Part 4 — Chapter II. Doctrine Of The Trinity. (continued 2)

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(a) In connection with Christians; (b) in connection with Christ; (c) in connection with the Father and the Son. If the Father and the Son are persons, the Spirit must be a person also.

(a) Acts 15:28—“it seemed good to the Holy Spirit, and to us.” (b) John 16:14—“He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; cf. 17:4—“I glorified thee on the earth.” (c) Mat. 28:29—“baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”; 2 Cor. 13:14—“the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all”; Jude 21—“praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 1 Pet. 1:1, 2—“elect ... according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.” Yet it is noticeable in all these passages that there is no obtrusion of the Holy Spirit's personality, as if he desired to draw attention to himself. The Holy Spirit shows, not himself, but Christ. Like John the Baptist, he is a mere voice, and so is an example to Christian preachers, who are themselves “made ... sufficient as ministers ... of the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:6). His leading is therefore often unperceived; he so joins himself to us that we infer his presence only from the new and holy exercises of our own minds; he continues to work in us even when his presence is ignored and his purity is outraged by our sins.

C. He performs acts proper to personality.

That which searches, knows, speaks, testifies, reveals, convinces, commands, strives, moves, helps, guides, creates, recreates, sanctifies, inspires, makes intercession, orders the affairs of the church, performs miracles, raises the dead—cannot be a mere power, influence, efflux, or attribute of God, but must be a person.

Gen. 1:2, marg.—“the Spirit of God was brooding upon the face of the waters”; 6:3—“My Spirit shalt not strive with man for ever”; Luke 12:12—“the Holy Spirit shall teach you in that very hour what ye ought to say”; John 3:8—“born of the Spirit”—here Bengel translates: “the Spirit breathes where he wills, and thou hearest his voice”—see also Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 166; 16:8—“convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment”; Acts 2:4—“the Spirit gave them utterance”; 8:29—“the Spirit said unto Philip, Go near”; 10:19, 20—“the Spirit said unto him [Peter], Behold, three men seek thee.... go with them ... for I have sent them”; 13:2—“the Holy Spirit said, Separate me Barnabas and Saul”; 16:6, 7—“forbidden of the Holy Spirit ... Spirit of Jesus suffered them not”; Rom. 8:11—“give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit”; 26—“the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity ... maketh intercession for us”; 15:19—“in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Holy Spirit”; 1 Cor. 2:10, 11—“the Spirit searcheth all things.... things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God”; 12:8-11—distributes spiritual gifts “to each one severally even as he will”—here Meyer calls attention to the words “as he will,” as proving the personality of the Spirit; 2 Pet. 1:21—“men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit”; 1 Pet. 1:2—“sanctification of the Spirit.” How can a person be given in various measures? We answer, by being permitted to work in our behalf with various degrees of power. Dorner: “To be power does not belong to the impersonal.”

D. He is affected as a person by the acts of others.

That which can be resisted, grieved, vexed, blasphemed, must be a person; for only a person can perceive insult and be offended. The blasphemy against the Holy Ghost cannot be merely blasphemy against a power or attribute of God, since in that case blasphemy against God would be a less crime than blasphemy against his power. That against which the unpardonable sin can be committed must be a person.

Is. 63:10—“they rebelled and grieved his holy Spirit”; Mat. 12:31—“Every sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men; but the blasphemy against the Spirit shall not be forgiven”; Acts 5:3, 4, 9—“lie to the Holy Ghost ... thou hast not lied unto men but unto God.... agreed together to try the Spirit of the Lord”; 7:51—“ye do always resist the Holy Spirit”; Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God.” Satan cannot be “grieved.”Selfishness can be angered, but only love can be grieved. Blaspheming the Holy Spirit is like blaspheming one's own mother. The passages just quoted show the Spirit's possession of an emotional nature. Hence we read of “the love of the Spirit” (Rom. 15:30). The unutterable sighings of the Christian in intercessory prayer (Rom. 8:26, 27) reveal the mind of the Spirit, and show the infinite depths of feeling which are awakened in God's [pg 325]heart by the sins and needs of men. These deep desires and emotions which are only partially communicated to us, and which only God can understand, are conclusive proof that the Holy Spirit is a person. They are only the overflow into us of the infinite fountain of divine love to which the Holy Spirit unites us.

As Christ in the garden “began to be sorrowful and sore troubled” (Mat. 26:37), so the Holy Spirit is sorrowful and sore troubled at the ignoring, despising, resisting of his work, on the part of those whom he is trying to rescue from sin and to lead out into the freedom and joy of the Christian life. Luthardt, in S. S. Times, May 26, 1888—“Every sin can be forgiven—even the sin against the Son of man—except the sin against the Holy Spirit. The sin against the Son of man can be forgiven because he can be misconceived. For he did not appear as that which he really was. Essence and appearance, truth and reality, contradicted each other.” Hence Jesus could pray: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). The office of the Holy Spirit, however, is to show to men the nature of their conduct, and to sin against him is to sin against light and without excuse. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 297-313. Salmond, in Expositor's Greek Testament, on Eph. 4:30—“What love is in us points truly, though tremulously, to what love is in God. But in us love, in proportion as it is true and sovereign, has both its wrath-side and its grief-side; and so must it be with God, however difficult for us to think it out.”

E. He manifests himself in visible form as distinct from the Father and the Son, yet in direct connection with personal acts performed by them.

Mat. 3:16, 17—“Jesus, when he was baptized, went up straightway from the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him; and lo, a voice out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased”; Luke 3:21, 22—“Jesus also having been baptized, and praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended in a bodily form, as a dove, upon him, and a voice came out of heaven, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.” Here are the prayer of Jesus, the approving voice of the Father, and the Holy Spirit descending in visible form to anoint the Son of God for his work. “I ad Jordanem, et videbis Trinitatem.”

F. This ascription to the Spirit of a personal subsistence distinct from that of the Father and of the Son cannot be explained as personification; for:

(a) This would be to interpret sober prose by the canons of poetry. Such sustained personification is contrary to the genius of even Hebrew poetry, in which Wisdom itself is most naturally interpreted as designating a personal existence. (b) Such an interpretation would render a multitude of passages either tautological, meaningless, or absurd,—as can be easily seen by substituting for the name Holy Spirit the terms which are wrongly held to be its equivalents; such as the power, or influence, or efflux, or attribute of God. (c) It is contradicted, moreover, by all those passages in which the Holy Spirit is distinguished from his own gifts.

(a) The Bible is not primarily a book of poetry, although there is poetry in it. It is more properly a book of history and law. Even if the methods of allegory were used by the Psalmists and the Prophets, we should not expect them largely to characterize the Gospels and Epistles; 1 Cor. 13:4—“Love suffereth long, and is kind”—is a rare instance in which Paul's style takes on the form of poetry. Yet it is the Gospels and Epistles which most constantly represent the Holy Spirit as a person. (b) Acts 10:38—“God anointed him [Jesus] with the Holy Spirit and with power” = anointed him with power and with power? Rom. 15:13—“abound in hope, in the power of the Holy Spirit” = in the power of the power of God? 19—“in the power of signs and wonders, in the power of the Holy Spirit” = in the power of the power of God? 1 Cor. 2:4—“demonstration of the Spirit and of power” = demonstration of power and of power? (c) Luke 1:35—“the Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee”; 4:14—“Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee”; 1 Cor. 12:4, 8, 11—after mention of the gifts of the Spirit, such as wisdom, knowledge, faith, healings, miracles, prophecy, discerning of spirits, tongues, interpretation of tongues, all these are traced to the Spirit who bestows them: “all these worketh the one and the same Spirit, dividing to each one severally even as he will.”Here is not only giving, but giving discreetly, in the exercise of an independent will such as belongs only to a person. Rom. 8:26—“the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us”—must be interpreted, if the Holy Spirit is not a person distinct from the Father, as meaning that the Holy Spirit intercedes with himself.

