Whether the trinity be accepted as an article of faith or not, I suppose it will be admitted by its friends, as well as by its enemies, that it is intellectually unintelligible. We may believe it, or think we believe it, or try to believe it; but it is impossible to comprehend it, impossible to understand it, it contains so many apparently irreconcilable contradictions. As setting them forth simply and clearly, I wish to read to you a paragraph attributed—I have not looked it up to see on what authority — to Lord Bacon. It says that a Christian believer in the trinity "believes three to be one and one to be three; a father not to be older than his son; a son to be equal with his father; and one proceeding from both to be equal with both. He believes in three persons in one nature, and three natures in one person. He believes a virgin to be a mother of a son, and that very son of hers to be her Maker. He believes Him to have been shut up in a narrow room whom heaven and earth could not contain. He believes Him to have been born in time who was and is from everlasting. He believes Him to have been a weak child, carried in arms, who is the Almighty; and Him once to have died who only hath life and immortality in himself."
I read this, not as an attack on the trinity,—for that is not my purpose,— but I read it as setting forth the fact that it is intellectually unintelligible. Yet you are not to believe for a moment that the men who formulated this doctrine were unreasonable or irrational men. You are to believe that they were as earnest, as consecrated, as noble in endeavor and purpose, as desirous of the truth, as are we to-day. I do not wish, then, to attack the doctrine of the trinity. I wish to help you, if I can, since this is one of the great doctrines of Christendom, one that has had as much power in shaping the thought and life of man for the last fifteen hundred years as any other, to understand under what conditions it grew up, how and, so far as possible, why men came to adopt this as an article of their creed.
In order to do this, I shall trace its growth historically. In the first place, I shall show you that within the limits of the New Testament itself there was a gradual progress or development of thought concerning the person and office of Jesus. Then I shall indicate to you some of the historic and philosophical steps in the early Church, from the time that the canon of the New Testament closed until the time of the Council of Nicaea, when the doctrine of the trinity was authoritatively issued as an article of faith. Then I shall ask you to go back with me to trace some of the conditions of thought in the old world that led up to the time of Jesus, that prepared, so to speak, the philosophers and thinkers to find in the doctrine of the trinity the solution of what to them was a great practical problem of the religious life. This will not be in any sense, as you will see, an attack on the trinity or a defence of it. It will simply be a rational attempt to comprehend one of the most significant and important phases of the religious growth of Christianity. Because it seemed rational, seemed even necessary to the men of that day, it does not follow that it is rational or necessary now; for the very problem for which they found a solution in this doctrine has ceased to exist, as at the end of my discourse I shall show you.
In the first place, then, let us trace the gradual growth of thought concerning the nature and dignity of Jesus as manifested in the New Testament writings.
In order to have a clear conception of this, you need to bear in mind that, if you open the New Testament and begin with the Gospels and read through until you come to the Apocalypse, you are not following the chronological order: you are beginning at the wrong end. The books of the New Testament are not printed to-day in the order in which they were written. That, then, you may trace the growth of this doctrine, you must get clearly in mind an outline, at any rate, of this chronological order of the books of the New Testament. I need not go into this in detail: it will be enough for my purpose to say that the first books that were written were the few authentic letters of Paul, letters to the Thessalonians, Galatians, Corinthians, Romans, etc. Some which are called by the name of Paul were probably written by some of his followers or by some one in sympathy with him, not by his own hand. The Gospels in their main outlines and traditions came not very long after Paul's letters; but the mythical and legendary stories, the cycle of legends that surround the stories of the miraculous conception and the birth of Jesus, were much later than the rest, and the Gospel of John the last one of all. You will then get the chronological order if you start with Paul's Epistles, take the main tradition as illustrated by the first three Gospels, then some of the later Epistles, then the Gospel of John.
What do we find concerning the nature of Jesus, following this order? We find Jesus simply a man, the carpenter's son, Jesus of Nazareth. Curiously enough, the Gospels themselves as they stand to-day, though two of them begin with the story of the miraculous conception, naively let us gain a glimpse of the older idea; for we find Mary very much astonished when Jesus does anything remarkable or is reported to have accomplished some wonderful work. She ought not to be astonished at anything, if she is familiar with the supposed fact that he is miraculously conceived, the supernatural son of God. The brothers of Jesus will have none of him. They think he is insane, they do not believe in any remarkable stories about him. His village acquaintances know nothing remarkable about him. They say he is Jesus of Nazareth, the son of the carpenter of Galilee.
