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I. Spiritual Theism . . . . i

II. The Holy Trinity . . . . 21

II. The Holy Trinity

Preached in Balliol College Chapel^ Trinity Sunday^ 1894.

" He shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you." John xvi. 15.

"'T^HE Holy Ghost is the love wherewith the -I Father loves the Son and the Son the

Father." * Such is the teaching of St. Augustine,

* The Holy Spurit is shown to be " quo genitus a genitante diligatur genitoremque suum diligat." — De Trin.^ vi. 5. (Cf. De Fide et symbolOi 19, 20, and De Civ. Dei^ xi., c. 26, where the parallel between the Divine Trinity and the human mind is insisted on : " Nam et sumus et nos esse novimus et id esse et nosse diligimus.") St. Augustine is, no doubt, anxious to show that in God **dilectio" is a *' substantia," because in God there is no distinction between substance and accident. This is, of course, a realistic technicality to which it is difficult for the modern mind to attach much meaning, though, no doubt, parallels might be found in modern metaphysicians. To understand the scholastic doctrine of the Trinity it is further necessary to remember that the love of the Father for the Son is really the love of God for the objects of His own thought, i,e.y for His creatures. '* Verbum igitur in mente conceptum est reprsesentativum omnis ejus quod actu intelligitur. Unde in nobis sunt diversa verba, secundum diversa quae intelligimus. Sed quia Deus uno actu et se et omnia intelligit, unicum Verbum ejus est expressivum non solum Patris, sed etiam creaturarum." {Sumtna Theol.^ Pt. I. Q. xxxiv. Art. 3.) When, therefore, some modern Divines talk about an intercourse or society subsisting between the Father and the Son, meaning by the Son a conscious being, distinct alike from God, the world, and the "assumptus homo," Jesus Christ, they are and the doctrine is repeated by the great schoolmen in a more general form : " The love by which we love

using language which an orthodox scholastic Theologian would probably have pronounced to be sheer Tritheism. It is true that the Scholastics speak of a "relatio" between the Persons of the Holy Trinity {i.e,, a relation between the Power of God, the Wisdom of God, and His Love or Will), but they do not forget that *' relatio in Deo sit idem quod sua essentia." Anyone who thinks that the doctrine here maintained is Sabellianism should read Pt. I. Q. xxviii. of the Summa. Stripped of technicalities, the Catholic doctrine differs from Sabellianism inasmuch as it asserts (i.) that these different activities are essential to God's nature, not appearances or modes which can be put on or off, and (il) that the Incarnation implies an indwelling of the Sapientia Dei in a human soul, but not that Christ was simply God (the whole Trinity) in a human body — carrjdng with it (as the Patripassians held) the consequence that the Father died upon the cross. All the difficulties of the doctrine of the Trinity have arisen from thinking of that relation between God and the pre-existing Logos as if it were of exactly the same kind as the relation between God and the Incarnate Son. Of course (if we like to eliminate the element of time) we may think of God as having an eternal relation to the man Jesus Christ even before his actual birth, and the idea of the pre-existence of Christ (not merely the Logos) in the form in which it appears in the New Testament seems to have arisen out of the strong conviction that the coming of the Messiah was part of the eternal counsel of God — the central event of the world-plan as it existed in the mind of God. For an admirable discussion of this question see Beyschlag, New Test, Theology (E. T., 1895), I. p. 2495^., II. p. 79 j^.

The doctrine of the Trinity, thus understood, is not a mere scholastic subtlety. It asserts just the essence of Christian Theism, i.e.^ that God is not mere Power or mere Thought or mere Love, but the three combined. It is not surprising to find a learned and candid Unitarian Divine acknowledging that ''there were certain elements in Christian experience which, when taken up and interpreted by Greek philosophy, necessarily resulted in this doctrine ; and though we may believe that the form and the terminology of the doctrine were derived from a foreign source, we may nevertheless admit the reality of fundamental Christian facts which imparted to it all its religious vitality." (Drummond, Via^ Veritas^ Vita, p. 203.) In the passage which follows Dr. Drummond seems to state the heart of the Trinitarian doctrine, though I do not, of course, mean to assent to

God and our neighbour is the Holy Ghost/' * they say. These dicta are, I think, by themselves enough to show you that when the Fathers or the Schoolmen spoke of a Trinity of Persons in the Unity of the Godhead, they used the word " Person " in a sense very different from its usual modern acceptation. It would be meaningless to call the love of one being for another a person in our modern sense of the word. Thomas Aquinas explains the terms "Persona" by " Proprietas " : he speaks indifferently of " tres Personae " or " tres proprietates." By " proprietates " we may, perhaps, understand three distinct and essential properties or powers or activities or modes of existence.

