3. Justice and Righteousness, or Transitive Holiness…

3. Justice and Righteousness, or Transitive Holiness

By justice and righteousness we mean the transitive holiness of God, in virtue of which his treatment of his creatures conforms to the purity of his nature,—righteousness demanding from all moral beings conformity to the moral perfection of God, and justice visiting non-conformity to that perfection with penal loss or suffering.

Gen. 18:25—“shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Deut. 32:4—“All his ways are justice; A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, Just and right is he”; Ps. 5:5—“Thou hatest all workers of iniquity”; 7:9-12—“the righteous God trieth the hearts ... saveth the upright ... is a righteous judge, Yea, a God that hath indignation every day”; 18:24-26—“Jehovah recompensed me according to my righteousness.... With the merciful, thou wilt show thyself merciful ... with the perverse thou wilt show thyself froward”; Mat. 5:48—“Ye therefore shall be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”; Rom. 2:6—“will render to every man according to his works”; 1 Pet. 1:16—“Ye shall be holy; for I am holy.” These passages show that God loves the same persons whom he hates. It is not true that he hates the sin, but loves the sinner; he both hates and loves the sinner himself, hates him as he is a living and wilful antagonist of truth and holiness, loves him as he is a creature capable of good and ruined by his transgression.

There is no abstract sin that can be hated apart from the persons in whom that sin is represented and embodied. Thomas Fuller found it difficult to starve the profaneness but to feed the person of the impudent beggar who applied to him for food. Mr. Finney declared that he would kill the slave-catcher, but would love him with all his heart. In our civil war Dr. Kirk said: “God knows that we love the rebels, but God also knows that we will kill them if they do not lay down their arms.” The complex nature of God not only permits but necessitates this same double treatment of the sinner, and the earthly father experiences the same conflict of emotions when his heart yearns over the corrupt son whom he is compelled to banish from the household. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 7—“It is the sinner who is punished, not the sin.”

(a) Since justice and righteousness are simply transitive holiness—righteousness designating this holiness chiefly in its mandatory, justice chiefly in its punitive, aspect,—they are not mere manifestations of benevolence, or of God’s disposition to secure the highest happiness of his creatures, nor are they grounded in the nature of things as something apart from or above God.

Cremer, N. T. Lexicon: δίκαιος = “the perfect coincidence existing between God’s nature, which is the standard for all, and his acts.” Justice and righteousness are simply holiness exercised toward creatures. The same holiness which exists in God in eternity past manifests itself as justice and righteousness, so soon as intelligent creatures come into being. Much that was said under Holiness as an immanent attribute of God is equally applicable here. The modern tendency to confound holiness with love shows itself in the merging of justice and righteousness in mere benevolence. Instances of this tendency are the following: Ritschl, Unterricht, § 16—“The righteousness of God denotes the manner in which God carries out his loving will in the redemption alike of humanity as a whole and of individual men; hence his righteousness is indistinguishable from his grace”; see also Ritschl, Rechtf. und Versöhnung, 2:113; 3:296. Prof. George M. Forbes: “Only right makes love moral; only love makes right moral.” Jones, Robert Browning, 70—“Is it not beneficence that places death at the heart of sin? Carlyle forgot this. God is not simply a great taskmaster. The power that imposes law is not an alien power.” D’Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 237-240—“How can self-realization be the realization of others? Why must the true good be always the common good? Why is the end of each the end of all?... We need a concrete universal which will unify all persons.”

So also, Harris, Kingdom of Christ on Earth, 39-42; God the Creator, 287, 290, 302—“Love, as required and regulated by reason, may be called righteousness. Love is universal good will or benevolence, regulated in its exercise by righteousness. Love is the choice of God and man as the objects of trust and service. This choice involves the determination of the will to seek universal well-being, and in this aspect it is benevolence. It also involves the consent of the will to the reason, and the determination to regulate all action in seeking well-being by its truths, laws, and ideals; and in this aspect it is righteousness.... Justice is the consent of the will to the law of love, in its authority, its requirements, and its sanctions. God’s wrath is the necessary reaction of this law of love in the constitution and order of the universe against the wilful violator of it, and Christ’s sufferings atone for sin by asserting and maintaining the authority, universality, and inviolability of God’s law of love in his redemption of men and his forgiveness of their sins.... Righteousness cannot be the whole of love, for this would shut us up to the merely formal principle of the law without telling us what the law requires. Benevolence cannot be the whole of love, for this would shut us up to hedonism, in the form of utilitarianism, excluding righteousness from the character of God and man.”

Newman Smyth also, in his Christian Ethics, 227-231, tells us that “love, as self-affirming, is righteousness; as self-imparting, is benevolence; as self-finding in others, is sympathy. Righteousness, as subjective regard for our own moral being, is holiness; as objective regard for the persons of others, is justice. Holiness is involved in love as its essential respect to itself; the heavenly Father is the holy Father (John 17:11). Love contains in its unity a trinity of virtue. Love affirms its own worthiness, imparts to others its good, and finds its life again in the well-being of others. The ethical limit of self-impartation is found in self-affirmation. Love in self-bestowal cannot become suicidal. The benevolence of love has its moral bounds in the holiness of love. True love in God maintains its transcendence, and excludes pantheism.”

The above doctrine, quoted for substance from Newman Smyth, seems to us unwarrantably to include in love what properly belongs to holiness. It virtually denies that holiness has any independent existence as an attribute of God. To make holiness a manifestation of love seems to us as irrational as to say that self-affirmation is a form of self-impartation. The concession that holiness regulates and limits love shows that holiness cannot itself be love, but must be an independent and superior attribute. Right furnishes the rule and law for love, but it is not true that love furnishes the rule and law for right. There is no such double sovereignty as this theory would imply. The one attribute that is independent and supreme is holiness, and love is simply the impulse to communicate this holiness.

William Ashmore: “Dr. Clarke lays great emphasis on the character of ‘a good God.’... But he is more than a merely good God; he is a just God, and a righteous God, and a holy God—a God who is ‘angry with the wicked,’ even while ready to forgive them, if they are willing to repent in his way, and not in their own. He is the God who brought in a flood upon the world of the ungodly; who rained down fire and brimstone from heaven; and who is to come in ‘flaming fire, taking vengeance on them that know not God’ and obey not the gospel of his son.... Paul reasoned about both the ‘goodness’ and the ‘severity’ of God.”

(b) Transitive holiness, as righteousness, imposes law in conscience and Scripture, and may be called legislative holiness. As justice, it executes the penalties of law, and may be called distributive or judicial holiness. In righteousness God reveals chiefly his love of holiness; in justice, chiefly his hatred of sin.

The self-affirming purity of God demands a like purity in those who have been made in his image. As God wills and maintains his own moral excellence, so all creatures must will and maintain the moral excellence of God. There can be only one centre in the solar system,—the sun is its own centre and the centre for all the planets also. So God’s purity is the object of his own will,—it must be the object of all the wills of all his creatures also. Bixby, Crisis in Morals, 282—“It is not rational or safe for the hand to separate itself from the heart. This is a universe, and God is the heart of the great system. Altruism is not the result of society, but society is the result of altruism. It begins in creatures far below man. The animals which know how to combine have the greatest chance of survival. The unsociable animal dies out. The most perfect organism is the most sociable. Right is the debt which the part owes to the whole.” This seems to us but a partial expression of the truth. Right is more than a debt to others,—it is a debt to one’s self, and the self-affirming, self-preserving, self-respecting element constitutes the limit and standard of all outgoing activity. The sentiment of loyalty is largely a reverence for this principle of order and stability in government. Ps. 145:5—“Of the glorious majesty of thine honor, And of thy wondrous works, will I meditate”; 97:2—“Clouds and darkness are round about him: Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.”

John Milton, Eikonoklastes: “Truth and justice are all one; for truth is but justice in our knowledge, and justice is but truth in our practice.... For truth is properly no more than contemplation, and her utmost efficiency is but teaching; but justice in her very essence is all strength and activity, and hath a sword put into her hand to use against all violence and oppression on the earth. She it is who accepts no person, and exempts none from the severity of her stroke.” A. J. Balfour, Foundations of Belief, 326—“Even the poet has not dared to represent Jupiter torturing Prometheus without the dim figure of Avenging Fate waiting silently in the background.... Evolution working out a nobler and nobler justice is proof that God is just. Here is ‘preferential action’.” S. S. Times, June 9, 1900—“The natural man is born with a wrong personal astronomy. Man should give up the conceit of being the centre of all things. He should accept the Copernican theory, and content himself with a place on the edge of things—the place he has always really had. We all laugh at John Jasper and his thesis that ‘the sun do move.’ The Copernican theory is leaking down into human relations, as appears from the current phrase: ‘There are others’.”

(c) Neither justice nor righteousness, therefore, is a matter of arbitrary will. They are revelations of the inmost nature of God, the one in the form of moral requirement, the other in the form of judicial sanction. As God cannot but demand of his creatures that they be like him in moral character, so he cannot but enforce the law which he imposes upon them. Justice just as much binds God to punish as it binds the sinner to be punished.

All arbitrariness is excluded here. God is what he is—infinite purity. He cannot change. If creatures are to attain the end of their being, they must be like God in moral purity. Justice is nothing but the recognition and enforcement of this natural necessity. Law is only the transcript of God’s nature. Justice does not make law,—it only reveals law. Penalty is only the reaction of God’s holiness against that which is its opposite. Since righteousness and justice are only legislative and retributive holiness, God can cease to demand purity and to punish sin only when he ceases to be holy, that is, only when he ceases to be God. “Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur.”

Simon, Reconciliation, 141—“To claim the performance of duty is as truly obligatory as it is obligatory to perform the duty which is prescribed.” E. H. Johnson, Systematic Theology, 84—“Benevolence intends what is well for the creature; justice insists on what is fit. But the well-for-us and the fit-for-us precisely coincide. The only thing that is well for us is our normal employment and development; but to provide for this is precisely what is fitting and therefore due to us. In the divine nature the distinction between justice and benevolence is one of form.” We criticize this utterance as not sufficiently taking into account the nature of the right. The right is not merely the fit. Fitness is only general adaptation which may have in it no ethical element, whereas right is solely and exclusively ethical. The right therefore regulates the fit and constitutes its standard. The well-for-us is to be determined by the right-for-us, but not vice versa. George W. Northrup: “God is not bound to bestow the same endowments upon creatures, nor to keep all in a state of holiness forever, nor to redeem the fallen, nor to secure the greatest happiness of the universe. But he is bound to purpose and to do what his absolute holiness requires. He has no attribute, no will, no sovereignty, above this law of his being. He cannot lie, he cannot deny himself, he cannot look upon sin with complacency, he cannot acquit the guilty without an atonement.”

(d) Neither justice nor righteousness bestows rewards. This follows from the fact that obedience is due to God, instead of being optional or a gratuity. No creature can claim anything for his obedience. If God rewards, he rewards in virtue of his goodness and faithfulness, not in virtue of his justice or his righteousness. What the creature cannot claim, however, Christ can claim, and the rewards which are goodness to the creature are righteousness to Christ. God rewards Christ’s work for us and in us.

Bruch, Eigenschaftslehre, 280-282, and John Austin, Province of Jurisprudence, 1:88-93, 220-223, both deny, and rightly deny, that justice bestows rewards. Justice simply punishes infractions of law. In Mat. 25:34—“inherit the kingdom”—inheritance implies no merit; 46—the wicked are adjudged to eternal punishment; the righteous, not to eternal reward, but to eternal life. Luke 17:7-10—“when ye shall have done all the things that are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants; we have done that which it was our duty to do.” Rom. 6:23—punishment is the “wages of sin”: but salvation is “the gift of God”; 2:6—God rewards, not on account of man’s work but “according to his works.” Reward is thus seen to be in Scripture a matter of grace to the creature; only to the Christ who works for us in atonement, and in us in regeneration and sanctification, is reward a matter of debt (see also John 6:27 and 2 John 8). Martineau, Types, 2:86, 244, 249—“Merit is toward man; virtue toward God.”

All mere service is unprofitable, because it furnishes only an equivalent to duty, and there is no margin. Works of supererogation are impossible, because our all is due to God. He would have us rise into the region of friendship, realize that he has been treating us not as Master but as Father, enter into a relation of uncalculating love. With this proviso that rewards are matters of grace, not of debt, we may assent to the maxim of Solon: “A republic walks upon two feet—just punishment for the unworthy and due reward for the worthy.” George Harris, Moral Evolution, 139—“Love seeks righteousness, and is satisfied with nothing other than that.” But when Harris adopts the words of the poet: “The very wrath from pity grew, From love of men the hate of wrong,” he seems to us virtually to deny that God hates evil for any other reason than because of its utilitarian disadvantages, and to imply that good has no independent existence in his nature. Bowne, Ethics, 171—“Merit is desert of reward, or better, desert of moral approval.” Tennyson: “For merit lives from man to man, And not from man, O Lord, to thee.” Baxter: “Desert is written over the gate of hell; but over the gate of heaven only, The Gift of God.”

(e) Justice in God, as the revelation of his holiness, is devoid of all passion or caprice. There is in God no selfish anger. The penalties he inflicts upon transgression are not vindictive but vindicative. They express the revulsion of God’s nature from moral evil, the judicial indignation of purity against impurity, the self-assertion of infinite holiness against its antagonist and would-be destroyer. But because its decisions are calm, they are irreversible.

Anger, within certain limits, is a duty of man. Ps. 97:10—“ye that love Jehovah, hate evil”; Eph. 4:28—“Be ye angry, and sin not.” The calm indignation of the judge, who pronounces sentence with tears, is the true image of the holy anger of God against sin. Weber, Zorn Gottes, 28, makes wrath only the jealousy of love. It is more truly the jealousy of holiness. Prof. W. A. Stevens, Com. on 1 Thess. 2:10—“Holily and righteously are terms that describe the same conduct in two aspects; the former, as conformed to God’s character in itself; the latter, as conformed to his law; both are positive.” Lillie, on 2 Thess. 1:6—“Judgment is ‘a righteous thing with God.’ Divine justice requires it for its own satisfaction.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:175-178, 365-385; Trench, Syn. N. T., 1:180, 181.

Of Gaston de Foix, the old chronicler admirably wrote: “He loved what ought to be loved, and hated what ought to be hated, and never had miscreant with him.” Compare Ps. 101:5, 6—“Him that hath a high look and a proud heart will I not suffer. Mine eyes shall be upon the faithful of the land, that they may dwell with me.” Even Horace Bushnell spoke of the “wrath-principle” in God. 1 K. 11:9—“And Jehovah was angry with Solomon” because of his polygamy. Jesus’ anger was no less noble than his love. The love of the right involved hatred of the wrong. Those may hate who hate evil for its hatefulness and for the sake of God. Hate sin in yourself first, and then you may hate it in itself and in the world. Be angry only in Christ and with the wrath of God. W. C. Wilkinson, Epic of Paul, 264—“But we must purge ourselves of self-regard, Or we are sinful in abhorring sin.” Instance Judge Harris’s pity, as he sentenced the murderer; see A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 192, 193.

Horace’s “Ira furor brevis est”—“Anger is a temporary madness”—is true only of selfish and sinful anger. Hence the man who is angry is popularly called “mad.” But anger, though apt to become sinful, is not necessarily so. Just anger is neither madness, nor is it brief. Instance the judicial anger of the church of Corinth in inflicting excommunication: 2 Cor. 7:11—“what indignation, yea what fear, yea what longing, yea what zeal, yea what avenging!” The only revenge permissible to the Christian church is that in which it pursues and exterminates sin. To be incapable of moral indignation against wrong is to lack real love for the right. Dr. Arnold of Rugby was never sure of a boy who only loved good; till the boy also began to hate evil, Dr. Arnold did not feel that he was safe. Herbert Spencer said that good nature with Americans became a crime. Lecky, Democracy and Liberty: “There is one thing worse than corruption, and that is acquiescence in corruption.”

