Author: Albert C. Knudson
[p. 370]
THE biblical conception of God may be defined in a general way as ethical personalism; and the distinctive element in the New Testament conception, as we have seen, is its stress on sacrificial love. If the latter idea had been communicated to the world simply through verbal instruction, Christian teaching would probably not have advanced beyond strict monotheism. But the revelation of the divine love was not made merely nor primarily in word, but in deed, and particularly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. This method of revelation imparted to the divine love a new and vital quality that it would not otherwise have had; but it also did more, it extended the divine love and with it the divine essence beyond the strictly monotheistic limits to which it had previously been confined. Deity as a result took on a new range; a new name came to be linked with it. Jesus as well as the traditional God came to be regarded as divine; and out of this expanded idea of Deity there grew eventually the doctrine of the Trinity.
The Trinity is the specific Christian doctrine of God. There are or have been numerous ethnic “trinities” [p. 371] or triads; such as Osiris, Isis, and Horns among the Egyptians; Ann, Enlil, and Ea among the Sumerians; Sin, Shamash, and Ishtar among the early Babylonians; Demeter, Kore, and a variable male deity among the Eleusinians; Uranos, Kronos, and Zeus among the Romans; and Vishnu, Siva, and Brahma among the Hindus. These triads were all polytheistic, and hence differ radically from the Christian Trinity, which is fundamentally monotheistic. Only the last-named, the Hindu Trimurti, as it is called, bears a certain resemblance to the Christian doctrine: Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva are treated as different manifestations or revelations of one and the same divine essence, the impersonal Brahman. But the resemblance is superficial. Between the two types of triadic monism there is a vast difference, and neither owed its origin to the other. What we have in the Hindu Trimurti is “a method of reconciling the claims of rival monotheistic religions with one another and with a traditional philosophy.” [1] The triad is probably not very old, and has never had any considerable religious significance.
Nathan Söderblom [2] has pointed out that besides the many polytheistic triads in the history of religion there are also nonpolytheistic triads. Of the latter the most important is the Buddhistic “triratna.” or three jewels, consisting of Buddha, his Doctrine, and his Order. According to Soderblom it is here that we have the closest ethnic analogy to the Christian [p. 372] Trinity. The triratna has played a role in the history of Buddhism comparable in importance to that of the Trinity in the history of Christianity; and in both we have the same general scheme. The three factors in each are constituted by the content of the revelation, its mediator, and its realising agency in the world. The content is in the one case the “Doctrine” and in the other God; the mediator is in the one case Buddha and in the other Jesus Christ; the realizing agency is in the one case the Order and in the other the Holy Spirit. But this correspondence is manifestly purely formal in character. So far as the content and inner structure of the two “trinities” are concerned, there is no real parallel between them. The one is theistic, the other nontheistic. The one has to do with distinctions within the Godhead, the other with different factors in an historic movement unrelated to the Deity. That one was not derived from the other, and particularly that the Christian Trinity was not derived from the Buddhistic triratna, is thus evident.
Still, there is a feeling that there must be some connection between the Christian Trinity and the numerous ethnic triads. One writer [3] has, for instance, argued that there was a primitive Semitic triad of Gods and that this triad, handed down by a continuous tradition, though now and then hidden from the view of the historian, came to new life in what he calls the “tritheistic” teaching of the New Testament. The original triad consisted of Father, Mother, and [p. 373] Son, who were somehow connected with or represented by the Moon, the Sun, and Venus. But the existence of such a primitive “trinity” is open to serious question, and that it in any case lost its religious significance both among the northern and southern Semites in pre-Christian times is conceded by the author. The theory may, consequently, be dismissed as a fanciful speculation. It throws no light on the origin of the Christian Trinity.
Another writer [4] has propounded the theory that among primitive peoples three was the highest number in their arithmetical system and that it hence came to be used as an expression of completeness or totality. Three objects stood for a large group or for a rounded whole, and so it became customary to put the names of three gods together as a designation of the entire superworld. It was in this way that the many ethnic triads arose, and to this motive also the origin of the Christian Trinity is traced. But whatever truth may attach to the theory, so far as it relates to the significance of the number three, it fails to account for what is distinctive in the Christian Trinity. The ethnic triads were made up of relatively independent deities and had a polytheistic background. The gods composing them were not bound together by any metaphysical or other ties. Their union was more or less “accidental,” and hence in their case the idea of totality suggested by the number three may have been an important factor in combining them into triads. But with the Christian Trinity the situation is different. There we have a monotheistic back [p. 374] ground, and surely the idea of completeness and totality is expressed as effectively by the number one as by the number three. In any case, in view of the known facts, it would be highly absurd to attribute the rise of the Trinitarian doctrine to the magical influence of a number. No doubt the Trinitarian formula has seemed to Christian people a more adequate expression of the idea of Deity than Jewish monotheism, but the reason is hardly to be found in the fact that it is composed of three parts.
A third writer has attempted to account for the doctrine of the Trinity by tracing its origin to what he regards as the threefold root of religion. [5] One of these roots is found in the worship of nature, another in the cult of the dead, and a third in the belief in a supremely good Being. The last of these is the most important, but the other two support and corroborate it, and together they constitute the source of religion. The fact that the source is threefold explains the numerous triadic and trinitarian formulae that have appeared in the course of religious history, for in these formulae the effort is made to sum up the essential elements in religious faith. But however true the latter statement may be, it is extremely dubious whether religion has just three roots, and it is still more dubious whether the three roots are those above mentioned. The fact is that the worship of nature and the cult of the dead are incidental expressions of religion [p. 375] rather than its sources, and the belief in a supremely good Being is a late development in religious history. The account given of the genesis and nature of religion is thus seriously defective. But apart from that it is very doubtful if there are three, and only three, sources of religion or fundamental elements in it. Georg Wobbermin, [6] who criticizes the foregoing theories, maintains that there are three fundamental religious feelings the feeling of dependence, the feeling of protectedness (Geborgenheitsgefühl), and the feeling of longing or aspiration and that these feelings receive their “specific Christian stamp” and their “highest conceivable unfolding” in trinitarian monotheism. But while the latter part of this contention may be true, it by no means follows that a correct analysis of religion necessarily takes a threefold form, nor does it follow that such a threefold analysis had any significant influence in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Certainly, the framers of the doctrine were guided by very different considerations. The truth is that religion is a highly complex phenomenon and is capable of analysis into many different elements or feelings. No threefold analysis could command general assent. Religion is not in any strict sense triadic in structure, nor can it be made such. There is nothing, therefore, in its essential nature that necessarily leads to the Trinitarian doctrine. This doctrine cannot with any stringency be psychologically deduced, nor was any attempt made to do so in the period of its formation. No doubt religious feeling had much to [p. 376] do with the development of the doctrine, and after its formulation its three component elements each met a fundamental religious need. But it was no triad of religious needs or feelings that gave rise to the doctrine. Other forces of a historical rather than a psychological nature were there determinative.
A trinity that stood closer to the Christian doctrine than any of the ethnic triads mentioned above was that of the Neoplatonic philosophy. According to Plotinus there were three hypostases or divine principles: the One or the Good, Intelligence or Spirit (nous), and the World-Soul. The first was the Godhead in the absolute sense of the term, the second was 1 an emanation from it, and the third an emanation from the second. How such “emanations” were possible we do not know. Indeed, they were not emanations in the strict sense of the term. They did not arise by a division of the divine substance. They were, rather, “overflowing by-products” which left the ultimate substance unchanged, though they proceeded from it by a necessity of its essence. They represented lower orders of reality, but they belonged still to the sphere of the Divine and found their ground and unity in the One, so that together they constituted a real triunity. Plotinus himself thought that this trinity could be found in Plato, and Socinus held that the church derived its Trinitarian doctrine from him. Both were mistaken, though there was more truth in Plotinus’ contention than in that of Socinus. Plato did express ideas that later furnished a basis for the Neoplatonic trinity. But neither he nor Plotinus nor Greek philosophy in general was in [p. 377] a similar way the source of the Christian doctrine. It has been maintained by an influential school that the doctrine of the Trinity was the result of the importation of Greek metaphysics into Christian theology. And it is no doubt true that not only this particular doctrine, but the whole theological movement in the early church was stimulated and guided by the Greek spirit of inquiry and was cast in molds of thought borrowed from Greek philosophy. But the essential content of the Trinitarian doctrine and the impelling motives behind it were not borrowed from Greek speculation, but were embedded deep in Christian history and Christian experience. It was the fact of Christ and the fact of a new life in and through him that constituted the real basis of the doctrine. These facts called for explanation and in the process of evolving an adequate explanation metaphysics necessarily played an important part; and more or less unconsciously the analysis of religious experience may also have had considerable influence. But the moving force in the whole process was its factual basis, and this was distinctively Christian.
