The Biblical Doctrine of the Trinity
The term "Trinity" is not a Biblical term,
and we are not using Biblical language when we define what is expressed by it
as the doctrine that there is one only and true God, but in the unity of the
Godhead there are three coeternal and coequal Persons, the same in substance
but distinct in subsistence. A doctrine so defined can be spoken of as a
Biblical doctrine only on the principle that the sense of Scripture is
Scripture. And the definition of a Biblical doctrine in such unBiblical
language can be justified only on the principle that it is better to preserve
the truth of Scripture than the words of Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity
lies in Scripture in solution; when it is crystallized from its solvent it does
not cease to be Scriptural, but only comes into clearer view. Or, to speak
without figure, the doctrine of the Trinity is given to us in Scripture, not in
formulated definition, but in fragmentary allusions; when we assembled the
disjecta membra into their organic unity, we are not passing from Scripture,
but entering more thoroughly into the meaning of Scripture. We may state the
doctrine in technical terms, supplied by philosophical reflection; but the
doctrine stated is a genuinely Scriptural doctrine.
In point of fact, the doctrine of the
Trinity is purely a revealed doctrine. That is to say, it embodies a truth which
has never been discovered, and is indiscoverable, by natural reason. With all
his searching, man has not been able to find out for himself the deepest things
of God. Accordingly, ethnic thought has never attained a Trinitarian conception
of God, nor does any ethnic religion present in its representations of the
Divine Being any analogy to the doctrine of the Trinity.
Triads of divinities, no doubt, occur in
nearly all polytheistic religions, formed under very various influences.
Sometimes as in the Egyptian triad of Osiris, Isis and Horus, it is the analogy
of the human family with its father, mother and son which lies at their basis.
Sometimes they are the effect of mere syncretism, three deities worshipped in
different localities being brought together in the common worship of all.
Sometimes, as in the Hindu triad of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, they represent
the cyclic movement of a pantheistic evolution, and symbolize the three stages
of Being, Becoming and Dissolution. Sometimes they are the result apparently of
nothing more than an odd human tendency to think in threes, which has given the
number three widespread standing as a sacred number (so H. Usener). It is no
more than was to be anticipated, that one or another of these triads should now
and again be pointed to as the replica (or even the original) of the Christian
doctrine of the Trinity.
As the doctrine of the Trinity is
indiscoverable by reason, so it is incapable of proof from reason. There are no
analogies to it in Nature, not even in the spiritual nature of man, who is made
in the image of God. In His trinitarian mode of being, God is unique; and, as
there is nothing in the universe like Him in this respect, so there is nothing
which can help us to comprehend Him. Many attempts have, nevertheless, been
made to construct a rational proof of the Trinity of the Godhead. Among these
there are two which are particularly attractive, and have therefore been put
forward again and again by speculative thinkers through all the Christian ages.
These are derived from the implications, in the one case, of
self-consciousness; in the other, of love. Both self-consciousness and love, it
is said, demand for their very existence an object over against which the self
stands as subject. If we conceive of God as self-conscious and loving,
therefore, we cannot help conceiving of Him as embracing in His unity some form
of plurality. From this general position both arguments have been elaborated,
however, by various thinkers in very varied forms.
The former of them, for example, is
developed by a great seventeenth century theologian -- Bartholomew Keckermann
(1614) -- as follows: God is self-conscious thought: and God's thought must
have a perfect object, existing eternally before it; this object to be perfect
must be itself God; and as God is one, this object which is God must be the God
that is one. It is essentially the same argument which is popularized in a
famous paragraph (73) of Lessing's "The Education of the Human Race."
Must not God have an absolutely perfect representation of Himself - that is, a
representation in which everything that is in Him is found? And would
everything that is in God be found in this representation if His necessary
reality were not found in it? If everything, everything without exception, that
is in God is to be found in this representation, it cannot, therefore, remain a
mere empty image, but must be an actual duplication of God. It is obvious that
arguments like this prove too much. If God's representation of Himself, to be
perfect, must possess the same kind of reality that He Himself possesses, it
does not seem easy to deny that His representations of everything else must
possess objective reality. And this would be as much as to say that the eternal
objective co-existence of all that God can conceive is given in the very idea
of God; and that is open pantheism. The logical flaw lies in including in the
perfection of a representation qualities which are not proper to representations,
however perfect. A perfect representation must, of course, have all the reality
proper to a representation; but objective reality is so little proper to a
representation that a representation acquiring it would cease to be a
representation. This fatal flaw is not transcended, but only covered up, when
the argument is compressed, as it is in most of its modern presentations, in
effect to the mere assertion that the condition of self-consciousness is a real
distinction between the thinking subject and the thought object, which, in
God's case, would be between the subject ego and the object ego. Why, however,
we should deny to God the power of self-contemplation enjoyed by every finite
spirit, save at the cost of the distinct hypostatizing of the contemplant and
the contemplated self, it is hard to understand. Nor is it always clear that
what we get is a distinct hypostatization rather than a distinct
substantializing of the contemplant and contemplated ego: not two persons in
the Godhead so much as two Gods. The discovery of the third hypostasis - the
Holy Spirit -remains meanwhile, to all these attempts rationally to construct a
Trinity in the Divine Being, a standing puzzle which finds only a very
artificial solution.
The case is much the same with the argument
derived from the nature of love. Our sympathies go out to that old Valentinian
writer - possibly it was Valentinus himself - who reasoned - perhaps he was the
first so to reason - that "God is all love," "but love is not
love unless there be an object of love." And they go out more richly still
to Augustine, when, seeking a basis, not for a theory of emanations, but for
the doctrine of the Trinity, he analyzes this love which God is into the triple
implication of "the lover," "the loved" and "the love
itself," and sees in this trinary of love an analogue of the Triune God.
It requires, however, only that the argument thus broadly suggested should be
developed into its details for its artificiality to become apparent. Richard of
St. Victor works it out as follows: It belongs to the nature of amor that it
should turn to another as caritas. This other, in God's case, cannot be the
world; since such love of the world would be inordinate. It can only be a
person; and a person who is God's equal in eternity, power and wisdom. Since,
however, there cannot be two Divine substances, these two Divine persons must
form one and the same substance. The best love cannot, however, con-fine itself
to these two persons; it must become condilectio by the desire that a third
should be equally loved as they love one another. Thus love, when perfectly
conceived, leads necessarily to the Trinity, and since God is all He can be,
this Trinity must be real. Modern writers (Sartorius, Schoberlein, J. Muller,
Liebner, most lately R. H. Griutzmacher) do not seem to have essentially
improved upon such a statement as this. And after all is said, it does not
appear clear that God's own all-perfect Being could not supply a satisfying
object of His all-perfect love. To say that in its very nature love is
self-communicative, and therefore implies an object other than self, seems an
abuse of figurative language.
Perhaps the ontological proof of the Trinity
is nowhere more attractively put than by Jonathan Edwards. The peculiarity of
his presentation of it lies in an attempt to add plausibility to it by a
doctrine of the nature of spiritual ideas or ideas of spiritual things, such as
thought, love, fear, in general. Ideas of such things, he urges, are just
repetitions of them, so that he who has an idea of any act of love, fear, anger
or any other act or motion of the mind, simply so far repeats the motion in
question; and if the idea be perfect and complete, the original motion of the
mind is absolutely reduplicated. Edwards presses this so far that he is ready
to contend that if a man could have an absolutely perfect idea of all that was
in his mind at any past moment, he would really, to all intents and purposes,
be over again what he was at that moment. And if he could perfectly contemplate
all that is in his mind at any given moment, as it is and at the same time that
it is there in its first and direct existence, he would really be two at that
time, he would be twice at once: "The idea he has of himself would be
himself again." This now is the case with the Divine Being. "God's
idea of Himself is absolutely perfect, and therefore is an express and perfect
image of Him, exactly like Him in every respect. . . . But that which is the
express, perfect image of God and in every respect like Him is God, to all
intents and purposes, because there is nothing wanting: there is nothing in the
Deity that renders it the Deity but what has something exactly answering to it
in this image, which will therefore also render that the Deity." The Second
Person of the Trinity being thus attained, the argument advances. "The
Godhead being thus begotten of God's loving [having?] an idea of Himself and
showing forth in a distinct Subsistence or Person in that idea, there proceeds
a most pure act, and an infinitely holy and sacred energy arises between the
Father and the Son in mutually loving and delighting in each other.;. . . The
Deity becomes all act, the Divine essence itself flows out and is as it were
breathed forth in love and joy. So that the Godhead therein stands forth in yet
another manner of Subsistence, and there proceeds the Third Person in the
Trinity, the Holy Spirit, viz., the Deity in act, for there is no other act but
the act of the will." The inconclusiveness of the reasoning lies on the surface.