Colestock, Changing Viewpoint, 139—“Xenophon intends to say a very commendable thing of Cyrus the Younger, when he writes of him that no one had done more good to his friends or more harm to his enemies.” Luther said to a monkish antagonist: “I will break in pieces your heart of brass and pulverize your iron brains.” Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:175-178—“Human character is worthless in proportion as abhorrence of sin is lacking in it. It is related of Charles II that ‘he felt no gratitude for benefits, and no resentment for wrongs; he did not love anyone, and he did not hate anyone.’ He was indifferent toward right and wrong, and the only feeling he had was contempt.” But see the death-bed scene of the “merry monarch,” as portrayed in Bp. Burnet, Evelyn’s Memoirs, or the Life of Bp. Ken. Truly “The end of mirth is heaviness” (Prov. 14:13).

Stout, Manual of Psychology, 22—“Charles Lamb tells us that his friend George Dyer could never be brought to say anything in condemnation of the most atrocious crimes, except that the criminal must have been very eccentric.” Professor Seeley: “No heart is pure that is not passionate.” D. W. Simon, Redemption of Man, 249, 250, says that God’s resentment “is a resentment of an essentially altruistic character.” If this means that it is perfectly consistent with love for the sinner, we can accept the statement; if it means that love is the only source of the resentment, we regard the statement as a misinterpretation of God’s justice, which is but the manifestation of his holiness and is not a mere expression of his love. See a similar statement of Lidgett, Spiritual Principle of the Atonement, 251—“Because God is love, his love coëxists with his wrath against sinners, is the very life of that wrath, and is so persistent that it uses wrath as its instrument, while at the same time it seeks and supplies a propitiation.” This statement ignores the fact that punishment is never in Scripture regarded as an expression of God’s love, but always of God’s holiness. When we say that we love God, let us make sure that it is the true God, the God of holiness, that we love, for only this love will make us like him.

The moral indignation of a whole universe of holy beings against moral evil, added to the agonizing self-condemnations of awakened conscience in all the unholy, is only a faint and small reflection of the awful revulsion of God’s infinite justice from the impurity and selfishness of his creatures, and of the intense, organic, necessary, and eternal reaction of his moral being in self-vindication and the punishment of sin; see Jer. 44:4—“Oh, do not this abominable thing that I hate!” Num. 32:23—“be sure your sin will find you out”; Heb. 10:30, 31—“For we know him that said, Vengeance belongeth unto me, I will recompense. And again, The Lord shall judge his people. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” On justice as an attribute of a moral governor, see N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 2:253-293; Owen, Dissertation on Divine Justice, in Works, 10:483-624.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

VII. Rank and Relations of the several Attributes

The attributes have relations to each other. Like intellect, affection and will in man, no one of them is to be conceived of as exercised separately from the rest. Each of the attributes is qualified by all the others. God’s love is immutable, wise, holy. Infinity belongs to God’s knowledge, power, justice. Yet this is not to say that one attribute is of as high rank as another. The moral attributes of truth, love, holiness, are worthy of higher reverence from men, and they are more jealously guarded by God, than the natural attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence. And yet even among the moral attributes one stands as supreme. Of this and of its supremacy we now proceed to speak.

Water is not water unless composed of oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen cannot be resolved into hydrogen, nor hydrogen into oxygen. Oxygen has its own character, though only in combination with hydrogen does it appear in water. Will in man never acts without intellect and sensibility, yet will, more than intellect or sensibility, is the manifestation of the man. So when God acts, he manifests not one attribute alone, but his total moral excellence. Yet holiness, as an attribute of God, has rights peculiar to itself; it determines the attitude of the affections; it more than any other faculty constitutes God’s moral being.

Clarke, Christian Theology, 83,92—“God would not be holy if he were not love, and could not be love if he were not holy. Love is an element in holiness. If this were lacking, there would be no perfect character as principle of his own action or as standard for us. On the other hand only the perfect being can be love. God must be free from all taint of selfishness in order to be love. Holiness requires God to act as love, for holiness is God’s self-consistency. Love is the desire to impart holiness. Holiness makes God’s character the standard for his creatures; but love, desiring to impart the best good, does the same. All work of love is work of holiness, and all work of holiness is work of love. Conflict of attributes is impossible, because holiness always includes love, and love always expresses holiness. They never need reconciliation with each other.”

The general correctness of the foregoing statement is impaired by the vagueness of its conception of holiness. The Scriptures do not regard holiness as including love, or make all the acts of holiness to be acts of love. Self-affirmation does not include self-impartation, and sin necessitates an exercise of holiness which is not also an exercise of love. But for the Cross, and God’s suffering for sin of which the Cross is the expression, there would be conflict between holiness and love. The wisdom of God is most shown, not in reconciling man and God, but in reconciling the holy God with the loving God.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

1. Holiness the fundamental attribute in God

That holiness is the fundamental attribute in God, is evident:

(a) From Scripture,—in which God’s holiness is not only most constantly and powerfully impressed upon the attention of man, but is declared to be the chief subject of rejoicing and adoration in heaven.

It is God’s attribute of holiness that first and most prominently presents itself to the mind of the sinner, and conscience only follows the method of Scripture: 1 Pet. 1:16—“Ye shall be holy; for I am holy”; Heb. 12:14—“the sanctification without which no man shall see the lord”; cf. Luke 5:8—“Depart from me; for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Yet this constant insistence upon holiness cannot be due simply to man’s present state of sin, for in heaven, where there is no sin, there is the same reiteration: Is. 6:3—“Holy, holy, holy, is Jehovah of hosts”; Rev. 4:8—“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God, the Almighty.” Of no other attribute is it said that God’s throne rests upon it: Ps. 97:2—“Righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne”; 99:4, 5, 9—“The king’s strength also loveth justice.... Exalt ye Jehovah our God.... holy is he.” We would substitute the word holiness for the word love in the statement of Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 45—“We assume that love is lord in the divine will, not that the will of God is sovereign over his love. God’s omnipotence, as Dorner would say, exists for his love.”

(b) From our own moral constitution,—in which conscience asserts its supremacy over every other impulse and affection of our nature. As we may be kind, but must be righteous, so God, in whose image we are made, may be merciful, but must be holy.

See Bishop Butler’s Sermons upon Human Nature, Bohn’s ed., 385-414, showing “the supremacy of conscience in the moral constitution of man.” We must be just, before we are generous. So with God, justice must be done always; mercy is optional with him. He was not under obligation to provide a redemption for sinners: 2 Pet. 2:4—“God spared not angels when they sinned, but cast them down to hell.” Salvation is a matter of grace, not of debt. Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 277-298—“The quality of justice is necessary exaction; but ‘the quality of mercy is not (con)strained’ ” [cf. Denham: “His mirth is forced and strained”]. God can apply the salvation, after he has wrought it out, to whomsoever he will: Rom. 9:18—“he hath mercy on whom he will.” Young, Night-Thoughts, 4:233—“A God all mercy is a God unjust.” Emerson: “Your goodness must have some edge to it; else it is none.” Martineau, Study, 2:100—“No one can be just without subordinating Pity to the sense of Right.”

We may learn of God’s holiness a priori. Even the heathen could say “Fiat justitia, ruat cœlum,” or “pereat mundus.” But, for our knowledge of God’s mercy, we are dependent upon special revelation. Mercy, like omnipotence, may exist in God without being exercised. Mercy is not grace but debt, if God owes the exercise of it either to the sinner or to himself; versus G. B. Stevens, in New Eng., 1888:421-443. “But justice is an attribute which not only exists of necessity, but must be exercised of necessity; because not to exercise it would be injustice”; see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:218, 219, 389, 390; 2:402, and Sermons to Nat. Man, 366. If it be said that, by parity of reasoning, for God not to exercise mercy is to show himself unmerciful,—we reply that this is not true so long as higher interests require that exercise to be withheld. I am not unmerciful when I refuse to give the poor the money needed to pay an honest debt; nor is the Governor unmerciful when he refuses to pardon the condemned and unrepentant criminal. Mercy has its conditions, as we proceed to show, and it does not cease to be when these conditions do not permit it to be exercised. Not so with justice: justice must always be exercised; when it ceases to be exercised, it also ceases to be.

The story of the prodigal shows a love that ever reaches out after the son in the far country, but which is ever conditioned by the father’s holiness and restrained from acting until the son has voluntarily forsaken his riotous living. A just father may banish a corrupt son from the household, yet may love him so tenderly that his banishment causes exquisite pain. E. G. Robinson: “God, Christ and the Holy Spirit have a conscience, that is, they distinguish between right and wrong.” E. H. Johnson, Syst. Theology, 85, 86—“Holiness is primary as respects benevolence; for (a) Holiness is itself moral excellence, while the moral excellence of benevolence can be explained. (b) Holiness is an attribute of being, while benevolence is an attribute of action; but action presupposes and is controlled by being. (c) Benevolence must take counsel of holiness, since for a being to desire aught contrary to holiness would be to wish him harm, while that which holiness leads God to seek, benevolence finds best for the creature. (d) The Mosaic dispensation elaborately symbolized, and the Christian dispensation makes provision to meet, the requirements of holiness as supreme; James 3:17—‘First pure, then [by consequence] peaceable.’ ”

We are “to do justly,” as well as “to love kindness, and to walk humbly with” our God (Micah 6:8). Dr. Samuel Johnson: “It is surprising to find how much more kindness than justice society contains.” There is a sinful mercy. A School Commissioner finds it terrible work to listen to the pleas of incompetent teachers begging that they may not be dismissed, and he can nerve himself for it only by remembering the children whose education may be affected by his refusal to do justice. Love and pity are not the whole of Christian duty, nor are they the ruling attributes of God.

(c) From the actual dealings of God,—in which holiness conditions and limits the exercise of other attributes. Thus, for example, in Christ’s redeeming work, though love makes the atonement, it is violated holiness that requires it; and in the eternal punishment of the wicked, the demand of holiness for self-vindication overbears the pleading of love for the sufferers.

Love cannot be the fundamental attribute of God, because love always requires a norm or standard, and this norm or standard is found only in holiness; Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more in knowledge and all discernment”; see A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 388-405. That which conditions all is highest of all. Holiness shows itself higher than love, in that it conditions love. Hence God’s mercy does not consist in outraging his own law of holiness, but in enduring the penal affliction by which that law of holiness is satisfied. Conscience in man is but the reflex of holiness in God. Conscience demands either retribution or atonement. This demand Christ meets by his substituted suffering. His sacrifice assuages the thirst of conscience in man, as well as the demand of holiness in God: John 6:55—“For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.” See Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 280, 291, 292; Dogmatic Theology, 1:377, 378—“The sovereignty and freedom of God in respect to justice relates not to the abolition, nor to the relaxation, but to the substitution, of punishment. It does not consist in any power to violate or waive legal claims. The exercise of the other attributes of God is regulated and conditioned by that of justice.... Where then is the mercy of God, in case justice is strictly satisfied by a vicarious person? There is mercy in permitting another person to do for the sinner what the sinner is bound to do for himself; and greater mercy in providing that person; and still greater mercy in becoming that person.”

Enthusiasm, like fire, must not only burn, but must be controlled. Man invented chimneys to keep in the heat but to let out the smoke. We need the walls of discretion and self-control to guide the flaming of our love. The holiness of God is the regulating principle of his nature. The ocean of his mercy is bounded by the shores of his justice. Even if holiness be God’s self-love, in the sense of God’s self-respect or self-preservation, still this self-love must condition love to creatures. Only as God maintains himself in his holiness, can he have anything of worth to give; love indeed is nothing but the self-communication of holiness. And if we say, with J. M. Whiton, that self-affirmation in a universe in which God is immanent is itself a form of self-impartation, still this form of self-impartation must condition and limit that other form of self-impartation which we call love to creatures. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:137-155, 346-353; Patton, art. on Retribution and the Divine Goodness, in Princeton Rev., Jan. 1878:8-16; Owen, Dissertation on the Divine Justice, in Works, 10: 483-624.

(d) From God’s eternal purpose of salvation,—in which justice and mercy are reconciled only through the foreseen and predetermined sacrifice of Christ. The declaration that Christ is “the Lamb ... slain from the foundation of the world” implies the existence of a principle in the divine nature which requires satisfaction, before God can enter upon the work of redemption. That principle can be none other than holiness.

Since both mercy and justice are exercised toward sinners of the human race, the otherwise inevitable antagonism between them is removed only by the atoning death of the God-man. Their opposing claims do not impair the divine blessedness, because the reconciliation exists in the eternal counsels of God. This is intimated in Rev. 13:8—“the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world.” This same reconciliation is alluded to in Ps. 85:10—“Mercy and truth are met together; Righteousness and peace have kissed each other”; and in Rom. 3:26—“that he might himself be just, and the justifier of him that hath faith in Jesus.” The atonement, then, if man was to be saved, was necessary, not primarily on man’s account, but on God’s account. Shedd, Discourses and Essays, 279—The sacrifice of Christ was an “atonement ab intra, a self-oblation on the part of Deity himself, by which to satisfy those immanent and eternal imperatives of the divine nature which without it must find their satisfaction in the punishment of the transgressor, or else be outraged.” Thus God’s word of redemption, as well as his word of creation, is forever “settled in heaven” (Ps. 119:89). Its execution on the cross was “according to the pattern” on high. The Mosaic sacrifice prefigured the sacrifice of Christ; but the sacrifice of Christ was but the temporal disclosure of an eternal fact in the nature of God. See Kreibig, Versöhnung, 155, 156.

God requires satisfaction because he is holiness, but he makes satisfaction because he is love. The Judge himself, with all his hatred of transgression, still loves the transgressor, and comes down from the bench to take the criminal’s place and bear his penalty. But this is an eternal provision and an eternal sacrifice. Heb. 9:14—“the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God.” Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 215, 216—“Christ’s sacrifice was offered through the Spirit. It was not wrung from a reluctant soul through obedience to outward law; it came from the inner heart, from the impulse of undying love. It was a completed offering before Calvary began; it was seen by the Father before it was seen by the world. It was finished in the Spirit, ere it began in the flesh, finished in the hour when Christ exclaimed: ‘not as I will, but as thou wilt’ (Mat. 26:39).”

Lang, Homer, 506—“Apollo is the bringer of pestilence and the averter of pestilence, in accordance with the well-known rule that the two opposite attributes should be combined in the same deity.” Lord Bacon, Confession of Faith: “Neither angel, man nor world, could stand or can stand one moment in God’s sight without beholding the same in the face of a Mediator; and therefore before him, with whom all things are present, the Lamb of God was slain before all worlds; without which eternal counsel of his, it was impossible for him to have descended to any work of creation.” Orr, Christian View of God and the World, 819—“Creation is built on redemption lines”—which is to say that incarnation and atonement were included in God’s original design of the world.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

2. The holiness of God the ground of moral obligation

A. Erroneous Views. The ground of moral obligation is not

(a) In power,—whether of civil law (Hobbes, Gassendi), or of divine will (Occam, Descartes). We are not bound to obey either of these, except upon the ground that they are right. This theory assumes that nothing is good or right in itself, and that morality is mere prudence.

Civil law: See Hobbes, Leviathan, part i, chap. 6 and 13; part ii, chap. 30; Gassendi, Opera, 6:120. Upon this view, might makes right; the laws of Nero are always binding; a man may break his promise when civil law permits; there is no obligation to obey a father, a civil governor, or God himself, when once it is certain that the disobedience will be hidden, or when the offender is willing to incur the punishment. Martineau, Seat of Authority, 67—“Mere magnitude of scale carries no moral quality; nor could a whole population of devils by unanimous ballot confer righteousness upon their will, or make it binding upon a single Abdiel.” Robert Browning, Christmas Eve, xvii—“Justice, good, and truth were still Divine if, by some demon’s will, Hatred and wrong had been proclaimed Law through the world, and right misnamed.”

Divine will: See Occam, lib. 2, quæs. 19 (quoted in Porter, Moral Science, 125); Descartes (referred to in Hickok, Moral Science, 27, 28); Martineau, Types, 148—“Descartes held that the will of God is not the revealer but the inventor of moral distinctions. God could have made Euclid a farrago of lies, and Satan a model of moral perfection.” Upon this view, right and wrong are variable quantities. Duns Scotus held that God’s will makes not only truth but right. God can make lying to be virtuous and purity to be wrong. If Satan were God, we should be bound to obey him. God is essentially indifferent to right and wrong, good and evil. We reply that behind the divine will is the divine nature, and that in the moral perfection of that nature lies the only ground of moral obligation. God pours forth his love and exerts his power in accordance with some determining principle in his own nature. That principle is not happiness. Finney, Syst. Theology, 936, 937—“Could God’s command make it obligatory upon us to will evil to him? If not, then his will is not the ground of moral obligation. The thing that is most valuable, namely, the highest good of God and of the universe must be both the end and the ground. It is the divine reason and not the divine will that perceives and affirms the law of conduct. The divine will publishes, but does not originate, the rule. God’s will could not make vice to be virtuous.”

