2. Qualified sense of these titles…

2. Qualified sense of these titles

Like the word “person”, the names Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not to be confined within the precise limitations of meaning which would be required if they were applied to men.

(a) The Scriptures enlarge our conceptions of Christ’s Sonship by giving to him in his preëxistent state the names of the Logos, the Image, and the Effulgence of God.—The term “Logos” combines in itself the two ideas of thought and word, of reason and expression. While the Logos as divine thought or reason is one with God, the Logos as divine word or expression is distinguishable from God. Words are the means by which personal beings express or reveal themselves. Since Jesus Christ was “the Word” before there were any creatures to whom revelations could be made, it would seem to be only a necessary inference from this title that in Christ God must be from eternity expressed or revealed to himself; in other words, that the Logos is the principle of truth, or self-consciousness, in God.—The term “Image” suggests the ideas of copy or counterpart. Man is the image of God only relatively and derivatively. Christ is the Image of God absolutely and archetypally. As the perfect representation of the Father’s perfections, the Son would seem to be the object and principle of love in the Godhead.—The term “Effulgence,” finally, is an allusion to the sun and its radiance. As the effulgence of the sun manifests the sun’s nature, which otherwise would be unrevealed, yet is inseparable from the sun and ever one with it, so Christ reveals God, but is eternally one with God. Here is a principle of movement, of will, which seems to connect itself with the holiness, or self-asserting purity, of the divine nature.

Smyth, Introd. to Edwards’ Observations on the Trinity: “The ontological relations of the persons of the Trinity are not a mere blank to human thought.” John 1:1—“In the beginning was the Word”—means more than “in the beginning was the x, or the zero.” Godet indeed says that Logos = “reason” only in philosophical writings, but never in the Scriptures. He calls this a Hegelian notion. But both Plato and Philo had made this signification a common one. On λόγος as = reason + speech, see Lightfoot on Colossians, 143, 144. Meyer interprets it as “personal subsistence, the self-revelation of the divine essence, before all time immanent in God.” Neander, Planting and Training, 369—Logos = “the eternal Revealer of the divine essence.” Bushnell: “Mirror of creative imagination”; “form of God.”

Word = 1. Expression; 2. Definite expression; 3. Ordered expression; 4. Complete expression. We make thought definite by putting it into language. So God’s wealth of ideas is in the Word formed into an ordered Kingdom, a true Cosmos; see Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 76. Max Müller: “A word is simply a spoken thought made audible as sound. Take away from a word the sound, and what is left is simply the thought of it.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 72, 73—“The Greek saw in the word the abiding thought behind the passing form. The Word was God and yet finite—finite only as to form, infinite as to what the form suggests or expresses. By Word some form must be meant, and any form is finite. The Word is the form taken by the infinite Intelligence which transcends all forms.” We regard this identification of the Word with the finite manifestation of the Word as contradicted by John 1:1, where the Word is represented as being with God before creation, and by Phil. 2:6, where the Word is represented as existing in the form of God before his self-limitation in human nature. Scripture requires us to believe in an objectification of God to himself in the person of the Word prior to any finite manifestation of God to men. Christ existed as the Word, and the Word was with God, before the Word was made flesh and before the world came into being; in other words, the Logos was the eternal principle of truth or self-consciousness in the nature of God.

Passages representing Christ as the Image of God are Col. 1:15—“who is the image of the invisible God”; 2 Cor. 4:4—“Christ, who is the image of God” (εἰκών); Heb. 1:3—“the very image of his substance” (χαρακτὴρ τῆς ὑποστάσεως αὐτοῦ); here χαρακτήρ means “impress,” “counterpart.” Christ is the perfect image of God, as men are not. He therefore has consciousness and will. He possesses all the attributes and powers of God. The word “Image” suggests the perfect equality with God which the title “Son” might at first seem to deny. The living Image of God which is equal to himself and is the object of his infinite love can be nothing less than personal. As the bachelor can never satisfy his longing for companionship by lining his room with mirrors which furnish only a lifeless reflection of himself, so God requires for his love a personal as well as an infinite object. The Image is not precisely the repetition of the original. The stamp from the seal is not precisely the reproduction of the seal. The letters on the seal run backwards and can be easily read only when the impression is before us. So Christ is the only interpretation and revelation of the hidden Godhead. As only in love do we come to know the depths of our own being, so it is only in the Son that “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

Christ is spoken of as the Effulgence of God in Heb. 1:3—“who being the effulgence of his glory” (ἀπαύγασμα τῆς δόξης); cf. 2 Cor. 4:6—“shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Notice that the radiance of the sun is as old as the sun itself, and without it the sun would not be sun. So Christ is coëqual and coëternal with the Father. Ps. 84:11—“Jehovah God is a sun.” But we cannot see the sun except by the sunlight. Christ is the sunlight which streams forth from the Sun and which makes the Sun visible. If there be an eternal Sun, there must be also an eternal Sunlight, and Christ must be eternal. Westcott on Hebrews 1:3—“The use of the absolute timeless term ὤν, ‘being’, guards against the thought that the Lord’s sonship was by adoption, and not by nature. ἀπαύγασμα does not express personality, and χαρακτήρ does not express coëssentiality. The two words are related exactly as ὁμοούσιος and μονογενής, and like those must be combined to give the fulness of the truth. The truth expressed thus antithetically holds good absolutely.... In Christ the essence of God is made distinct; in Christ the revelation of God’s character is seen.” On Edwards’s view of the Trinity, together with his quotations from Ramsey’s Philosophical Principles, from which he seems to have derived important suggestions, see Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 338-376; G. P. Fisher, Edwards’s Essay on the Trinity, 110-116.

(b) The names thus given to the second person of the Trinity, if they have any significance, bring him before our minds in the general aspect of Revealer, and suggest a relation of the doctrine of the Trinity to God’s immanent attributes of truth, love, and holiness. The prepositions used to describe the internal relations of the second person to the first are not prepositions of rest, but prepositions of direction and movement. The Trinity, as the organism of Deity, secures a life-movement of the Godhead, a process in which God evermore objectifies himself and in the Son gives forth of his fulness. Christ represents the centrifugal action of the deity. But there must be centripetal action also. In the Holy Spirit the movement is completed, and the divine activity and thought returns into itself. True religion, in reuniting us to God, reproduces in us, in our limited measure, this eternal process of the divine mind. Christian experience witnesses that God in himself is unknown; Christ is the organ of external revelation; the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal revelation—only he can give us an inward apprehension or realization of the truth. It is “through the eternal Spirit” that Christ “offered himself without blemish unto God,” and it is only through the Holy Spirit that the church has access to the Father, or fallen creatures can return to God.

Here we see that God is Life, self-sufficient Life, Infinite Life, of which the life of the universe is but a faint reflection, a rill from the fountain, a drop from the ocean. Since Christ is the only Revealer, the only outgoing principle in the Godhead, it is he in whom the whole creation comes to be and holds together. He is the Life of nature: all natural beauty and grandeur, all forces molecular and molar, all laws of gravitation and evolution, are the work and manifestation of the omnipresent Christ. He is the Life of humanity: the intellectual and moral impulses of man, so far as they are normal and uplifting, are due to Christ; he is the principle of progress and improvement in history. He is the Life of the church: the one and only Redeemer and spiritual Head of the race is also its Teacher and Lord.

All objective revelation of God is the work of Christ. But all subjective manifestation of God is the work of the Holy Spirit. As Christ is the principle of outgoing, so the Holy Spirit is the principle of return to God. God would take up finite creatures into himself, would breath into them his breath, would teach them to launch their little boats upon the infinite current of his life. Our electric cars can go up hill at great speed so long as they grip the cable. Faith is the grip which connects us with the moving energy of God. “The universe is homeward bound,” because the Holy Spirit is ever turning objective revelation into subjective revelation, and is leading men consciously or unconsciously to appropriate the thought and love and purpose of Him in whom all things find their object and end; “for of him and through him, and unto him, are all things” (Rom. 11:36),—here there is allusion to the Father as the source, the Son as the medium, and the Spirit as the perfecting and completing agent, in God’s operations. But all these external processes are only signs and finite reflections of a life-process internal to the nature of God.

Meyer on John 1:1—“the Word was with God”: “πρὸς τὸν θεόν does not = παρὰ τῷ θεῷ, but expresses the existence of the Logos in God in respect of intercourse. The moral essence of this essential fellowship is love, which excludes any merely modalistic conception.” Marcus Dods, Expositor’s Greek Testament, in loco: “This preposition implies intercourse and therefore separate personality.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 62—“And the Word was toward God” = his face is not outwards, as if he were merely revealing, or waiting to reveal, God to the creation. His face is turned inwards. His whole Person is directed toward God, motion corresponding to motion, thought to thought.... In him God stands revealed to himself. Contrast the attitude of fallen Adam, with his face averted from God. Godet, on John 1:1—“Πρὸς τὸν θεόν intimates not only personality but movement.... The tendency of the Logos ad extra rests upon an anterior and essential relation ad intra. To reveal God, one must know him; to project him outwardly, one must have plunged into his bosom.” Compare John 1:18—“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” (R. V.) where we find, not ἐν τῷ κόλπῷ, but εἰς τὸν κόλπον. As ἦν εἰς τὴν πόλιν means “went into the city and was there,” so the use of these prepositions indicates in the Godhead movement as well as rest. Dorner, System of Doctrine, 3:193, translates πρός by “hingewandt zu,” or “turned toward.” The preposition would then imply that the Revealer, who existed in the beginning, was ever over against God, in the life-process of the Trinity, as the perfect objectification of himself. “Das Aussichselbstsein kraft des Durchsichselbstsein mit dem Fürsichselbstsein zusammenschliesst.” Dorner speaks of “das Aussensichoderineinemandernsein; Sichgeltendmachen des Ausgeschlossenen; Sichnichtsogesetzthaben; Stehenbleibenwollen.”