But I will not lead you any further into the mazes of the Scholastic Theology. I only want just to point out what I do think requires at the present day to be stated in the plainest and most unmistakable language, that those who framed what are still the accepted orthodox formulae on this great subject did not mean by Person what nine-tenths of those who have to-day repeated the Athanasian Creed naturally enough suppose it to mean. I am afraid that most people — at least in their orthodox moments, when they are trying to realize to themselves the doctrine of the Holy Trinity — think of the three Persons as three distinct beings, three consciousnesses, three minds,

everything in his book. Catholic doctrine does not become Unitarianism because it is implicitly or explicitly held by some who call themselves Unitarians.

* Petrus Lombardus, Sententiae^ Lib. I., i., Dist. XVII. So St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa TheoL, Pt. I., Q. xxxvii.

three wills. Nothing less than that could be implied if by Person were meant anything like what is meant by it in ordinary discourse. I trust I have said enough to show that, whatever be the exact shade of meaning which this highly technical expression bore to those who first introduced it, it certainly did not mean that. And when this admission is made, it further becomes evident that if the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is to have any real meaning or importance to us at the present day, it is much in need of a little translation into the language and thought of the present day.

Technicalities apart, the essence of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is surely this — that God reveals Himself, that it is His nature eternally to reveal Himself His revelation of Himself did not begin with the coming of Christ. Creation is itself in a sense a revelation of God, an embodiment of His thought. "All things were made," says St John, "through or by means of the Word or Reason of God." In a much higher sense God was revealed in the growing intellect and conscience of mankind : " In Him was life, and the life was the light of men." In all the long course of moral and intellectual development which preceded the coming of Christ the eternal Word of God was communicating or revealing God to man, most clearly and fully no doubt (in the moral and spiritual sphere) to the later Jewish prophets, but (as the greatest of the Christian Fathers always recognised) not by any means to them alone. Yet all previous revelations of God were but broken and imperfect revelations.

The Revelation had been made, as the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, iroXvfiepm kol TroXvTpoTroog — "in divers portions and in divers manners " — till in the end of these days God spake to man by His Son.* In the life and teaching and character of Christ the mind, the will, the character of God was revealed as it had never been revealed before. And in one sense that revelation was final. But it wanted to be brought home to the minds and consciences of man ; it wanted to be continually applied to the changing needs and aspirations of each successive age. And, when we say that we believe in the Holy Spirit, we say that we believe that God is still revealing Himself; that God is still in contact with the human spirit ; that God is still making Himself known in the great movements of action and of thought, of history and of literature, and in the secret depths of individual souls. There will always, no doubt, to the Christian consciousness be an essential difference between the revelations which preceded and those which follow the coming of Christ. For the Christian consciousness all that can be revealed to man now, in the strictly moral and religious sphere, can be only a development — a bringing out of what is latent in the teaching and character of Christ. It is but a taking of Christ's, and a showing unto us. Every improvement that has taken place, whether in the acknowledged moral standard or in the operative ideal of successive ages, seems to us so plainly written in the teaching of Christ, that each age

* Hebrews i. I.

marvels how men can ever have called themselves Christians and yet not have seen it there. The Revelation made in Christ is inexhaustible; but there were many things which the world to which Christ came could not hear or see in it then. It is only the continued working of God*s Spirit in the souls of men that could bring to men's remembrance all that the historic Christ implicity had said. The Christian Revelation was final, just because it contained in itself the germ of all future development ; just because it possessed, and still possesses, the capacity of taking up into itself, and transforming and harmonising, all that is permanent and essential in other revelations.

God is Power, and God is Wisdom, and God is Will — that is the recognised scholastic explanation of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. Or, since the Will of God is always a loving Will, the Schoolmen tell us the Holy Spirit may indifferently be spoken of as Will or as Love ; from the union of Power and Wisdom in God's nature there proceeds a loving Will.