As between power or utility on the one hand, and right on the other hand, we must regard right as the more fundamental. We do not, however, as will be seen further on, place the ground of moral obligation even in right, considered as an abstract principle; but place it rather in the moral excellence of him who is the personal Right and therefore the source of right. Character obliges, and the master often bows in his heart to the servant, when this latter is the nobler man.

(b) Nor in utility,—whether our own happiness or advantage present or eternal (Paley), for supreme regard for our own interest is not virtuous; or the greatest happiness or advantage to being in general (Edwards), for we judge conduct to be useful because it is right, not right because it is useful. This theory would compel us to believe that in eternity past God was holy only because of the good he got from it,—that is, there was no such thing as holiness in itself, and no such thing as moral character in God.

Our own happiness: Paley, Mor. and Pol. Philos., book i, chap. vii—“Virtue is the doing good to mankind, in obedience to the will of God, and for the sake of everlasting happiness.” This unites (a) and (b). John Stuart Mill and Dr. N. W. Taylor held that our own happiness is the supreme end. These writers indeed regard the highest happiness as attained only by living for others (Mill’s altruism), but they can assign no reason why one who knows no other happiness than the pleasures of sense should not adopt the maxim of Epicurus, who, according to Lucretius, taught that “ducit quemque voluptas.” This theory renders virtue impossible; for a virtue which is mere regard to our own interest is not virtue but prudence. “We have a sense of right and wrong independently of all considerations of happiness or its loss.” James Mill held that the utility is not the criterion of the morality but itself constitutes the morality. G. B. Foster well replies that virtue is not mere egoistic sagacity, and the moral act is not simply a clever business enterprise. All languages distinguish between virtue and prudence. To say that the virtues are great utilities is to confound the effect with the cause. Carlyle says that a man can do without happiness. Browning, Red Cotton Nightcap Country: “Thick heads ought to recognize The devil, that old stager, at his trick Of general utility, who leads Downward perhaps, but fiddles all the way.” This is the morality of Mother Goose: “He put in his thumb, And pulled out a plum, And said, ‘What a good boy am I!’ ”

E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 160—“Utility has nothing ultimate in itself, and therefore can furnish no ground of obligation. Utility is mere fitness of one thing to minister to something else.” To say that things are right because they are useful, is like saying that things are beautiful because they are pleasing. Martineau, Types of Ethical Theory, 2:170, 511, 556—“The moment the appetites pass into the self-conscious state, and become ends instead of impulses, they draw to themselves terms of censure.... So intellectual conscientiousness, or strict submission of the mind to evidence, has its inspiration in pure love of truth, and would not survive an hour if entrusted to the keeping either of providence or of social affection.... Instincts, which provide for they know not what, are proof that want is the original impulse to action, instead of pleasure being the end.” On the happiness theory, appeals to self-interest on behalf of religion ought to be effective,—as a matter of fact few are moved by them.

Dewey, Psychology, 300, 362—“Emotion turned inward eats up itself. Live on feelings rather than on the things to which feelings belong, and you defeat your own end, exhaust your power of feeling, commit emotional suicide. Hence arise cynicism, the nil admirari spirit, restless searching for the latest sensation. The only remedy is to get outside of self, to devote self to some worthy object, not for feeling’s sake but for the sake of the object.... We do not desire an object because it gives us pleasure, but it gives us pleasure because it satisfies the impulse which, in connection with the idea of the object, constitutes the desire.... Pleasure is the accompaniment of the activity or development of the self.”

Salter, First Steps in Philosophy, 150—“It is right to aim at happiness. Happiness is an end. Utilitarianism errs in making happiness the only and the highest end. It exalts a state of feeling into the supremely desirable thing. Intuitionalism gives the same place to a state of will. The truth includes both. The true end is the highest development of being, self and others, the realization of the divine idea, God in man.” Bowne, Principles of Ethics, 96—“The standard of appeal is not the actual happiness of the actual man but the normal happiness of the normal man.... Happiness must have a law. But then also the law must lead to happiness.... The true ethical aim is to realize the good. But then the contents of this good have to be determined in accordance with an inborn ideal of human worth and dignity.... Not all good, but the true good, not the things which please, but the things which should please, are to be the aim of action.”

Bixby, Crisis of Morals, 223—“The Utilitarian is really asking about the wisest method of embodying the ideal. He belongs to that second stage in which the moral artist considers through what material and in what form and color he may best realize his thought. What the ideal is, and why it is the highest, he does not tell us. Morality begins, not in feeling, but in reason. And reason is impersonal. It discerns the moral equality of personalities.” Genung, Epic of the Inner Life, 20—Job speaks out his character like one of Robert Browning’s heroes. He teaches that “there is a service of God which is not work for reward: it is a heart-loyalty, a hunger after God’s presence, which survives loss and chastisement; which in spite of contradictory seeming cleaves to what is godlike as the needle seeks the pole; and which reaches up out of the darkness and hardness of this life into the light and love beyond.”

Greatest good of being: Not only Edwards, but Priestley, Bentham, Dwight, Finney, Hopkins, Fairchild, hold this view. See Edwards, Works, 2:261-304—“Virtue is benevolence toward being in general”; Dwight, Theology, 3:150-162—“Utility the foundation of Virtue”; Hopkins, Law of Love, 7-28; Fairchild, Moral Philosophy; Finney, Syst. Theol., 42-135. This theory regards good as a mere state of the sensibility, instead of consisting in purity of being. It forgets that in eternity past “love for being in general” = simply God’s self-love, or God’s regard for his own happiness. This implies that God is holy only for a purpose; he is bound to be unholy, if greater good would result; that is, holiness has no independent existence in his nature. We grant that a thing is often known to be right by the fact that it is useful; but this is very different from saying that its usefulness makes it right. “Utility is only the setting of the diamond, which marks, but does not make, its value.” “If utility be a criterion of rectitude, it is only because it is a revelation of the divine nature.” See British Quarterly, July, 1877, on Matthew Arnold and Bishop Butler. Bp. Butler, Nature of Virtue, in Works, Bohn’s ed., 334—“Benevolence is the true self-love.” Love and holiness are obligatory in themselves, and not because they promote the general good. Cicero well said that they who confounded the honestum with the utile deserved to be banished from society. See criticism on Porter’s Moral Science, in Lutheran Quarterly, Apr. 1885:325-331; also F. L. Patton, on Metaphysics of Oughtness, in Presb. Rev., 1886:127-150.

Encyc. Britannica, 7:690, on Jonathan Edwards—“Being in general, being without any qualities, is too abstract a thing to be the primary cause of love. The feeling which Edwards refers to is not love, but awe or reverence, and moreover necessarily a blind awe. Properly stated therefore, true virtue, according to Edwards, would consist in a blind awe of being in general,—only this would be inconsistent with his definition of virtue as existing in God. In reality, as he makes virtue merely the second object of love, his theory becomes identical with that utilitarian theory with which the names of Hume, Bentham and Mill are associated.” Hodge, Essays, 275—“If obligation is due primarily to being in general, then there is no more virtue in loving God—willing his good—than there is in loving Satan. But love to Christ differs in its nature from benevolence toward the devil.” Plainly virtue consists, not in love for mere being, but in love for good being, or in other words, in love for the holy God. Not the greatest good of being, but the holiness of God, is the ground of moral obligation.

Dr. E. A. Park interprets the Edwardian theory as holding that virtue is love to all beings according to their value, love of the greater therefore more than the less, “love to particular beings in a proportion compounded of the degree of being and the degree of virtue or benevolence to being which they have.” Love is choice. Happiness, says Park, is not the sole good, much less the happiness of creatures. The greatest good is holiness, though the last good aimed at is happiness. Holiness is disinterested love—free choice of the general above the private good. But we reply that this gives us no reason or standard for virtue. It does not tell us what is good nor why we should choose it. Martineau, Types, 2:70, 77, 471, 484—“Why should I promote the general well-being? Why should I sacrifice myself for others? Only because this is godlike. It Would never have been prudent to do right, had it not been something infinitely more.... It is not fitness that makes an act moral, but it is its morality that makes it fit.”

Herbert Spencer must be classed as a utilitarian. He says that justice requires that “every man be free to do as he wills provided he infringes not the equal freedom of every other man.” But, since this would permit injury to another by one willing to submit to injury in return, Mr. Spencer limits the freedom to “such actions as subserve life.” This is practically equivalent to saying that the greatest sum of happiness is the ultimate end. On Jonathan Edwards, see Robert Hall, Works, 1:43 sq.; Alexander, Moral Science, 194-198; Bib. Repertory (Princeton Review), 25:22; Bib. Sacra, 9:176, 197; 10:403, 705.

(c) Nor in the nature of things (Price),—whether by this we mean their fitness (Clarke), truth (Wollaston), order (Jouffroy), relations (Wayland), worthiness (Hickok), sympathy (Adam Smith), or abstract right (Haven and Alexander); for this nature of things is not ultimate, but has its ground in the nature of God. We are bound to worship the highest; if anything exists beyond and above God, we are bound to worship that,—that indeed is God.

See Wayland, Moral Science, 33-48; Hickok, Moral Science, 27-34; Haven, Moral Philosophy, 27-50; Alexander, Moral Science, 159-198. In opposition to all the forms of this theory, we urge that nothing exists independently of or above God. “If the ground of morals exist independently of God, either it has ultimately no authority, or it usurps the throne of the Almighty. Any rational being who kept the law would be perfect without God, and the moral centre of all intelligences would be outside of God” (Talbot). God is not a Jupiter controlled by Fate. He is subject to no law but the law of his own nature. Noblesse oblige,—character rules,—purity is the highest. And therefore to holiness all creatures, voluntarily or involuntarily, are constrained to bow. Hopkins, Law of Love, 77—“Right and wrong have nothing to do with things, but only with actions; nothing to do with any nature of things existing necessarily, but only with the nature of persons.” Another has said: “The idea of right cannot be original, since right means conformity to some standard or rule.” This standard or rule is not an abstraction, but an existing being—the infinitely perfect God.

Faber: “For right is right, since God is God; And right the day must win; To doubt would be disloyalty, To falter would be sin.” Tennyson: “And because right is right, to follow right Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence.” Right is right, and I should will the right, not because God wills it, but because God is it. E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 178-180—“Utility and relations simply reveal the constitution of things and so represent God. Moral law was not made for purposes of utility, nor do relations constitute the reason for obligation. They only show what the nature of God is who made the universe and revealed himself in it. In his nature is found the reason for morality.” S. S. Times, Oct. 17, 1891—“Only that is level which conforms to the curvature of the earth’s surface. A straight line tangent to the earth’s curve would at its ends be much further from the earth’s centre than at its middle. Now equity means levelness. The standard of equity is not an impersonal thing, a ’nature of things’ outside of God. Equity or righteousness is no more to be conceived independently of the divine centre of the moral world than is levelness comprehensible apart from the earth’s centre.”

Since God finds the rule and limitation of his action solely in his own being, and his love is conditioned by his holiness, we must differ from such views as that of Moxom: “Whether we define God’s nature as perfect holiness or perfect love is immaterial, since his nature is manifested only through his action, that is, through his relation to other beings. Most of our reasoning on the divine standard of righteousness, or the ultimate ground of moral obligation, is reasoning in a circle, since we must always go back to God for the principle of his action; which principle we can know only by means of his action. God, the perfectly righteous Being, is the ideal standard of human righteousness. Righteousness in man therefore is conformity to the nature of God. God, in agreement with his perfect nature, always wills the perfectly good toward man. His righteousness is an expression of his love; his love is a manifestation of his righteousness.”

So Newman Smyth: “Righteousness is the eternal genuineness of the divine love. It is not therefore an independent excellence, to be contrasted with, or even put in opposition to, benevolence; it is an essential part of love.” In reply to which we urge as before that that which is the object of love, that which limits and conditions love, that which furnishes the norm and reason for love, cannot itself be love, nor hold merely equal rank with love. A double standard is as irrational in ethics as in commerce, and it leads in ethics to the same debasement of the higher values, and the same unsettling of relations, as has resulted in our currency from the attempt to make silver regulate gold at the same time that gold regulates silver.

B. The Scriptural View.—According to the Scriptures, the ground of moral obligation is the holiness of God, or the moral perfection of the divine nature, conformity to which is the law of our moral being (Robinson, Chalmers, Calderwood, Gregory, Wuttke). We show this:

(a) From the commands: “Ye shall be holy,” where the ground of obligation assigned is simply and only: “for I am holy” (1 Pet. 1:16); and “Ye therefore shall be perfect,” where the standard laid down is: “as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mat. 5:48). Here we have an ultimate reason and ground for being and doing right, namely, that God is right, or, in other words, that holiness is his nature.

(b) From the nature of the love in which the whole law is summed up (Mat. 22:37—“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God”; Rom. 13:10—“love therefore is the fulfilment of the law”). This love is not regard for abstract right or for the happiness of being, much less for one’s own interest, but it is regard for God as the fountain and standard of moral excellence, or in other words, love for God as holy. Hence this love is the principle and source of holiness in man.

(c) From the example of Christ, whose life was essentially an exhibition of supreme regard for God, and of supreme devotion to his holy will. As Christ saw nothing good but what was in God (Mark 10:18—“none is good save one, even God”), and did only what he saw the Father do (John 5:19; see also 30—“I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me”), so for us, to be like God is the sum of all duty, and God’s infinite moral excellence is the supreme reason why we should be like him.

For statements of the correct view of the ground of moral obligation, see E. G. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Morality, 138-180; Chalmers, Moral Philosophy, 412-420; Calderwood, Moral Philosophy; Gregory, Christian Ethics, 112-122; Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:80-107; Talbot, Ethical Prolegomena, in Bap. Quar., July, 1877:257-274—“The ground of all moral law is the nature of God, or the ethical nature of God in relation to the like nature in man, or the imperativeness of the divine nature.” Plato: “The divine will is the fountain of all efficiency; the divine reason is the fountain, of all law; the divine nature is the fountain of all virtue.” If it be said that God is love as well as holiness, we ask: Love to what? And the only answer is: Love to the right, or to holiness. To ask why right is a good, is no more sensible than to ask why happiness is a good. There must be something ultimate. Schiller said there are people who want to know why ten is not twelve. We cannot study character apart from conduct, nor conduct apart from character. But this does not prevent us from recognizing that character is the fundamental thing and that conduct is only the expression of it.

The moral perfection of the divine nature includes truth and love, but since it is holiness that conditions the exercise of every other attribute, we must conclude that holiness is the ground of moral obligation. Infinity also unites with holiness to make it the perfect ground, but since the determining element is holiness, we call this, and not infinity, the ground of obligation. J. H. Harris, Baccalaureate Sermon, Bucknell University, 1890—“As holiness is the fundamental attribute of God, so holiness is the supreme good of man. Aristotle perceived this when he declared the chief good of man to be energizing according to virtue. Christianity supplies the Holy Spirit and makes this energizing possible.” Holiness is the goal of man’s spiritual career; see 1 Thess. 3:13—“to the end he may establish your hearts unblamable in holiness before our God and Father.”