There is, however, an important truth connected with the attempts at both a psychological and a speculative derivation of the Trinitarian doctrine. In both of them it is assumed, and correctly, that the doctrine stands in an organic relation to reason and to religious experience. This is a fact that needs to be emphasized in view of the tendency in the past to lay so much stress upon the mysterious character of the doctrine as to deny to it any rational or empirical basis. Since the time of Thomas Aquinas it has been [p. 378] customary in orthodox theology to separate the Trinity from the doctrine of God and treat it as a pure mystery, a superrational truth of revelation. It may, we are told, be grounded in the divine reason, but so far as man is concerned, it lies entirely beyond the range of rational justification. The only basis on which we are warranted in accepting it is the authority of Scripture. “Faith in the Trinity and its cognate doctrines,” said Miner Raymond, “must be founded on an unquestionable thus saith the Lord/ or it is a mere superstition.” [7] With the Christian doctrine of God, however, it is different. It is a “mixed article,” based both on reason and revelation, and hence admits of rational support and exposition, such as has been given it in the preceding chapters.
This sharp cleavage between the idea of God as a unitary Being and the doctrine of the Trinity owed its origin to the influence of the Aristotelian philosophy which became dominant in the church in the thirteenth century. Previous to that time the difficulties involved in the Trinitarian doctrine were, of course, recognized, but they were not regarded as essentially different from those connected with the general idea of God. Again and again the early church Fathers declared that God in his essential nature lay beyond the reach of the human understanding. “That God is, I know,” said Basil, [8] “but what his essence is, I hold to be above reason; . . . faith is competent to know that God is, not what he [p. 379] is.” “It is not,” said John of Damascus, “within our capacity to say anything about God, or even to think of him, beyond the things which have been divinely revealed to us. It is plain that there is a God. But what he is in his essence and nature is absolutely incomprehensible and unknowable.” [9] The being of God itself was thus thought of as representing the extreme of mystery. Between it and the Trinity there was in that respect no difference. Both were on the same plane. They were what Lotze would have called “limit notions.” From the side of the facts they were simple enough; they were rational constructions, interpretations of facts. But when taken by themselves and viewed from the standpoint of their intrinsic rationality they faded into dimness and unintelligibility. This was as true of “the unity of the essence” as of “the distinction of the persons.” The two were equally mysterious, and each involved the other. The Trinity was not a kind of revelational appendix to an otherwise rational self-consistent idea of God. It was the fuller unfolding of the Christian view of Deity itself, its completer explication. However mysterious it may have been from the point of view of the finite reason, it was not uniquely so. It was arrived at by logical processes and stood vitally and organically related to the general Christian conception of God. What the latter implied was most clearly exhibited in the doctrine of the Trinity. Trinitarianism was the ripe fruit of Christian theism. This view of the Trinity has been expounded at [p. 380] length from the religious standpoint by Georg Wobbermin in the third volume of his Systematische Theologie. He there maintains that the decisive difference between Christianity and Judaism is to be found in their conceptions of God. The Christian conception is more thoroughly personalistic and more absolutely monotheistic. Its personalism was deeper and more sharply denned because of the new stress placed upon the thought of eternal fellowship with God. Christ was raised from the dead in order to enter upon this fellowship and in order to lead others into it. This gave to the personal character of God a depth and inwardness that it had previously lacked. It also carried with it the idea of his absoluteness in a new and more exclusive sense. The older nationalistic particularism was completely transcended, and the Divine Father came to be regarded as absolute from both the metaphysical and the ethical points of view* “No one is good,” said Jesus, “no one but God himself.” [10] It is worthy of note that this remark was made in response to a question that had to do with the attainment of eternal life^ In the light of this goal Jesus declared God to be alone good and to be the only God. In other words, God was for him the end as well as the beginning, the Omega as well as the Alpha, the Redeemer as well as the Creator* These two were essential moments in the early Christian view of God, and their vital union represented a distinct advance beyond the Old Testament, But there was a third and even more significant factor* Between creation and redemption there is a long period, [p. 381] and during it God was regarded as regnant in nature and history, a history that reached its religious climax in Christ. A God immanent in history, especially religious history, who was also Creator and Redeemer such was then the God of the early Christians, and he was, as the foregoing analysis shows, a triune God. [11]
Several variations of this triple analysis appear in Wobbermin’s book! He, for instance, says that the Christian God is (1) transcendent, (2) personal, and (3) immanent. [12] He is also (1) a God of creation, (2) a God of redemption, and (3) a God of sanctification. [13] Again, he is (1) the All-ruler, (2) the immanent God of history, and (3) a spiritual-personal God. [14] To this objective Trinity Wobbermin, furthermore, finds a corresponding subjective or ethical trinity, consisting of faith, love, and hope. [15] And yet again he points out that there is a parallel between the three elements in the Christian conception of God and the three fundamental religious feelings the feeling of dependence, the feeling of “protectedness,” and the feeling of longing, [16] In these different trinities it may be noted that transcendence, creation, universal rule, faith and the feeling of dependence go together and have reference to the “Father.” Redemption, spiritual-personality, hope, and the feeling of longing likewise stand related to each other [p. 382] and point to the second principle in the divine nature, the “Son.” Immanence, sanctification, love, and the feeling of “protectedness” constitute the third group and find their parallel in the “Holy Spirit.” This correspondence of the various trinities mentioned by Wobbermin, with each other and with the ecclesiastical Trinity is not exact; but the relation between them is sufficiently close to bring out rather impressively the fact that the Christian idea of God can be analyzed into three basal elements and that there are three analogous elements in our empirical response to them.
For the analysis presented by Wobbermin there is not a little scriptural support. He himself lays special stress upon Rom. 11. 36. There we read that “from him and through him and unto him are all things.” God is the Creator of the world, the source of all that is. From him comes everything. Everything also exists through him. He is the immanent ground of the world. In him we live and move and have our being, and by him human history is guided toward its ultimate goal. This goal is found in God himself. So unto him also are all things. Everything ends in him. He thus fulfills a threefold function. He is the Whence and the Whither of life and its sustaining Ground.
That this triple formula was taken seriously by Paul and had something more than a merely literary or aesthetic significance would seem to be indicated by the other passages where it occurs. In 1 Cor. 8. 6 the apostle says: “To us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things, and we unto him; and one [p. 383] Lord Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him.” Here again we have God referred to as both the Whence and the Whither of life, its Creator and Redeemer. But instead of his being also designated as the immanent ground of the world and of history, Jesus Christ appears as the one through whom are all things and we through him. This does not mean that Christ is only another name for the immanent activity of God. He is rather represented as a distinct Being, the Mediator of creation and redemption. Mediatorship, however, does not exclude divine activity; it presupposes it. There is, therefore, in the mediatorial activity of Christ an implied reference to the third factor in the early Christian view of God; and this reference assumes that the immanent activity of God in history reached its climax in Christ Jesus. The same assumption underlies Col. 1. 15-17. Here we read of Christ that “all things have been created through him and unto him.” But back of his creative activity lay the original creative power of the Father (v. 12), from whom all things came and who reveals himself in the work of Christ. In this passage also we thus have in the background of the apostles thought the triple formula: from God, through God, unto God.
Some have maintained that this formula is not specifically Christian, that it was borrowed from Stoicism, and that it is interpreted most naturally in a pantheistic sense. Hence no such fundamental significance can be attached to it as does Wobbermin. He, however, rightly replies that, while a similar formula occurs in Marcus Aurelius and may have [p. 384] been common in Stoic circles, and while Paul may have derived it from that source, he gives to it an entirely new and distinctively Christian content. The various contexts in which it occurs make this evident. Consequently, there is no inherent reason why it should not be equated with the trinitarian benediction in 2 Cor. 13, 14: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” It has been argued that there was no connection between the two in the apostle’s mind; but in Eph. 4. 4-6 the essential ideas expressed by both are bound up immediately with each other. We there read of the “one Spirit,” the “one Lord,” and then the “one God and Father of all,” who, in conformity with Rom. 11. 36, “is over all, and through all, and in all.” Another significant passage is that in 1 Cor. 12. 4-6, which is the earliest clear-cut and unquestioned formulation of the Trinitarian doctrine. It speaks of “one and the same Spirit,” of “one and the same Lord,” and of “one and the same God,” adding of the last named that he “worketh all things in all,” a clause that suggests Rom. 11. 36.
