LECTURE VII. THE UNSCRIPTURAL ORIGIN AND ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY. BY REV. JOHN HAMILTON THOM. (continued 2)
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The Trinitarian answers, that though he believes in the Unity of God, yet that Unity is totally different from the unity of all other beings. He believes that in the One God there are three distinct and infinite persons, presenting themselves to human contemplation in different characters, and as the objects of different affections; the first reigning in Heaven, the second in intimate and inseparable connection with a dying man upon the Earth; the first immutable in his immensity, the other coming down from his eternal throne to wrap his infinite essence in a covering of human flesh; the Father sending the Son, and the Son satisfying the demands of the Father; the Father the cause and origin of all things, but holding himself loftily apart, whilst the Holy Spirit takes the office of communion with men, and becomes the Comforter, Teacher, and spiritual Friend of the human souls, whom the Father’s creative energies, acting through the Son, have called into existence. This, then, is the doctrine of the Trinity: three equal Persons, each Supreme, each a perfect and infinite Deity, and yet so united as to constitute but one undivided God.
We are tauntingly told of the vague statements of Unitarian Doctrine. Now nothing can be more unjust than this, or farther from the facts. “Controversially described,” Unitarianism is the most definite thing imaginable. It simply says, No, to every one of the allegations of Trinitarianism. There are, at the very least, five different forms in which the doctrine of the Trinity has been explained and defended; and to every one of these five shifting modifications, we repeat our definite negative. There is the widest difference among Trinitarian Theologians as to their method of stating and explaining the influence of Atonement and of Original Sin; and to every one of these varieties we equally repeat our simple negative. Where, then, is the superior definiteness of Trinitarian statements? We affirm, of all its characteristic doctrines, that they are untenable in any form whatever. This, surely, is definite enough.
I am not aware that I have stated the doctrine of the Trinity in a way which any Trinitarian could disown; and the first observation I make upon it is this, that in this view of the oneness of God, in connecting the deity of the Father, and the deity of the Son, and the deity of the Holy Spirit, with a strict unity in the godhead, the Trinitarian has at least departed from the ordinary acceptation of language. We will not assert the absolute impossibility of his retaining a belief in the Unity of God, because we have no right to question his own solemn assertion of the fact, or to set limits to the powers of another’s faith; but he will not deny that he believes God to be one, in a sense totally different from that in which he believes himself to be one; that it is a unity of three minds, each a perfect God, and capable of acting separately,—in so much that it is a warning of the Creeds,—not to confound the Persons. It is not a unity of Mind, nor a unity of Will, nor a unity of Agency, nor a unity of Person, which the Trinitarian regards as constituting the Unity of God, but three Minds, three Wills, three Agents, three Persons, mysteriously making one Deity. I ask, were it not for the overpowering brightness with which the Bible reveals the doctrine of one God, would the Trinitarian encumber himself with the difficulty of combining it with his other views; would he not rather simply confess that three persons made three beings, and not one being; and represent the world as under the threefold, but harmonious, government of a Creator, a Saviour, and a sanctifying Spirit?
We have thus, then, two admissions on the part of the Trinitarian, which I ask you distinctly to bear in mind. He admits the Unity of God; and he admits that when he attempts to combine that Unity with a Trinity, he uses the word in an unintelligible sense, and understands, or rather marks, by it something entirely different from the oneness of any other being,—a oneness in short of which he himself is capable of forming no conception. That is, he retains the form of words that God is one; but these words convey to him no distinct idea,—and yet words are the signs of human ideas;—he confesses that God is not one in any sense of that word that he can comprehend; and that, therefore, when he professes his faith in the Unity of God, he is using language which is unintelligible even to himself. This he must acknowledge, for he calls the Trinity a mystery; but the mystery he will admit is in the Unity, not in the Trinity: the mystery (that is, the no-meaningness to man, for this is the only meaning the word will here bear, the difficulty being not in the vastness or spirituality of the Conceptions, but in their irreconcilableness,) is not that there are three Persons, but that the three are one. Now this is the confession of every Trinitarian: he can form very distinct notions of the Trinity, but he admits that he cannot reconcile these notions with any human idea of unity; it is unintelligible, it is inconceivable, it is an apparent contradiction to all other men, to him only a paradox; it is an unfathomable mystery (a sad desecration of that solemn word); but still he professes to believe it,—he maintains that he can hold “the form of sound words;” and as to thoughts, it is his duty to have none upon the subject. He knows that it is revealed that God is One; and he thinks it is revealed that God is in Three; and without any attempt to harmonize these two statements, he professes to believe them both.
