The doctrine of the Trinity has indeed been so sublimated and refined, and so reduced in the rigidity of its old technical terms, that it may now be said to offer itself in some quite inoffensive and unobjectionable shapes to that large number of persons who feel bound to accept it in some shape, and yet are aware that in full mental honesty they can accept it only in the least dogmatic and most accommodated shape. Though for our own part we can connect no intelligible idea with such an assertion as Dr. Bushnell makes, for example, when he says that God has been "eternally threeing himself," we can recognize the fact that genius and fancy and irrepressible restlessness of mind are determined to festoon and array a dogma whose angular sharpness and whose barrenness of look would offend. If we could only find any occasion for believing a Trinity in the Godhead, in any form of the dogma, Archbishop Whately might largely help us to make the very little effort which is all that is left as essential. In some of the modern shapings of the doctrine, we confess that there is no reason for rejecting it which will weigh against the slightest good reason for receiving it. But that slightest reason for receiving it is the very thing which fails us: it is wholly lacking.
We have said that the chief reason for asserting the doctrine of the Trinity is that it may include or cover the doctrine of the Deity of Christ. Frankly, and with general consent, is this admission yielded by Orthodox writers. Professor Stuart says: "All difficulties in respect to the doctrine of the Trinity are essentially connected with proving or disproving the divinity [he means the Deity] of Christ." "When this [the Deity of Christ] is admitted or rejected, no possible objection can be felt to admitting or rejecting the doctrine of the Trinity." The plain inference from such statements evidently is, that the Deity of a third personality in the Godhead (the Holy Spirit) is affirmed and insisted upon, in order to secure and make good the Deity of a second personality in the Godhead. The Holy Spirit is admitted to the prerogative of a distinct personality in order to facilitate that distribution of the essence of the Godhead which will assign to Jesus Christ the rank of the Supreme. And this device is adopted, because into some of the texts which are needed inferentially to confirm the assumption that Christ is God, the Holy Spirit enters by equally distinct mention.
It is even so. There is no other reason for asserting the separate personality of the Holy Spirit, except as that will bear upon the claim for Christ of the underived and self-subsisting prerogative of Deity. The weakest point in all the arguments in support or defence of Trinitarianism, is that which attempts to prove from Scripture the personality of the Holy Spirit. Yet weak as this point in such arguments always is, laboring at the very start, made essential by an indirect instead of a direct and independent necessity, and requiring a most tortuous and unsatisfactory dealing with the phraseology of Scripture, it is the very point on which Orthodox divines spend the least of their strength, as if conscious of their weakness. The personality of the Spirit is expected to come in by indulgent construction after the divisibility of the Godhead has been affirmed for the sake of sharing its attributes between Christ and the Father. So obvious is it to all minds not prejudiced by a dogma, that the term Holy Spirit, wherever it is used in the Bible, may always have its whole meaning recognized when it is regarded as expressing the agency or influence of God's spiritual operations. We might as well attempt to claim a distinct personality for the Wisdom of God, or the Power of God, or the Fear of God, or the Love of God, as to claim it for the Spirit of God. God is himself a Spirit; that is the very loftiest and fullest title by which the Saviour made him an object of our faith. All the agency of God is spiritual, though for convenience of distinction we generally withdraw that epithet from uses relating to God's agency in the physical world, and confine it to the methods of his operation on his intelligent creation. The advocate of Trinitarianism thinks that he visits upon us a perfectly overwhelming argument, when he gathers texts from the Bible to prove that Divine attributes of Creation, Omnipresence, Wisdom, Might, and operative energy are assigned to the Spirit. It would be strange if they were not so assigned. We are amazed that any one should offer these manifest inferences of simple truth, the conditions which constitute the great truth that "God is a Spirit," in proof of the astounding dogma that one third part of the Godhead is Spirit. God is himself a Spirit. Now if we distinguish the Spirit as a divided personality in the Godhead, what crowning attribute have we left for the Father? The device would seem to us puerile, if it did not appear monstrous, which would distinguish, not the agency, but the nature of God by a division, or a duplication, of his essence into God the Father as one person, and God the Spirit as another person. How can a reader of Scripture fail to recognize the fact that the Spirit of God is itself but one of many terms used for expressing the operating, penetrating, and sanctifying energy and influence of the Supreme Being? If Scripture, in deference to the straits of our limited power of intellectual conception, gives us several terms for defining the methods and the attributes of the One Supreme, shall we seize upon them, and, instead of using them for the purpose for which they are given, turn them back upon the Unity of the Godhead, to confound it with a plurality?