What next? There are traces of his being looked on as a messenger from God, a prophet coming on a divine mission, only that, nothing more. This leaves him simply a human being.
Jesus, in the third place, is treated as the Messiah that the Jews had been looking for for ages. They believed him to be one divinely commissioned to be the leader of his people, their deliverer. This still leaves him human; for a part of the Jews at any rate, though they believed that the Messiah was to be divinely sent, did not suppose he would be anything more than a man, a glorious king like David, but, after all, only a man.
Another step is taken in the writings of Paul. Paul not only teaches that Jesus was the Messiah, but that he is the divinely appointed head of a new order of humanity, the second Adam, the one who is to introduce a new dispensation and stand as its representative. So far as Paul's teaching goes, Jesus never becomes more than this. It is very curious, but there were times in the life of Paul when, if he had known anything about the miraculous conception, it would have been a mighty point in his hands. The Jews talked about the crucified Messiah, one who had been treated as a malefactor, as a stumbling-block; and the Greeks looked upon it as a great objection in a leader. Suppose Paul had been able to say Jesus was supernaturally born and came for just this purpose: he would have answered his objectors. Yet there is no trace in his writings of his knowing anything about the miraculous conception whatever.
At last Jesus is not only miraculously born, conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the virgin Mary, but he is the eternal Son of God. In the words that I read from the first chapter of the Gospel of John, which is the latest teaching concerning Jesus, he is the heaven-descended Logos, the eternal Word, the manifestation in time of the wisdom, the utterance of God, which was with him in the beginning, which was a partaker of his nature, and which in one sense might be called God.
I wish now, after this conclusion of the outline of the development of Jesus' character and office so far as the New Testament is concerned, to hint to you certain ideas and speculations of certain groups of thinkers and philosophers of the early Christian Church, and give you a few way-marks for your guidance.
We find traces in the New Testament of certain Gnostic speculations. There was a philosophical sect called the "Gnostics," or those who knew. They believed and taught that matter was naturally and essentially evil, and that God was pure spirit, separated by an almost impassable gulf from the world, dwelling somewhere in infinitude. They taught that he did not create the world, though he had something to do with it, through agents, messengers, just as a mighty monarch invisible to his subjects deals with them and rules them through the officials of his court, who carry out his orders. In order, then, to get God into connection with this world, they devised a doctrine that there were certain aeons, or emanations of the divine nature, constituting a sort of lower deity,— a sub-god, so to speak. While there were a good many of these, a chain of them reaching from this far-off infinite being to this earth, the lower one of this chain was the creator of the world. In this way they bridged the gulf between the infinite spirit and the material universe, which they regarded as essentially evil. The early Christians were tinctured with this doctrine. There were traces of it in the New Testament. But it was outgrown, and came to be condemned as a heresy.
There was a little sect called the "Docetics," meaning seemed, or appeared,— who said, because they wanted to make Jesus as great in his origin and nature as they could, that Christ, the Logos was one of those Gnostic aeons, a divine being who had simply assumed the appearance of man, not a real man of flesh and blood, in order to come as messenger of the divine, and to reveal God to the world. You will notice that certain passages in the New Testament are written as though against some opponent, saying that Jesus Christ actually came in the flesh. Wherever you find a verse like that, the writer is opposing the sect of the Docetics. It was a great stumbling-block, as I have said, to certain ones that the Messiah should have been crucified. So you will find these attempts at making Jesus a supernatural being, who had come into this world on purpose to suffer and be crucified, so that this was no derogation of his dignity. He was not conquered by his enemies, but voluntarily submitted for the purpose of delivering humanity from its sins.
About the year 150 A.d. there lived and wrote one of the most famous of the Fathers, Justin Martyr, or Justin, the Martyr. He was a Greek by birth, and a follower of the philosophy of Plato. He taught that this Logos, or supreme reason, or wisdom of God, was given off as a sort of emanation, and that it was this which was incarnated in Jesus. He held that there were two Gods, but taught vigorously and earnestly the subordination of Jesus to the Father. He would have been shocked and horrified even at the supposition that Jesus was supposed to be the equal of God. He does not say anything about the Holy Spirit except as an influence. Up to this time there was no dream of attributing anything like personality to the Holy Spirit.