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“The personality of the Holy Spirit was virtually rejected by the Arians, as it has since been by Schleiermacher, and it has been positively denied by the Socinians”(E. G. Robinson). Gould, Bib. Theol. N. T., 83, 96—“The Twelve represent the Spirit as sent by the Son, who has been exalted that he may send this new power out of the heavens. Paul represents the Spirit as bringing to us the Christ. In the Spirit Christ dwells in us. The Spirit is the historic Jesus translated into terms of universal Spirit. Through the Spirit we are in Christ and Christ in us. The divine Indweller is to Paul alternately Christ and the Spirit. The Spirit is the divine principle incarnate in Jesus and explaining his preëxistence (2 Cor. 3:17, 18). Jesus was an incarnation of the Spirit of God.”

This seeming identification of the Spirit with Christ is to be explained upon the ground that the divine essence is common to both and permits the Father to dwell in and to work through the Son, and the Son to dwell in and to work through the Spirit. It should not blind us to the equally patent Scriptural fact that there are personal relations between Christ and the Holy Spirit, and work done by the latter in which Christ is the object and not the subject; John 16:14—“He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you.” The Holy Spirit is not some thing, but some one; not αὐτό, but Αὐτός; Christ's alter ego, or other self. We should therefore make vivid our belief in the personality of Christ and of the Holy Spirit by addressing each of them frequently in the prayers we offer and in such hymns as “Jesus, lover of my soul,” and “Come, Holy Spirit, heavenly Dove!” On the personality of the Holy Spirit, see John Owen, in Works, 3:64-92; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:341-350.

III. This Tripersonality of the Divine Nature is not merely economic and temporal, but is immanent and eternal.

1. Scripture proof that these distinctions of personality are eternal.

We prove this (a) from those passages which speak of the existence of the Word from eternity with the Father; (b) from passages asserting or implying Christ's preëxistence; (c) from passages implying intercourse between the Father and the Son before the foundation of the world; (d) from passages asserting the creation of the world by Christ; (e) from passages asserting or implying the eternity of the Holy Spirit.

(a) John 1:1, 2—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”; cf. Gen. 1:1—“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; Phil. 2:6—“existing in the form of God ... on an equality with God.” (b) John 8:58—“before Abraham was born, I am”; 1:18—“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” (R. V.); Col. 1:15-17—“firstborn of all creation” or “before every creature ... he is before all things.” In these passages “am” and “is” indicate an eternal fact; the present tense expresses permanent being. Rev. 22:13, 14—“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (c) John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”; 24—“Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.” (d) John 1:3—“All things were made through him”; 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”; Col. 1:16—“all things have been created through him and unto him”; Heb. 1:2—“through whom also he made the worlds”; 10—“Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hands.”(e) Gen. 1:2—“the Spirit of God was brooding”—existed therefore before creation; Ps. 33:6—“by the word of Jehovah were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath [Spirit] of his mouth”; Heb. 9:14—“through the eternal Spirit.”

With these passages before us, we must dissent from the statement of Dr. E. G. Robinson: “About the ontologic Trinity we know absolutely nothing. The Trinity we can contemplate is simply a revealed one, one of economic manifestations. We may supposethat the ontologic underlies the economic.” Scripture compels us, in our judgment, to go further than this, and to maintain that there are personal relations between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit independently of creation and of time; in other words we maintain that Scripture reveals to us a social Trinity and an intercourse of love apart from and before the existence of the universe. Love before time implies distinctions of personality before time. There are three eternal consciousnesses and three eternal wills in the divine nature. We here state only the fact,—the explanation of it, and its reconciliation with the fundamental unity of God is treated in our next section. We now proceed to show that the two varying systems which ignore this tripersonality are unscriptural and at the same time exposed to philosophical objection.

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2. Errors refuted by the foregoing passages.

A. The Sabellian.

Sabellius (of Ptolemais in Pentapolis, 250) held that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are mere developments or revelations to creatures, in time, of the otherwise concealed Godhead—developments which, since creatures will always exist, are not transitory, but which at the same time are not eternal a parte ante. God as united to the creation is Father; God as united to Jesus Christ is Son; God as united to the church is Holy Spirit. The Trinity of Sabellius is therefore an economic and not an immanent Trinity—a Trinity of forms or manifestations, but not a necessary and eternal Trinity in the divine nature.

Some have interpreted Sabellius as denying that the Trinity is eternal a parte post, as well as a parte ante, and as holding that, when the purpose of these temporary manifestations is accomplished, the Triad is resolved into the Monad. This view easily merges in another, which makes the persons of the Trinity mere names for the ever shifting phases of the divine activity.

The best statement of the Sabellian doctrine, according to the interpretation first mentioned, is that of Schleiermacher, translated with comments by Moses Stuart, in Biblical Repository, 6:1-16. The one unchanging God is differently reflected from the world on account of the world's different receptivities. Praxeas of Rome (200) Noetus of Smyrna (230), and Beryl of Arabia (250) advocated substantially the same views. They were called Monarchians (μόνη ἀρχή), because they believed not in the Triad, but only in the Monad. They were called Patripassians, because they held that, as Christ is only God in human form, and this God suffers, therefore the Father suffers. Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, xlii, suggests a connection between Sabellianism and Emanationism. See this Compendium, on Theories which oppose Creation.

A view similar to that of Sabellius was held by Horace Bushnell, in his God in Christ, 113-115, 130 sq., 172-175, and Christ in Theology, 119, 120—“Father, Son and Holy Spirit, being incidental to the revelation of God, may be and probably are from eternity to eternity, inasmuch as God may have revealed himself from eternity, and certainly will reveal himself so long as there are minds to know him. It may be, in fact, the nature of God to reveal himself, as truly as it is of the sun to shine or of living mind to think.”He does not deny the immanent Trinity, but simply says we know nothing about it. Yet a Trinity of Persons in the divine essence itself he called plain tritheism. He prefers “instrumental Trinity” to “modal Trinity” as a designation of his doctrine. The difference between Bushnell on the one hand, and Sabellius and Schleiermacher on the other, seems then to be the following: Sabellius and Schleiermacher hold that the One becomes three in the process of revelation, and the three are only media or modes of revelation. Father, Son, and Spirit are mere names applied to these modes of the divine action, there being no internal distinctions in the divine nature. This is modalism, or a modal Trinity. Bushnell stands by the Trinity of revelation alone, and protests against any constructive reasonings with regard to the immanent Trinity. Yet in his later writings he reverts to Athanasius and speaks of God as eternally “threeing himself”; see Fisher, Edwards on the Trinity, 73.

Lyman Abbott, in The Outlook, proposes as illustration of the Trinity, 1. the artist working on his pictures; 2. the same man teaching pupils how to paint; 3. the same man entertaining his friends at home. He has not taken on these types of conduct. They are not masks (personæ), nor offices, which he takes up and lays down. There is a threefold nature in him: he is artist, teacher, friend. God is complex, and not simple. I do not know him, till I know him in all these relations. Yet it is evident that Dr. Abbott's view provides no basis for love or for society within the divine nature. The three persons are but three successive aspects or activities of the one God. General Grant, when in office, was but one person, even though he was a father, a President, and a commander in chief of the army and navy of the United States.

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It is evident that this theory, in whatever form it may be held, is far from satisfying the demands of Scripture. Scripture speaks of the second person of the Trinity as existing and acting before the birth of Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit as existing and acting before the formation of the church. Both have a personal existence, eternal in the past as well as in the future—which this theory expressly denies.

A revelation that is not a self-revelation of God is not honest. Stuart: Since God is revealed as three, he must be essentially or immanently three, back of revelation; else the revelation would not be true. Dorner: A Trinity of revelation is a misrepresentation, if there is not behind it a Trinity of nature. Twesten properly arrives at the threeness by considering, not so much what is involved in the revelation of God to us, as what is involved in the revelation of God to himself. The unscripturalness of the Sabellian doctrine is plain, if we remember that upon this view the Three cannot exist at once: when the Father says “Thou art my beloved Son” (Luke 3:22), he is simply speaking to himself; when Christ sends the Holy Spirit, he only sends himself. John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”—“sets aside the false notion that the Word become personal first at the time of creation, or at the incarnation” (Westcott, Bib. Com. in loco).