Arthur H. Hallam, in John Brown’s Rab and his Friends, 272—“Holiness and happiness are two notions of one thing.... Unless therefore the heart of a created being is at one with the heart of God, it cannot but be miserable.” It is more true to say that holiness and happiness are, as cause and effect, inseparably bound together. Martineau, Types, 1:xvi; 2:70-77—“Two classes of facts it is indispensable for us to know: what are the springs of voluntary conduct, and what are its effects”; Study, 1:26—“Ethics must either perfect themselves in Religion, or disintegrate themselves into Hedonism.” William Law remarks: “Ethics are not external but internal. The essence of a moral act does not lie in its result, but in the motive from which it springs. And that again is good or bad, according as it conforms to the character of God.” For further discussion of the subject see our chapter on The Law of God. See also Thornwell, Theology, 1:363-373; Hinton, Art of Thinking, 47-62; Goldwin Smith, in Contemporary Review, March, 1882, and Jan. 1884; H. B. Smith, System of Theology, 195-231, esp. 223.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

II. Doctrine Of The Trinity

In the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions which are represented to us under the figure of persons, and these three are equal. This tripersonality of the Godhead is exclusively a truth of revelation. It is clearly, though not formally, made known in the New Testament, and intimations of it may be found in the Old.

The doctrine of the Trinity may be expressed in the six following statements: 1. In Scripture there are three who are recognized as God. 2. These three are so described in Scripture that we are compelled to conceive of them as distinct persons. 3. This tripersonality of the divine nature is not merely economic and temporal, but is immanent and eternal. 4. This tripersonality is not tritheism; for while there are three persons, there is but one essence. 5. The three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, are equal. 6. Inscrutable yet not self-contradictory, this doctrine furnishes the key to all other doctrines.—These statements we proceed now to prove and to elucidate.

Reason shows us the Unity of God; only revelation shows us the Trinity of God, thus filling out the indefinite outlines of this Unity and vivifying it. The term “Trinity” is not found in Scripture, although the conception it expresses is Scriptural. The invention of the term is ascribed to Tertullian. The Montanists first defined the personality of the Spirit, and first formulated the doctrine of the Trinity. The term “Trinity” is not a metaphysical one. It is only a designation of four facts: (1) the Father is God; (2) the Son is God; (3) the Spirit is God; (4) there is but one God.

Park: “The doctrine of the Trinity does not on the one hand assert that three persons are united in one person, or three beings in one being, or three Gods in one God (tritheism); nor on the other hand that God merely manifests himself in three different ways (modal trinity, or trinity of manifestations); but rather that there are three eternal distinctions in the substance of God.” Smyth, preface to Edwards, Observations on the Trinity: “The church doctrine of the Trinity affirms that there are in the Godhead three distinct hypostases or subsistences—the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit—each possessing one and the same divine nature, though in a different manner. The essential points are (1) the unity of essence; (2) the reality of immanent or ontological distinctions.” See Park on Edwards’s View of the Trinity, in Bib. Sac., April, 1881:333. Princeton Essays, 1:28—“There is one God; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are this one God; there is such a distinction between Father, Son and Holy Spirit as to lay a sufficient ground for the reciprocal use of the personal pronouns.” Joseph Cook: “(1) The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost are one God; (2) each has a peculiarity incommunicable to the others; (3) neither is God without the others; (4) each, with the others, is God.”

We regard the doctrine of the Trinity as implicitly held by the apostles and as involved in the New Testament declarations with regard to Father, Son and Holy Spirit, while we concede that the doctrine had not by the New Testament writers been formulated. They held it, as it were in solution; only time, reflection, and the shock of controversy and opposition, caused it to crystalize into definite and dogmatic form. Chadwick, Old and New Unitarianism, 59, 60, claims that the Jewish origin of Christianity shows that the Jewish Messiah could not originally have been conceived of as divine. If Jesus had claimed this, he would not have been taken before Pilate,—the Jews would have dispatched him. The doctrine of the Trinity, says Chadwick, was not developed until the Council of Nice, 325. E. G. Robinson: “There was no doctrine of the Trinity in the Patristic period, as there was no doctrine of the Atonement before Anselm.” The Outlook, Notes and Queries, March 30, 1901—“The doctrine of the Trinity cannot be said to have taken final shape before the appearance of the so-called Athanasian Creed in the 8th or 9th century. The Nicene Creed, formulated in the 4th century, is termed by Dr. Schaff, from the orthodox point of view, ‘semi-trinitarian.’ The earliest time known at which Jesus was deified was, after the New Testament writers, in the letters of Ignatius, at the beginning of the second century.”

Gore, Incarnation, 179—“The doctrine of the Trinity is not so much heard, as overheard, in the statements of Scripture.” George P. Fisher quotes some able and pious friend of his as saying: “What meets us in the New Testament is the disjecta membra of the Trinity.” G. B. Foster: “The doctrine of the Trinity is the Christian attempt to make intelligible the personality of God without dependence upon the world.” Charles Kingsley said that, whether the doctrine of the Trinity is in the Bible or no, it ought to be there, because our spiritual nature cries out for it. Shedd, Dogmatic Theology, 1:250—“Though the doctrine of the Trinity is not discoverable by human reason, it is susceptible of a rational defense, when revealed.” On New England Trinitarianism, see New World, June, 1896:272-295—art. by Levi L. Paine. He says that the last phase of it is represented by Phillips Brooks, James M. Whiton and George A. Gordon. These hold to the essential divineness of humanity and preëminently of Christ, the unique representative of mankind, who was, in this sense, a true incarnation of Deity. See also, L. L. Paine, Evolution of Trinitarianism, 141, 287.

Neander declared that the Trinity is not a fundamental doctrine of Christianity. He was speaking however of the speculative, metaphysical form which the doctrine has assumed in theology. But he speaks very differently of the devotional and practical form in which the Scriptures present it, as in the baptismal formula and in the apostolic benediction. In regard to this he says: “We recognize therein the essential contents of Christianity summed up in brief.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 10, 11, 55, 91, 92—“God transcendent, the Father, is revealed by God immanent, the Son. This one nature belongs equally to God, to Christ, and to mankind, and in this fact is grounded the immutableness of moral distinctions and the possibility of moral progress.... The immanent life of the universe is one with the transcendent Power; the filial stream is one with its paternal Fount. To Christ supremely belongs the name of Son, which includes all that life that is begotten of God. In Christ the before unconscious Sonship of the world awakes to consciousness of the Father. The Father is the Life transcendent, above all; the Son is Life immanent, through all; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized, in all. In Christ we have collectivism; in the Holy Spirit we have individualism; as Bunsen says: ‘The chief power in the world is personality.’ ”

For treatment of the whole doctrine, see Dorner, System of Doctrine, 1:344-465; Twesten, Dogmatik, and translation in Bib. Sac., 3:502; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:145-199; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:57-135; Kahnis, Dogmatik, 3:203-229; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:248-333, and History of Doctrine, 1:246-385; Farrar, Science and Theology, 138; Schaff, Nicene Doctrine of the Holy Trinity, in Theol. Eclectic, 4:209. For the Unitarian view, see Norton, Statement of Reasons, and J. F. Clarke, Truths and Errors of Orthodoxy.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

I. In Scriptures there are Three who are recognized as God

1. Proofs from the New Testament.

A. The Father is recognized as God.

The Father is recognized as God,—and that in so great a number of passages (such as John 6:27—“him the Father, even God, hath sealed,” and 1 Pet. 1:2—“foreknowledge of God the Father”) that we need not delay to adduce extended proof.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

B. Jesus Christ is recognized as God

(a) He is expressly called God.

In John 1:1—Θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος—the absence of the article shows Θεός to be the predicate (cf. 4:24—πνεῦμα ὁ Θεός). This predicate precedes the verb by way of emphasis, to indicate progress in the thought = “the Logos was not only with God, but was God” (see Meyer and Luthardt, Comm. in loco). “Only ὁ λόγος can be the subject, for in the whole Introduction the question is, not who God is, but who the Logos is” (Godet).

Westcott in Bible Commentary, in loco—“The predicate stands emphatically first. It is necessarily without the article, inasmuch as it describes the nature of the Word and does not identify his person. It would be pure Sabellianism to say: ‘The Word was ὁ Θεός.’ Thus in verse 1 we have set forth the Word in his absolute eternal being, (a) his existence: beyond time; (b) his personal existence: in active communion with God; (c) his nature: God in essence.” Marcus Dods, in Expositor’s Greek Testament, in loco: “The Word is distinguishable from God, yet Θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος—the word was God, of divine nature; not ‘a God,’ which to a Jewish ear would have been abominable, nor yet identical with all that can be called God, for then the article would have been inserted (cf. 1 John 3:4).”

In John 1:18, μονογενὴς θεός—“the only begotten God”—must be regarded as the correct reading, and as a plain ascription of absolute Deity to Christ. He is not simply the only revealer of God, but he is himself God revealed.

John 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten God, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” In this passage, although Tischendorf (8th ed.) has μονογενὴς ὑιός, Westcott and Hort (with א*BC*L Pesh. Syr.) read μονογενὴς Θεός and the Rev. Vers. puts “the only begotten God” in the margin, though it retains “the only begotten Son” in the text. Harnack says the reading μονογενὴς θεός is “established beyond contradiction”; see Westcott, Bib. Com. on John, pages 32, 33. Here then we have a new and unmistakable assertion of the deity of Christ. Meyer says that the apostles actually call Christ God only in John 1:1 and 20:28, and that Paul never so recognizes him. But Meyer is able to maintain his position only by calling the doxologies to Christ, in 2 Tim. 4:18, Heb. 13:21 and 2 Pet. 3:18, post-apostolic. See Thayer, N. T. Lexicon, on Θεός, and on μονογενής.

In John 20:28, the address of Thomas Ὁ κύριός μου καὶ ὁ θεός μου—“My Lord and my God”—since it was unrebuked by Christ, is equivalent to an assertion on his own part of his claim to Deity.

John 20:28—“Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God.” This address cannot be interpreted as a sudden appeal to God in surprise and admiration, without charging the apostle with profanity. Nor can it be considered a mere exhibition of overwrought enthusiasm, since it was accepted by Christ. Contrast the conduct of Paul and Barnabas when the heathen at Lystra were bringing sacrifice to them as Jupiter and Mercury (Acts 14:11-18). The words of Thomas, as addressed directly to Christ and as accepted by Christ, can be regarded only as a just acknowledgment on the part of Thomas that Christ was his Lord and his God. Alford, Commentary, in loco: “The Socinian view that these words are merely an exclamation is refuted (1) by the fact that no such exclamations were in use among the Jews; (2) by the εἶπεν αὐτῷ; (3) by the impossibility of referring the ὁ κύριός μου to another than Jesus: see verse 13; (4) by the N. T. usage of expressing the vocative by the nominative with an article; (5) by the psychological absurdity of such a supposition: that one just convinced of the presence of him whom he dearly loved should, instead of addressing him, break out into an irrelevant cry; (6) by the further absurdity of supposing that, if such were the case, the Apostle John, who of all the sacred writers most constantly keeps in mind the object for which he is writing, should have recorded anything so beside that object; (7) by the intimate conjunction of πεπίστευκας.” Cf. Mat. 5:34—“Swear not ... by the heaven”—swearing by Jehovah is not mentioned, because no Jew did so swear. This exclamation of Thomas, the greatest doubter among the twelve, is the natural conclusion of John’s gospel. The thesis “the Word was God” (John 1:1) has now become part of the life and consciousness of the apostles. Chapter 21 is only an Epilogue, or Appendix, written later by John, to correct the error that he was not to die; see Westcott, Bible Com., in loco. The Deity of Christ is the subject of the apostle who best understood his Master. Lyman Beecher: “Jesus Christ is the acting Deity of the universe.”

In Rom. 9:5, the clause ὁ ὢν ἐπὶ πάντων Θεὸς εὐλογητός cannot be translated “blessed be the God over all,” for ὢν is superfluous if the clause is a doxology; “εὐλογητός precedes the name of God in a doxology, but follows it, as here, in a description” (Hovey). The clause can therefore justly be interpreted only as a description of the higher nature of the Christ who had just been said, τὸ κατὰ σάρκα, or according to his lower nature, to have had his origin from Israel (see Tholuck, Com. in loco).

Sanday, Com. on Rom. 9:5—“The words would naturally refer to Christ, unless ‘God’ is so definitely a proper name that it would imply a contrast in itself. We have seen that this is not so.” Hence Sanday translates: “of whom is the Christ as concerning the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever”. See President T. Dwight, in Jour. Soc. Bib. Exegesis, 1881:22-55; per contra, Ezra Abbot, in the same journal, 1881:1-19, and Denney, in Expositor’s Gk. Test., in loco.

In Titus 2:13, ἐπιφάνειαν τῆς δόξης τοῦ μεγάλου Θεοῦ καὶ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ we regard (with Ellicott) as “a direct, definite, and even studied declaration of Christ’s divinity” = “the ... appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ” (so English Revised Version). Ἐπιφάνεια is a term applied specially to the Son and never to the Father, and μεγάλου is uncalled for if used of the Father, but peculiarly appropriate if used of Christ. Upon the same principles we must interpret the similar text 2 Pet. 1:1 (see Huther, in Meyer’s Com.: “The close juxtaposition indicates the author’s certainty of the oneness of God and Jesus Christ”).

Titus 2:13—“looking for the blessed hope and appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ”—so the English Revised Version. The American Revisers however translate: “the glory of the great God and Savior”; and Westcott and Hort bracket the word ἡμῶν. These considerations somewhat lessen the cogency of this passage as a proof-text, yet upon the whole the balance of argument seems to us still to incline in favor of Ellicott’s interpretation as given above.

In Heb. 1:8, πρὸς δὲ τὸν υἱόν; ὁ θρόνος σου, ὁ Θεὸς, εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα is quoted as an address to Christ, and verse 10 which follows—“Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth”—by applying to Christ an Old Testament ascription to Jehovah, shows that ὁ Θεός, in verse 8, is used in the sense of absolute Godhead.

It is sometimes objected that the ascription of the name God to Christ proves nothing as to his absolute deity, since angels and even human judges are called gods, as representing God’s authority and executing his will. But we reply that, while it is true that the name is sometimes so applied, it is always with adjuncts and in connections which leave no doubt of its figurative and secondary meaning. When, however, the name is applied to Christ, it is, on the contrary, with adjuncts and in connections which leave no doubt that it signifies absolute Godhead. See Ex. 4:16—“thou shalt be to him as God”; 7:1—“See, I have made thee as God to Pharaoh”; 22:28—“Thou shalt not revile God, [marg., the judges], nor curse a ruler of thy people”; Ps. 82:1—“God standeth in the congregation of God; he judgeth among the gods” [among the mighty]; 6—“I said, Ye are gods, And all of you sons of the Most High”; 7—“Nevertheless ye shall die like men, And fall like one of the princes.” Cf. John 10:34-36—“If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came” (who were God’s commissioned and appointed representatives), how much more proper for him who is one with the Father to call himself God.

As in Ps. 82:7 those who had been called gods are represented as dying, so in Ps. 97:7—“Worship him, all ye gods”—they are bidden to fall down before Jehovah. Ann. Par. Bible: “Although the deities of the heathen have no positive existence, they are often described in Scripture as if they had, and are represented as bowing down before the majesty of Jehovah.” This verse is quoted in Heb. 1:6—“let all the angels of God worship him”—i. e., Christ. Here Christ is identified with Jehovah. The quotation is made from the Septuagint, which has “angels” for “gods.” “Its use here is in accordance with the spirit of the Hebrew word, which includes all that human error might regard as objects of worship.” Those who are figuratively and rhetorically called “gods” are bidden to fall down in worship before him who is the true God, Jesus Christ. See Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:314; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 10.

In 1 John 5:20—ἐσμεν ἐν τῷ ἀληθινῷ, ἐν τῷ υἱῷ αὐτοῦ Ἰησοῦ Χριστῷ. οὗτος ἐστιν ὁ ἀληθινὸς Θεός—“it would be a flat repetition, after the Father had been twice called ὁ ἀληθινός, to say now again: ‘this is ὁ ἀληθενὸς Θεός.’ Our being in God has its basis in Christ his Son, and this also makes it more natural that οὖτος should be referred to υἱῷ. But ought not ὁ ἀληθενός then to be without the article (as in John 1:1—Θεός ἦν ὁ λόγος)? No, for it is John’s purpose in 1 John 5:20 to say, not what Christ is, but who he is. In declaring what one is, the predicate must have no article; in declaring who one is, the predicate must have the article. St. John here says that this Son, on whom our being in the true God rests, is this true God himself” (see Ebrard, Com. in loco).

