unknowable to it. Athanasius on the
contrary asserted that God did not send a messenger in Christ, but
came himself, so that to know Christ is really to know God who is
essentially revealed in him. This gave the Church the doctrine of
God immanent, or Immanuel, God knowable and actually known by men,
because actually present.” Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present
Age, 14—“The world was never further from Unitarianism than it is
to-day; we may add that Unitarianism was never further from
itself.” On the doctrines of the early Socinians, see Princeton
Essays, 1:195. On the whole subject, see Blunt, Dict. of Heretical
Sects, art.: Arius; Guericke, Hist. Doctrine, 1:313, 319. See also
a further account of Arianism in the chapter of this Compendium on
the Person of Christ.

IV. This Tripersonality is not Tritheism; for, while there are three Persons, there is but one Essence.

(_a_) The term “person” only approximately represents the truth. Although this word, more nearly than any other single word, expresses the conception which the Scriptures give us of the relation between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it is not itself used in this connection in Scripture, and we employ it in a qualified sense, not in the ordinary sense in which we apply the word “person” to Peter, Paul, and John.

The word “person” is only the imperfect and inadequate expression
of a fact that transcends our experience and comprehension.
Bunyan: “My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold The truth, as
cabinets encase the gold.” Three Gods, limiting each other, would
deprive each other of Deity. While we show that the unity is
articulated by the persons, it is equally important to remember
that the persons are limited by the unity. With us personality
implies entire separation from all others—distinct individuality.
But in the one God there can be no such separation. The personal
distinctions in him must be such as are consistent with essential
unity. This is the merit of the statement in the _Symbolum
Quicumque_ (or Athanasian Creed, wrongly so called): “The Father
is God, the Son is God, the Holy Ghost is God; and yet there are
not three Gods but one God. So likewise the Father is Lord, the
Son is Lord, the Holy Ghost is Lord; yet there are not three Lords
but one Lord. For as we are compelled by Christian truth to
acknowledge each person by himself to be God and Lord, so we are
forbidden by the same truth to say that there are three Gods or
three Lords.” See Hagenbach, History of Doctrine, 1:270. We add
that the personality of the Godhead as a whole is separate and
distinct from all others, and in this respect is more fully
analogous to man’s personality than is the personality of the
Father or of the Son.

The church of Alexandria in the second century chanted together:
“One only is holy, the Father; One only is holy, the Son; One only
is holy, the Spirit.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 154,
167, 168—“The three persons are neither three Gods, nor three
parts of God. Rather are they God threefoldly, tri-personally....
The personal distinction in Godhead is a distinction within, and
of, Unity: not a distinction which qualifies Unity, or usurps the
place of it, or destroys it. It is not a relation of mutual
exclusiveness, but of mutual inclusiveness. No one person is or
can be without the others.... The personality of the supreme or
absolute Being cannot be without self-contained mutuality of
relations such as Will and Love. But the mutuality would not be
real, unless the subject which becomes object, and the object
which becomes subject, were on each side alike and equally
Personal.... The Unity of all-comprehending inclusiveness is a
higher mode of unity than the unity of singular
distinctiveness.... The disciples are not to have the presence of
the Spirit instead of the Son, but to have the Spirit is to have
the Son. We mean by the Personal God not a limited alternative to
unlimited abstracts, such as Law, Holiness, Love, but the
transcendent and inclusive completeness of them all. The terms
Father and Son are certainly terms which rise more immediately out
of the temporal facts of the incarnation than out of the eternal
relations of the divine Being. They are metaphors, however, which
mean far more in the spiritual than they do in the material
sphere. Spiritual hunger is more intense than physical hunger. So
sin, judgment, grace, are metaphors. But in _John 1:1-18_ ‘Son’ is
not used, but ‘Word.’ ”

(_b_) The necessary qualification is that, while three persons among men have only a _specific_ unity of nature or essence—that is, have the same _species_ of nature or essence,—the persons of the Godhead have a _numerical_ unity of nature or essence—that is, have the _same_ nature or essence. The undivided essence of the Godhead belongs equally to each of the persons; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each possesses all the substance and all the attributes of Deity. The plurality of the Godhead is therefore not a plurality of essence, but a plurality of hypostatical, or personal, distinctions. God is not three and one, but three in one. The one indivisible essence has three modes of subsistence.