It is at this point, of course, that one who has been educated under this Trinitarian dogma, and is seeking to test its truth, or one who is brought into debate with a professed believer in it, will begin to raise the question whether the Scriptures teach, or the Christian scheme includes, any doctrine of a Trinity of co-equal and co-eternal Persons in the One God. Though the doctrine is advanced chiefly as a help towards the proof of another doctrine of the Deity of Christ, we object to the doctrine, in the first place, on grounds wholly distinct from its relation to that article of the Trinitarian faith. We object, in general, to the doctrine of the Trinity, that it is an invention of the human mind, for which the Scriptures afford no warrant; and that its prominent effect is to introduce into the system of truths taught in the Scriptures an extraneous, artificial, and perplexing dogma, wholly inconsistent with, utterly unlike to, the acknowledged and accepted doctrines of Scripture. We do not object, as is often charged upon us, that the doctrine involves a mystery. On the contrary, we object that the doctrine when urged upon us as a mystery misuses and perverts the word mystery, and avails itself of the acknowledged and allowed credibility of what the word mystery properly signifies, to propose to us something quite unlike a mystery; namely, a statement that is absurd, so far as it is intelligible, and that is inconsistent in the very terms which it brings together for making its proposition. We accept all such religious truths as can fairly be covered by the word mystery. We live religiously upon such truths; they are the nutriment of our spirits,—of infinitely larger account to us than anything we can learn or understand. We are made familiar, by every moment's exercise of close thought, with the necessity of accepting mysteries, and we know very well what a sensation and sentiment they send down into the innermost chambers of our being. But we are conscious of feeling quite a different sensation and sentiment when this doctrine of the Trinity is proposed to us under the covert of a mystery. Quite another quality in it than that of its mysterious character at once suggests itself to us. Its utter absurdity, its attempt to say something which it fails to say intelligibly, simply because it cannot say it truly, is the first painful consciousness attaching to the doctrine. If the doctrine be true, then it is the only doctrine of the Gospel which causes the same sort of puzzling, confounding, bewildering effect on the mind that seeks to entertain it. It sets us into the frame into which we fall when any one proposes to us an enigma, or a conundrum. It lays at the very threshold of the Christian faith an obstacle at which we stumble. It requires of us a summoning of resources, or a concession, a yielding up, of our natural desire for intelligent apprehension, as if to be addressed by some profound truth, when in fact we are only bewildered. The state of mind into which we should be driven by an attempt to accept the doctrine of the Trinity as fundamental to the Gospel, would be of no service to us in dealing with the real doctrines of the Gospel. The doctrine is not homogeneous with the contents of revelation; it is unevangelical and anti-evangelical in all its characteristic elements. Just where we need the clearest exercise of our thoughts, and wish to accommodate our ideas to our theme, and to engage the orderly action of all our faculties, we are beclouded and staggered, and thrown into a maze. Has not our whole theology been made to suffer, by thus taking its start from a metaphysical subtilty which confuses the mind, instead of from one august truth which lifts and solemnizes the spirit?
How much of sublime and penetrating power did the Hebrew faith carry with it in the announcement, "Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is One Lord!"
Would we as Christians sacrifice anything of this majestic utterance by substituting for it, "Hear, O Christian, the Lord thy God is one God in a Trinity of Persons"? The Trinitarian, however, assures us that his belief of a triplicate personality in the Godhead does not impair his belief in the Divine Unity. How inoperative then must be his Trinitarian belief, unless, as is probably the case, the idea which he has in his mind fails to find expression in any phraseology that can give a verbal announcement of the doctrine of the Trinity. The purest attraction, the most spiritual warrant of revealed religion, is the oneness of God. It is by that distinction that revealed religion stands loftily and simply elevated above all earth-born religions. Yet this high distinction is at once impaired, and in some measure neutralized, by a doctrine of tri-personality in unity. Long use has accustomed us to the assertion of this doctrine in words, but none the less is it chargeable with an influence prejudicial to the best exercise of our faculties upon the great truths of Gospel revelation. A question for which this age is fully ready, instructed as it has been by so much experience in the past, is this, and it is a question which earnestly addresses itself to earnest persons in all communions:—Cannot full justice be done to the Christian scheme, and to the orderly connection of every one of its dependent truths, without any use of this doctrine of the Trinity? Do we need it? Can we not dispense with it, and yet be Christian believers?