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 50, 51—“Sabellius claimed that the Unity became a Trinity by expansion. Fatherhood began with the world. God is not eternally Father, nor does he love eternally. We have only an impersonal, unintelligible God, who has played upon us and confused our understanding by showing himself to us under three disguises. Before creation there is no Fatherhood, even in germ.”

According to Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 2:269, Origen held that the Godhead might be represented by three concentric circles; the widest, embracing the whole being, is that of the Father; the next, that of the Son, which extends to the rational creation; and the narrowest is that of the Spirit, who rules in the holy men of the church. King, Reconstruction of Theology, 192, 194—“To affirm social relations in the Godhead is to assert absolute Tritheism.... Unitarianism emphasizes the humanity of Christ, to preserve the unity of God; the true view emphasizes the divinity of Christ, to preserve the unity.”

L. L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 141, 287, says that New England Trinitarianism is characterized by three things: 1. Sabellian Patripassianism; Christ is all the Father there is, and the Holy Spirit is Christ's continued life; 2. Consubstantiality, or community of essence, of God and man; unlike the essential difference between the created and the uncreated which Platonic dualism maintained, this theory turns morallikeness into essential likeness; 3. Philosophical monism, matter itself being but an evolution of Spirit.... In the next form of the scientific doctrine of evolution, the divineness of man becomes a vital truth, and out of it arises a Christology that removes Jesus of Nazareth indeed out of the order of absolute Deity, but at the same time exalts him to a place of moral eminence that is secure and supreme.

Against this danger of regarding Christ as a merely economic and temporary manifestation of God we can guard only by maintaining the Scriptural doctrine of an immanent Trinity. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 86, 165—“We cannot incur any Sabellian peril while we maintain—what is fatal to Sabellianism—that that which is revealed within the divine Unity is not only a distinction of aspects or of names, but a real reciprocity of mutual relation. One ‘aspect’ cannot contemplate, or be loved by, another.... Sabellianism degrades the persons of Deity into aspects. But there can be no mutual relation between aspects. The heat and the light of flame cannot severally contemplate and be in love with one another.” See Bushnell's doctrine reviewed by Hodge, Essays and Reviews, 433-473. On the whole subject, see Dorner, Hist. Doct. Person of Christ, 2:152-169; Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 1:259; Baur, Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit, 1:256-305; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk 1:83.

B. The Arian.

Arius (of Alexandria; condemned by Council of Nice, 325) held that the Father is the only divine being absolutely without beginning; the Son and the Holy Spirit, through whom God creates and recreates, having been [pg 329] themselves created out of nothing before the world was; and Christ being called God, because he is next in rank to God, and is endowed by God with divine power to create.

The followers of Arius have differed as to the precise rank and claims of Christ. While Socinus held with Arius that worship of Christ was obligatory, the later Unitarians have perceived the impropriety of worshiping even the highest of created beings, and have constantly tended to a view of the Redeemer which regards him as a mere man, standing in a peculiarly intimate relation to God.

For statement of the Arian doctrine, see J. Freeman Clarke, Orthodoxy, Its Truths and Errors. Per contra, see Schäffer, in Bib. Sac., 21:1, article on Athanasius and the Arian controversy. The so-called Athanasian Creed, which Athanasius never wrote, is more properly designated as the Symbolum Quicumque. It has also been called, though facetiously, “the Anathemasian Creed.” Yet no error in doctrine can be more perilous or worthy of condemnation than the error of Arius (1 Cor. 16:22—“If any man loveth not the Lord, let him be anathema”; 1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father”; 4:3—“every spirit that confesseth not Jesus is not of God: and this is the spirit of the antichrist”). It regards Christ as called God only by courtesy, much as we give to a Lieutenant Governor the title of Governor. Before the creation of the Son, the love of God, if there could be love, was expended on himself. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism: “The Arian Christ is nothing but a heathen idol, invented to maintain a heathenish Supreme in heathen isolation from the world. The nearer the Son is pulled down towards man by the attenuation of his Godhead, the more remote from man becomes the unshared Godhead of the Father. You have an Être Suprême who is practically unapproachable, a mere One-and-all, destitute of personality.”

Gore, Incarnation, 90, 91, 110, shows the immense importance of the controversy with regard to ὁμοούσιον and ὁμοιούσιον. Carlyle once sneered that “the Christian world was torn in pieces over a diphthong.” But Carlyle afterwards came to see that Christianity itself was at stake, and that it would have dwindled away to a legend, if the Arians had won. Arius appealed chiefly to logic, not to Scripture. He claimed that a Son must be younger than his Father. But he was asserting the principle of heathenism and idolatry, in demanding worship for a creature. The Goths were easily converted to Arianism. Christ was to them a hero-god, a demigod, and the later Goths could worship Christ and heathen idols impartially.

It is evident that the theory of Arius does not satisfy the demands of Scripture. A created God, a God whose existence had a beginning and therefore may come to an end, a God made of a substance which once was not, and therefore a substance different from that of the Father, is not God, but a finite creature. But the Scripture speaks of Christ as being in the beginning God, with God, and equal with God.

Luther, alluding to John 1:1, says: “‘The Word was God’ is against Arius; ‘the Word was with God’ is against Sabellius.” The Racovian Catechism, Quaes. 183, 184, 211, 236, 237, 245, 246, teaches that Christ is to be truly worshiped, and they are denied to be Christians who refuse to adore him. Davidis was persecuted and died in prison for refusing to worship Christ; and Socinus was charged, though probably unjustly, with having caused his imprisonment. Bartholomew Legate, an Essexman and an Arian, was burned to death at Smithfield, March 13, 1613. King James I asked him whether he did not pray to Christ. Legate's answer was that “indeed he had prayed to Christ in the days of his ignorance, but not for these last seven years”; which so shocked James that “he spurned at him with his foot.” At the stake Legate still refused to recant, and so was burned to ashes amid a vast conflux of people. The very next month another Arian named Whiteman was burned at Burton-on-Trent.

It required courage, even a generation later, for John Milton, in his Christian Doctrine, to declare himself a high Arian. In that treatise he teaches that “the Son of God did not exist from all eternity, is not coëval or coëssential or coëqual with the Father, but came into existence by the will of God to be the next being to himself, the first-born and best beloved, the Logos or Word through whom all creation should take its beginnings.” [pg 330]So Milton regards the Holy Spirit as a created being, inferior to the Son and possibly confined to our heavens and earth. Milton's Arianism, however, is characteristic of his later, rather than his earlier, writings; compare the Ode on Christ's Nativity with Paradise Lost, 3:383-391; and see Masson's Life of Milton, 1:39; 6:823, 824; A. H. Strong, Great Poets and their Theology, 260-262.

Dr. Samuel Clarke, when asked whether the Father who had created could not also destroy the Son, said that he had not considered the question. Ralph Waldo Emerson broke with his church and left the ministry because he could not celebrate the Lord's Supper,—it implied a profounder reverence for Jesus than he could give him. He wrote: “It seemed to me at church to-day, that the Communion Service, as it is now and here celebrated, is a document of the dullness of the race. How these, my good neighbors, the bending deacons, with their cups and plates, would have straightened themselves to sturdiness, if the proposition came before them to honor thus a fellow-man”; see Cabot's Memoir, 314. Yet Dr. Leonard Bacon said of the Unitarians that “it seemed as if their exclusive contemplation of Jesus Christ in his human character as the example for our imitation had wrought in them an exceptional beauty and Christlikeness of living.”

Chadwick, Old and New Unitarian Belief, 20, speaks of Arianism as exalting Christ to a degree of inappreciable difference from God, while Socinus looked upon him only as a miraculously endowed man, and believed in an infallible book. The term “Unitarians,”he claims, is derived from the “Uniti,” a society in Transylvania, in support of mutual toleration between Calvinists, Romanists, and Socinians. The name stuck to the advocates of the divine Unity, because they were its most active members. B. W. Lockhart: “Trinity guarantees God's knowableness. Arius taught that Jesus was neither human nor divine, but created in some grade of being between the two, essentially unknown to man. An absentee God made Jesus his messenger, God himself not touching the world directly at any point, and unknown and unknowable to it. Athanasius on the contrary asserted that God did not send a messenger in Christ, but came himself, so that to know Christ is really to know God who is essentially revealed in him. This gave the Church the doctrine of God immanent, or Immanuel, God knowable and actually known by men, because actually present.” Chapman, Jesus Christ and the Present Age, 14—“The world was never further from Unitarianism than it is to-day; we may add that Unitarianism was never further from itself.” On the doctrines of the early Socinians, see Princeton Essays, 1:195. On the whole subject, see Blunt, Dict. of Heretical Sects, art.: Arius; Guericke, Hist. Doctrine, 1:313, 319. See also a further account of Arianism in the chapter of this Compendium on the Person of Christ.