There is in all human intelligence a threefoldness which points toward a trinitarian life in God. We can distinguish a Wissen, a Bewusstsein, a Selbstbewusstein. In complete self-consciousness there are the three elements: 1. We are ourselves; 2. We form a picture of ourselves; 3. We recognize this picture as the picture of ourselves. The little child speaks of himself in the third person: “Baby did it.” The objective comes before the subject; “me” comes first, and “I” is a later development; “himself” still holds its place, rather than “heself.” But this duality belongs only to undeveloped intelligence; it is characteristic of the animal creation; we revert to it in our dreams; the insane are permanent victims of it; and since sin is moral insanity, the sinner has no hope until, like the prodigal, he “comes to himself” (Luke 15:17). The insane person is mente alienatus, and we call physicians for the insane by the name of alienists. Mere duality gives us only the notion of separation. Perfect self-consciousness whether in man or in God requires a third unifying element. And in God mediation between the “I” and the “Thou” must be the work of a Person also, and the Person who mediates between the two must be in all respects the equal of either, or he could not adequately interpret the one to the other; see Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 57-59.

Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:179-189, 276-283—“It is one of the effects of conviction by the Holy Spirit to convert consciousness into self-consciousness.... Conviction of sin is the consciousness of self as the guilty author of sin. Self-consciousness is trinal, while mere consciousness is dual.... One and the same human spirit subsists in two modes or distinctions—subject and object ... The three hypostatical consciousnesses in their combination and unity constitute the one consciousness of God ... as the three persons make one essence.”

Dorner considers the internal relations of the Trinity (System, 1:412 sq.) in three aspects: 1. Physical. God is causa sui. But effect that equals cause must itself be causative. Here would be duality, were it not for a third principle of unity. Trinitas dualitatem ad unitatem reducit. 2. Logical. Self-consciousness sets self over against self. Yet the thinker must not regard self as one of many, and call himself “he,” as children do; for the thinker would then be, not self-conscious, but mente alienatus, “beside himself.” He therefore “comes to himself” in a third, as the brute cannot. 3. Ethical. God—self-willing right. But right based on arbitrary will is not right. Right based on passive nature is not right either. Right as being—Father. Right as willing—Son. Without the latter principle of freedom, we have a dead ethic, a dead God, an enthroned necessity. The unity of necessity and freedom is found by God, as by the Christian, in the Holy Spirit. The Father—I; the Son—Me; the Spirit the unity of the two; see C. C. Everett, Essays, Theological and Literary, 32. There must be not only Sun and Sunlight, but an Eye to behold the Light. William James, in his Psychology, distinguishes the Me, the self as known, from the I, the self as knower.

But we need still further to distinguish a third principle, a subject-object, from both subject and object. The subject cannot recognize the object as one with itself except through a unifying principle which can be distinguished from both. We may therefore regard the Holy Spirit as the principle of self-consciousness in man as well as in God. As there was a natural union of Christ with humanity prior to his redeeming work, so there is a natural union of the Holy Spirit with all men prior to his regenerating work: Job 32:18—“there is a spirit in man, And the breath of the Almighty giveth them understanding.” Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, teaches that the Holy Spirit constitutes the principle of life in all living things, and animates all rational beings, as well as regenerates and sanctifies the elect of God. Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 75, remarks on Job 34:14, 15—“If he gather unto himself his Spirit and his breath; all flesh shall perish together”—that the Spirit is not only necessary to man’s salvation, but also to keep up even man’s natural life.

Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:172, speaks of the Son as the centrifugal, while the Holy Spirit is the centripetal movement of the Godhead. God apart from Christ is unrevealed (John 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time”); Christ is the organ of external revelation (18—“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”); the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal revelation (1 Cor. 2:10—“unto us Christ revealed them through the Spirit”). That the Holy Spirit is the principle of all movement towards God appears from Heb. 9:14—Christ “through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish unto God”; Eph. 2:28—“access in one Spirit unto the Father”; Rom. 8:26—“the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity ... the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us”; John 4:24—“God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship in spirit”; 16:8-11—“convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.” See Twesten, Dogmatik, on the Trinity; also Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:111. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 68—“It is the joy of the Son to receive, his gladness to welcome most those wishes of the Father which will cost most to himself. The Spirit also has his joy in making known,—in perfecting fellowship and keeping the eternal love alive by that incessant sounding of the deeps which makes the heart of the Father known to the Son, and the heart of the Son known to the Father.” We may add that the Holy Spirit is the organ of internal revelation even to the Father and to the Son.

(c) In the light of what has been said, we may understand somewhat more fully the characteristic differences between the work of Christ and that of the Holy Spirit. We may sum them up in the four statements that, first, all outgoing seems to be the work of Christ, all return to God the work of the Spirit; secondly, Christ is the organ of external revelation, the Holy Spirit the organ of internal revelation; thirdly, Christ is our advocate in heaven, the Holy Spirit is our advocate in the soul; fourthly, in the work of Christ we are passive, in the work of the Spirit we are active. Of the work of Christ we shall treat more fully hereafter, in speaking of his Offices as Prophet, Priest, and King. The work of the Holy Spirit will be treated when we come to speak of the Application of Redemption in Regeneration and Sanctification. Here it is sufficient to say that the Holy Spirit is represented in the Scriptures as the author of life—in creation, in the conception of Christ, in regeneration, in resurrection; and as the giver of light—in the inspiration of Scripture writers, in the conviction of sinners, in the illumination and sanctification of Christians.

Gen. 1:2—“The Spirit of God was brooding”; Luke 1:35—to Mary: “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee”, John 3:8—“born of the Spirit”; Ps. 37:9, 14—“Come from the four winds, O breath.... I will put my Spirit in you, and ye shall live”; Rom. 8:11—“give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit.” 1 John 2:1—“an advocate (παράκλητον) with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous”; John 14:16, 17—“another Comforter (παράκλητον), that he may be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth”; Rom. 8:26—“the Spirit himself maketh intercession for us.” 2 Pet. 1:21—“men spake from God, being moved by the Holy Spirit”; John 16:8—“convict the world in respect of sin”; 13—“when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he shall guide you into all the truth”; Rom. 8:14—“as many as are led by the Spirit of God, these are sons of God.”

McCosh: The works of the Spirit are Conviction, Conversion, Sanctification, Comfort. Donovan: The Spirit is the Spirit of conviction, enlightenment, quickening, in the sinner; and of revelation, remembrance, witness, sanctification, consolation, to the saint. The Spirit enlightens the sinner, as the flash of lightning lights the traveler stumbling on the edge of a precipice at night; enlightens the Christian, as the rising sun reveals a landscape which was all there before, but which was hidden from sight until the great luminary made it visible. “The morning light did not create The lovely prospect it revealed; It only showed the real state Of what the darkness had concealed.” Christ’s advocacy before the throne is like that of legal counsel pleading in our stead; the Holy Spirit’s advocacy in the heart is like the mother’s teaching her child to pray for himself.

J. W. A. Stewart: “Without the work of the Holy Spirit redemption would have been impossible, as impossible as that fuel should warm without being lighted, or that bread should nourish without being eaten. Christ is God entering into human history, but without the Spirit Christianity would be only history. The Holy Spirit is God entering into human hearts. The Holy Spirit turns creed into life. Christ is the physician who leaves the remedy and then departs. The Holy Spirit is the nurse who applies and administers the remedy, and who remains with the patient until the cure is completed.” Matheson, Voices of the Spirit, 78—“It is in vain that the mirror exists in the room, if it is lying on its face; the sunbeams cannot reach it till its face is upturned to them. Heaven lies about thee not only in thine infancy but at all times. But it is not enough that a place is prepared for thee; thou must be prepared for the place. It is not enough that thy light has come; thou thyself must arise and shine. No outward shining can reveal, unless thou art thyself a reflector of its glory. The Spirit must set thee on thy feet, that thou mayest hear him that speaks to thee (Ez. 2:2).”

The Holy Spirit reveals not himself but Christ. John 16:14—“He shall glorify me: for he shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you.” So should the servants of the Spirit hide themselves while they make known Christ. E. H. Johnson, The Holy Spirit, 40—“Some years ago a large steam engine all of glass was exhibited about the country. When it was at work one would see the piston and the valves go; but no one could see what made them go. When steam is hot enough to be a continuous elastic vapor, it is invisible.” So we perceive the presence of the Holy Spirit, not by visions or voices, but by the effect he produces within us in the shape of new knowledge, new love, and new energy of our own powers. Denney, Studies in Theology, 161—“No man can bear witness to Christ and to himself at the same time. Esprit is fatal to unction; no man can give the impression that he himself is clever and also that Christ is mighty to save. The power of the Holy Spirit is felt only when the witness is unconscious of self, and when others remain unconscious of him.” Moule, Veni Creator, 8—“The Holy Spirit, as Tertullian says, is the vicar of Christ. The night before the Cross, the Holy Spirit was present to the mind of Christ as a person.”