God is Power and Wisdom and Love. God is revealed fully and perfectly in Christ. God is revealing Himself ever more and more perfectly in the souls of men. That is the sum and substance of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity as defined by the most unimpeachable exponents of orthodox Theology. And if there are other parts of the technical formulae on this subject which we find strange, or arbitrary, or unintelligible, let us solace ourselves with the avowal of the really great Old Catholic Theologian, Dr. Dollinger : —

"Few people here" (he says in reply to the question whether he attached the same extreme importance which some people do in England to the Athanasian Creed) — "few people here would insist on rigid agreement with formulas in a matter of such inscrutable mystery as the Trinity. In some particulars it is impossible to know the meaning of the terms used. The most subtle philosopher and the most profound Theologian cannot explain the difference between ' generation ' and * procession ' in the ' generation of the Son ' and the ' procession of the Spirit' " *

The doctrine of the Holy Trinity is not an unpractical doctrine without meaning or importance for us at the present day. It brings before us in close connexion the two great aspects of the divine self-revelation. It is, as it seems to me, of almost equal practical importance that we should try to appreciate and appropriate to ourselves all that God once said to the world by His Son, and that we should not close our ears to what the Spirit is saying to the Churches in our own day. It is of almost equal importance for the illumination of our own souls and the guidance of our own lives, that we should seek to realize and to keep ever present to our minds a true and living image of the historic

* "Recollections of Dr. DolUnger," by Alfred Plummer, D.D., mExposiior^ Ser. iv., vol. i. (1S90), pp. 425, 426. By Aquinas, Summa TkeoL, Pt. I. , Q. xxvii. , the " generatio " of the V\^ord is actually spoken of as a *'processio," and in the Sentences of Peter the Lombard (Lib. L, Dist. xiii.) there is a section showing "quod non potest distingui a nobis inter generationem Filii et processionem Spiritus Sancti."

Son of God, and that we should recognise as a revelation of the Spirit of God all that is true and noble in the thoughts and ideas and spiritual achievements of other ages, and not least of our own.

The fact is, it is impossible to understand what that great historic revelation of God in Christ means to us, except in the light of the continuous revelation of the Spirit. The historic revelation can never mean to us exactly what it meant to any former age ; no two ages in the past have ever interpreted it exactly alike. There is a danger lest it should cease to mean anything at all to us, unless we do constantly seek to reinterpret it to ourselves in the light of present-day knowledge and experience. And is it superfluous to remind ourselves that to do this demands, on our part, a little effort and a little trouble? It does require an effort to understand what Christianity means to us at the present day. It demands effort of other kinds — effort in prayer and effort in life : the effort to will and to do the truth that we possess. But, all-important as the moral effort is, to understand Christianity demands also intellectual effort. It does require a good deal of effort, I know, side by side with studies which may seem to have very little relation to such matters, to undertake however little reading of a theological or religious kind. And yet if we take a sufficiently large and liberal view of what is meant by Theology, Theology ought not merely to be looked upon as a merely professional study, as a specialism with which a well-educated Christian man can afford to be wholly unacquainted. By

Theology we mean the intellectual appreciation of religious truth in its relation to other branches of knowledge. Knowledge progresses ; and Theology must progress with it, or become a mere fossil Science. Theology must be progressive, both in the world at large and in each individual mind. No two ages at different levels of intellectual development can ever think exactly alike about Religion. Nor can the religious ideas of the man be exactly those of the child. Now in this place our knowledge, our ideas on all other subjects are, or ought to be, growing and expanding. Can we reasonably expect that our Religion should retain the place it ought to have in our thoughts and in our lives if we do nothing to add to our faith knowledge? Sooner or later we must come to outlive the Theology of the nursery. Are we doing anything to fill its place?

" Duly, daily, needs provision be For keeping the soul's prowess possible, Building new barriers as the old decay, Saving us from evasion of life's proof, Putting the question ever ' Does God love, And will ye hold that truth against the world.'"*

For those who have little leisure for such studies, and who have no intention of becoming Theologians, it is not always, of course, the more technical kind of theological writing that will be found most stimulating; though one may perhaps be allowed to regret that a knowledge of the elementary facts about New

* Browning, A Death in the Desert.

Testament criticism, as much knowledge (say) as an average classical student thinks it necessary to possess about the Homeric question, should not be more common than it is even among highly cultivated men. I believe that a little such knowledge is a very real help even to the spiritual comprehension of the New Testament. But even for the fruitful understanding of the New Testament some of us have found such a book as Ecce Homo, or some more modern work on the life and teaching of Christ, of more help than many commentaries. And some of the best Theology of the day must be sought for in books which would not usually be called Theology at all. The living and moving ideas of those who have most powerfully and fruitfully influenced the religious thought of our own time, or at least of the generation just gone by — the ideas of men like Maurice and Kingsley, of Frederick Robertson and Arnold — may be gathered from their Biographies almost better than from their writings.

