6: The Holy Trinity

Off with our shoes, please, for the Holy Trinity is holy ground. Away with finely figured syllogisms and ordinary arithmetic: here, logic and mathematics do not suffice. The need is rather for a listening ear, an obedient heart (John 7:17), rapt adoration, a careful engagement with the Holy Scriptures.

That the one God is three-personed is an audacious conception. Yet it is the confidence which has possessed us Christians ever since it dawned upon us in the days of his sojourn that Jesus Christ too was divine. We have understood that God is three persons existing in a single, uncompounded nature—in structural togetherness; the mid-numbered one in this eternal society being an actual alter ego, as is the Holy Spirit as well; there being three “hims,” three centers of consciousness, but one nature, essence, substance, Godhead.

Call it an intellectual elixir if it must be called that. Discount it as an “incomprehensible jargon” as Thomas Jefferson did. Throw it off as “the fairytale of the three Lord Shaftesburys” as did Matthew Arnold. Nonetheless, this is our confidence.

We cannot comprehend with our natural faculties this threeness in oneness, oneness in threeness. In part, this is because we have no analogies of it where our native faculties are accustomed to function. No three human persons are structurally one, without any hindrance to a full interpenetration of personal life; always there is a core of privacy about human persons. Nor is a human person, even with his intellect, feeling, and will, of such distinct threeness as we understand to obtain in God. We cannot therefore conceive the One Divine Three in man’s image.

Biblical Basis. The doctrine that God is three persons in one substance or essence is first of all an attempt to explain what is revealed in the Holy Scriptures. The unity of God is certainly the indispensable starting point. In the Hebraic-Christian faith there is but one God. Not three, as Roscellin (condemned for tritheism at Soissons in 1092) was inclined to say, but only one. Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Augustine, the Fathers in general and the Schoolmen (excepting Roscellin) and the Reformers—all saw it plainly taught in the Scriptures that there is but one God. Those three New Testament “unity” passages used in the Socinian Racovian Catechism to oppose the threeness (John 17:13; 1 Cor. 8:6; Eph. 4:6) are simply enfolded into the Trinitarian conception, which admits that there is but one God.

And yet the Scriptures differentiate the Deity in a three-personal way. The most common designations are, of course, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The three are referred to at Jesus’ baptism (John 1:27–33). Our baptism too is to be in the name of the three, according to Matthew 28:19. Paul’s benediction enumerates them in 2 Corinthians 13:14. The three are spoken of in John 14–16; Ephesians 2:18; 1 Peter 1:21, 22, and so on. The Son is called God in John 1:1 and 20:28; 1 Timothy 3:16; Hebrews 1:8. That the Holy Spirit is God is implied in Hebrews 9:14; 1 Peter 3:18; 2 Peter 1:21.

After the nature of God was floodlighted by the New Testament revelation, Christians began to see that in the Old Testament there are numerous lesser lights thrown upon God which point to his tri-personality. One of them is the “holy, holy, holy” of Isaiah’s vision in 6:3, when coupled with the “… who will go for us?” of 6:8. Another is the plurality of persons possibly implied in the plural Elohim used so often, even in the Deuteronomy 6:4 “unity” passage; and certainly suggested in such passages as “Let us make man in our image (Gen. 1:26) and “… let us go down, and there confound their language …” (Gen. 11:7).

Creedal Statement. Secondarily, the doctrine of the Tri-Unity has been devised in order to explain our common experience of God. This common experience, shared in great part because of the scriptural disclosure, has been made express in the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian creeds. The Apostles’ Creed is not clearly Trinitarian. From that compact formula, taken by itself, you might think that only the Father is God, as in Arianism and adoptionism. You might read into it Sabellianism, with the Creed’s simple, successive mentions of the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. But the formulation does not state that the three are one, nor that Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are divine. It might be taken as implying that they are not, since the Father and only the Father is referred to as God.

But when you get to the second of the three ecumenical creeds which Western Christianity espouses, the Nicene of A.D. 325, and when you read it with what was added to it on the Holy Spirit in 381, you have a Trinitarianism in which the three are divine and are of one substance. The Athanasian Creed centuries later, named for the fourth century figure most vigorous with a “Nay” to Arius, spells out both the oneness and the threeness much as an anthem conveys and re-conveys its message. At one point that creed affirms, “So the Father is God; the Son is God; and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet there are not three Gods but one God.” It contains the important formula, “… neither confounding the persons, nor dividing the substance.”

In Eastern Christianity, such as Greek Orthodoxy, it is taught, from the earlier version of the Nicene-Constantinople Creed, that the Holy Spirit “proceedeth from the Father,” and not from the Son. In the Athanasian Creed and in Western Christianity in general, it has been taught that the “Holy Ghost is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten; but proceeding.” This surely helps to explain why both “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” appear in Romans 8:9—although some say that the Spirit of Christ is Christ’s spirit, meaning Christ himself, which might tend to a binitarianism (as in the Shepherd of Hermas and in the fourth century Macedonian Heresy) but is actually used to a unitarian purpose. The Western view is also suggested in 1 Peter 1:10, 11, where “the Spirit of Christ” (that is, who proceeds from Christ) is evidently the Holy Spirit and not Christ because through the prophets he “testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ.” A passage in John can be taken as teaching either the single or the double procession of the Spirit, for Jesus says, “But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father …” (15:26).

Myriad Impugners. There have been opposers aplenty as the centuries have passed. Some have been like Sabellius of the early third century, teaching that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three successive ways in which the uni-personal God has manifested himself. Many have been either adoptian or Arian, the latter being in a sense closer to the Trinitarian view in teaching not simply that a man was adopted as God’s son in a special way, but that Christ was the first and highest created being, of like substance with the Father—and the Holy Spirit a less exalted creature. But in neither of these is there participation in human life on the part of the Deity; in neither of them does a God-man die for our sins. God remains alone and aloof, unhurt by our humanity.

