The union of three in one; generally applied to the ineffable mystery of three persons in one God,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This doctrine is rejected by many because it is incomprehensible; but, as Mr. Scott observes, if distinct personality, agency, and divine perfections, be in Scripture ascribed to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, no words can more exactly express the doctrine, which must unavoidably be thence inferred, than those commonly used on this subject, viz. that there are three distinct Persons in the Unity of the Godhead. The sacred oracles most assuredly teach us, that the One living and true God is, in some inexplicable manner, Triune, for he is spoken of, as One in some respects, and as Three in others, Gen 1:26, Gen 2:6-7. Is. 48: 16. Is. 34: 16. 2Co 13:14. Joh 14:23. Mat 28:19. 2Th 3:3. 1Jn 5:7. Act 5:3-4. The Trinity of Persons in the Diety consists with the Unity of the Divine Essence; though we pretend not to explain the modus of it, and deem those reprehensible who have attempted it; as the modus in which any being subsists, according to its distinct nature and known properties, is a secret to the most learned naturalists to this present day, and probably will always continue so. But if the most common of God’s works, with which we are the most conversant, be in this respect incomprehensible, how can men think that the modus existetendi (or manner of existence) of the infinite Creator can be level to their capacities?
The doctrine of the Trinity is indeed a mystery, but no man hath yet shown that it involves in it a real contradiction. Many have ventured to say, that it ought to be ranked with transubstantiation, as equally absurd. But Archbishop Tillotson has shown, by the most convincing arguments imaginable, that transubstantiation includes, the most palpable contradictions; and that we have the evidence of our eyes, feeling, and taste, that what we receive in the Lord’s supper is bread, and not the body of a man; whereas we have the testimony of our eyes alone, that the words "This is my body, " are at all in the Scriptures. Now this in intelligible to the meanest capacity: it is fairly made out, and perfectly unanswerable: but who ever attempted thus to prove the doctrine of the Trinity to be self-contradictory? What testimony of our senses, or what demonstrated truth, does it contradict? Yet till this be shown, it is neither fair nor convincing, to exclaim against it as contradictory, absurd, and irrational."
See articles JESUS CHRIST and HOLY GHOST; also Owen, Watts, Jones, S. Browne, Fawcett, A. Taylor, J. Scott, Sampson, and Wesley’s Pieces on the Subject; Bull’s Defensio Fidei Nicaenae; Dr. Allix’s Testimonies of the Jewish Church; Display of the Trinity by a Layman; Scott’s Essays.
That nearly all the Pagan nations of antiquity, says Bishop Tomline, in their various theological systems, acknowledged a kind of Trinity, has been fully evinced by those learned men who have made the Heathen mythology the subject of their elaborate inquiries. The almost universal prevalence of this doctrine in the Gentile kingdoms must be considered as a strong argument in favour of its truth. The doctrine itself bears such striking internal marks of a divine original, and is so very unlikely to have been the invention of mere human reason that there is no way of accounting for the general adoption of so singular a belief, but by supposing that it was revealed by God to the early patriarchs, and that it was transmitted by them to their posterity. In its progress, indeed, to remote countries, and to distant generations, this belief became depraved and corrupted in the highest degree; and he alone who brought “life and immortality to light,” could restore it to its original simplicity and purity. The discovery of the existence of this doctrine in the early ages, among the nations whose records have been the best preserved, has been of great service to the cause of Christianity, and completely refutes the assertion of infidels and skeptics, that the sublime and mysterious doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the philosophers of Greece. “If we extend,” says Mr. Maurice, “our eye through the remote region of antiquity, we shall find this very doctrine, which the primitive Christians are said to have borrowed from the Platonic school, universally and immemorially flourishing in all those countries where history and tradition have united to fix those virtuous ancestors of the human race, who, for their distinguished attainments in piety, were admitted to a familiar intercourse with Jehovah and the angels, the divine heralds of his commands.” The same learned author justly considers the first two verses of the Old Testament as containing very strong, if not decisive, evidence in support of the truth of this doctrine: Elohim, a noun substantive of the plural number, by which the Creator is expressed, appears as evidently to point toward a plurality of persons in the divine nature, as the verb in the singular, with which it is joined, does to the unity of that nature: “In the beginning God created;” with strict attention to grammatical propriety, the passage should be rendered, “In the beginning Gods created,” but our belief in the unity of God forbids us thus to translate the word Elohim. Since, therefore, Elohim is plural, and no plural can consist of less than two in number, and since creation can alone be the work of Deity, we are to understand by this term so particularly used in this place, God the Father, and the eternal Logos, or Word of God; that Logos whom St. John, supplying us with an excellent comment upon this passage, says, was in the beginning with God, and who also was God. As the Father and the Son are expressly pointed out in the first verse of this chapter, so is the Third Person in the blessed Trinity not less decisively revealed to us in Gen 1:2: “And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters:” “brooded upon” the water, incubavit, as a hen broods over her eggs. Thus we see the Spirit exerted upon this occasion an active effectual energy, by that energy agitating the vast abyss, and infusing into it a powerful vital principle.
Elohim seems to be the general appellation by which the Triune Godhead is collectively distinguished in Scripture; and in the concise history of the creation only, the expression, bara Elohim, “the Gods created,” is used above thirty times. The combining this plural noun with a verb in the singular would not appear so remarkable, if Moses had uniformly adhered to that mode of expression; for then it would be evident that he adopted the mode used by the Gentiles in speaking of their false gods in the plural number, but by joining with it a singular verb or adjective, rectified a phrase that might appear to give a direct sanction to the error of polytheism. But, in reality, the reverse is the fact; for in Deu 32:15; Deu 32:17, and other places, he uses the singular number of this very noun to express the Deity, though not employed in the August work of creation: “He forsook God,” Eloah; “they sacrificed to devils, not to God,” Eloah. But farther, Moses himself uses this very word Elohim with verbs and adjectives in the plural. Of this usage Dr. Allix enumerates many other striking instances that might be brought from the Pentateuch; and other inspired writers use it in the same manner in various parts of the Old Testament, Job 35:10; Jos 24:19; Psa 109:1; Ecc 12:3; 2Sa 7:23. It must appear, therefore, to every reader of reflection, exceedingly singular, that when Moses was endeavouring to establish a theological system, of which the unity of the Godhead was the leading principle, and in which it differed from all other systems, he should make use of terms directly implicative of a plurality in it; yet so deeply was the awful truth under consideration impressed upon the mind of the Hebrew legislator, that this is constantly done by him; and, indeed, as Allix has observed, there is scarcely any method of speaking from which a plurality in Deity may be inferred, that is not used either by himself in the Pentateuch, or by the other inspired writers in various parts of the Old Testament. A plural is joined with a verb singular, as in the passage cited before from Gen 1:1; a plural is joined with a verb plural, as in Gen 35:7, “And Jacob called the name of the place El- beth-el, because the Gods there appeared to him;” a plural is joined with an adjective plural, Jos 24:19, “You cannot serve the Lord; for he is the holy Gods.” To these passages, if we add that remarkable one from Ecclesiastes, “Remember thy Creators in the days of thy youth,” and the predominant use of the terms, Jehovah Elohim, or, the “Lord thy Gods,” which occur a hundred times in the law, (the word Jehovah implying the unity of the essence, and Elohim a plurality in that unity,) we must allow that nothing can be more plainly marked than this doctrine in the ancient Scriptures.
Though the August name of Jehovah in a more peculiar manner belongs to God the Father, yet is that name, in various parts of Scripture, applied to each person in the holy Trinity. The Hebrews considered that name in so sacred a light, that they never pronounced it, and used the word Adonai instead of it. It was, indeed a name that ranked first among their profoundest cabbala; a mystery, sublime, ineffable, incommunicable. It was called tetragrammaton, or the name of four letters, and these letters are jod, he, vau, he, the proper pronunciation of which, from long disuse, is said to be no longer known to the Jews themselves. This awful name was first revealed by God to Moses from the centre of the burning bush; and Josephus, who, as well as Scripture, relates this circumstance, evinces his veneration for it, by calling it the name which his religion did not permit him to mention. From this word the Pagan title of Iao and Jove is, with the greatest probability, supposed to have been originally formed; and in the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, there is an oath still extant to this purpose, “By Him who has the four letters.” As the name Jehovah, however, in some instances applied to the Son and the Holy Spirit, was the proper name of God the Father, so is Logos in as peculiar a manner the appropriated name of God the Son. The Chaldee Paraphrasts translate the original Hebrew text by Mimra da Jehovah, literally, “the word of Jehovah,” a term totally different, as Bishop Kidder has incontestably proved, in its signification, and in its general application among the Jews, from the Hebrew dabar, which simply means a discourse or decree, and is properly rendered by pithgam. In the Septuagint translation of the Bible, a work supposed by the Jews to have been undertaken by men immediately inspired from above, the former term is universally rendered
The first passage to be adduced from the New Testament in proof of this important doctrine of the Trinity, is, the charge and commission which our Saviour gave to his apostles, to “go and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost,”
Mat 28:19. The Gospel is every where in Scripture represented as a covenant or conditional offer of eternal salvation from God to man; and baptism was the appointed ordinance by which men were to be admitted into that covenant, by which that offer was made and accepted. This covenant being to be made with God himself, the ordinance must of course be performed in his name; but Christ directed that it should be performed in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; and therefore we conclude that God is the same as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Since baptism is to be performed in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, they must be all three persons; and since no superiority or difference whatever is mentioned in this solemn form of baptism, we conclude that these three persons are all of one substance, power, and eternity. Are we to be baptized in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, and is it possible that the Father should be self-existent, eternal, the Lord God Omnipotent; and that the Son, in whose name we are equally baptized, should be a mere man, born of a woman, and subject to all the frailties and imperfections of human nature? or, is it possible that the Holy Ghost, in whose name also we are equally baptized, should be a bare energy or operation, a quality or power, without even personal existence? Our feelings, as well as our reason, revolt from the idea of such disparity.
This argument will derive great strength from the practice of the early ages, and from the observations which we meet with in several of the ancient fathers relative to it. We learn from Ambrose, that persons at the time of their baptism, declared their belief in the three persons of the Holy Trinity, and that they were dipped in the water three times. In his Treatise upon the Sacraments he says, “Thou wast asked at thy baptism, Dost thou believe in God the Father Almighty? and thou didst reply, I believe, and thou wast dipped; and a second time thou wast asked, Dost thou believe in Jesus Christ the Lord? thou didst answer again, I believe, and thou wast dipped; a third time the question was repeated, Dost thou believe in the Holy Ghost? and the answer was, I believe, then thou wast dipped a third time.” It is to be noticed, that the belief, here expressed separately, in the three persons of the Trinity, is precisely the same in all. Tertullian, Basil, and Jerom, all mention this practice of trine immersion as ancient; and Jerom says, “We are thrice dipped in the water, that the mystery of the Trinity may appear to be but one. We are not baptized in the names of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but in one name, which is God’s; and, therefore, though we be thrice put under water to represent the mystery of the Trinity, yet it is reputed but one baptism.” Thus the mysterious union of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, as one God, was, in the opinion of the purer ages of the Christian church, clearly expressed in this form of baptism. By it the primitive Christians understood the Father’s gracious acceptance of the atonement offered by the Messiah; the peculiar protection of the Son, our great High Priest and Intercessor; and the readiness of the Holy Ghost to sanctify, to assist, and to comfort all the obedient followers of Christ, confirmed by the visible gift of tongues, of prophecy, and divers other gifts to the first disciples. And as their great Master’s instructions evidently distinguished these persons from each other, without any difference in their authority or power, all standing forth as equally dispensing the benefits of Christianity, as equally the objects of the faith required in converts upon admission into the church, they clearly understood that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, were likewise equally the objects of their grateful worship: this fully appears from their prayers, doxologies, hymns, and creeds, which are still extant.
The second passage to be produced in support of the doctrine now under consideration, is, the doxology at the conclusion of St. Paul’s Second Epistle to the Corinthians, “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with you.” The manner in which Christ and the Holy Ghost are here mentioned, implies that they are persons, for none but persons can confer grace or fellowship; and these three great blessings of grace, love, and fellowship, being respectively prayed for by the inspired apostle from Jesus Christ, God the Father, and the Holy Ghost, without any intimation of disparity, we conclude that these three persons are equal and Divine. This solemn benediction may therefore be considered as another proof of the Trinity, since it acknowledges the divinity of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Ghost. The third passage is the following salutation or benediction in the beginning of the Revelation of St. John: “Grace and peace from Him which is, and which was, and which is to come; and from the seven spirits which are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ.” Here the Father is described by a periphrasis taken from his attribute of eternity; and “the seven spirits” is a mystical expression for the Holy Ghost, used upon this occasion either because the salutation is addressed to seven churches, every one of which had partaken of the Spirit. or because seven was a sacred number among the Jews, denoting both variety and perfection, and in this case alluding to the various gifts, administrations, and operations of the Holy Ghost. Since grace and peace are prayed for from these three persons jointly and without discrimination, we infer an equality in their power to dispense those blessings; and we farther conclude that these three persons together constitute the Supreme Being, who is alone the object of prayer, and is alone the Giver of every good and of every perfect gift. It might be right to remark, that the seven spirits cannot mean angels, since prayers are never in Scripture addressed to angels, nor are blessings ever pronounced in their name. It is unnecessary to quote any of the numerous passages in which the Father is singly called God, as some of them must be recollected by every one, and the divinity of the Father is not called in question by any sect of Christians; and those passages which prove the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Ghost separately, will be more properly, considered under those heads. In the mean time we may observe, that if it shall appear from Scripture, that Christ is God, and the Holy Ghost is God, it will follow, since we are assured that there is but one God, that the three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, by a mysterious union, constitute the one God, or, as it is expressed in the first article of the church of England: “There is a Trinity in Unity; and in the unity of this Godhead there be three Persons of one substance, power, and eternity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”
The word Trinity does not occur in Scripture, nor do we find it in any of the early confessions of faith; but this is no argument against the doctrine itself, since we learn from the fathers of the first three centuries, that the divinity of the Son and of the Holy Ghost was, from the days of the Apostles, acknowledged by the catholic church, and that those who maintained a contrary opinion were considered as heretics; and as every one knows that neither the divinity of the Father, nor the unity of the Godhead, was ever called in question at any period, it follows that the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity has been in substance, in all its constituent parts, always known among Christians. In the fourth century it became the subject of eager and general controversy; and it was not till then that this doctrine was particularly discussed. While there was no denial or dispute, proof and defence were unnecessary: Nunquid enim perfecte de Trinitate tractatum est, antequam oblatrarent Ariani? But this doctrine is positively mentioned as being admitted among catholic Christians, by writers who lived long before that age of controversy. Justin Martyr, in refuting the charge of atheism urged against Christians, because they did not believe in the gods of the Heathen, expressly says, “We worship and adore the Father, and the Son who came from him and taught us these things, and the prophetic Spirit;” and soon after, in the same apology, he undertakes to show the reasonableness of the honour paid by Christians to the Father in the first place, to the Son in the second, and to the Holy Ghost in the third; and says, that their assigning the second place to a crucified man, was, by unbelievers, denominated madness, because they were ignorant of the mystery, which he then proceeds to explain. Athenagoras, in replying to the same charge of atheism urged against Christians, because they refused to worship the false gods of the Heathen, says “Who would not wonder, when he knows that we, who call upon God the Father, and God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, showing their power in the unity, and their distinction in order, should be called atheists?” Clement of Alexandria not only mentions three divine persons, but invokes them as one only God. Praxeas, Sabellius, and other Unitarians, accused the orthodox Christians of tritheism, which is of itself a clear proof that the orthodox worshipped the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and though in reality they considered these three persons as constituting the one true God, it is obvious that their enemies might easily represent that worship as an acknowledgment of three Gods. Tertullian, in writing against Praxeas, maintains, that a Trinity rationally conceived is consistent with truth, and that unity irrationally conceived forms heresy. He had before said, in speaking of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, that “there are three of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power, because there is one God:” and he afterward adds, “The connection of the Father in the Son, and of the Son in the Comforter, makes three united together, the one with the other; which three are one thing, not one person; as it is said, I and the Father are one thing, with regard to the unity of substance, not to the singularity of number:” and he also expressly says, “The Father is God, and the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God;” and again, “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, believed to be three, constitute one God.” And in another part of his works he says, “There is a Trinity of one Divinity, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” And Tertullian not only maintains these doctrines, but asserts that they were prior to any heresy, and had, indeed, been the faith of Christians from the first promulgation of the Gospel. To these writers of the second century, we may add Origen and Cyprian in the third; the former of whom mentions baptism (alluding to its appointed form) as “the source and fountain of graces to him who dedicates himself to the divinity of the adorable Trinity.” And the latter, after reciting the same form of baptism, says that “by it Christ delivered the doctrine of the Trinity, unto which mystery or sacrament the nations were to be baptized.” It would be easy to multiply quotations upon this subject; but these are amply sufficient to show the opinions of the early fathers, and to refute the assertion that the doctrine of the Trinity was an invention of the fourth century. To these positive testimonies may be subjoined a negative argument: those who acknowledged the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Ghost, are never called heretics by any writer of the first three centuries; and this circumstance is surely a strong proof that the doctrine of the Trinity was the doctrine of the primitive church; more especially, since the names of those who first denied the divinity of Christ and of the Holy Ghost, are transmitted to us as of persons who dissented from the common faith of Christians.
But while we contend that the doctrine of the Trinity in Unity is founded in Scripture, and supported by the authority of the early Christians, we must acknowledge that it is not given to man to understand in what manner the three persons are united, or how, separately and jointly, they are God. It would, perhaps, have been well, if divines, in treating this awful and mysterious subject, had confined themselves to the expressions of Scripture; for the moment we begin to explain it beyond the written word of God, we plunge ourselves into inextricable difficulties. And how can it be otherwise? Is it to be expected that our finite understandings should be competent to the full comprehension of the nature and properties of an infinite Being? “Can we find out the Almighty to perfection,” Job 11:7; or penetrate into the essence of the Most High? “God is a Spirit,” Joh 4:24, and our gross conceptions are but ill-adapted to the contemplation of a pure and spiritual Being. We know not the essence of our own mind, nor the precise distinction of its several faculties; and why then should we hope to comprehend the personal characters which exist in the Godhead? “If I tell you earthly things, and you understand them not, how shall ye understand if I tell you heavenly things?” When we attempt to investigate the nature of the Deity, whose existence is commensurate with eternity, by whose power the universe was created, and by whose wisdom it is governed; whose presence fills all space, and whose knowledge extends to the thoughts of every man in every age, and to the events of all places, past, present, and to come, the mind is quickly lost in the vastness of these ideas, and, unable to find any sure guide to direct its progress, it becomes, at every step, more bewildered and entangled in the endless mazes of metaphysical abstraction. “God is a God that hideth himself.” “We cannot by searching find out God.” “Behold, God is great, and we know him not,”
Job 23:9; Job 11:7; Job 36:26. “Such knowledge is too wonderful and excellent for us; it is high; we cannot attain unto it,” Psa 139:6. It is for us, simply and in that docile spirit which becomes us, to receive the testimony of God as to himself, and to fix ourselves upon that firmest of all foundations, and most rational of all evidence, “Thus saith the Lord.”