The Trinity is not simply a partnership, in which each member can
sign the name of the firm; for this is unity of council and
operation only, not of essence. God’s nature is not an abstract
but an organic unity. God, as living, cannot be a mere Monad.
Trinity is the organism of the Deity. The one divine Being exists
in three modes. The life of the vine makes itself known in the
life of the branches, and this union between vine and branches
Christ uses to illustrate the union between the Father and
himself. (See _John 15:10—_“If ye keep my commandments, ye shall
abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments,
and abide in his love”; _cf._ _verse 5—_“I am the vine, ye are the
branches; he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth
much fruit”; _17:22, 23—_“That they may be one, even as we are
one; I in them, and thou in me.”) So, in the organism of the body,
the arm has its own life, a different life from that of the head
or the foot, yet has this only by partaking of the life of the
whole. See Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:450-453—“The one divine
personality is so present in each of the distinctions, that these,
which singly and by themselves would not be personal, yet do
participate in the one divine personality, each in its own manner.
This one divine personality is the unity of the three modes of
subsistence which participate in itself. Neither is personal
without the others. In each, in its manner, is the whole Godhead.”

The human body is a complex rather than a simple organism, a unity
which embraces an indefinite number of subsidiary and dependent
organisms. The one life of the body manifests itself in the life
of the nervous system, the life of the circulatory system, and the
life of the digestive system. The complete destruction of either
one of these systems destroys the other two. Psychology as well as
physiology reveals to us the possibility of a three-fold life
within the bounds of a single being. In the individual man there
is sometimes a double and even a triple consciousness. Herbert
Spencer, Autobiography, 1:459; 2:204—“Most active minds have, I
presume, more or less frequent experiences of double
consciousness—one consciousness seeming to take note of what the
other is about, and to applaud or blame.” He mentions an instance
in his own experience. “May there not be possible a bi-cerebral
thinking, as there is a binocular vision?... In these cases it
seems as though there were going on, quite apart from the
consciousness which seemed to constitute myself, some process of
elaborating coherent thoughts—as though one part of myself was an
independent originator over whose sayings and doings I had no
control, and which were nevertheless in great measure consistent;
while the other part of myself was a passive spectator or
listener, quite unprepared for many of the things that the first
part said, and which were nevertheless, though unexpected, not
illogical.” This fact that there can be more than one
consciousness in the same personality among men should make us
slow to deny that there can be three consciousnesses in the one
God.

Humanity at large is also an organism, and this fact lends new
confirmation to the Pauline statement of organic interdependence.
Modern sociology is the doctrine of one life constituted by the
union of many. “Unus homo, nullus homo” is a principle of ethics
as well as of sociology. No man can have a conscience to himself.
The moral life of one results from and is interpenetrated by the
moral life of all. All men moreover live, move and have their
being in God. Within the bounds of the one universal and divine
consciousness there are multitudinous _finite_ consciousnesses.
Why then should it be thought incredible that in the nature of
this one God there should be three _infinite_ consciousnesses?
Baldwin, Psychology, 53, 54—“The integration of finite
consciousnesses in an all-embracing divine consciousness may find
a valid analogy in the integration of subordinate consciousnesses
in the unit-personality of man. In the hypnotic state, multiple
consciousnesses may be induced in the same nervous organism. In
insanity there is a secondary consciousness at war with that which
normally dominates.” Schurman, Belief in God, 26, 161—“The
infinite Spirit may include the finite, as the idea of a single
organism embraces within a single life a plurality of members and
functions.... All souls are parts or functions of the eternal life
of God, who is above all, and through all, and in all, and in whom
we live, and move, and have our being.” We would draw the
conclusion that, as in the body and soul of man, both as an
individual and as a race, there is diversity in unity, so in the
God in whose image man is made, there is diversity in unity, and a
triple consciousness and will are consistent with, and even find
their perfection in, a single essence.