Gore, in Lux Mundi, 318—“It was a point in the charge against Origen that his language seemed to involve an exclusion of the Holy Spirit from nature, and a limitation of his activity to the church. The whole of life is certainly his. And yet, because his special attribute is holiness, it is in rational natures, which alone are capable of holiness, that he exerts his special influence. A special inbreathing of the divine Spirit gave to man his proper being.” See Gen. 2:7—“Jehovah God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul”; John 3:8—“The Spirit breatheth where it will ... so is every one that is born of the Spirit.” E. H. Johnson, on The Offices of the Holy Spirit, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:381-382—“Why is he specially called the Holy, when Father and Son are also holy, unless because he produces holiness, i. e., makes the holiness of God to be ours individually? Christ is the principle of collectivism, the Holy Spirit the principle of individualism. The Holy Spirit shows man the Christ in him. God above all = Father; God through all = Son; God in all = Holy Spirit (Eph. 4:6).”

The doctrine of the Holy Spirit has never yet been scientifically unfolded. No treatise on it has appeared comparable to Julius Müller’s Doctrine of Sin, or to I. A. Dorner’s History of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ. The progress of doctrine in the past has been marked by successive stages. Athanasius treated of the Trinity; Augustine of sin; Anselm of the atonement; Luther of justification; Wesley of regeneration; and each of these unfoldings of doctrine has been accompanied by religious awakening. We still wait for a complete discussion of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit, and believe that widespread revivals will follow the recognition of the omnipotent Agent in revivals. On the relations of the Holy Spirit to Christ, see Owen, in Works, 3:152-159; on the Holy Spirit’s nature and work, see works by Faber, Smeaton, Tophel, G. Campbell Morgan, J. D. Robertson, Biederwolf; also C. E. Smith, The Baptism of Fire; J. D. Thompson, The Holy Comforter; Bushnell, Forgiveness and Law, last chapter; Bp. Andrews, Works, 3:107-400; James S. Candlish, Work of the Holy Spirit; Redford, Vox Dei; Andrew Murray, The Spirit of Christ; A. J. Gordon, Ministry of the Spirit; Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit; J. E. Cumming, Through the Eternal Spirit; Lechler, Lehre vom Heiligen Geiste; Arthur, Tongue of Fire; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 250-258, and Christ in Creation, 297-313.

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

3. Generation and procession consistent with equality

That the Sonship of Christ is eternal, is intimated in Psalm 2:7. “This day have I begotten thee” is most naturally interpreted as the declaration of an eternal fact in the divine nature. Neither the incarnation, the baptism, the transfiguration, nor the resurrection marks the beginning of Christ’s Sonship, or constitutes him Son of God. These are but recognitions or manifestations of a preëxisting Sonship, inseparable from his Godhood. He is “born before every creature” (while yet no created thing existed—see Meyer on Col. 1:15) and “by the resurrection of the dead” is not made to be, but only “declared to be,” “according to the Spirit of holiness” (= according to his divine nature) “the Son of God with power” (see Philippi and Alford on Rom. 1:3, 4). This Sonship is unique—not predicable of, or shared with, any creature. The Scriptures intimate, not only an eternal generation of the Son, but an eternal procession of the Spirit.

Psalm 2:7—“I will tell of the decree: Jehovah said unto me, Thou art my Son; This day I have begotten thee” see Alexander, Com. in loco; also Com. on Acts 13:33—“‘To-day’ refers to the date of the decree itself; but this, as a divine act, was eternal,—and so must be the Sonship which it affirms.” Philo says that “to-day” with God means “forever.” This begetting of which the Psalm speaks is not the resurrection, for while Paul in Acts 13:33 refers to this Psalm to establish the fact of Jesus’ Sonship, he refers in Acts 13:34, 35 to another Psalm, the sixteenth, to establish the fact that this Son of God was to rise from the dead. Christ is shown to be Son of God by his incarnation (Heb. 1:5, 6—“when he again bringeth in the firstborn into the world he saith, And let all the angels of God worship him”), his baptism (Mat. 3:17—“This is my beloved Son”), his transfiguration (Mat. 17:5—“This is my beloved Son”), his resurrection (Acts 13:34, 35—“as concerning that he raised him up from the dead ... he saith also in another psalm, Thou wilt not give thy Holy One to see corruption”). Col. 1:15—“the firstborn of all creation”—πρωτότοκος πάσης κτίσεως = “begotten first before all creation” (Julius Müller, Proof-texts, 14); or “first-born before every creature, i. e., begotten, and that antecedently to everything that was created” (Ellicott, Com. in loco). “Herein” (says Luthardt, Compend. Dogmatik, 81, on Col. 1:15) “is indicated an antemundane origin from God—a relation internal to the divine nature.” Lightfoot, on Col. 1:15, says that in Rabbi Bechai God is called the “primogenitus mundi.”

On Rom. 1:4 (ὁρισθέντος = “manifested to be the mighty Son of God”) see Lange’s Com., notes by Schaff on pages 56 and 61. Bruce, Apologetics, 404—“The resurrection was the actual introduction of Christ into the full possession of divine Sonship so far as thereto belonged, not only the inner of a holy spiritual essence, but also the outer of an existence in power and heavenly glory.” Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 353, 354—“Calvin waves aside eternal generation as an ‘absurd fiction.’ But to maintain the deity of Christ merely on the ground that it is essential to his making an adequate atonement for sin, is to involve the rejection of his deity if ever the doctrine of atonement becomes obnoxious.... Such was the process by which, in the mind of the last century, the doctrine of the Trinity was undermined. Not to ground the distinctions of the divine essence by some immanent eternal necessity was to make easy the denial of what has been called the ontological Trinity, and then the rejection of the economical Trinity was not difficult or far away.”

If Westcott and Hort’s reading ὁ μονογενὴς Θεός, “the only begotten God,” in John 1:18, is correct, we have a new proof of Christ’s eternal Sonship. Meyer explains ἑαυτοῦ in Rom. 8:3—“God, sending his own Son,” as an allusion to the metaphysical Sonship. That this Sonship is unique, is plain from John 1:14, 18—“the only begotten from the Father ... the only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the father”; Rom. 8:32—“his own Son”; Gal. 4:4—“sent forth his Son”; cf. Prov. 8:22-31—“When he marked out the foundations of the earth; Then I was by him as a master workman”; 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?” The eternal procession of the Spirit seems to be implied in John 15:26—“the Spirit of truth which proceedeth from the Father”—see Westcott, Bib. Com., in loco; Heb. 9:14—“the eternal Spirit.” Westcott here says that παρά (not ἐξ) shows that the reference is to the temporal mission of the Holy Spirit, not to the eternal procession. At the same time he maintains that the temporal corresponds to the eternal.

The Scripture terms “generation” and “procession,” as applied to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, are but approximate expressions of the truth, and we are to correct by other declarations of Scripture any imperfect impressions which we might derive solely from them. We use these terms in a special sense, which we explicitly state and define as excluding all notion of inequality between the persons of the Trinity. The eternal generation of the Son to which we hold is

(a) Not creation, but the Father’s communication of himself to the Son. Since the names, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not applicable to the divine essence, but are only applicable to its hypostatical distinctions, they imply no derivation of the essence of the Son from the essence of the Father.

The error of the Nicene Fathers was that of explaining Sonship as derivation of essence. The Father cannot impart his essence to the Son and yet retain it. The Father is fons trinitatis, not fons deitatis. See Shedd, Hist. Doct., 1:308-311, and Dogm. Theol., 1:287-299; per contra, see Bib. Sac., 41:698-760.

(b) Not a commencement of existence, but an eternal relation to the Father,—there never having been a time when the Son began to be, or when the Son did not exist as God with the Father.

If there had been an eternal sun, it is evident that there must have been an eternal sunlight also. Yet an eternal sunlight must have evermore proceeded from the sun. When Cyril was asked whether the Son existed before generation, he answered: “The generation of the Son did not precede his existence, but he always existed, and that by generation.”

(c) Not an act of the Father’s will, but an internal necessity of the divine nature,—so that the Son is no more dependent upon the Father than the Father is dependent upon the Son, and so that, if it be consistent with deity to be Father, it is equally consistent with deity to be Son.

The sun is as dependent upon the sunlight as the sunlight is upon the sun; for without sunlight the sun is no true sun. So God the Father is as dependent upon God the Son, as God the Son is dependent upon God the Father; for without Son the Father would be no true Father. To say that aseity belongs only to the Father is logically Arianism and Subordinationism proper, for it implies a subordination of the essence of the Son to the Father. Essential subordination would be inconsistent with equality. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:115. Palmer, Theol. Definitions, 66, 67, says that Father = independent life; Son begotten = independent life voluntarily brought under limitations; Spirit = necessary consequence of existence of the other two.... The words and actions whereby we design to affect others are “begotten.” The atmosphere of unconscious influence is not “begotten,” but “proceeding.”

(d) Not a relation in any way analogous to physical derivation, but a life-movement of the divine nature, in virtue of which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while equal in essence and dignity, stand to each other in an order of personality, office, and operation, and in virtue of which the Father works through the Son, and the Father and the Son through the Spirit.