Trinity. This word does not occur in Scripture. As a fact the Scripture reveals the doctrine of the Trinity in two ways: first in passages in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are mentioned together as God; and secondly, in passages which speak of each as divine. In the New Testament clear evidence is given. See Mat 3:16-17; Mat 28:19; 1Co 12:3-6; 2Co 13:14; Eph 4:4-6; Tit 3:4-6; 1Pe 1:2; Jud 1:20-21. These passages, carefully read, are sufficient to prove that "the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is one, the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal; such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Ghost; the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God; and yet they are not three Gods, but one God."
A word only used to convey the thought of a plurality of Persons in the Godhead. This was revealed at the baptism of the Lord Jesus. The Holy Spirit descended ’like a dove’ and abode upon Him; and God the Father declared "This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased." That the Father is a distinct Person and is God is plainly stated, as in Joh 20:17. Many passages prove that the Lord Jesus is God: one will suffice: ". . . . in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God, and eternal life." 1Jn 5:20. That the Holy Spirit is a Person and is God the following passages clearly prove: Gen 1:2; Mat 4:1; Joh 16:13; Act 10:19; Act 13:2; Act 13:4; Act 20:28; Rom 15:30; 1Co 2:10. The three Persons are also named in the formula instituted by Christ in baptism. Mat 28:19. Yet there is but one God. 1Ti 2:5. Satan will have an imitation of the Trinity in the Roman beast, the false prophet, and himself. Rev 13:4; Rev 13:11; Rev 20:10.
TRINITY.—Our subject is the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in relation to Christ and the Gospels. We have to consider how far that great conception of God’s being and nature is revealed or implied in the fact of Christ as presented in the Gospels and in the teaching of our Lord Himself.
I. The witness of our Lord’s consciousness as revealed in the Gospels
(i.) As regards Himself.—It was not our Lord’s custom to take to Himself the names and titles to which He knew He had a right. The passage which exhibits this fact most clearly is that in which we find Him questioning His disciples, first as to the popular opinion, and then as to their own belief (Mat 16:13 ff., Mar 8:27 ff., Luk 9:18 ff.). After St. Peter had made his great confession, our Lord charged the disciples to keep the truth which had just emerged, to themselves. No doubt He desired to avoid the mistakes arising from the popular conceptions of the Messiah. He wished also to train the minds of the disciples, to lead them gently from truth to truth, so that spiritual experience might keep pace with knowledge. And yet our Lord’s thoughts about Himself were loftier far than could be imagined from the mere names and titles which He acknowledged. When the passages which contain His statements about His own relation to God and man are collected and viewed as a whole, they are found to imply claims which are far in advance of the first and more obvious meanings of the titles.
It is being more and more fully recognized by critical students of the life of Jesus that He certainly regarded Himself as the Messiah, and that the names and titles by which He described Himself and permitted others to describe Him are Messianic in their significance. But when this has been granted to the full, there remains a very large proportion of His self-revelation unaccounted for. Bousset considers that the reserve of our Lord on the subject of His Messiahship was due to His deep sense of the inadequacy of the Messianic title for that which He felt Himself to be (Jesus, p. 175 ff., English translation ). And certain it is that, among all the conceptions which clustered round the Jewish anticipation of the Messiah, none is great enough, none deep enough, to correspond with the revelation of Himself which our Lord makes in the Gospels. (See art. ‘Development of Doctrine’ in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible , Ext. Vol.; Charles, ‘Enoch’ and ‘Eschatology’ in vol. i.; also Briggs, The Messiah of the Gospels). True, we have the great OT conceptions of the later Isaiah and of the Book of Daniel, and we have the latter repeated, and in some respects enlarged, in the Similitudes of Enoch. In this probably pre-Christian work there is a wonderful picture of the Son of Man, which corresponds remarkably with certain passages in the Gospels. He is, as it seems, regarded as pre-existent, was named in the presence of God before creation, and takes part in judgment. But there is no anticipation of that extraordinary union of earthly humiliation with transcendent relationship to God the Father which is the principal deliverance of our Lord’s consciousness concerning Himself. The truth is that the difficulty of representing that consciousness by means of the understood and recognized terms of the religion and theology of the day was almost inconceivably great.
It was this very inadequacy of all existing conceptions to convey the truth of our Lord’s Person in His relation to God and man which rendered necessary that careful and patient handling of the faith of the disciples which we find everywhere in His dealing with them. A spiritual experience of a new kind had to be created before the new language could be learned. The new wine needed new bottles. The first danger to be guarded against was a premature precision, a hasty definition. The one title which our Lord constantly used of Himself, ‘the Son of Man,’ most skilfully avoided anything of the nature of definition. Messianic in its associations, it was yet not so distinctively Messianic as to constitute a claim, and it was capable of infinite suggestion, according to its application and context. It was a continual challenge to reflexion. See art. Son of Man above and in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible .
These reflexions will help us to discern the true nature of the problem which is presented by our Lord’s revelation of Himself. The facts of that problem may be summarized as follows, the Synoptic evidence and that of the Fourth Gospel being exhibited separately.
(1) Direct statements or claims to a position or authority more than human.—The strongest passage in the Synoptics is the solemn declaration recorded by Mt. (Mat 11:27) and Lk. (Luk 10:22), ‘All things have been delivered unto me of my Father: and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him.’
These words form the most striking connecting link between the Christology of the Synoptics and that of the Fourth Gospel. But they do not, as some critics would have us believe, stand alone. On the contrary, they but sum up teaching which may be found everywhere, expressed or implied. In many places our Lord speaks of His mission from God in a manner which sets Him above and apart from men (Mat 20:28, Mar 9:37; Mar 10:45, Luk 9:48, Mat 28:18 etc.). He is King in a superhuman sense of the term (Mat 24:30 ff; Mat 25:34; Mat 25:40, Mar 15:2, Luk 19:38-40; Luk 22:29; Luk 23:2-3). He is Judge of all and Lord of the future (Mat 25:31 ff; Mat 16:27; Mat 19:28; Mat 26:64, Mar 8:38; Mar 13:26-27; Mar 14:62, Luk 9:26; Luk 12:8-9; Luk 12:40 ff., Luk 13:25 ff., Luk 17:30; Luk 21:36; Luk 22:69 etc.). He is David’s Lord (Mat 22:43-45, Mar 12:35 ff., Luk 20:44). He is higher than the angels (Mar 13:32). He demands the most complete devotion as His right, and the most extreme self-sacrifice (Mat 8:22; Mat 10:32-33; Mat 10:37; Mat 10:39; Mat 11:29; Mat 16:24; Mat 16:26; Mat 26:10 ff., Mar 8:34 ff; Mar 10:29, Luk 9:23 ff; Luk 14:26 ff; Luk 21:12 ff. etc.). These passages express the Divine claim upon the loyalty of mankind in terms which could not be surpassed. So it is that our Lord declares Himself greater than the Temple (Mat 12:6), Lord of the Sabbath (Mat 12:8, Mar 2:28), greater than Solomon (Mat 12:42).
In the Fourth Gospel this great claim of Christ occupies a much larger space, and is more explicit and more fully stated, but it is a mistake to suppose that it is more strongly expressed. Such a passage as Joh 5:22-23 ‘He hath given all judgment unto the Son; that all may honour the Son even as they honour the Father,’ is very definite, but it is only putting into general terms the teaching of Mat 10:37; Mat 25:31 ff., Mar 8:34-38, Luk 14:26. The tremendous statement in Joh 10:30 ‘I and the Father are one,’ summing up as it does the teaching of the whole Gospel, finds perhaps its most perfect explication in Mat 11:27, Luk 10:22. The great section, John 14-17, is but the further development of the same doctrine, introducing, as was necessary, the promise of the Holy Spirit and certain fundamental instruction concerning His function and work.
(2) When from direct statements made by our Lord Himself we pass to the revelation of His consciousness of His unique relation to God which is to be found implied in His life and methods, we are able to note the following:
(a) The unvarying tone of authority which characterizes all His actions and utterances—authority as regards the greatest subjects which have ever engaged the mind of man. See, further, artt. Authority of Christ and Claims of Christ.
(b) The serene certainty of His judgments upon the greatest questions of morality and religion. This characteristic is most noticeable in the Sermon on the Mount, and in all those parts of His teaching which deal with His own relation to God, and God’s love to man. All the highest and greatest things are to Him easy and familiar. He walks upon the mountain peaks of vision with unhesitating confidence. He speaks as One who sees clearly into the heart of God. Examples will be found in the following passages:
Mat 5:43 ff; Mat 6:25-34; Mat 7:7-12; Mat 11:20-30; Mat 12:30-37; Mat 17:20; Mat 18:7-14; Mat 22:19-21; Mat 22:29-33; Mat 23:37, Mar 2:18-22; Mar 2:27; Mar 9:33-50; Mar 10:42-45; Mar 14:3-9, Luk 2:49; Luk 4:21; Luk 7:22-23; Luk 7:47-50; Luk 10:24-37; Luk 10:15; Luk 17:4; Luk 17:10; Luk 17:20-21; Luk 18:9-14, Joh 3:3; Joh 4:24; Joh 5:17; Joh 14:2 etc.
(c) He never prays with His disciples. He teaches them to pray, He prays for them, but not with them. (See Chadwick, Christ bearing witness to Himself, pp. 104, 105; and Forrest, The Christ of History and of Experience, p. 22 ff., and Appendix to 5th ed.). We read of solitary prayers (Mar 6:45-48, Joh 6:15).
(d) The harmonious combination of opposite qualities in His character.—Characteristics which would be incompatible in any one else unite freely and with perfect consistency in Him. Here is perhaps the strongest proof of the absolute truth of the portrait presented in the Gospels. Nothing but the strength and reality of the Personality which inspired the various accounts could have made such a result possible. See, further, artt. Character of Christ, Divinity of Christ, Mental Characteristics.
(ii.) His relation to the Father
(1) Our Lord asserts and implies that He stands in a relation of unique intimacy with God the Father. The great passage already quoted (Mat 11:27, Luk 10:22) is the fullest statement in the Synoptics. The language here associates the Son with the Father in a manner which exalts Him above all creation. It corresponds with certain characteristic phrases and mental habits of our Lord. For example, He calls God ‘my Father’ in a manner which sets the relation indicated by the words far apart from that Fatherhood which He attributes to God in relation to men, whether disciples or not: see Mat 7:21; Mat 10:32-33; Mat 11:27; Mat 15:13; Mat 18:10; Mat 20:23 etc., Mar 8:38, Luk 2:49; Luk 22:29; Luk 24:49, Joh 5:17; Joh 10:29-30; Joh 14:20; Joh 20:17 etc. These passages but supply the correlative to the announcement at the Baptism and the Transfiguration (Mar 1:11; Mar 9:7). They also interpret for us the title ‘Son of God’ attributed to Him and accepted by Him (Mat 4:3; Mat 4:6; Mat 8:29; Mat 14:33; Mat 27:40; Mat 27:43; Mat 27:54, Mar 3:11; Mar 12:6-8; Mar 15:39, Luk 4:41; Luk 22:70, Joh 1:34; Joh 1:49; Joh 9:35; Joh 11:27 etc.).
In connexion with this we observe the cloudless serenity of His relation to God. It has been remarked that the absence of any note of repentance is the strongest proof of our Lord’s perfect sinlessness. But we have in His life the marks of a moral state which is very much more than mere sinlessness. The value of the negative is entirely relative to the corresponding positive. The perfect innocence of a soul which possessed but small moral capacity would, so far as we can see, be of but little value as a moral factor in the universe. But, in the case of our Lord, we find a moral capacity which is absolutely without parallel in human experience, and we find the moral Being who possesses this capacity not merely conscious of innocence, but living a life which is wittingly and willingly all that God would have it be (see Forrest, op. cit., Lect. I.).
(2) Unity with the Father.—The revelation which our Lord gives us of His relation to the Father amounts to much more than a manifestation of a peculiar intimacy between Himself and God. He claims distinctly certain Divine attributes and privileges. He is King and Judge of all. He is to be the object of the most absolute trust, the utmost devotion. No sacrifice is too great to be made for His sake (see above). To reject Him or His messengers is to reject God and to incur the severest judgment (Mat 10:15; Mat 10:40; Mat 11:22; Mat 11:24, Mar 12:9, Luk 10:13-14; Luk 10:16; Luk 13:34-35 etc.). The right of the Almighty to supremacy over the hearts and lives of men could not be expressed in stronger terms than those in which Jesus claims human allegiance. The only possible explanation of His attitude is that given by His own words, ‘All things have been delivered unto me of my Father’ (Mat 11:27, Luk 10:22).
When we turn to the Fourth Gospel, we find this teaching expressed with a fulness and clearness of statement which ought not to appear extraordinary. There must surely have been an inner side to such a life as we find portrayed from the outside in the Synoptics. If the external accounts give so many indications of a unique relation to God, the revelation of the inner life of the wonderful Personality must display that relation with special clearness. What is truly extraordinary is that the inner history, as we have it in St. John’s Gospel, does not reveal any essential element which cannot be found, expressed or implied, in the external histories (see above). And this is the more remarkable when we consider that the method and style of the Fourth Gospel contrast so strongly with those of the others.
From St. John we learn then to think of our Lord: (1) As One who came from God, with whom He was before, on a mission of mercy to mankind, Joh 3:11-14; Joh 3:16-17; Joh 3:31 ff., Joh 5:24; Joh 5:30; Joh 5:43; Joh 6:29; Joh 6:32-33 ff., Joh 6:62; Joh 7:16; Joh 7:28 etc. Joh 8:23; Joh 8:42 etc Joh 16:28 ff. (2) As One whose relation to the Father is essential and unique, Joh 3:13; Joh 3:18; Joh 3:34, Joh 5:17-18; Joh 5:23; Joh 5:26, Joh 6:57, Joh 8:16, Joh 10:15; Joh 10:38, Joh 14:7; Joh 14:11. (3) As the only-begotten Son of God, Joh 3:16; Joh 3:18, and see Joh 1:14; Joh 1:18 (in Joh 1:18 the stronger
This classification of passages enables us to pass along an ascending plane of thought to that great doctrine which is so comprehensively and yet so briefly expressed in the Prologue to the Gospel. We learn that the Evangelist intended us to gather that the conception of the Logos which is there presented is the true and necessary implication of our Lord’s consciousness of Himself and His work in relation to God and the world.
II. The revelation of God in the Gospels
(i.) The Father.—We must never forget that Christianity was built upon the foundation of Jewish monotheism. A long providential discipline had secured to the Jewish people their splendid heritage of faith in the One and Only God. ‘Hear, O Israel, Jehovah our God is one Jehovah: and thou shalt love Jehovah thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might’ (Deu 6:4 f.). This was the corner-stone of the religion of Israel. These were perhaps the most familiar of all sacred words to the ears of the pious Jew. They were recited continually. Our Lord Himself had them frequently in His mind (Mat 22:37, Mar 12:29-30, Luk 10:27). That He thought of God always as the Supreme One is unquestionable. Indeed the very idea of Fatherhood, which, with our Lord, is the characteristic conception, and which is capable of being presented in a way which might weaken or injure a true monotheism, becomes in His teaching absolutely monotheistic because absolutely universal (see Mat 5:45; Mat 5:48; Mat 7:11; Mat 8:11; Mat 10:29, Luk 6:35; Luk 13:29-30; Luk 13:15). To the Jewish mind, the sovereignty of God was the natural and characteristic thought. In our Lord’s teaching the Divine Fatherhood overshadows and also transforms the Divine sovereignty, but never threatens to dissolve the pure and splendid monotheism of the original doctrine.
There are three degrees of the Divine Fatherhood presented in the teaching of our Lord: God is the universal Father (see reff. given above); He is, in a very intimate and special way, the Father of the disciples of Jesus (Mat 5:16; Mat 6:1; Mat 6:8-9 ff., Mat 7:11, Luk 12:32 etc.); He is, in the highest, and unique, sense, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (see above).
It is evident that our Lord makes a very clear distinction between His own Sonship and the relationship in which others, even the most faithful of disciples, stand towards God. Yet, in thus setting Himself apart as the Son of God, He was in truth providing that very element which was required to form a connecting link between the Divine and the human. The great danger of monotheism is its tendency towards a transcendence which removes man to an infinite distance: God and man seem to stand apart from one another in hopeless opposition. Such was the tendency of the Jewish conception in the time of our Lord. (See art. ‘God (in NT)’ by Dr. Sanday in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible ).
We find, then, that the teaching of our Lord and of the Gospels concerning God is the union of a true and unwavering monotheism with a great doctrine of mediation, according to which God and man enter into very close relationship in the Person of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
(ii.) The Son
(1) The Son is a distinct Person from the Father.—It is easy to complicate this question by a discussion of the meaning of the word ‘personality.’ The Latin word persona was chosen to represent the Greek
Certain passages express this very distinctly: Mar 13:32 ‘Of that day and that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’ These words are usually considered in connexion with the doctrine of the kenosis (wh. see). But they are quite as important as a testimony to our Lord’s consciousness of His own Divine Sonship. Here we find Him placing Himself above the angels in heaven, next to the Eternal Father, and the fact of His ignorance of the great secret noted as extraordinary. The truth is that the implications of this passage involve a Christology which agrees perfectly with the teaching of St. John. There is, however, the clear assertion of the subordination of the Son; and even if His ignorance of the great day be regarded as temporary, part of the limitation involved in His humiliation while on earth, none the less the assertion remains.
Secondly, especial mention may be made of Joh 14:23 ‘The Father is greater than I.’ As Coleridge observes (see Table Talk, 1st May 1823), these words, which have been used to supply an argument against the orthodox creed, contain, in truth, a very strong implication of our Lord’s Divinity. For a mere man to say, ‘God is greater than I,’ would be monstrous or absurd. Comparison is possible only between things of the same nature. While, therefore, the assertion implies the Divinity, it is a direct statement of the filial subordination of the Son. It is remarkable that, in this statement, our Lord uses the emphatic ‘I,’ as in Joh 8:58 (
(b) The derivative nature of the Son’s Divinity.—We are left in no doubt as to what is the essential nature of this subordination. The Son derives His being, His knowledge, His power, His active life, at every moment, from the Father. For the detailed proof of this we are mainly dependent upon the Fourth Gospel. But here the range of passages which may be adduced is extraordinary.