There are many other Trinitarian passages in the New Testament [17] or passages that suggest the Trinitarian formula; [18] but those cited suffice to illustrate the view that the Christian conception of God was from the outset Trinitarian in form. Whether Wobbermin’s analysis was consciously in the mind of Paul [p. 385] and the early Christians or not, it brings out the three essential elements in their thought of God; and these elements have through the ages been the vital source of Trinitarian speculation. The doctrine of the Trinity was not, then, superimposed upon the doctrine of God as a more or less alien addition and as a unique mystery completely transcending the human reason. No doubt many mysterious and contradictory things have been said about the Trinity, so that there is more or less justification for Doctor South’s warning that “as he that denies this fundamental article of the Christian religion may lose his soul, so he that much strives to understand it may lose his wits.” [19] But the difficulties in the doctrine have grown out of later speculative elaborations of it rather than out of the religious ideas expressed by it. It has always been the latter that have been the generating and sustaining source of the doctrine and they are inherent in the Christian view of God. It is to them and the historic facts with which they were associated in New Testament times that Christian Trinitarianism owes its origin. The particular form taken by it in later times was due in considerable measure to ideas borrowed from Greek philosophy, but the spirit that inspired it was always Christian. In the Trinity we have simply an explication of the primitive Christian faith in God.
In the development of the Trinitarian doctrine [p. 386] there were two main periods. The first was marked by the recognition of a unique presence of God in Christ a presence that called forth and warranted a worshipful attitude toward him. The second was characterized by the identification of this presence with a distinct and eternal mode of being within the divine essence itself. Between these two periods there was no sharp line of demarcation. The first passed gradually over into the second. Eoughly speaking, it may be said that the first was represented by the New Testament. The second reached its climax at the Council of Nicaea in 325, but extended a full century beyond that date.
In both periods it should be noted that interest o centered in the person of Christ. It was not God the Creator, nor God the sanctifying Spirit, nor was it the idea of threeness [20] in the Godhead with which the doctrine of the Trinity was primarily concerned. Its fundamental concern was with God the Son or God in Christ. The divinity of Christ carried with it the idea of a Divine Creator and of a Divine Spirit and thus grounded the idea of a Divine Trinity. But it was not the Trinity as such toward which the attention of the early church was especially directed, nor was it the Creator or Holy Spirit; it was God incarnate in Christ. This was the great creative idea in the life and thought of the church. It may have had [p. 387] as its background such a Trinitarian conception of God as that expounded by Wobbermin. But this conception was itself due to the influence of Christ. It was he who by his life and death put the redemptive activity of God on a par with his creative activity and made vital the idea of his immanent activity in the world an activity that reached its religious culmination in his own Messiahship and was perpetuated in the church by the work of the Holy Spirit. The Trinity represented by the creative, redemptive, and immanent activity of God, as it was conceived by Paul and others in the apostolic age, was the direct result of the life and teaching of Christ. Indeed, it might be said to be an inference from the impression made by_his personality. It was in him and his sacrificial death that God was most fully revealed as Redeemer, and it was in the sanctifying work of the Spirit that his immanence was made most manifest to men. Apart from these concrete manifestations of the redemptive and immanent activity of God, the Trinity of creation, redemption and immanence would probably not have been thought of in Jewish circles and certainly would have been devoid of the power necessary to found a universal church. It was Christ and the Holy Spirit, not the abstract ideas of the redemptive and creative activity of God, that laid hold of the minds and the hearts of Christian believers. Hence the Trinitarian formula, adopted by the church, spontaneously took the form of a confession of faith, not in three aspects of the divine activity, but in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The starting point of Christian Trinitarianism was [p. 388] the belief in what may be called the unique divinity of Christ. How this belief arose is one of the most mooted questions in the history of religion. Its rise in a polytheistic faith would not have been especially strange, but that it should have sprung up in connection with a clear-cut monotheism creates a perplexing problem. Two groups of theories may be distinguished. One traces the source of the belief to the actual impression made by Jesus upon his disciples and to its logical and consistent development. The other group finds its origin in some contemporary myth such as that of a dying Saviour current in the non-Christian mystery cults of the day. Some have gone so far as to argue that Jesus never existed and that the gospel figure was that of a cultgod, clothed in historical dress. [21] Others hold that, while a Jewish rabbi by the name of Jesus existed, no real importance would ever have attached to him but for the fact that a mystery cult with its mythical deity came somehow to be grafted upon his surviving memory. Still others look upon Jesus as a religious genius of transcendent significance, but they insist that he was only a man and that the later association of his name with Deity was not only at variance with his own teaching, but a perversion of Christianity that has cursed the whole subsequent history of the church. According to this view we must distinguish sharply between the religion of Jesus and the religion about Jesus, and between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Occasionally the distinction is spoken of as one between Jesus [p. 389] and Paul or one between Palestinian and Hellenistic Christianity. But however it is phrased, the meaning is essentially the same. The real Jesus, the Jesus of history, was a mere man, to whom divinity could not 1 in any proper sense of the term be attributed. It was the creative imagination of the early church and the influence of the mystery cults that translated him into an object of worship. Paul, in particular, was responsible for the change.
This theory and the others related to it seek to fit Jesus into the frame of a semideistic Jewish monotheism, and in so doing necessarily deny to him the unique position accorded him by the Christian faith. From their point of view there is a gulf between the human and the divine which cannot be bridged except by mythology. There may have been such a man as Jesus or there may not, he may have been a very remarkable man or he may not; but in any case there could have been no unique divine element in him. The ascription of divinity to him was due to the mythmaking faculty. There was no historical or empirical basis for it. The later Trinitarian and Christological doctrines were simply rationalizations of a myth. It was, we are frankly told, a myth that conquered the world.
Opposed to theories of this type stands the New Testament conviction that “God was in Christ” in a real and unique sense. How this conviction arose we cannot say with certainty, nor is it altogether clear how the Divine Presence in Christ was conceived by the New Testament writers. But that they regarded it as a fact is evident, and it is equally evident to [p. 390] Christian faith that this conviction was no foreign importation, but was due to the direct impression made by Christ himself upon his disciples.
The factors and considerations that led the early disciples to set Jesus apart from other men and to ascribe to him more or less of a divine character were no doubt numerous. We may distinguish five. For one thing there must have been something about the * personality of Jesus that awakened the sense of the “numinous” or the superhuman. Rudolf Otto [22] directs special attention to Mark 10. 32, where we read that, as Jesus went before his disciples on the way to Jerusalem, “they were amazed, and as they followed they were afraid.” The feeling here referred to, we are told, was that of the numinous, and “no artistry of characterization” could express it “so powerfully as these few masterly and pregnant words.” Akin to this verse is Luke 5. 8, where it is said of Peter that he “fell down at Jesus’ knees, saying, Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord,” and also Matt. 8. 8, where the centurion is reported as saying, “O Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof.” In addition to these, it is probable that there were many unrecorded instances of a similar kind. Only on this supposition would it seem possible to account for the depth of attachment to Christ implied in the founding of a religious community in his name.
A second factor that contributed to the same end was Jesus’ Messianic consciousness or his consciousness of a unique filial relation to God. Of these two [p. 391] the latter was the more basal. It was Jesus’ consciousness of divine Sonship that led to his Messianic consciousness rather than the reverse. It has, it is true, been denied that Jesus thought of himself either as the Messiah or as standing in a unique relation to God; but the grounds on which this conclusion is based have not commended themselves to the great body of New Testament critics. It is also true that there is considerable difference of opinion as to the exact meaning of the Sonship and Messiahship which Jesus in all probability claimed for himself. But that these terms carried with them the idea of an altogether unique mission can hardly be doubted. They denoted someone greater than a prophet. This is evident from Matt. 11. 27 and 16. 15-17. In the first of these passages we have that most self-revealing of all Jesus’ words, “No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.” In the second we have Peter’s confession of Jesus’ Messiahship, “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God.” This insight, it is worthy of note, Jesus attributed to an immediate experience on Peter’s part, an experience of the numinous or intuitional type. “Flesh and blood,” he said to him, “hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven.” The important thing, however, was not the way the disciples arrived at their belief in Jesus’ Messiahship, but the fact that they derived it directly from him. It was his own self-consciousness that awakened in them the belief. Either he told them of his inner conviction or they sensed it. [p. 392] In any case he stood apart from all others as the bearer of a “superprophetic consciousness, the consciousness of the accomplisher to whose person the flight of the ages and the whole destiny of his followers is linked”; [23] and this fact led naturally to his being called “Lord” in the religious as well as the merely honorific sense of the term.