About A.d. 169 there was Theophilus, a Greek convert, who first uses the word trias, triad, or trinity. The word "trinity" does not appear anywhere in the New Testament. His trinity is not the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is a mystical, poetical trinity, made up of God, God's word, and God's wisdom. There is no thought of making the two subordinate members of the trinity equal to the original one. They are only manifestations of it.
About A.d. 177 comes Irenaeus, a Greek of Asia Minor, who makes a distinction between the Son and the one only true God. He believed that the Logos dwelt in Jesus instead of an ordinary human soul.. That is, Jesus was a man, but having this divine word or wisdom for a soul instead of a human soul. I give you all these, that you may see the various speculations out of which at last the doctrine of the trinity was formulated.
Next came Tertullian, one of the most eminent and mighty of the Fathers, a Latin, who lived in Carthage about A.d. 192, who taught that the Logos, having existed from eternity with the Father, came down to earth and inhabited the person of Jesus, so that he was an eternal though subordinate being. But he did not say for an instant that the New Testament teaches the equality of Jesus. He takes those passages where Jesus says, "I and my Father are one," and interprets them just as I should to-day in connection with the passage immediately by it, where Jesus says that he is one with his disciples in the same manner that he is one with his Father, — that this only means oneness of purpose, affection, heart.
Clement came next, who lived in Alexandria about A.d. 215, a Greek; and he holds substantially the same opinions as Tertullian. He uses the word "trinity" once, speaking of the trinity of graces, faith, hope, and charity, with no reference to the nature of God or any supposed mystery connected with it.
About this time there came a spirit of reaction. They began to appreciate which way they were going, into what difficulties they would fall. There were certain ones who frankly faced the difficulty without shrinking. What was that difficulty? In this tendency to make Jesus equal with God, of the same nature, to make him God wearing a human body, some saw where it was leading them. It implied that the Almighty God of the universe suffered and was put to death on the cross. They were called the Patripassians,— those who believed that the Father himself suffered and was crucified. Some frankly accepted this, others fought against it. Among those who shrank from it and devoted his life to controverting it was one of the most famous of the Church Fathers, Origen, who lived in Alexandria, A.d. 230, a Greek. He fought against this tendency to make Jesus the equal of the Father; and he taught from the New Testament everywhere that, however he might have attained higher dignity* than man, he was still infinitely less than the supreme God. He quotes in illustration as confirming this the words, "My Father is greater than I."
Soon after this, in A.d. 255, there arose a great teacher in Ptolemais in Egypt, called Sabellius, whose followers have been called Sabellians from that day to this. He endeavored to reconcile the doctrine of the deity of Christ with the unity of God. How? Through a device of a modal trinity, a trinity of manifestation. There is one God, he said, who sometimes manifests himself as Father, sometimes as Son, sometimes as Spirit. God exists in one person, but in three relations, thus revealing himself to the universe.
Then at last, about A.d. 320, came the great conflict which lasted until the year 325, when at the Council of Nicaea it was settled what should be the orthodox doctrine concerning the person of Christ. The two giant combatants in this controversy were Arius and Athanasius. Arius taught that Jesus was the first-born, the first-created, made out of nothing, possibly of like substance with the Father, but not of the same substance with the Father; that he was created before the world was created, and so was the first-born of every creature. Against him was Athanasius, who held,— they had not yet arrived at any discussion about the personality of the Holy Spirit,— contrary to Arius, that Jesus, the Logos, was of the same substance with the Father, eternally of him, eternally begotten, existing forever and ever. Out of that discussion came those two words that have played so great a part in the ridicule of controversial theology. It is said that the feud turned on one little Greek letter, iota, because Arius held to the doctrine of homoi-ousios, and Athanasius held to the doctrine of homo-ousios, one meaning of similar substance, and the other of the same substance. Arius said Jesus is of like substance, Athanasius said he was of the same substance, with the Father. The whole Church rang with the battle-cries, and the warfare lasted for many years.