IV. This Tripersonality is not Tritheism; for, while there are three Persons, there is but one Essence.

(a) The term “person” only approximately represents the truth. Although this word, more nearly than any other single word, expresses the conception which the Scriptures give us of the relation between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, it is not itself used in this connection in Scripture, and we employ it in a qualified sense, not in the ordinary sense in which we apply the word “person” to Peter, Paul, and John.

The word “person” is only the imperfect and inadequate expression of a fact that transcends our experience and comprehension. Bunyan: “My dark and cloudy words, they do but hold The truth, as cabinets encase the gold.” Three Gods, limiting each other, would deprive each other of Deity. While we show that the unity is articulated by the persons, it is equally important to remember that the persons are limited by the unity. With us personality implies entire separation from all others—distinct individuality. But in the one God there can be no such separation. The personal distinctions in him must be such as are consistent with essential unity. This is the merit of the statement in the Symbolum Quicumque (or Athanasian Creed, wrongly so called): “The Father is God, the Son is God, the Holy Ghost is God; and yet there are not three Gods but one God. So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son is Lord, the Holy Ghost is Lord; yet there are not three Lords but one Lord. For as we are compelled by Christian truth to acknowledge each person by himself to be God and Lord, so we are forbidden by the same truth to say that there are three Gods or three Lords.” See [pg 331]Hagenbach, History of Doctrine, 1:270. We add that the personality of the Godhead as a whole is separate and distinct from all others, and in this respect is more fully analogous to man's personality than is the personality of the Father or of the Son.

The church of Alexandria in the second century chanted together: “One only is holy, the Father; One only is holy, the Son; One only is holy, the Spirit.” Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 154, 167, 168—“The three persons are neither three Gods, nor three parts of God. Rather are they God threefoldly, tri-personally.... The personal distinction in Godhead is a distinction within, and of, Unity: not a distinction which qualifies Unity, or usurps the place of it, or destroys it. It is not a relation of mutual exclusiveness, but of mutual inclusiveness. No one person is or can be without the others.... The personality of the supreme or absolute Being cannot be without self-contained mutuality of relations such as Will and Love. But the mutuality would not be real, unless the subject which becomes object, and the object which becomes subject, were on each side alike and equally Personal.... The Unity of all-comprehending inclusiveness is a higher mode of unity than the unity of singular distinctiveness.... The disciples are not to have the presence of the Spirit instead of the Son, but to have the Spirit is to have the Son. We mean by the Personal God not a limited alternative to unlimited abstracts, such as Law, Holiness, Love, but the transcendent and inclusive completeness of them all. The terms Father and Son are certainly terms which rise more immediately out of the temporal facts of the incarnation than out of the eternal relations of the divine Being. They are metaphors, however, which mean far more in the spiritual than they do in the material sphere. Spiritual hunger is more intense than physical hunger. So sin, judgment, grace, are metaphors. But in John 1:1-18 ‘Son’ is not used, but ‘Word.’ ”

(b) The necessary qualification is that, while three persons among men have only a specific unity of nature or essence—that is, have the same species of nature or essence,—the persons of the Godhead have a numerical unity of nature or essence—that is, have the same nature or essence. The undivided essence of the Godhead belongs equally to each of the persons; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each possesses all the substance and all the attributes of Deity. The plurality of the Godhead is therefore not a plurality of essence, but a plurality of hypostatical, or personal, distinctions. God is not three and one, but three in one. The one indivisible essence has three modes of subsistence.

The Trinity is not simply a partnership, in which each member can sign the name of the firm; for this is unity of council and operation only, not of essence. God's nature is not an abstract but an organic unity. God, as living, cannot be a mere Monad. Trinity is the organism of the Deity. The one divine Being exists in three modes. The life of the vine makes itself known in the life of the branches, and this union between vine and branches Christ uses to illustrate the union between the Father and himself. (See John 15:10—“If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love”; cf. verse 5—“I am the vine, ye are the branches; he that abideth in me, and I in him, the same beareth much fruit”; 17:22, 23—“That they may be one, even as we are one; I in them, and thou in me.”) So, in the organism of the body, the arm has its own life, a different life from that of the head or the foot, yet has this only by partaking of the life of the whole. See Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:450-453—“The one divine personality is so present in each of the distinctions, that these, which singly and by themselves would not be personal, yet do participate in the one divine personality, each in its own manner. This one divine personality is the unity of the three modes of subsistence which participate in itself. Neither is personal without the others. In each, in its manner, is the whole Godhead.”

The human body is a complex rather than a simple organism, a unity which embraces an indefinite number of subsidiary and dependent organisms. The one life of the body manifests itself in the life of the nervous system, the life of the circulatory system, and the life of the digestive system. The complete destruction of either one of these systems destroys the other two. Psychology as well as physiology reveals to us the possibility of a three-fold life within the bounds of a single being. In the individual man there is sometimes a double and even a triple consciousness. Herbert Spencer, Autobiography, 1:459; 2:204—“Most active minds have, I presume, more or less frequent experiences of double consciousness—one consciousness seeming to take note [pg 332]of what the other is about, and to applaud or blame.” He mentions an instance in his own experience. “May there not be possible a bi-cerebral thinking, as there is a binocular vision?... In these cases it seems as though there were going on, quite apart from the consciousness which seemed to constitute myself, some process of elaborating coherent thoughts—as though one part of myself was an independent originator over whose sayings and doings I had no control, and which were nevertheless in great measure consistent; while the other part of myself was a passive spectator or listener, quite unprepared for many of the things that the first part said, and which were nevertheless, though unexpected, not illogical.” This fact that there can be more than one consciousness in the same personality among men should make us slow to deny that there can be three consciousnesses in the one God.

Humanity at large is also an organism, and this fact lends new confirmation to the Pauline statement of organic interdependence. Modern sociology is the doctrine of one life constituted by the union of many. “Unus homo, nullus homo” is a principle of ethics as well as of sociology. No man can have a conscience to himself. The moral life of one results from and is interpenetrated by the moral life of all. All men moreover live, move and have their being in God. Within the bounds of the one universal and divine consciousness there are multitudinous finite consciousnesses. Why then should it be thought incredible that in the nature of this one God there should be three infinite consciousnesses? Baldwin, Psychology, 53, 54—“The integration of finite consciousnesses in an all-embracing divine consciousness may find a valid analogy in the integration of subordinate consciousnesses in the unit-personality of man. In the hypnotic state, multiple consciousnesses may be induced in the same nervous organism. In insanity there is a secondary consciousness at war with that which normally dominates.”Schurman, Belief in God, 26, 161—“The infinite Spirit may include the finite, as the idea of a single organism embraces within a single life a plurality of members and functions.... All souls are parts or functions of the eternal life of God, who is above all, and through all, and in all, and in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” We would draw the conclusion that, as in the body and soul of man, both as an individual and as a race, there is diversity in unity, so in the God in whose image man is made, there is diversity in unity, and a triple consciousness and will are consistent with, and even find their perfection in, a single essence.

By the personality of God we mean more than we mean when we speak of the personality of the Son and the personality of the Spirit. The personality of the Godhead is distinct and separate from all others, and is, in this respect, like that of man. Hence Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:194, says “it is preferable to speak of the personality of the essence rather than of the person of the essence; because the essence is not one person, but three persons.... The divine essence cannot be at once three persons and one person, if ‘person’ is employed in one signification; but it can be at once three persons and one personal Being.” While we speak of the one God as having a personality in which there are three persons, we would not call this personality a superpersonality, if this latter term is intended to intimate that God's personality is less than the personality of man. The personality of the Godhead is inclusive rather than exclusive.