A third fact that tended to lift Jesus above the common human plane was his exalted moral character, his embodiment of the principle of sacrificial love. This received its supreme expression in his death, but it must have radiated from his entire life. It is significant, as John Baillie [24] points out, that the affirmation that “No man hath seen God at any time,” which occurs twice in the New Testament, [25] is in one instance followed by the statement that we nevertheless see him in the love we show one another, while in the other instance it is followed by the statement that we see him in Jesus. Between these two statements there is no contradiction, nor do they represent two different findings of God. It was the perfect love in the soul of Christ that led men to recognize in him the unique and unalloyed presence of God.
A fourth element that had much to do with the finding of God in Jesus was the belief in his resurrection. However this belief may have originated, it led inevitably to the view that he was in some special sense divine. As Paul put it, it was by the resurrection of the dead that he was declared to be the Son [p. 393] of God with power. [26] The word “power” may refer to the miraculous method of the declaration, as Sanday [27] holds, but it may also refer to the new accession of strength that came to the risen Christ. The latter thought was anticipated by Jesus himself (Luke 12. 49f.) and was assumed in the life and beliefs of the early church. Certainly, it was the risen Christ that Paul thought of as operative in the hearts of believers. To them to live was Christ. It was this experience of the risen Christ that was the source of all living interest in him, and the risen Christ thus experienced must have been looked upon as essentially divine. Between him and God there could have been no perceptible difference. The agape that constituted the soul of the early Christian fellowship was the love both of Christ and of God. The love bearing these two names was not two loves but one.
A fifth consideration that must have tended to give rise to and confirm the belief that “God was in Christ” was the deep-seated religious conviction that all history is rooted in God. To one holding this conviction it must have seemed inevitable that “the unsearchable riches” discovered in Christ were primarily and fundamentally a divine gift to men. Jesus was no doubt the ideal man, and the ideal he attained was in one sense an achievement; his life was a quest after God, an instance of perfect obedience and of perfect faith. But it was much more than that. It was “a self-disclosure of Deity,” a quest of God after man, a supreme [p. 394] instance of divine grace. In and through Christ God imparted himself to men, he did something for them. To this conclusion we are driven by the Christian conception of God’s relation to the world as well as by the intuitions of experience and the testimony of Scripture.
In view of the foregoing facts and considerations we are warranted in deriving the higher view of Christ from the impression made by his personality upon his disciples instead of from an alien and mythical source. But the higher view is not clearly defined in the New Testament. Christ is treated as an object of worship; but there is apparently no consciousness of a conflict between this attitude toward him and monotheism, and no direct effort is made to reconcile the two. Christ is also thought of as in some sense divine; but the relation of the divine element in him to the eternal God, on the one hand, and to the human element in his own being, on the other, is not made a subject of speculation. Problems of this kind were left for a later date. What the New Testament writers were concerned about was to find a designation of Christ that would do justice to the supreme religious and spiritual value they found in him. Such terms as “Messiah,” “Lord,” and in Greek circles “Logos” lay close at hand, and were used. But they were more or less ambiguous terms and did not define in a precise way the relation of the person of Christ either to God or man. They served, rather, a practical religious purpose, and their use formed part of the problem bequeathed to later generations.
It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that [p. 395] the apostolic age had no interest in the speculative questions connected with the person of Christ. The beginnings of such speculation are observable in the account of the baptism and in the story of the virgin birth; and a bold invasion of the speculative field is represented by the doctrine of Christ’s pre-existence taught by Paul and by the authors of the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Gospel of John. In Col. 1. 15-17 and later in Heb. 1. 3 and John 1. 1-18 cosmic significance is attributed to Christ; he is declared to be the Mediator of creation. This has been characterized as “one of the most daring leaps of imagination that have ever been made by the mind of man” and as “the intellectual miracle of the apostolic age.” [28] And such it may seem to us who do not know its historical antecedents. But more remarkable than the idea itself was the fact that, so far as we know, it Avent unchallenged when first announced by Paul. This would seem to indicate either that the idea was not original with him or that it was accepted as a natural inference from the view of Christ previously held. So closely had Christ already been identified with Deity that it imposed no strain upon the Christian imagination to ascribe creative activity to him. But for our purpose the point of special interest is that Paul conceived of the pre-existent Christ as a kind of archangelic being, distinct from God, and fully personal. [29] In what relation the incarnate personality stood to the pre-existent personality, except that it was somehow a continuation of it, he does not tell us; nor does [p. 396] he harmonize this conception of the incarnation with the statement that “God was in Christ.” In speaking of “God” in the latter connection he may have had in mind the pre-existent Christ, but more likely the statement was a general one that took no account of the pre-existent state. Indeed, it might have been said of the pre-existent as well as the incarnate Christ that God was in him. The mystery of the unique presence of God is not solved by the theory of pre-existence, and Paul’s particular theory of preexistence was not accepted as adequate by later Christian theologians. It owed its origin to contemporary modes of thought, and for a time served as an effective expression of what Christ meant in Christian experience. But later and profounder thought demanded a more intimate relation between the divine element in Christ or his pre-existent state and God himself, and this prepared the way for the second period in the development of the Trinitarian doctrine. In the first period, represented by the New Testament, there was a clear conviction that “God was in Christ,” but there was no uniform or adequate theory of the nature of this unique divine presence. The fact of it led naturally to a more immanental view of Deity, but this did not solve the special problem created by the person of Christ. At first the current angelology suggested a solution, and this was later supplemented in Hebrews and the Prologue to John’s Gospel by ideas borrowed from Greek philosophy. But the idea of an archangelic being, whether called the Son or the Logos, did not, when thought through, prove satisfactory either to faith or reason. A more [p. 397] complete deification than that represented by such a being was needed, and so in the second period of Trinitarian thought the divine principle in Christ was identified with a mode of being within God himself. The process by which this identification was brought about was a gradual one. We may note five stages in its unfolding. [30] The first marked what seems but a slight advance beyond the New Testament. It consisted in the equating of Christ with the Logos by the Apologists of the second century. What differentiated their position from that of the Prologue to the fourth Gospel was the fact that they were adherents of the Platonic-Stoic philosophy and that the idea of the Logos was fundamental in their theory of reality. Consequently, they made it basal also in their Christology. The fourth Gospel subordinated the idea of the Logos to that of the Son, but the Apologists reversed the order, and in so doing took what Harnack has called “the most important step that was ever taken in the domain of Christian doctrine.” [31] This new step was not altogether free from evil consequences, but it had its distinct advantages. The very fact that Greek philosophers saw in Christ an incarnation of the Logos was itself a striking testimony to the extraordinary impression produced upon them by his personality. But what is more significant, the identifying of Christ with the Logos gave to the belief in him a rational status that it had not had before. It lifted the pre-existent and exalted Christ out of the realm of Jewish fancy and transformed [p. 398] him from a semi-mythical archangelic being into a “rational Power,” a Power or Being that had its established place in the philosophical worldview of the day. Such a view naturally had an “intoxicating effect” upon Christian believers in intellectual circles. Then, too, it brought Christ into closer relation to the absolute Deity. The term “Logos” was an elastic one and was used in various senses. It denoted the Mediator of creation, the immanent Divine Reason, and the world of Ideas rooted in God. But however conceived, the Being designated by the term stood in a more organic and “essential” relation to Deity than did the transcendent Christ of earlier Christian thought. To define exactly this relation was not an easy task. According to the Apologists the Logos Christ was not a “creation,” nor was he an “emanation.” In some nonquantitative way he shared in the being of God< and yet was dependent upon him. “Generation” seemed the most satisfactory term to designate this dependence, but it was manifestly figurative, and whether the process indicated by it referred to the divine will or the divine nature was not made clear. It was also left uncertain whether “generation” implied that the Logos had an absolute beginning. Some statements would seem to favor this view, and yet it was held by Justin, for instance, that “potentially” the Logos was “eternally in God.” [32] The very fact that he was the Reason of God and that God was never devoid of reason seemed to point to such a conclusion.