Other passages might be here adduced, as Col. 2:9—“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”; Phil 2:6—“existing in the form of God”; but we prefer to consider these under other heads as indirectly proving Christ’s divinity. Still other passages once relied upon as direct statements of the doctrine must be given up for textual reasons. Such are Acts 20:28, where the correct reading is in all probability not ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Θεοῦ, but ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ Κυρίου (so ACDE Tregelles and Tischendorf; B and א, however, have τοῦ Θεοῦ. The Rev. Vers. continues to read “church of God”; Amer. Revisers, however, read “church of the Lord”—see Ezra Abbot’s investigation in Bib. Sac., 1876: 313-352); and 1 Tim. 3:16, where ὅς is unquestionably to be substituted for Θεός, though even here ἐφανερώθη intimates preëxistence.

Rev. George E. Ellis, D. D., before the Unitarian Club, Boston, November, 1882—“Fifty years of study, thought and reading given largely to the Bible and to the literature which peculiarly relates to it, have brought me to this conclusion, that the book—taken with the especial divine quality and character claimed for it, and so extensively assigned to it, as inspired and infallible as a whole, and in all its contents—is an Orthodox book. It yields what is called the Orthodox creed. The vast majority of its readers, following its letter, its obvious sense, its natural meaning, and yielding to the impression which some of its emphatic texts make upon them, find in it Orthodoxy. Only that kind of ingenious, special, discriminative, and in candor I must add, forced treatment, which it receives from us liberals can make the book teach anything but Orthodoxy. The evangelical sects, so called, are clearly right in maintaining that their view of Scripture and of its doctrines draws a deep and wide division of creed between them and ourselves. In that earnest controversy by pamphlet warfare between Drs. Channing and Ware on the one side, and Drs. Worcester and Woods and Professor Stuart on the other—a controversy which wrought up the people of our community sixty years ago more than did our recent political campaign—I am fully convinced that the liberal contestants were worsted. Scripture exegesis, logic and argument were clearly on the side of the Orthodox contestants. And this was so, mainly because the liberal party put themselves on the same plane with the Orthodox in their way of regarding and dealing with Scripture texts in their bearing upon the controversy. Liberalism cannot vanquish Orthodoxy, if it yields to the latter in its own way of regarding and treating the whole Bible. Martin Luther said that the Papists burned the Bible because it was not on their side. Now I am not about to attack the Bible because it is not on my side; but I am about to object as emphatically as I can against a character and quality assigned to the Bible, which it does not claim for itself, which cannot be certified for it: and the origin and growth and intensity of the fond and superstitious influences resulting in that view we can trace distinctly to agencies accounting for, but not warranting, the current belief. Orthodoxy cannot readjust its creeds till it readjusts its estimate of the Scriptures. The only relief which one who professes the Orthodox creed can find is either by forcing his ingenuity into the proof-texts or indulging his liberty outside of them.”

With this confession of a noted Unitarian it is interesting to compare the opinion of the so-called Trinitarian, Dr. Lyman Abbott, who says that the New Testament nowhere calls Christ God, but everywhere calls him man, as in 1 Tim. 2:5—“for there is one God, one mediator also between God and men, himself man, Christ Jesus.” On this passage Prof. L. L. Paine remarks in the New World, Dec. 1894—“That Paul ever confounded Christ with God himself, or regarded him as in any way the Supreme Divinity, is a position invalidated not only by direct statements, but also by the whole drift of his epistles.”

(b) Old Testament descriptions of God are applied to him.

This application to Christ of titles and names exclusively appropriated to God is inexplicable, if Christ was not regarded as being himself God. The peculiar awe with which the term “Jehovah” was set apart by a nation of strenuous monotheists as the sacred and incommunicable name of the one self-existent and covenant-keeping God forbids the belief that the Scripture writers could have used it as the designation of a subordinate and created being.

Mat. 3:3—“Make ye ready the way of the Lord”—is a quotation from Is. 40:3—“Prepare ye ... the way of Jehovah.” John 12:41—“These things said Isaiah, because he saw his glory; and he spake of him” [i. e., Christ]—refers to Is. 6:1—“In the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne.” So in Eph. 4:7, 8—“measure of the gift of Christ ... led captivity captive”—is an application to Christ of what is said of Jehovah in Ps. 68:18. In 1 Pet. 3:15, moreover, we read, with all the great uncials, several of the Fathers, and all the best versions: “sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord”; here the apostle borrows his language from Is. 8:13, where we read: “Jehovah of hosts, him shall ye sanctify.” When we remember that, with the Jews, God’s covenant-title was so sacred that for the Kethib (= “written”) Jehovah there was always substituted the Keri (= “read”—imperative) Adonai, in order to avoid pronunciation of the great Name, it seems the more remarkable that the Greek equivalent of “Jehovah” should have been so constantly used of Christ. Cf. Rom. 10:9—“confess ... Jesus as Lord”; 1 Cor. 12:3—“no man can say, Jesus is Lord, but in the Holy Spirit.” We must remember also the indignation of the Jews at Christ’s assertion of his equality and oneness with the Father. Compare Goethe’s, “Wer darf ihn nennen?” with Carlyle’s, “the awful Unnameable of this Universe.” The Jews, it has been said, have always vibrated between monotheism and moneytheism. Yet James, the strongest of Hebrews, in his Epistle uses the word ’Lord’ freely and alternately of God the Father and of Christ the Son. This would have been impossible if James had not believed in the community of essence between the Son and the Father.

It is interesting to note that 1 Maccabees does not once use the word Θεός or κύριος, or any other direct designation of God unless it be οὐρανός (cf. “swear ... by the heaven”—Mat. 5:34). So the book of Esther contains no mention of the name of God, though the apocryphal additions to Esther, which are found only in Greek, contain the name of God in the first verse, and mention it in all eight times. See Bissell, Apocrypha, in Lange’s Commentary; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 93; Max Müller on Semitic Monotheism, in Chips from a German Workshop, 1:337.

(c) He possesses the attributes of God.

Among these are life, self-existence, immutability, truth, love, holiness, eternity, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence. All these attributes are ascribed to Christ in connections which show that the terms are used in no secondary sense, nor in any sense predicable of a creature.

Life: John 1:4—“In him was life”; 14:6—“I am ... the life.” Self-existence: John 5:26—“have life in himself”; _Heb. 7:16—_“power of an endless life.” Immutability: _Heb. 13:8—_“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and to-day, yea and forever.” Truth: John 14:6—“I am ... the truth”; _Rev. 3:7—_“he that is true.” Love: 1 John 3:16—“Hereby know we love” (τὴν ἀγάπην = the personal Love, as the personal Truth) “because he laid down his life for us.” Holiness: _Luke 1:35—_“that which is to be born shall be called holy, the Son of God”; John 6:69—“thou art the Holy One of God”; _Heb. 7:26—_“holy, guileless, undefiled, separated from sinners.”

Eternity: John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word.” Godet says ἐν ἀρχῇ = not “in eternity,” but “in the beginning of the creation”; the eternity of the Word being an inference from the ἦν—the Word was, when the world was created: cf. Gen. 1:1—“In the beginning God created.” But Meyer says, ἐν ἀρχῇ here rises above the historical conception of “in the beginning” in Genesis (which includes the beginning of time itself) to the absolute conception of anteriority to time; the creation is something subsequent. He finds a parallel in Prov. 8:23—ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸ τοῦ τὴν γῆν ποιῆσαι. The interpretation “in the beginning of the gospel” is entirely unexegetical; so Meyer. So John 17:5—“glory which I had with thee before the world was”; Eph. 1:4—“chose us in him before the foundation of the world.” Dorner also says that ἐν ἀρχῇ in John 1:1 is not “the beginning of the world,” but designates the point back of which it is impossible to go, i. e., eternity; the world is first spoken of in verse 3. John 8:58—“Before Abraham was born, I am”; cf. 1:15; Col. 1:17—“he is before all things”; Heb. 1:11—the heavens “shall perish; but thou continuest”; Rev. 21:6—“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.”

Omnipresence: Mat. 28:20—“I am with you always”; Eph. 1:23—“the fulness of him that filleth all in all.” Omniscience: Mat. 9:4—“Jesus knowing their thoughts”; John 2:24, 25—“knew all men ... knew what was in man”; 16:30—“knowest all things”; Acts 1:24—“Thou, Lord, who knowest the hearts of all men”—a prayer offered before the day of Pentecost and showing the attitude of the disciples toward their Master; 1 Cor. 4:5—“until the Lord come, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and make manifest the counsels of the hearts”; Col. 2:3—“in whom are all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden.” Omnipotence: Mat. 27:18—“All authority hath been given unto me in heaven and on earth”; Rev. 1:8—“the Lord God, which is and which was and which is to come, the Almighty.”

Beyschlag, N. T. Theology, 1:249-260, holds that Jesus’ preëxistence is simply the concrete form given to an ideal conception. Jesus traces himself back, as everything else holy and divine was traced back in the conceptions of his time, to a heavenly original in which it preëxisted before its earthly appearance; e. g.: the tabernacle, in Heb. 8:5; Jerusalem, in Gal. 4:25 and Rev. 21:10; the kingdom of God in Mat. 13:24; much more the Messiah, in John 6:62—“ascending where he was before”; 8:58—“Before Abraham was born, I am”; 17:4, 5—“glory which I had with thee before the world was” 17:24—“thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.” This view that Jesus existed before creation only ideally in the divine mind, means simply that God foreknew him and his coming. The view is refuted by the multiplied intimations of a personal, in distinction from an ideal, preëxistence.

Lowrie, Doctrine of St. John, 115—“The words ‘In the beginning’ (John 1:1) suggest that the author is about to write a second book of Genesis, an account of a new creation.” As creation presupposes a Creator, the preëxistence of the personal Word is assigned as the explanation of the being of the universe. The ἦν indicates absolute existence, which is a loftier idea than that of mere preëxistence, although it includes this. While John the Baptist and Abraham are said to have arisen, appeared, come into being, it is said that the Logos was, and that the Logos was God. This implies coëternity with the Father. But, if the view we are combating were correct, John the Baptist and Abraham preëxisted, equally with Christ. This is certainly not the meaning of Jesus in John 8:58—“Before Abraham was born, I am”; cf. Col. 1:17—“he is before all things”—“αὐτός emphasizes the personality, while ἔστιν declares that the preëxistence is absolute existence” (Lightfoot); John 1:15—“He that cometh after me is become before me: for he was before me” = not that Jesus was born earlier than John the Baptist, for he was born six months later, but that he existed earlier. He stands before John in rank, because he existed long before John in time; 6:62—“the Son of man ascending where he was before”; 16:28—“I came out from the Father, and am come into the world.” So Is. 9:6, 7, calls Christ “Everlasting Father” = eternity is an attribute of the Messiah. T. W. Chambers, in Jour. Soc. Bib. Exegesis, 1881:169-171—“Christ is the Everlasting One, ‘whose goings forth have been from of old, even from the days of eternity’_ (Micah 5:2). _‘Of the increase of his government ... there shall be no end,’ just because of his existence there has been no beginning.”

(d) The works of God are ascribed to him.

We do not here speak of miracles, which may be wrought by communicated power, but of such works as the creation of the world, the upholding of all things, the final raising of the dead, and the judging of all men. Power to perform these works cannot be delegated, for they are characteristic of omnipotence.

Creation: John 1:3—“All things were made through him”; 1 Cor. 8:6—“one lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”; Col. 1:16—“all things have been created through him, and unto him”; Heb, 1:10—“Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundation of the earth, And the heavens are the works of thy hands”; 3:3, 4—“he that built all things is God” = Christ, the builder of the house of Israel, is the God who made all things; Rev. 3:14—“the beginning of the creation of God” (cf. Plato: “Mind is the ἀρχή of motion”). Upholding: Col. 1:17—“in him all things consist” (marg. “hold together”); Heb. 1:3—“upholding all things by the word of his power.” Raising the dead and judging the world: John 5:27-29—“authority to execute judgment ... all that are in the tombs shall hear his voice, and shall come forth”; Mat. 25:31, 32—“sit on the throne of his glory; and before him shall be gathered all the nations.” If our argument were addressed wholly to believers, we might also urge Christ’s work in the world as Revealer of God and Redeemer from sin, as a proof of his deity. [On the works of Christ, see Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 153; per contra, see Examination of Liddon’s Bampton Lectures, 72.]

Statements of Christ’s creative and of his upholding activity are combined in John 1:3, 4—Πάντα δι᾽ αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἕν. ὅ γέγονεν ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν—“All things were made through him; and without him was not anything made. That which hath been made was life in him” (marg.). Westcott: “It would be difficult to find a more complete consent of ancient authorities in favor of any reading than that which supports this punctuation.” Westcott therefore adopts it. The passage shows that the universe 1. exists within the bounds of Christ’s being; 2. is not dead, but living; 3. derives its life from him; see Inge, Christian Mysticism, 46. Creation requires the divine presence, as well as the divine agency. God creates through Christ. All things were made, not ὐπὸ αὐτοῦ—“by him,” but δι᾽ αὐτοῦ—“through him.” Christian believers “Behind creation’s throbbing screen Catch movements of the great Unseen.”

Van Oosterzee, Christian Dogmatics, iv, lvi—“That which many a philosopher dimly conjectured, namely, that God did not produce the world in an absolute, immediate manner, but in some way or other, mediately, here presents itself to us with the lustre of revelation, and exalts so much the more the claim of the Son of God to our deep and reverential homage.” Would that such scientific men as Tyndall and Huxley might see Christ in nature, and, doing his will, might learn of the doctrine and be led to the Father! The humblest Christian who sees Christ’s hand in the physical universe and in human history knows more of the secret of the universe than all the mere scientists put together.

Col 1:17—“In him all things consist,” or “hold together,” means nothing less than that Christ is the principle of cohesion in the universe, making it a cosmos instead of a chaos. Tyndall said that the attraction of the sun upon the earth was as inconceivable as if a horse should draw a cart without traces. Sir Isaac Newton: “Gravitation must be caused by an agent acting constantly according to certain laws.” Lightfoot: “Gravitation is an expression of the mind of Christ.” Evolution also is a method of his operation. The laws of nature are the habits of Christ, and nature itself is but his steady and constant will. He binds together man and nature in one organic whole, so that we can speak of a “universe.” Without him there would be no intellectual bond, no uniformity of law, no unity of truth. He is the principle of induction, that enables us to argue from one thing to another. The medium of interaction between things is also the medium of intercommunication between minds. It is fitting that he who draws and holds together the physical and intellectual, should also draw and hold together the moral universe, drawing all men to himself (John 12:32) and so to God, and reconciling all things in heaven and earth (Col. 1:20). In Christ “the law appears, Drawn out in living characters,” because he is the ground and source of all law, both in nature and in humanity. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 6-12.

(e) He receives honor and worship due only to God.

In addition to the address of Thomas, in John 20:28, which we have already cited among the proofs that Jesus is expressly called God, and in which divine honor is paid to him, we may refer to the prayer and worship offered by the apostolic and post-apostolic church.

John 5:23—“that all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father”; 14:14—“If ye shall ask me [so אB and Tisch. 8th ed.] anything in my name, that will I do”; Acts 7:59—“Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (cf. Luke 23:46—Jesus’ words: “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit”); Rom. 10:9—“confess with thy mouth Jesus as Lord”; 13—“whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (cf. Gen. 4:26—“Then began men to call upon the name of Jehovah”); 1 Cor. 11:24, 25—“this do in remembrance of me” = worship of Christ; Heb. 1:6—“let all the angels of God worship him”; Phil. 2:10, 11—“in the name of Jesus every knee should bow ... every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord”; Rev. 5:12-14—“Worthy is the Lamb that hath been slain to receive the power....”; 2 Pet. 3:18—“Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory”; 2 Tim. 4:18 and Heb. 13:21—“to whom be the glory for ever and ever”—these ascriptions of eternal glory to Christ imply his deity. See also 1 Pet. 3:15—“Sanctify in your hearts Christ as Lord,” and Eph. 5:21—“subjecting yourselves one to another in the fear of Christ.” Here is enjoined an attitude of mind towards Christ which would be idolatrous if Christ were not God. See Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 266, 366.