There is Theology in Kingsley's novels and Newman's poetry, as well as in their sermons. It is no vague or emasculate Theology, again, that has found expression in the poetry of Tennyson and of Browning. But if our belief in the Holy Spirit is to be a really vital belief, if it is to correspond with the facts of history and the experience of life, we must recognise that the Spirit of God has spoken much in these latter days through voices which are not professedly Christian at all. Those who believe that Jesus Christ is in a unique sense the Son of God — the brightness of his Father's glory and the express image of his

Person — must no doubt regard the ideal embodied in him as the norm or criterion by which to test all other theories of conduct, all ideals of life, all schemes of social regeneration. By that canon we shall try the Spirits, whether they be of God. But prophets cannot be divided into true and false so easily as we are apt to imagine was the case in days gone by. We cannot help recognising that God has had something to say to this generation, as to other generations, by the mouth of people whose thoughts and whose characters were not wholly conformed to the mind of Christ. To many Carlyle has no doubt proved a true prophet of God, in spite of his essentially pagan hero-worship and his loveless temper. Everyone recognises the high Christian teaching in the novels of George Eliot, if we may occasionally feel in her writings the void background of Materialism. Again, at the present day we often see the social side, at least, of Christian Ethics both preached and practised by men whose religious views we may detest, and whose social schemes we may distrust, with an earnestness and a self-denial which have often been lacking within the pale of formal Christianity. It is by strange methods and strange voices that the Christian Church has sometimes been led to fhe understanding of her own creed. The Spirit bloweth where it listeth. The Spirit of God moves not only upon the sails of the Church's ship, but also upon the chaotic waters of human life around. The Spirit takes of Christ's and shows it unto men by other organs than by that of his Church. It is the Church's mission ultimately to absorb into herself and to make her own all that the Spirit shall teach by whatever organ He may speak.

And what is the Church's mission collectively is really in its measure the task of each one of us as a member of that Church. Each one of us has to build up for the illuminating of his own individual soul, and then to live out, what is really a Theology, A man's Theology is his theory of the universe. And our ideal of life ought surely to rest upon a theory of some kind — vague and dim and inarticulate as it must needs be for many in these days. The man without a Theology is in danger of becoming a man without an ideal.

III. Limitations Of Knowledge In Christ.*

Preached before the University of Cambridge^ December z-^rd, 1889.

" Have this mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus : who, being in the form of God, counted it not a prize to be on an equality with God, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men."— Philippians ii. 5, 6. (R.V.)

IN these verses an aspect of our Lord's Incarnation is brought before us, which it is, if I mistake not, of especial importance to insist upon at the present day. It is a well-recognised fact that in the early- Church as many heresies arose from an unwillingness

* Since this Sermon was written the question has been brought into prominence by Canon Gore in Lux Mundi (1889), in his Bampton Lectures, The Incarnation of the Son of God (1891) ; and in the learned Dissertations on subjects connected with the Incarnation (1895). The Bishop of Manchester has also dealt with the subject in the Teaching of Christ (1891) — a little book which contains more of the best results of modern theological thought and investigation in a smaller compass than any book with which I am acquainted. Had these works already appeared, I might have spoken less apologetically, though (as will be seen from the Sermon) I hold that in certain directions the theory of hmitation in our Lord's knowledge must be carried further than Canon Gore would admit.

to admit the reality of our Lord's human nature as from unwillingness to admit the reality of his Godhead. At the present day Christians rightly regard the Divinity of Christ as the very core and centre of the Christian Faith ; and the jealousy with which we habitually guard this fundamental doctrine, the suspicion with which we view any uncertainty of utterance or laxity of statement thereupon, the knowledge that it is just at this point that the great gulf is fixed between those who regard Christianity as a divine revelation adapted to the wants of all nations and of all time, and those who look upon it as merely one of the many forms in which the religious idea has from time to time historically embodied itself — all these causes have combined to make us somewhat afraid of insisting upon the complementary truth of the real humanity. Even in those parts of the New Testament Canon whose Christology is least explicit, Jesus is habitually spoken of in a way quite inconsistent with a belief, on the part of the writers, that he was a mere man. But, side by side with the passages which accord to Christ an exceptional nature and position, we meet with expressions and modes of speech which many a modern preacher would hesitate to use without qualification or explanation. A modern preacher or writer who should speak of our Lord (as he spoke of Himself) as one among the prophets, or who should employ some nineteenth century equivalent for St. Peter's phrase, "Jesus, a man approved of God," without balancing his statement by some higher theological formula, would be in some danger of losing his reputation for orthodoxy.