By the personality of God we mean more than we mean when we speak
of the personality of the Son and the personality of the Spirit.
The personality of the Godhead is distinct and separate from all
others, and is, in this respect, like that of man. Hence Shedd,
Dogm. Theol., 1:194, says “it is preferable to speak of the
_personality_ of the essence rather than of the _person_ of the
essence; because the essence is not one person, but three
persons.... The divine essence cannot be at once three persons and
one person, if ‘person’ is employed in one signification; but it
can be at once three persons and one personal Being.” While we
speak of the one God as having a personality in which there are
three persons, we would not call this personality a
superpersonality, if this latter term is intended to intimate that
God’s personality is less than the personality of man. The
personality of the Godhead is inclusive rather than exclusive.

With this qualification we may assent to the words of D’Arcy,
Idealism and Theology, 93, 94, 218, 230, 236, 254—“The innermost
truth of things, God, must be conceived as personal; but the
ultimate Unity, which is his, must be believed to be
superpersonal. It is a unity of persons, not a personal unity. For
us personality is the ultimate form of unity. It is not so in him.
For in him all persons live and move and have their being.... God
is personal and also superpersonal. In him there is a transcendent
unity that can embrace a personal multiplicity.... There is in God
an ultimate superpersonal unity in which all persons are one—[all
human persons and the three divine persons].... Substance is more
real than quality, and subject is more real than substance. The
most real of all is the concrete totality, the all-inclusive
Universal.... What human love strives to accomplish—the overcoming
of the opposition of person to person—is perfectly attained in the
divine Unity.... The presupposition on which philosophy is driven
back—[that persons have an underlying ground of unity] is
identical with that which underlies Christian theology.” See
Pfleiderer and Lotze on personality, in this Compendium, p. 104.

(_c_) This oneness of essence explains the fact that, while Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as respects their personality, are distinct subsistences, there is an intercommunion of persons and an immanence of one divine person in another which permits the peculiar work of one to be ascribed, with a single limitation, to either of the others, and the manifestation of one to be recognized in the manifestation of another. The limitation is simply this, that although the Son was sent by the Father, and the Spirit by the Father and the Son, it cannot be said _vice versa_ that the Father is sent either by the Son, or by the Spirit. The Scripture representations of this intercommunion prevent us from conceiving of the distinctions called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as involving separation between them.

Dorner adds that “in one is each of the others.” This is true with
the limitation mentioned in the text above. Whatever Christ does,
God the Father can be said to do; for God acts only in and through
Christ the Revealer. Whatever the Holy Spirit does, Christ can be
said to do; for the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. The
Spirit is the omnipresent Jesus, and Bengel’s dictum is true: “Ubi
Spiritus, ibi Christus.” Passages illustrating this intercommunion
are the following: _Gen. 1:1—_“God created”; _cf._ _Heb.
1:2—_“through whom [the Son] also he made the worlds”; _John 5:17,
19—_“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.... The Son can
do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing; for
what things soever he doeth, these the Son also doeth in like
manner”; _14:9—_“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”;
_11—_“I am in the Father and the Father in me”; _18—_“I will not
leave you desolate: I come unto you” (by the Holy Spirit);
_15:26—_“when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you
from the Father, even the Spirit of truth”; _17:21—_“that they may
all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee”; _2
Cor. 5:19—_“God was in Christ reconciling”; _Titus 2:10—_“God our
Savior”; _Heb. 12:23—_“God the Judge of all”; _cf._ _John
5:22—_“neither doth the father judge any man, but he hath given
all judgment unto the Son”; _Acts 17:31—_“judge the world in
righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”