Foster, Christian Life and Theology, 154—“In the eucharistic liturgy of the ‘Teaching’ we read: ‘Hosanna to the God of David’; Ignatius styles him repeatedly God ‘begotten and unbegotten, come in the flesh’; speaking once of ‘the blood of God’, in evident allusion to Acts 20:28; the epistle to Diognetus takes up the Pauline words and calls him the ‘architect and world-builder by whom [God] created the heavens’, and names him God (chap. vii); Hermas speaks of him as ‘the holy preëxistent Spirit, that created every creature’, which style of expression is followed by Justin, who calls him God, as also all the later great writers. In the second epistle of Clement (130-160, Harnack), we read: ‘Brethren, it is fitting that you should think of Jesus Christ as of God—as the Judge of the living and the dead.’ And Ignatius describes him as ‘begotten and unbegotten, passible and impassible, ... who was before the eternities with the Father.’ ”

These testimonies only give evidence that the Church Fathers saw in Scripture divine honor ascribed to Christ. They were but the precursors of a host of later interpreters. In a lull of the awful massacre of Armenian Christians at Sassouan, one of the Kurdish savages was heard to ask: “Who was that ‘Lord Jesus’ that they were calling to?” In their death agonies, the Christians, like Stephen of old, called upon the name of the Lord. Robert Browning quoted, in a letter to a lady in her last illness, the words of Charles Lamb, when “in a gay fancy with some friends as to how he and they would feel if the greatest of the dead were to appear suddenly in flesh and blood once more—on the first suggestion, ‘And if Christ entered this room?’ changed his tone at once and stuttered out as his manner was when moved: ‘You see—if Shakespere entered, we should all rise; if He appeared, we must kneel.’ ” On prayer to Jesus, see Liddon, Bampton Lectures, note F; Bernard, in Hastings’ Bib. Dict., 4:44; Zahn, Skizzen aus dem Leben der alten Kirche, 9, 288.

(f) His name is associated with that of God upon a footing of equality.

We do not here allude to 1 John 5:7 (the three heavenly witnesses), for the latter part of this verse is unquestionably spurious; but to the formula of baptism, to the apostolic benedictions, and to those passages in which eternal life is said to be dependent equally upon Christ and upon God, or in which spiritual gifts are attributed to Christ equally with the Father.

The formula of baptism: Mat. 28:19—“baptising them into the name of the father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”; cf. Acts 2:38—“be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ”; Rom. 6:3—“baptized into Christ Jesus.” “In the common baptismal formula the Son and the Spirit are coördinated with the Father, and εἰς ὄνομα has religious significance.” It would be both absurd and profane to speak of baptizing into the name of the Father and of Moses.

The apostolic benedictions: 1 Cor. 1:3—“Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ”; 2 Cor. 13:14—“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit, be with you all.” “In the benedictions grace is something divine, and Christ has power to impart it. But why do we find ‘God,’ instead of simply ‘the Father,’ as in the baptismal formula? Because it is only the Father who does not become man or have a historical existence. Elsewhere he is specially called ‘God the Father,’ to distinguish him from God the Son and God the Holy Spirit (Gal. 1:3; Eph. 3:14; 6:23).”

Other passages: John 5:23—“that all may honor the Son, even as they honor the Father”; John 14:1—“believe in God, believe also in me”—double imperative (so Westcott, Bible Com., in loco); 17:3—“this is life eternal, that they should know thee the only true God, and him whom thou didst send, even Jesus Christ”; Mat. 11:27—“no one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal him”; 1 Cor. 12:4-6—“the same Spirit ... the same Lord [Christ] ... the same God” [the Father] bestow spiritual gifts, e. g., faith: Rom. 10:17—“belief cometh of hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ”; peace: Col. 3:15—“let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.” 2 Thess. 2:16, 17—“now our lord Jesus Christ himself, and God our Father ... comfort your hearts”—two names with a verb in the singular intimate the oneness of the Father and the Son (Lillie). Eph. 5:5—“kingdom of Christ and God”; Col. 3:1—“Christ ... seated on the right hand of God” = participation in the sovereignty of the universe,—the Eastern divan held not only the monarch but his son; Rev. 20:6—“priests of God and of Christ”; 22:3—“the throne of God and of the Lamb”; 16—“the root and the offspring of David” = both the Lord of David and his son. Hackett: “As the dying Savior said to the Father, ‘Into thy hands I commend my spirit’ (Luke 23:46), so the dying Stephen said to the Savior, ‘receive my spirit’ (Acts 7:59).”

(g) Equality with God is expressly claimed.

Here we may refer to Jesus’ testimony to himself, already treated of among the proofs of the supernatural character of the Scripture teaching (see pages 189, 190). Equality with God is not only claimed for himself by Jesus, but it is claimed for him by his apostles.

John 5:18—“called God his own Father, making himself equal with God”; Phil. 2:6—“who, existing in the form of God, counted not the being on an equality with God a thing to be grasped”—counted not his equality with God a thing to be forcibly retained. Christ made and left upon his contemporaries the impression that he claimed to be God. The New Testament has left, upon the great mass of those who have read it, the impression that Jesus Christ claims to be God. If he is not God, he is a deceiver or is self-deceived, and, in either case, Christus, si non Deus, non bonus. See Nicoll, Life of Jesus Christ, 187.

(h) Further proof of Christ’s deity may be found in the application to him of the phrases: “Son of God,” “Image of God”; in the declarations of his oneness with God; in the attribution to him of the fulness of the Godhead.

Mat. 26:63, 64—“I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou art the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said”—it is for this testimony that Christ dies. Col. 1:15—“the image of the invisible God”; Heb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his [the Father’s] glory, and the very image of his substance”; John 10:30—“I and the Father are one”; 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father”; 17:11, 22—“that they may be one, even as we are”—ἕ, not εἰς; unum, not unus; one substance, not one person. “Unum is antidote to the Arian, sumus to the Sabellian heresy.” Col. 2:9—“in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily”; cf. 1:19—“for it was the pleasure of the Father that in him should all the fulness dwell;” or (marg.) “for the whole fulness of God was pleased to dwell in him.” John 16:15—“all things whatsoever the Father hath are mine”; 17:10—“all things that are mine are thine, and thine are mine.”

Meyer on John 10:30—“I and the Father are one”—“Here the Arian understanding of a mere ethical harmony as taught in the words ‘are one’ is unsatisfactory, because irrelevant to the exercise of power. Oneness of essence, though not contained in the words themselves, is, by the necessities of the argument, presupposed in them.” Dalman, The Words of Jesus: “Nowhere do we find that Jesus called himself the Son of God in such a sense as to suggest a merely religious and ethical relation to God—a relation which others also possessed and which they were capable of attaining or were destined to acquire.” We may add that while in the lower sense there are many “sons of God,” there is but one “only begotten Son.”

(i) These proofs of Christ’s deity from the New Testament are corroborated by Christian experience.

Christian experience recognizes Christ as an absolutely perfect Savior, perfectly revealing the Godhead and worthy of unlimited worship and adoration; that is, it practically recognizes him as Deity. But Christian experience also recognizes that through Christ it has introduction and reconciliation to God as one distinct from Jesus Christ, as one who was alienated from the soul by its sin, but who is now reconciled through Jesus’s death. In other words, while recognizing Jesus as God, we are also compelled to recognize a distinction between the Father and the Son through whom we come to the Father.

Although this experience cannot be regarded as an independent witness to Jesus’ claims, since it only tests the truth already made known in the Bible, still the irresistible impulse of every person whom Christ has saved to lift his Redeemer to the highest place, and bow before him in the lowliest worship, is strong evidence that only that interpretation of Scripture can be true which recognizes Christ’s absolute Godhead. It is the church’s consciousness of her Lord’s divinity, indeed, and not mere speculation upon the relations of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, that has compelled the formulation of the Scripture doctrine of the Trinity.

In the letter of Pliny to Trajan, it is said of the early Christians “quod essent soliti carmen Christo quasi Deo dicere invicem.” The prayers and hymns of the church show what the church has believed Scripture to teach. Dwight Moody is said to have received his first conviction of the truth of the gospel from hearing the concluding words of a prayer, “For Christ’s sake, Amen,” when awakened from physical slumber in Dr. Kirk’s church, Boston. These words, wherever uttered, imply man’s dependence and Christ’s deity. See New Englander, 1878:432. In Eph. 4:32, the Revised Version substitutes “in Christ” for “for Christ’s sake.” The exact phrase “for Christ’s sake” is not found in the N. T. in connection with prayer, although the O. T. phrase “for my name’s sake” (Ps. 25:11) passes into the N. T. phrase “in the name of Jesus” (Phil. 2:10); cf. Ps. 72:15—“men shall pray for him continually” = the words of the hymn: “For him shall endless prayer be made, And endless blessings crown his head.” All this is proof that the idea of prayer for Christ’s sake is in Scripture, though the phrase is absent.

A caricature scratched on the wall of the Palatine palace in Rome, and dating back to the third century, represents a human figure with an ass’s head, hanging upon a cross, while a man stands before it in the attitude of worship. Under the effigy is this ill-spelled inscription: “Alexamenos adores his God.”

This appeal to the testimony of Christian consciousness was first made by Schleiermacher. William E. Gladstone: “All I write, and all I think, and all I hope, is based upon the divinity of our Lord, the one central hope of our poor, wayward race.” E. G. Robinson: “When you preach salvation by faith in Christ, you preach the Trinity.” W. G. T. Shedd: “The construction of the doctrine of the Trinity started, not from the consideration of the three persons, but from belief in the deity of one of them.” On the worship of Christ in the authorized services of the Anglican church, see Stanley, Church and State, 333-335; Liddon, Divinity of our Lord, 514.

In contemplating passages apparently inconsistent with those now cited, in that they impute to Christ weakness and ignorance, limitation and subjection, we are to remember, first, that our Lord was truly man, as well as truly God, and that this ignorance and weakness may be predicated of him as the God-man in whom deity and humanity are united; secondly, that the divine nature itself was in some way limited and humbled during our Savior’s earthly life, and that these passages may describe him as he was in his estate of humiliation, rather than in his original and present glory; and, thirdly, that there is an order of office and operation which is consistent with essential oneness and equality, but which permits the Father to be spoken of as first and the Son as second. These statements will be further elucidated in the treatment of the present doctrine and in subsequent examination of the doctrine of the Person of Christ.

There are certain things of which Christ was ignorant: Mark 13:32—“of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.” He was subject to physical fatigue: John 4:6—“Jesus therefore, being wearied with his journey, sat thus by the well.” There was a limitation connected with Christ’s taking of human flesh: Phil. 2:7—“emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men”; John 14:28—“the Father is greater than I.” There is a subjection, as respects order of office and operation, which is yet consistent with equality of essence and oneness with God; 1 Cor. 15:28—“then shall the Son also himself be subjected to him that did subject all things unto him, that God may be all in all.” This must be interpreted consistently with John 17:5—“glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was,” and with Phil. 2:6, where this glory is described as being “the form of God” and “equality with God.”

Even in his humiliation, Christ was the Essential Truth, and ignorance in him never involved error or false teaching. Ignorance on his part might make his teaching at times incomplete,—it never in the smallest particular made his teaching false. Yet here we must distinguish between what he intended to teach and what was merely incidental to his teaching. When he said: Moses “wrote of me” (John 5:46) and “David in the Spirit called him Lord” (Mat. 22:43), if his purpose was to teach the authorship of the Pentateuch and of the 110th Psalm, we should regard his words as absolutely authoritative. But it is possible that he intended only to locate the passages referred to, and if so, his words cannot be used to exclude critical conclusions as to their authorship. Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 136—“If he spoke of Moses or David, it was only to identify the passage. The authority of the earlier dispensation did not rest upon its record being due to Moses, nor did the appropriateness of the Psalm lie in its being uttered by David. There is no evidence that the question of authorship ever came before him.” Adamson rather more precariously suggests that “there may have been a lapse of memory in Jesus’ mention of ‘Zachariah, son of Barachiah’ (Mat. 23:35), since this was a matter of no spiritual import.”

For assertions of Jesus’ knowledge, see John 2:24, 25—“he knew all men ... he needed not that any one should bear witness concerning man; for he himself knew what was in man”; 6:64—“Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who it was that should betray him”; 12:33—“this he said, signifying by what manner of death he should die”; 21:19—“Now this he spake, signifying by what manner of death he [Peter] should glorify God”; 13:1—“knowing that his hour was come that he should depart”; Mat. 25:31—“when the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, then shall he sit on the throne of his glory” = he knew that he was to act as final judge of the human race. Other instances are mentioned by Adamson, The Mind in Christ, 24-49: 1. Jesus’ knowledge of Peter (John 1:42); 2. his finding Philip (1:43); 3. his recognition of Nathanael (1:47-50); 4. of the woman of Samaria (4:17-19, 39); 5. miraculous draughts of fishes (Luke 5:6-9; John 21:6); 6. death of Lazarus (John 11:14); 7. the ass’s colt (Mat. 21:2); 8. of the upper room (Mark 14:15); 9. of Peter’s denial (Mat. 26:34); 10. of the manner of his own death (John 12:33; 18:32); 11. of the manner of Peter’s death (John 21:19); 12. of the fall of Jerusalem (Mat. 24:2).

On the other hand there are assertions and implications of Jesus’ ignorance: he did not know the day of the end (Mark 13:32), though even here he intimates his superiority to angels; 5:30-34—“Who touched my garments?” though even here power had gone forth from him to heal; John 11:34—“Where have ye laid him?” though here he is about to raise Lazarus from the dead; Mark 11:13—“seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find anything thereon” = he did not know that it had no fruit, yet he had power to curse it. With these evidences of the limitations of Jesus’ knowledge, we must assent to the judgment of Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, 33—“We must decline to stake the authority of Jesus on a question of literary criticism”; and of Gore, Incarnation, 195—“That the use by our Lord of such a phrase as ‘Moses wrote of me’ binds us to the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch as a whole, I do not think we need to yield.” See our section on The Person of Christ; also Rush Rhees, Life of Jesus, 243, 244. Per contra, see Swayne, Our Lord’s Knowledge as Man; and Crooker, The New Bible, who very unwisely claims that belief in a Kenosis involves the surrender of Christ’s authority and atonement.

It is inconceivable that any mere creature should say, “God is greater than I am,” or should be spoken of as ultimately and in a mysterious way becoming “subject to God.” In his state of humiliation Christ was subject to the Spirit (Acts 1:2—“after that he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit”; 10:38—“God anointed him with the Holy Spirit ... for God was with him”; Heb.9:14—“through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God”), but in his state of exaltation Christ is Lord of the Spirit (κυρίου πνεύματος—2 Cor. 3:18—Meyer), giving the Spirit and working through the Spirit. Heb. 2:7, marg.—“Thou madest him for a little while lower than the angels.” On the whole subject, see Shedd, Hist. Doctrine, 262, 351; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:61-64; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 127, 207, 458; per contra, see Examination of Liddon, 252, 294; Professors of Andover Seminary, Divinity of Christ.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

C. The Holy Spirit is recognized as God

(a) He is spoken of as God; (b) the attributes of God are ascribed to him, such as life, truth, love, holiness, eternity, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence; (c) he does the works of God, such as creation, regeneration, resurrection; (d) he receives honor due only to God; (e) he is associated with God on a footing of equality, both in the formula of baptism and in the apostolic benedictions.

(a) Spoken of as God. Acts 5:3, 4—“lie to the Holy Spirit ... not lied unto men, but unto God”; 1 Cor. 3:16—“ye are a temple of God ... the Spirit of God dwelleth in you”; 6:19—“your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit”; _12:4-6 _“same Spirit ... same Lord ... same God, who worketh all things in all”—“The divine Trinity is here indicated in an ascending climax, in such a way that we pass from the Spirit who bestows the gifts to the Lord [Christ] who is served by means of them, and finally to God, who as the absolute first cause and possessor of all Christian powers works the entire sum of all charismatic gifts in all who are gifted” (Meyer in loco).