Faustus Socinus (d. 1604) was conspicuous for his anti-Trinitarianism and fathered the Unitarians, who have now joined organically with the Universalists. The English Deists, such as Lord Herbert and John Locke, impugned the doctrine and soon Leibniz and Wolff in Germany were also “enlightened.” That country’s Kant, Schleiermacher, and Hegel opposed also, generally in the direction of adoptionism or an impersonal pantheism—although Schleiermacher considered himself to be Sabellian.

The late William Adams Brown of Union Theological Seminary in New York figured that the threeness is simply the way we think about God, not the way in which he exists (Dogmatics in Outline, p. 156). One of the most articulate recent oppositions to the doctrine has come from another Union professor, Cyril C. Richardson (The Doctrine of the Trinity, New York, Abingdon, 1958). Richardson likes to speak of the three as “symbols” (p. 111), not persons. Frequently he calls them “terms” (p. 98). He supposes that the doctrine “often beclouds” (p. 14) “the vital concerns of the Christian faith.” To him it is “an artificial threefoldness” (p. 15). If you are a “thoughtful Christian” you are not supposed to believe in it (p. 14).

Richardson properly credits Leonard Hodgson with giving us one of our superb studies of Trinitarian doctrine (The Doctrine of the Trinity, Scribner’s, 1944). But while Hodgson says that there are three centers of consciousness in God, and that this makes for a more “intensive” unity such as obtains in organisms but not in arithmetic (p. 96), Richardson admits the possibility of the three making for a more intensified unity but asks why Hodgson stops with three centers of consciousness. Richardson suggests, “The logic of this should perhaps have driven Hodgson to posit an infinite number of persons in the Trinity” (p. 113). Hodgson posits only three because both Scripture and the creeds stop there—although Hodgson is like many others so vocal in our time in holding that revelation is in events conceived as divine disclosures rather than also in the biblical records of those events. Like Barth, Hodgson is more orthodox on this doctrine than on the Bible itself.

Not as many are impugning the doctrine of the Trinity now as, say, a generation or two ago, although the eternality of the three persons is often lost in merely modal views. During the late summer of 1960, the 90-member central committee of the World Council of Churches voted to recommend to the 1961 New Delhi World Council meeting that all member denominations confess faith not only in “Jesus Christ as God and Saviour,” as at present; but, along with a few other changes, in “… the one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

A Prize to Promulgate. The doctrine of the Trinity, scripturally supportable and spelled out particularly in the historic creeds, is no doubt the one basic Christian belief, when it is thought of comprehensively so as to include redemption. In one of the few choice books on the subject, Charles W. Lowry calls the conception “… at once the ultimate and the supreme glory of the Christian faith” (The Trinity and Christian Devotion, 1946, p. xi).

There is a richness in the dogma. It means that God is no bare monad but an eternal fellowship. It is exciting to realize that God did not exist in solitary aloneness from all eternity, prior to the creation of the world and man, but in a blessed communion.

Although Jesus Christ is the proper magnetic center of our faith, and although faith in him distinguishes ours from other religions such as Judaism and Unitarianism, we evangelical Protestants are sometimes prone to relegate the Father and the Holy Spirit to lesser importance. It is to be expected that we would feel close to the one who “pitched his tent” among us; who bit dust for us, wept for us, died for us, is coming to translate us. Stressing the deity of Christ as we need to do, we might tend to make the begotten one the first instead of the second person of the Trinity. The three are of equal dignity, majesty, glory, power, eternity. Each has all the divine attributes. But the Father has a priority in eternally generating the Son, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The fact that the incarnated Son obeys the Father, along with the biblical portrayal of the Holy Spirit as peculiarly characterized by personal self-effacement, also points to a priority of the Father. Whereas Jesus said that he and the Father are one (John 10:30), he also said, “My Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). He declared, “For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak” (John 12:49).

One way in which we have tended to give Christ the first-numbered position is by so often directing our prayers to him. Actually, prayer may be made to any one of the persons. But ordinarily, according to our biblical precedent, we should address the Father in Christ’s name and as the Spirit urges us, both in private and in public prayer. Very frequently, however, our private prayers, and often our public ones, are directed to Christ. Often when directed to “God” or to the “Father,” they are concluded “in thy name”—which probably means that we have thought of the prayer as directed to Christ.

A similar tendency to error in evangelical Protestantism lies in the common practice of asking Christ to forgive. He can forgive sins, according to the New Testament (Mark 2:10). But according to the same New Covenant Scriptures, we are ordinarily to think of the Father as forgiving the sinner because Christ by his death assuaged the Father’s holy wrath (Rom. 3:24–26).

Our tendency to give priority to the middle person may be reflected also in our making next to nothing of Trinity Sunday. It is doubtful if a high percentage of evangelical Protestant ministers even know that this festival falls the first Sunday after Pentecost. Because it was inaugurated in the West in 1305 and universally observed after 1334, and since we of the Reformation faith share the belief that God is triune, we might well mark the festival as do the Romanists and the Anglicans.

Bibliography: Augustine, “On the Holy Trinity,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, P. Schaff, ed.; R. S. Franks. The Doctrine of the Trinity; L. Hodgson. The Doctrine of the Trinity; C. Lowry, The Trinity and Christian Devotion; B. B. Warfield, Studies in Tertullian and Augustine.

Assoc. Prof. of Systematic Theology

Nazarene Theological Seminary

Kansas City, Missouri

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