The mind does not consist in its states, and the repetition of its states would
not, therefore, duplicate or triplicate it. If it did, we should have a
plurality of Beings, not of Persons in one Being. Neither God's perfect idea of
Himself nor His perfect love of Himself reproduces Himself. He differs from His
idea and His love of Himself precisely by that which distinguishes His Being
from His acts. When it is said, then, that there 15 nothing in the Deity which
renders it the Deity but what has something answering to it in its image of
itself, it is enough to respond - except the Deity itself. What is wanting to
the image to make it a second Deity is just objective reality.
Inconclusive as all such reasoning is,
however, considered as rational demonstration of the reality of the Trinity, it
is very far from possessing no value. It carries home to us in a very
suggestive way the superiority of the Trinitarian conception of God to the
conception of Him as an abstract monad, and thus brings important rational
support to the doctrine of the Trinity, when once that doctrine has been given
us by revelation. If it is not quite possible to say that we cannot conceive of
God as eternal self-consciousness and eternal love, without conceiving Him as a
Trinity, it does seem quite necessary to say that when we conceive Him as a
Trinity, new fullness, richness, force are given to our conception of Him as a
self-conscious, loving Being, and therefore we conceive Him more adequately
than as a monad, and no one who has ever once conceived Him as a Trinity can
ever again satisfy himself with a monadistic conception of God. Reason thus not
only performs the important negative service to faith in the Trinity, of
showing the self-consistency of the doctrine and its consistency with other
known truth, but brings this positive rational support to it of discovering in
it the only adequate conception of God as self-conscious spirit and living
love. Difficult, therefore, as the idea of the Trinity in itself is, it does
not come to us as an added burden upon our intelligence; it brings us rather
the solution of the deepest and most persistent difficulties in our conception
of God as infinite moral Being, and illuminates, enriches and elevates all our
thought of God. It has accordingly become a commonplace to say that Christian
theism is the only stable theism. That is as much as to say that theism
requires the enriching conception of the Trinity to give it a permanent hold
upon the human mind - the mind finds it difficult to rest in the idea of an
abstract unity for its God; and that the human heart cries out for the living
God in whose Being there is that fullness of life for which the conception of
the Trinity alone provides.
So strongly is it felt in wide circles that
a Trinitarian conception is essential to a worthy idea of God, that there is
abroad a deep-seated unwillingness to allow that God could ever have made
Himself known otherwise than as a Trinity. From this point of view it is
inconceivable that the Old Testament revelation should know nothing of the
Trinity. Accordingly, I. A. Dorner, for example, reasons thus: "If,
however - and this is the faith of universal Christendom - a living idea of God
must be thought in some way after a Trinitarian fashion, it must be antecedently
probable that traces of the Trinity cannot be lacking in the Old Testament,
since its idea of God is a living or historical one." Whether there really
exist traces of the idea of the Trinity in the Old Testament, however, is a
nice question. Certainly we cannot speak broadly of the revelation of the
doctrine of the Trinity in the Old Testament. It is a plain matter of fact that
none who have depended on the revelation embodied in the Old Testament alone
have ever attained to the doctrine of the Trinity. It is another question,
however, whether there may not exist in the pages of the Old Testament turns of
expression or. records of occurrences in which one already acquainted with the
doctrine of the Trinity may fairly see indications of an underlying implication
of it. The older writers discovered intimations of the Trinity in such
phenomena as the plural form of the Divine name Elohim, the occasional
employment with reference to God of plural pronouns ("Let us make man in
our image," Gen. i. 26; iii. 22; xi. 7; Isa. vi. 8), or of plural verbs
(Gen. xx. 13; xxxv. 7), certain repetitions of the name of God which seem to
distinguish between God and God (Ps. xlv. 6, 7; cx. 1; Hos. i. 7), threefold
liturgical formulas Num. vi. 24, 26; Isa. vi. 3), a certain tendency to
hypostatize the conception of Wisdom (Prov. viii.), and especially the
remarkable phenomena connected with the appearances of the Angel of Jehovah
(Gen. xvi. 2-13, xxii. 11. 16; xxxi. 11,13; xlviii. 15,16; Ex. iii. 2, 4, 5;
Jgs. xiii. 20-22). The tendency of more recent authors is to appeal, not so
much to specific texts of the Old Testament, as to the very "organism of
revelation" in the Old Testament in which there is perceived an underlying
suggestion "that all things owe their existence and persistence to a
threefold cause," both with reference to the first creation, and, more
plainly, with reference to the second creation. Passages like Ps. xxxiii. 6;
Isa. lxi. 1; lxiii. 9-12 Hag. ii. 5, 6, in which God and His Word and His
Spirit are brought together, co-causes of effects, are adduced. A tendency is
pointed out to hypostatize the Word of God on the one hand (e.g., Gen. i. 3;
Ps. xxxiii. 6; cvii. 20; cxlvii. 15-18 Isa. lv. 11); and, especially in Ezek.
and the later Prophets, the Spirit of God, on the other (e. g., Gen. i. 2; Isa.
xlviii. 16; lxiii. 10; Ezek. ii. 2; viii. 3; Zec. vii. 12). Suggestions - in
Isa. for instance (vii. 14; ix. 6) - of the Deity of the Messiah are appealed
to. And if the occasional occurrence of plural verbs and pronouns referring to
God, and the plural form of the name Elohim are not insisted upon as in
themselves evidence of a multiplicity in the Godhead, yet a certain weight is
lent them as witnesses that "the God of revelation is no abstract unity,
but the living, true God who in the fullness of His life embraces the highest
variety" (Bavinek). The upshot of it all is that it is very generally felt
that, somehow, in the Old Testament development of the idea of God there is a
suggestion that the Deity is not a simple monad, and that thus a preparation is
made for the revelation of the Trinity yet to come. It would seem clear that we
must recognize in the Old Testament doctrine of the relation of God to His
revelation by the creative Word and the Spirit, at least the germ of the
distinctions in the Godhead afterward fully made known in the Christian
revelation. And we can scarcely stop there. After all is said, in the light of
the later revelation, the Trinitarian interpretation remains the most natural
one of the phenomena which the older writers frankly interpreted as intimations
of the Trinity; especially of those connected with the descriptions of the
Angel of Jehovah no doubt, but also even of such a form of expression as meets
us in the "Let us make man in our image" of Gen. i. 26--- for surely
verse 27: "And God created man in his own image," does not encourage
us to take the preceding verse as announcing that man was to be created in the
image of the angels. This is not an illegitimate reading of New Testament ideas
back into the text of the Old Testament; it is only reading the text of the Old
Testament under the illumination of the New Testament revelation. The Old
Testament may be likened to a chamber richly furnished but dimly lighted; the
introduction of light brings into it nothing which was not in it before; but it
brings out into clearer view much of what is in it but was only dimly or even
not at all perceived before. The mystery of the Trinity is not revealed in the
Old Testament; but the mystery of the Trinity underlies the Old Testament
revelation, and here and there almost comes into view. Thus the Old Testament
revelation of God is not corrected by the fuller revelation which follows it,
but only perfected, extended and enlarged.