It is this intercommunion, together with the order of personality
and operation to be mentioned hereafter, which explains the
occasional use of the term “Father” for the whole Godhead; as in
_Eph. 4:6—_“one God and Father of all, who is over all through all
[in Christ], and in you all” [by the Spirit]. This intercommunion
also explains the designation of Christ as “_the Spirit_,” and of
the Spirit as “_the Spirit of Christ_,” as in _1 Cor. 15:45—_“the
last Adam became a life-giving Spirit”; _2 Cor. 3:17—_“Now the
Lord is the Spirit”; _Gal. 4:6—_“sent forth the Spirit of his
Son”; _Phil. 1:19—_“supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ” (see
Alford and Lange on _2 Cor. 3:17, 18_). So the Lamb, in _Rev.
5:6_, has “_seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven
Spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth_” = the Holy Spirit,
with his manifold powers, is the Spirit of the omnipotent,
omniscient, and omnipresent Christ. Theologians have designated
this intercommunion by the terms περιχώρησις, _circumincessio_,
_intercommunicatio_, _circulatio_, _inexistentia_. The word οὐσία
was used to denote essence, substance, nature, being; and the
words πρόσωπον and ὑπόστασις for person, distinction, mode of
subsistence. On the changing uses of the words πρόσωπον and
ὑπόστασις see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:321, note 2. On the meaning
of the word ’person’ in connection with the Trinity, see John
Howe, Calm Discourse of the Trinity; Jonathan Edwards,
Observations on the Trinity; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:194, 267-275,
299, 300.

The Holy Spirit is Christ’s _alter ego_, or other self. When Jesus
went away, it was an exchange of his presence for his
omnipresence; an exchange of limited for unlimited power; an
exchange of companionship for indwelling. Since Christ comes to
men in the Holy Spirit, he speaks through the apostles as
authoritatively as if his own lips uttered the words. Each
believer, in having the Holy Spirit, has the whole Christ for his
own; see A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit. Gore, Incarnation,
218—“The persons of the Holy Trinity are not separable
individuals. Each involves the others; the coming of each is the
coming of the others. Thus the coming of the Spirit must have
involved the coming of the Son. But the specialty of the
Pentecostal gift appears to be the coming of the Holy Spirit out
of the uplifted and glorified _manhood_ of the incarnate Son. The
Spirit is the life-giver, but the life with which he works in the
church is the life of the _Incarnate_, the life of Jesus.”

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 85—“For centuries upon
centuries, the essential unity of God had been burnt and branded
in upon the consciousness of Israel. It had to be completely
established first, as a basal element of thought, indispensable,
unalterable, before there could begin the disclosure to man of the
reality of the eternal relations within the one indivisible being
of God. And when the disclosure came, it came not as modifying,
but as further interpreting and illumining, that unity which it
absolutely presupposed.” E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology,
238—“There is extreme difficulty in giving any statement of a
triunity that shall not verge upon tritheism on the one hand, or
upon mere modalism on the other. It was very natural that Calvin
should be charged with Sabellianism, and John Howe with
tritheism.”

V. The Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are equal.

In explanation, notice that:

1. These titles belong to the Persons.

(_a_) The Father is not God as such; for God is not only Father, but also Son and Holy Spirit. The term “Father” designates that hypostatical distinction in the divine nature in virtue of which God is related to the Son, and through the Son and the Spirit to the church and the world. As author of the believer’s spiritual as well as natural life, God is doubly his Father; but this relation which God sustains to creatures is not the ground of the title. God is Father primarily in virtue of the relation which he sustains to the eternal Son; only as we are spiritually united to Jesus Christ do we become children of God.

(_b_) The Son is not God as such; for God is not only Son, but also Father and Holy Spirit. “The Son” designates that distinction in virtue of which God is related to the Father, is sent by the Father to redeem the world, and with the Father sends the Holy Spirit.

(_c_) The Holy Spirit is not God as such; for God is not only Holy Spirit, but also Father and Son. “The Holy Spirit” designates that distinction in virtue of which God is related to the Father and the Son, and is sent by them to accomplish the work of renewing the ungodly and of sanctifying the church.