Still more apparent is this caution or timidity about emphasising the human side of our Lord's nature when we examine the inferences which are drawn by popular Theology from the fact of our Lord's Divinity and the explanations which are given in orthodox commentaries of those passages of the Gospels or the Epistles in which limitations to our Lord^s power or knowledge seemed to be hinted at. At the present day we no longer, indeed, find that difficulty in admitting the reality of our Lord's sufferings which lay at the root of Gnosticism and so many early forms of heresy. The reality of our Lord's human body and of all those mental affections or passions which spring most directly from the conditions of the bodily organism — the reality of pain, of sorrow, of human affection, of loneliness, of bodily weakness and weariness in Jesus Christ — the reality of all these attributes of his human nature has been branded into the popular religious consciousness by their intimate connexion with the doctrine of the Atonement. On the emotional side our Lord's humanity is accepted without difficulty and without scruple. But in the current ideas about the intellectual part of our Lord's nature does not the notion of a human brain, a growing and expanding human intelligence, a human reason, tend very much to drop out of sight? Is there not, in short, a good deal of latent Apollinarianism in orthodox popular teaching upon this matter ?

The proper corrective of such a one-sided view of our blessed Lord's nature seems to me to be to insist upon the Pauline doctrine of the /ceVwo-ts-* or self-emptying of the Son, which is brought before us in these verses. " He emptied Himself" Of what did he empty Himself? The only clue which we have to St. Paul's thought on this matter is contained in the immediately preceding words, "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not a thing to be clutched at to be equal with God, hut emptied Himself"

It is, indeed, difficult to say whether as a matter of pure exegesis we should hold that when the fxop<j)ri of the slave was assumed, the /j.op<pr} of God was temporarily laid aside, put (so to speak) into abeyance. But at all events we may fairly represent the thought of the passage by saying that when the Eternal Wisdom, the Eternal Thought, the Eternal Word of God was united with a human soul, some at least of the divine attributes — though not lost — ceased to be manifested in the man Christ Jesus. Of what attributes of Godhead then was the Incarnate Word divested ? Certainly of the divine Omnipresence. That surely is implied in the very idea of Incarnation. The ubiquity of our Lord's Human Body or Human Nature has never (I believe) been entertained except as a support for the Lutheran doctrine of Consubstantiation. Hardly less certainly

* I do not mean to identify myself with any of the later technical theories usually known as "kenotic." Many of them seem either to imply an actual demission (so to speak) of Godhead which is unintelligible, or to imply that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, prior to and independently of the Incarnation, is to be regarded as possessing knowledge and reason of His own distinct from that of the Father, a doctrine which is happily as unorthodox as it is irrational. (See above, Sermon ii. )

did the Incarnate Word empty Himself of the Divine Omnipotence. Omnipotence is not compatible with the form of a slave. I suppose that this will on reflection be admitted by everyone. Limitation surely is essential to the very idea of humanity. It is scarcely possible to assign any real meaning to the humanity of our Lord Jesus Christ if we do not recognise that by acceptance of our human nature the divine power and nature were defined, conditioned; limited. The miracles recorded in the Gospels do not prove Omnipotence, though they do prove the possession of more than the normal control of the human will over the processes of physical nature.

We must remember, moreover, that the miracles which are usually regarded as the most striking manifestations of Divine Power are more often ascribed directly to the Father than to the will of the Incarnate Son. "Him God raised up" appears to have been the earliest and most usual form of the apostolic proclamation.

Weiss, indeed, assumes as a universal principle that our Lord only worked miracles when he felt within Him that it was the Father's will to work them.* This seems to me much more than we can possibly know. But certainly Christ's works of healing would to some minds lose much of their naturalness — they would constitute a far less touching manifestation of tender, human affection than they do now, if we were forced to believe that in that human soul which felt sympathy with the sufferer,

* Life of Christ (E. T.), p. 195- and felt the power to relieve his pain, there was also all the while the consciousness of capacity to bring to an end by one word of power all the sufferings of all humanity. Undoubtedly we are here touching upon the fringe of that one great insoluble enigma — the mystery of pain, the mystery of evil. But it is just because it does so much to facilitate the belief that the universe has its origin in, and is governed by an unseen Love, that the Godhead of Christ is so unspeakably precious to us ; and I confess that the Love which the Incarnation proclaims to us would become to me less real a thing if I did not believe that in the assumption of our humanity there was a real self-emptying — not a continued voluntary nonexercise, but a real surrender — of divine power in (to use the technical language of Theology) the "man assumed."