It is an old saying that what becomes patent
in the New Testament was latent in the Old Testament. And it is important that
the continuity of the revelation of God contained in the two Testaments should
not be overlooked or obscured. If we find some difficulty in perceiving for ourselves,
in the Old Testament, definite points of attachment for the revelation of the
Trinity, we cannot help perceiving with great clearness in the New Testament
abundant evidence that its writers felt no incongruity whatever between their
doctrine of the Trinity and the Old Testament conception of God. The New
Testament writers certainly were not conscious of being "setters forth of
strange gods." To their own apprehension they worshipped and proclaimed
just the God of Israel; and they laid no less stress than the Old Testament
itself upon His unity (Jn. xvii. 3; I Cor. viii. 4; I
The simplicity and assurance with which the
New Testament writers speak of God as a Trinity have, however, a further
implication. If they betray no sense of novelty in so speaking of Him, this is
undoubtedly in part because it was no longer a novelty so to speak of Him. It
is clear, in other words, that, as we read the New Testament, we are not
witnessing the birth of a new conception of God. What we meet with in its pages
is a firmly established conception of God underlying and giving its tone to the
whole fabric. It is not in a text here and there that the New Testament bears
its testimony to the doctrine of the Trinity. The whole book is Trinitarian to
the core; all its teaching is built on the assumption of the Trinity; and its
allusions to the Trinity are frequent, cursory, easy and confident. It is with
a view to the cursoriness of the allusions to it in the New Testament that it
has been remarked that "the doctrine of the Trinity is not so much heard
as overheard in the statements of Scripture." It would be more exact to
say that it is not so much inculcated as presupposed. The doctrine of the
Trinity does not appear in the New Testament in the making, but as already
made. It takes its place in its pages, as Gunkel phrases it, with an air almost
of complaint, already "in full completeness" (vollig fertig), leaving
no trace of its growth. "There is nothing more wonderful in the history of
human thought," says Sanday, with his eye on the appearance of the
doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament, "than the silent and
imperceptible way in which this doctrine, to us so difficult, took its place
without struggle - and without controversy - among accepted Christian
truths." The explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is, however,
simple. Our New Testament is not a record of the development of the doctrine or
of its assimilation. It everywhere presupposes the doctrine as the fixed
possession of the Christian community; and the process by which it became the
possession of the Christian community lies behind the New Testament.
We cannot speak of the doctrine of the
Trinity, therefore, if we study exactness of speech, as revealed in the New
Testament, any more than we can speak of it as revealed in the Old Testament.
The Old Testament was written before its revelation; the New Testament after
it. The revelation itself was made not in word but in deed. It was made in the
incarnation of God the Son, and the outpouring of God the Holy Spirit. The
relation of the two Testaments to this revelation is in the one case that of
preparation for it, and in the other that of product of it. The revelation
itself is embodied just in Christ and the Holy Spirit. This is as much as to
say that the revelation of the Trinity was incidental to, and the inevitable
effect of, the accomplishment of redemption. It was in the coming of the Son of
God in the likeness of sinful flesh to offer Himself a sacrifice for sin; and
in the coming of the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin, of righteousness
and of judgment, that the Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Godhead was
once for all revealed to men. Those who knew God the Father, who loved them and
gave His own Son to die for them; and the Lord Jesus Christ, who loved them and
delivered Himself up an offering and sacrifice for them; and the Spirit of
Grace, who loved them and dwelt within them a power not themselves, making for
righteousness, knew the Triune God and could not think or speak of God
otherwise than as triune. The doctrine of the Trinity, in other words, is
simply the modification wrought in the conception of the one only God by His
complete revelation of Himself in the redemptive process. It necessarily
waited, therefore, upon the completion of the redemptive process for its
revelation, and its revelation, as necessarily, lay complete in the redemptive
process.
From this central fact we may understand
more fully several circumstances connected with the revelation of the Trinity
to which allusion has been made. We may from it understand, for example, why
the Trinity was not revealed in the Old Testament. It may carry us a little way
to remark, as it has been customary to remark since the time of Gregory of
Nazianzus, that it was the task of the Old Testament revelation to fix firmly
in the minds and hearts of the people of God the great fundamental truth of the
unity of the Godhead; and it would have been dangerous to speak to them of the
plurality within this unity until this task had been fully accomplished. The
real reason for the delay in the revelation of the Trinity, however, is
grounded in the secular development of the redemptive purpose of God: the times
were not ripe for the revelation of the Trinity in the unity of the Godhead
until the fullness of the time had come for God to send forth His Son unto
redemption, and His Spirit unto sanctification. The revelation in word must
needs wait upon the revelation in fact, to which it brings its necessary
explanation, no doubt, but from which also it derives its own entire
significance and value. The revelation of a Trinity in the Divine unity as a
mere abstract truth without relation to manifested fact, and without
significance to the development of the kingdom of God, would have been foreign
to the whole method of the Divine procedure as it lies exposed to us in the
pages of Scripture. Here the working-out of the Divine purpose supplies the
fundamental principle to which all else, even the progressive stages of
revelation itself, is subsidiary; and advances in revelation are ever closely
connected with the advancing accomplishment of the redemptive purpose. We may
understand also, however, from the same central fact, why it is that the
doctrine of the Trinity lies in the New Testament rather in the form of
allusions than in express teaching, why it is rather everywhere presupposed,
coming only here and there into incidental expression, than formally
inculcated. It is because the revelation, having been made in the actual occurrences
of redemption, was already the common property of all Christian hearts. In
speaking and writing to one another, Christians, therefore, rather spoke out of
their common Trinitarian consciousness, and reminded one another of their
common fund of belief, than instructed one another in what was already the
common property of all. We are to look for, and we shall find, in the New
Testament allusions to the Trinity, rather evidence of how the Trinity,
believed in by all, was conceived by the authoritative teachers of the church,
than formal attempts, on their part, by authoritative declarations, to bring
the church into the understanding that God is a Trinity.
The fundamental proof that God is a Trinity
is supplied thus by the fundamental revelation of the Trinity in fact: that is
to say, in the incarnation of God the Son and the outpouring of God the Holy
Spirit. In a word, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are the fundamental proof
of the doctrine of the Trinity. This is as much as to say that all the evidence
of whatever kind, and from whatever source derived, that Jesus Christ is God
manifested in the flesh, and that the Holy Spirit is a Divine Person, is just
so much evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity; and that when we go to the
New Testament for evidence of the Trinity we are to seek it; not merely in the
scattered allusions to the Trinity as such, numerous and instructive as they
are, but primarily in the whole mass of evidence which the New Testament
provides of the Deity of Christ and the Divine personality of the Holy Spirit.
When we have said this, we have said in effect that the whole mass of the New
Testament is evidence for the Trinity. For the New Testament is saturated with
evidence of the Deity of Christ and the Divine personality of the Holy Spirit.