‘The Son can do nothing of himself’ (Joh 5:19); ‘As the Father hath life in himself, even so gave he to the Son also to have life in himself’ (Joh 5:26); ‘I can of myself do nothing’ (Joh 5:30); ‘I am come down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me’ (Joh 6:38); ‘I do nothing of myself’ (Joh 8:28); ‘I spoke not from myself; but the Father which sent me, he hath given me a commandment, what I should say and what I should speak’ (Joh 12:49); ‘The Father abiding in me doeth his works’ (Joh 14:10); ‘Thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee’ (Joh 17:21)
(c) The kenosis.—It is this derivative nature of the Son’s Divinity which helps us to realize that the limitations to which He submitted during His life on earth involved no breach of His Divine identity. Our ordinary experience teaches us that the limitation of our powers does not destroy our identity. If we shut our eyes, we impose upon ourselves voluntarily a limitation which, while it lasts, diminishes very considerably our hold upon reality; yet we continue to be the same identical persons that we were before, and that we shall be again when the voluntary limitation has come to an end. But it is hard to imagine anything similar in the case of the Eternal Source of all being. All that is depends on Him, and any reduction or limitation of His power is inconceivable. Certainly that would seem to be the case, when we think of the Eternal Father. But surely it is different with the Eternal Son. His Divinity is derivative, dependent from moment to moment upon the Father: and therefore there is no difficulty in accepting what seems to be a necessary inference from the facts of the Gospel history, that, during our Lord’s life on earth, there took place a limitation of the Divine effluence. Nor is it necessary to suppose that this limitation was always the same in extent or degree. Here may be the explanation of the awful cry, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Such a view is not inconsistent with the declaration of St. Paul that ‘it was the good pleasure of the Father that in him should all fulness dwell,’ the whole
Both speculatively and historically the Incarnation is the starting-point for that course of thought which leads inevitably to the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity. As soon as Christian thinkers came to realize that the Christ is the Son of God as being the Incarnate Divine Logos, their thought was launched upon that vast speculation as to the nature of God, and especially as to the relation of the Son to the Father, which occupied the minds of theologians during the earlier centuries of Church history.
(iii.) The Holy Ghost.—For a general statement of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit the reader may be referred to art. Holy Spirit in vol. i. and the corresponding art. in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible . Here a briefer and more limited treatment must suffice.
(1) The evidence of the Synoptic Gospels.—The Gospels record a renewed activity of prophetic inspiration in connexion with the Advent of Christ. Of John the Baptist it was foretold, ‘He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost, even from his mother’s womb’ (Luk 1:15). So we read (Luk 1:41; Luk 1:67) of Elisabeth and Zacharias, that, filled with the Spirit, they uttered prophetic language. See also Luk 2:25-27; Luk 2:36. Again, the miraculous conception is ascribed to the operation of the Spirit (Luk 1:35, Mat 1:18; Mat 1:20). Equally clear is the statement of the agency of the Holy Spirit at the Baptism of our Lord (Mar 1:10, Mat 3:16, Luk 3:22). As He entered upon His ministry, the Evangelists tell us that our Lord was guided by the Holy Spirit (Mar 1:12, Mat 4:1, Luk 4:1-2; Luk 4:14; Luk 4:18). His miracles are performed in the Spirit (Mat 12:28). In His hour of most profound concentration upon the mystery of His own Person and work we are told, ‘He rejoiced in the Holy Spirit’ (Luk 10:21).
Our Lord’s own teaching on this subject, as given in the Synoptics, recognizes the inspiration of the OT (Mar 12:36, Mat 22:43), and connects His own miraculous works (Mat 12:28) and His mission (Luk 4:18) with the agency of the Holy Spirit. Certain of His promises to His disciples can be fully understood only in the light of the teaching which we find in the Fourth Gospel. See Mat 10:20, Luk 11:13; Luk 12:12; Luk 24:49, Act 1:4-5; Act 1:8. Perhaps, however, the strongest passage of all is that in which our Lord warns against the awful sin against the Holy Ghost (Mar 3:29, Mat 12:32, Luk 12:10). The intensity of our Lord’s language here certainly points to the Deity of the Spirit. See, further, art. Unpardonable Sin.
(2) The evidence of the Fourth Gospel.—Here the work of the Holy Spirit is frequently mentioned. He is the agent in the new birth (Joh 3:5-8); he living water (Joh 4:14, Joh 7:39); the Paraclete (Joh 14:16); the Spirit of truth (Joh 14:17, Joh 15:26, Joh 16:13), etc. In these and other passages the relation of the Holy Spirit to the Father and to the Son, and His agency in connexion with the work of God in the Church and the world, are presented with extraordinary impressiveness.
(3) The Personality of the Holy Ghost.—It is inevitable, owing to the very use of the ambiguous word
This group of passages also shows very clearly that we are here taught to think of the Spirit as not only personal, but as distinct from the Father and the Son. This appears remarkably in Joh 14:26 ‘The Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.’ Again in Joh 15:26 ‘Whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father, he shall bear witness of me.’ Language could not make the distinctness of the Persons clearer. Yet strong and clear as this teaching is, we find its strength and clearness greatly increased by the fact that it fits into the scheme of Christian thought as we find that scheme developing in the Epistles of St. Paul and taking more rounded dogmatic form in the later ages of Christian reflexion.
(4) The Divinity of the Holy Ghost.—We can have no doubt on this subject when we have reached the point at which we attain the conviction that, in His great discourse, our Lord teaches us unmistakably the Personality of the Spirit as distinct from that of the Father and of the Son. The Three Persons are here viewed upon a plane of being which is above that of all created things.
In Joh 14:16; Joh 14:18; Joh 14:26; Joh 15:26; Joh_Joh 16:14-15 the inter-relationship of the Divine Three is expressed and implied. The dependence of both the Son and the Holy Ghost upon the Father appears: ‘I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Paraclete.’ The Spirit ‘proceeds’ from the Father and is sent by the Son (Joh 15:26, Joh 16:7). His presence is equivalent to the presence of the Son, for with reference to His coming, our Lord declares (Joh 14:18), ‘I will not leave you desolate: I come unto you.’ In His relation to the Son, the Spirit is to bring all our Lord’s words to the remembrance of the disciples (Joh 14:26); He is to bear witness of our Lord (Joh 15:26), to glorify Him (Joh 16:14), etc. So important is the work of the Spirit in its connexion with that of the Son, that our Lord solemnly declares the expediency of His own departure in order that the period of the Spirit’s activity may begin. And to this teaching we must add such statements as the following: ‘He that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (Joh 14:9); ‘I am in the Father, and the Father in me’ (Joh 14:10); ‘If a man love me, he will keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him’ (Joh 14:24); ‘All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine, therefore said I, that he (i.e. the Spirit) taketh of mine and shall declare it unto you’ (Joh 16:15). All these refer to the nature and effects of that dispensation of the Spirit concerning which our Lord is instructing His disciples in this great discourse.
Such teaching certainly implies both the Divinity and the Unity of the Three Persons, which throughout are at once distinguished, regarded as inseparably united, and placed upon a plane of being far above all created existence.
III. Summary
(i.) The Baptismal Formula.—We have omitted from our consideration one great passage of first-rate importance on every branch of our subject. It has been kept to the last because it is the nearest thing to a comprehensive and formal statement of the doctrine of the Trinity to be found in Holy Scripture. In Mat 28:18-20 there is, as the last word of that Gospel, a solemn charge which it is stated our Lord gave to His disciples when they met Him, by His special command, after His resurrection. The charge includes:
(1) a declaration of His universal authority, ‘All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and in earth,’ containing a very strong implication of His Divinity and agreeing with Mat 11:27 and Luk 10:22 as well as with the teaching of the Fourth Gospel.
(2) A great commission, ‘Go ye therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you,’—words which are at once the greatest command, the greatest prophecy, and the greatest dogmatic statement ever given.
(3) A promise, ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world,’ which has been a source of power and inspiration to the Church ever since.
It is true that this passage belongs to a part of St. Matthew’s Gospel which has been assailed with great persistence, and, on internal grounds, with some apparent reason. It is often argued that the First Gospel contains many additions to the Evangelic narrative which arose from the habits of thought and practice, as well as from explanatory teaching, current in the primitive Church. The account of baptism given here would then be a reflexion of the teaching of a later time. Against this, we have to note that there is no textual evidence against the passage, that 2Co 13:14 contains the threefold Divine name in a way which shows that the combination was familiar to the mind of the Christian Church at a time which was certainly less than thirty years after the Ascension, and that there is a continuous stream of testimony from the earliest times as to baptism into the threefold name, the Didache providing the connecting link between the Apostolic age and Justin Martyr. But stronger than all these is the fact that this passage merely sums up the teachings concerning God which, as we have seen in detail, may be found scattered throughout the four Gospels. It is surely somewhat hard to suppose that the Christian doctrine of God could have so rapidly assumed the form in which we find it in St. Paul’s Epistles, if our Lord Himself had not brought together the various strands of His teaching; and when was this so likely to happen as when He manifested Himself to His disciples after His resurrection? The truth is that this passage in Mt. supplies exactly the clue we need in order to understand the rapid development of doctrine and the continuity of custom in the early Church. (See Sanday in art. ‘God’ in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible ii. p. 213, and his Criticism of the Fourth Gospel, p. 218; also Scott in art. ‘Trinity’ in DB
We may, unless our judgments are obscured by critical prejudices, turn to this passage as supplying the needful summary of all those thoughts about God which we have gleaned from the teaching of Christ and the Gospels. The expression
(ii.) The illuminating power of the doctrine.—When from the position which has now been attained we look back over the life and teaching of our Lord, we find that sudden light is thrown upon much that otherwise seems obscure. It is this reflex illumination of Christian experience which constitutes the verification of the doctrine—a verification which may be traced throughout the whole history of the Church, and which to this day may be discerned in the vitality of orthodox Christianity and its continued value for the religious consciousness of mankind in contrast with Deism in all its forms. Here we confine our brief survey to the Gospels, and note the following. At the Annunciation the angel replies to the Virgin’s question (Luk 1:35): ‘The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also that which is to be born shall be called holy, the Son of God.’ At the Baptism the three Divine Persons are represented: ‘He saw the heavens rent asunder and the Spirit as a dove descending upon him; and a voice came out of the heavens, Thou art my beloved Son, in thee I am well pleased’ (Mar 1:10-11, also Mat 3:16-17, Luk 3:21-22). At the Transfiguration the glory of the Son and His relation to the Father are manifested (Mar 9:7, Mat 17:5, Luk 9:35).
But more profound even than such indications as these is the truth that the doctrine of the Trinity underlies the whole movement of Divine providence for the redemption and elevation of man as we have it presented in the NT. Here it is sufficient to note that everywhere in the Gospels, while God the Father is regarded as the ultimate source of all things, both in creation and in redemption, certain special functions are declared to belong to the Son and the Spirit, and yet there is no separation or opposition between the Divine Persons. God the Father is the Creator, yet all things were made by (
And all this has its counterpart in the Christian experience of our own time, for Christianity is, for the Church and for the individual, the revelation of the Fatherhood of God through and in that Christ who presents Himself afresh to every age as the manifestation of the love of God, and whose personal influence, in some mysterious manner, survives every shock of revolution as well as the slow movement of the ages.
(iii.) The philosophical aspect.—This is not the place to consider the great question as to how far the doctrine of the Trinity can commend itself to, or be justified by, the philosophical reason of mankind. The problem is as old as Christian theology, and is latent in all discussions which touch the life of the Christian creed. If it has not been greatly canvassed, at least directly, in recent times, it is because all the resources of Christian thought have been devoted to a work which has been in truth more pressing, the endeavour to grasp more firmly and to realize more perfectly the facts to which the Scriptures testify, the elements of the great revelation upon which the doctrine depends. When the time for full discussion comes, there is at least a probability that the general mind will be prepared. The old objection that the doctrine is apparently contradictory, that it cannot be made logically consistent, is certainly losing its plausibility. All the lines of thought which have guided so many in the direction of Agnosticism have converged upon this: that there must be an element of mystery in the nature of God. The old Deistic conception of a solitary Sovereign in the skies, standing above and apart from creation, is now impossible for the instructed. The doctrine of the Trinity stands in truth midway between Agnosticism and Deism. With the former it recognizes the impossibility of presenting to our minds the inmost nature of the Supreme One, with the latter it insists upon the absolute necessity of thinking of the Deity in terms of personality. But it keeps closer than either to the facts of the religious consciousness and the needs of humanity, because it builds upon actual experience, the experience which stands central in the history of the race, and it interprets this experience by means of the only perfect Personality known to man.
In addition to this general consideration, there are tendencies in recent thought which seem to promise new light on the old doctrine. Philosophy and psychology have both been dealing with the question of personality, and have been revealing the existence of problems of extraordinary complexity and suggestiveness in connexion with it. For both, human personality appears, from one point of view, as a self-sufficing unity, and, from another, as an illuminated portion of a vast world of spiritual existence. It is both inclusive and exclusive, both universal and limited, according to the way in which it is regarded, and no principle has yet come to light by means of which these oppositions can be shown to be overcome.
The more usual way of approaching the application of the principle of personality to the doctrine of the Trinity is to follow the line indicated by Lotze (Microcosmos, bk. ix. ch. iv.) and regard personality as it exists in man as incomplete, perfect personality belonging to God only. If this conception be justifiable, we may well expect to be able to apply an ancient method and find that distinctions which we know to exist in man’s personality may be correctly regarded as corresponding to distinctions of a much profounder degree in the Divine Being. The best modern exposition of this view is Illingworth’s Personality, Human and Divine, a work which may justly be regarded as representing for our time the classic point of view, that of St. Augustine in his de Trinitate.
The difficulty which is inherent in this method was, however, clearly seen by Augustine himself, and it cannot be said that modern philosophers have been able to surmount it successfully. Regarding the distinctions in the Godhead as corresponding to the three, ‘memory, understanding, love,’ which we know of in ourselves, he yet perceives that ‘Tria ista … mea sunt, non sua; nec sibi sed mihi agunt quod agunt, imo ego per illa,’ and again, ‘Ego per omnia illa tria memini, ego intelligo, ego diligo, qui nec memoria sum, nec intelligentia, nec dilectio, sed haec habeo. Ista ergo dici possunt ab una persona quae habet haec tria, non ipsa est haec tria’ (de Trinitate, bk. xv. ch. xxii. § 42). Nor can it be said that Augustine or any of his successors in this great adventure, not even Hegel in his Philosophy of Religion, has been able to show how what in us is only the attribute, faculty, or thought of a persona, can become a Persona in the Deity.
There is, however, another line of thought in recent philosophy, which seems to the writer to promise much better results for the Christian thinker. Out of the Hegelian school have arisen some who, feeling the force of certain considerations relied on by Agnostic reasoners, hold that the nature of the Ultimate Reality is beyond us, our highest categories and our most concrete experiences being inadequate alike to express or to present it. In addition to this, there has been slowly gaining recognition the importance of the conception of degrees of reality. Bradley in his Appearance and Reality has done more than any other writer to call attention to this principle. Foe to theology, as he professes to be, he may prove its most useful ally. The work of Pringle-Pattison points in the same direction. Personality may be, for human thought, the highest of all categories; but the existence of certain fundamental antinomies and oppositions, speculative and practical, proves clearly that it is not the ultimate form of being. There is a degree of Reality, a final Unity, higher, more concrete, than Personality. There must be, because a person is, after all, essentially one among many. A person is what he is, not merely because he is inclusive as regards his own experience, but because he is exclusive as regards his neighbours’ experience. Personality cannot therefore be a full definition of the Divine nature. God is personal and something more. In His final Unity He is super-personal, and this super-personal unity is the ultimate Reality, concrete and universal. Here is exactly the condition demanded by the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The most complete monotheism is compatible with the recognition of a personal multiplicity in the Godhead.
Literature.—Bull, Defensio Fidei Nicaenœ; Waterland, Vindication of Christ’s Divinity, and other works; Dorner, Syst. of Christ. Doctrine, and Hist. of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ; Pearson, On the Creed; H. Browne, Exposition of the Articles; Swete, The Apostles’ Creed; Martensen, Dogmatik; Works on NT Theology by Schmid, Weiss, Oosterzee, and Beyschlag; Liddon, Divinity of our Lord; Gore, The Incarnation, and Dissertations; Scott, art. ‘Trinity’ in Hasting’s Dictionary of the Bible (Ext. Vol.); Sanday, art. ‘God (in NT),’ ib. (vol. ii.); art. ‘Trinität’ in PRE
Charles F. D’Arcy.
By: Kaufmann Kohler, Samuel Krauss
The fundamental dogma of Christianity; the concept of the union in one God of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three infinite persons. It was the Nicene Council and even more especially the Athanasian Creed that first gave the dogma its definite formulation: "And the Catholick Faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; Neither confounding the Persons; nor dividing the Substance." Equalization of the Son with the Father marks an innovation in the Pauline theology: "Yet to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him" (I Cor. viii. 6, R. V.), while in another passage the Holy Ghost is added (ib. xii. 3; comp. Titus ii. 13), thus rapidly developing the concept of the Trinity (II Cor. xiii. 14). Although the Judæo-Christian sect of the Ebionites protested against this apotheosis of Jesus ("Clementine Homilies," xvi. 15), the great mass of Gentile Christians accepted it.
The Holy Ghost.
The Holy Ghost as the third person of the Trinity could originate only on Gentile soil, since it was based on a linguistic error. The "Gospel According to the Hebrews," which was once held in high esteem, especially in Ebionitic circles, still regards the term "mother" as equivalent to "Holy Ghost" (Origen, Commentary on John ii. 12; see Preuschen, "Antilegomena," p. 4, Giessen, 1901; Henneke, "Neutestamentliche Apokryphen," p. 19, Tübingen, 1904), since in Aramaic, the language of this Gospel and possibly the original dialect of all the Gospels, the noun "ruḥa" (spirit) is feminine (comp. the Gnostic statement
Jewish Objections.