Now taking our stand on the conceded truth that God is revealed to be one, we ask for equal evidence that He is revealed to be Three Persons. We ask throughout the Bible for one plain assertion of this doctrine. We shall be satisfied with even one, and we think it is not asking much. We ask but for a single text in which it is declared that there are three infinite Minds in the Unity of but one infinite God.
It is admitted that there is no distinct statement of this doctrine in any part of the Scriptures; and here again we rest upon another confession of all instructed Trinitarians,[512] that this mystery is nowhere found in express terms; that if taught at all it is taught by implication; that it is no part of the direct revelation, but merely an inference which may be collected from certain appearances, certain verbal phenomena. Now I ask if this doctrine was intended to be revealed, could it have been so left? If the Trinity is as strictly true as the Unity, could the one have had the witness of Prophets and Apostles, and shine forth as the clearest light on the revealed page, whilst the other was left to be gathered from some obscure and incidental intimations which the most gifted minds have not been able to perceive? Is it credible that if the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, were three Persons in one God, there should be nowhere in the Bible a single statement of that truth;[513] and ought not this extraordinary fact make us very cautious to try the soundness of the inferences, human and erring modes of reasoning, upon which, as upon its foundation, this stupendous doctrine is laid?
There are two passages in the Bible, and only two, in which God, and Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are mentioned together. It is recorded in St. Matthew’s Gospel as the last words of the risen Jesus, that he ascended to his Father, leaving to the world the legacy of his truth—“Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name (properly into the name) of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”—baptizing them into a belief of God, and of Christ, and of the power and comfort of the Holy Spirit accompanying the truth, and witnessing to it in the hearts of all who receive it purely.[514] The Apostle declares of the Jews that they were baptized into Moses, and the Evangelist declares of Christians that they were baptized into Christ, (see also Rom. vi. 3; Gal. iii. 27,) and the plain meaning of such language is that they were baptized into the Truth which God had revealed through Moses and through Christ. What support then is there here for the doctrine of a Trinity? Is this indeed the strongest scriptural evidence that Trinitarianism can boast of—that because three distinctions follow one another—God, and his Prophet, and his Spirit witnessing to his truth in the hearts and before the eyes of His children—therefore the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God in communication with man, must be a person, distinct from God, because the other two words express persons—and therefore these three are co-equal and are one. Such is the Interpretation that produces Trinitarianism. Is there a single hint in this passage of three persons in one God? What can be made out of it more than the Saviour’s last injunction to his followers, to carry through the world that glorious and sanctifying truth, which the one God manifested through his well-beloved Son, and accompanied with the energy of his spirit. The Holy Spirit is a Scripture expression for God in communication with man, naturally or supernaturally.
The only other passage in which Jesus Christ, and God, and the Holy Spirit, are mentioned in the same sentence, must receive a precisely similar explanation. St. Paul concludes the Second Epistle to the Corinthians in these words—“The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all.” Now what is this but a beautiful and affectionate prayer that the Corinthians might be partakers of the grace of God that was in Jesus Christ, of the love of their Heavenly Father, and of the gifts and influences of his holy spirit? Indeed this passage, like all others brought to prove the Trinity, is of itself quite sufficient to overthrow that doctrine. The name God in it, is not applied to Jesus Christ nor to the holy spirit: and to prove that holy spirit does not mean a person, but the spiritual energies of God in communication with man, the word communion is used:—a participation or communion of a person is without meaning—a communion in holy and heavenly influences is beautiful and everlasting truth. Such are the only pretences that Trinitarianism puts forth, that it is openly taught in Scripture! We ask for no other passages scripturally to disprove the doctrine.
Let us now attend to that inferential reasoning by which it is attempted to be proved that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are united with the Father, to form three persons in one God. There are some texts in which divine attributes are supposed to be ascribed to Jesus, and the same mode of reasoning being applied to the Holy Spirit, it is inferred that Christ is God, and that the Holy Spirit is God—and that to preserve the consistency of Scripture, it is necessary to maintain both that God is One, and that God is Three. Now I ask, does not this look like a seeking of evidence for the doctrine after Ecclesiastical History had introduced it, under the influences and motives already described, rather than like the natural way in which such a doctrine would break from Revelation itself upon the notice of the world? Had not the doctrine its true origin in human and worldly influences, and then was not an origin sought for it in the Orientalisms of Scripture language? This then is the method of reasoning by which this doctrine, so vast, so awful, if it be true, is attempted to be proved; and upon the soundness of this inferential process does Trinitarianism depend. So that Orthodoxy after all its sneers against the pride of Human Reason, depends for its own life upon the correctness of human reasonings,—and then erects the results of this process of fallible reasoning into the Essentials of Salvation.