Precisely what the New Testament is, is the documentation of the religion of
the incarnate Son and of the outpourcd Spirit, that is to say, of the religion
of the Trinity, and what we mean by the doctrine of the Trinity is nothing but
the formulation in exact language of the conception of God presupposed in the
religion of the incarnate Son and outpoured Spirit. We may analyze this
conception and adduce proof for every constituent element of it from the New
Testament declarations. We may show that the New Testament everywhere insists
on the unity of the Godhead; that it constantly recognizes the Father as God,
the Son as God and the Spirit as God; and that it cursorily presents these
three to us as distinct Persons. It is not necessary, however, to enlarge here
on facts so obvious. We may content ourselves with simply observing that to the
New Testament there is but one only living and true God; but that to it Jesus
Christ and the Holy Spirit are each God in the fullest sense of the term; and
yet Father, Son and Spirit stand over against each other as I, and Thou, and
He. In this composite fact the New Testament gives us the doctrine of the
Trinity. For the doctrine of the Trinity is but the statement in well guarded
language of this composite fact. Throughout the whole course of the many
efforts to formulate the doctrine exactly, which have followed one another
during the entire history of the church, indeed, the principle which has ever
determined the result has always been determination to do justice in conceiving
the relations of God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit, on the one
hand to the unity of God, and, on the other, to the true Deity of the Son and
Spirit and their distinct personalities. When we have said these three things,
then - that there is but one God, that the Father and the Son and the Spirit is
each God, that the Father and the Son and the Spirit is each a distinct person
- we have enunciated the doctrine of the Trinity in its completeness.
That this doctrine underlies the whole New
Testament as its constant presupposition and determines everywhere its forms of
expression is the primary fact to be noted. We must not omit explicitly to
note, however, that it now and again also, as occasion arises for its
incidental enunciation, comes itself to expression in more or less completeness
of statement. The passages in which the three Persons of the Trinity are
brought together are much more numerous than, perhaps, is generally supposed;
but it should be recognized that the for- mal collocation of the elements of
the doctrine naturally is relatively rare in writings which are occasional in
their origin and practical rather than doctrinal in their immediate purpose.
The three Persons already come into view as Divine Persons in the annunciation
of the birth of Our Lord: 'The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee,' said the angel
to Mary, 'and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also
the holy thing which is to be born shall be called the Son of God; (Lk. i. 35
m; cf. Mt. i. 18 ff.). Here the Holy Ghost is the active agent in the
production of an effect which is also ascribed to the power of the Most High,
and the child thus brought into the world is given the great designation of
"Son of God." The three Persons are just as clearly brought before us
in the account of Mt. (i. 18 ff.), though the allusions to them are dispersed
through a longer stretch of narrative, in the course of which the Deity of the
child is twice intimated (ver. 21: 'It is He that shall save His people from
their sins'; ver. 23: 'They shall call His name Immanuel; which is, being
interpreted, God-with-us'). In the baptismal scene which finds record by all
the evangelists at the opening of Jesus' ministry (Mt. iii. 16, 17; Mk. i. 10,
11; Lk. iii. 21, 22; Jn. i. 32-34), the three Persons are thrown up to sight in
a dramatic picture in which the Deity of each is strongly emphasized. From the
open heavens the Spirit descends in visible form, and 'a voice came out of the
heavens, Thou art my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.' Thus care
seems to have been taken to make the advent of the Son of God into the world
the revelation also of the Triune God, that the minds of men might as smoothly
as possible adjust themselves to the preconditions of the Divine redemption
which was in process of being wrought out.
With this as a starting-point, the teaching
of Jesus is Trinitarianly conditioned throughout. He has much to say of God His
Father, from whom as His Son He is in some true sense distinct, and with whom
He is in some equally true sense one. And He has much to say of the Spirit, who
represents Him as He represents the Father, and by whom He works as the Father
works by Him. It is not merely in the Gospel of John that such representations
occur in the teaching of Jesus. In the Synoptics, too, Jesus claims a Sonship
to God which is unique (Mt. xi. 27; xxiv. 36; Mk. xiii. 32; Lk. x. 22; in the
following passages the title of "Son of God" is attributed to Him and
accepted by Him: Mt. iv. 6; viii. 29; xiv. 33; xxvii. 40, 43, 54; Mk. iii. 11;
xv. 39; Lk. iv. 41; xxii. 70; cf. Jn. i. 34, 49; ix. 35; xi. 27), and which
involves an absolute community between the two in knowledge, say, and power:
both Mt. (xi. 27) and Lk. (x. 22) record His great declaration that He knows
the Father and the Father knows Him with perfect mutual knowledge: "No one
knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the
Son." In the Synoptics, too, Jesus speaks of employing the Spirit of God
Himself for the performance of His works, as if the activities of God were at
His disposal: "I by the Spirit of God" --- or as Luke has it,
"by the finger of God" - "cast out demons" (Mt. xii. 28;
Lk. xi. 20; cf. the promise of the Spirit in Mk. xiii. 11; Lk. xii. 12).
It is in the discourses recorded in John,
however, that Jesus most copiously refers to the unity of Himself, as the Son,
with the Father, and to the mission of the Spirit from Himself as the dispenser
of the Divine activities. Here He not only with great directness declares that
He and the Father are one (x. 30; cf. xvii. 11, 21, 22, 25) with a unity of
interpenetration ("The Father is in me, and I in the Father," x. 38;
cf. xvi. 10, 11), so that to have seen Him was to have seen the Father (xiv. 9;
cf. xv. 21); but He removes all doubt as to the essential nature of His oneness
with the Father by explicitly asserting His eternity ("Before Abraham was
born, I am," Jn. viii. 58), His co-eternity with God ("had with thee
before the world was," xvii. 5; cf. xvii. 18; vi. 62), His eternal
participation in the Divine glory itself ("the glory which I had with
thee," in fellowship, community with Thee "before the world
was," xvii. 5). So clear is it that in speaking currently of Himself as
God's Son (v.25; ix. 35; xi. 4; cf. x. 36), He meant, in accordance with the
underlying significance of the idea of sonship in Semitic speech (founded on
the natural implication that whatever the father is that the son is also; cf.
xvi. 15; xvii. 10), to make Himself, as the Jews with exact appreciation of His
meaning perceived, "equal with God" (v.18), or, to put it brusquely,
just "God" (x. 33). How He, being thus equal or rather identical with
God, was in the world, He explains as involving a coming forth on His part, not
merely from the presence of God (xvi. 30; cf. xiii. 3) or from fellowship with
God (xvi. 27; xvii. 8), but from out of God Himself (viii. 42; xvi. 28). And in
the very act of thus asserting that His eternal home is in the depths of the
Divine Being, He throws up, into as strong an emphasis as stressed pronouns can
convey, His personal distinctness from the Father. 'If God were your Father,'
says He (viii. 42), 'ye would love me: for I came forth and am come out of God;
for neither have I come of myself, but it was He that sent me.' Again, He says
(xvi. 26, 27):' In that day ye shall ask in my name: and I say not unto you
that I will make request of the Father for you; for the Father Himself loveth
you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that it was from fellowship
with the Father that I came forth; I came from out of the Father, and have come
into the world.' Less pointedly, but still distinctly, He says again (xvii. 8):
' They know of a truth that it was from fellowship with Thee that I came forth,
and they believed that it was Thou that didst send me.' It is not necessary to
illustrate more at large a form of expression so characteristic of the
discourses of Our Lord recorded by John that it meets us on every page: a form
of expression which combines a clear implication of a unity of Father and Son
which is identity of Being, and an equally clear implication of a distinction
of Person between them such as allows not merely for the play of emotions
between them, as, for instance, of love (xvii. 24; cf. xv. 9 [iii. 35]; xiv.
31), but also of an action and reaction upon one another which argues a high
measure, if not of exteriority, yet certainly of exteriorization. Thus, to
instance only one of the most outstanding facts of Our Lord's discourses (not
indeed confined to those in John's Gospel, but found also in His sayings
recorded in the Synoptists, as e.g., Lk. iv. 43 [cf. j Mk. i. 38]; ix. 48; x.
16; iv. 34; v.32; vii. 19; xix. 10), He continually represents Himself as on
the one hand sent by God, and as, on the other, having come forth from the
Father (e. g., Jn. viii. 42; x. 36; xvii. 3; v.23).
It is more important to point out that these
phenomena of interrelationship are not confined to the Father and Son, but are
extended also to the Spirit. Thus, for example, in a context in which Our Lord
had emphasized in the strongest manner His own essential unity and continued
interpenetration with the Father ("If ye had known me, ye would have known
my Father also"; "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father"; .