With this qualification we may assent to the words of D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 93, 94, 218, 230, 236, 254—“The innermost truth of things, God, must be conceived as personal; but the ultimate Unity, which is his, must be believed to be superpersonal. It is a unity of persons, not a personal unity. For us personality is the ultimate form of unity. It is not so in him. For in him all persons live and move and have their being.... God is personal and also superpersonal. In him there is a transcendent unity that can embrace a personal multiplicity.... There is in God an ultimate superpersonal unity in which all persons are one—[all human persons and the three divine persons].... Substance is more real than quality, and subject is more real than substance. The most real of all is the concrete totality, the all-inclusive Universal.... What human love strives to accomplish—the overcoming of the opposition of person to person—is perfectly attained in the divine Unity.... The presupposition on which philosophy is driven back—[that persons have an underlying ground of unity] is identical with that which underlies Christian theology.” See Pfleiderer and Lotze on personality, in this Compendium, p. 104.

(c) This oneness of essence explains the fact that, while Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as respects their personality, are distinct subsistences, there is an intercommunion of persons and an immanence of one divine person in [pg 333] another which permits the peculiar work of one to be ascribed, with a single limitation, to either of the others, and the manifestation of one to be recognized in the manifestation of another. The limitation is simply this, that although the Son was sent by the Father, and the Spirit by the Father and the Son, it cannot be said vice versa that the Father is sent either by the Son, or by the Spirit. The Scripture representations of this intercommunion prevent us from conceiving of the distinctions called Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as involving separation between them.

Dorner adds that “in one is each of the others.” This is true with the limitation mentioned in the text above. Whatever Christ does, God the Father can be said to do; for God acts only in and through Christ the Revealer. Whatever the Holy Spirit does, Christ can be said to do; for the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Christ. The Spirit is the omnipresent Jesus, and Bengel's dictum is true: “Ubi Spiritus, ibi Christus.” Passages illustrating this intercommunion are the following: Gen. 1:1—“God created”; cf. Heb. 1:2—“through whom [the Son] also he made the worlds”; John 5:17, 19—“My Father worketh even until now, and I work.... The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father doing; for what things soever he doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner”; 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”; 11—“I am in the Father and the Father in me”; 18—“I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you” (by the Holy Spirit); 15:26—“when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth”; 17:21—“that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee”; 2 Cor. 5:19—“God was in Christ reconciling”; Titus 2:10—“God our Savior”; Heb. 12:23—“God the Judge of all”; cf. John 5:22—“neither doth the father judge any man, but he hath given all judgment unto the Son”; Acts 17:31—“judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he hath ordained.”

It is this intercommunion, together with the order of personality and operation to be mentioned hereafter, which explains the occasional use of the term “Father” for the whole Godhead; as in Eph. 4:6—“one God and Father of all, who is over all through all [in Christ], and in you all” [by the Spirit]. This intercommunion also explains the designation of Christ as “the Spirit,” and of the Spirit as “the Spirit of Christ,” as in 1 Cor. 15:45—“the last Adam became a life-giving Spirit”; 2 Cor. 3:17—“Now the Lord is the Spirit”; Gal. 4:6—“sent forth the Spirit of his Son”; Phil. 1:19—“supply of the Spirit of Jesus Christ” (see Alford and Lange on 2 Cor. 3:17, 18). So the Lamb, in Rev. 5:6, has “seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven Spirits of God, sent forth into all the earth” = the Holy Spirit, with his manifold powers, is the Spirit of the omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Christ. Theologians have designated this intercommunion by the terms περιχώρησις, circumincessio, intercommunicatio, circulatio, inexistentia. The word οὐσία was used to denote essence, substance, nature, being; and the words πρόσωπον and ὑπόστασις for person, distinction, mode of subsistence. On the changing uses of the words πρόσωπον and ὑπόστασις see Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 2:321, note 2. On the meaning of the word 'person' in connection with the Trinity, see John Howe, Calm Discourse of the Trinity; Jonathan Edwards, Observations on the Trinity; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:194, 267-275, 299, 300.

The Holy Spirit is Christ's alter ego, or other self. When Jesus went away, it was an exchange of his presence for his omnipresence; an exchange of limited for unlimited power; an exchange of companionship for indwelling. Since Christ comes to men in the Holy Spirit, he speaks through the apostles as authoritatively as if his own lips uttered the words. Each believer, in having the Holy Spirit, has the whole Christ for his own; see A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit. Gore, Incarnation, 218—“The persons of the Holy Trinity are not separable individuals. Each involves the others; the coming of each is the coming of the others. Thus the coming of the Spirit must have involved the coming of the Son. But the specialty of the Pentecostal gift appears to be the coming of the Holy Spirit out of the uplifted and glorified manhood of the incarnate Son. The Spirit is the life-giver, but the life with which he works in the church is the life of the Incarnate, the life of Jesus.”

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 85—“For centuries upon centuries, the essential unity of God had been burnt and branded in upon the consciousness of Israel. It had to be completely established first, as a basal element of thought, indispensable, unalterable, before there could begin the disclosure to man of the reality of the eternal relations within the one indivisible being of God. And when the disclosure came, it came not as modifying, but as further interpreting and illumining, that unity which [pg 334]it absolutely presupposed.” E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 238—“There is extreme difficulty in giving any statement of a triunity that shall not verge upon tritheism on the one hand, or upon mere modalism on the other. It was very natural that Calvin should be charged with Sabellianism, and John Howe with tritheism.”

V. The Three Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are equal.

In explanation, notice that:

1. These titles belong to the Persons.

(a) The Father is not God as such; for God is not only Father, but also Son and Holy Spirit. The term “Father” designates that hypostatical distinction in the divine nature in virtue of which God is related to the Son, and through the Son and the Spirit to the church and the world. As author of the believer's spiritual as well as natural life, God is doubly his Father; but this relation which God sustains to creatures is not the ground of the title. God is Father primarily in virtue of the relation which he sustains to the eternal Son; only as we are spiritually united to Jesus Christ do we become children of God.

(b) The Son is not God as such; for God is not only Son, but also Father and Holy Spirit. “The Son” designates that distinction in virtue of which God is related to the Father, is sent by the Father to redeem the world, and with the Father sends the Holy Spirit.

(c) The Holy Spirit is not God as such; for God is not only Holy Spirit, but also Father and Son. “The Holy Spirit” designates that distinction in virtue of which God is related to the Father and the Son, and is sent by them to accomplish the work of renewing the ungodly and of sanctifying the church.

Neither of these names designates the Monad as such. Each designates rather that personal distinction which forms the eternal basis and ground for a particular self-revelation. In the sense of being the Author and Provider of men's natural life, God is the Father of all. But even this natural sonship is mediated by Jesus Christ; see 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ through whom are all things, and we through him.” The phrase “Our Father,”however, can be used with the highest truth only by the regenerate, who have been newly born of God by being united to Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. See Gal. 3:26—“For ye are all sons of God, through faith, in Jesus Christ”; 4:4-6—“God sent forth his Son ... that we might receive the adoption of sons ... sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father”; Eph. 1:5—“foreordained as unto adoption as sons through Jesus Christ.” God's love for Christ is the measure of his love for those who are one with Christ. Human nature in Christ is lifted up into the life and communion of the eternal Trinity. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:306-310.

Human fatherhood is a reflection of the divine, not, vice versa, the divine a reflection of the human; cf. Eph. 3:14, 15—“the Father, from whom every fatherhood πατριά in heaven and on earth is named.” Chadwick, Unitarianism, 77-83, makes the name “Father” only a symbol for the great Cause of organic evolution, the Author of all being. But we may reply with Stearns, Evidence of Christian Experience, 177—“to know God outside of the sphere of redemption is not to know him in the deeper meaning of the term ‘Father’. It is only through the Son that we know the Father: Mat. 11:27—‘Neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.’”

