Article in The Christian Examiner, January 1856
What a dreary and repelling task it is to go over the New Testament, or the whole Bible, to hunt out words, phrases, and sentences that may constructively or inferentially be turned to the support of a doctrine which ought to lie patent on the page. It would seem as if Trinitarians had reconciled themselves to the condition, that the only consistent way in which Scripture could convey to us such an enigmatical and puzzling doctrine, was by a method which should engage the most tortuous, adroit, and mazy ingenuity of the human faculties in seeking for results that must partake of the character of the process for reaching them. Roman Catholic critics acknowledge manfully, as did Dr. Newman while he was yet an Oxford divine, that the Trinity is not a Bible doctrine, but a Church doctrine, and that our knowledge and recognition of it and its authority rest for us on the same basis as does the substitution of the Christian Sunday for the Jewish Sabbath. And if the method by which Trinitarians hunt through the Bible for intimations and implications of the doctrine of the Trinity be a repulsive one, not the less uninviting is the task of answering all such arguments by a similar process. Since the doctrine gained currency in the world, and found a positive statement in many creeds, the Scriptures have been translated into the vernacular languages of Christendom under the bias of a Trinitarian belief. The present Archbishop of Canterbury, who ought to be the highest of human authorities, speaks, in his discourse on Apostolic Preaching, of “the many passages of Scripture which have suffered by the general bias of the age in which our translation was made,” — the bias of Calvinism. Those who have argued for the Trinity, having started with a bias, helped by their ingenuity and guided by their fancy, have, with a vast deal of pains, gone through the whole Bible, trying to see how many intimations of this doctrine they could cull out. There has been an amazing amount of trifling exercised in this direction. Some who have ridiculed or censured the follies of Rabbinical and allegorical interpretation, or the puerilities of the Cabala, have rivalled these follies in their attempts to find hints of the Trinity in sentences whose writers evidently never dreamed of the doctrine. Thus the use of the Hebrew plural in the word (Elohim) for God, and the use of the plural pronoun when “God said, Let us make man in our own image,” modes of speech used to denote majesty or sovereignty, are urged in proof of a companionship in the Deity. Sentences are quoted asserting that no man hath seen or can see God, and are compared with other sentences which speak of manifestations of God to the patriarchs and others; and the conclusion is drawn, that the Jehovah of the Old Testament was the revealing Son, not the Father. Yet even then the chain of intended proofs breaks at one link, while another link is in the welding; for if a manifestation of one person in the Trinity was impossible, how could there be a manifestation of another person in it? Again, the assertion is quoted as from God, that he “will not give his glory to another,” and then an argument is raised to show that the honors of God are assigned to Christ; while the inference follows that Christ is God.
We have no heart for going through this unnatural, this offensive task of tracing the windings of this textual ingenuity, or of answering its characteristic results. The process has no natural limitations or rules, because it has no reasonable basis, no first grounds. It is all a forced work, and fancy will make more or less of it according as it is pursued by those who have more or less of fancy, — fancy, however, of a very inferior sort.
For we have to object once more, that the Scriptures bear a positive testimony against this doctrine of the Trinity, by insisting upon the absolute Unity of God. Trinitarians think that they recognize the force of these reiterated and emphatic assertions of Scripture by afterwards gathering up into one God those whom they have made three divine persons. But as the analysis was forced, the synthesis must be strained. As the ingenuity of the human mind could alone devise the triplicate distinction, the same ingenuity has to nullify its own work to construct the Unity. Trinitarians do indeed assure us that there is no incongruity, nothing inconceivable, in the essential substance of their doctrinal statement. But we must be judges as to that matter, certainly so far as our own minds are concerned. Our minds assure us that violence must be done to the most explicit statements of every page of Scripture, before it can be made to yield to us the doctrine of the Trinity.