Neither of these names designates the Monad as such. Each
designates rather that personal distinction which forms the
eternal basis and ground for a particular self-revelation. In the
sense of being the Author and Provider of men’s natural life, God
is the Father of all. But even this natural sonship is mediated by
Jesus Christ; see _1 Cor. 8:6—_“one Lord, Jesus Christ through
whom are all things, and we through him.” The phrase “_Our
Father_,” however, can be used with the highest truth only by the
regenerate, who have been newly born of God by being united to
Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. See _Gal. 3:26—_“For
ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Jesus Christ”;
_4:4-6—_“God sent forth his Son ... that we might receive the
adoption of sons ... sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our
hearts, crying, Abba, Father”; _Eph. 1:5—_“foreordained as unto
adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.” God’s love for Christ is
the measure of his love for those who are one with Christ. Human
nature in Christ is lifted up into the life and communion of the
eternal Trinity. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:306-310.

Human fatherhood is a reflection of the divine, not, _vice versa_,
the divine a reflection of the human; _cf._ _Eph. 3:14, 15—_“the
Father, from whom every fatherhood πατριά in heaven and on earth
is named.” Chadwick, Unitarianism, 77-83, makes the name “Father”
only a symbol for the great Cause of organic evolution, the Author
of all being. But we may reply with Stearns, Evidence of Christian
Experience, 177—“to know God outside of the sphere of redemption
is not to know him in the deeper meaning of the term ‘Father’. It
is only through the Son that we know the Father: _Mat.
11:27—_‘Neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to
whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.’”

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 38—“The Unseen can be known only by the seen
which comes forth from it. The all-generating or Paternal Life
which is hidden from us can be known only by the generated or
Filial Life in which it reveals itself. The goodness and
righteousness which inhabits eternity can be known only by the
goodness and righteousness which issues from it in the successive
births of time. God above the world is made known only by God in
the world. God transcendent, the Father, is revealed by God
immanent, the Son.” Faber: “O marvellous, O worshipful! No song or
sound is heard, But everywhere and every hour, In love, in wisdom
and in power, the Father speaks his dear eternal Word.” We may
interpret this as meaning that self-expression is a necessity of
nature to an infinite Mind. The Word is therefore eternal. Christ
is the mirror from which are flashed upon us the rays of the
hidden Luminary. So Principal Fairbairn says: “Theology must be on
its historical side Christocentric, but on its doctrinal side
Theocentric.”

Salmond, Expositor’s Greek Testament, on _Eph. 1:5_—“By ‘adoption’
Paul does not mean the bestowal of the full privileges of the
family on those who are sons by nature, but the acceptance into
the family of those who are not sons originally and by right in
the relation proper of those who are sons by birth. Hence υἱοθεσία
is never affirmed of Christ, for he alone is Son of God by nature.
So Paul regards our sonship, not as lying in the natural relation
in which men stand to God as his children, but as implying a new
relation of grace, founded on a covenant relation of God and on
the work of Christ (_Gal. 4:5_ _sq._).”

2. Qualified sense of these titles.

Like the word “person”, the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not to be confined within the precise limitations of meaning which would be required if they were applied to men.

(_a_) The Scriptures enlarge our conceptions of Christ’s Sonship by giving to him in his preëxistent state the names of the Logos, the Image, and the Effulgence of God.—The term “Logos” combines in itself the two ideas of thought and word, of reason and expression. While the Logos as divine thought or reason is one with God, the Logos as divine word or expression is distinguishable from God. Words are the means by which personal beings express or reveal themselves. Since Jesus Christ was “the Word” before there were any creatures to whom revelations could be made, it would seem to be only a necessary inference from this title that in Christ God must be from eternity expressed or revealed to himself; in other words, that the Logos is the principle of truth, or self-consciousness, in God.—The term “Image” suggests the ideas of copy or counterpart. Man is the image of God only relatively and derivatively. Christ is the Image of God absolutely and archetypally. As the perfect representation of the Father’s perfections, the Son would seem to be the object and principle of love in the Godhead.—The term “Effulgence,” finally, is an allusion to the sun and its radiance. As the effulgence of the sun manifests the sun’s nature, which otherwise would be unrevealed, yet is inseparable from the sun and ever one with it, so Christ reveals God, but is eternally one with God. Here is a principle of movement, of will, which seems to connect itself with the holiness, or self-asserting purity, of the divine nature.