The subordination of the person of the Son to the person of the Father, or in other words an order of personality, office, and operation which permits the Father to be officially first, the Son second, and the Spirit third, is perfectly consistent with equality. Priority is not necessarily superiority. The possibility of an order, which yet involves no inequality, may be illustrated by the relation between man and woman. In office man is first and woman second, but woman’s soul is worth as much as man’s; see 1 Cor. 11:3—“the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.” On John 14:28—“the Father is greater than I”—see Westcott, Bib. Com., in loco.

Edwards, Observations on the Trinity (edited by Smyth), 22—“In the Son the whole deity and glory of the Father is as it were repeated or duplicated. Everything in the Father is repeated or expressed again, and that fully, so that there is properly no inferiority.” Edwards, Essay on the Trinity (edited by Fisher), 110-116—“The Father is the Deity subsisting in the prime, unoriginated, and most absolute manner, or the Deity in its direct existence. The Son is the Deity generated by God’s understanding, or having an Idea of himself and subsisting in that Idea. The Holy Ghost is the Deity subsisting in act, or the divine essence flowing out and breathed forth in God’s infinite love to and delight in himself. And I believe the whole divine essence does truly and distinctly subsist both in the divine Idea and in the divine Love, and each of them are properly distinct persons.... We find no other attributes of which it is said in Scripture that they are God, or that God is they, but λόγος and ἀγάπη, the Reason and the Love of God, Light not being different from Reason.... Understanding may be predicated of this Love.... It is not a blind Love.... The Father has Wisdom or Reason by the Son’s being in him.... Understanding is in the Holy Spirit, because the Son is in him.” Yet Dr. Edwards A. Park declared eternal generation to be “eternal nonsense,” and is thought to have hid Edwards’s unpublished Essay on the Trinity for many years because it taught this doctrine.

The New Testament calls Christ θεός, but not ὁ θεός. We frankly recognize an eternal subordination of Christ to the Father, but we maintain at the same time that this subordination is a subordination of order, office, and operation, not a subordination of essence. “Non de essentia dicitur, sed de ministeriis.” E. G. Robinson: “An eternal generation is necessarily an eternal subordination and dependence. This seems to be fully admitted even by the most orthodox of the Anglican writers, such as Pearson and Hooker. Christ’s subordination to the Father is merely official, not essential.” Whiton, Gloria Patri, 42, 96—“The early Trinitarians by eternal Sonship meant, first, that it is of the very nature of Deity to issue forth into visible expression. Thus next, that this outward expression of God is not something other than God, but God himself, in a self-expression as divine as the hidden Deity. Thus they answered Philip’s cry, ‘show us the Father, and it sufficeth us’ (John 14:8), and thus they affirmed Jesus’ declaration, they secured Paul’s faith that God has never left himself without witness. They meant, ‘he that hath seen me hath seen the Father’ (John 14:9).... The Father is the Life transcendent, the divine Source, ‘above all’; the Son is the Life immanent, the divine Stream, ‘through all’; the Holy Spirit is the Life individualized, ‘in all’ (Eph. 4:6). The Holy Spirit has been called ‘the executive of the Godhead.’ ” Whiton is here speaking of the economic Trinity; but all this is even more true of the immanent Trinity. On the Eternal Sonship, see Weiss, Bib. Theol. N. T., 424, note; Treffrey, Eternal Sonship of our Lord; Princeton Essays, 1:30-56; Watson, Institutes, 1:530-577; Bib. Sac., 27:268. On the procession of the Spirit, see Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:300-304, and History of Doctrine, 1:387; Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:347-350.

The same principles upon which we interpret the declaration of Christ’s eternal Sonship apply to the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Father through the Son, and show this to be not inconsistent with the Spirit’s equal dignity and glory.

We therefore only formulate truth which is concretely expressed in Scripture, and which is recognized by all ages of the church in hymns and prayers addressed to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, when we assert that in the nature of the one God there are three eternal distinctions, which are best described as persons, and each of which is the proper and equal object of Christian worship.

We are also warranted in declaring that, in virtue of these personal distinctions or modes of subsistence, God exists in the relations, respectively, first, of Source, Origin, Authority, and in this relation is the Father; secondly, of Expression, Medium, Revelation, and in this relation is the Son; thirdly, of Apprehension, Accomplishment, Realization, and in this relation is the Holy Spirit.

John Owen, Works, 3:64-92—“The office of the Holy Spirit is that of concluding, completing, perfecting. To the Father we assign opera naturæ; to the Son, opera gratiæ procuratæ; to the Spirit, opera gratiæ applicatæ.” All God’s revelations are through the Son or the Spirit, and the latter includes the former. Kuyper, Work of the Holy Spirit, designates the three offices respectively as those of Causation, Construction, Consummation; the Father brings forth, the Son arranges, the Spirit perfects. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 365-373—“God is Life, Light, Love. As the Fathers regarded Reason both in God and man as the personal, omnipresent second Person of the Trinity, so Jonathan Edwards regarded Love both in God and in man as the personal, omnipresent third Person of the Trinity. Hence the Father is never said to love the Spirit as he is said to love the Son—for this love is the Spirit. The Father and the Son are said to love men, but the Holy Spirit is never said to love them, for love is the Holy Spirit. But why could not Edwards also hold that the Logos or divine Reason also dwelt in humanity, so that manhood was constituted in Christ and shared with him in the consubstantial image of the Father? Outward nature reflects God’s light and has Christ in it,—why not universal humanity?”

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 136, 202, speaks of “1. God, the Eternal, the Infinite, in his infinity, as himself; 2. God, as self-expressed within the nature and faculties of man—body, soul, and spirit—the consummation and interpretation and revelation of what true manhood means and is, in its very truth, in its relation to God; 3. God, as Spirit of Beauty and Holiness, which are himself present in things created, animate and inanimate, and constituting in them their divine response to God; constituting above all in created personalities the full reality of their personal response. Or again: 1. What a man is invisibly in himself; 2. his outward material projection or expression as body; and 3. the response which that which he is through his bodily utterance or operation makes to him, as the true echo or expression of himself.” Moberly seeks thus to find in man’s nature an analogy to the inner processes of the divine.

VI. Inscrutable, yet not self-contradictory, this Doctrine furnishes the Key to all other Doctrines.

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

1. The mode of this triune existence is inscrutable

It is inscrutable because there are no analogies to it in our finite experience. For this reason all attempts are vain adequately to represent it;

(a) From inanimate things—as the fountain, the stream, and the rivulet trickling from it (Athanasius); the cloud, the rain, and the rising mist (Boardman); color, shape, and size (F. W. Robertson); the actinic, luminiferous, and calorific principles in the ray of light (Solar Hieroglyphics, 34).

Luther: “When logic objects to this doctrine that it does not square with her rules, we must say; ‘Mulier taceat in ecclesia.’ ” Luther called the Trinity a flower, in which might be distinguished its form, its fragrance, and its medicinal efficacy; see Dorner, Gesch. prot. Theol., 189. In Bap. Rev., July, 1880:434, Geer finds an illustration of the Trinity in infinite space with its three dimensions. For analogy of the cloud, rain, mist, see W. E. Boardman, Higher Christian Life. Solar Hieroglyphics, 34 (reviewed in New Englander, Oct. 1874:789)—“The Godhead is a tripersonal unity, and the light is a trinity. Being immaterial and homogeneous, and thus essentially one in its nature, the light includes a plurality of constituents, or in other words is essentially three in its constitution, its constituent principles being the actinic, the luminiferous, and the calorific; and in glorious manifestation the light is one, and is the created, constituted, and ordained emblem of the tripersonal God”—of whom it is said that “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). The actinic rays are in themselves invisible; only as the luminiferous manifest them, are they seen; only as the calorific accompany them, are they felt.

Joseph Cook: “Sunlight, rainbow, heat—one solar radiance; Father, Son, Holy Spirit, one God. As the rainbow shows what light is when unfolded, so Christ reveals the nature of God. As the rainbow is unraveled light, so Christ is unraveled God, and the Holy Spirit, figured by heat, is Christ’s continued life.” Ruder illustrations are those of Oom Paul Krüger: the fat, the wick, the flame, in the candle; and of Augustine: the root, trunk, branches, all of one wood, in the tree. In Geer’s illustration, mentioned above, from the three dimensions of space, we cannot demonstrate that there is not a fourth, but besides length, breadth, and thickness, we cannot conceive of its existence. As these three exhaust, so far as we know, all possible modes of material being, so we cannot conceive of any fourth person in the Godhead.

(b) From the constitution or processes of our own minds—as the psychological unity of intellect, affection, and will (substantially held by Augustine); the logical unity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (Hegel); the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-object (Melanchthon, Olshausen, Shedd).

Augustine: “Mens meminit sui, intelligit se, diligit se; si hoc cernimus, Trinitatem cernimus.”... I exist, I am conscious, I will; I exist as conscious and willing, I am conscious of existing and willing, I will to exist and be conscious; and these three functions, though distinct, are inseparable and form one life, one mind, one essence.... “Amor autem alicujus amantis est, et amore aliquid amatur. Ecce tria sunt, amans, et quod amatur, et amor. Quid est ergo amor, nisi quædam vita duo aliqua copulans, vel copulare appetans, amantem scilicet et quod amatur.” Calvin speaks of Augustine’s view as “a speculation far from solid.” But Augustine himself had said: “If asked to define the Trinity, we can only say that it is not this or that.” John of Damascus: “All we know of the divine nature is that it is not to be known.” By this, however, both Augustine and John of Damascus meant only that the precise mode of God’s triune existence is unrevealed and inscrutable.