We object, finally, to this doctrine, that we know its origin to have been, not in the Scriptures, but outside of them. It was the Greek Philosophy of Alexandria, and not the Hebrew or Christian Theology of Jerusalem, that gave birth to this doctrine. We can trace its fount, its spring, its incomings. There is no historical fact more fully supported than that of the addiction of the Church Fathers to the study of the Greek Philosophy; they loved it, they fondly pursued it, they were infected by it, their speculations were influenced by it, their Christian faith received intermixture from it. Dr. Caesar Morgan acknowledges this fact most candidly, though he pursues a critical examination of all the passages in Plato which are thought to contain references to an ante-Christian Trinity, for the sake of proving that the Fathers did not get the doctrine from the philosopher. But the argument which he assails does not yield to his assault upon it. We might as well dispute whether an ancient tragedy, whose catastrophe turns on Fate, were of Grecian or Jewish origin, as debate the issue whether a theosophical fiction concerning the Godhead, which involves the most acute subtilty of philosophy, sprang from the Abrahamic faith or from Hellenic Gnosticism. The history of the doctrine of the Trinity makes to us an evident display of a development, an amplification and steady augmentation, from a germ which was forced into an artificial growth. It was an evolved doctrine which was constantly seeking to define itself, which was never at rest, and which never has been at rest under any of the definitions which it has found for itself. A comparison of the three old creeds, the so-called Apostles', the Nicene, and the Athanasian, with a reference to their dates, will unmistakably reveal of what processes and elements the doctrine of the Trinity is the product.
We return now to that great doctrine of controverted theology, the Deity of Christ, to maintain which, as we have said, the doctrine of a Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Godhead is so strenuously asserted in Orthodox creeds. Very many Trinitarians have candidly acknowledged the force of one or all of the objections which have just been hinted at. They allow that the Trinitarian scheme is burdened with the most serious perplexities to the understanding, that it is not simply a mystery, like some of the other tenets of their faith, but a confounding and puzzling enigma, teasing their minds, rather than yielding them an instructive idea, straining their comprehension instead of enlightening it. And yet those who most candidly make this allowance insist, with their fellow-believers, upon the vital truth and importance of the doctrine of the Trinity as involving the essential doctrine of the Deity of Christ. This latter doctrine then presents itself to us as really the primary rudiment of a scheme of which, in other aspects, it claims to be only one of the conditions and consequences. A Trinity is insisted upon in order that it may include the Deity of Christ, and then the Deity of Christ is affirmed as an element of the Trinity. We do not err in saying that the doctrine now before us is charged with the double obligation of sustaining its own truth, and also that of the doctrine of the Trinity, by the positive authority of the Scriptures. Orthodoxy has a dogma on this point, but Unitarianism has no dogma, except in the quality of denying a dogma. Let the issue be fairly understood. The question is not whether the Scriptures do or do not assign to Jesus Christ an exalted and mysterious nature and range of being, which lifts him above the sphere of humanity. The question is not whether from what is revealed of the Saviour we can fashion a full and satisfactory theory, which will make him to us a perfectly intelligible and well-defined being, holding a fixed place on the scale between man and God. But the question is this: Do all the offices and functions and honors assigned to Jesus Christ exhibit him as undistinguishable from God in time and essence and underived existence, and in self-centred, inherent qualities? Is he, or is he not, presented to us as a fractional part of the Godhead, – the object, not the medium, of prayer, — the source, not the agent, of redemption, — the substitute, not the representative, of Jehovah, – as the occupant of heaven's high throne, not as seated “by the right hand” of the Supreme? We are not to be driven, as to a sole alternative, to the affirming that Christ was a man, because he was not God, nor to the holding ourselves bound to show what he was less than God, nor yet to the assigning him a sphere of his own distinct at every point from that of Deity, because we say that the New Testament presents him as receiving everything from the Father. What that everything includes, it would be presumptuous in us to define; but it is not presumptuous in us to say that it excludes underived prerogatives. There is indeed large room for choice amid the range of speculative opinions which Unitarianism has covered on this point, in seeking to find a substitute for the Trinitarian opinion. The office which we have assigned to ourselves in this review of the substantial issues of a protracted controversy, does not require an elaborate and exhaustive statement of Unitarian views on this point. We have but to present the antagonistic positions of the parties in this controversy.
If there are two connected truths taught with emphatic and reiterated distinctness in the New Testament, — or rather we should say, if there are two such truths taken for granted there, — they are that of the sole and simple unity of God the Father, and that of the derived and dependent relation to him of Jesus Christ. In order to secure distinctness and clearness of thought upon Scripture doctrine, we must subordinate the Son to the Father, and having done this to take our first step in Christian faith, we cannot complete our progress in that faith by confounding the Son with the Father. We must distinguish between that being who appeared in Judaea as a messenger from God, and the God whose messenger he was. ~C.E.E.
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