(b) Attributes of God. Life: Rom. 8:2—“Spirit of life.” Truth: _John 16:13 _“Spirit of truth.” Love: Rom. 15:30—“love of the Spirit.” Holiness: Eph. 4:30—“the Holy Spirit of God.” Eternity: Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.” Omnipresence: Ps. 139:7—“Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?” Omniscience: 1 Cor. 12:11—“all these [including gifts of healings and miracles] worketh the one and the same Spirit, dividing to each one severally even as he will.”

(c) Works of God. Creation: Gen. 1:2, marg.—“Spirit of God was brooding upon the face of the waters.” Casting out of demons: Mat. 12:28—“But if I by the Spirit of God cast out demons.” Conviction of sin: John 16:8—“convict the world in respect of sin.” Regeneration: John 3:8—“born of the Spirit”; Tit. 3:5—“renewing of the Holy Spirit.” Resurrection: Rom. 8:11—“give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit”; 1 Cor. 15:45—“The last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”

(d) Honor due to God. 1 Cor. 3:16—“ye are a temple of God ... the Spirit of God dwelleth in you”—he who inhabits the temple is the object of worship there. See also the next item.

(e) Associated with God. Formula of baptism: Mat. 28:19—“baptizing them into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” If the baptismal formula is worship, then we have here worship paid to the Spirit. Apostolic benedictions: 2 Cor. 13:14—“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” If the apostolic benedictions are prayers, then we have here a prayer to the Spirit. 1 Pet. 1:2—“foreknowledge of God the Father ... sanctification of the Spirit ... sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.”

On Heb. 9:14, Kendrick, Com. in loco, interprets: “Offers himself by virtue of an eternal spirit which dwells within him and imparts to his sacrifice a spiritual and an eternal efficacy. The ‘spirit’ here spoken of was not, then, the ‘Holy Spirit’; it was not his purely divine nature; it was that blending of his divine nature with his human personality which forms the mystery of his being, that ‘spirit of holiness’ by virtue of which he was declared ‘the Son of God with power,’ on account of his resurrection from the dead.” Hovey adds a note to Kendrick’s Commentary, in loco, as follows: “This adjective ‘eternal’ naturally suggests that the word ‘Spirit’ refers to the higher and divine nature of Christ. His truly human nature, on its spiritual side, was indeed eternal as to the future, but so also is the spirit of every man. The unique and superlative value of Christ’s self-sacrifice seems to have been due to the impulse of the divine side of his nature.” The phrase “eternal spirit” would then mean his divinity. To both these interpretations we prefer that which makes the passage refer to the Holy Spirit, and we cite in support of this view Acts 1:2—“he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit unto the apostles”; 10:38—“God anointed him with the Holy Spirit.” On 1 Cor. 2:10, Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 63, remarks: “The Spirit of God finds nothing even in God which baffles his scrutiny. His ‘search’ is not a seeking for knowledge yet beyond him.... Nothing but God could search the depths of God.”

As spirit is nothing less than the inmost principle of life, and the spirit of man is man himself, so the spirit of God must be God (see 1 Cor. 2:11—Meyer). Christian experience, moreover, expressed as it is in the prayers and hymns of the church, furnishes an argument for the deity of the Holy Spirit similar to that for the deity of Jesus Christ. When our eyes are opened to see Christ as a Savior, we are compelled to recognize the work in us of a divine Spirit who has taken of the things of Christ and has shown them to us; and this divine Spirit we necessarily distinguish both from the Father and from the Son. Christian experience, however, is not an original and independent witness to the deity of the Holy Spirit: it simply shows what the church has held to be the natural and unforced interpretation of the Scriptures, and so confirms the Scripture argument already adduced.

The Holy Spirit is God himself personally present in the believer. E. G. Robinson: “If ‘Spirit of God’ no more implies deity than does ‘angel of God,’ why is not the Holy Spirit called simply the angel or messenger, of God?” Walker, The Spirit and the Incarnation, 337—“The Holy Spirit is God in his innermost being or essence, the principle of life of both the Father and the Son; that in which God, both as Father and Son, does everything, and in which he comes to us and is in us increasingly through his manifestations. Through the working and indwelling of this Holy Spirit, God in his person of Son was fully incarnate in Christ.” Gould, Am. Com. on 1 Cor. 2:11—“For who among men knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of the man, which is in him? even so the things of God none knoweth, save the Spirit of God”—“The analogy must not be pushed too far, as if the Spirit of God and God were coëxtensive terms, as the corresponding terms are, substantially, in man. The point of the analogy is evidently self-knowledge, and in both cases the contrast is between the spirit within and anything outside.” Andrew Murray, Spirit of Christ, 140—“We must not expect always to feel the power of the Spirit when it works. Scripture links power and weakness in a wonderful way, not as succeeding each other but as existing together. ‘I was with you in weakness ... my preaching was in power’ (1 Cor. 2:3); ‘when I am weak then am I strong’ (2 Cor. 12:10). The power is the power of God given to faith, and faith grows strong in the dark.... He who would command nature must first and most absolutely obey her.... We want to get possession of the Power, and use it. God wants the Power to get possession of us, and use us.”

This proof of the deity of the Holy Spirit is not invalidated by the limitations of his work under the Old Testament dispensation. John 7:39—“for the Holy Spirit was not yet”—means simply that the Holy Spirit could not fulfill his peculiar office as Revealer of Christ until the atoning work of Christ should be accomplished.

John 7:39 is to be interpreted in the light of other Scriptures which assert the agency of the Holy Spirit under the old dispensation (Ps. 51:11—“take not thy holy Spirit from me”) and which describe his peculiar office under the new dispensation (John 16:14, 15—“he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you”). Limitation in the manner of the Spirit’s work in the O. T. involved a limitation in the extent and power of it also. Pentecost was the flowing forth of a tide of spiritual influence which had hitherto been dammed up. Henceforth the Holy Spirit was the Spirit of Jesus Christ, taking of the things of Christ and showing them, applying his finished work to human hearts, and rendering the hitherto localized Savior omnipresent with his scattered followers to the end of time.

Under the conditions of his humiliation, Christ was a servant. All authority in heaven and earth was given him only after his resurrection. Hence he could not send the Holy Spirit until he ascended. The mother can show off her son only when he is fully grown. The Holy Spirit could reveal Christ only when there was a complete Christ to reveal. The Holy Spirit could fully sanctify, only after the example and motive of holiness were furnished in Christ’s life and death. Archer Butler: “The divine Artist could not fitly descend to make the copy, before the original had been provided.”

And yet the Holy Spirit is “the eternal Spirit” (Heb. 9:14), and he not only existed, but also wrought, in Old Testament times. 2 Pet. 1:21—“men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit”—seems to fix the meaning of the phrase “the Holy Spirit,” where it appears in the O. T. Before Christ “the Holy Spirit was not yet” (John 7:39), just as before Edison electricity was not yet. There was just as much electricity in the world before Edison as there is now. Edison has only taught us its existence and how to use it. Still we can say that, before Edison, electricity, as a means of lighting, warming and transporting people, had no existence. So until Pentecost, the Holy Spirit, as the revealer of Christ, “was not yet.” Augustine calls Pentecost the dies natalis, or birthday, of the Holy Spirit; and for the same reason that we call the day when Mary brought forth her firstborn son the birthday of Jesus Christ, though before Abraham was born, Christ was. The Holy Spirit had been engaged in the creation, and had inspired the prophets, but officially, as Mediator between men and Christ, “the Holy Spirit was not yet.” He could not show the things of Christ until the things of Christ were ready to be shown. See Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit, 19-25; Prof. J. S. Gubelmann, Person and Work of the Holy Spirit in O. T. Times. For proofs of the deity of the Holy Spirit, see Walker, Doctrine of the Holy Spirit; Hare, Mission of the Comforter; Parker, The Paraclete; Cardinal Manning, Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:341-350. Further references will be given in connection with the proof of the Holy Spirit’s personality.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

2. Intimations of the Old Testament

The passages which seem to show that even in the Old Testament there are three who are implicitly recognized as God may be classed under four heads:

A. Passages which seem to teach plurality of some sort in the Godhead.

(a) The plural noun אלהים is employed, and that with a plural verb—a use remarkable, when we consider that the singular אל was also in existence; (b) God uses plural pronouns in speaking of himself; (c) Jehovah distinguishes himself from Jehovah; (d) a Son is ascribed to Jehovah; (e) the Spirit of God is distinguished from God; (f) there are a threefold ascription and a threefold benediction.

(a) Gen. 20:13—“God caused [plural] me to wander from my father’s house”; 35:7—“built there an altar, and called the place El-Beth-el; because there God was revealed [plural] unto him.” (b) Gen. 1:26—“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness”; 3:22—“Behold, the man is become as one of us”; 11:7—“Come, let us go down, and there confound their language”; Is. 6:8—“Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” (c) Gen. 19:24—“Then Jehovah rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from Jehovah out of heaven”; Hos. 1:7—“I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by Jehovah, their God”; cf. 2 Tim. 1:18—“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day”—though Ellicott here decides adversely to the Trinitarian reference. (d) Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my son; this day have I begotten thee”; Prov. 30:4—“Who hath established all the ends of the earth? What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if thou knowest?” (e) Gen. 1:1 and 2, marg.—“God created ... the Spirit of God was brooding”; Ps. 33:6—“By the word of Jehovah were the heavens made, And all the host of them by the breath [spirit] of his mouth”; Is. 48:16—“the Lord Jehovah hath sent me, and his Spirit”; 63:7, 10—“loving kindnesses of Jehovah ... grieved his holy Spirit.” (f) Is. 6:3—the trisagion: “Holy, holy, holy”; Num. 6:24-26—“Jehovah bless thee, and keep thee: Jehovah make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: Jehovah lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.”

It has been suggested that as Baal was worshiped in different places and under different names, as Baal-Berith, Baal-hanan, Baal-peor, Baal-zeebub, and his priests could call upon any one of these as possessing certain personified attributes of Baal, while yet the whole was called by the plural term “Baalim,” and Elijah could say: “Call ye upon your Gods,” so “Elohim” may be the collective designation of the God who was worshiped in different localities; see Robertson Smith, Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 229. But this ignores the fact that Baal is always addressed in the singular, never in the plural, while the plural “Elohim” is the term commonly used in addresses to God. This seems to show that “Baalim” is a collective term, while “Elohim” is not. So when Ewald, Lehre von Gott, 2:333, distinguishes five names of God, corresponding to five great periods of the history of Israel, viz., the “Almighty” of the Patriarchs, the “Jehovah” of the Covenant, the “God of Hosts” of the Monarchy, the “Holy One” of the Deuteronomist and the later prophetic age, and the “Our Lord” of Judaism, he ignores the fact that these designations are none of them confined to the times to which they are attributed, though they may have been predominantly used in those times.

The fact that אלהים is sometimes used in a narrower sense, as applicable to the Son (Ps. 45:6; cf. Heb. 1:8), need not prevent us from believing that the term was originally chosen as containing an allusion to a certain plurality in the divine nature. Nor is it sufficient to call this plural a simple pluralis majestaticus; since it is easier to derive this common figure from divine usage than to derive the divine usage from this common figure—especially when we consider the constant tendency of Israel to polytheism.

Ps. 45:6; cf. Heb. 1:8—“of the Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.” Here it is God who calls Christ “God” or “Elohim.” The term Elohim has here acquired the significance of a singular. It was once thought that the royal style of speech was a custom of a later date than the time of Moses. Pharaoh does not use it. In Gen. 41:41-44, he says: “I have set thee over all the land of Egypt ... I am Pharaoh.” But later investigations seem to prove that the plural for God was used by the Canaanites before the Hebrew occupation. The one Pharaoh is called “my gods” or “my god,” indifferently. The word “master” is usually found in the plural in the O. T. (cf. Gen. 24:9, 51; 39:19; 40:1). The plural gives utterance to the sense of awe. It signifies magnitude or completeness. (See The Bible Student, Aug. 1900:67.)

This ancient Hebrew application of the plural to God is often explained as a mere plural of dignity, = one who combines in himself many reasons for adoration (אלהים from אלה to fear, to adore). Oehler, O. T. Theology, 1:128-130, calls it a “quantitative plural,” signifying unlimited greatness. The Hebrews had many plural forms, where we should use the singular, as “heavens” instead of “heaven,” “waters” instead of “water.” We too speak of “news,” “wages,” and say “you” instead of “thou”; see F. W. Robertson, on Genesis, 12. But the Church Fathers, such as Barnabas, Justin Martyr, Irenæus, Theophilus, Epiphanius, and Theodoret, saw in this plural an allusion to the Trinity, and we are inclined to follow them. When finite things were pluralized to express man’s reverence, it would be far more natural to pluralize the name of God. And God’s purpose in securing this pluralization may have been more far-reaching and intelligent than man’s. The Holy Spirit who presided over the development of revelation may well have directed the use of the plural in general, and even the adoption of the plural name Elohim in particular, with a view to the future unfolding of truth with regard to the Trinity.

We therefore dissent from the view of Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 323, 330—“The Hebrew religion, even much later than the time of Moses, as it existed in the popular mind, was, according to the prophetic writings, far removed from a real monotheism, and consisted in the wavering acceptance of the preëminence of a tribal God, with a strong inclination towards a general polytheism. It is impossible therefore to suppose that anything approaching the philosophical monotheism of modern theology could have been elaborated or even entertained by primitive man.... ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me’ (Ex. 20:3), the first precept of Hebrew monotheism, was not understood at first as a denial of the hereditary polytheistic faith, but merely as an exclusive claim to worship and obedience.” E. G. Robinson says, in a similar strain, that “we can explain the idolatrous tendencies of the Jews only on the supposition that they had lurking notions that their God was a merely national god. Moses seems to have understood the doctrine of the divine unity, but the Jews did not.”

To the views of both Hill and Robinson we reply that the primitive intuition of God is not that of many, but that of One. Paul tells us that polytheism is a later and retrogressive stage of development, due to man’s sin (Rom. 1:19-25). We prefer the statement of McLaren: “The plural Elohim is not a survival from a polytheistic stage, but expresses the divine nature in the manifoldness of its fulnesses and perfections, rather than in the abstract unity of its being”—and, we may add, expresses the divine nature in its essential fulness, as a complex of personalities. See Conant, Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar, 108; Green, Hebrew Grammar, 306; Girdlestone, O. T. Synonyms, 38, 53; Alexander on Psalm 11:7; 29:1; 58:11.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

B. Passages relating to the Angel of Jehovah

(a) The angel of Jehovah identifies himself with Jehovah; (b) he is identified with Jehovah by others; (c) he accepts worship due only to God. Though the phrase “angel of Jehovah” is sometimes used in the later Scriptures to denote a merely human messenger or created angel, it seems in the Old Testament, with hardly more than a single exception, to designate the pre-incarnate Logos, whose manifestations in angelic or human form foreshadowed his final coming in the flesh.

(a) Gen. 22:11, 16—“the angel of Jehovah called unto him [Abraham, when about to sacrifice Isaac] ... By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah”; 31:11, 13—“the angel of God said unto me [Jacob] ... I am the God of Beth-el.” (b) Gen. 16:9, 13—“angel of Jehovah said unto her ... and she called the name of Jehovah that spake unto her, Thou art a God that seeth”; 48:15, 16—“the God who hath fed me ... the angel who hath redeemed me.” (c) Ex. 3:2, 4, 5—“the angel of Jehovah appeared unto him ... God called unto him out of the midst of the bush ... put off thy shoes from off thy feet”; Judges 13:20-22—“angel of Jehovah ascended.... Manoah and his wife ... fell on their faces ... Manoah said ... We shall surely die, because we have seen God.”