The controversies between the Christians and the Jews concerning the Trinity centered for the most part about the problem whether the writers of the Old Testament bore witness to it or not, the Jews naturally rejecting every proof brought forward by their opponents. The latter based their arguments on the Trisagion in Isa. vi. 3, a proof which had been frequently offered since Eusebius and Gregory of Nazianzus. The convert Jacob Perez of Valentia (d. 1491) even found an allusion to the Trinity in the word "Elohim," and Luther saw distinct traces of the doctrine in Gen. i. 1, 26; iii. 21; xi. 7, 8, 9; Num. vi. 22; II Sam. xxiii. 2; and Dan. vii. 13. The Jewish polemics against this doctrine date almost from its very conception. Even in the Talmud, R. Simlai (3d cent.) declared, in refutation of the "heretics," "The three words 'El,' 'Elohim,' and 'Yhwh' (Josh. xxii. 22) connote one and the same person, as one might say, 'King, Emperor, Augustus'" (Yer. Ber. ix. 12d), while elsewhere he substitutes the phrase "as if one should say, 'master, builder, and architect'" (ib. 13a). There are, however, no other allusions to the Trinity in Talmudic literature, as has been rightly pointed out by Herford ("Christianity in Talmud and Midrash," p. 395, London, 1903), since the polemics of the rabbis of that periodwere directed chiefly against dualism (
). Another polemic, which is noteworthy for its antiquity and its protagonists, was the disputation between Pope Sylvester I. (314-335) and the Jew Noah (Migne, "Patrologia Græca," viii. 814).
In the Middle Ages the nature of the Trinity was discussed in every one of the numerous disputations between Christians and Jews, the polemic of Abraham Roman (in his "Sela' ha-Maḥaloḳet," printed in the "Milḥemet Ḥobah," Constantinople, 1710) being especially bitter; while in his well-known disputation Naḥmanides wrote as follows:
("Milḥemet Ḥobah," p. 13a).
"Fra Pablo asked me in Gerona whether I believed in the Trinity [
]. I said to him, 'What is the Trinity? Do three great human bodies constitute the Divinity?' 'No!' 'Or are there three ethereal bodies, such as the souls, or are there three angels?' 'No!' 'Or is an object composed of three kinds of matter, as bodies are composed of the four elements?' 'No!' 'What then is the Trinity?' He said: 'Wisdom, will, and power' [comp. the definition of Thomas Aquinas cited above]. Then I said: 'I also acknowledge that God is wise and not foolish, that He has a will unchangeable, and that He is mighty and not weak. But the term "Trinity" is decidedly erroneous; for wisdom is not accidental in the Creator, since He and His wisdom are one, He and His will are one, He and His power are one, so that wisdom, will, and power are one. Moreover, even were these things accidental in Him, that which is called God would not be three beings, but one being with these three accidental attributes.' Our lord the king here quoted an analogy which the erring ones had taught him, saying that there are also three things in wine, namely, color, taste, and bouquet, yet it is still one thing. This is a decided error; for the redness, the taste, and the bouquet of the wine are distinct essences, each of them potentially self-existent; for there are red, white, and other colors, and the same statement holds true with regard to taste and bouquet. The redness, the taste, and the bouquet, moreover, are not the wine itself, but the thing which fills the vessel, and which is, therefore, a body with the three accidents. Following this course of argument, there would be four, since the enumeration should include God, His wisdom, His will, and His power, and these are four. You would even have to speak of five things; for He lives, and His life is a part of Him just as much as His wisdom. Thus the definition of God would be 'living, wise, endowed with will, and mighty'; the Divinity would therefore be fivefold in nature. All this, however, is an evident error. Then Fra Pablo arose and said that he believed in the unity, which, none the less, included the Trinity, although this was an exceedingly deep mystery, which even the angels and the princes of heaven could not comprehend. I arose and said: 'It is evident that a person does not believe what he does not know: therefore the angels do not believe in the Trinity.' His colleagues then bade him be silent"
The boldness of the Christian exegetes, who converted even the "Shema'," the solemn confession of the Divine Unity, into a proof of the Trinity (Maimonides, in "Teḥiyyat ha-Metim," beginning), furnishes an explanation of the bitterness of the Jewish apologists. Joseph Ḳimḥi assailed the doctrine of the Trinity first of all ("Milḥemet Ḥobah," p. 19a), refuting with weighty arguments the favorite proof based on Gen. xviii. 1-2, where Yhwh is described as first appearing alone to Abraham, who later beholds two persons (comp. Abraham ibn Ezra's commentary, ad loc.). Simeon ben Ẓemaḥ Duran, who also refuted the Trinitarian proofs, added: "The dogma itself is manifestly false, as I have shown by philosophic deduction; and my present statements are made only with reference to their [the Christians'] assertions, while the monk Nestor accepted Judaism for the very reason that he had refuted them" ("Milḥemet Ḥobah," p. 48b). Noteworthy among modern polemics against the Trinity is Joshua Segre's critique ("Zeit. für Hebr. Bibl." viii. 22).
In the Zohar.
The Cabala, on the other hand, especially the Zohar, its fundamental work, was far less hostile to the dogma of the Trinity, since by its speculations regarding the father, the son, and the spirit it evolved a new trinity, and thus became dangerous to Judaism. Such terms as "maṭronita," "body," "spirit," occur frequently (e.q., "Tazria'," ed. Polna, iii. 43b); so that Christians and converts like Knorr von Rosenroth, Reuchlin, and Rittangel found in the Zohar a confirmation of Christianity and especially of the dogma of the Trinity (Jellinek, "Die Kabbala," p. 250, Leipsic, 1844 [trans]. of Franck's "La Kabbale," Paris, 1843]). Reuchlin sought on the basis of the Cabala the words "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost" in the second word of the Pentateuch, as well as in Ps. cxviii. 22 (ib. p. 10), while Johann Kemper, a convert, left in manuscript a work entitled "Maṭṭeh Mosheh," which treats in its third section of the harmony of the Zohar with the doctrine of the Trinity (Zettersteen, "Verzeichniss der Hebräischen und Aramäischen Handschriften zu Upsala," p. 16, Lund, 1900). The study of the Cabala led the Frankists to adopt Christianity; but the Jews have always regarded the doctrine of the Trinity as one irreconcilable with the spirit of the Jewish religion and with monotheism. See Christianity in Its Relation to Judaism; Polemics.
Bibliography:
F. C. Bauer, Die Christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit, etc., 3 vols., Tübingen, 1841-43;
H. Usener, Die Dreiheit, in Rheinisches Museum für Klassische Philologie, lviii. 1-47.
TRINITY
1. The doctrine approached.—It is sometimes asked why we are not given a definite statement that there are three Persons in the Godhead. One reason for the absence of any such categorical and dogmatic teaching is probably to be found in the fact that the earliest hearers of the gospel were Jews, and that any such pronouncement might (and probably would) have seemed a contradiction of their own great truth of the unity of the Godhead. Consequently, instead of giving an intellectual statement of doctrine, which might have led to theological and philosophic discussion, and ended only in more Intense opposition to Christianity, the Apostles preached Jesus of Nazareth as a personal Redeemer from sin, and urged on every one the acceptance of Him and His claims. Then, in due course, would come the inevitable process of thought and meditation upon this personal experience, and this would in turn lead to the inference that Jesus, from whom, and in whom, these experiences were being enjoyed, must be more than man, must be none other than Divine, ‘for who can forgive sins but God only?’ Through such a personal impression and inference based on experience, a distinction in the Godhead would at once be realized. Then, in the course of their Christian life, and through fuller instruction, would be added the personal knowledge and experience of the Holy Spirit, and once again a similar inference would in due course follow, making another distinction in their thought of the Godhead. The intellectual conception and expression of these distinctions probably concerned only comparatively few of the early believers, but nevertheless all of them had in their lives an experience of definite action and blessing which could only have been from above, and which no difficulty of intellectual correlation or of theological co-ordination with former teachings could invalidate and destroy.
2. The doctrine derived.—The doctrine of the Trinity is an expansion of the doctrine of the Incarnation, and emerges out of the personal claim of our Lord. We believe this position can be made good from the NT. We take first the Gospels, and note that our Lord’s method of revealing Himself to His disciples was by means of personal impression and influence. His character, teaching, and claim formed the centre and core of everything, and His one object was, as it were, to stamp Himself on His disciples, knowing that in the light of fuller experience His true nature and relations would become clear to them. We see the culmination of this impression and experience in the confession of the Apostle, ‘My Lord and my God.’ Then, as we turn to the Acts of the Apostles, we find St. Peter preaching to Jews, and emphasizing two associated truths: (1) the Sonship and Messiahship of Jesus, as proved by the Resurrection, and (2) the consequent relation of the hearers to Him as to a Saviour and Master. The emphasis is laid on the personal experience of forgiveness and grace, without any attempt to state our Lord’s position in relation to God. Indeed, the references to Jesus Christ as the ‘Servant [wrongly rendered in AV
In the same way the doctrine of the Godhead of the Holy Spirit arises directly out of our Lord’s revelation. Once grant a real personal distinction between the Father and the Son, and it is easy to believe it also of the Spirit as revealed by the Son. As long as Christ was present on earth there was no room and no need for the specific work of the Holy Spirit, but as Christ was departing from the world He revealed a doctrine which clearly associated the Holy Spirit with Himself and the Father in a new and unique way (Joh 14:16-17; Joh 14:26; Joh 15:26; Joh 16:7-15). Arising immediately out of this, and consonant with it, is the place given to the Holy Spirit in the Book of the Acts. From ch. 5, where lying against the Holy Spirit is equivalent to lying against God (Joh 5:3-4; Joh 5:9), we see throughout the book the essential Deity of the Holy Spirit in the work attributed to Him of superintending and controlling the life of the Apostolic Church (Joh 2:4, Joh 8:29, Joh 10:19, Joh 13:2; Joh 13:4, Joh 16:6-7, Joh 20:25).
Then, as we pass to the Epistles, we find references to our Lord Jesus and to the Holy Spirit which imply unmistakably the functions of Godhead. In the opening salutations our Lord is associated with God as the Source of grace and peace (1Th 1:1 f., 1Pe 1:2), and in the closing benedictions as the Divine Source of blessing (Rom 15:30, 2Th 3:16; 2Th 3:18). In the doctrinal statements He is referred to in practical relation to us and to our spiritual life in terms that can be predicated of God only, and in the revelations concerning things to come He is stated to be about to occupy a position which can refer to God only. In like manner, the correlation of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Son in matters essentially Divine is clear (1Co 2:4-6, 2Co 13:14, 1Pe 1:2).
In all these assertions and implications of the Godhead of Jesus Christ, it is to be noted very carefully that St. Paul has not the faintest idea of contradicting his Jewish monotheism. Though he and others thus proclaimed the Godhead of Christ, it is of great moment to remember that Christianity was never accused of polytheism. The NT doctrine of God is essentially a form of monotheism, and stands in no relation to polytheism. There can be no doubt that, however and whenever the Trinitarian idea was formulated, it arose in immediateconnexion with the monotheism of Judæa; and the Apostles, Jews though they were, in stating so unmistakably the Godhead of Jesus Christ, are never once conscious of teaching anything inconsistent with their most cherished ideas about the unity of God.
3. The doctrine confirmed.—When we have approached the doctrine by means of the personal experience of redemption, we are prepared to give full consideration to the two lines of teaching found in the NT. (a) One line of teaching insists on the unity of the Godhead (1Co 8:4, Jas 2:19); and (b) the other line reveals distinctions within the Godhead (Mat 3:16-17; Mat 28:19, 2Co 13:14). We see clearly that (1) the Father is God (Mat 11:25, Rom 15:6, Eph 4:6); (2) the Son is God (Joh 1:1; Joh 1:18; Joh 20:28, Act 20:26, Rom 9:5, Heb 1:8, Col 2:9, Php 2:6, 2Pe 1:1); (3) the Holy Spirit is God (Act 5:3-4, 1Co 2:10-11, Eph 2:22); (4) the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct from one another, sending and being sent, honouring and being honoured. The Father honours the Son, the Son honours the Father, and the Holy Spirit honours the Son (Joh 15:26; Joh 16:13-14; Joh 17:1; Joh 17:8; Joh 17:18; Joh 17:23). (5) Nevertheless, whatever relations of subordination there may be between the Persons in working out redemption, the three are alike regarded as God. The doctrine of the Trinity is the correlation, co-ordination, and synthesis of the teaching of these passages. In the Unity of the Godhead there is a Trinity of Persons working out redemption. God the Father is the Creator and Ruler of man and the Provider of redemption through His love (Joh 3:16). God the Son is the Redeemer, who became man for the purpose of our redemption. God the Holy Spirit is the ‘Executive of the Godhead,’ who applies to each believing soul the benefits of redemption. The elements of the plan of redemption thus find their root, foundation, and spring in the nature of the Godhead; and the obvious reason why these distinctions which we express by the terms ‘Person’ and ‘Trinity’ were not revealed earlier than NT times is that not until then was redemption accomplished.
4. The doctrine stated.—By the Trinity, therefore, we mean the specific and unique Christian idea of the Godhead. The foundation of the Christian idea of the Godhead is that of the One Supreme Almighty Spirit whom we worship, to whom we pray, from whom we receive grace, and whom we serve. But the specific Christian thought of God is that of a Spirit, in the unity of whose being is revealed a distinction of Persons whom we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; the God from whom, through whom, and by whom all things come—the Father as the primal Source, the Son as the redemptive Mediator, and the Holy Spirit as the personal Applier of life and grace. The Christian idea of the Trinity may be summed up in the familiar words: ‘The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God. The Godhead of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost is all one, the Glory equal, the Majesty coeternal. And in this Trinity none is afore or after other: none is greater or less than another, but the whole three Persons are co-eternal together and co-equal.’
The term ‘Trinity’ dates from the second century, being found in Greek in Theophilus of Antioch (a.d. 181); and the actual Latin word, from which we derive our English term, in Tertullian (a.d. 200). Its use is sometimes criticised because it is not found in the Bible, but this is no valid objection to it. Like other words. e.g. ‘Incarnation,’ it expresses in technical language the truth about the Godhead which is found implicitly in the NT. The real question is whether it is true, and whether it is fairly expressive of the Bible truth. It is intended to express and safeguard that real and essential unity of the Godhead which is at the root of the distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The term ‘Person’ is also sometimes objected to. Like all human language, it is liable to be accused of inadequacy and even positive error. It certainly must not be pressed too far, or it will lead to Tritheism. While we use the term to denote distinctions in the Godhead, we do not imply distinctions which amount to separateness, but distinctions which are associated with essential mutual coinherence or inclusiveness. We intend by the term ‘Person’ to express those real distinctions of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit which are found amid the oneness of the Godhead, distinctions which are no mere temporary manifestations of Deity, but essential and permanent elements within the Divine unity.
5. The doctrine supported.—When all this is granted and so far settled, we may find a second line of teaching to support the foregoing in the revelation of God as Love. Following the suggestion of St. Augustine, most modern theologians have rightly seen in this a safe ground for our belief. It transcends, and perhaps renders unnecessary, all arguments drawn from human and natural analogies of the doctrine. ‘God is love’ means, as some one has well said, ‘God as the Infinite home of all moral emotions, the fullest and most highly differentiated life.’ Love must imply relationships, and, as He is eternally perfect in Himself, He can realize Himself as Love only through relationships within His own Being. We may go so far as to say that this is the only way of obtaining a living thought about God. Belief in Theism postulates a self-existent God, and yet it is impossible to think of a God without relationships. These relationships must be eternal and prior to His temporal relationships to the universe of His own creation. He must have relationships eternally adequate, and worthy, and when once we realize that love must have an object in God as well as in ourselves, we have the germ of that distinction in the Godhead which is theologically known as the Trinity.
6. The doctrine anticipated.—At this stage, and only here, we may seek another support for the doctrine. In the light of the facts of the NT we cannot refrain from asking whether there may not have been some adumbrations of it in the OT. As the doctrine arises directly out of the facts of the NT, we do not for an instant look for any full discovery of it in the OT. But if the doctrine be true, we might expect that Christian Jews, at any rate, would seek for some anticipation of it in the OT. We believe we find it there. (a) The references to the ‘Angel of Jehovah’ prepare the way for the Christian doctrine of a distinction in the Godhead (Gen 18:2; Gen 18:16; Gen 17:22 with Gen 19:1, Jos 5:13-15 with Jos 6:1, Jdg 13:8-21, Zec 13:7). (b) Allusions to the ‘Spirit of Jehovah’ form another line of OT teaching. In Gen 1:2 the Spirit is an energy only, but in subsequent books an agent (Isa 40:13; Isa 48:16; Isa 59:19; Isa 63:10 f.). (c) The personification of Divine Wisdom is also to be observed, for the connexion between the personification of Wisdom in Pro 8:1-36, the Logos of Joh 1:1-18, and the ‘wisdom’ of 1Co 1:24 can hardly be accidental. (d) There are also other hints, such as the triplicity of the Divine Names (Num 6:24-27, Psa 29:3-5, Isa 6:3), which may not be pressed, but can hardly be overlooked. Hints are all that were to be expected or desired until the fulness of time should have come. The function of Israel was to guard God’s transcendence and omnipresence; it was for Christianity to develop the doctrine of the Godhead into the fulness, depth, and richness that we find in the revelation of the Incarnate Son of God.
7. The doctrine justified.—(a) From the facts of Scripture. It emerges clearly from the claim of Christ; it is an extension of the doctrine of the Incarnation. If the Incarnation was real, the Trinity is true. (b) From the facts of Christian experience. It is a simple fact that Christians of all periods of history claim to have personal direct fellowship with Christ. This claim must be accounted for. It is possible only by predicating Deity of our Lord, for such fellowship would be impossible with one who is not God. (c) From the facts of history. Compared with other religions, Christianity makes God a reality in a way in which no other system does. The doctrine of the Trinity has several positive theological and philosophical advantages over the Unitarian conception of God, but especially is this so in reference to the relation of God to the world. There are two conceivable relations of God to the world—as transcendent (in Mohammedanism), or as immanent (in Buddhism). The first alone means Deism, the second alone Pantheism. But the Christian idea is of God as at once transcendent and immanent. It is therefore the true protection of a living Theism, which otherwise oscillates uncertainly between these two extremes of Deism and Pantheism, either of which is false to It. It is only in Christianity that the Semitic and Aryan conceptions of God are united, blended, correlated, balanced, and preserved. (d) From reason. It is simple truth to say that, if Jesus be not God, Christians are idolaters, for they worship One who is not God. There is no other alternative. But when once the truth of the doctrine of the Trinity is regarded as arising out of Christ’s claim to Godhead as Divine Redeemer, reason soon finds its warrant for the doctrine. The doctrine of the Trinity comes to us by revelation and not by nature, though it is soon seen to have points of contact with thought and reason.
The doctrine ‘started in the concrete, with the baptismal formula … emanating from Jesus Christ. And throughout the history of its dogmatic formulation, we are confronted with this fact. It was regarded as a revelation by the men who shaped its intellectual expression; and it was only in the process … of that expression that its congruity with human psychology came out; that psychology in fact being distinctly developed in the effort to give it utterance.… They did not accommodate Christian religion to their philosophy, but philosophy to their Christian religion.’ This doctrine appealed ‘first to unsophisticated men, far removed from Alexandria or Athens; yet the very words in which it does so, turn out, upon analysis, to involve a view of personality which the world had not attained, but which, once stated, is seen to be profoundly, philosophically true’ (Illingworth, Personality, p. 212f.).
