The Christian creed affirms that Deity consists of three "persons" which are perfectly distinct yet perfectly one; not three Gods, but one God; yet not one person but three; one being Father, the second Son, and the third Holy Spirit. Now, it is quite possible so to paraphrase the bare formula "Trinity in Unity" as to make it intelligible: you have only to say that "person" means in the strict Latin sense persona, a character or function, and that one Deity is "three persons" in the sense that he "plays three parts" or has "three character aspects." But such a rationalisation is not orthodox Christian doctrine; every intelligible compromise of the kind has been branded as antitrinitarian heresy; and the Trinitarian creeds continue to insist on the personality of the three "persons" in the normal sense of the term. The creed is in fact avowedly an affirmation of the unintelligible: the Christian is called upon to accept it as an incomprehensible proposition; and the orthodox Christian does so accept it, avowing that he "believes" the doctrine as being given by supernatural revelation. The more thoughtful believers, on challenge, will say that they are satisfied on reasonable grounds (1) of the supreme wisdom of the Scriptures in general, (2) of the spiritual genius of multitudes of the men and women who have accepted the dogma; or, if they be Roman Catholics, they may put it (3) that they are by historical study satisfied of the fulfilment of the Gospel promise of divine-indwelling to "the Church"; and that on that score they believe what the Church officially teaches.
You will readily see, I think, the rational answer to such avowals. In the first place, the assent given to the dogma is merely nominal: it is not belief; it is a make-believe. The proposition that three literal persons are literally one— that three separate Almighties are but one Almighty—is believed by nobody, let him say what he will. The "believing" Christian is either playing the part of a parrot or is spending his life in alternation between the two "heresies" of Tritheism and Sabellianism. And the final solution of this strange dispute is to be found in realising why men came to set up such an astonishing shibboleth, and to maintain it. Broadly speaking, it was in this wise. Long before Christianity, priesthoods found their advantage in grouping as husband and wife and child, or in some other relation, deities who had been separately worshipped; or in distinguishing among a multitude of deities sets who had long been reputed to be so related. The beginnings of the idea probably lie in the remotest ages of human culture, when Gods and Goddesses of Sun and Earth, River and Field, were figured in terms of human personalities and relationships. As a result of all that primeval guesswork, Triads were common in the Babylonian and Egyptian world before our era.
In the earliest Christian documents the Triad idea is not present; it arose, like most of the rites of the cult, by way of assimilation of convenient doctrines from other systems; men trained in Egyptian and Syrian mysticisms turning the formulas of these to the uses of the new system. We need not here ask whether they were "dishonest" or merely "confused." In our strict sense of the term they were both; they could not be "sincere" because their intellectual processes were so undisciplined, so lax, so incompetentOnce set up, however, the trinitarian formula became a stumbling-block for the more intelligent theologians; and many of these sought to rationalise it in some such fashion as I have above indicated. But to do this was to put in jeopardy one or other of the elements of the faith on which its prestige appeared to rest. If "the Son" were defined as a mere "phase" of the Deity, the gospel story in general and the doctrines of the divine sacrifice and the eucharist were resolved into mere avowed metaphors; the hold of the priesthood on the hopes and fears of the multitude would be gone; and with the faith would vanish the revenue. If, on the other hand, the separateness of "the Son" from the Father were alone insisted on, the monotheistic basis, emphasised in the Old Testament, would be upset, and Christianity would be only one school of polytheism competing with others. The insoluble dilemma was met by an unintelligible formula; the Church affirmed both sides of a contradiction; the religious habit sufficed to make the little-reasoning majority acquiesce; and there the dogma stands to-day, a shibboleth fit for savages, the intellectual scandal and demoralisation of the Christian system.
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