Hegel, Philos. Relig., transl., 3:99, 100—“God is, but is at the same time the Other, the self-differentiating, the Other in the sense that this Other is God himself and has potentially the Divine nature in it, and that the abolishing of this difference, of this otherness, this return, this love, is Spirit.” Hegel calls God “the absolute Idea, the unity of Life and Cognition, the Universal that thinks itself and thinkingly recognizes itself in an infinite Actuality, from which, as its Immediacy, it no less distinguishes itself again”; see Schwegler, History of Philosophy, 321, 331. Hegel’s general doctrine is that the highest unity is to be reached only through the fullest development and reconciliation of the deepest and widest antagonism. Pure being is pure nothing; we must die to live. Light is thesis, Darkness is antithesis, Shadow is synthesis, or union of both. Faith is thesis, Unbelief is antithesis, Doubt is synthesis, or union of both. Zweifel comes from Zwei, as doubt from δύο. Hegel called Napoleon “ein Weltgeist zu Pferde”—“a world-spirit on horseback.” Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 202, speaks of “the monotonous tit-tat-too of the Hegelian logic.” Ruskin speaks of it as “pure, definite, and highly finished nonsense.” On the Hegelian principle good and evil cannot be contradictory to each other; without evil there could be no good. Stirling well entitled his exposition of the Hegelian Philosophy “The Secret of Hegel,” and his readers have often remarked that, if Stirling discovered the secret, he never made it known.

Lord Coleridge told Robert Browning that he could not understand all his poetry. “Ah, well,” replied the poet, “if a reader of your calibre understands ten per cent. of what I write, he ought to be content.” When Wordsworth was told that Mr. Browning had married Miss Barrett, he said: “It is a good thing that these two understand each other, for no one else understands them.” A pupil once brought to Hegel a passage in the latter’s writings and asked for an interpretation. The philosopher examined it and replied: “When that passage was written, there were two who knew its meaning—God and myself. Now, alas! there is but one, and that is God.” Heinrich Heine, speaking of the effect of Hegelianism upon the religious life of Berlin, says: “I could accommodate myself to the very enlightened Christianity, filtrated from all superstition, which could then be had in the churches, and which was free from the divinity of Christ, like turtle soup without turtle.” When German systems of philosophy die, their ghosts take up their abode in Oxford. But if I see a ghost sitting in a chair and then sit down boldly in the chair, the ghost will take offence and go away. Hegel’s doctrine of God as the only begotten Son is translated in the Journ. Spec. Philos., 15:395-404.

The most satisfactory exposition of the analogy of subject, object, and subject-object is to be found in Shedd, History of Doctrine, 1:365, note 2. See also Olshausen on John 1:1; H. N. Day, Doctrine of Trinity in Light of Recent Psychology, in Princeton Rev., Sept. 1882:156-179; Morris, Philosophy and Christianity, 122-163. Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 174, has a similar analogy: 1. A man’s invisible self; 2. the visible expression of himself in a picture or poem; 3. the response of this picture or poem to himself. The analogy of the family is held to be even better, because no man’s personality is complete in itself; husband, wife, and child are all needed to make perfect unity. Allen, Jonathan Edwards, 372, says that in the early church the Trinity was a doctrine of reason; in the Middle Ages it was a mystery; in the 18th century it was a meaningless or irrational dogma; again in the 19th century it becomes a doctrine of the reason, a truth essential to the nature of God. To Allen’s characterization of the stages in the history of the doctrine we would add that even in our day we cannot say that a complete exposition of the Trinity is possible. Trinity is a unique fact, different aspects of which may be illustrated, while, as a whole, it has no analogies. The most we can say is that human nature, in its processes and powers, points towards something higher than itself, and that Trinity in God is needed in order to constitute that perfection of being which man seeks as an object of love, worship and service.

No one of these furnishes any proper analogue of the Trinity, since in no one of them is there found the essential element of tripersonality. Such illustrations may sometimes be used to disarm objection, but they furnish no positive explanation of the mystery of the Trinity, and, unless carefully guarded, may lead to grievous error.

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

2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory

This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the measure of the divine.

The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible essence.

Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man’s nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul’s conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.

Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she “unanimously consented.” “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind” (Luke 10:27). Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden: “Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate ‘temperance’ or ‘self-control’ is better expressed by ‘whole-mindedness.’ ”

Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man’s personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God’s personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”

John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.” Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”

The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability. “The Zeitgeist,” he says, “is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.” We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton: “A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”

3. The doctrine of the Trinity has important relations to other doctrines.

A. It is essential to any proper theism.

Neither God’s independence nor God’s blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God’s perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism. “Love is an impossible exercise to a solitary being.” Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living Unity in the Godhead.

Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find a perfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is: ‘a perfect intelligence.’ ” The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows: “There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God, viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with the divine cause, and the material condition of all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.” See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existent causes. A self-existence which is not a cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence which is a cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.” Here we see that Martineau’s Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God’s blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God’s self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.

E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham’s Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald: ‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’ In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son: ‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’ ” Dr. Johnson adds: “So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of God was revealed by act of the Son.” After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.

H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau’s most significant utterances, such as the following: “The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward ‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes, viz., to get rid of the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”

Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that “both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christ homoousios with the Father. We assert the same of mankind.” But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57; Col. 2:9).

Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this “facilis descensus Averno,” this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind’s conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God. “We take refuge in the term ‘Godhead.’ The literati find relief in speaking of ‘the gods.’ ” Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.” Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.” Shedd himself remarks: “The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divine Unity is a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divine Personality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”

Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.” Bp. Phillips Brooks: “Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.” Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that “Nature and God are the same.” It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For “Nature” includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.

Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.” Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that “there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.” William Adams Brown: “If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.” But Dr. Brown wrongly adds: “Not the mysteries of God’s being, as he is in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.” Similarly P. S. Moxom: “I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.” But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.

W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, or natura naturans and natura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.” This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.

B. It is essential to any proper revelation.

If there be no Trinity, Christ is not God, and cannot perfectly know or reveal God. Christianity is no longer the one, all-inclusive, and final revelation, but only one of many conflicting and competing systems, each of which has its portion of truth, but also its portion of error. So too with the Holy Spirit. “As God can be revealed only through God, so also can he be appropriated only through God. If the Holy Spirit be not God, then the love and self-communication of God to the human soul are not a reality.” In other words, without the doctrine of the Trinity we go back to mere natural religion and the far-off God of deism,—and this is ultimately exchanged for pantheism in the way already mentioned.

Martensen, Dogmatics, 104; Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 156. If Christ be not God, he cannot perfectly know himself, and his testimony to himself has no independent authority. In prayer the Christian has practical evidence of the Trinity, and can see the value of the doctrine; for he comes to God the Father, pleading the name of Christ, and taught how to pray aright by the Holy Spirit. It is impossible to identify the Father with either the Son or the Spirit. See Rom. 8:27—“he that searcheth the hearts [i. e., God] knoweth what is the mind of the Spirit, because he maketh intercession for the saints according to the will of God.” See also Godet on John 1:18—“No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”; notice here the relation between ὁ ὤν and ἐξηγήσατο. Napoleon I: “Christianity says with simplicity, ‘No man hath seen God, except God.’ ” John 16:15—“All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you”; here Christ claims for himself all that belongs to God, and then declares that the Holy Spirit shall reveal him. Only a divine Spirit can do this, even as only a divine Christ can put out an unpresumptuous hand to take all that belongs to the Father. See also Westcott, on John 14:9—“he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, Show us the Father?”

The agnostic is perfectly correct in his conclusions, if there be no Christ, no medium of communication, no principle of revelation in the Godhead. Only the Son has revealed the Father. Even Royce, in his Spirit of Modern Philosophy, speaks of the existence of an infinite Self, or Logos, or World-mind, of which all individual minds are parts or bits, and of whose timeless choice we partake. Some such principle in the divine nature must be assumed, if Christianity is the complete and sufficient revelation of God’s will to men. The Unitarian view regards the religion of Christ as only “one of the day’s works of humanity”—an evanescent moment in the ceaseless advance of the race. The Christian on the other hand regards Christ as the only Revealer of God, the only God with whom we have to do, the final authority in religion, the source of all truth and the judge of all mankind. “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Mat. 24:35). The resurrection of just and unjust shall be his work (John 5:28), and future retribution shall be “the wrath of the Lamb” (Rev. 6:16). Since God never thinks, says, or does any thing, except through Christ, and since Christ does his work in human hearts only through the Holy Spirit, we may conclude that the doctrine of the Trinity is essential to any proper revelation.

C. It is essential to any proper redemption.

If God be absolutely and simply one, there can be no mediation or atonement, since between God and the most exalted creature the gulf is infinite. Christ cannot bring us nearer to God than he is himself. Only one who is God can reconcile us to God. So, too, only one who is God can purify our souls. A God who is only unity, but in whom is no plurality, may be our Judge, but, so far as we can see, cannot be our Savior or our Sanctifier.