,, "I am in the Father, and the Father in me ; "The Father abiding in
me doeth his works," Jn. xiv. 7, 9, 10), we read as follows (Jn. xiv.
16-26): 'And I will make request of the Father, and He shall give you another
[thus sharply distinguished from Our Lord as a distinct Person] Advocate, that
He may be with you forever, the Spirit of Truth . . . He abideth with you and
shall be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I come unto you. . . In that day
ye shall know that I am in the Father. . . . If a man love me, he will keep my
word; and my Father will love him and we [that is, both Father and Son] will
come unto him and make our abode with him. . . . These things have I spoken
unto you while abiding with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the
Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things, and bring to your
remembrance all that I said unto you.' It would be impossible to speak more
distinctly of three who were yet one. The Father, Son and Spirit are constantly
distinguished from one another --- the Son makes request of the Father, and the
Father in response to this request gives an Advocate, "another" than
the Son, who is sent in the Son's name. And yet the oneness of these three is
so kept in sight that the coming of this "another Advocate" is spoken
of without embarrassment as the coming of the Son Himself (vs. 18, 19, 20, 21),
and indeed as the coming of the Father and the Son (ver. 23). There is a sense,
then, in which, when Christ goes away, the Spirit comes in His stead; there is
also a sense in which, when the Spirit comes, Christ comes in Him; and with
Christ's coming the Father comes too. There is a distinction between the
Persons brought into view; and with it an identity among them; for both of
which allowance must be made. The same phenomena meet us in other passages.
Thus, we read again (xv. 26):' But when there is come the Advocate whom I will
send unto you from [fellowship with] the Father, the Spirit of Truth, which
goeth forth from [fellowship with] the Father, He shall bear witness of me.' In
the compass of this single verse, it is intimated that the Spirit is personally
distinct from the Son, and yet, like Him, has His eternal home (in fellowship)
with the Father, from whom He, like the Son, comes forth for His saving work,
being sent thereunto, however, not in this instance by the Father, but by the
Son.
This last feature is even more strongly
emphasized in yet another passage in which the work of the Spirit in relation
to the Son is presented as closely parallel with the work of the Son in
relation to the Father (xvi. 5 ff.) . 'But now I go unto Him that sent me. . .
. Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is expedient for you that I go away;
for, if I go not away the Advocate will not come unto you; but if I go I will
send Him unto you. And He, after He is come, will convict the world . . . of
righteousness because I go to the Father and ye behold me no more. . . . I have
yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He,
the Spirit of truth is come, He shall guide you into all the truth; for He
shall not speak from Himself; but what things soever He shall hear, He shall
speak, and He shall declare unto you the things that are to come. He shall
glorify me: for He shall take of mine and shall show it unto you. All things
whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I that He taketh of mine,
and shall declare it unto you.' Here the Spirit is sent by the Son, and comes
in order to complete and apply the Son's work, receiving His whole commission from
the Son - not, however, in derogation of the Father, because when we speak of
the things of the Son, that is to speak of the things of the Father.
It is not to be said, of course, that the
doctrine of the Trinity is formulated in passages like these, with which the
whole mass of Our Lord's discourses in John are strewn; but it certainly is
presupposed in them, and that is, considered from the point of view of their
probative force, even better. As we read we are kept in continual contact with
three Persons who act, each as a distinct person, and yet who are in a deep,
under lying sense, one. There is but one God - there is never any question of
that - and yet this Son who has been sent into the world by God not only
represents God but is God, and this Spirit whom the Son has in turn sent unto
the world is also Himself God. Nothing could be clearer than that the Son and
Spirit are distinct Persons, unless indeed it be that the Son of God is just
God the Son and the Spirit of God just God the Spirit.
Meanwhile, the nearest approach to a formal
announcement of the doctrine of the Trinity which is recorded from Our Lord's
lips, or, perhaps we may say, which is to be found in the whole compass of the
New Testament, has been preserved for us, not by John, but by one of the
synoptists. It too, however, is only incidentally introduced, and has for its
main object something very different from formulating the doctrine of the
Trinity. It is embodied in the great commission which the resurrected Lord gave
His disciples to be their "marching orders" "even unto the end
of the world": "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the
nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit" (Mt. xxviii. 19). In seeking to estimate the significance of
this great declaration, we must bear in mind the high solemnity of the
utterance, by which we are required to give its full value to every word of it.
Its phrasing is in any event, however, remarkable. It does not say, "In
the names [plural] of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost";
nor yet (what might be taken to be equivalent to that),"In the name of the
Father, and in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost," as
if we had to deal with three separate Beings. Nor, on the other hand, does it
say, "In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost," as if "the
Father, Son and Holy Ghost" might be taken as merely three designations of
a single person. With stately impressiveness it asserts the unity of the three
by combining them all within the bounds of the single Name; and then throws up
into emphasis the distinctness of each by introducing them in turn with the
repeated article: "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost "(Authorized Version). These three, the Father, and the Son,
and the Holy Ghost, each stand in some clear sense over against the others in
distinct personality: these three, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost,
all unite in some profound sense in the common participation of the one Name.
Fully to comprehend the implication of this mode of statement, we must bear in
mind, further, the significance of the term, "the name," and the
associations laden with which it came to the recipients of this commission. For
the Hebrew did not think of the name, as we are accustomed to do, as a mere
external symbol; but rather as the adequate expression of the innermost being
of its bearer. In His name the Being of God finds expression; and the Name of
God - "this glorious and fearful name, Jehovah thy God" (Deut.
xxviii. 58) - was accordingly a most sacred thing, being indeed virtually
equivalent to God Himself. It is no solecism, therefore, when we read (Isa.
xxx. 27), "Behold, the name of Jehovah cometh"; and the parallelisms
are most instructive when we read (Isa. lix. 19):' So shall they fear the Name
of Jehovah from the west, and His glory from the rising of the sun; for He
shall come as a stream pent in which the Spirit of Jehovah driveth.' So
pregnant was the implication of the Name, that it was possible for the term to
stand absolutely, without adjunction of the name itself, as the sufficient
representative of the majesty of Jehovah: it was a terrible thing to 'blaspheme
the Name' (Lev. xxiv. 11). All those over whom Jehovah's Name was called were
His, His possession to whom He owed protection. It is for His Name's sake,
therefore, that afflicted Judah cries to the Hope of Israel, the Saviour
thereof in time of trouble: '0 Jehovah, Thou art in the midst of us, and Thy
Name is called upon us; leave us not' (Jer. xiv. 9); and His people find the
appropriate expression of their deepest shame in the lament, 'We have become as
they over whom Thou never barest rule; as they upon whom Thy Name was not
called' (Isa. lxiii. 19); while the height of joy is attained in the cry, 'Thy
Name, Jehovah, G6d of Hosts, is called upon me' (Jer. xv. 16; cf. II Chron.
vii. 14; Dan. ix. 18, 19). When, therefore, Our Lord commanded His disciples to
baptize those whom they brought to His obedience "into the name of . . . ,"
He was using language charged to them with high meaning. He could not have been
understood otherwise than as substituting for the Name of Jehovah this other
Name "of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost"; and this
could not possibly have meant to His disciples anything else than that Jehovah
was now to be known to them by the new Name, of the Father, and the Son, and
the Holy Ghost. The only alternative would have been that, for the community
which He was founding, Jesus was supplanting Jehovah by a new God; and this
alternative is no less than monstrous. There is no alternative, therefore, to
understanding Jesus here to be giving for His community a new Name to Jehovah
and that new Name to be the threefold Name of "the Father, and the Son, and
the Holy Ghost." Nor is there room for doubt that by "the Son
"in this threefold Name, He meant just Himself with all the implications
of distinct personality which this carries with it; and, of course, that
further carries with it the equally distinct personality of "the
Father" and "the Holy Ghost," with whom "the Son" is
here associated, and from whom alike "the Son" is here distinguished.