Smyth, Introd. to Edwards’ Observations on the Trinity: “The
ontological relations of the persons of the Trinity are not a mere
blank to human thought.” _John 1:1—_“In the beginning was the
Word”—means more than “in the beginning was the _x_, or the zero.”
Godet indeed says that Logos = “reason” only in philosophical
writings, but never in the Scriptures. He calls this a Hegelian
notion. But both Plato and Philo had made this signification a
common one. On λόγος as = reason + speech, see Lightfoot on
Colossians, 143, 144. Meyer interprets it as “personal
subsistence, the self-revelation of the divine essence, before all
time immanent in God.” Neander, Planting and Training, 369—Logos =
“the eternal Revealer of the divine essence.” Bushnell: “Mirror of
creative imagination”; “form of God.”

Word = 1. Expression; 2. Definite expression; 3. Ordered
expression; 4. Complete expression. We make thought definite by
putting it into language. So God’s wealth of ideas is in the Word
formed into an ordered Kingdom, a true Cosmos; see Mason, Faith of
the Gospel, 76. Max Müller: “A word is simply a spoken thought
made audible as sound. Take away from a word the sound, and what
is left is simply the thought of it.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 72,
73—“The Greek saw in the word the abiding thought behind the
passing form. The Word was God and yet finite—finite only as to
form, infinite as to what the form suggests or expresses. By Word
some form must be meant, and any form is finite. The Word is the
form taken by the infinite Intelligence which transcends all
forms.” We regard this identification of the Word with the finite
manifestation of the Word as contradicted by _John 1:1_, where the
Word is represented as being with God before creation, and by
_Phil. 2:6_, where the Word is represented as existing in the form
of God before his self-limitation in human nature. Scripture
requires us to believe in an objectification of God to himself in
the person of the Word prior to any finite manifestation of God to
men. Christ existed as the Word, and the Word was with God, before
the Word was made flesh and before the world came into being; in
other words, the Logos was the eternal principle of truth or
self-consciousness in the nature of God.

Passages representing Christ as the Image of God are _Col.
1:15—_“who is the image of the invisible God”; _2 Cor.
4:4—_“Christ, who is the image of God” (εἰκών); _Heb. 1:3—_“the
very image of his substance” (χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ); here
χαρακτήρ means “impress,” “counterpart.” Christ is the perfect
image of God, as men are not. He therefore has consciousness and
will. He possesses all the attributes and powers of God. The word
“Image” suggests the perfect equality with God which the title
“Son” might at first seem to deny. The living Image of God which
is equal to himself and is the object of his infinite love can be
nothing less than personal. As the bachelor can never satisfy his
longing for companionship by lining his room with mirrors which
furnish only a lifeless reflection of himself, so God requires for
his love a personal as well as an infinite object. The Image is
not precisely the _repetition_ of the original. The stamp from the
seal is not precisely the _reproduction_ of the seal. The letters
on the seal run backwards and can be easily read only when the
impression is before us. So Christ is the only interpretation and
revelation of the hidden Godhead. As only in love do we come to
know the depths of our own being, so it is only in the Son that
“God is love”_ (1 John 4:8)_.