W. H. Griffith Thomas.
1. The Term “Trinity”
2. Purely a Revealed Doctrine
3. No Rational Proof of It
4. Finds Support in Reason
5. Not Clearly Revealed in the Old Testament
6. Prepared for in the Old Testament
7. Presupposed Rather Than Inculcated in the New Testament
8. Revealed in Manifestation of Son and Spirit
9. Implied in the Whole New Testament
10. Conditions the Whole Teaching of Jesus
11. Father and Son in Johannine Discourses
12. Spirit in Johannine Discourses
13. The Baptismal Formula
14. Genuineness of Baptismal Formula
15. Paul’s Trinitarianism
16. Conjunction of the Three in Paul
17. Trinitarianism of Other New Testament Writers
18. Variations in Nomenclature
19. Implications of “Son” and “Spirit”
20. The Question of Subordination
21. Witness of the Christian Consciousness
22. Formulation of the Doctrine
LITERATURE
1. The Term “Trinity”:
The term “Trinity” is not a Biblical term, and we are not using Biblical language when we define what is expressed by it as the doctrine that there is one only and true God, but in the unity of the Godhead there are three coeternal and coequal Persons, the same in substance but distinct in subsistence. A doctrine so defined can be spoken of as a Biblical doctrine only on the principle that the sense of Scripture is Scripture. And the definition of a Biblical doctrine in such un-Biblical language can be justified only on the principle that it is better to preserve the truth of Scripture than the words of Scripture. The doctrine of the Trinity lies in Scripture in solution; when it is crystallized from its solvent it does not cease to be Scriptural, but only comes into clearer view. Or, to speak without figure, the doctrine of the Trinity is given to us in Scripture, not in formulated definition, but in fragmentary allusions; when we assemble the disjecta membra into their organic unity, we are not passing from Scripture, but entering more thoroughly into the meaning of Scripture. We may state the doctrine in technical terms, supplied by philosophical reflection; but the doctrine stated is a genuinely Scriptural doctrine.
2. Purely a Revealed Doctrine:
In point of fact, the doctrine of the Trinity is purely a revealed doctrine. That is to say, it embodies a truth which has never been discovered, and is indiscoverable, by natural reason. With all his searching, man has not been able to find out for himself the deepest things of God. Accordingly, ethnic thought has never attained a Trinitarian conception of God, nor does any ethnic religion present in its representations of the divine being any analogy to the doctrine of the Trinity.
Triads of divinities, no doubt, occur in nearly all polytheistic religions, formed under very various influences. Sometimes, as in the Egyptian triad of Osiris. Isis and Horus, it is the analogy of the human family with its father, mother and son which lies at their basis. Sometimes they are the effect of mere syncretism, three deities worshipped in different localities being brought together in the common worship of all. Sometimes, as in the Hindu triad of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, they represent the cyclic movement of a pantheistic evolution, and symbolize the three stages of Being, Becoming and Dissolution. Sometimes they are the result apparently of nothing more than an odd human tendency to think in threes, which has given the number three widespread standing as a sacred number (so H. Usener). It is no more than was to be anticipated, that one or another of these triads should now and again be pointed to as the replica (or even the original) of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Gladstone found the Trinity in the Homeric mythology, the trident of Poseidon being its symbol. Hegel very naturally found it in the Hindu Trimurti, which indeed is very like his pantheizing notion of what the Trinity is. Others have perceived it in the Buddhist Triratna (Soderblom); or (despite their crass dualism) in some speculations of Parseeism; or, more frequently, in the notional triad of Platonism (e.g. Knapp); while Jules Martin is quite sure that it is present in Philo’s neo-Stoical doctrine of the “powers,” especially when applied to the explanation of Abraham’s three visitors. Of late years, eyes have been turned rather to Babylonia; and H. Zimmern finds a possible forerunner of the Trinity in a Father, Son, and Intercessor, which he discovers in its mythology. It should be needless to say that none of these triads has the slightest resemblance to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity embodies much more than the notion of “threeness,” and beyond their “threeness” these triads have nothing in common with it.
3. No Rational Proof of It:
As the doctrine of the Trinity is indiscoverable by reason, so it is incapable of proof from reason. There are no analogies to it in Nature, not even in the spiritual nature of man, who is made in the image of God. In His trinitarian mode of being, God is unique; and, as there is nothing in the universe like Him in this respect, so there is nothing which can help us to comprehend Him. Many attempts have, nevertheless, been made to construct a rational proof of the Trinity of the God head. Among these there are two which are particularly attractive, and have therefore been put forward again and again by speculative thinkers through all the Christian ages. These are derived from the implications, in the one case, of self-consciousness; in the other, of love. Both self-consciousness and love, it is said, demand for their very existence an object over against which the self stands as subject. If we conceive of God as self-conscious and loving, therefore, we cannot help conceiving of Him as embracing in His unity some form of plurality. From this general position both arguments have been elaborated, however, by various thinkers in very varied forms.
The former of them, for example, is developed by a great 17th-century theologian - Bartholomew Keckermann (1614) - as follows: God is self-conscious thought; and God’s thought must have a perfect object, existing eternally before it; this object to be perfect must be itself God; and as God is one, this object which is God must be the God that is one. It is essentially the same argument which is popularized in a famous paragraph (section 73) of Lessing’s The Education of the Human Race. Must not God have an absolutely perfect representation of Himself - that is, a representation in which everything that is in Him is found? And would everything that is in God be found in this representation if His necessary reality were not found in it? If everything, everything without exception, that is in God is to be found in this representation, it cannot, therefore, remain a mere empty image, but must be an actual duplication of God. It is obvious that arguments like this prove too much. If God’s representation of Himself, to be perfect, must possess the same kind of reality that He Himself possesses, it does not seem easy to deny that His representations of everything else must possess objective reality. And this would be as much as to say that the eternal objective coexistence of all that God can conceive is given in the very idea of God; and that is open pantheism. The logical flaw lies in including in the perfection of a representation qualities which are not proper to representations, however perfect. A perfect representation must, of course, have all the reality proper to a representation; but objective reality is so little proper to a representation that a representation acquiring it would cease to be a representation. This fatal flaw is not transcended, but only covered up, when the argument is compressed, as it is in most of its modern presentations, in effect to the mere assertion that the condition of self-consciousness is a real distinction between the thinking subject and the thought object, which, in God’s case, would be between the subject ego and the object ego. Why, however, we should deny to God the power of self-contemplation enjoyed by every finite spirit, save at the cost of the distinct hypostatizing of the contemplant and the contemplated self, it is hard to understand. Nor is it always clear that what we get is a distinct hypostatization rather than a distinct substantializing of the contemplant and contemplated ego: not two persons in the Godhead so much as two Gods. The discovery of the third hypostasis - the Holy Spirit - remains meanwhile, to all these attempts rationally to construct a Trinity in the Divine Being, a standing puzzle which finds only a very artificial solution.
The case is much the same with the argument derived from the nature of love. Our sympathies go out to that old Valentinian writer - possibly it was Valentinus himself - who reasoned - perhaps he was the first so to reason - that “God is all love,” “but love is not love unless there be an object of love.” And they go out more richly still to Augustine, when, seeking a basis, not for a theory of emanations, but for the doctrine of the Trinity, he analyzes this love which God is into the triple implication of “the lover,” “the loved” and “the love itself,” and sees in this trinary of love an analogue of the Triune God. It requires, however, only that the argument thus broadly suggested should be developed into its details for its artificiality to become apparent. Richard of Victor works it out as follows: It belongs to the nature of amor that it should turn to another as caritas. This other, in God’s case, cannot be the world; since such love of the world would be inordinate. It can only be a person; and a person who is God’s equal in eternity, power and wisdom. Since, however, there cannot be two divine substances, these two divine persons must form one and the same substance. The best love cannot, however, confine itself to these two persons; it must become condilectio by the desire that a third should be equally loved as they love one another. Thus love, when perfectly conceived, leads necessarily to the Trinity, and since God is all He can be, this Trinity must be real. Modern writers (Sartorius, Schoberlein, J. Muller, Liebner, most lately R. H. Grutzmacher) do not seem to have essentially improved upon such a statement as this. And after all is said, it does not appear clear that God’s own all-perfect Being could not supply a satisfying object of His all-perfect love. To say that in its very nature love is self-communicative, and therefore implies an object other than self, seems an abuse of figurative language.
Perhaps the ontological proof of the Trinity is nowhere more attractively put than by Jonathan Edwards. The peculiarity of his presentation of it lies in an attempt to add plausibility to it by a doctrine of the nature of spiritual ideas or ideas of spiritual things, such as thought, love, fear, in general. Ideas of such things, he urges, are just repetitions of them, so that he who has an idea of any act of love, fear, anger or any other act or motion of the mind, simply so far repeats the motion in question; and if the idea be perfect and complete, the original motion of the mind is absolutely reduplicated. Edwards presses this so far that he is ready to contend that if a man could have an absolutely perfect idea of all that was in his mind at any past moment, he would really, to all intents and purposes, be over again what he was at that moment. And if he could perfectly contemplate all that is in his mind at any given moment, as it is and at the same time that it is there in its first and direct existence, he would really be two at that time, he would be twice at once: “The idea he has of himself would be himself again.” This now is the case with the Divine Being. “God’s idea of Himself is absolutely perfect, and therefore is an express and perfect image of Him, exactly like Him in every respect.... But that which is the express, perfect image of God and in every respect like HIm is God, to all intents and purposes, because there is nothing wanting: there is nothing in the Deity that renders it the Deity but what has something exactly answering to it in this image, which will therefore also render that the Deity.” The Second Person of the Trinity being thus attained, the argument advances. “The Godhead being thus begotten of God’s loving (having?) an idea of Himself and showing forth in a distinct Subsistence or Person in that idea, there proceeds a most pure act, and an infinitely holy and sacred energy arises between the Father and the Son in mutually loving and delighting in each other.... The Deity becomes all act, the divine essence itself flows out and is as it were breathed forth in love and joy. So that the Godhead therein stands forth in yet another manner of Subsistence, and there proceeds the Third Person in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, namely, the Deity in act, for there is no other act but the act of the will.” The inconclusiveness of the reasoning lies on the surface. The mind does not consist in its states, and the repetition of its states would not, therefore, duplicate or triplicate it. If it did, we should have a plurality of Beings, not of Persons in one Being. Neither God’s perfect idea of Himself nor His perfect love of Himself reproduces Himself. He differs from His idea and His love of Himself precisely by that which distinguishes His Being from His acts. When it is said, then, that there is nothing in the Deity which renders it the Deity but what has something answering to it in its image of itself, it is enough to respond - except the Deity itself. What is wanting to the image to make it a second Deity is just objective reality.
4. Finds Support in Reason:
Inconclusive as all such reasoning is, however, considered as rational demonstration of the reality of the Trinity, it is very far from possessing no value. It carries home to us in a very suggestive way the superiority of the Trinitarian conception of God to the conception of Him as an abstract monad, and thus brings important rational support to the doctrine of the Trinity, when once that doctrine has been given us by revelation. If it is not quite possible to say that we cannot conceive of God as eternal self-consciousness and eternal love, without conceiving Him as a Trinity, it does seem quite necessary to say that when we conceive Him as a Trinity, new fullness, richness, force are given to our conception of Him as a self-conscious, loving Being, and therefore we conceive Him more adequately than as a monad, and no one who has ever once conceived Him as a Trinity can ever again satisfy himself with a monadistic conception of God. Reason thus not only performs the important negative service to faith in the Trinity, of showing the self-consistency of the doctrine and its consistency with other known truth, but brings this positive rational support to it of discovering in it the only adequate conception of God as self-conscious spirit and living love. Difficult, therefore, as the idea of the Trinity in itself is, it does not come to us as an added burden upon our intelligence; it brings us rather the solution of the deepest and most persistent difficulties in our conception of God as infinite moral Being, and illuminates, enriches and elevates all our thought of God. It has accordingly become a commonplace to say that Christian theism is the only stable theism. That is as much as to say that theism requires the enriching conception of the Trinity to give it a permanent hold upon the human mind - the mind finds it difficult to rest in the idea of an abstract unity for its God; and that the human heart cries out for the living God in whose Being there is that fullness of life for which the conception of the Trinity alone provides.
5. Not Clearly Revealed in the Old Testament:
So strongly is it felt in wide circles that a Trinitarian conception is essential to a worthy idea of God, that there is abroad a deep-seated unwillingness to allow that God could ever have made Himself known otherwise than as a Trinity. From this point of view it is inconceivable that the Old Testament revelation should know nothing of the Trinity. Accordingly, I. A. Dorner, for example, reasons thus: “If, however - and this is the faith of universal Christendom - a living idea of God must be thought in some way after a Trinitarian fashion, it must be antecedently probable that traces of the Trinity cannot be lacking in the Old Testament, since its idea of God is a living or historical one.” Whether there really exist traces of the idea of the Trinity in the Old Testament, however, is a nice question. Certainly we cannot speak broadly of the revelation of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Old Testament. It is a plain matter of fact that none who have depended on the revelation embodied in the Old Testament alone have ever attained to the doctrine of the Trinity. It is another question, however, whether there may not exist in the pages of the Old Testament turns of expression or records of occurrences in which one already acquainted with the doctrine of the Trinity may fairly see indications of an underlying implication of it. The older writers discovered intimations of the Trinity in such phenomena as the plural form of the divine name
6. Prepared for in the Old Testament:
It is an old saying that what becomes patent in the New Testament was latent in the Old Testament. And it is important that the continuity of the revelation of God contained in the two Testaments should not be overlooked or obscured. If we find some difficulty in perceiving for ourselves, in the Old Testament, definite points of attachment for the revelation of the Trinity, we cannot help perceiving with great clearness in the New Testament abundant evidence that its writers felt no incongruity whatever between their doctrine of the Trinity and the Old Testament conception of God. The New Testament writers certainly were not conscious of being “setters forth of strange gods.” To their own apprehension they worshipped and proclaimed just the God of Israel; and they laid no less stress than the Old Testament itself upon His unity (Joh 17:3; 1Co 8:4; 1Ti 2:5). They do not, then, place two new gods by the side of Yahweh, as alike with Him to be served and worshipped; they conceive Yahweh as Himself at once Father, Son and Spirit. In presenting this one Yahweh as Father, Son and Spirit, they do not even betray any lurking feeling that they are making innovations. Without apparent misgiving they take over Old Testament passages and apply them to Father, Son and Spirit indifferently. Obviously they understand themselves, and wish to be understood, as setting forth in the Father, Son and Spirit just the one God that the God of the Old Testament revelation is; and they are as far as possible from recognizing any breach between themselves and the Fathers in presenting their enlarged conception of the Divine Being. This may not amount to saying that they saw the doctrine of the Trinity everywhere taught in the Old Testament. It certainly amounts to saying that they saw the Triune God whom they worshipped in the God of the Old Testament revelation, and felt no incongruity in speaking of their Triune God in the terms of the Old Testament revelation. The God of the Old Testament was their God, and their God was a Trinity, and their sense of the identity of the two was so complete that no question as to it was raised in their minds.
7. Presupposed Rather than Inculcated in the New Testament:
The simplicity and assurance with which the New Testament writers speak of God as a Trinity have, however, a further implication. If they betray no sense of novelty in so speaking of Him, this is undoubtedly in part because it was no longer a novelty so to speak of Him. It is clear, in other words, that, as we read the New Testament, we are not witnessing the birth of a new conception of God. What we meet with in its pages is a firmly established conception of God underlying and giving its tone to the whole fabric. It is not in a text here and there that the New Testament bears its testimony to the doctrine of the Trinity. The whole book is Trinitarian to the core; all its teaching is built on the assumption of the Trinity; and its allusions to the Trinity are frequent, cursory, easy and confident. It is with a view to the cursoriness of the allusions to it in the New Testament that it has been remarked that “the doctrine of the Trinity is not so much heard as overheard in the statements of Scripture.” It would be more exact to say that it is not so much inculcated as presupposed. The doctrine of the Trinity does not appear in the New Testament in the making, but as already made. It takes its place in its pages, as Gunkel phrases it, with an air almost of complaint, already “in full completeness” (vollig fertig), leaving no trace of its growth. “There is nothing more wonderful in the history of human thought,” says Sanday, with his eye on the appearance of the doctrine of the Trinity in the New Testament, “than the silent and imperceptible way in which this doctrine, to us so difficult, took its place without struggle - and without controversy - among accepted Christian truths.” The explanation of this remarkable phenomenon is, however, simple. Our New Testament is not a record of the development of the doctrine or of its assimilation. It everywhere presupposes the doctrine as the fixed possession of the Christian community; and the process by which it became the possession of the Christian community lies behind the New Testament.
8. Revealed in Manifestation of Son and Spirit:
We cannot speak of the doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, if we study exactness of speech, as revealed in the New Testament, any more than we can speak of it as revealed in the Old Testament. The Old Testament was written before its revelation; the New Testament after it. The revelation itself was made not in word but in deed. It was made in the incaration of God the Son, and the outpouring of God the Holy Spirit. The relation of the two Testaments to this revelation is in the one case that of preparation for it, and in the other that of product of it. The revelation itself is embodied just in Christ and the Holy Spirit. This is as much as to say that the revelation of the Trinity was incidental to, and the inevitable effect of, the accomplishment of redemption. It was in the coming of the Son of God in the likeness of sinful flesh to offer Himself a sacrifice for sin; and in the coming of the Holy Spirit to convict the world of sin, of righteousness and of judgment, that the Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Godhead was once for all revealed to men. Those who knew God the Father, who loved them and gave His own Son to die for them; and the Lord Jesus Christ, who loved them and delivered Himself up an offering and sacrifice for them; and the Spirit of Grace, who loved them and dwelt within them a power not themselves, making for righteousness, knew the Triune God and could not think or speak of God otherwise than as triune. The doctrine of the Trinity, in other words, is simply the modification wrought in the conception of the one only God by His complete revelation of Himself in the redemptive process. It necessarily waited, therefore, upon the completion of the redemptive process for its revelation, and its revelation, as necessarily, lay complete in the redemptive process.