Having thus begun the statement of our objections to this scholastic doctrine of the Trinity, by impugning it as unintelligible and confounding, not enlightening or solemnizing, we are led on through a series of valid and strengthening reasons, which amount, in our own mind, to an unanswerable refutation of it.
Though Christians have insisted upon the fundamental character of this doctrine, they find it utterly impossible to state it in the language of Scripture. A human formula is necessarily the vehicle for its expression. Though the Scriptures, as we often affirm, have a peculiar directness and simplicity of phrase, and excel all other forms of literature in the conciseness and vigor with which they express truths and precepts, they nevertheless fail to furnish one single sentence which can be used in a creed to announce the Trinity. Yes, this so-called primary and all-essential article of the Christian faith, — "the foundation of all our communion with God," — cannot be uttered in any Divine oracle, but must look to uninspired men for an expression. No announcement of it can be quoted from the lips of prophet or apostle, or from Him who spake as never man spake. A piece-meal selection of the elements which are to be wrought up into the doctrine must be gathered from isolated sentences and phrases of the Bible, and even then one of the most familiar and well-defined words of our language — the word person, which is already appropriated past changing to mark the separate individuality of one complete being — must be perverted to a wholly new use, while they who thus pervert it profess to dislike it, and aver that it wholly fails to convey the idea that is in their minds. Are they sure that there is any real, well-developed idea in their minds, seeing that they cannot express it without perverting language, and even then are forced to confess that they fail to express it. Are they sure, too, that the idea which they wish to express is one received from the Scriptures? Does Scripture bid us believe, as a fundamental, a doctrine which Scripture itself does not announce in its own "form of sound words"?
Again, a fundamental doctrine ought to be emphatically announced and constantly reiterated. Now all candid persons must admit that no stress, no prominence, no directness or earnestness of statement, is made of this doctrine in the Scriptures corresponding to the emphatic and pre-eminent place assigned to it in all Orthodox creeds. Considering too with what strenuous positiveness and reiteration the Unity of God is there asserted, ought there not to have been a balancing of this assertion by as emphatic a proclamation of the Trinity? This triplicity of constitution of the Godhead was certainly a new doctrine to the world. It was new to the Jews. It demanded, therefore, at least one announcement from each Apostle, and each Evangelist, in terms as clear and strong as the resources and capacities of human language will admit. What is most remarkable under this head of objection is the fact, that, on the occasions upon which we should have looked for the most distinct statement of the doctrine, it was held back. The baptismal formula, which, unlike as it is to the formula of the creed, does gather together the three component elements of the Trinity, stops far short of the assertion that three personalities are mentioned, — and that such three make up the one God of the Gospel. The most natural and unprejudiced construction of that baptismal formula views it as announcing a Gospel message from God the Father, through Christ his beloved Son, attested by spiritual evidences from God's Holy Spirit . What an opportunity was there here for the statement — what an imperative demand was there for the statement, if fundamentally true, and of paramount importance — of the full doctrine of the Trinity! But it is not here! After the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension of Jesus, after the miraculous illumination of the Apostles on the Feast of Pentecost, one signal event occurred. The religion which, with its author, the Jewish rulers supposed had been committed to a hopeless tomb, was resuscitated. Instead of having heard the last of it, the world was now to begin to listen to a new and unceasing proclamation of it . The opportunity for making its first re-announcement came to Peter after an astounding manifestation of Divine power. And what an opportunity there was, what a pressing and emergent necessity and demand there was, for proclaiming the doctrine which Christians now make fundamental in their creed! We should look and listen to hear Peter announcing to the Jewish rulers that in the person of Jesus Christ they had rejected and condemned one who shared the underived attributes of their own Jehovah. But no! What says he? This: —"Ye men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of God among you by miracles and wonders and signs, which God did by him in the midst of you, as ye yourselves also know; him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain: whom God hath raised up." (Acts ii. 22-24.) And on how many other occasions through Judaea, Asia Minor, and at Rome, on the first promulgation of our faith, was it incumbent on its preachers to have put foremost its founation doctrine! But if the Trinity be such a doctrine, they did not make one single statement of it which will serve the use of the creed. And now what can be offered in frankness, and in the thorough simplicity and ingenuousness of true candor, to meet the force of this objection?
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