“God is the way to himself.” “Nothing human holds good before God, and nothing but God himself can satisfy God.” The best method of arguing with Unitarians, therefore, is to rouse the sense of sin; for the soul that has any proper conviction of its sins feels that only an infinite Redeemer can ever save it. On the other hand, a slight estimate of sin is logically connected with a low view of the dignity of Christ. Twesten, translated in Bib. Sac., 3:510—“It would seem to be not a mere accident that Pelagianism, when logically carried out, as for example among the Socinians, has also always led to Unitarianism.” In the reverse order, too, it is manifest that rejection of the deity of Christ must tend to render more superficial men’s views of the sin and guilt and punishment from which Christ came to save them, and with this to deaden religious feeling and to cut the sinews of all evangelistic and missionary effort (John 12:44; Heb. 10:26). See Arthur, on the Divinity of our Lord in relation to his work of Atonement, in Present Day Tracts, 6: no. 35; Ellis, quoted by Watson, Theol. Inst., 23; Gunsaulus, Transfig. of Christ, 13—“We have tried to see God in the light of nature, while he said: ‘In thy light shall we see light’ (Ps. 36:9).” We should see nature in the light of Christ. Eternal life is attained only through the knowledge of God in Christ (John 16:9). Hence to accept Christ is to accept God; to reject Christ is to turn one’s back on God: John 12:44—“He that believeth on me, believeth not on me, but on him that sent me”; Heb. 10:26, 29—“there remaineth no more a sacrifice for sin ... [for him] who hath trodden under foot the Son of God.”

In The Heart of Midlothian, Jeanie Deans goes to London to secure pardon for her sister. She cannot in her peasant attire go direct to the King, for he will not receive her. She goes to a Scotch housekeeper in London; through him to the Duke of Argyle; through him to the Queen; through the Queen she gets pardon from the King, whom she never sees. This was mediæval mediatorship. But now we come directly to Christ, and this suffices us, because he is himself God (The Outlook). A man once went into the cell of a convicted murderer, at the request of the murderer’s wife and pleaded with him to confess his crime and accept Christ, but the murderer refused. The seeming clergyman was the Governor, with a pardon which he had designed to bestow in case he found the murderer penitent. A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 86—“I have heard that, during our Civil War, a swaggering, drunken, blaspheming officer insulted and almost drove from the dock at Alexandria, a plain unoffending man in citizen’s dress; but I have also heard that that same officer turned pale, fell on his knees, and begged for mercy, when the plain man demanded his sword, put him under arrest and made himself known as General Grant. So we may abuse and reject the Lord Jesus Christ, and fancy that we can ignore his claims and disobey his commands with impunity; but it will seem a more serious thing when we find at the last that he whom we have abused and rejected is none other than the living God before whose judgment bar we are to stand.”

Henry B. Smith began life under Unitarian influences, and had strong prejudices against evangelical doctrine, especially the doctrines of human depravity and of the divinity of Christ. In his Senior year in College he was converted. Cyrus Hamlin says: “I regard Smith’s conversion as the most remarkable event in College in my day.” Doubts of depravity vanished with one glimpse into his own heart; and doubts about Christ’s divinity could not hold their own against the confession: “Of one thing I feel assured: I need an infinite Savior.” Here is the ultimate strength of Trinitarian doctrine. When the Holy Spirit convinces a man of his sin, and brings him face to face with the outraged holiness and love of God, he is moved to cry from the depths of his soul: “None but an infinite Savior can ever save me!” Only in a divine Christ—Christ for us upon the Cross, and Christ in us by his Spirit—can the convicted soul find peace and rest. And so every revival of true religion gives a new impulse to the Trinitarian doctrine. Henry B. Smith wrote in his later life: “When the doctrine of the Trinity was abandoned, other articles of the faith, such as the atonement and regeneration, have almost always followed, by logical necessity, as, when one draws the wire from a necklace of gems, the gems all fall asunder.”

D. It is essential to any proper model for human life.

If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.

See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God’s absolute and essential nature; not simply what he is to us, but what he is in himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.” Hence 1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.” D’Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8) become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”

Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father’s perfection to originate—a Son’s to receive. We need sympathy and aid in this receptive life; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ’s filial life to the root of all filial life in us. See Gal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’” Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.” Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.” On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.

On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C., ‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’ ” The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?

The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllable Om, or Aum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The places of the three are interchangeable. Williams: “In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.” There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men’s salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.

The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus. “These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to ‘agree in one’ ”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.

Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are “residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea. ‘There is but one,’ they say, ‘though the poets call him by different names.’ The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things ‘under the form of eternity.’ All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.” See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.

The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor: “He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man’s invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”

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

III. The Decrees Of God

I. Definition of Decrees.

By the decrees of God we mean that eternal plan by which God has rendered certain all the events of the universe, past, present, and future. Notice in explanation that:

(a) The decrees are many only to our finite comprehension; in their own nature they are but one plan, which embraces not only effects but also causes, not only the ends to be secured but also the means needful to secure them.

In Rom. 8:28—“called according to his purpose”—the many decrees for the salvation of many individuals are represented as forming but one purpose of God. Eph. 1:11—“foreordained according to the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his will”—notice again the word “purpose,” in the singular. Eph. 3:11—“according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our Lord.” This one purpose or plan of God includes both means and ends, prayer and its answer, labor and its fruit. Tyrolese proverb: “God has his plan for every man.” Every man, as well as Jean Paul, is “der Einzige”—the unique. There is a single plan which embraces all things; “we use the word ‘decree’ when we think of it partitively” (Pepper). See Hodge, Outlines of Theology, 1st ed., 165; 2d ed., 200—“In fact, no event is isolated—to determine one involves determination of the whole concatenation of causes and effects which constitutes the universe.” The word “plan” is preferable to the word “decrees,” because “plan” excludes the ideas of (1) plurality, (2) short-sightedness, (3) arbitrariness, (4) compulsion.

(b) The decrees, as the eternal act of an infinitely perfect will, though they have logical relations to each other, have no chronological relation. They are not therefore the result of deliberation, in any sense that implies short-sightedness or hesitancy.

Logically, in God’s decree the sun precedes the sunlight, and the decree to bring into being a father precedes the decree that there shall be a son. God decrees man before he decrees man’s act; he decrees the creation of man before he decrees man’s existence. But there is no chronological succession. “Counsel” in Eph. 1:11—“the counsel of his will”—means, not deliberation, but wisdom.

(c) Since the will in which the decrees have their origin is a free will, the decrees are not a merely instinctive or necessary exercise of the divine intelligence or volition, such as pantheism supposes.

It belongs to the perfection of God that he have a plan, and the best possible plan. Here is no necessity, but only the certainty that infinite wisdom will act wisely. God’s decrees are not God; they are not identical with his essence; they do not flow from his being in the same necessary way in which the eternal Son proceeds from the eternal Father. There is free will in God, which acts with infinite certainty, yet without necessity. To call even the decree of salvation necessary is to deny grace, and to make an unfree God. See Dick, Lectures on Theology, 1:355; lect. 34.

(d) The decrees have reference to things outside of God. God does not decree to be holy, nor to exist as three persons in one essence.

Decrees are the preparation for external events—the embracing of certain things and acts in a plan. They do not include those processes and operations within the Godhead which have no reference to the universe.

(e) The decrees primarily respect the acts of God himself, in Creation, Providence, and Grace; secondarily, the acts of free creatures, which he foresees will result therefrom.

While we deny the assertion of Whedon, that “the divine plan embraces only divine actions,” we grant that God’s plan has reference primarily to his own actions, and that the sinful acts of men, in particular, are the objects, not of a decree that God will efficiently produce them, but of a decree that God will permit men, in the exercise of their own free will, to produce them.

(f) The decree to act is not the act. The decrees are an internal exercise and manifestation of the divine attributes, and are not to be confounded with Creation, Providence, and Redemption, which are the execution of the decrees.

The decrees are the first operation of the attributes, and the first manifestation of personality of which we have any knowledge within the Godhead. They presuppose those essential acts or movements within the divine nature which we call generation and procession. They involve by way of consequence that execution of the decrees which we call Creation, Providence, and Redemption, but they are not to be confounded with either of these.

(g) The decrees are therefore not addressed to creatures; are not of the nature of statute law; and lay neither compulsion nor obligation upon the wills of men.

So ordering the universe that men will pursue a given course of action is a very different thing from declaring, ordering, or commanding that they shall. “Our acts are in accordance with the decrees, but not necessarily so—we can do otherwise and often should” (Park). The Frenchman who fell into the water and cried: “I will, drown,—no one shall help me!” was very naturally permitted to drown; if he had said: “I shall drown,—no one will help me!” he might perchance have called some friendly person to his aid.

(h) All human acts, whether evil or good, enter into the divine plan and so are objects of God’s decrees, although God’s actual agency with regard to the evil is only a permissive agency.

No decree of God reads: “You shall sin.” For (1) no decree is addressed to you; (2) no decree with respect to you says shall; (3) God cannot cause sin, or decree to cause it. He simply decrees to create, and himself to act, in such a way that you will, of your own free choice, commit sin. God determines upon his own acts, foreseeing what the results will be in the free acts of his creatures, and so he determines those results. This permissive decree is the only decree of God with respect to sin. Man of himself is capable of producing sin. Of himself he is not capable of producing holiness. In the production of holiness two powers must concur, God’s will and man’s will, and God’s will must act first. The decree of good, therefore, is not simply a permissive decree, as in the case of evil. God’s decree, in the former case, is a decree to bring to bear positive agencies for its production, such as circumstances, motives, influences of his Spirit. But, in the case of evil, God’s decrees are simply his arrangement that man may do as he pleases, God all the while foreseeing the result.