From this central fact we may understand more fully several circumstances connected with the revelation of the Trinity to which allusion has been made. We may from it understand, for example, why the Trinity was not revealed in the Old Testament. It may carry us a little way to remark, as it has been customary to remark since the time of Gregory of Nazianzus, that it was the task of the Old Testament revelation to fix firmly in the minds and hearts of the people of God the great fundamental truth of the unity of the Godhead; and it would have been dangerous to speak to them of the plurality within this unity until this task had been fully accomplished. The real reason for the delay in the revelation of the Trinity, however, is grounded in the secular development of the redemptive purpose of God: the times were ripe for the revelation of the Trinity in the unity of the Godhead until the fullness of the time had come for God to send forth His Son unto redemption, and His Spirit unto sanctification. The revelation in word must needs wait upon the revelation in fact, to which it brings its necessary explanation, no doubt, but from which also it derives its own entire significance and value. The revelation of a Trinity in the divine unity as a mere abstract truth without relation to manifested fact, and without significance to the development of the kingdom of God, would have been foreign to the whole method of the divine procedure as it lies exposed to us in the pages of Scripture. Here the working-out of the divine purpose supplies the fundamental principle to which all else, even the progressive stages of revelation itself, is subsidiary; and advances in revelation are ever closely connected with the advancing accomplishment of the redemptive purpose. We may understand also, however, from the same central fact, why it is that the doctrine of the Trinity lies in the New Testament rather in the form of allusions than in express teaching, why it is rather everywhere presupposed, coming only here and there into incidental expression, than formally inculcated. It is because the revelation, having been made in the actual occurrences of redemption, was already the common property of all Christian hearts. In speaking and writing to one another, Christians, therefore, rather spoke out of their common Trinitarian consciousness, and reminded one another of their common fund of belief, than instructed one another in what was already the common property of all. We are to look for, and we shall find, in the New Testament allusions to the Trinity, rather evidence of how the Trinity, believed in by all, was conceived by the authoritative teachers of the church, than formal attempts, on their part, by authoritative declarations, to bring the church into the understanding that God is a Trinity.
9. Implied in the Whole New Testament:
The fundamental proof that God is a Trinity is supplied thus by the fundamental revelation of the Trinity in fact: that is to say, in the incarnation of God the Son and the outpouring of God the Holy Spirit. In a word, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are the fundamental proof of the doctrine of the Trinity. This is as much as to say that all the evidence of whatever kind, and from whatever source derived, that Jesus Christ is God manifested in the flesh, and that the Holy Spirit is a Divine Person, is just so much evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity; and that when we go to the New Testament for evidence of the Trinity we are to seek it, not merely in the scattered allusions to the Trinity as such, numerous and instructive as they are, but primarily in the whole mass of evidence which the New Testament provides of the Deity of Christ and the divine personality of the Holy Spirit. When we have said this, we have said in effect that the whole mass of the New Testament is evidence for the Trinity. For the New Testament is saturated with evidence of the Deity of Christ and the divine personality of the Holy Spirit, Precisely what the New Testament is, is the documentation of the religion of the incarnate Son and of the outpoured Spirit, that is to say, of the religion of the Trinity, and what we mean by the doctrine of the Trinity is nothing but the formulation in exact language of the conception of God presupposed in the religion of the incarnate Son and outpoured Spirit. We may analyze this conception and adduce proof for every constituent element of it from the New Testament declarations. We may show that the New Testament everywhere insists on the unity of the Godhead; that it constantly recognizes the Father as God, the Son as God and the Spirit as God; and that it cursorily presents these three to us as distinct Persons. It is not necessary, however, to enlarge here on facts so obvious. We may content ourselves with simply observing that to the New Testament there is but one only living and true God; but that to it Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit are each God in the fullest sense of the term; and yet Father, Son and Spirit stand over against each other as I, and Thou, and He. In this composite fact the New Testament gives us the doctrine of the Trinity. For the doctrine of the Trinity is but the statement in wellguarded language of this composite fact. Through out the whole course of the many efforts to formulate the doctrine exactly, which have followed one another during the entire history of the church, indeed, the principle which has ever determined the result has always been determination to do justice in conceiving the relations of God the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit, on the one hand to the unity of God, and, on the other, to the true Deity of the Son and Spirit and their distinct personalities. When we have said these three things, then - that there is but one God, that the Father and the Son and the Spirit is each God, that the Father and the Son and the Spirit is each a distinct person - we have enunciated the doctrine of the Trinity in its completeness.
That this doctrine underlies the whole New Testament as its constant presupposition and determines everywhere its forms of expression is the primary fact to be noted. We must not omit explicitly to note, however, that it now and again also, as occasion arises for its incidental enunciation, comes itself to expression in more or less completeness of statement. The passages in which the three Persons of the Trinity are brought together are much more numerous than, perhaps, is generally supposed; but it should be recognized that the formal collocation of the elements of the doctrine naturally is relatively rare in writings which are occasional in their origin and practical rather than doctrinal in their immediate purpose. The three Persons already come into view as Divine Persons in the annunciation of the birth of our Lord: ’The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee,’ said the angel to Mary, ’and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee: wherefore also the holy thing which is to be born shall be called the Son of God’ (Luk 1:35 margin; compare Mat 1:18 ff). Here the Holy Ghost is the active agent in the production of an effect which is also ascribed to the power of the Most High, and the child thus brought into the world is given the great designation of “Son of God.” The three Persons are just as clearly brought before us in the account of Matthew (Mat 1:18 ff), though the allusions to them are dispersed through a longer stretch of narrative, in the course of which the Deity of the child is twice intimated (Mat 1:21: ’It is He that shall save His people from their sins’; Mat 1:23: ’They shall call His name Immanuel; which is, being interpreted, God-with-us’) In the baptismal scene which finds record by all the evangelists at the opening of Jesus’ ministry (Mat 3:16, Mat 3:17; Mar 1:10, Mar 1:11; Luk 3:21, Luk 3:22; Joh 1:32-34), the three Persons are thrown up to sight in a dramatic picture in which the Deity of each is strongly emphasized. From the open heavens the Spirit descends in visible form, and ’a voice came out of the heavens, Thou art my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.’ Thus care seems to have been taken to make the advent of the Son of God into the world the revelation also of the Triune God, that the minds of men might as smoothly as possible adjust themselves to the preconditions of the divine redemption which was in process of being wrought out.
10. Conditions the Whole Teaching of Jesus:
With this as a starting-point, the teaching of Jesus is conditioned throughout in a Trinitarian way. He has much to say of God His Father, from whom as His Son He is in some true sense distinct, and with whom He is in some equally true sense one. And He has much to say of the Spirit, who represents Him as He represents the Father, and by whom He works as the Father works by Him. It is not merely in the Gospel of John that such representations occur in the teaching of Jesus. In the Synoptics, too, Jesus claims a Sonship to God which is unique (Mat 11:27; Mat 24:36; Mar 13:32; Luk 10:22; in the following passages the title of “Son of God” is attributed to Him and accepted by Him: Mat 4:6; Mat 8:29; Mat 14:33; Mat 27:40, Mat 27:43, Mat 27:44; Mar 3:11; Mar 12:6-8; Mar 15:39; Luk 4:41; Luk 22:70; compare Joh 1:34, Joh 1:49; Joh 9:35; Joh 11:27), and which involves an absolute community between the two in knowledge, say, and power: both Matthew (Mat 11:27) and Luke (Luk 10:22) record His great declaration that He knows the Father and the Father knows Him with perfect mutual knowledge: “No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son.” In the Synoptics, too, Jesus speaks of employing the Spirit of God Himself for the performance of His works, as if the activities of God were at His disposal: “I by the Spirit of God” - or as Luke has it, “by the finger of God - cast out demons” (Mat 12:28; Luk 11:20; compare the promise of the Spirit in Mar 13:11; Luk 12:12).
11. Father and Son in Johannine Discourses:
It is in the discourses recorded in John, however, that Jesus most copiously refers to the unity of Himself, as the Son, with the Father, and to the mission of the Spirit from Himself as the dispenser of the divine activities. Here He not only with great directness declares that He and the Father are one (Joh 10:30; compare Joh 17:11, Joh 17:21, Joh 17:22, Joh 17:25) with a unity of interpenetration (“The Father is in me, and I in the Father,” Joh 10:38; compare Joh 16:10, Joh 16:11), so that to have seen Him was to have seen the Father (Joh 14:9; compare Joh 15:21); but He removes all doubt as to the essential nature of His oneness with the Father by explicitly asserting His eternity (“Before Abraham was born, I am,” Joh 8:58), His co-eternity with God (“had with thee before the world was,” Joh 17:5; compare Joh 17:18; Joh 6:62), His eternal participation in the divine glory itself (“the glory which I had with thee,” in fellowship, community with Thee “before the world was,” Joh 17:5). So clear is it that in speaking currently of Himself as God’s Son (Joh 5:25; Joh 9:35; Joh 11:4; compare Joh 10:36), He meant, in accordance with the underlying significance of the idea of sonship in Semitic speech (founded on the natural implication that whatever the father is that the son is also; compare Joh 16:15; Joh 17:10), to make Himself, as the Jews with exact appreciation of His meaning perceived, “equal with God” (Joh 5:18), or, to put it brusquely, just “God” (Joh 10:33). How He, being thus equal or rather identical with God, was in the world, He explains as involving a coming forth (
12. Spirit in Johannine Discourses:
It is more important to point out that these phenomena of interrelationship are not confined to the Father and Son, but are extended also to the Spirit. Thus, for example, in a context in which our Lord had emphasized in the strongest manner His own essential unity and continued interpenetration with the Father (“ If ye had known me, ye would have known my Father also”; “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father”; “I am in the Father, and the Father in me”; “The Father abiding in me doeth his works,” Joh 14:7, Joh 14:9, Joh 14:10), we read as follows (Joh 14:16-26): ’And I will make request of the Father, and He shall ive you another (thus sharply distinguished from Our Lord as a distinct Person) Advocate, that He may be with you forever, the Spirit of Truth ... He abideth with you and shall be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I come unto you.... In that day ye shall know that I am in the Father.... If a man love me, he will keep my word; and my Father will love him and we (that is, both Father and Son) will come unto him and make our abode with him.... These things have I spoken unto you while abiding with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I said unto you.’ It would be impossible to speak more distinctly of three who were yet one. The Father, Son and Spirit are constantly distinguished from one another - the Son makes request of the Father, and the Father in response to this request gives an Advocate, “another” than the Son, who is sent in the Son’s name. And yet the oneness of these three is so kept in sight that the coming of this “another Advocate” is spoken of without embarrassment as the coming of the Son Himself (Joh 14:18, Joh 14:19, Joh 14:20, Joh 14:21), and indeed as the coming of the Father and the Son (Joh 14:23). There is a sense, then, in which, when Christ goes away, the Spirit comes in His stead; there is also a sense in which, when the Spirit comes, Christ comes in Him; and with Christ’s coming the Father comes too. There is a distinction between the Persons brought into view; and with it an identity among them; for both of which allowance must be made. The same phenomena meet us in other passages. Thus, we read again (Joh 15:26): But when there is come the Advocate whom I will send unto you from (fellowship with) the Father, the Spirit of Truth, which goeth forth from (fellowship with) the Father, He shall bear witness of me.’ In the compass of this single verse, it is intimated that the Spirit is personally distinct from the Son, and yet, like Him, has His eternal home (in fellowship) with the Father, from whom He, like the Son, comes forth for His saving work, being sent thereunto, however, not in this instance by the Father, but by the Son.
This last feature is even more strongly emphasized in yet another passage in which the work of the Spirit in relation to the Son is presented as closely parallel with the work of the Son in relation to the Father (Joh 16:5 ff). ’But now I go unto Him that sent me ... Nevertheless I tell you the truth; it is expedient for you that I go away; for, if I go not away the Advocate will not come unto you; but if I go I will send Him unto you. And He, after He is come, will convict the world ... of righteousness because I go to the Father and ye behold me no more.... I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now. Howbeit when He, the Spirit of truth is come, He shall guide you into all the truth; for He shall not speak from Himself; but what things soever He shall hear, He shall speak, and He shall declare unto you the things that are to come. He shall glorify me: for He shall take of mine and shall show it unto you. All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I that He taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you.’ Here the Spirit is sent by the Son, and comes in order to complete and apply the Son’s work, receiving His whole commission from the Son - not, however, in derogation of the Father, because when we speak of the things of the Son, that is to speak of the things of the Father.
It is not to be said, of course, that the doctrine of the Trinity is formulated in passages like these, with which the whole mass of our Lord’s discourses in John are strewn; but it certainly is presupposed in them, and that is, considered from the point of view of their probative force, even better. As we read we are kept in continual contact with three Persons who act, each as a distinct person, and yet who are in a deep, underlying sense, one. There is but one God - there is never any question of that - and yet this Son who has been sent into the world by God not only represents God but is God, and this Spirit whom the Son has in turn sent unto the world is also Himself God. Nothing could be clearer than that the Son and Spirit are distinct Persons, unless indeed it be that the Son of God is just God the Son and the Spirit of God just God the Spirit.
13. The Baptismal Formula:
Meanwhile, the nearest approach to a formal announcement of the doctrine of the Trinity which is recorded from our Lord’s lips, or, perhaps we may say, which is to be found in the whole compass of the New Testament, has been preserved for us, not by John, but by one of the synoptists. It too, however, is only incidentally introduced, and has for its main object something very different from formulating the doctrine of the Trinity. It is embodied in the great commission which the resurrected Lord gave His disciples to be their “marching orders” “even unto the end of the world”: “Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Mat 28:19). In seeking to estimate the significance of this great declaration, we must bear in mind the high solemnity of the utterance, by which we are required to give its full value to every word of it. Its phrasing is in any event, however, remarkable. It does not say, “In the names (plural) of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost”; nor yet (what might be taken to be equivalent to that), “In the name of the Father, and in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Ghost,” as if we had to deal with three separate Beings. Nor, on the other hand does it say, “In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost,” as if “the Father, Son and Holy Ghost” might be taken as merely three designations of a single person. With stately impressiveness it asserts the unity of the three by combining them all within the bounds of the single Name; and then throws up into emphasis the distinctness of each by introducing them in turn with the repeated article: “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost (the King James Version). These three, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, each stand in some clear sense over against the others in distinct personality: these three, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, all unite in some profound sense in the common participation of the one Name. Fully to comprehend the implication of this mode of statement, we must bear in mind, further, the significance of the term, “the name,” and the associations laden with which it came to the recipients of this commission. For the Hebrew did not think of the name, as we are accustomed to do, as a mere external symbol; but rather as the adequate expression of the innermost being of its bearer. In His Name the Being of God finds expression; and the Name of God - “this glorious and fearful name, Yahweh thy God” (Deu 28:58) - was accordingly a most sacred thing, being indeed virtually equivalent to God Himself. It is no solecism, therefore, when we read (Isa 30:27), “Behold, the name of Yahweh cometh”; and the parallelisms are most instructive when we read (Isa 59:19): ’So shall they fear the Name of Yahweh from the west, and His glory from the rising of the sun; for He shall come as a stream pent in which the Spirit of Yahweh driveth.’ So pregnant was the implication of the Name, that it was possible for the term to stand absolutely, without adjunction of the name itself, as the sufficient representative of the majesty of Yahweh: it was a terrible thing to ’blaspheme the Name’ (Lev 24:11). All those over whom Yahweh’s Name was called were His, His possession to whom He owed protection. It is for His Name’s sake, therefore, that afflicted Judah cries to the Hope of Israel, the Saviour thereof in time of trouble: ’O Yahweh, Thou art in the midst of us, and Thy Name is called upon us; leave us not’ (Jer 14:9); and His people find the appropriate expression of their deepest shame in the lament, ’We have become as they over whom Thou never barest rule; as they upon whom Thy Name was not called’ (Isa 63:19); while the height of joy is attained in the cry, ’Thy Name, Yahweh, God of Hosts, is called upon me’ (Jer 15:16; compare 2Ch 7:14; Dan 9:18, Dan 9:19). When, therefore, our Lord commanded His disciples to baptize those whom they brought to His obedience “into the name of ...,” He was using language charged to them with high meaning. He could not have been understood otherwise than as substituting for the Name of Yahweh this other Name “of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost”; and this could not ’possibly have meant to His disciples anything else than that Yahweh was now to be known to them by the new Name, of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The only alternative would have been that, for the community which He was rounding, Jesus was supplanting Yahweh by a new God; and this alternative is no less than monstrous. There is no alternative, therefore, to understanding Jesus here to be giving for His community a new Name to Yahweh, and that new Name to be the threefold Name of “the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” Nor is there room for doubt that by “the Son” in this threefold Name, He meant just Himself with all the implications of distinct personality which this carries with it; and, of course, that further carries with it the equally distinct personality of “the Father” and “the Holy Ghost,” with whom “the Son” is here associated, and from whom alike “the Son” is here distinguished. This is a direct ascription to Yahweh, the God of Israel, of a threefold personality, and is therewith the direct enunciation of the doctrine of the Trinity. We are not witnessing here the birth of the doctrine of the Trinity; that is presupposed. What we are witnessing is the authoritative announcement of the Trinity as the God of Christianity by its Founder, in one of the most solemn of His recorded declarations. Israel had worshipped the one only true God under the Name of Yahweh; Christians are to worship the same one only and true God under the Name of “the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” This is the distinguishing characteristic of Christians; and that is as much as to say that the doctrine of the Trinity is, according to our Lord’s own apprehension of it, the distinctive mark of the religion which He founded.
14. Genuineness of Baptismal Formula:
A passage of such range of implication has, of course, not escaped criticism and challenge. An attempt which cannot be characterized as other than frivolous has even been made to dismiss it from the text of Matthew’s Gospel. Against this, the whole body of external evidence cries out; and the internal evidence is of itself not less decisive to the same effect. When the “universalism,” “ecclesiasticism,” and “high theology” of the passage are pleaded against its genuineness, it is forgotten that to the Jesus of Matthew there are attributed not only such parables as those of the Leaven and the Mustard Seed, but such declarations as those contained in Mat 8:11, Mat 8:12; Mat 21:43; Mat 24:14; that in this Gospel alone is Jesus recorded as speaking familiarly about His church (Mat 16:18; Mat 18:17); and that, after the great declaration of Mat 11:27 if, nothing remained in lofty attribution to be assigned to Him. When these same objections are urged against recognizing the passage as an authentic saying of Jesus own, it is quite obvious that the Jesus of the evangelists cannot be in mind. The declaration here recorded is quite in character with the Jesus of Matthew’s Gospel, as has just been intimated; and no less with the Jesus of the whole New Testament transmission. It will scarcely do, first to construct a priori a Jesus to our own liking, and then to discard as “unhistorical” all in the New Testament transmission which would be unnatural to such a Jesus. It is not these discarded passages but our a priori Jesus which is unhistorical. In the present instance, moreover, the historicity of the assailed saying is protected by an important historical relation in which it stands. It is not merely Jesus who speaks out of a Trinitarian consciousness, but all the New Testament writers as well. The universal possession by. His followers of so firm a hold on such a doctrine requires the assumption that some such teaching as is here attributed to Him was actually contained in Jesus’ instructions to His followers. Even had it not been attributed to Him in so many words by the record, we should have had to assume that some such declaration had been made by Him. In these circumstances, there can be no good reason to doubt that it was made by Him, when it is expressly attributed to Him by the record.