This is a direct ascription to Jehovah the God of Israel, of a threefold
personality, and is therewith the direct enunciation of the doctrine of the
Trinity. We are not witnessing here the birth of the doctrine of the Trinity;
that is presupposed. What we are witnessing is the authoritative announcement
of the Trinity as the God of Christianity by its Founder, in one of the most
solemn of His recorded declarations. Israel had worshipped the one only true
God under the Name of Jehovah; Christians are to worship the same one only and
true God under the Name of "the Father, and the Son, and the Holy
Ghost." This is the distinguishing characteristic of Christians; and that
is as much as to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is, according to Our
Lord's own apprehension of it, the distinctive mark of the religion which He
founded.
A passage of such range of implication has,
of course, not escaped criticism and challenge. An attempt which cannot be
characterized as other than frivolous has even been made to dismiss it from the
text of Matthew's Gospel. Against this, the whole body of external evidence
cries out; and the internal evidence is of itself not less decisive to the same
effect. When the "universalism," "ecclesiasticism," and
"high theology" of the passage are pleaded against its genuineness,
it is forgotten that to the Jesus of Matthew there are attributed not only such
parables as those of the Leaven and the Mustard Seed, but such declarations as
those contained in viii. 11,12; xxi. 43; xxiv. 14; that in this Gospel alone is
Jesus recorded as speaking familiarly about His church (xvi. 18; xviii. 17);
and that, after the great declaration of xi. 27 ff., nothing remained in lofty
attribution to be assigned to Him. When these same objections are urged against
recognizing the passage as an authentic saying of Jesus' own, it is quite
obvious that the Jesus of the evangelists cannot be in mind. The declaration
here recorded is quite in character with the Jesus of Matthew's Gospel, as has
just been intimated; and no less with the Jesus of the whole New Testament
transmission. It will scarcely do, first to construct a priori a Jesus to our
own liking, and then to discard as "unhistorical" all in the New
Testament transmission which would be unnatural to such a Jesus. It is not
these discarded passages but our a priori Jesus which is unhistorical. In the
present instance, moreover, the historicity of the assailed saying is protected
by an important historical relation in which it stands. It is not merely Jesus
who speaks out of a Trinitarian consciousness, but all the New Testament
writers as well. The universal possession by His followers of so firm a hold on
such a doctrine requires the assumption that some such teaching as is here
attributed to Him was actually contained in Jesus' instructions to His
followers. Even had it not been attributed to Him in so many words by the record,
we should have had to assume that some such declaration had been, made by Him.
In these circumstances, there can be no good reason to doubt that it was made
by Him, when it is expressly attributed to Him by the record.
When we turn from the discourses of Jesus to
the writings of His followers with a view to observing how the assumption of
the doctrine of the Trinity underlies their whole fabric also, we naturally go
first of all to the letters of Paul. Their very mass is impressive; and the
definiteness with which their composition within a generation of the death of
Jesus may be fixed adds importance to them as historical witnesses. Certainly
they leave nothing to be desired in the richness of their testimony to the
Trinitarian conception of God which underlies them. Throughout the whole
series, from I Thess., which comes from about 52 A.D., to II
In numerous passages scattered through
Paul's Epistles, from the earliest of them (I Thess. i. 2-5; II Thess. ii. 13,
14) to the latest (Tit. iii. 4-6; II
The phenomena of Paul's Epistles are
repeated in the other writings of the New Testament. In these other writings
also it is everywhere assumed that the redemptive activities of God rest on a
threefold source in God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit;
and these three Persons repeatedly come forward together in the expressions of
Christian hope or the aspirations of Christian devotion (e. g., Heb. ii. 3, 4;
vi. 4-6; x. 29-31; 1 Pet. i. 2;ii. 3-12; iv. 13-19; I Jn. v.4-8; Jude vs. 20,
21; Rev. i. 4-6). Perhaps as typical instances as any are supplied by the two
following: "According to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in
sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of
Jesus Christ" (I Pet. i. 2); "Praying in the Holy Spirit, keep
yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ
unto eternal life" (Jude vs. 20, 21). To these may be added the highly
symbolical instance from the Apocalypse: 'Grace to you and peace from Him which
is and was and which is to come; and from the Seven Spirits which are before
His throne; and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn
of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth' (Rev. i. 4, 5). Clearly
these writers, too, write out of a fixed Trinitarian consciousness and bear
their testimony to the universal understanding current in apostolical circles.
Everywhere and by all it was fully understood that the one God whom Christians
worshipped and from whom alone they expected redemption and all that redemption
brought with it, included within His undiminished unity the three: God the
Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, whose activities relatively
to one another are conceived as distinctly personal. This is the uniform and
pervasive testimony of the New Testament, and it is the more impressive that it
is given with such unstudied naturalness and simplicity, with no effort to
distinguish between what have come to be called the ontological and the
economical aspects of the Trinitarian distinctions, and indeed without apparent
consciousness of the existence of such a distinction of aspects. Whether God is
thought of in Himself or in His operations, the underlying conception runs
unaffectedly into trinal forms.
It will not have escaped observation that
the Trinitarian terminology of Paul and the other writers of the New Testament
is not precisely identical with that of Our Lord as recorded for us in His
discourses. Paul, for example - and the same is true of the other New Testament
writers (except John) - does not speak, as Our Lord is recorded as speaking, of
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, so much as of God, the Lord Jesus
Christ, and the Holy Spirit. This difference of terminology finds its account
in large measure in the different relations in which the speakers stand to the
Trinity. Our Lord could not naturally speak of Himself, as one of the
Trinitarian Persons, by the designation of "the Lord," while the
designation of "the Son," expressing as it does His consciousness of
close relation, and indeed of exact similarity, to God, came naturally to His
lips. But He was Paul's Lord; and Paul naturally thought and spoke of Him as
such. In point of fact, "Lord" is one of Paul's favorite designations
of Christ, and indeed has become with him practically a proper name for Christ,
and in point of fact, his Divine Name for Christ. It is naturally, therefore,
his Trinitarian name for Christ. Because when he thinks of Christ as Divine he
calls Him "Lord," he naturally, when he thinks of the three Persons
together as the Triune God, sets Him as "Lord" by the side of God -
Paul's constant name for "the Father" - and the Holy Spirit. Question
may no doubt be raised whether it would have been possible for Paul to have
done this, especially with the constancy with which he has done it, if, in his
conception of it, the very essence of the Trinity were enshrined in the terms
"Father" and "Son." Paul is thinking of the Trinity, to be
sure, from the point of view of a worshipper, rather than from that of a
systematizer. He designates the Persons of the Trinity therefore rather from
his relations to them than from their relations to one another. He sees in the
Trinity his God, his Lord, and the Holy Spirit who dwells in him; and naturally
he so speaks currently of the three Persons. It remains remarkable,
nevertheless, if the very essence of the Trinity were thought of by him as
resident in the terms "Father," "Son," that in his numerous
allusions to the Trinity in the Godhead, he never betrays any sense of this. It
is noticeable also that in their allusions to the Trinity, there is preserved,
neither in Paul nor in the other writers of the New Testament, the order of the
names as they stand in Our Lord's great declaration (Mt. xxviii. 19). The
reverse order occurs, indeed, occasionally, as, for example, in I Cor. xii. 4-6
(cf. Eph. iv. 4-6); and this may be understood as a climactic arrangement and
so far a testimony to the order of Mt. xxviii. 19. But the order is very
variable; and in the most formal enumeration of the three Persons, that of II
Cor. xiii. 14, it stands thus: Lord, God, Spirit. The question naturally
suggests itself whether the order Father, Son, Spirit was especially
significant to Paul and his fellow-writers of the New Testament. If in their
conviction the very essence of the doctrine of the Trinity was embodied in this
order, should we not anticipate that there should appear in their numerous
allusions to the Trinity some suggestion of this conviction?