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 38—“The Unseen can be known only by the seen which comes forth from it. The all-generating or Paternal Life which is hidden from us can be known only by the generated or Filial Life in which it reveals itself. The goodness and righteousness which inhabits eternity can be known only by the goodness and righteousness which issues from it in the successive births of time. God above the world is made known only by God in the world. God transcendent, the Father, is revealed by God immanent, the Son.” Faber: “O marvellous, O worshipful! No song or sound is heard, But everywhere and every hour, In love, in wisdom and in power, [pg 335]the Father speaks his dear eternal Word.” We may interpret this as meaning that self-expression is a necessity of nature to an infinite Mind. The Word is therefore eternal. Christ is the mirror from which are flashed upon us the rays of the hidden Luminary. So Principal Fairbairn says: “Theology must be on its historical side Christocentric, but on its doctrinal side Theocentric.”

Salmond, Expositor's Greek Testament, on Eph. 1:5—“By ‘adoption’ Paul does not mean the bestowal of the full privileges of the family on those who are sons by nature, but the acceptance into the family of those who are not sons originally and by right in the relation proper of those who are sons by birth. Hence υἱοθεσία is never affirmed of Christ, for he alone is Son of God by nature. So Paul regards our sonship, not as lying in the natural relation in which men stand to God as his children, but as implying a new relation of grace, founded on a covenant relation of God and on the work of Christ (Gal. 4:5 sq.).”

2. Qualified sense of these titles.

Like the word “person”, the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not to be confined within the precise limitations of meaning which would be required if they were applied to men.

(a) The Scriptures enlarge our conceptions of Christ's Sonship by giving to him in his preëxistent state the names of the Logos, the Image, and the Effulgence of God.—The term “Logos” combines in itself the two ideas of thought and word, of reason and expression. While the Logos as divine thought or reason is one with God, the Logos as divine word or expression is distinguishable from God. Words are the means by which personal beings express or reveal themselves. Since Jesus Christ was “the Word” before there were any creatures to whom revelations could be made, it would seem to be only a necessary inference from this title that in Christ God must be from eternity expressed or revealed to himself; in other words, that the Logos is the principle of truth, or self-consciousness, in God.—The term “Image” suggests the ideas of copy or counterpart. Man is the image of God only relatively and derivatively. Christ is the Image of God absolutely and archetypally. As the perfect representation of the Father's perfections, the Son would seem to be the object and principle of love in the Godhead.—The term “Effulgence,” finally, is an allusion to the sun and its radiance. As the effulgence of the sun manifests the sun's nature, which otherwise would be unrevealed, yet is inseparable from the sun and ever one with it, so Christ reveals God, but is eternally one with God. Here is a principle of movement, of will, which seems to connect itself with the holiness, or self-asserting purity, of the divine nature.

Smyth, Introd. to Edwards' Observations on the Trinity: “The ontological relations of the persons of the Trinity are not a mere blank to human thought.” John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word”—means more than “in the beginning was the x, or the zero.” Godet indeed says that Logos = “reason” only in philosophical writings, but never in the Scriptures. He calls this a Hegelian notion. But both Plato and Philo had made this signification a common one. On λόγος as = reason + speech, see Lightfoot on Colossians, 143, 144. Meyer interprets it as “personal subsistence, the self-revelation of the divine essence, before all time immanent in God.” Neander, Planting and Training, 369—Logos = “the eternal Revealer of the divine essence.” Bushnell: “Mirror of creative imagination”; “form of God.”

Word = 1. Expression; 2. Definite expression; 3. Ordered expression; 4. Complete expression. We make thought definite by putting it into language. So God's wealth of ideas is in the Word formed into an ordered Kingdom, a true Cosmos; see Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 76. Max Müller: “A word is simply a spoken thought made audible as sound. Take away from a word the sound, and what is left is simply the thought of [pg 336]it.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 72, 73—“The Greek saw in the word the abiding thought behind the passing form. The Word was God and yet finite—finite only as to form, infinite as to what the form suggests or expresses. By Word some form must be meant, and any form is finite. The Word is the form taken by the infinite Intelligence which transcends all forms.” We regard this identification of the Word with the finite manifestation of the Word as contradicted by John 1:1, where the Word is represented as being with God before creation, and by Phil. 2:6, where the Word is represented as existing in the form of God before his self-limitation in human nature. Scripture requires us to believe in an objectification of God to himself in the person of the Word prior to any finite manifestation of God to men. Christ existed as the Word, and the Word was with God, before the Word was made flesh and before the world came into being; in other words, the Logos was the eternal principle of truth or self-consciousness in the nature of God.

Passages representing Christ as the Image of God are Col. 1:15—“who is the image of the invisible God”; 2 Cor. 4:4—“Christ, who is the image of God” (εἰκών); Heb. 1:3—“the very image of his substance”(χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ); here χαρακτήρ means “impress,” “counterpart.” Christ is the perfect image of God, as men are not. He therefore has consciousness and will. He possesses all the attributes and powers of God. The word “Image” suggests the perfect equality with God which the title “Son” might at first seem to deny. The living Image of God which is equal to himself and is the object of his infinite love can be nothing less than personal. As the bachelor can never satisfy his longing for companionship by lining his room with mirrors which furnish only a lifeless reflection of himself, so God requires for his love a personal as well as an infinite object. The Image is not precisely the repetition of the original. The stamp from the seal is not precisely the reproduction of the seal. The letters on the seal run backwards and can be easily read only when the impression is before us. So Christ is the only interpretation and revelation of the hidden Godhead. As only in love do we come to know the depths of our own being, so it is only in the Son that “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

Christ is spoken of as the Effulgence of God in Heb. 1:3—“who being the effulgence of his glory”(ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης); cf. 2 Cor. 4:6—“shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Notice that the radiance of the sun is as old as the sun itself, and without it the sun would not be sun. So Christ is coëqual and coëternal with the Father. Ps. 84:11—“Jehovah God is a sun.” But we cannot see the sun except by the sunlight. Christ is the sunlight which streams forth from the Sun and which makes the Sun visible. If there be an eternal Sun, there must be also an eternal Sunlight, and Christ must be eternal. Westcott on Hebrews 1:3—“The use of the absolute timeless term ὤν, ‘being’, guards against the thought that the Lord's sonship was by adoption, and not by nature. ἀπαύγασμα does not express personality, and χαρακτήρ does not express coëssentiality. The two words are related exactly as ὁμοούσιος and μονογενής, and like those must be combined to give the fulness of the truth. The truth expressed thus antithetically holds good absolutely.... In Christ the essence of God is made distinct; in Christ the revelation of God's character is seen.” On Edwards's view of the Trinity, together with his quotations from Ramsey's Philosophical Principles, from which he seems to have derived important suggestions, see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 338-376; G. P. Fisher, Edwards's Essay on the Trinity, 110-116.

(b) The names thus given to the second person of the Trinity, if they have any significance, bring him before our minds in the general aspect of Revealer, and suggest a relation of the doctrine of the Trinity to God's immanent attributes of truth, love, and holiness. The prepositions used to describe the internal relations of the second person to the first are not prepositions of rest, but prepositions of direction and movement. The Trinity, as the organism of Deity, secures a life-movement of the Godhead, a process in which God evermore objectifies himself and in the Son gives forth of his fulness. Christ represents the centrifugal action of the deity. But there must be centripetal action also. In the Holy Spirit the movement is completed, and the divine activity and thought returns into itself. True religion, in reuniting us to God, reproduces in us, in our limited measure, this eternal process of the divine mind. Christian experience witnesses that [pg 337] God in himself is unknown; Christ is the organ of external revelation; the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal revelation—only he can give us an inward apprehension or realization of the truth. It is “through the eternal Spirit” that Christ “offered himself without blemish unto God,” and it is only through the Holy Spirit that the church has access to the Father, or fallen creatures can return to God.

Here we see that God is Life, self-sufficient Life, Infinite Life, of which the life of the universe is but a faint reflection, a rill from the fountain, a drop from the ocean. Since Christ is the only Revealer, the only outgoing principle in the Godhead, it is he in whom the whole creation comes to be and holds together. He is the Life of nature: all natural beauty and grandeur, all forces molecular and molar, all laws of gravitation and evolution, are the work and manifestation of the omnipresent Christ. He is the Life of humanity: the intellectual and moral impulses of man, so far as they are normal and uplifting, are due to Christ; he is the principle of progress and improvement in history. He is the Life of the church: the one and only Redeemer and spiritual Head of the race is also its Teacher and Lord.