In view of this uncertainty a new stage in the development [p. 399] of the doctrine of the Trinity was introduced by Origen when he plainly and emphatically taught the “eternal generation” of the Logos-Son. This teaching ran parallel in his mind with the idea of the eternal creation of the world, but was not derived from it. It “owed its origin, in the last instance, to the transformation of the conception of God brought about by the ethical appearance of Christ.” [33] In advocating it Origen was actuated by two apparently contradictory motives. He wished, on the one hand, to identify Christ more closely with the Father than the Apologists had done and, on the other hand, to distinguish him more clearly from him. In holding to the temporal generation of the Son the Apologists and other writers such as Tertullian reduced him, so far as his own hypostatic being was concerned, to a finite and temporal plane and thus shut him out “too much from the essence and sphere of the Father.” Origen consequently affirmed his eternal generation, and by so doing lifted him out of the temporal sphere and made him share more completely in the nature and being of God. That this formula came nearer to expressing the living Christian faith of the day is evident from the eager way in which it was received and from the fact that it became “a corner stone in the doctrinal edifice of the church.” It stood as a permanent support of the higher view of Christ. But while Origen was thus concerned with bringing the Son and the Father closer together he was also deeply interested in establishing a clear distinction between them. The [p. 400] Apologists had ascribed a kind of existence to the Logos before his “generation but this existence was hardly distinguishable from that of the absolute Deity; and others, such as the Patripassians and Sabellians, completely identified the Son with the Father. Against this tendency Origen resolutely set himself in the interest of the reality of the incarnation and the distinct personality of Christ, but here he went further than the faith of the church was willing to follow. “Generation,” he held, implied subordination. The Son was, therefore, not God in the full sense of the term. He was theos, but only the Father was ho theos. [34] Absolute Deity belonged only to the latter. There were then degrees of Godhood, and the Son, while the image of the Father, was subordinate to him. He was “of a nature midway between that of the uncreated and that of all creatures.” While sharing to some extent in the being of the Father lie was not completely homoousios, of the same substance, with him. Only by taking this position did it seem possible to Origen to maintain the necessary distinction between the Son and the Father.
The church, however, thought otherwise. It retained the distinction between Father and Son, but it felt the need of a Son or Redeemer in whom dwelt “all the fullness of the Godhead bodily,” a Redeemer who was of the same divine essence as the Father and hence could mediate immortal life to men. To this great affirmation Trinitarian thought in its third stage, consequently, devoted itself. The affirmation was made officially at the Council of Nicaea. Its immediate [p. 401] occasion was the heresy of Arius; but apart from that the doctrine it formulated must have come eventually to definitive expression, for it was the logical outcome of the conviction of the early church. This Athanasius, the leader and hero of the new movement, made abundantly clear. He showed that the divine unity required that the Logos, or Son, should be homoousios with the Father, that only such a Son was worthy of worship, and that only the incarnation of such a fully divine Being could make possible human redemption. If Christ were less than God, union with him would not be union with God and so there would be no salvation for those who trusted in him. The very heart of the gospel, according to Athanasius, consisted in the belief that in Christ God “was made man that we might be made God.” Hence the only consistent view to take of the Son was that of the Nicene creed, where he is said to be “very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” Indeed, God would not be Father unless he were also Son. The two belong logically together in the divine unity.
With the attainment of this insight the chief motive underlying the doctrine of the Trinity came to its full development. The monotheistic idea was now, so enlarged as to take up into itself the new elements contributed by the person and work of Christ. But formally the Trinitarian doctrine was not yet complete. It was dyadic rather than triadic. Then, too, more explicit statements were needed with reference to the personal distinctions within the Deity and also with reference to the nature of the divine unity. To [p. 402] these problems the Cappadocian theologians and Augustine devoted themselves. The former Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzum, and Gregory of Nyssa belonged to the latter half of the fourth century, and represent the fourth stage in the development of Trinitarianism. To them, and especially to Gregory of Nyssa, we owe a sharp distinction between the terms ousici and hypostasis. In the Nicene creed these terms were used synonymously, but now “hypostasis” was differentiated from “essence” and applied to what was distinctive in the Father and the Son. At the same time the Holy Spirit was definitely recognized as a third hypostasis, thus giving rise to the full Trinitarian doctrine with its one essence and three hypostases.
The hypostatizing of the Spirit followed naturally that of the Son and had no special doctrinal significance. It would perhaps have been possible to think of the Spirit as a mere influence emanating from the Father and the Son, but biblical and ecclesiastical usage was on the whole against such a view. In the baptismal formula and in the apostolic benediction the Spirit was co-ordinated with the Son in such a way that, if the Son was regarded as a divine hypos: tasis, it was almost inevitable that the Spirit should be also. It was said of the Spirit that it proceeded from the Father instead of being begotten by him as was the Son. This difference of terminology may suggest a more personal view of the Son than of the Spirit, but otherwise no distinguishable meaning can be attached to the two terms. Both seem to indicate a certain subordination to the Father, and this was [p. 403] the prevailing view in the Eastern church. The Father was looked upon as the center of the divine unity, the principal seat of divinity. From him the Son and Spirit derived their being. Not only was he the logical commencement of the trinitarian process, he was the unifying principle in it, the root and source of all Deity. In assigning him this position the intention was not to attribute to the other hypostases a lower form of divinity, but, rather, to provide within the Godhead a ground of unity so that it would not be necessary to make of the common divine essence a fourth principle and thus fall into Tetradism.
By an “hypostasis” the Cappadocian Fathers understood a mode of being midway between a substance and an attribute. Like an attribute it presupposed a substance and like a substance it had attributes. But what it was beyond that it was difficult to say. The translation of the term by the Latin “persona” led to much confusion and misunderstanding. That the Cappadocian Divines meant by “hypostasis” something less than what we mean by “person” is generally conceded. They were seeking to guard the doctrine of the Trinity against Sabellianism on the one hand and Tritheism on the other. Hence they maintained that Father, Son, and Spirit were more than divine attributes, more than successive and temporary phases of the divine self-revelation. On the other hand, they were not independent centers of self-consciousness and self-determination. They were “hypostases,” eternal distinctions within a larger divine unity.
But how was this unity to be conceived? Logically, [p. 404] there would seem to be need of a unitary divine essence, immanent in the three hypostases, which constituted each of them divine. But this would have led to Tetradism. Hence the tendency was, as we have seen, to find the source of the divine unity in the Father. This, however, involved a subordination of the Son and the Spirit which by implication, at least, denied divinity to them in the highest sense of the term and which to that extent seemed out of harmony with the unqualified affirmation of faith that “God was in Christ.” Consequently, Trinitarian thought did not rest content until it had removed the last trace of subordination on the part of the Son and the Spirit. This was done by Augustine, whose, work “On the Trinity” marks the fifth and concluding stage in the development of the Trinitarian doctrine. It was under the influence of his teaching that i the so-called “Athanasian Creed” was written, in ^ which the absolute equality of the three Persons of the Trinity is declared to be “the Catholic Faith, which except a man believe faithfully, he cannot be saved.”
According to Augustine, each Person, or Hypostasis, was totally and absolutely God. The terms “begotten” and “proceeding” were still used of the Son and the Spirit, but they were divested of every element of subordination, and to indicate this it was said that the Spirit proceeded from the Father and the Son (filioque). Formally this still left the Spirit in an apparently subordinate relation to the Father and the Son, but it was only formally and apparently so. Actually everything positive that was said of [p. 405] the Father and the Son was also said of the Spirit, and each was equated with the total Deity. “In that highest Trinity,” said Augustine, “one is as much as the three together, nor are two anything more than one. And they are infinite in themselves. So both each are in each and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one.” [35] Some indication of what was meant by such a statement as this may be gathered from the unity of consciousness. The subject is completely present in each one of his states or acts; and so it is with God. That is Avhat we mean by his omnipresence. And what Augustine and the Athanasian creed did, was to apply the attribute of omnipresence to the inner being of the Trinitarian God. Only from this point of view can any intelligible meaning be given to their paradoxical utterances. God is present in each Hypostasis in some such way as the self is in each of its states, except that his presence is not limited to one Hypostasis at a time. He is simultaneously and completely present in them all by virtue of his self-consciousness; and it is this consciousness that constitutes his unity. In no other way can his unity be rationally conceived.