There are several passages in which Christ is supposed to be called God, though there is not, I think, one clear instance of such an application of the word; and even if there was, we have Christ’s own interpretation of the only sense in which such language could be applied to him. “Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said ye are gods? if he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the Scripture cannot be broken; say ye of him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world, ‘Thou blasphemest;’ because I said I am the Son of God?”[515]
There are only two passages in the whole gospels, in which the title has ever been supposed to be given to Christ, and these both occurring in the same gospel, so that three of the gospels never were even supposed to have a trace of such language. One of these passages in the Proem of St. John’s Gospel has already been explained in the course of the present Controversy, and the other is the expression of Thomas, who, the moment before he made the exclamation, knew so little of Christ and of Christianity that he would not believe that Jesus was risen from the dead. It is from the lips of the unbeliever of one moment, and the inspired of the next, that we are to receive the high mystery of the Trinity. But in truth the exclamation of Thomas will not bear to be sobered down into a revelation of doctrines—“My Lord, and my God!” The first of these clauses was an exclamation of surprise, a sudden and passionate recognition of Jesus; the second was the natural and immediate transference (common in cases of supernatural impression, with all minds, pious or profane,) of the thoughts of Thomas to that awful and wonder-working God, whose power and presence were so visibly manifested in the resurrection of his Christ. There is no evidence, in the remainder of the gospel, or in the book of the Acts, or throughout the New Testament, that Thomas, or the rest of the Apostles, for a moment believed that Jesus was God. Now, since this was a doctrine that they certainly had no conception of, previous to the death of Christ, there must have been an occasion, when, if true, it broke for the first time on the astonished minds of the disciples. Now is it possible to believe that such an occasion could have passed unmarked—that no amazement, no awe would be expressed—and that as we follow them in their course, we should be unable to distinguish between the moments when they did not, and the moments when they did understand, that the being with whom they had been living in familiar intercourse was the everlasting God? Could such a discovery burst upon any human mind, and that mind manifest no emotion—not a ripple on the current of sentiment and feeling to show when it was that these disciples first began to know that they had been the familiar friends of the living God? I confidently state that the thing is not credible nor possible. The disciples would not have been human, if such things could be. We know that after the ascension, as before, they always speak of him as “the man approved by God, by signs and miracles which God did by him, and whom God raised from the dead?” Do such things admit of explanation from the known course of human sentiments and emotions, if Trinitarianism is true? We think not.
There is another passage in the Gospels supposed to teach the deity of Christ—and hence so far used as an inferential proof of the doctrine of the Trinity:—“I and my Father are one.” Beautiful expression of the soul of Christ, excelled in beauty only by that life which yet more spiritually declared that He and his Father were one, for “what the Son seeth the Father do, these also doeth the Son likewise!” Why are we compelled to examine coldly, or turn an instant from the deep religious meaning of this perfect filial utterance of the Son of God? It expresses that harmony of purpose with God which is the result and peace of the spirit of true religion, and which was perfect in the mind of Jesus, because in him was perfect the spirit of faith in Providence, of trustful submission to his Father’s will. “The cup that my Father hath given me, shall I not drink of it?” Well might he say, and yet how wondrous it is that any being could say, and yet retain his intense humanity, “I and my Father are one!” Clear proof of the inspiration of the Christ! But how the beauty fades away if this very being was God himself, and all his submission of will is but an artifice of words! How hard, artificial, and unlovely, does the ever fresh gospel become when submitted to the tortures of systems, and system-makers! What a difference in genuine spiritual power on the heart of man between Jesus living and dying in the peace of faith, in the trust that a holy God will keep the destinies of a holy mind, that his Providence will recompense the Right—and Jesus not living and dying in the strength of the moral elements of faith, but actually associated with the omniscient mind of God, so as to be an inseparable person! Such should be the difference between the genuine spiritual energy of Unitarian and Trinitarian representations of Christianity.