All objective revelation of God is the work of Christ. But all subjective manifestation of God is the work of the Holy Spirit. As Christ is the principle of outgoing, so the Holy Spirit is the principle of return to God. God would take up finite creatures into himself, would breath into them his breath, would teach them to launch their little boats upon the infinite current of his life. Our electric cars can go up hill at great speed so long as they grip the cable. Faith is the grip which connects us with the moving energy of God. “The universe is homeward bound,” because the Holy Spirit is ever turning objective revelation into subjective revelation, and is leading men consciously or unconsciously to appropriate the thought and love and purpose of Him in whom all things find their object and end; “for of him and through him, and unto him, are all things” (Rom. 11:36),—here there is allusion to the Father as the source, the Son as the medium, and the Spirit as the perfecting and completing agent, in God's operations. But all these external processes are only signs and finite reflections of a life-process internal to the nature of God.

Meyer on John 1:1—“the Word was with God”: “πρὸς τὸν θεόν does not = παρὰ τῷ θεῷ, but expresses the existence of the Logos in God in respect of intercourse. The moral essence of this essential fellowship is love, which excludes any merely modalistic conception.”Marcus Dods, Expositor's Greek Testament, in loco: “This preposition implies intercourse and therefore separate personality.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 62—“And the Word was toward God” = his face is not outwards, as if he were merely revealing, or waiting to reveal, God to the creation. His face is turned inwards. His whole Person is directed toward God, motion corresponding to motion, thought to thought.... In him God stands revealed to himself. Contrast the attitude of fallen Adam, with his face averted from God. Godet, on John 1:1—“Πρὸς τὸν θεόν intimates not only personality but movement.... The tendency of the Logos ad extra rests upon an anterior and essential relation ad intra. To reveal God, one must know him; to project him outwardly, one must have plunged into his bosom.” Compare John 1:18—“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” (R. V.) where we find, not ἐν τῷ κόλπῷ, but εἰς τὸν κόλπον. As ἦν εἰς τὴν πόλιν means “went into the city and was there,” so the use of these prepositions indicates in the Godhead movement as well as rest. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:193, translates πρός by “hingewandt zu,”or “turned toward.” The preposition would then imply that the Revealer, who existed in the beginning, was ever over against God, in the life-process of the Trinity, as the perfect objectification of himself. “Das Aussichselbstsein kraft des Durchsichselbstsein mit dem Fürsichselbstsein zusammenschliesst.” Dorner speaks of “das Aussensichoderineinemandernsein; Sichgeltendmachen des Ausgeschlossenen; Sichnichtsogesetzthaben; Stehenbleibenwollen.”

There is in all human intelligence a threefoldness which points toward a trinitarian life in God. We can distinguish a Wissen, a Bewusstsein, a Selbstbewusstein. In complete self-consciousness there are the three elements: 1. We are ourselves; 2. We form a picture of ourselves; 3. We recognize this picture as the picture of ourselves. The little child speaks of himself in the third person: “Baby did it.” The objective comes before the subject; “me” comes first, and “I” is a later development; “himself”still holds its place, rather than “heself.” But this duality belongs only to undeveloped intelligence; it is characteristic of the animal creation; we revert to it in our [pg 338]dreams; the insane are permanent victims of it; and since sin is moral insanity, the sinner has no hope until, like the prodigal, he “comes to himself” (Luke 15:17). The insane person is mente alienatus, and we call physicians for the insane by the name of alienists. Mere duality gives us only the notion of separation. Perfect self-consciousness whether in man or in God requires a third unifying element. And in God mediation between the “I” and the “Thou” must be the work of a Person also, and the Person who mediates between the two must be in all respects the equal of either, or he could not adequately interpret the one to the other; see Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 57-59.

Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:179-189, 276-283—“It is one of the effects of conviction by the Holy Spirit to convert consciousness into self-consciousness.... Conviction of sin is the consciousness of self as the guilty author of sin. Self-consciousness is trinal, while mere consciousness is dual.... One and the same human spirit subsists in two modes or distinctions—subject and object ... The three hypostatical consciousnesses in their combination and unity constitute the one consciousness of God ... as the three persons make one essence.”

Dorner considers the internal relations of the Trinity (System, 1:412 sq.) in three aspects: 1. Physical. God is causa sui. But effect that equals cause must itself be causative. Here would be duality, were it not for a third principle of unity. Trinitas dualitatem ad unitatem reducit. 2. Logical. Self-consciousness sets self over against self. Yet the thinker must not regard self as one of many, and call himself “he,” as children do; for the thinker would then be, not self-conscious, but mente alienatus, “beside himself.” He therefore “comes to himself” in a third, as the brute cannot. 3. Ethical. God—self-willing right. But right based on arbitrary will is not right. Right based on passive nature is not right either. Right as being—Father. Right as willing—Son. Without the latter principle of freedom, we have a dead ethic, a dead God, an enthroned necessity. The unity of necessity and freedom is found by God, as by the Christian, in the Holy Spirit. The Father—I; the Son—Me; the Spirit the unity of the two; see C. C. Everett, Essays, Theological and Literary, 32. There must be not only Sun and Sunlight, but an Eye to behold the Light. William James, in his Psychology, distinguishes the Me, the self as known, from the I, the self as knower.

But we need still further to distinguish a third principle, a subject-object, from both subject and object. The subject cannot recognize the object as one with itself except through a unifying principle which can be distinguished from both. We may therefore regard the Holy Spirit as the principle of self-consciousness in man as well as in God. As there was a natural union of Christ with humanity prior to his redeeming work, so there is a natural union of the Holy Spirit with all men prior to his regenerating work: Job 32:18—“there is a spirit in man, And the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding.”Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, teaches that the Holy Spirit constitutes the principle of life in all living things, and animates all rational beings, as well as regenerates and sanctifies the elect of God. Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 75, remarks on Job 34:14, 15—“If he gather unto himself his Spirit and his breath; all flesh shall perish together”—that the Spirit is not only necessary to man's salvation, but also to keep up even man's natural life.

Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:172, speaks of the Son as the centrifugal, while the Holy Spirit is the centripetal movement of the Godhead. God apart from Christ is unrevealed (John 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time”); Christ is the organ of external revelation (18—“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”); the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal revelation (1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us Christ revealed them through the Spirit”). That the Holy Spirit is the principle of all movement towards God appears from Heb. 9:14—Christ “through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God”; Eph. 2:28—“access in one Spirit unto the Father”; Rom. 8:26—“the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity ... the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us”; John 4:24—“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit”; 16:8-11—“convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” See Twesten, Dogmatik, on the Trinity; also Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:111. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 68—“It is the joy of the Son to receive, his gladness to welcome most those wishes of the Father which will cost most to himself. The Spirit also has his joy in making known,—in perfecting fellowship and keeping the eternal love alive by that incessant sounding of the deeps which makes the heart of the Father known to the Son, and the heart of the Son known to the Father.” We may add that the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal revelation even to the Father and to the Son.

(c) In the light of what has been said, we may understand somewhat more fully the characteristic differences between the work of Christ and that of the Holy Spirit. We may sum them up in the four statements that, [pg 339] first, all outgoing seems to be the work of Christ, all return to God the work of the Spirit; secondly, Christ is the organ of external revelation, the Holy Spirit the organ of internal revelation; thirdly, Christ is our advocate in heaven, the Holy Spirit is our advocate in the soul; fourthly, in the work of Christ we are passive, in the work of the Spirit we are active. Of the work of Christ we shall treat more fully hereafter, in speaking of his Offices as Prophet, Priest, and King. The work of the Holy Spirit will be treated when we come to speak of the Application of Redemption in Regeneration and Sanctification. Here it is sufficient to say that the Holy Spirit is represented in the Scriptures as the author of life—in creation, in the conception of Christ, in regeneration, in resurrection; and as the giver of light—in the inspiration of Scripture writers, in the conviction of sinners, in the illumination and sanctification of Christians.