The dogmatic theologians sought to explain the inner unity of the triune God by the theory of “circumincession” or “perichoresis.” According to this theory, there is a “living reciprocal interpenetration of the three hypostases.” They are in ceaseless interaction and intercommunion with each other. They are bound together by “an immanent circulation in the Divine Nature an unceasing and eternal movement [p. 406] in the Godhead, whereby each Person coinheres in the others, and the others in each.” [36] This conception of an eternal process in the divine life has the advantage of ascribing to God a vital and dynamic character that he lacked in non-Trinitarian thought, and it no doubt has value also as a metaphysical interpretation of the terms “generation” and “procession,” but it hardly solves the problem of the divine unity. It rather forms a part of it. “Process” does not constitute nor explain metaphysical unity; it presupposes it. If we are to understand the divine unity, we must rise above the plane of mere “process” or “essence” and lay hold of the idea of self-consciousness. Only in it do we have the key to real unity. This, however, is an insight to which the ancient world did not attain. It adhered to the idea of an underlying or immanent substance or essence as the ground of unity. This was true both of the mental life and of things. But it is interesting and significant that at this point Augustine noted a distinction between the activities of the mind and the Hypostases of the Trinity. “Whereas,” he said, “memory, understanding, and will are not the soul, but only exist in the soul, the Trinity does not exist in God but is God.” [37] Here it is implied that the divine unity is not distinguishable from the three Hypostases, but is realized only in and through them. They are bound together by an interacting and interpenetrating process which in a sense constitutes them one as well as three. [p. 407] But this process can be truly unified only in the form of an all-embracing consciousness, and to such a conception the theory of circumincession may be regarded as pointing forward.
With this theory and with the Athanasian creed the development of the doctrine of the Trinity came virtually to an end. Since then the doctrine has been elaborated and refined by Thomas Aquinas [38] and other theologians, but in its essential features it has remained the same. For a long time it has been subjected to a steady stream of criticism and numerous efforts have been made to modify it or dispense with it altogether, but thus far these efforts have failed. The doctrine in its traditional form still maintains itself, and to a brief consideration of its elements of strength and weakness we now turn.
The doctrine of the Trinity owed its origin, as we have seen, to the deep-seated conviction of the early … church that God was in Christ in a way and to a degree that justified his being made an object of worship. This conviction led to an enlargement of the idea of God. The enlargement took two different forms, that of external addition and that of internal expansion and enrichment. The first of these was embodied in the Adoptionist theology represented by such men as Theodotus, active in Rome between 189 and 199, and Paul of Samosata, bishop of Antioch from 260 to 269. These men are commonly known as Dynamic Monarchians, because they insisted on the [p. 408] older Unitarian or monarchic view of God and looked upon Jesus as a man in whom a unique divine power (dynamis) dwelt, but who was not an incarnation of Deity. They did, however, hold that through his own perfect obedience and through divine grace he attained to divinity and after his resurrection was invested with divine rank. He thus became a proper object of worship and, insofar as there was anything distinctive in his being, supplemented to that extent the idea of Deity heretofore current. But such a method of enlarging the conception of God had more in common with polytheism and mythology than with the Christian faith, though there are some passages in the New Testament that may seem to support it. [39] A deified man or any being who might conceivably achieve deity or have deity thrust upon him would not be God in the Christian sense of the term. Such a being might have angelic or even archangelic status, but he would still be external to essential Deity. No real enrichment of the idea of God can come through the adoptionist method. This the early church clearly saw and so rejected it as heretical.
The other method of interpreting the divine presence in Christ was that represented by the doctrines of the incarnation and the Trinity. This was the method adopted by the church; but within it there were three possibilities. One might think of the incarnated Being as the one God, or as a subordinate and created Being, or as an eternal mode of being within the one God. The first view was advocated toward the close of the second and the early part of [p. 409] the third century by Praxeas, Noetus, and Sabellius, from the last of whom the movement later took its name. These men were called Patripassians, because they held that it was the Father himself who suffered in Christ, and modalistic Monarchians, because they maintained that the so-called “persons” in the Trinity were merely successive and temporary modes of manifestation on the part of the one Father-God. To this type of theology there were three main objections. It was out of harmony with the distinct personality ascribed to Christ in the New Testament; it denied the existence of the Divine Christ after his ascension and thus ran counter to a vital element in Christian experience; and in the third place it was in a state of unstable equilibrium in its view of God, tending to attribute to him either a “heathen mutability” on the one hand or an extreme deistic transcendence on the other. The church, consequently, put it under the ban at a Synod held in the year 261.
The second possible view above referred to, which conceives of the preincarnate Christ as a temporal and created being, was represented by Arianisin. According to it, the Holy Spirit was another created Being second to the Son. The Trinity was thus dissolved into a triad, consisting of the omnipotent God and two creatures. To this view also three important objections were raised. For one thing it presupposed an extreme form of the divine transcendence which excluded the self-communication of God to the world and living communion with him. Then in its conception of the Son and the Spirit it introduced into Christianity a mythological element, closely akin to [p. 410] that of heathen polytheism. And in the third place it was religiously barren. Sabellianism stood close to the fundamental Christian conviction that “God was in Christ”; but Arianism substituted for the living, indwelling God an intermediate Being, a demiGod, who on examination turned out to be hardly more than a cosmological principle and hence could not serve as an adequate ground for the redemptive experience of the Christian believer. It was for this reason that Athanasius so vigorously and persistently opposed it and eventually triumphed over it.
There remained, consequently, as the only view acceptable to the Christian faith the third one above mentioned, which identified the divine life incarnate in Christ with an Hypostasis or mode of being within the one God. How this view developed through various stages until it reached virtually its final form in the teaching of Augustine and the Athanasian creed, we have already shown. Here we are concerned with its merits and defects. We begin with the former.
Traditional or orthodox Trinitarianism has this primary advantage over all deistic forms of monarchianism or unitarianism; it gives us a living God, and that in a twofold sense. He is living in the sense that his inner being is eternally active. The three Hypostases are in ceaseless interaction; they interpenetrate one another. There is a circular movement coursing through them, and this movement is not mechanical nor an “unearthly ballet of bloodless categories.” It is vital, a form of spiritual communion. It is life and love. The Trinitarian God is also living [p. 411] in the sense that he is immanent in the world. He is no distant and self -inclosed deity of the Aristotelian type; he is a God active in the world and in history, a Being who has entered human life through Jesus Christ and through the sanctifying Spirit. The common idea that Trinitarianism gives us a peculiarly mysterious, unreal, and transcendent type of Deity is thus the reverse of the truth. The Trinitarian God is the living God of Christian experience, the God incarnate in Christ, the God operative in human redemption. He is the near God as opposed to the abstract and transcendent God of ancient philosophy. It was because of this fact that the early Christian theologians laid so much stress upon the Trinitarian idea. What they were concerned about was the union between man and God; only thus could redemption be effected. And such a union for Christian believers was possible only in case the incarnate Son was of the same substance with the Father. Only in case he was “very God of very God” could we have in Christ such a union of divinity with humanity as would make possible the “divinizing” and redemption of the Christian believer. God, it was said over and over again, became v man that man might become God. No doubt it was a limited immanence that the Trinitarian theologians had in mind, but though limited it was vital. The God immanent in Christ and in Christian experience was a living God.