15. Paul’s Trinitarianism:
When we turn from the discourses of Jesus to the writings of His followers with a view to observing how the assumption of the doctrine of the Trinity underlies their whole fabric also, we naturally go first of all to the letters of Paul. Their very mass is impressive; and the definiteness with which their composition within a generation of the death of Jesus may be fixed adds importance to them as historical witnesses. Certainly they leave nothing to be desired in the richness of their testimony to the Trinitarian conception of God which underlies them. Throughout the whole series, from 1 Thessalonians, which comes from about 52 AD, to 2 Timothy, which was written about 68 AD, the redemption, which it is their one business to proclaim and commend, and all the blessings which enter into it or accompany it are referred consistently to a threefold divine causation. Everywhere, throughout their pages, God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit appear as the joint objects of all religious adoration, and the conjunct source of all divine operations. In the freedom of the allusions which are made to them, now and again one alone of the three is thrown up into prominent view; but more often two of them are conjoined in thanksgiving or prayer; and not infrequently all three are brought together as the apostle strives to give some adequate expression to his sense of indebtedness to the divine source of all good for blessings received, or to his longing on behalf of himself or of his readers for further communion with the God of grace. It is regular for him to begin his Epistles with a prayer for “grace and peace” for his readers, “from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ,” as the joint source of these divine blessings by way of eminence (Rom 1:7; 1Co 1:3; 2Co 1:2; Gal 1:3; Eph 1:2; Php 1:2; 2Th 1:2; 1Ti 1:2; 2Ti 1:2; Phm 1:3; compare 1Th 1:1). It is obviously no departure from this habit in the essence of the matter, but only in relative fullness of expression, when in the opening words of the Epistle to the Colossians, the clause “and the Lord Jesus Christ” is omitted, and we read merely: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father.” So also it would have been no departure from it in the essence of the matter, but only in relative fullness of expression, if in any instance the name of the Holy Spirit had chanced to be adjoined to the other two, as in the single instance of 2Co 13:14 it is adjoined to them in the closing prayer for grace with which Paul ends his letters, and which ordinarily takes the simple form of, “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you” (Rom 16:20; 1Co 16:23; Gal 6:18; Php 4:23; 1Th 5:28; 2Th 3:18; Phm 1:25; more expanded form, Eph 6:23, Eph 6:24; more Compressed, Col 4:18; 1Ti 6:21; 2Ti 4:22; Tit 3:15). Between these opening and closing passages the allusions to God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit are constant and most intricately interlaced. Paul’s monotheism is intense: the first premise of all his thought on divine things is the unity of God (Rom 3:30; 1Co 8:4; Gal 3:20; Eph 4:6; 1Ti 2:5; compare Rom 16:22; 1Ti 1:17). Yet to him God the Father is no more God than the Lord Jesus Christ is God, or the Holy Spirit is God. The Spirit of God is to him related to God as the spirit of man is to man (1Co 2:11), and therefore if the Spirit of God dwells in us, that is God dwelling in us (Rom 8:10 ff), and we are by that fact constituted temples of God (1Co 3:16). And no expression is too strong for him to use in order to assert the Godhead of Christ: He is “our great God” (Tit 2:13); He is “God over all” (Rom 9:5); and indeed it is expressly declared of Him that the “fulness of the Godhead, that is, everything that enters into Godhead and constitutes it Godhead, dwells in Him. In the very act of asserting his monotheism Paul takes our Lord up into this unique Godhead. “There is no God but one” he roundly asserts, and then illustrates and proves this assertion by remarking that the heathen may have “gods many, and lords many,” but “to us there is one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we unto him; and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things, and we through him” (1Co 8:6). Obviously, this “one God, the Father,” and “one Lord, Jesus Christ,” are embraced together in the one God who alone is. Paul’s conception of the one God, whom alone he worships, includes, in other words, a recognition that within the unity of His Being, there exists such a distinction of Persons as is given us in the “one God, the Father” and the “one Lord, Jesus Christ.”
16. Conjunction of the Three in Paul:
In numerous passages scattered through Paul’s Epistles, from the earliest of them (1Th 1:2-5; 2Th 2:13, 2Th 2:14) to the latest (Tit 3:4-6; 2Ti 1:3, 2Ti 1:13, 2Ti 1:14), all three Persons, God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit, are brought together, in the most incidental manner, as co-sources of all the saving blessings which come to believers in Christ. A typical series of such passages may be found in Eph 2:18; Eph 3:2-5, Eph 3:14, Eph 3:17; Eph 4:4-6; Eph 5:18-20. But the most interesting instances are offered to us perhaps by the Epistles to the Corinthians. In 1Co 12:4-6 Paul presents the abounding spiritual gifts with which the church was blessed in a threefold aspect, and connects these aspects with the three Divine Persons. “Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are diversities of ministrations, and the same Lord. And there are diversities of workings, but the same God, who worketh all things in all.” It may be thought that there is a measure of what might almost be called artificiality in assigning the endowments of the church, as they are graces to the Spirit, as they are services to Christ, and as they are energizings to God. But thus there is only the more strikingly revealed the underlying Trinitarian conception as dominating the structure of the clauses: Paul clearly so writes, not because “gifts,” “workings,” “operations” stand out in his thought as greatly diverse things, but because God, the Lord, and the Spirit lie in the back of his mind constantly suggesting a threefold causality behind every manifestation of grace. The Trinity is alluded to rather than asserted; but it is so alluded to as to show that it constitutes the determining basis of all Paul’s thought of the God of redemption. Even more instructive is 2Co 13:14, which has passed into general liturgical use in the churches as a benediction: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.” Here the three highest redemptive blessings are brought together, and attached distributively to the three Persons of the Triune God. There is again no formal teaching of the doctrine of the Trinity; there is only another instance of natural speaking out of a Trinitarian consciousness. Paul is simply thinking of the divine source of these great blessings; but he habitually thinks of this divine source of redemptive blessings after a trinal fashion. He therefore does not say, as he might just as well have said, “The grace and love and communion of God be with you all,” but “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.” Thus he bears, almost unconsciously but most richly, witness to the trinal composition of the Godhead as conceived by Him.
17. Trinitarianism of Other New Testament Writers:
The phenomena of Paul’s Epistles are repeated in the other writings of the New Testament. In these other writings also it is everywhere assumed that the redemptive activities of God rest on a threefold source in God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit; and these three Persons repeatedly come forward together in the expressions of Christian hope or the aspirations of Christian devotion (e.g. Heb 2:3, Heb 2:4; Heb 6:4-6; Heb 10:29-31; 1Pe 1:2; 1Pe 2:3-12; 1Pe 4:13-19; 1Jn 5:4-8; Jud 1:20, Jud 1:21; Rev 1:4-6). Perhaps as typical instances as any are supplied by the two following: “According to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ” (1Pe 1:2); “Praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life” (Jud 1:20, Jud 1:21). To these may be added the highly symbolical instance from the Apocalypse: ’Grace to you and peace from Him which is and was and which is to come; and from the Seven Spirits which are before His throne; and from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead, and the ruler of the kings of the earth’ (Rev 1:4, Rev 1:5). Clearly these writers, too, write out of a fixed Trinitarian consciousness and bear their testimony to the universal understanding current in apostolical circles. Everywhere and by all it was fully understood that the one God whom Christians worshipped and from whom alone they expected redemption and all that redemption brought with it, included within His undiminished unity the three: God the Father, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit, whose activities relatively to one another are conceived as distinctly personal. This is the uniform and pervasive testimony of the New Testament, and it is the more impressive that it is given with such unstudied naturalness and simplicity, with no effort to distinguish between what have come to be called the ontological and the economical aspects of the Trinitarian distinctions, and indeed without apparent consciousness of the existence of such a distinction of aspects. Whether God is thought of in Himself or in His operations, the underlying conception runs unaffectedly into trinal forms.
18. Variations in Nomenclature:
It will not have escaped observation that the Trinitarian terminology of Paul and the other writers of the New Testament is not precisely identical with that of our Lord as recorded for us in His discourses. Paul, for example - and the same is true of the other New Testament writers (except John) - does not speak, as our Lord is recorded as speaking, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, so much as of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. This difference of terminology finds its account in large measure in the different relations in which the speakers stand to the Trinity. Our Lord could not naturally speak of Himself, as one of the Trinitarian Persons, by the designation of “the Lord,” while the designation of “the Son,” expressing as it does His consciousness of close relation, and indeed of exact similarity, to God, came naturally to His lips. But He was Paul’s Lord; and Paul naturally thought and spoke of Him as such. In point of fact, “Lord” is one of Paul’s favorite designations of Christ, and indeed has become with him practically a proper name for Christ, and in point of fact, his Divine Name for Christ. It is naturally, therefore, his Trinitarian name for Christ. Because when he thinks of Christ as divine he calls Him “Lord,” he naturally, when he thinks of the three Persons together as the Triune God, sets Him as “Lord” by the side of God - Paul’s constant name for “the Father” - and the Holy Spirit. Question may no doubt be raised whether it would have been possible for Paul to have done this, especially with the constancy with which he has done it, if, in his conception of it, the very essence of the Trinity were enshrined in the terms “Father” and “Son.” Paul is thinking of the Trinity, to be sure, from the point of view of a worshipper, rather than from that of a systematizer. He designates the Persons of the Trinity therefore rather from his relations to them than from their relations to one another. He sees in the Trinity his God, his Lord, and the Holy Spirit who dwells in him; and naturally he so speaks currently of the three Persons. It remains remarkable, nevertheless, if the very essence of the Trinity were thought of by him as resident in the terms “Father,” “Son,” that in his numerous allusions to the Trinity in the Godhead, he never betrays any sense of this. It is noticeable also that in their allusions to the Trinity, there is preserved, neither in Paul nor in the other writers of the New Testament, the order of the names as they stand in our Lord’s great declaration (Mat 28:19). The reverse order occurs, indeed, occasionally, as, for example, in 1Co 12:4-6 (compare Eph 4:4-6); and this may be understood as a climactic arrangement and so far a testimony to the order of Mat 28:19. But the order is very variable; and in the most formal enumeration of the three Persons, that of 2Co 13:14, it stands thus: Lord, God, Spirit. The question naturally suggests itself whether the order Father, Son, Spirit was especially significant to Paul and his fellow-writers of the New Testament. If in their conviction the very essence of the doctrine of the Trinity was embodied in this order, should we not anticipate that there should appear in their numerous allusions to the Trinity some suggestion of this conviction?
19. Implications of “Son” and “Spirit”:
Such facts as these have a bearing upon the testimony of the New Testament to the interrelations of the Persons of the Trinity. To the fact of the Trinity - to the fact, that is, that in the unity of the Godhead there subsist three Persons, each of whom has his particular part in the working out of salvation - the New Testament testimony is clear, consistent, pervasive and conclusive. There is included in this testimony constant and decisive witness to the complete and undiminished Deity of each of these Persons; no language is too exalted to apply to each of them in turn in the effort to give expression to the writer’s sense of His Deity: the name that is given to each is fully understood to be “the name that is above every name.” When we attempt to press the inquiry behind the broad fact, however, with a view to ascertaining exactly how the New Testament writers conceive the three Persons to be related, the one to the other, we meet with great difficulties. Nothing could seem more natural, for example, than to assume that the mutual relations of the Persons of the Trinity are revealed in the designations, “the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” which are given them by our Lord in the solemn formula of Mat 28:19. Our confidence in this assumption is somewhat shaken, however, when we observe, as we have just observed, that these designations are not carefully preserved in their allusions to the Trinity by the writers of the New Testament at large, but are characteristic only of our Lord’s allusions and those of John, whose modes of speech in general very closely resemble those of our Lord. Our confidence is still further shaken when we observe that the implications with respect to the mutual relations of the Trinitarian Persons, which are ordinarily derived from these designations, do not so certainly lie in them as is commonly supposed.
It may be very natural to see in the designation “Son” an intimation of subordination and derivation of Being, and it may not be difficult to ascribe a similar connotation to the term “Spirit.” But it is quite certain that this was not the denotation of either term in the Semitic consciousness, which underlies the phraseology of Scripture; and it may even be thought doubtful whether it was included even in their remoter suggestions. What underlies the conception of sonship in Scriptural speech is just “likeness”; whatever the father is that the son is also. The emphatic application of the term “Son” to one of the Trinitarian Persons, accordingly, asserts rather His equality with the Father than His subordination to the Father; and if there is any implication of derivation in it, it would appear to be very distant. The adjunction of the adjective “only begotten” (Joh 1:14; Joh 3:16-18; 1Jn 4:9) need add only the idea of uniqueness, not of derivation (Psa 22:21; Psa 25:16; Psa 35:17; The Wisdom of Solomon 7:22 margin); and even such a phrase as “God only begotten” (Joh 1:18 margin) may contain no implication of derivation, but only of absolutely unique consubstantiality; as also such a phrase as ’the first-begotten of all creation’ (Col 1:15) may convey no intimation of coming into being, but merely assert priority of existence. In like manner, the designation “Spirit of God” or “Spirit of Yahweh,” which meets us frequently in the Old Testament, certainly does not convey the idea there either of derivation or of subordination, but is just the executive name of God - the designation of God from the point of view of His activity - and imports accordingly identity with God; and there is no reason to suppose that, in passing from the Old Testament to the New Testament, the term has taken on an essentially different meaning. It happens, oddly enough, moreover, that we have in the New Testament itself what amounts almost to formal definitions of the two terms “Son” and “Spirit,” and in both cases the stress is laid on the notion of equality or sameness. In Joh 5:18 we read: ’On this account, therefore, the Jews sought the more to kill him, because, not only did he break the Sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal to God.’ The point lies, of course, in the adjective “own.” Jesus was, rightly, understood to call God “his own Father,” that is, to use the terms “Father” and “Son” not in a merely figurative sense, as when Israel was called God’s son, but in the real sense. And this was understood to be claiming to be all that God is. To be the Son of God in any sense was to be like God in that sense; to be God’s own Son was to be exactly like God, to be “equal with God.” Similarly, we read in 1Co 2:10, 1Co 2:11: ’For the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For who of men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? Even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God.’ Here the Spirit appears as the substrate of the divine self-consciousness, the principle of God’s knowledge of Himself: He is, in a word, just God Himself in the innermost essence of His Being. As the spirit of man is the seat of human life, the very life of man itself, so the Spirit of God is His very life-element. How can He be supposed, then, to be subordinate to God, or to derive His Being from God? If, however, the subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father in modes of subsistence and their derivation from the Father are not implicates of their designation as Son and Spirit, it will be hard to find in the New Testament compelling evidence of their subordination and derivation.
20. The Question of Surbordination:
There is, of course, no question that in “modes of operation,” as it is technically called - that is to say, in the functions ascribed to the several persons of the Trinity in the redemptive process, and, more broadly, in the entire dealing of God with the world - the principle of subordination is clearly expressed. The Father is first, the Son is second, and the Spirit is third, in the operations of God as revealed to us in general, and very especially in those operations by which redemption is accomplished. Whatever the Father does, He does through the Son (Rom 2:16; Rom 3:22; Rom 5:1, Rom 5:11, Rom 5:17, Rom 5:21; Eph 1:5; 1Th 5:9; Tit 3:5) by the Spirit. The Son is sent by the Father and does His Father’s will (Joh 6:38); the Spirit is sent by the Son and does not speak from Himself, but only takes of Christ’s and shows it unto His people (Joh 17:7 ff); and we have our Lord’s own word for it that ’one that is sent is not greater than he that sent him’ (Joh 13:16). In crisp decisiveness, our Lord even declares, indeed: ’My Father is greater than I’ (Joh 14:28); and Paul tells us that Christ is God’s, even as we are Christ’s (1Co 3:23), and that as Christ is “the head of every man,” so God is “the head of Christ” (1Co 11:3). But it is not so clear that the principle of subordination rules also in “modes of subsistence,” as it is technically phrased; that is to say, in the necessary relation of the Persons of the Trinity to one another. The very richness and variety of the expression of their subordination, the one to the other, in modes of operation, create a difficulty in attaining certainty whether they are represented as also subordinate the one to the other in modes of subsistence. Question is raised in each case of apparent intimation of subordination in modes of subsistence, whether it may not, after all, be explicable as only another expression of subordination in modes of operation. It may be natural to assume that a subordination in modes of operation rests on a subordination in modes of subsistence; that the reason why it is the Father that sends the Son and the Son that sends the Spirit is that the Son is subordinate to the Father, and the Spirit to the Son. But we are bound to bear in mind that these relations of subordination in modes of operation may just as well be due to a convention, an agreement, between the Persons of the Trinity - a “Covenant” as it is technically called - by virtue of which a distinct function in the work of redemption is voluntarily assumed by each. It is eminently desirable, therefore, at the least, that some definite evidence of subordination in modes of subsistence should be discoverable before it is assumed. In the case of the relation of the Son to the Father, there is the added difficulty of the incarnation, in which the Son, by the assumption of a creaturely nature into union with Himself, enters into new relations with the Father of a definitely subordinate character. Question has even been raised whether the very designations of Father and Son may not be expressive of these new relations, and therefore without significance with respect to the eternal relations of the Persons so designated. This question must certainly be answered in the negative. Although, no doubt, in many of the instances in which the terms “Father” and “Son” occur, it would be possible to take them of merely economical relations, there ever remain some which are intractable to this treatment, and we may be sure that “Father” and “Son” are applied to their eternal and necessary relations. But these terms, as we have seen, do not appear to imply relations of first and second, superiority and subordination, in modes of subsistence; and the fact of the humiliation of the Son of God for His earthly work does introduce a factor into the interpretation of the passages which import His subordination to the Father, which throws doubt upon the inference from them of an eternal relation of subordination in the Trinity itself. It must at least be said that in the presence of the great New Testament doctrines of the Covenant of Redemption on the one hand, and of the Humiliation of the Son of God for His work’s sake and of the Two Natures in the constitution of His Person as incarnated, on the other, the difficulty of interpreting subordinationist passages of eternal relations between the Father and Son becomes extreme. The question continually obtrudes itself, whether they do not rather find their full explanation in the facts embodied in the doctrines of the Covenant, the Humiliation of Christ, and the Two Natures of His incarnated Person. Certainly in such circumstances it were thoroughly illegitimate to press such passages to suggest any subordination for the Son or the Spirit which would in any manner impair that complete identity with the Father in Being and that complete equality with the Father in powers which are constantly presupposed, and frequently emphatically, though only incidentally, asserted for them throughout the whole fabric of the New Testament.