Such facts as these have a bearing upon the
testimony of the New Testament to the interrelations of the Persons of the
Trinity. To the fact of the Trinity - to the fact, that is, that in the unity
of the Godhead there subsist three Persons, each of whom has his particular
part in the working out of salvation - the New Testament testimony is clear,
consistent, pervasive and conclusive. There is included in this testimony
constant and decisive witness to the complete and undiminished Deity of each of
these Persons; no language is too exalted to apply to each of them in turn in
the effort to give expression to the writer's sense of His Deity: the name that
is given to each is fully understood to be "the name that is above every
name." When we attempt to press the inquiry behind the broad fact,
however, with a view to ascertaining exactly how the New Testament writers
conceive the three Persons to be related, the one to the other, we meet with
great difficulties. Nothing could seem more natural, for example, than to
assume that the mutual relations of the Persons of the Trinity are revealed in
the designations, "the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," which
are given them by Our Lord in the solemn formula of Mt. xxviii. 19. Our
confidence in this assumption is somewhat shaken, however, when we observe, as
we have just observed, that these designations are not carefully preserved in
their allusions to the Trinity by the writers of the New Testament at large,
but are characteristic only of Our Lord's allusions and those of John, whose
modes of speech in general very closely resemble those of Our Lord. Our
confidence is still further shaken when we observe that the implications with
respect to the mutual relations of the Trinitarian Persons, which are
ordinarily derived from these designations, do not so certainly lie in them as
is commonly supposed.
It may be very natural to see in the
designation "Son" an intimation of subordination and derivation of
Being, and it may not be difficult to ascribe a similar connotation to the term
"Spirit." But it is quite certain that this was not the denotation of
either term in the Semitic consciousness, which underlies the phraseology of
Scripture; and it may even be thought doubtful whether it was included even in
their remoter suggestions. What underlies the conception of sonship in
Scriptural speech is just "likeness"; whatever the father is that the
son is also. The emphatic application of the term "Son" to one of the
Trinitarian Persons, accordingly, asserts rather His equality with the Father
than His subordination to the Father; and if there is any implication of
derivation in it, it would appear to be very distant. The adjunction of the
adjective "only begotten" (Jn. i. 14; iii. 16-18; I Jn. iv. 9) need
add only the idea of uniqueness, not of derivation (Ps. xxii. 20; xxv. 16;
xxxv. 17; Wisd. vii. 22 m.); and even such a phrase as "God only begotten"
(Jn. i. 18 m.) may contain no implication of derivation, but only of absolutely
unique consubstantiality; as also such a phrase as "the first-begotten of
all creation" (Col. i. 15) may convey no intimation of coming into being,
but merely assert priority of existence. In like manner, the designation
"Spirit of God" or "Spirit of Jehovah," which meets us
frequently in the Old Testament, certainly does not convey the idea there
either of derivation or of subordination, but is just the executive name of God
--- the designation of God from the point of view of His activity - and imports
accordingly identity with God; and there is no reason to suppose that, in
passing from the Old Testament to the New Testament, the term has taken on an
essentially different meaning. It happens, oddly enough, moreover, that we have
in the New Testament itself what amounts almost to formal definitions of the
two terms "Son" and "Spirit," and in both cases the stress
is laid on the notion of equality or sameness. In Jn. v.18 we read: 'On this account,
therefore, the Jews sought the more to kill him, because, not only did he break
the Sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal to God.'
The point lies, of course, in the adjective "own." Jesus was,
rightly, understood to call God "his own Father," that is, to use the
terms "Father" and "Son" not in a merely figurative sense,
as when Israel was called God's son, but in the real sense. And this was
understood to be claiming to be all that God is. To be the Son of God in any
sense was to be like God in that sense; to be God's own Son was to be exactly
like God, to be "equal with God." Similarly, we read in I Cor. ii.
10,11:' For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For
who of men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him?
Even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God.' Here the
Spirit appears as the substrate of the Divine self-consciousness, the principle
of God's knowledge of Himself: He is, in a word, just God Himself in the
innermost essence of His Being. As the spirit of man is the seat of human life,
the very life of man itself, so the Spirit of God is His very life-element. How
can He be supposed, then, to be subordinate to God, or to derive His Being from
God? If, however, the subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father in
modes of subsistence and their derivation from the Father are not implicates of
tbeir designation as Son and Spirit, it will be hard to find in the New
Testament compelling evidence of their subordination and derivation.
There is, of course, no question that in
"modes of operation," as it is technically called - that is to say,
in the functions ascribed to the several Persons of the Trinity in the
redemptive process, and, more broadly, in the entire dealing of God with the
world - the principle of subordination is clearly expressed. The Father is
first, the Son is second, and the Spirit is third, in the operations of God as
revealed to us in general, and very especially in those operations by which
redemption is accomplished. Whatever the Father does, He does through the Son
(Rom. ii. 16; iii. 22;v. 1,11, 17, 21; Eph. i.5; I Thess. v.9; Tit. iii. v) by
the Spirit. The Son is sent by the Father and does His Father's will (Jn. vi.
38); the Spirit is sent by the Son and does not speak from Himself, but only
takes of Christ's and shows it unto His people (Jn. xvii. 7 ff.); and we have
Our Lord's own word for it that 'one that is sent is not greater than he that
sent him' (Jn. xiii. 16). In crisp decisiveness, Our Lord even declares,
indeed: 'My Father is greater than I' (Jn. xiv. 28); and Paul tells us that
Christ is God's, even as we are Christ's (I Cor. iii. 23), and that as Christ
is "the head of every man," so God is "the head of Christ" (I
Cor. xi. 3). But it is not so clear that the principle of subordination rules
also in "modes of subsistence," as it is technically phrased; that is
to say, in the necessary relation of the Persons of the Trinity to one another.
The very richness and variety of the expression of their subordination, the one
to the other, in modes of operation, create a difficulty in attaining certainty
whether they are represented as also subordinate the one to the other in modes
of subsistence. Question is raised in each ease of apparent intimation of
subordination in modes of subsistence, whether it may not, after all, be
explicable as only another expression of subordination in modes of operation.
It may be natural to assume that a subordination in modes of operation rests on
a subordination in modes of subsistence; that the reason why it is the Father
that sends the Son and the Son that sends the Spirit is that the Son is
subordinate to the Father, and the Spirit to the Son. But we are bound to bear
in mind that these relations of subordination in modes of operation may just as
well be due to a convention, an agreement, between the Persons of the Trinity -
a "Covenant" as it is technically called - by virtue of which a
distinct function in the work of redemption is voluntarily assumed by each. It
is eminently desirable, therefore, at the least, that some definite evidence of
subordination in modes of subsistence should be discoverable before it is
assumed. In the case of the relation of the Son to the Father, there is the
added difficulty of the incarnation, in which the Son, by the assumption of a
creaturely nature into union with Himself, enters into new relations with the
Father of a definitely subordinate character. Question has even been raised
whether the very designations of Father and Son may not be expressive of these
new relations, and therefore without significance with respect to the eternal
relations of the Persons so designated. This question must certainly be
answered in the negative. Although, no doubt, in many of the instances in which
the terms "Father" and "Son" occur, it would be possible to
take them of merely economical relations, there ever remain some which are
intractable to this treatment, and we may be sure that "Father" and
"Son" are applied to their eternal and necessary relations. But these
terms, as we have seen, do not appear to imply relations of first and second,
superiority and subordination, in modes of subsistence; and the fact of the
humiliation of the Son of God for His earthly work does introduce a factor into
the interpretation of the passages which import His subordination to the
Father, which throws doubt upon the inference from them of an eternal relation
of subordination in the Trinity itself. It must at least be said that in the presence
of the great New Testament doctrines of the Covenant of Redemption on the one
hand, and of the Humiliation of the Son of God for His work's sake and of the
Two Natures in the constitution of His Person as incarnated, on the other, the
difficulty of interpreting subordinationist passages of eternal relations
between the Father and Son becomes extreme. The question continually obtrudes
itself, whether they do not rather find their full explanation in the facts
embodied in the doctrines of the Covenant, the Humiliation of Christ, and the
Two Natures of His incarnated Person. Certainly in such circumstances it were
thoroughly illegitimate to press such passages to suggest any subordination for
the Son or the Spirit which would in any manner impair that complete identity
with the Father in Being and that complete equality with the Father in powers
which are constantly presupposed, and frequently emphatically, though only
incidentally, asserted for them throughout the whole fabric of the New
Testament.