Another significant element in the doctrine of the Trinity is the provision it makes for the moral absoluteness of God. The highest affirmation concerning God is that he is love. But how can he be love, if [p. 412] in his essential nature he is one and alone? “Love consists in a union of different persons. Hence the I requires a Thou, the first a second person, the loving a beloved, without whom he could not love. God conceived of as only I, as a mere subject, would be absolute egoism, and thus the very reverse of love.” [40] This conviction was one of the major motives in the development of the doctrine of the Trinity. Athanasius, for instance, in contending for the deity of the Son maintained that the divine Fatherhood implied the divine Sonship. Apart from the Son there could be no Father. The two terms were correlative; one involved the other. And this, of course, was true not only of the terms but of the ideas expressed by them. Athanasius was not basing his case on a mere exegesis of metaphors. What he meant was that the love of God implied an object, a Son, as well as a subject, a Father. Without both, an I and a Thou, there could be no love in the proper sense of the term. The deity of the Son was thus an implication of the divine Fatherhood. Without at least a duality of divine persons there could be no divine love. Later this thought was extended so as to apply to the three persons of the Godhead. “Thou dost see the Trinity,” said Augustine, “if thou seest love.” For in love “there are three things: He that loves, and that which is loved, and love.” [41] This idea of a trinity of love was elaborated at length during the medieval period by Richard St. Victor in his six books de Trinitate, and in modern discussions of the subject it has figured [p. 413] prominently. It is at present, for instance, urged that personality is in its very nature social. It implies fellowship. There can, therefore, be no proper personality of God except on something like the Trinitarian basis. If it be objected that a unitarian God might be personal in the full social and ethical sense of the term by virtue of his relation to finite spirits, the answer is that this would make his personal and ethical self-realization dependent upon his creatures and would thus destroy his moral absoluteness. In and of himself he would in that case be only potentially moral. A community of personal life within his own being is essential to his being) morally absolute. The very highest religious values associated with deity personality and love are, therefore, bound up with Trinitarianisin.
A third important religious value in the traditional doctrine of the Trinity is found in the support that it lends to the doctrine of the incarnation. If the second Person of the Trinity freely renounced the glory that he had with the Father and assumed a human form with all its limitations and suffering in order to redeem men, we have in that fact the supreme manifestation of the divine love. In it the possibilities of grace are exhausted. Nothing beyond it is conceivable. Self -sacrifice in its sublimest form is now carried up into the very heart of God and he becomes the chief of burden-bearers. This thought lies at the very center of Christianity and constitutes its chief source of power. What has always stirred the human heart most profoundly has been the condescension, the self-renunciation of the Lord Jesus. “Though he [p. 414] was rich, yet for your sakes lie became poor, that ye through his poverty might become rich.” No belief is more distinctively Christian than this, and none has contributed more to the enrichment of the idea of God. That God at infinite cost to himself redeemed men is the most moving thought of Scripture; and it is this thought that lies at the basis of the doctrine of the Trinity and is the inspiring source of all vital faith in it.
A fourth element of strength in the Trinitarian doctrine is its philosophical value. This has manifested itself in two different ways. First, the doctrine saves philosophy from the impasse to which it has often been brought by the assumption of an ultimate simple and distinctionless unity. Such a unity has within itself no principle of movement. It is unable to differentiate itself into plurality and hence either leaves the concrete world unaccounted for or condemns it to a shadowy form of existence. As over against this sterile type of monism the Trinitarian theory gives us a differentiated unity which has within it the principle of action and which makes provision for creation and for the plural world of sense experience. Furthermore, the distinctions within the Trinitarian unity have an analogy in human self-consciousness. We distinguish between feeling, willing and knowing, and also between the subject, the object and the union of the two. The latter has figured prominently in the triadic dialectic of the Hegelian philosophy. Whether in this form it has any metaphysical validity need not here concern us. What we should note is that in human personality or [p. 415] self-consciousness we have a concrete instance of differentiated unity and that we may regard it as a faint reflection of the infinite triune personality.
The other service which the Trinitarian doctrine has rendered philosophy is the protection it has afforded theism as over against deism on the one hand and pantheism on the other. We have already seen that by way of contrast with the remote and transcendent God of deism the Trinitarian Deity is an immanent and living God, a God forever linked up with humanity by the incarnation. But while immanent in the world he is distinct from it. He is himself absolutely self-sufficient. He does not need the world to complete himself, and hence there is no danger of identifying him in pantheistic fashion with the world. On any theory that denies to God complete self-sufficiency the latter is a very real peril. Trinitarianism by the provision it makes for both the moral and the metaphysical absoluteness of God, consequently, renders a very important service to theism by protecting it securely against the ever-recurring tendency toward pantheism.
But while the traditional doctrine of the Trinity has the very great merits that have been pointed out, there are serious difficulties in and objections to it that cannot be overlooked.
Considerations such as the foregoing have led the church to be less insistent than it once was on the orthodox form of the Trinitarian creed. That this creed enshrines great values that must be conserved, is quite generally conceded. There is no widespread movement to reject it. Nor is there any strong conviction that the traditional formulation of it is so seriously defective that it ought to be superseded by a modern restatement. The feeling rather is that the doctrine in its older form is of permanent value, but that it in some respects transcends both the limits of reason and the demands of faith, and that it does not, consequently, have the finality once attributed to it. So far as its underlying motives are concerned we affirm them as confidently as ever. We hold that God is immanent in the world and that he [p. 423] was in some real sense incarnate in Christ. We hold that he is Redeemer as well as Creator, that he is personally present in human hearts as the sanctifying Spirit, and that in his essential nature he is sacrificial love. But that in order to make these affirmations we must also affirm three distinct centers of self-consciousness and self-decision in the Godhead, is by no means clear. God as bare unity, it is true, makes little appeal to us. As modern men we probably would prefer an organic or social tritheism to a rigid imitarianism. For we are more concerned about religious value than about theoretical simplicity or formal consistency. Yet we should prefer both, and we are not convinced that the traditional Trinitarian theory has pointed out the only way in which the highest values in the Christian idea of God can be conserved.
The profoundest movement in modern religious thought has been that away from Platonism and toward personalism. It is this fact more than any other that has given rise to the current dissatisfaction with the clear-cut Trinitarianism of the past. If God in the totality of his being is a unitary personality, it is at least confusing to continue to speak of three “Persons” in the Godhead. The personality of God would seem to exclude the older idea of personality in God. Hence there is a tendency to fall back upon the psychological as opposed to the social interpretation of the Trinity, and to combine it either with a form of Sabellianism or an agnostic attitude toward the problem. At the same time there is a deep-seated desire not to surrender the religious [p. 424] values of the orthodox theory. The result is that three different ways have arisen, by which the effort is made to retain the essential truth of the older Trinitarianism without committing oneself to its sharply defined personal distinctions within the Deity.
The first consists in saying that the Trinity is a symbol of the richness of the idea of God. What God is in the inner structure of his being we do not know. The classical expositions of the Trinity such as that of Thomas Aquinas went too far. They knew too much. They told us that there are in God “one essence, two processions, three Persons, four relations, five notions, and the circumincession which the Greeks call perichoresis” all of which was logically deduced from the Trinitarian idea. But however logical the deduction may have been, we have an instinctive feeling and firm persuasion that it is altogether too Gnostic. We can have no such insight into the inner being of God as it assumes. When it comes to this dark realm, the best we can do is to use symbolic terms, and it is in this sense that the doctrine of the Trinity is to be understood. We do not know what hypostatic distinctions there are, if any, in the Divine Being, nor what their relations to each other are, but we are confident that we come nearest the truth when we think of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are symbolic terms that express the inexhaustible richness of the divine nature; and it is chiefly because of this fact that the church has clung so tenaciously to. them and to the Trinitarian doctrine in which they have been embodied.