Permissive agency should not be confounded with conditional agency, nor permissive decree with conditional decree. God foreordained sin only indirectly. The machine is constructed not for the sake of the friction, but in spite of it. In the parable Mat. 13:24-30, the question “Whence then hath it tares?” is answered, not by saying, “I decreed the tares.” but by saying: “An enemy hath done this.” Yet we must take exception to Principal Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Theology, 456, when he says: “God did not permit sin to be; it is, in its essence, the transgression of his law, and so his only attitude toward it is one of opposition. It is, because man has contradicted and resisted his will.” Here the truth of God’s opposition to sin is stated so sharply as almost to deny the decree of sin in any sense. We maintain that God does decree sin in the sense of embracing in his plan the foreseen transgressions of men, while at the same time we maintain that these foreseen transgressions are chargeable wholly to men and not at all to God.

(i) While God’s total plan with regard to creatures is called predestination, or foreordination, his purpose so to act that certain will believe and be saved is called election, and his purpose so to act that certain will refuse to believe and be lost is called reprobation. We discuss election and reprobation, in a later chapter, as a part of the Application of Redemption.

God’s decrees may be divided into decrees with respect to nature, and decrees with respect to moral beings. These last we call foreordination, or predestination; and of these decrees with respect to moral beings there are two kinds, the decree of election, and the decree of reprobation; see our treatment of the doctrine of Election. George Herbert: “We all acknowledge both thy power and love To be exact, transcendent, and divine; Who dost so strongly and so sweetly move. While all things have their will—yet none but thine. For either thy command or thy permission Lays hands on all; they are thy right and left. The first puts on with speed and expedition; The other curbs sin’s stealing pace and theft. Nothing escapes them both; all must appear And be disposed and dressed and tuned by thee Who sweetly temperest all. If we could hear Thy skill and art, what music it would be!” On the whole doctrine, see Shedd, Presb. and Ref. Rev., Jan. 1890:1-25.

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

II. Proof of the Doctrine of Decrees

1. From Scripture.

A. The Scriptures declare that all things are included in the divine decrees. B. They declare that special things and events are decreed; as, for example, (a) the stability of the physical universe; (b) the outward circumstances of nations; (c) the length of human life; (d) the mode of our death; (e) the free acts of men, both good acts and evil acts. C. They declare that God has decreed (a) the salvation of believers; (b) the establishment of Christ’s kingdom; (c) the work of Christ and of his people in establishing it.

A. Is. 14:26, 27—“This is the purpose that is purposed upon the whole earth; and this is the hand that is stretched out upon all the nations; for Jehovah of hosts hath purposed ... and his hand is stretched out, and who shall turn it back?” 46:10, 11—“declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times the things that are not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure ... yea, I have spoken, I will also bring it to pass; I have purposed, I will also do it.” Dan. 4:35—“doeth according to his will in the army of heaven, and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand, or say unto him, What doest thou?” Eph. 1:11—“the purpose of him who worketh all things after the counsel of his will.”

B. (a) Ps. 119:89-91—“For ever, O Jehovah, thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: Thou hast established the earth and it abideth. They abide this day according to thine ordinances; For all things are thy servants.” (b) Acts 17:26—“he made of one every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, having determined their appointed seasons, and the bounds of their habitation”; cf. Zach. 5:1—“came four chariots out from between two mountains; and the mountains were mountains of brass”—the fixed decrees from which proceed God’s providential dealings? (c) Job 14:5—“Seeing his days are determined, The number of his months is with thee, And thou hast determined his bounds that he cannot pass.” (d) John 21:19—“this he spake, signifying by what manner of death he should glorify God.” (e) Good acts: Is. 44:28—“that saith of Cyrus, He is my shepherd and shall perform all my pleasure, even saying of Jerusalem, She shall be built; and of the temple, Thy foundation shall be laid”; Eph. 2:10—“For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them.” Evil acts: Gen. 50:20—“as for you, ye meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive”; 1 K. 12:15—“So the king hearkened not unto the people, for it was a thing brought about of Jehovah”; 24—“for this thing is of me”; Luke 22:23—“For the Son of man indeed goeth, as it hath been determined: but woe unto that man through whom he is betrayed”; Acts 2:23—“him, being delivered up by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye by the hand of lawless men did crucify and slay”; 4:27, 28—“of a truth in this city against thy holy Servant Jesus, who thou didst anoint, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, with the Gentiles and the people of Israel, were gathered together, to do whatsoever thy hand and thy counsel foreordained to come to pass”; Rom. 9:17—“For the scripture saith unto Pharaoh, For this very purpose did I raise thee up, that I might show in thee my power”; 1 Pet 2:3—“They stumble at the word, being disobedient: whereunto also they were appointed”; Rev. 17:17—“For God did put in their hearts to do his mind, and to come to one mind, and to give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God should be accomplished.”

C. (a) 1 Cor. 2:7—“the wisdom which hath been hidden, which God foreordained before the worlds unto our glory”; Eph 3:10, 11—“manifold wisdom of God, according to the eternal purpose which he purposed in Christ Jesus our lord.” Ephesians 1 is a pæan in praise of God’s decrees. (b) The greatest decree of all is the decree to give the world to Christ. Ps. 2:7, 8—“I will tell of the decree:... I will give thee the nations for thine inheritance”; cf. verse 6—“I have set my king Upon my holy hill of Zion”; 1 Cor. 15:25—“he must reign, till he hath put all his enemies under his feet.” (c) This decree we are to convert into our decree; God’s will is to be executed through our wills. Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.” Rev. 5:1, 7—“I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the back, close sealed with seven seals.... And he [the Lamb] came, and he taketh it out of the right hand of him that sat on the throne”; verse 9—“Worthy art thou to take the book, and to open the seals thereof”—Christ alone has the omniscience to know, and the omnipotence to execute, the divine decrees. When John weeps because there is none in heaven or earth to loose the seals and to read the book of God’s decrees, the Lion of the tribe of Judah prevails to open it. Only Christ conducts the course of history to its appointed end. See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 268-283, on The Decree of God as the Great Encouragement to Missions.

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

2. From Reason

A. From the Divine Foreknowledge.

Foreknowledge implies fixity, and fixity implies decree.—From eternity God foresaw all the events of the universe as fixed and certain. This fixity and certainty could not have had its ground either in blind fate or in the variable wills of men, since neither of these had an existence. It could have had its ground in nothing outside the divine mind, for in eternity nothing existed besides the divine mind. But for this fixity there must have been a cause; if anything in the future was fixed, something must have fixed it. This fixity could have had its ground only in the plan and purpose of God. In fine, if God foresaw the future as certain, it must have been because there was something in himself which made it certain; or, in other words, because he had decreed it.

We object therefore to the statement of E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 74—“God’s knowledge and God’s purposes both being eternal, one cannot be conceived as the ground of the other, nor can either be predicated to the exclusion of the other as the cause of things, but, correlative and eternal, they must be coequal quantities in thought.” We reply that while decree does not chronologically precede, it does logically precede, foreknowledge. Foreknowledge is not of possible events, but of what is certain to be. The certainty of future events which God foreknew could have had its ground only in his decree, since he alone existed to be the ground and explanation of this certainty. Events were fixed only because God had fixed them. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:397—“An event must be made certain, before it can be known as a certain event.” Turretin, Inst. Theol., loc. 3, quaes. 12, 18—“Præcipuum fundamentum scientiæ divinæ circa futura contingentia est deoretum solum.”

Decreeing creation implies decreeing the foreseen results of creation.—To meet the objection that God might have foreseen the events of the universe, not because he had decreed each one, but only because he had decreed to create the universe and institute its laws, we may put the argument in another form. In eternity there could have been no cause of the future existence of the universe, outside of God himself, since no being existed but God himself. In eternity God foresaw that the creation of the world and the institution of its laws would make certain its actual history even to the most insignificant details. But God decreed to create and to institute these laws. In so decreeing he necessarily decreed all that was to come. In fine, God foresaw the future events of the universe as certain, because he had decreed to create; but this determination to create involved also a determination of all the actual results of that creation; or, in other words, God decreed those results.

E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 84—“The existence of divine decrees may be inferred from the existence of natural law.” Law = certainty = God’s will. Positivists express great contempt for the doctrine of the eternal purpose of God, yet they consign us to the iron necessity of physical forces and natural laws. Dr. Robinson also points out that decrees are “implied in the prophecies. We cannot conceive that all events should have converged toward the one great event—the death of Christ—without the intervention of an eternal purpose.” E. H. Johnson, Outline Syst. Theol., 2d ed., 251, note—“Reason is confronted by the paradox that the divine decrees are at once absolute and conditional; the resolution of the paradox is that God absolutely decreed a conditional system—a system, however, the workings of which he thoroughly foreknows.” The rough unhewn stone and the statue into which it will be transformed are both and equally included in the plan of the sculptor.

No undecreed event can be foreseen.—We grant that God decrees primarily and directly his own acts of creation, providence, and grace; but we claim that this involves also a secondary and indirect decreeing of the acts of free creatures which he foresees will result therefrom. There is therefore no such thing in God as scientia media, or knowledge of an event that is to be, though it does not enter into the divine plan; for to say that God foresees an undecreed event, is to say that he views as future an event that is merely possible; or, in other words, that he views an event not as it is.