The “angel of the Lord” appears to be a human messenger in Haggai 1:13—“Haggai, Jehovah’s messenger”; a created angel in Mat. 1:20—“an angel of the Lord [called Gabriel] appeared unto” Joseph; in Acts 3:26—“an angel of the Lord spake unto Philip”; and in 12:7—“an angel of the Lord stood by him” (Peter). But commonly, in the O.T., the “angel of Jehovah” is a theophany, a self-manifestation of God. The only distinction is that between Jehovah in himself and Jehovah in manifestation. The appearances of “the angel of Jehovah” seem to be preliminary manifestations of the divine Logos, as in Gen. 18:2, 13—“three men stood over against him [Abraham] ... And Jehovah said unto Abraham”; Dan. 3:25, 28—“the aspect of the fourth is like a son of the gods.... Blessed be the God ... who hath sent his angel.” The N.T. “angel of the Lord” does not permit, the O.T. “angel of the Lord” requires, worship (Rev. 22:8, 9—“See thou do it not”; cf. Ex. 3:5—“put off thy shoes”). As supporting this interpretation, see Hengstenberg, Christology, 1:107-123; J. Pye Smith, Scripture Testimony to the Messiah. As opposing it, see Hofmann, Schriftbeweis, 1:329, 378; Kurtz, History of Old Covenant, 1:181. On the whole subject, see Bib. Sac., 1879:593-615.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

C. Descriptions of the divine Wisdom and Word

(a) Wisdom is represented as distinct from God, and as eternally existing with God; (b) the Word of God is distinguished from God, as executor of his will from everlasting.

(a) Prov. 8:1—“Doth not wisdom cry?” Cf. Mat. 11:19—“wisdom is justified by her works”; Luke 7:35—“wisdom is justified of all her children”; 11:49—“Therefore also said the wisdom of God, I will send unto them prophets and apostles”; Prov. 8:22, 30, 31—“Jehovah possessed me in the beginning of his way, Before his works of old.... I was by him, as a master workman: And I was daily his delight.... And my delight was with the sons of men”; cf. 3:19—“Jehovah by wisdom founded the earth,” and Heb. 1:2—“his Son ... through whom ... he made the worlds.” (b) Ps. 107:20—“He sendeth his word, and healeth them”; 119:89—“For ever, O Jehovah, Thy word is settled in heaven”; 147:15-18—“He sendeth out his commandment.... He sendeth out his word.”

In the Apocryphal book entitled Wisdom, 7:26, 28, wisdom is described as “the brightness of the eternal light,” “the unspotted mirror of God’s majesty,” and “the image of his goodness”—reminding us of Heb. 1:3—“the effulgence of his glory, and the very image of his substance.” In Wisdom, 9:9, 10, wisdom is represented as being present with God when he made the world, and the author of the book prays that wisdom may be sent to him out of God’s holy heavens and from the throne of his glory. In 1 Esdras 4:35-38, Truth in a similar way is spoken of as personal: “Great is the Truth and stronger than all things. All the earth calleth upon the Truth, and the heaven blesseth it; all works shake and tremble at it, and with it is no unrighteous thing. As for the Truth, it endureth and is always strong; it liveth and conquereth forevermore.”

It must be acknowledged that in none of these descriptions is the idea of personality clearly developed. Still less is it true that John the apostle derived his doctrine of the Logos from the interpretations of these descriptions in Philo Judæus. John’s doctrine (John 1:1-18) is radically different from the Alexandrian Logos-idea of Philo. This last is a Platonizing speculation upon the mediating principle between God and the world. Philo seems at times to verge towards a recognition of personality in the Logos, though his monotheistic scruples lead him at other times to take back what he has given, and to describe the Logos either as the thought of God or as its expression in the world. But John is the first to present to us a consistent view of this personality, to identify the Logos with the Messiah, and to distinguish the Word from the Spirit of God.

Dorner, in his History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ, 1:13-45, and in his System of Doctrine, 1:348, 349, gives the best account of Philo’s doctrine of the Logos. He says that Philo calls the Logos ἀρχάγγελος, ἀρχιερεύς, δεύτερος θεός. Whether this is anything more than personification is doubtful, for Philo also calls the Logos the κόσμος νοητός. Certainly, so far as he makes the Logos a distinct personality, he makes him also a subordinate being. It is charged that the doctrine of the Trinity owes its origin to the Platonic philosophy in its Alexandrian union with Jewish theology. But Platonism had no Trinity. The truth is that by the doctrine of the Trinity Christianity secured itself against false heathen ideas of God’s multiplicity and immanence, as well as against false Jewish ideas of God’s unity and transcendence. It owes nothing to foreign sources.

We need not assign to John’s gospel a later origin, in order to account for its doctrine of the Logos, any more than we need to assign a later origin to the Synoptics in order to account for their doctrine of a suffering Messiah. Both doctrines were equally unknown to Philo. Philo’s Logos does not and cannot become man. So says Dorner. Westcott, in Bible Commentary on John, Introd., xv-xviii, and on John 1:1—“The theological use of the term [in John’s gospel] appears to be derived directly from the Palestinian Memra, and not from the Alexandrian Logos.” Instead of Philo’s doctrine being a stepping-stone from Judaism to Christianity, it was a stumbling-stone. It had no doctrine of the Messiah or of the atonement. Bennett and Adeny, Bib. Introd., 340—“The difference between Philo and John may be stated thus: Philo’s Logos is Reason, while John’s is Word; Philo’s is impersonal, while John’s is personal; Philo’s is not incarnate, while John’s is incarnate; Philo’s is not the Messiah, while John’s is the Messiah.”

Philo lived from B. C. 10 or 20 to certainly A. D. 40, when he went at the head of a Jewish embassy to Rome, to persuade the Emperor to abstain from claiming divine honor from the Jews. In his De Opifice Mundi he says: “The Word is nothing else but the intelligible world.” He calls the Word the “chainband,” “pilot,” “steersman,” of all things. Gore, Incarnation, 69—“Logos in Philo must be translated ‘Reason.’ But in the Targums, or early Jewish paraphrases of the O. T., the ‘Word’ of Jehovah (Memra, Devra) is constantly spoken of as the efficient instrument of the divine action, in cases where the O. T. speaks of Jehovah himself, ‘The Word of God’ had come to be used personally, as almost equivalent to God manifesting himself, or God in action.” George H. Gilbert, in Biblical World, Jan. 1899:44—“John’s use of the term Logos was suggested by Greek philosophy, while at the same time the content of the word is Jewish.”

Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, 174-208—“The Stoics invested the Logos with personality. They were Monists and they made λόγος and ὕλη the active and the passive forms of the one principle. Some made God a mode of matter—natura naturata; others made matter a mode of God—natura naturans = the world a self-evolution of God. The Platonic forms, as manifold expressions of a single λόγος, were expressed by a singular term, Logos, rather than the Logoi, of God. From this Logos proceed all forms of mind or reason. So held Philo: ‘The mind is an offshoot from the divine and happy soul (of God), an offshoot not separated from him, for nothing divine is cut off and disjoined, but only extended.’ Philo’s Logos is not only form but force—God’s creative energy—the eldest-born of the ‘I am,’ which robes itself with the world as with a vesture, the high priest’s robe, embroidered with all the forces of the seen and unseen worlds.”

Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:53—“Philo carries the transcendence of God to its logical conclusions. The Jewish doctrine of angels is expanded in his doctrine of the Logos. The Alexandrian philosophers afterwards represented Christianity as a spiritualized Judaism. But a philosophical system dominated by the idea of the divine transcendence never could have furnished a motive for missionary labors like those of Paul. Philo’s belief in transcendence abated his redemptive hopes. But, conversely, the redemptive hopes of orthodox Judaism saved it from some of the errors of exclusive transcendence.” See a quotation from Siegfried, in Schürer’s History of the Jewish People, article on Philo: “Philo’s doctrine grew out of God’s distinction and distance from the world. It was dualistic. Hence the need of mediating principles, some being less than God and more than creature. The cosmical significance of Christ bridged the gulf between Christianity and contemporary Greek thought. Christianity stands for a God who is revealed. But a Logos-doctrine like that of Philo may reveal less than it conceals. Instead of God incarnate for our salvation, we may have merely a mediating principle between God and the world, as in Arianism.”

The preceding statement is furnished in substance by Prof. William Adams Brown. With it we agree, adding only the remark that the Alexandrian philosophy gave to Christianity, not the substance of its doctrine, but only the terminology for its expression. The truth which Philo groped after, the Apostle John seized and published, as only he could, who had heard, seen, and handled “the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). “The Christian doctrine of the Logos was perhaps before anything else an effort to express how Jesus Christ was God (Θεός), and yet in another sense was not God (ὁ θεός); that is to say, was not the whole Godhead” (quoted in Marcus Dods, Expositors’ Bible, on John 1:1). See also Kendrick, in Christian Review, 26:369-399; Gloag, in Presb. and Ref. Rev., 1891:45-57; Réville, Doctrine of the Logos in John and Philo; Godet on John, Germ. transl., 13, 135; Cudworth, Intellectual System, 2:320-333; Pressensé, Life of Jesus Christ, 83; Hagenbach, Hist. Doct., 1:114-117; Liddon, Our Lord’s Divinity, 59-71; Conant on Proverbs, 53.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

D. Descriptions of the Messiah

(a) He is one with Jehovah; (b) yet he is in some sense distinct from Jehovah.

(a) Is. 9:6—“unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given ... and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace”; Micah 5:2—“thou Bethlehem ... which art little ... out of thee shall one come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.” (b) Ps. 45:6, 7—“Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever.... Therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee”; Mal 3:1—“I send my messenger, and he shall prepare the way before me: and the Lord, whom ye seek, will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant, whom ye desire.” Henderson, in his Commentary on this passage, points out that the Messiah is here called “the Lord” or “the Sovereign”—a title nowhere given in this form (with the article) to any but Jehovah; that he is predicted as coming to the temple as its proprietor; and that he is identified with the angel of the covenant, elsewhere shown to be one with Jehovah himself.

It is to be remembered, in considering this, as well as other classes of passages previously cited, that no Jewish writer before Christ’s coming had succeeded in constructing from them a doctrine of the Trinity. Only to those who bring to them the light of New Testament revelation do they show their real meaning.

Our general conclusion with regard to the Old Testament intimations must therefore be that, while they do not by themselves furnish a sufficient basis for the doctrine of the Trinity, they contain the germ of it, and may be used in confirmation of it when its truth is substantially proved from the New Testament.

That the doctrine of the Trinity is not plainly taught in the Hebrew Scriptures is evident from the fact that Jews unite with Mohammedans in accusing trinitarians of polytheism. It should not surprise us that the Old Testament teaching on this subject is undeveloped and obscure. The first necessity was that the Unity of God should be insisted on. Until the danger of idolatry was past, a clear revelation of the Trinity might have been a hindrance to religious progress. The child now, like the race then, must learn the unity of God before it can profitably be taught the Trinity,—else it will fall into tritheism; see Gardiner, O. T. and N. T., 49. We should not therefore begin our proof of the Trinity with a reference to passages in the Old Testament. We should speak of these passages, indeed, as furnishing intimations of the doctrine rather than proof of it. Yet, after having found proof of the doctrine in the New Testament, we may expect to find traces of it in the Old which will corroborate our conclusions. As a matter of fact, we shall see that traces of the idea of a Trinity are found not only in the Hebrew Scriptures but in some of the heathen religions as well. E. G. Robinson: “The doctrine of the Trinity underlay the O. T., unperceived by its writers, was first recognized in the economic revelation of Christianity, and was first clearly enunciated in the necessary evolution of Christian doctrine.”

II. These Three are so described in Scripture that we are compelled to conceive of them as distinct Persons.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

1. The Father and the Son are persons distinct from each other

(a) Christ distinguishes the Father from himself as “another”; (b) the Father and the Son are distinguished as the begetter and the begotten; (c) the Father and the Son are distinguished as the sender and the sent.

(a) John 5:32, 37—“It is another that beareth witness of me ... the Father that sent me, he hath borne witness of me.” (b) Ps. 2:7—“Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee”; _John 1:14—_“the only begotten from the Father”; 18—“the only begotten Son”; 3:16—“gave his only begotten Son.” (c) John 10:36—“say ye of him, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest; because I said, I am the Son of God?”; _Gal 4:4—_“when the fulness of the time came, God sent forth his Son.” In these passages the Father is represented as objective to the Son, the Son to the Father, and both the Father and Son to the Spirit.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

2. The Father and the Son are persons distinct from the Spirit

(a) Jesus distinguishes the Spirit from himself and from the Father; (b) the Spirit proceeds from the Father; (c) the Spirit is sent by the Father and by the Son.

(a) John 14:16, 17—“I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth”—or “Spirit of the truth,” = he whose work it is to reveal and apply the truth, and especially to make manifest him who is the truth. Jesus had been their Comforter: he now promises them another Comforter. If he himself was a person, then the Spirit is a person. (b) John 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father.” (c) John 14:26—“the Comforter, even the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name”; 15:26—“when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father”; Gal. 4:6—“God sent forth the Spirit of his Son into our hearts.” The Greek church holds that the Spirit proceeds from the Father only; the Latin church, that the Spirit proceeds both from the Father and from the Son. The true formula is: The Spirit proceeds from the Father through or by (not “and”) the Son. See Hagenbach, History of Doctrine, 1:262, 263. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 195—“The Filioque is a valuable defence of the truth that the Holy Spirit is not simply the abstract second Person of the Trinity, but rather the Spirit of the incarnate Christ, reproducing Christ in human hearts, and revealing in them the meaning of true manhood.”

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

3. The Holy Spirit is a person

A. Designations proper to personality are given him.

(a) The masculine pronoun ἐκεῖνος, though πνεῦμα is neuter; (b) the name παράκλητος, which cannot be translated by “comfort”, or be taken as the name of any abstract influence. The Comforter, Instructor, Patron, Guide, Advocate, whom this term brings before us, must be a person. This is evident from its application to Christ in 1 John 2:1—“we have an Advocate—παράκλητον—with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.”

(a) John 16:14—“He (ἐκεῖνος) shall glorify me”; in Eph. 1:14 also, some of the best authorities, including Tischendorf (8th ed.), read ὄς, the masculine pronoun: “who is an earnest of our inheritance.” But in John 14:16-18, παράκλητος is followed by the neuters ὁ and αὐτό, because πνεῦμα had intervened. Grammatical and not theological considerations controlled the writer. See G. B. Stevens, Johannine Theology, 189-217, especially on the distinction between Christ and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is another person than Christ, in spite of Christ’s saying of the coming of the Holy Spirit: “I come unto you.” (b) John 16:7—“if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you.” The word παράκλητος, as appears from 1 John 2:1, quoted above, is a term of broader meaning than merely “Comforter.” The Holy Spirit is, indeed, as has been said, “the mother-principle in the Godhead,” and “as one whom his mother comforteth” so God by his Spirit comforts his children (Is. 66:13). But the Holy Spirit is also an Advocate of God’s claims in the soul, and of the soul’s interests in prayer (Rom. 8:26—“maketh intercession for us”). He comforts not only by being our advocate, but by being our instructor, patron, and guide; and all these ideas are found attaching to the word παράκλητος in good Greek usage. The word indeed is a verbal adjective, signifying “called to one’s aid,” hence a “helper”; the idea of encouragement is included in it, as well as those of comfort and of advocacy. See Westcott, Bible Com., on John 14:16; Cremer, Lexicon of N. T. Greek, in voce.

T. Dwight, in S. S. Times, on John 14:16—“The fundamental meaning of the word παράκλητος, which is a verbal adjective, is ‘called to one’s aid,’ and thus, when used as a noun, it conveys the idea of ‘helper.’ This more general sense probably attaches to its use in John’s Gospel, while in the Epistle (1 John 2:1, 2) it conveys the idea of Jesus acting as advocate on our behalf before God as a Judge.” So the Latin advocatus signifies one “called to”—i. e., called in to aid, counsel, plead. In this connection Jesus says: “I will not leave you orphans” (John 14:18). Cumming, Through the Eternal Spirit, 228—“As the orphaned family, in the day of the parent’s death, need some friend who shall lighten their sense of loss by his own presence with them, so the Holy Spirit is ‘called in’ to supply the present love and help which the Twelve are losing in the death of Jesus.” A. A. Hodge, Pop. Lectures, 237—“The Roman ‘client,’ the poor and dependent man, called in his ‘patron’ to help him in all his needs. The patron thought for, advised, directed, supported, defended, supplied, restored, comforted his client in all his complications. The client, though weak, with a powerful patron, was socially and politically secure forever.”

B. His name is mentioned in immediate connection with other persons, and in such a way as to imply his own personality.

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

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

C. He performs acts proper to personality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

2. Errors refuted by the foregoing passages

A. The Sabellian.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

B. The Arian

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

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

In explanation, notice that:

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

1. These titles belong to the Persons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us