[p. 425]
A second method of combining the religious content of the older Trinitarianism with modern personalism is to revert to ancient Sabellianism which W. G. T. Shedd has characterized as “the most subtle and also the most elevated of all the forms of spurious trinitarianism” [52] and to modify it in such a way as to bring it into harmony with the theory of an immanent Trinity. The objection to original Sabellianism was not that it taught a Trinity of manifestation, but that it failed to bring this Trinity into direct relation to the essential nature of Deity. According to Sabellius, the three manifestations Father, Son and Spirit were temporary and successive, and hence did not reveal what God really and eternally is. His so-called self-revelations were not actual revelations, and they could not be such unless there were permanent elements in the divine nature corresponding to them. The Trinity of manifestation would not be true to its name if there were no Trinity of essence. The two belong together. We learn the Trinity of essence from the Trinity of manifestation, and the Trinity of manifestation derives its religious significance from the Trinity of essence. This synthesis of modalism with the doctrine of an immanent Trinity or modified Sabellianism, as it may be called, has considerable vogue at present. It affirms that God in his essential nature is all that is indicated by the terms “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit,” without attempting to define more precisely the character of the distinctions in his being so named and their relation to each other. We call them “persons,” as Augustine says, [p. 426] in order to avoid the necessity of silence rather than because of any definite idea conveyed by the term. Strictly speaking they are not persons, and yet we may say with Dorner that “though they are not of themselves and singly personal, they have a share in the One Divine Personality, in their own manner.” [53] An excellent statement of this position in its more positive form is given by H. C. Sheldon in his System of Christian Doctrine. “Corresponding,” he says, “to the threefold manifestation of Father, Son and Spirit, there subsist in the Godhead, in a certain logical order, eternal and necessary distinctions which enter into the divine consciousness and determine the perfection of the divine life.” [54]
The third way of confessing the Trinitarian faith without committing oneself to the traditional “distinction of persons” is to assert the Christlikeness of God. This method of expression has several advantages. For one -thing, it fixes attention on what is basal in the Trinitarian doctrine. What led to the development of this doctrine was, as Bishop McConnell says, “not merely the pressure to make a place for Christ in the Divine Life, in the sense of granting him divine honors, but, rather, to carry the Christ spirit into the Divine, or, rather, to reveal the Divine as throughout Christlike.” [55] In other words, what the, Trinitarian theologians were fundamentally concerned about was a new ethical conception of God. They affirmed the deity of Christ in order to make certain [p. 427] the Christlikeness of God. If this conception of God is granted, we have the heart of the Trinitarian doctrine and for practical purposes need nothing more.
Again, the ascription of Christlikeness to God has the advantage of associating our knowledge of the divine character with the historical revelation of it in Christ. If we lay the primary stress upon the eternal personal distinctions within the Godhead and upon a pretemporal act of self-abnegation on the part of the second Person of the Trinity, we obscure to some extent the revelational significance of the life and death of Christ. It was the impression made by the personality of the man Jesus that led to the expansion and reconstruction of the idea of God. It was because his life and death and resurrection were Godlike that men came to believe in the Christlikeness of God, and it was because they believed in the Christlikeness of God that they came to believe in his eternal and self-denying love. It was not belief in the self-humiliation of the pre-existent Son that led the disciples to see a divine element in the death of Christ, but the reverse. They saw God mirrored in the Christ spirit and hence attributed to him an act of self-abnegation. Christ was for them the “express image” of the eternal. In this conception we have the basis of all that is distinctive in the teaching of the New Testament and of the church concerning the divine grace.
A further advantage in affirming the Christlikeness of God is the fact that it directs particular attention to his unity. If God is Christlike, he is one both [p. 428] metaphysically and ethically, especially ethically. He is not a “holy obstacle” to redemption in one aspect of his being and an “eager mediator” of it in another. His entire being is holy will, and to speak of him as Christlike is equivalent to saying that he is in his essential nature love. His love is both self-love, a love of goodness, and communicative love. In both respects he was incarnate in Christ, and hence we have a Godlike Christ and a Christlike God. In such a God there may perhaps be three eternal and necessary distinctions, between whom there is an interchange of affection and who thus enrich his inner life. But that this triune nature is essential to the absoluteness of his love and of his ethical character, is not certain. Without it there would be in him an eternal self-love, a love of goodness, and there might also be an eternal communicative love, ceaselessly but freely creating personal beings. In the latter case he would eternally have objects of his affection even though he did not find them in himself, and thus an eternal and absolute life of communicative love would be possible to him. But however that may be, the Trinitarian doctrine does unquestionably dramatize the divine love in a way that appeals to the imagination and that makes it an effective symbol of the divine grace. This practical value it will always have, and weighty considerations in the way of a theoretical justification of it will always be available. But whatever value, practical or theoretical, it may have, it should not be forgotten that as an expression of the divine love it does not stand in its own right, but is dependent on faith in the Christlikeness of God.
George F. Moore, History of Religions, I, p. 345. ↩︎
Vater, Sohn und Geist unter den Jieiligen Dreiheiten und vor der religidsen Denkweise der Gegenioart, 1909. ↩︎
Ditlef Nielsen, Der dreieinige Gott in religionsnistorischer Beleuchtung, 1922. ↩︎
Hermann Usener, Dreiheit, 1903. ↩︎
Leop. v. Schroder, Beitrage zur Weiterentwicklung der Christlichen Religion (1905), pp. 1-39; Arische Religion (1914), I, pp. 48-138. ↩︎
Wesen und Wahrheit des Christentums, pp. 419-34. ↩︎
Systematic Theology, I, p. 125. ↩︎
Adversus Eunomium, I, p. 12. ↩︎
De Fide Orthodoxa, I, pp. 2, 4. ↩︎
Georg Wobbermin, Systematische Theologie, III, pp. 77-80. ↩︎
Systematische Theologie, III, pp. 175ff. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 179f ↩︎
Ibid., p. 238. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 156, 241ff., 389. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 414f. ↩︎
For example, Matt. 28. 19; John 14. 16f., 26; 15. 26; 16. 7-13; 2 Thess. 2. 13f.; 1 Thess. 5. 9f.; 1 Pet. 1. If.; Jude 20f.; Eph. 2. 18. ↩︎
For example, 1 John 1. 3; 2. 22; 3. 23L; Col. 3. 4; Mark 8. 38; Matt. 16. 27; Luke 9. 26. ↩︎
Quoted by W. G. T. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, I, p. 250, from Sermon XLIII. ↩︎
Note the following statement by Basil: “In delivering the formula of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, our Lord did not connect the gift with number. He did not say, into First, Second and Third/ nor yet into One, Two and Three, but he gave us the boon of the knowledge of faith which leads to salvation, by means of holy names” (De Spiritu Sancto, 44). ↩︎
For example, Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth. ↩︎
The Idea of the Holy, pp. 162f . ↩︎
W. Bousset, Jesus, p. 179. ↩︎
The Place of Jesus Christ in Modern Christianity, p. 119. ↩︎
The Epistle to the Romans, in the International Critical Commentary, p. 9. ↩︎
H. T. Andrews in The Lord of Life, p. 108. ↩︎
Cf. W. A. Brown, Christian Theology in Outline, pp. 142-45. ↩︎
What Is Christianity? Pp. 217f. ↩︎
J. A. Dorner, The Doctrine of the Person of Christ, I, p. 272. ↩︎
J. A. Dorner, ibid., II, p. 113. ↩︎
See John 1. 1-2. ↩︎
On the Trinity, VI, p. 12. ↩︎
W. G. T. Shedd, A History of Christian Doctrine, I, p. 348. ↩︎
Epist. CLXIX. Quoted by H. C. Sheldon, History of Christian Doctrine, I, p. 215. ↩︎
Summa Theologica, Part I, Qu. XXVII-XLIII. ↩︎
For example, Acts 2. 32-36; 5. 30-31. ↩︎
Ernest Sartorius, The Doctrine of Divine Love, pp. 8-9. ↩︎
On the Trinity, Bk. VIII, 12, 14. ↩︎
O. A. Curtis, The Christian Faith, p. 492. ↩︎
Trinitas dualitatem ad unitatem reducit. ↩︎
Living Together, pp. 29f. ↩︎
Cf. P. R. Tennant, Philosophical Theology, II, p. 268. ↩︎
“Our modern doctrine of God as self-expressive personality,” says Richard M. Vaughan, “is the equivalent of the Trinitarian doctrine of God the Son.” See The Significance of Personality (p. 147), a book of special interest and value from both the personalistic and religious points of view. ↩︎
Christliche Dogmatik, II, p. 60. ↩︎
Of. O. A. Curtis, The Christian Faith, p. 235. ↩︎
J. Vernon Bartlet in The Lord of Life, p. 129. ↩︎
The Christian Faith, paragraph 94. ↩︎
“Compare the following statement by Professor Edwin Lewis in his admirable work on Jesus Christ and the Human Quest: “Let God be conceived as the Eternal Spirit of Sacrificial Love from which all things proceed, and let Jesus be conceived as One who absolutely manifested that Spirit under the conditions of a human life, and all the practical and religious and philosophical value of the idea and fact of incarnation may be retained without entailing the burden of an outworn and impossible metaphysic” (p. 114). ↩︎
History of Christian Doctrine, I, p. 252. ↩︎
System of Christian Doctrine, I, p. 448. ↩︎
Page 227. ↩︎
The Christlike God, p. 70. ↩︎