How was it settled at last? Constantine — who, however great a general and ruler he might have been, was not much of a Christian — called a great Council. He said he could not have the Church rent in this way by these factions, and they must settle it. The Council met in Nicaea, in Bithynia, in 325 A.d., and was made up of representative bishops and leaders from all over the empire, who came together to settle this question. It is hinted that one of Arius's followers had been in favor of Constantine's rival, so there were more or less political motives mixed up with it. Constantine himself was there in person, and one of his favorites presided; and I suppose never in this republic, in any political caucus or convention, was there any such strife, such attempts at intimidation, such quarrelling, such tyranny, such manipulations, such attempts to control the delegates, as was manifested in that Council of Nicasa. At last the party of Athanasius prevailed; and it was settled for all time, so far as the Catholic Church was concerned, the orthodox part of it, that Jesus was to be declared of the same substance with the Father, as his equal, eternally of him, almighty like him, to be worshipped like him.
Not a great while, and certain other additions were made to the doctrine at other councils. The Holy Spirit was added as a third person,— a trinity,— so that at last they could say the Father is Almighty, the Son is Almighty, and the Holy Spirit is Almighty. There are three Almighties, and yet there is only one Almighty. The Father is to be worshipped, the Son is to be worshipped, and the Holy Spirit is to be worshipped,— three persons to be worshipped, but only one God to be worshipped. The Father is to be prayed to, the Son is to be prayed to, and the Holy Spirit is to be prayed to,— three persons, but one God. This suggests to you the difficulties and some of the methods arrived at. It was the result of this desire to exalt and glorify the person of Jesus, the natural growth of his greatness and the honor paid to him, coupled with philosophical speculation and an attempt to solve a great problem.
Now, go back, and let me give you a little hint of some preceding thoughts and speculations older than the time of Jesus, so that you can discern how naturally this problem might afterward come up.
If you go to Egypt, you find not a trinity, but triads, as of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, father, mother, and the child. You find that the one God was worshipped under three different relations, so that practically it is a sort of trinitarian, or threefold, worship. You trace this in ancient Egypt.
Among the Hindus were Brahma, the creator, Vishnu, the preserver, and Siva, the destroyer. In Assyria you find substantially the same tendency to look at the one God whom they regarded as supreme under different relations. Among the Aryan peoples, the Hindus, Greeks, Romans, the Egyptians, there was this tendency; but you never find it among the Semitic peoples, the Hebrews or the Arabs.
But that which had more influence upon the immediate preparation of the mind of Christendom for trinitarian speculation was the doctrine and teaching of Plato. Plato was held in great reverence among the early Christians, and his philosophy played an important part in determining the lines of Christianity. After the death of Socrates, Plato went to Egypt. He talks about the one God as first, and then he personifies what he calls the Logos. He is the first to use the word in that sense. Logos means word, or discourse. You can see the distinction. It is God as he is himself and as he is uttered,— the manifestation of him. Plato, in his mystic speculation, talks about this Logos as though it were a second deity, and, in imitation of the Egyptians, he talks about three; but they are only attributes with Plato, a sort of personified attributes of God, God looked at under different relations. There was a tendency about this time among the Hebrews towards personification. In the Book of Proverbs there is a poetical personification of wisdom. She is represented as standing at the street corners, calling to the young men, and saying, "My ways are ways of pleasantness, and all my paths are peace." When you come to the time of the Wisdom of Solomon, one of the apocryphal books, written about one hundred and fifty years before Jesus, you find this wisdom has become a real being, and is spoken of as though it had become such. Meantime, the Old Testament had been translated into the Greek for the use of the Alexandrian Jews who spoke Greek and had lost the use of their own language. In this Septuagint the Hebrew for Word is translated Logos, so here you find a preparation for this personification of the word of God.
Now comes at last Philo, one of the most distinguished of ancient Hebrews, and one of Plato's followers. He lived in Alexandria, the centre of culture of the ancient world at that time, about twenty-five years before the birth of Jesus. As the result of the conquest of Alexander the Great, the West was flooded with hints and suggestions of Oriental learning and mysticism. Probably they had heard of the Hindu religion, possibly of the Buddhist, and this mysticism had now become a fashionable cultus. Philo had a great love and reverence for Plato. He was imbued with this mysticism; and he constructed a system in which he attempts to reconcile Plato and the Old Testament. So he uses Plato's phrase, the Logos, as meaning God manifested or revealed. So in Philo you find a duality,— God in himself, and God as he is manifest in the Logos. Then you find that sometimes he talks about this God who is in himself and of two ancient powers, one of which is might and one is wisdom. But yet in Philo there is always strict subordination of these two other members of the triad to the one infinite, the God who is incommunicable and not to be understood by human thought.