21. Witness of the Christian Consciousness:
The Trinity of the Persons of the Godhead, shown in the incarnation and the redemptive work of God the Son, and the descent and saving work of God the Spirit, is thus everywhere assumed in the New Testament, and comes to repeated fragmentary but none the less emphatic and illuminating expression in its pages. As the roots of its revelation are set in the threefold divine causality of the saving process, it naturally finds an echo also in the consciousness of everyone who has experienced this salvation. Every redeemed soul, knowing himself reconciled with God through His Son, and quickened into newness of life by His Spirit, turns alike to Father, Son and Spirit with the exclamation of reverent gratitude upon his lips, “My Lord and my God!” If he could not construct the doctrine of the Trinity out of his consciousness of salvation, yet the elements of his consciousness of salvation are interpreted to him and reduced to order only by the doctrine of the Trinity which he finds underlying and giving their significance and consistency to the teaching of the Scriptures as to the processes of salvation. By means of this doctrine he is able to think clearly and consequently of his threefold relation to the saving God, experienced by him as Fatherly love sending a Redeemer, as redeeming love executing redemption, as saving love applying redemption: all manifestations in distinct methods and by distinct agencies of the one seeking and saving love of God. Without the doctrine of the Trinity, his conscious Christian life would be thrown into confusion and left in disorganization if not, indeed, given an air of unreality; with the doctrine of the Trinity, order, significance and reality are brought to every element of it. Accordingly, the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of redemption, historically, stand or fall together. A Unitarian theology is commonly associated with a Pelagian anthropology and a Socinian soteriology. It is a striking testimony which is borne by E. Koenig (Offenbarungsbegriff des Altes Testament, 1882, I, 125): “I have learned that many cast off the whole history of redemption for no other reason than because they have not attained to a conception of the Triune God.” It is in this intimacy of relation between the doctrines of the Trinity and redemption that the ultimate reason lies why the Christian church could not rest until it had attained a definite and well-compacted doctrine of the Trinity. Nothing else could be accepted as an adequate foundation for the experience of the Christian salvation. Neither the Sabellian nor the Arian construction could meet and satisfy the data of the consciousness of salvation, any more than either could meet and satisfy the data of the Scriptural revelation. The data of the Scriptural revelation might, to be sure, have been left unsatisfied: men might have found a modus vivendi with neglected, or even with perverted Scriptural teaching. But perverted or neglected elements of Christian experience are more clamant in their demands for attention and correction. The dissatisfied Christian consciousness necessarily searched the Scriptures, on the emergence of every new attempt to state the doctrine of the nature and relations of God, to see whether these things were true, and never reached contentment until the Scriptural data were given their consistent formulation in a valid doctrine of the Trinity. Here too the heart of man was restless until it found its rest in the Triune God, the author, procurer and applier of salvation.
22. Formulation of the Doctrine:
The determining impulse to the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity in the church was the church’s profound conviction of the absolute Deity of Christ, on which as on a pivot the whole Christian conception of God from the first origins of Christianity turned. The guiding principle in the formulation of the doctrine was supplied by the Baptismal Formula announced by Jesus (Mat 28:19), from which was derived the ground-plan of the baptismal confessions and “rules of faith” which very soon began to be framed all over the church. It was by these two fundamental principia - the true Deity of Christ and the Baptismal Formula - that all attempts to formulate the Christian doctrine of God were tested, and by their molding power that the church at length found itself in possession of a form of statement which did full justice to the data of the redemptive revelation as reflected in the New Testament and the demands of the Christian heart under the experience of salvation.
In the nature of the case the formulated doctrine was of slow attainment. The influence of inherited conceptions and of current philosophies inevitably showed itself in the efforts to construe to the intellect the immanent faith of Christians. In the 2nd century the dominant neo-Stoic and neo-Platonic ideas deflected Christian thought into subordinationist channels, and produced what is known as the Logos-Christology, which looks upon the Son as a prolation of Deity reduced to such dimensions as comported with relations with a world of time and space; meanwhile, to a great extent, the Spirit was neglected altogether. A reaction which, under the name of Monarchianism, identified the Father, Son, and Spirit so completely that they were thought of only as different aspects or different moments in the life of the one Divine Person, called now Father, now Son, now Spirit, as His several activities came successively into view, almost succeeded in establishing itself in the 3rd century as the doctrine of the church at large. In the conflict between these two opposite tendencies the church gradually found its way, under the guidance of the Baptismal Formula elaborated into a “Rule of Faith,” to a better and more well-balanced conception, until a real doctrine of the Trinity at length came to expression, particularly in the West, through the brilliant dialectic of Tertullian. It was thus ready at hand, when, in the early years of the 4th century, the Logos-Christology, in opposition to dominant Sabellian tendencies, ran to seed in what is known as Arianism, to which the Son was a creature, though exalted above all other creatures as their Creator and Lord; and the church was thus prepared to assert its settled faith in a Triune God, one in being, but in whose unity there subsisted three consubstantial Persons. Under the leadership of Athanasius this doctrine was proclaimed as the faith of the church at the Council of Nice in 325 AD, and by his strenuous labors and those of “the three great Cappadocians,” the two Gregories and Basil, it gradually won its way to the actual acceptance of the entire church. It was at the hands of Augustine, however, a century later, that the doctrine thus become the church doctrine in fact as well as in theory, received its most complete elaboration and most carefully grounded statement. In the form which he gave it, and which is embodied in that “battle-hymn of the early church,” the so-called Athanasian Creed, it has retained its place as the fit expression of the faith of the church as to the nature of its God until today. The language in which it is couched, even in this final declaration, still retains elements of speech which owe their origin to the modes of thought characteristic of the Logos-Christology of the 2nd century, fixed in the nomenclature of the church by the Nicene Creed of 325 AD, though carefully guarded there against the subordinationism inherent in the Logos-Christology, and made the vehicle rather of the Nicene doctrines of the eternal generation of the Son and procession of the Spirit, with the consequent subordination of the Son and Spirit to the Father in modes of subsistence as well as of operation. In the Athanasian Creed, however, the principle of the equalization of the three Persons, which was already the dominant motive of the Nicene Creed - the
Literature.
F. C. Baur, Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit Gottea, 3 volumes, Tubingen, 1841-43; Dionysius Petavius, De Trinitate (vol II, of De Theologicis Dogmaticis, Paris, 1647); G. Bull, A Defence of the Nicene Creed (1685), 2 volumes, Oxford, 1851; G. S. Faber, The Apostolicity of Trinitarianism, 2 volumes, 1832; Augustine, On the Holy Trinity (Volume III of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 1-228), New York, 1887; Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, I, chapter xiii; C. Hodge, Systematic Theology and Index, I, New York, 1873, 442-82; H. Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatick2, II, Kampen, 1908, 260-347 (gives excellent references to literature); S. Harris, God, Creator, and Lord of All, New York, 1896; R. Rocholl, Der christliche Gottesbegriff, Gottingen, 1900; W. F. Adeney, The Christian Conception of God, London, 1909, 215-46; J. Lebreton, Lea origines du dogme de la Trinite, Paris, 1910; J. C. K. Hofmann, Der Schriftbeweis2, Nordlingen, 1857-60, I, 85-111; J. L. S. Lutz, Biblische Dogmatik, Pforzheim, 1817, 319-94; R. W. Landis, A Plea for the Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity, Philadelphia, 1832; E. H. Bickersteth, The Rock of Ages, etc., London, 1860, New York, 1861; E. Riggenbach, “Der trinitarische Taufbefehl, Mat 28:19” (in Schlatter and Cremer, Beitrage zur Forderung christlicher Theologie, 1903, VII; also 1906, X); F. J. Hall, The Trinity, London and New York, 1910, 100-141; J. Pearson, An Exposition of the Creed, edition Chevallier and Sinker, Cambridge, 1899; J. Howe, “Calm Discourse on the Trinity,” in Works, edition Hunt, London, 1810-22; J. Owen, “Vindication of the Doctrine of the Holy Trinity,” and “Saint’s Fellowship with the Trinity,” in Works, Gould’s edition, London, 1850-55; J. Edwards, Observations concerning the Scripture Economy of the Trinity, etc., New York, 1880, also An Unpublished Essay on the Trinity, New York, 1903; J. R. Illingworth, The Doctrine of the Trinity Apologetically Considered, London and New York, 1907; A. F. W. Ingrain, The Love of the Trinity, New York, 1908.
(NOTE. - In this article the author has usually given his own renderings of original passages, and not those of any particular version - EDITORS.)
See God.
God is one, but he exists as a Trinity. Any attempt to define the Trinity is difficult and dangerous, as it is an attempt to do what the Bible does not do. However, by a study of the biblical teaching about God, we understand that although God is one, the form in which his godhead exists is that of three persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Each of the three persons is fully God, yet there is only one God, not three.
One God, three persons
The Old Testament gives little clear teaching about the Trinity, for the emphasis there is on the oneness of God. Israel lived among nations that had many gods. The important truth impressed upon Israel was that there is only one God, and he is a unity (Deu 6:4).
Our understanding of the Trinity comes largely from the New Testament. This does not mean that the God of Old Testament times differed from the God of New Testament times, or that a God who was previously ‘one’ branched out into three. God has always existed in a Trinity. What is new in the New Testament is the revelation of the Trinity, not the Trinity itself.
The reason why the revelation of the Trinity is new in the New Testament is that it was related to the great acts of God in bringing his plan of salvation to completion in Christ. God did not reveal his truth in the form of abstract truths unrelated to the situation in which the people of the time lived. Rather he revealed his truth step by step as he brought his people closer to the full salvation he had planned.
Nevertheless, with the fuller knowledge that Christians gain from the New Testament, they may see suggestions of the Trinity in the Old Testament. Such suggestions are there, even though believers of Old Testament times may not have seen them (cf. 1Pe 1:10-12).
For example, in the Old Testament references to the creation there was an inseparable connection between God, the creative power of God’s Word, and the life-giving power of God’s Spirit (Gen 1:1-3; Job 33:4; Psa 33:6). But with the coming of Jesus, people gained a clearer understanding of the work of the Trinity in all the activity of God, including the creation (Joh 1:1-4). This understanding increased further as Jesus taught his followers and left with them the gift of the Holy Spirit, who would interpret his teaching and continue to enlighten them (Joh 16:13-15).
The revelation through Jesus Christ
When God took human form in the person of Jesus Christ, much that was previously secret and hidden became open. Jesus revealed God to the world (Joh 1:1; Joh 1:14; Joh 1:18).
Through Jesus Christ, God was now physically present in the world. But in another sense he was not physically present. Jesus made it plain that when people saw him they saw God (Joh 8:58-59), but he also made it plain that God existed elsewhere; for he himself came from God, and during his earthly life he spoke to God (Joh 6:38; Joh 11:41-42).
Jesus explained this apparent contradiction by pointing out that he was God the Son, and that the one from whom he came and to whom he spoke was God the Father. Although these two persons were distinct, they were uniquely united (Joh 5:18; Joh 5:37; Joh 8:42; Joh 10:30; Joh 11:41; Joh 14:9; Joh 16:26-28; see FATHER; SON OF GOD).
Having become a human being, God the Son now gave the additional revelation that there was a third person in the Godhead, the Holy Spirit. All three persons were involved in the miraculous coming of the Son into the world (Luk 1:35), and the life and ministry of Jesus that followed should have shown people that God existed as a Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Mat 3:16-17; Mat 12:28; Luk 4:18; Joh 3:34-35). Just before he completed his ministry, Jesus explained about the Holy Spirit more fully. He promised that after he returned to his Father, he and the Father would send the Holy Spirit to be with his disciples, as he himself had been previously (Joh 14:16-17; Joh 14:26; Joh 15:26).
The Holy Spirit, though a separate person from the Father and the Son, is inseparably united with both (Act 2:32-33). He comes from the Father as the bearer of the Father’s power and presence (Joh 15:26; Joh 16:7-11), and he comes from the Son as the bearer of the Son’s power and presence (Joh 14:18; Joh 16:7; Rom 8:9; see HOLY SPIRIT). Although there is a distinction between the three persons of the Godhead, there is no division. Each has his own personality and will, but he never acts independently of the others (Joh 14:26; Act 16:6-7; Gal 4:6).
No change in God
This three-in-one and one-in-three unity of the Godhead is well illustrated in the command that Jesus gave to his disciples to baptize their converts ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (Mat 28:19). In Jewish thought the name represented the person (see NAME). Jesus here spoke of the name (singular), indicating one God, but at the same time he showed that this God existed in three persons. And these three persons were distinct from each other, yet uniquely and inseparably united.
As a God-fearing Jew, Jesus gave his complete allegiance to the one and only true God, and he taught others to do likewise (Deu 6:4; Mat 22:37). Jesus’ statement therefore indicated that this God whom Israelites of former times worshipped under the name of Yahweh (Jehovah) was the same God as Christians worshipped under the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The God who is ‘one’ is at the same time a Trinity.
Faith of the New Testament writers
The early disciples reached a fuller understanding of the Trinity through the life, teaching, death and triumph of Jesus Christ. They then passed on their insights through the writings of the New Testament. They never tried to define the Trinity, nor did they try to ‘prove’ it in a theoretical sense. Since they knew God as the one who gave his Son to die for them and gave his Spirit to indwell them, they thought of God in no other way than as a Trinity. The New Testament writings therefore assume the fact of the Trinity at all times (Eph 4:4-6; Eph 5:18-20; 1Th 1:3-5; 1Pe 1:2). Yet they also assume the oneness of God (Rom 3:30; 1Co 8:4).
In keeping with the teachings of Jesus, the teachings of the New Testament writers show that the three persons of the Trinity are fully and equally God. No one person is inferior to, or superior to, any other. Concerning their operations, however, there is a difference. The Son is willingly subject to the Father (Joh 5:30; Joh 7:16; Joh 12:49; Php 2:5-8; Heb 10:5-7), and the Spirit is willingly subject to both the Father and the Son (Joh 14:26; Joh 15:26; Joh 16:13-15; Rom 8:26-27; Gal 4:6; Php 1:19).
Because of the unity between the persons of the Trinity, all three are active in all the work of God. This work is not, as it were, divided among three persons. In a sense, what one does they all do. But the Bible story shows that there is also a sense in which their activities differ.
The name ‘Father’ speaks of one who has to do with the origin of things, and this is seen in the great works of creation, history and redemption (Mal 2:10; Eph 1:3-10; Heb 12:9; Jas 1:17). The Son is the one who reveals the Father, the one through whom the Father does these works (Joh 10:25; Joh 10:38; Joh 14:10; 2Co 5:19; Eph 1:3-10; Col 1:15-16). The Spirit is the one by whom God’s power operates in the world, the one who applies the truth of God’s works to people’s lives (Joh 14:17; Joh 16:7-13; Act 1:8; Rom 8:2-4; Gal 5:16-18; 1Pe 1:2). God’s salvation comes from the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit (Tit 3:4-6), and people’s approach to God is by the Spirit, through the Son, to the Father (Eph 2:18).
Relationship with the triune God
In making statements about the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, the New Testament writers were not attempting a theoretical analysis of God. Their concern was not to set out in systematic form the character and activities of the persons of the Trinity, but to express the relationship that Christians have with God. Christians cannot fully understand the mysteries of the Godhead, but they should try to learn all they can about God; for the life they have in Christ depends on God being the sort of God he is – a Trinity.
Jesus Christ, for example, could not be humankind’s Saviour if he were not the unique person that he is. The fact of the Trinity was essential to his birth (Luk 1:35), his life (Joh 3:34; Joh 5:36-37; Heb 2:3-4; 1Jn 5:6-9), his death (Rom 8:32; Gal 2:20; Heb 9:14), his resurrection (Act 2:42; Joh 10:18; Rom 8:11) and his exaltation (Act 5:30-32).
The fact of the Trinity is essential also for the life of believers: their indwelling by God (Eph 4:6; Col 1:27; 1Co 6:19); their sanctification (Joh 17:17; Heb 2:11; 1Co 6:11), their enjoyment of salvation (2Co 13:14), their exercise of prayer (Rom 8:26-27; Rom 8:34; Eph 2:18), their eternal security (Joh 10:28-29; Eph 4:30) and their ultimate victory over death (Joh 5:21; Rom 8:11).
Likewise the Trinity is involved in the life of the church (1Co 12:4-6) and in Christian service (2Co 3:5-6; 1Ti 1:12; Act 20:28). The Scriptures that Christians possess are a provision from the triune God (2Ti 3:16-17; 1Pe 1:10-11; 2Pe 1:21). They are one of the means by which the same God wants to work in and through his people, as they build themselves up in their faith and prepare themselves for fellowship with him in the age to come (Jud 1:20-21).
The three persons that make up the Godhead: God the Father, God the Son (Jesus), and God the Holy Spirit (see Matthew 28:19; John 14:26; 1 Peter 1:2).
—New Believer’s Bible Glossary
The word "trinity" is not found in the Bible. Nevertheless, it is a word used to describe one fact the Bible teaches about God: Our God is a Trinity. This means there are three persons in one God, not three Gods. The persons are known as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and they have all always existed as three separate persons. The person of the Father is not the same person as the Son. The person of the Son is not the same person as the Holy Spirit. The person of the Holy Spirit is not the same person as the Father. If you take away any one, there is no God. God has always been a trinity from all eternity: "From everlasting to everlasting, Thou art God" (Psa 90:2).
God is not one person who took three forms, i.e., the Father who became the Son, who then became the Holy Spirit. This belief is known today as the "Jesus Only Movement". It is taught by the United Apostolic and United Pentecostal churches, and is an incorrect teaching.
Nor is God only one person as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Way International, and the Christadelphians teach (These groups are classified as non-Christian cults). For proof that there is more than one person in the Godhead, see the Plurality Study.
The Bible says there is only one God. Yet, it says Jesus is God (Joh 1:1; Joh 1:14); it says the Father is God (Php 1:2); and it says the Holy Spirit is God (Act 5:3-4). Since the Son speaks to the Father, they are separate persons. Since the Holy Spirit speaks also (Act 13:2), He is a separate person. There is one God who exists in three persons.
The following chart should help you understand how the Trinity doctrine is derived.
T H E T R I N I T Y
Father Son Holy Spirit
Called God
Creator
Resurrects
Indwells
Everywhere
All knowing
Sanctifies
Life giver
Fellowship
Eternal
A Will
Speaks
Love
Searches the heart
We belong to
Savior
We serve
Believe in
Gives joy
Judges Joh 8:50