Chapter II: Doctrine Of The Trinity (5)

Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus
Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the
great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire
universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.” Even
James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors,
436, admits that “there is an essential truth hidden in the idea
of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it
has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human
heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.” William
Adams Brown: “If God is by nature love, he must be by nature
social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the
limitations of finite personality are removed.” But Dr. Brown
wrongly adds: “Not the mysteries of God’s being, as he is in
himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this
doctrine.” Similarly P. S. Moxom: “I do not know how it is
possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is
absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived
of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as
righteous.” But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other
moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that
righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons
within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,
1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre,
1:462-524.

W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer
of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without
attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be
non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an
antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, or _natura
naturans_ and _natura naturata_, or in some other way. This
antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think
of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in
existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we
cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune
God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God
revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and
God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the
Spirit that proceeds from both.” This confession of an economic
Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent
and eternal.

B. It is essential to any proper revelation.

If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too with the Holy Spirit. “As God can be revealed only through God, so also can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God, then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a reality.” In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.

Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk,
156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and
his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer
the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see
the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father,
pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the
Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either
the Son or the Spirit. See _Rom. 8:27—_“he that searcheth the
hearts [_i. e._, God] knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit,
because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the
will of God.” See also Godet on _John 1:18—_“No man hath seen God
at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the
Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ
ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I: “Christianity says with simplicity,
‘No man hath seen God, except God.’ ” _John 16:15—_“All things
whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he
taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims
for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the
Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this,
even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to
take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, on _John
14:9—_“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou,
Show us the Father?”

The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be
no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation
in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce,
in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an
infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual
minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake.
Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if
Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God’s
will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as
only “one of the day’s works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in
the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand
regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom
we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all
truth and the judge of all mankind. “Heaven and earth shall pass
away, but my words shall not pass away”_ (Mat. 24:35)._ The
resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (_John 5:28_),
and future retribution shall be “the wrath of the Lamb”_ (Rev.
6:16)_. Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except
through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts
only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of
the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.

C. It is essential to any proper redemption.

If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality, may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our Sanctifier.

“God is the way to himself.” “Nothing human holds good before God,
and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.” The best method of
arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin;
for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that
only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a
slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of
the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It
would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when
logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has
also always led to Unitarianism.” In the reverse order, too, it is
manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render
more superficial men’s views of the sin and guilt and punishment
from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden
religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and
missionary effort (_John 12:44_; _Heb. 10:26_). See Arthur, on the
Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in
Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol.
Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to
see God in the light of nature, while he said: ‘In thy light shall
we see light’_ (Ps. 36:9)_.” We should see nature in the light of
Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God
in Christ (_John 16:9_). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God;
to reject Christ is to turn one’s back on God: _John 12:44—_“He
that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent
me”; _Heb. 10:26, 29—_“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin
... [for him] who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”

In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure
pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct
to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch
housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through
him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King,
whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we
come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is
himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a
convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer’s wife and
pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the
murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a
pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the
murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have
heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken,
blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at
Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen’s dress; but I have
also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees,
and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put
him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we
may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can
ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it
will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he
whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God
before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”

Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had
strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the
doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his
Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says: “I
regard Smith’s conversion as the most remarkable event in College
in my day.” Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his
own heart; and doubts about Christ’s divinity could not hold their
own against the confession: “Of one thing I feel assured: I need
an infinite Savior.” Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian
doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and
brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of
God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul: “None but an
infinite Savior can ever save me!” Only in a divine Christ—Christ
_for_ us upon the Cross, and Christ _in_ us by his Spirit—can the
convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true
religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B.
Smith wrote in his later life: “When the doctrine of the Trinity
was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement
and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical
necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems,
the gems all fall asunder.”

D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.

If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.

See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God’s
absolute and essential nature; not simply what he is _to us_, but
what he is _in himself_. If Christ is the eternal Son of the
Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature,
the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being;
the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates
from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian
idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God,
reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and
thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father
is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the
universe.” Hence _1 John 2:23—_“Whosoever denieth the Son, the
same hath not the Father.” D’Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If
God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as
waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished
before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself.
His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to
his relation to some of his creatures. The words ‘God is love’_ (1
John 4:8)_ become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the
expression of a truth about the divine nature.”

Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a
perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing
in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual
want. It is a Father’s perfection to originate—a Son’s to receive.
We need sympathy and aid in this _receptive_ life; hence, the help
of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are
heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ’s filial life to the root of all
filial life in us. See _Gal. 2:19, 20—_‘it is no longer I that
live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in
the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God,
who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’” Thomas Erskine of
Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in
this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.” Gore,
Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of
manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the
prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is
love.” On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the
Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M.
Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On
the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289;
Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed
Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.

On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod.
Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C.,
‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one;
the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these
three made all things.’ ” The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris,
Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true
persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the
Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was
pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29;
Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of
the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three
dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man
creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?

The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given
the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a
personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in
good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the
three mystic letters of the syllable _Om_, or _Aum_, and by the
image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick,
Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The places of the three are
interchangeable. Williams: “In the three persons the one God is
shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva,
Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the
blessed three.” There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men’s
salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which
temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced
to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is
only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity.
According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in
later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first
principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of
matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the
mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light
of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.

The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo
or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus. “These three
surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential
care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing
relations to each other, that they may be said to ‘agree in
one’ ”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone,
Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it
gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is
a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a
philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.

Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are “residuary
fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a
process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and
spiritual degradation.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity,
92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated
by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only
names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity
invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a
latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the
objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is
never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The
personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is
scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering
breeze or sullen moaning restless sea. ‘There is but one,’ they
say, ‘though the poets call him by different names.’ The
all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of
these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was
implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in
Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of
philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find
in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying
essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal
substance, and he wished to look at all things ‘under the form of
eternity.’ All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the
infinite substance which we call God.” See also L. L. Paine,
Ethnic Trinities.

The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God,
together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of
it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the
Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the
inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our
treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor: “He who goes about to
speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and
names of man’s invention, talking of essence and existences,
hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in
pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head,
and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that
feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom,
sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the
Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand
nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands
the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”