Jesus, in the context, explains in what sense he uses this beautiful expression, “I and my Father are one,” and he there positively denies that the employment of it implies any claim of equality with God. Let our Lord be his own interpreter, and let the solemn and affecting words I am about to quote, silence for ever the vain plea, that this exquisite expression of the moral sentiment and spirit of Jesus, was intended to be doctrinal and Trinitarian. If so, there is equal proof for all Christians being portions of the Godhead. “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou Father art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us:—and the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one; I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as thou hast loved me.”[516]
The only other passage of any force in which deity is supposed to be accorded to Jesus,[517] I do not notice here, because it has already been abundantly examined in the present Controversy.
I would now call your attention to the precise state of the argument so far as we have advanced in it. We have taken for granted the Unity of God, which no Christian denies. We have found that the belief of three persons in one God is not reconcilable with any human conception of that admitted unity: we have found that there was no direct evidence in the Bible for the doctrine of the Trinity: and lastly, we have examined some of the very strongest passages of Scripture, on which that doctrine is attempted to be established, through an inferential mode of reasoning.
I might stop here then, and without looking at the Scripture evidence against the doctrine, but only the evidence in its favour, declare that such a doctrine could not possibly have such an insufficient publication. The very passages brought forward to sustain it, disprove it. They all speak of derived powers, and of glory communicated. They are all in the strain,—“Therefore God, even his God, hath highly exalted him, and given him a name that is above every name.” Nay, take that passage, than which there is none in which dominion is more emphatically ascribed to Christ, and see how it closes:—“and when all things shall be subdued unto him, then shall the Son also himself be subject unto him that did put all things under him, that God may be all in all.”—1 Cor. xv. 28. We shall not, however, treat Trinitarianism so lightly as to dismiss it, unproved upon its own showing; we shall not rest satisfied with pointing out the insufficiency of its Scriptural authority, but bring against it the overpowering force of opposing Scripture; and as we have given specimens of the biblical evidence for, advance something of the biblical evidence against, the Trinity.
In the first place, then, this doctrine cannot be true, because there are some passages in which it is expressly and plainly declared that the Father alone is the one God, not the Father, and the Son, and the Spirit, but the Father. “Father!—this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent.” “But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in Him, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.”
“There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all.”
“Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no not the angels which are in Heaven; neither the Son, but the Father.”
These declarations are surely sufficient to protect Unitarianism from having no warrant in Scripture. They contain direct, positive, definite assertions; they assert that there is one God, and that Jesus Christ is not that God. It is not possible for human language to express more clearly or more guardedly the simple faith of Unitarian Christianity. Yet we are told that only the ingenuity of heretics has obliged Trinitarians to have recourse to unscriptural language. Strange, certainly, that Holy Writ should have itself expressed the creeds of heresy and damnable error, and rendered it impossible to express in its sacred words the Creeds of Truth!
I quote, in the second place, some passages out of a multitude, in which ideas are connected with Christ which are utterly inconsistent with the supposition of his deity. “I came not to do mine own will.” “I can of myself do nothing.” “If I honour myself, my honour is nothing; it is my Father that honoureth me.”—John viii. 54. “For as the Father hath life in himself, so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself.”—John v. 26. “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father.”—John vi. 57. “I have not spoken of myself, but the Father who sent me, He gave me a commandment what I should say, and what I should speak.”—John xii. 49, 50.
“The word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father’s which sent me.”—John xiv. 24.
“I ascend to my Father and your Father, and to my God and your God.”—John xx. 17.
“When ye have lifted up the Son of man on high, then shall ye know that I am he, and that I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me I speak these things”—John viii. 28.
Ecclesiastical History has already acquainted us with the device that sets aside the plain meaning of these passages. It is said that Jesus Christ had two natures, was composed of two minds, that he was both man and God; and thus does Trinitarianism openly assert mysteries of an opposite character. Three Persons in one Essence is unintelligible enough; but no sooner is this propounded to us, than we are called off to a directly opposite mystery of two Essences in one Person. And here we cannot be put off with the metaphysical sophistry that we do not know the nature of God, for we do know something of the nature of man; and we do say that never was there a greater abuse of the moral meanings of the word Faith, than to set forth, that God’s nature and man’s nature so united together as to form one inseparable person, may be embraced as an object of Faith. The true nature and office of Faith is to carry us from the seen to the unseen,—to give us moral confidence in that world which we do not see, from our moral experience in this world which we do see,—and in that portion of God’s ways which the future conceals, from what we know of that portion of them which the present unfolds. Faith is moral, not metaphysical; and, above all, finds no merit and no efficacy in assenting to unmeaning words.