Gen. 1:2—“The Spirit of God was brooding”; Luke 1:35—to Mary: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee”, John 3:8—“born of the Spirit”; Ps. 37:9, 14—“Come from the four winds, O breath.... I will put my Spirit in you, and ye shall live”; Rom. 8:11—“give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit.” 1 John 2:1—“an advocate(παράκλητον) with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous”; John 14:16, 17—“another Comforter (παράκλητον), that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth”; Rom. 8:26—“the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us.” 2 Pet. 1:21—“men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit”; John 16:8—“convict the world in respect of sin”; 13—“when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth”; Rom. 8:14—“as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.”

McCosh: The works of the Spirit are Conviction, Conversion, Sanctification, Comfort. Donovan: The Spirit is the Spirit of conviction, enlightenment, quickening, in the sinner; and of revelation, remembrance, witness, sanctification, consolation, to the saint. The Spirit enlightens the sinner, as the flash of lightning lights the traveler stumbling on the edge of a precipice at night; enlightens the Christian, as the rising sun reveals a landscape which was all there before, but which was hidden from sight until the great luminary made it visible. “The morning light did not create The lovely prospect it revealed; It only showed the real state Of what the darkness had concealed.”Christ's advocacy before the throne is like that of legal counsel pleading in our stead; the Holy Spirit's advocacy in the heart is like the mother's teaching her child to pray for himself.

J. W. A. Stewart: “Without the work of the Holy Spirit redemption would have been impossible, as impossible as that fuel should warm without being lighted, or that bread should nourish without being eaten. Christ is God entering into human history, but without the Spirit Christianity would be only history. The Holy Spirit is God entering into human hearts. The Holy Spirit turns creed into life. Christ is the physician who leaves the remedy and then departs. The Holy Spirit is the nurse who applies and administers the remedy, and who remains with the patient until the cure is completed.” Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 78—“It is in vain that the mirror exists in the room, if it is lying on its face; the sunbeams cannot reach it till its face is upturned to them. Heaven lies about thee not only in thine infancy but at all times. But it is not enough that a place is prepared for thee; thou must be prepared for the place. It is not enough that thy light has come; thou thyself must arise and shine. No outward shining can reveal, unless thou art thyself a reflector of its glory. The Spirit must set thee on thy feet, that thou mayest hear him that speaks to thee (Ez. 2:2).”

The Holy Spirit reveals not himself but Christ. John 16:14—“He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you.” So should the servants of the Spirit hide themselves while they make known Christ. E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 40—“Some years ago a large steam engine all of glass was exhibited about the country. When it was at work one would see the piston and the valves go; but no one could see what made them go. When steam is hot enough to be a continuous elastic vapor, it is invisible.”So we perceive the presence of the Holy Spirit, not by visions or voices, but by the effect he produces within us in the shape of new knowledge, new love, and new energy of our own powers. Denney, Studies in Theology, 161—“No man can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time. Esprit is fatal to unction; no man can give the impression that he himself is clever and also that Christ is mighty to save. The [pg 340]power of the Holy Spirit is felt only when the witness is unconscious of self, and when others remain unconscious of him.” Moule, Veni Creator, 8—“The Holy Spirit, as Tertullian says, is the vicar of Christ. The night before the Cross, the Holy Spirit was present to the mind of Christ as a person.”

Gore, in Lux Mundi, 318—“It was a point in the charge against Origen that his language seemed to involve an exclusion of the Holy Spirit from nature, and a limitation of his activity to the church. The whole of life is certainly his. And yet, because his special attribute is holiness, it is in rational natures, which alone are capable of holiness, that he exerts his special influence. A special inbreathing of the divine Spirit gave to man his proper being.” See Gen. 2:7—“Jehovah God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; John 3:8—“The Spirit breatheth where it will ... so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” E. H. Johnson, on The Offices of the Holy Spirit, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:381-382—“Why is he specially called the Holy, when Father and Son are also holy, unless because he produces holiness, i. e., makes the holiness of God to be ours individually? Christ is the principle of collectivism, the Holy Spirit the principle of individualism. The Holy Spirit shows man the Christ in him. God above all = Father; God through all = Son; God in all = Holy Spirit (Eph. 4:6).”

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit has never yet been scientifically unfolded. No treatise on it has appeared comparable to Julius Müller's Doctrine of Sin, or to I. A. Dorner's History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ. The progress of doctrine in the past has been marked by successive stages. Athanasius treated of the Trinity; Augustine of sin; Anselm of the atonement; Luther of justification; Wesley of regeneration; and each of these unfoldings of doctrine has been accompanied by religious awakening. We still wait for a complete discussion of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and believe that widespread revivals will follow the recognition of the omnipotent Agent in revivals. On the relations of the Holy Spirit to Christ, see Owen, in Works, 3:152-159; on the Holy Spirit's nature and work, see works by Faber, Smeaton, Tophel, G. Campbell Morgan, J. D. Robertson, Biederwolf; also C. E. Smith, The Baptism of Fire; J. D. Thompson, The Holy Comforter; Bushnell, Forgiveness and Law, last chapter; Bp. Andrews, Works, 3:107-400; James S. Candlish, Work of the Holy Spirit; Redford, Vox Dei; Andrew Murray, The Spirit of Christ; A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit; Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit; J. E. Cumming, Through the Eternal Spirit; Lechler, Lehre vom Heiligen Geiste; Arthur, Tongue of Fire; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 250-258, and Christ in Creation, 297-313.

3. Generation and procession consistent with equality.

That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7. “This day have I begotten thee” is most naturally interpreted as the declaration of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of Christ's Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from his Godhood. He is “born before every creature” (while yet no created thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and “by the resurrection of the dead” is not made to be, but only “declared to be,” “according to the Spirit of holiness” (= according to his divine nature) “the Son of God with power” (see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit.

Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee”see Alexander, Com. in loco; also Com. on Acts 13:33—“‘To-day’ refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.” Philo says that “to-day” with God means “forever.” This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul in Acts 13:33 refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus' Sonship, he refers in Acts 13:34, 35 to another Psalm, the sixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn [pg 341]into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”). Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως = “begotten first before all creation” (Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or “first-born before every creature, i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created” (Ellicott, Com. in loco). “Herein” (says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, on Col. 1:15) “is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.”Lightfoot, on Col. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the “primogenitus mundi.”

On Rom. 1:4 (ὁρισθέντος = “manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange's Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only the inner of a holy spiritual essence, but also the outer of an existence in power and heavenly glory.” Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an ‘absurd fiction.’ But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”

If Westcott and Hort's reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός, “the only begotten God,” in John 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ's eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ in Rom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,” as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain from John 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”; Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”; Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”; cf. Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”; 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son's name, if thou knowest?” The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied in John 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com., in loco; Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.” Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.

The Scripture terms “generation” and “procession,” as applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal generation of the Son to which we hold is

(a) Not creation, but the Father's communication of himself to the Son. Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions, they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the Father.

The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father is fons trinitatis, not fons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299; per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.

(b) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when the Son did not exist as God with the Father.

If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun. [pg 342]When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered: “The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”

(c) Not an act of the Father's will, but an internal necessity of the divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.

The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are “begotten.” The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not “begotten,” but “proceeding.”

(d) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the Spirit.

The subordination of the person of the Son to the person of the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman's soul is worth as much as man's; see 1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.” On John 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com., in loco.

Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.” Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God's understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God's infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son's being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.” Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be “eternal nonsense,”and is thought to have hid Edwards's unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.

The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence. “Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.” E. G. Robinson: “An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ's subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.”Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus [pg 343]next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip's cry, ‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’ (John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus' declaration, they secured Paul's faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant, ‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source, ‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream, ‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized, ‘in all’ (Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called ‘the executive of the Godhead.’ ” Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.

The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ's eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit's equal dignity and glory.

We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal object of Christian worship.

We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations, respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment, Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.

John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assign opera naturæ; to the Son, opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit, opera gratiæ applicatæ.” All God's revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this love is the Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for love is the Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God's light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of “1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.” Moberly seeks thus to find in man's nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.

[pg 344]

VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes the Key to all other Doctrines.