The Trinity of the Persons of the Godhead,
shown in the incarnation and the redemptive work of God the Son, and the
descent and saving work of God the Spirit, is thus everywhere assumed in the
New Testament, and comes to repeated fragmentary but none the less emphatic and
illuminating expression in its pages. As the roots of its revelation are set in
the threefold Divine causality of the saving process, it naturally finds an
echo also in the consciousness of everyone who has experienced this salvation.
Every redeemed soul, knowing himself reconciled with God through His Son, and
quickened into newness of life by His Spirit, turns alike to Father, Son and
Spirit with the exclamation of reverent gratitude upon his lips, "My Lord
and my God!" If he could not construct the doctrine of the Trinity out of
his consciousness of salvation, yet the elements of his consciousness of
salvation are interpreted to him and reduced to order only by the doctrine of
the Trinity which he finds underlying and giving their significance and
consistency to the teaching of the Scriptures as to the processes of salvation.
By means of this doctrine he is able to think clearly and consequently of his
threefold relation to the saving God, experienced by Him as Fatherly love
sending a Redeemer, as redeeming love executing redemption, as saving love
applying redemption: all manifestations in distinct methods and by distinct
agencies of the one seeking and saving love of God. Without the doctrine of the
Trinity, his conscious Christian life would be thrown into confusion and left
in disorganization if not, indeed, given an air of unreality; with the doctrine
of the Trinity, order, significance and reality are brought to every element of
it. Accordingly, the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of redemption,
historically, stand or fall together. A Unitarian theology is commonly
associated with a Pelagian anthropology and a Socinian soteriology. It is a
striking testimony which is borne by F. E. Koenig ("Offenbarungsbegriff
des AT," 1882, 1,125):: J have learned that many cast off the whole
history of redemption for no other reason than because they have not attained
to a conception of the Triune God." It is in this intimacy of relation
between the doctrines of the Trinity and redemption that the ultimate reason
lies why the Christian church could not rest until it had attained a definite
and well-compacted doctrine of the Trinity. Nothing else could be accepted as
an adequate foundation for the experience of the Christian salvation. Neither
the Sabellian nor the Arian construction could meet and satisfy the data of the
consciousness of salvation, any more than either could meet and satisfy the
data of the Scriptural revelation. The data of the Scriptural revelation might,
to be sure, have been left unsatisfied: men might have found a modus vivendi
with neglected, or even with perverted Scriptural teaching. But perverted or
neglected elements of Christian experience are more clamant in their demands
for attention and correction. The dissatisfied Christian consciousness
necessarily searched the Scriptures, on the emergence of every new attempt to
state the doctrine of the nature and relations of God, to see whether these
things were true, and never reached contentment until the Scriptural data were given
their consistent formulation in a valid doctrine of the Trinity. Here too the
heart of man was restless until it found its rest in the Triune God, the
author, procurer and applier of salvation.
The determining impulse to the formulation of
the doctrine of the Trinity in the church was the church's profound conviction
of the absolute Deity of Christ, on which as on a pivot the whole Christian
conception of God from the first origins of Christianity turned. The guiding
principle in the formulation of the doctrine was supplied by the Baptismal
Formula announced by Jesus (Mt. xxviii. 19), from which was derived the
ground-plan of the baptismal confessions and "rules of faith" which
very soon began to be framed all over the church. It was by these two
fundamental principia --- the true Deity of Christ and the Baptismal Formula
--- that all attempts to formulate the Christian doctrine of God were tested,
and by their molding power that the church at length found itself in possession
of a form of statement which did full justice to the data of the redemptive
revelation as reflected in the New Testament and the demands of the Christian
heart under the experience of salvation.
In the nature of the case the formulated
doctrine was of slow attainment. The influence of inherited conceptions and of
current philosophies inevitably showed itself in the efforts to construe to the
intellect the immanent faith of Christians. In the second century the dominant
neo-Stoic and neo-Platonic ideas deflected Christian thought into
subordinationist channels, and produced what is known as the Logos-Christology,
which looks upon the Son as a prolation of Deity reduced to such dimensions as
comported with relations with a world of time and space; meanwhile, to a great extent,
the Spirit was neglected altogether. A reaction which, under the name of
Monarchianism, identified the Father, Son, and Spirit so completely that they
were thought of only as different aspects or different moments in the life of
the one Divine Person, called now Father, now Son, now Spirit, as His several
activities came successively into view, almost succeeded in establishing itself
in the third century as the doctrine of the church at large. In the conflict
between these two opposite tendencies the church gradually found its way, under
the guidance of the Baptismal Formula elaborated into a "Rule of
Faith," to a better and more well-balanced conception, until a real
doctrine of the Trinity at length came to expression, particularly in the West,
through the brilliant dialectic of Tertullian. It was thus ready at hand, when,
in the early years of the fourth century, the Logos-Christology, in opposition
to dominant Sabellian tendencies, ran to seed in what is known as Arianism, to
which the Son was a creature, though exalted above all other creatures as their
Creator and Lord; and the church was thus prepared to assert its settled faith
in a Triune God, one in being, but in whose unity there subsisted three
consubstantial Persons. Under the leadership of Athanasius this doctrine was
proclaimed as the faith of the church at the Council of Nice in 325 A.D., and
by his strenuous labors and those of "the three great Cappadocians,"
the two Gregories and Basil, it gradually won its way to the actual acceptance
of the entire church. It was at the hands of Augustine, however, a century
later, that the doctrine thus become the church doctrine in fact as well as in
theory, received its most complete elaboration and most carefully grounded
statement. In the form which he gave it, and which is embodied in that
"battle-hymn of the early church," the so-called Athanasian Creed, it
has retained its place as the fit expression of the faith of the church as to
the nature of its God until today. The language in which it is couched, even in
this final declaration, still retains elements of speech which owe their origin
to the modes of thought characteristic of the Logos Christology of the second
century, fixed in the nomenclature of the church by the Nicene Creed of 325
A.D., though carefully guarded there against the subordinationism inherent in
the Logos-Christology, and made the vehicle rather of the Nicene doctrines of
the eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit, with the
consequent subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father in modes of
subsistence as well as of operation. In the Athanasian Creed, however, the
principle of the equalization of the three Persons, which was already the
dominant motive of the Nicene Creed - the homoousia - is so strongly emphasized
as practically to push out of sight, if not quite out of existence, these
remanent suggestions of derivation and subordination. It has been found
necessary, nevertheless, from time to time, vigorously to reassert the
principle of equalization, over against a tendency unduly to emphasize the
elements of subordinationism which still hold a place thus in the traditional
language in which the church states its doctrine of the Trinity. In particular,
it fell to Calvin, in the interests of the true Deity of Christ - the constant
motive of the whole body of Trinitarian thought - to reassert and make good the
attribute of self-existence (autotheotos) for the Son. Thus Calvin takes his
place, alongside of Tertullian, Athanasius and Augustine, as one of the chief
contributors to the exact and vital statement of the Christian doctrine of the
Triune God.
Text Scanned and
edited by Michael Bremmer