As before, of the doctrine of the Trinity, so now of this doctrine of the Hypostatic Union, as it is called, I ask for a single hint throughout the New Testament of the inconceivable fact that, in the body of Jesus, resided the mind of God and the mind of man,—two natures, the one finite, the other infinite, yet making but one person,—a difficulty you will perceive the very opposite of that of the Trinity; for whereas it teaches three persons in one nature, this teaches two natures in one person. But we have already traced, in Ecclesiastical History, the origin of this view, and the necessity of its appearance, in subservience to the doctrine of the Trinity.
I will only apply one scriptural test to this theory of the two natures in Christ. And it is one from which Trinitarians cannot escape by their ordinary refuge of avoiding one set of statements by referring them to the humanity of Jesus, and another set of statements by referring them to his deity. It is God the Son, whom Trinitarians represent as becoming incarnate in the body of Jesus; it was God the Son who took humanity into union with deity; therefore whenever Jesus, in his human nature, speaks of the divinity that dwelt within him, inspired him, and wrought through him, it must be God the Son to whom he refers. But this is never the case: Scripture does not know this doctrine, nor support its requisitions. It is always, “the Father who dwelleth in me, He doeth the works.”
It was asserted in Christ Church, that if there is not a plurality of persons in the godhead, the oriental style, “let us make man in our own image,” and the use of the plural where we use the singular, made the word of God an agent of deception, and affected the morality of the divine mind. This is bold language; and, considering the evidence, as unscholarlike as bold. We refrain from a retort in the same spirit. We look with unaffected wonder upon the mind that is reckless enough, and ignorant enough of the sources of error within itself, to dare to say, “if I am not right in my interpretation of Scripture, God is a deceiver.” Yet such men can charge others with making themselves judges of revelation, and saying what God must mean.
I have not taken up that other thread of supposed scriptural intimations, which is thought to connect the Holy Spirit as a third Person in the unity of the godhead. This portion of the argument, strangely neglected by Trinitarians, who generally take for granted the deity and personality of the Holy Ghost as following without debate from the deity of Christ, since three not two is the favourite mythological and theological number, is however to form the subject of a separate Lecture in Christ Church, not yet delivered. Why there should be any necessity, on Trinitarian principles of theology, for a third person in the Godhead to perform “the work,” as it is called, of the spirit of God in communication with man, after the sacrifice of Christ had left the Father’s love free to operate, we cannot perceive, except upon the Platonic principle, that the Supreme One in the Trinity is an Essence perfectly abstracted, immoveable, and without action. Not wishing, however, to anticipate the argument, I shall only adduce one remarkable passage, in proof that the Holy Spirit could not, in the first age of the Gospel, have a deity and personality ascribed to it distinct from the deity and personality of God the Father. When Paul came to Ephesus, he found there some disciples, of whom he inquired,—“Have you received the Holy Ghost since you believed?” The answer is remarkable: “We have not so much as heard whether there be any Holy Ghost.” Now is it possible that the Holy Ghost should be the third person of the Trinity, a constituent person in the Christian God, and that these “believers,” though only disciples of John, should have been uninstructed in the doctrine? The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God, God himself in communication with man, naturally or supernaturally, the enlightening influence of the Spiritual Father revealing Himself to the spiritual nature of His children.
I do not know what may appear convincing to other minds, but to me the Ecclesiastical History of the doctrine of the Trinity, with its rise in human sources of Philosophy and Motive, and not in Revelation, seems a fact capable of being most clearly traced. Rarely indeed does the origin of an error so conspicuously disclose itself: rarely is its course so open to observation. On the other hand, if there is not decisive proof in Scripture of the strict and personal Unity of God, I must think that it is vain to prove any doctrine from the words of the Bible—for sure I am that there is no doctrine more distinctly, more guardedly, more simply, more repeatedly stated, than the great doctrine, that there is One God, and that the Father is that God.
We are told that the “invisible things of God are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godhead.” Yet the Universe reveals no Trinity. Reason knows and requires no Trinity. Natural Religion is not Trinitarian. Scripture speaks of One God the Father, and of One Lord Jesus Christ. Gentile Philosophy and Ecclesiastical History are Trinitarian. In their pages we find this subject. Ecclesiastical History has narrated the rise and progress of these doctrines—and to Ecclesiastical History shall they finally be referred,—when another chapter is added, a chapter that unhappily yet remains to be written, the history of their decline and fall.