You see, then, that it is at this particular time in the history of the world, here in Alexandria among these Greek theologians, that there was precisely the condition of things under which a doctrine like this of the trinity would spring up as naturally as grass grows in May. It was simply this outcome of the mystic ideas from the Orient, the Platonic speculations, the Egyptian thought, and the exaltation of the person of Jesus and the attempt to reconcile this new dignity added to Jesus with the oneness of God. There was not a man of them all in that early day who would have borne for a moment the thought that God was other than one. And this curious speculation of theirs was an attempt to reconcile the dignity, the divinity, the deity, of the Holy Spirit and of Jesus with the oneness of God, which all of them held to as strenuously as would any modern Unitarian.
But why was there any need of such speculation at all? Let me see if I can make it clear. The old Hebrews had held to God as one, alone, isolated, separate from his works. It was God and the world, a God away from his world, ruling it by angels or messengers. This was the Semitic thought. On the other hand, the Aryan races, to which we with the European nations belong, have always been ready to deify men. There is nothing approaching the deification of men to be found on the part of any Semitic people. It was a horror to their thought. God was spirit, isolated, apart, as high above men as his heavens are above the earth. But the Aryans had no difficulty in deifying men; and the secret of their feeling probably lies right here,— they wished a God not far off, but near, close at hand.
The Semitic peoples, again, held to the essential evil of matter. The Aryans have been inclined to hold, as we do to-day, to the divinity of matter. Now, the problem that they were trying to solve was to keep God from being isolated from his world, and to keep early Christendom from worshipping something else than God. Though Arius was the most famous of ancient Unitarians,— not the kind at all that we are to day,— it was probably better for Christendom that he was defeated. Supposing Arianism had prevailed, what would it have meant but that for the last fifteen hundred years Christians would have been worshipping a being admitted to be less than God? It would have been idolatry. In other words, no matter if Jesus was older than the world, so long as he was a created being and less than divine, less than deity, it seemed intolerable to the early Church that they should worship a being like that. As they could not give up Jesus and they could not give up the worship of God, they must make him God and save God's unity in that way, and save the Church from idolatry at the same time. So these two things, consciously or unconsciously, inspired the great struggle in the early Church. It was the attempt on the part of the Church to escape idolatry, and an attempt on the part of the Church to keep God, the great, real, original God, here in his world and among men. Supposing Arianism had prevailed, the original God would have been somewhere off in the eternities, and we should only have had a delegate or sub-deity here among men. They wished to hold to the doctrine that the original, the eternal God is one God, that he is in and through his works and in and through humanity. This was what they were after,— an attempt to bridge this gulf that they had been taught to believe separated God from his humanity and from his world, and an attempt to escape the worship of the subordinate being. I take it that this was the purpose, more or less dimly conceived, which animated the orthodox party, or what came to be that party in that great struggle.
In conclusion, I need only to say the word that I suggested at the outset: that all this philosophic, unintelligible speculation is utterly uncalled for now, for the simple reason that there is no gulf to be bridged. It was only in the mistaken fancies of the ancient world that God was away off in the eternity, that matter was supposed to be evil and separate from him. Matter is not evil: matter is divine. Matter is simply one of the manifestations of the divine activity, the garment of the infinite God. So there is no gulf to be bridged. We do not need a trinity. We do not need any special manifestation of God within the sphere of humanity, in order to link him to man. He is linked to humanity, and he has always been. It is very curious to me to note how the world provides useless problems for itself, and then settles them in an irrational way.
It was objected against Newton's discovery of the law of gravity that it put the universe and the care of it into the power of law, and left God out of the question, as though a law were not a vital manifestation of God. So you find people frightened at Darwinism and the natural origin of things, as though here, again, God were left out of the question. What the natural origin of anything would be that leaves God out of the question I do not know. God has never been far from his creation. God is in the finest dust particle, in the lowest manifestation of life, in the lower orders of being, climbing and lifting; in the crude human being, leading, guiding, all the way up unto the present hour. God, the one, the eternal, always in the world, always in his humanity, closer to us than the air we breathe. So there needs no trinity to bring him down out of his heavens; for he is here, and he has always been here. There needs no device to get him into relation with his children; for he has always been in closer relation with them than they have been with each other. It only needs that we open our eyes to see, that we train our sensitiveness to feel, and we shall lift our little lives into the divine, because we are in the eternal presence of the eternal God.