Christ is spoken of as the Effulgence of God in _Heb. 1:3—_“who
being the effulgence of his glory” (ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης); _cf._ _2
Cor. 4:6—_“shined in our hearts, to give the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Notice
that the radiance of the sun is as old as the sun itself, and
without it the sun would not be sun. So Christ is coëqual and
coëternal with the Father. _Ps. 84:11—_“Jehovah God is a sun.” But
we cannot see the sun except by the sunlight. Christ is the
sunlight which streams forth from the Sun and which makes the Sun
visible. If there be an eternal Sun, there must be also an eternal
Sunlight, and Christ must be eternal. Westcott on _Hebrews
1:3_—“The use of the absolute timeless term ὤν, ‘_being_’, guards
against the thought that the Lord’s sonship was by adoption, and
not by nature. ἀπαύγασμα does not express personality, and
χαρακτήρ does not express coëssentiality. The two words are
related exactly as ὁμοούσιος and μονογενής, and like those must be
combined to give the fulness of the truth. The truth expressed
thus antithetically holds good absolutely.... In Christ the
essence of God is made distinct; in Christ the revelation of God’s
character is seen.” On Edwards’s view of the Trinity, together
with his quotations from Ramsey’s Philosophical Principles, from
which he seems to have derived important suggestions, see Allen,
Jonathan Edwards, 338-376; G. P. Fisher, Edwards’s Essay on the
Trinity, 110-116.

(_b_) The names thus given to the second person of the Trinity, if they have _any_ significance, bring him before our minds in the general aspect of Revealer, and suggest a relation of the doctrine of the Trinity to God’s immanent attributes of truth, love, and holiness. The prepositions used to describe the internal relations of the second person to the first are not prepositions of rest, but prepositions of direction and movement. The Trinity, as the organism of Deity, secures a life-movement of the Godhead, a process in which God evermore objectifies himself and in the Son gives forth of his fulness. Christ represents the centrifugal action of the deity. But there must be centripetal action also. In the Holy Spirit the movement is completed, and the divine activity and thought returns into itself. True religion, in reuniting us to God, reproduces in us, in our limited measure, this eternal process of the divine mind. Christian experience witnesses that God in himself is unknown; Christ is the organ of external revelation; the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal revelation—only he can give us an inward apprehension or realization of the truth. It is “through the eternal Spirit” that Christ “offered himself without blemish unto God,” and it is only through the Holy Spirit that the church has access to the Father, or fallen creatures can return to God.

Here we see that God is Life, self-sufficient Life, Infinite Life,
of which the life of the universe is but a faint reflection, a
rill from the fountain, a drop from the ocean. Since Christ is the
only Revealer, the only outgoing principle in the Godhead, it is
he in whom the whole creation comes to be and holds together. He
is the Life of nature: all natural beauty and grandeur, all forces
molecular and molar, all laws of gravitation and evolution, are
the work and manifestation of the omnipresent Christ. He is the
Life of humanity: the intellectual and moral impulses of man, so
far as they are normal and uplifting, are due to Christ; he is the
principle of progress and improvement in history. He is the Life
of the church: the one and only Redeemer and spiritual Head of the
race is also its Teacher and Lord.

All objective revelation of God is the work of Christ. But all
subjective manifestation of God is the work of the Holy Spirit. As
Christ is the principle of outgoing, so the Holy Spirit is the
principle of return to God. God would take up finite creatures
into himself, would breath into them his breath, would teach them
to launch their little boats upon the infinite current of his
life. Our electric cars can go up hill at great speed so long as
they grip the cable. Faith is the grip which connects us with the
moving energy of God. “The universe is homeward bound,” because
the Holy Spirit is ever turning objective revelation into
subjective revelation, and is leading men consciously or
unconsciously to appropriate the thought and love and purpose of
Him in whom all things find their object and end; “for of him and
through him, and unto him, are all things”_ (Rom. 11:36)_,—here
there is allusion to the Father as the source, the Son as the
medium, and the Spirit as the perfecting and completing agent, in
God’s operations. But all these external processes are only signs
and finite reflections of a life-process internal to the nature of
God.

Meyer on _John 1:1—_“the Word was with God”: “πρὸς τὸν θεόν does
not = παρὰ τῷ θεῷ, but expresses the existence of the Logos in God
in respect of intercourse. The moral essence of this essential
fellowship is love, which excludes any merely modalistic
conception.” Marcus Dods, Expositor’s Greek Testament, _in loco_:
“This preposition implies intercourse and therefore separate
personality.”