We recognize only two kinds of knowledge: (1) Knowledge of undecreed possibles, and (2) foreknowledge of decreed actuals. Scientia media is a supposed intermediate knowledge between these two, namely (3) foreknowledge of undecreed actuals. See further explanations below. We deny the existence of this third sort of knowledge. We hold that sin is decreed in the sense of being rendered certain by God’s determining upon a system in which it was foreseen that sin would exist. The sin of man can be foreknown, while yet God is not the immediate cause of it. God knows possibilities, without having decreed them at all. But God cannot foreknow actualities unless he has by his decree made them to be certainties of the future. He cannot foreknow that which is not there to be foreknown. Royce, World and Individual, 2:374, maintains that God has, not _fore_knowledge, but only eternal knowledge, of temporal things. But we reply that to foreknow how a moral being will act is no more impossible than to know how a moral being in given circumstances would act.

Only knowledge of that which is decreed is foreknowledge.—Knowledge of a plan as ideal or possible may precede decree; but knowledge of a plan as actual or fixed must follow decree. Only the latter knowledge is properly _fore_knowledge. God therefore foresees creation, causes, laws, events, consequences, because he has decreed creation, causes, laws, events, consequences; that is, because he has embraced all these in his plan. The denial of decrees logically involves the denial of God’s foreknowledge of free human actions; and to this Socinians, and some Arminians, are actually led.

An Arminian example of this denial is found in McCabe, Foreknowledge of God, and Divine Nescience of Future Contingencies a Necessity. Per contra, see notes on God’s foreknowledge, in this Compendium, pages 283-286. Pepper: “Divine volition stands logically between two divisions and kinds of divine knowledge.” God knew free human actions as possible, before he decreed them; he knew them as future, because he decreed them. Logically, though not chronologically, decree comes before foreknowledge. When I say, “I know what I will do,” it is evident that I have determined already, and that my knowledge does not precede determination, but follows it and is based upon it. It is therefore not correct to say that God foreknows his decrees. It is more true to say that he decrees his foreknowledge. He foreknows the future which he has decreed, and he foreknows it because he has decreed it. His decrees are eternal, and nothing that is eternal can be the object of foreknowledge. G. F. Wright, in Bib. Sac., 1877:723—“The knowledge of God comprehended the details and incidents of every possible plan. The choice of a plan made his knowledge determinate as _fore_knowledge.”

There are therefore two kinds of divine knowledge: (1) knowledge of what may be—of the possible (scientia simplicis intelligentiæ); and (2) knowledge of what is, and is to be, because God has decreed it (scientia visionis). Between these two Molina, the Spanish Jesuit, wrongly conceived that there was (3) a middle knowledge of things which were to be, although God had not decreed them (scientia media). This would of course be a knowledge which God derived, not from himself, but from his creatures! See Dick, Theology, 1:351. A. S. Carman: “It is difficult to see how God’s knowledge can be caused from eternity by something that has no existence until a definite point of time.” If it be said that what is to be will be “in the nature of things,” we reply that there is no “nature of things” apart from God, and that the ground of the objective certainty, as well as of the subjective certitude corresponding to it, is to be found only in God himself.

But God’s decreeing to create, when he foresees that certain free acts of men will follow, is a decreeing of those free acts, in the only sense in which we use the word decreeing, viz., a rendering certain, or embracing in his plan. No Arminian who believes in God’s foreknowledge of free human acts has good reason for denying God’s decrees as thus explained. Surely God did not foreknow that Adam would exist and sin, whether God determined to create him or not. Omniscience, then, becomes _fore_knowledge only on condition of God’s decree. That God’s foreknowledge of free acts is intuitive does not affect this conclusion. We grant that, while man can predict free action only so far as it is rational (i. e., in the line of previously dominant motive), God can predict free action whether it is rational or not. But even God cannot predict what is not certain to be. God can have intuitive foreknowledge of free human acts only upon condition of his own decree to create; and this decree to create, in foresight of all that will follow, is a decree of what follows. For the Arminian view, see Watson, Institutes, 2:375-398, 422-448. Per contra, see Hill, Divinity, 512-582; Fiske, in Bib. Sac., April, 1862; Bennett Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 214-254; Edwards the younger, 1:398-420; A. H. Strong, Philosophy and Religion, 98-101.

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

B. From the Divine Wisdom

It is the part of wisdom to proceed in every undertaking according to a plan. The greater the undertaking, the more needful a plan. Wisdom, moreover, shows itself in a careful provision for all possible circumstances and emergencies that can arise in the execution of its plan. That many such circumstances and emergencies are uncontemplated and unprovided for in the plans of men, is due only to the limitations of human wisdom. It belongs to infinite wisdom, therefore, not only to have a plan, but to embrace all, even the minutest details, in the plan of the universe.

No architect would attempt to build a Cologne cathedral without a plan; he would rather, if possible, have a design for every stone. The great painter does not study out his picture as he goes along; the plan is in his mind from the start; preparations for the last effects have to be made from the beginning. So in God’s work every detail is foreseen and provided for; sin and Christ entered into the original plan of the universe. Raymond, Syst. Theol., 2:156, says this implies that God cannot govern the world unless all things be reduced to the condition of machinery; and that it cannot be true, for the reason that God’s government is a government of persons and not of things. But we reply that the wise statesman governs persons and not things, yet just in proportion to his wisdom he conducts his administration according to a preconceived plan. God’s power might, but God’s wisdom would not, govern the universe without embracing all things, even the least human action, in his plan.

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

C. From the Divine Immutability

What God does, he always purposed to do. Since with him there is no increase of knowledge or power, such as characterizes finite beings, it follows that what under any given circumstances he permits or does, he must have eternally decreed to permit or do. To suppose that God has a multitude of plans, and that he changes his plan with the exigencies of the situation, is to make him infinitely dependent upon the varying wills of his creatures, and to deny to him one necessary element of perfection, namely, immutability.

God has been very unworthily compared to a chess-player, who will checkmate his opponent whatever moves he may make (George Harris). So Napoleon is said to have had a number of plans before each battle, and to have betaken himself from one to another as fortune demanded. Not so with God. Job 23:13—“he is in one mind, and who can turn him?” James 1:17-“the Father of lights, with whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning.” Contrast with this Scripture McCabe’s statement in his Foreknowledge of God, 62—“This new factor, the godlike liberty of the human will, is capable of thwarting, and in uncounted instances does thwart, the divine will, and compel the great I AM to modify his actions, his purposes, and his plans, in the treatment of individuals and of communities.”

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

D. From the Divine Benevolence

The events of the universe, if not determined by the divine decrees, must be determined either by chance or by the wills of creatures. It is contrary to any proper conception of the divine benevolence to suppose that God permits the course of nature and of history, and the ends to which both these are moving, to be determined for myriads of sentient beings by any other force or will than his own. Both reason and revelation, therefore, compel us to accept the doctrine of the Westminster Confession, that “God did from all eternity, by the most just and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatsoever comes to pass.”

It would not be benevolent for God to put out of his own power that which was so essential to the happiness of the universe. Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 231-243—“The denial of decrees involves denial of the essential attributes of God, such as omnipotence, omniscience, benevolence; exhibits him as a disappointed and unhappy being; implies denial of his universal providence; leads to a denial of the greater part of our own duty of submission; weakens the obligations of gratitude.” We give thanks to God for blessings which come to us through the free acts of others; but unless God has purposed these blessings, we owe our thanks to these others and not to God. Dr. A. J. Gordon said well that a universe without decrees would be as irrational and appalling as would be an express-train driving on in the darkness without headlight or engineer, and with no certainty that the next moment it might not plunge into the abyss. And even Martineau, Study, 2:108, in spite of his denial of God’s foreknowledge of man’s free acts, is compelled to say: “It cannot be left to mere created natures to play unconditionally with the helm of even a single world and steer it uncontrolled into the haven or on to the reefs; and some security must be taken for keeping the deflections within tolerable bounds.” See also Emmons, Works, 4:273-401: and Princeton Essays, 1:57-73.

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

III. Objections to the Doctrine of Decrees

1. That they are inconsistent with the free agency of man.

To this we reply that:

A. The objection confounds the decrees with the execution of the decrees. The decrees are, like foreknowledge, an act eternal to the divine nature, and are no more inconsistent with free agency than foreknowledge is. Even foreknowledge of events implies that those events are fixed. If this absolute fixity and foreknowledge is not inconsistent with free agency, much less can that which is more remote from man’s action, namely, the hidden cause of this fixity and foreknowledge—God’s decrees—be inconsistent with free agency. If anything be inconsistent with man’s free agency, it must be, not the decrees themselves, but the execution of the decrees in creation and providence.

On this objection, see Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 244-249; Forbes, Predestination and Free Will, 3—“All things are predestinated by God, both good and evil, but not prenecessitated, that is, causally preördained by him—unless we would make God the author of sin. Predestination is thus an indifferent word, in so far as the originating author of anything is concerned; God being the originator of good, but the creature, of evil. Predestination therefore means that God included in his plan of the world every act of every creature, good or bad. Some acts he predestined causally, others permissively. The certainty of the fulfilment of all God’s purposes ought to be distinguished from their necessity.” This means simply that God’s decree is not the cause of any act or event. God’s decrees may be executed by the causal efficiency of his creatures, or they may be executed by his own efficiency. In either case it is, if anything, the execution, and not the decree, that is inconsistent with human freedom.

B. The objection rests upon a false theory of free agency—namely, that free agency implies indeterminateness or uncertainty; in other words, that free agency cannot coëxist with certainty as to the results of its exercise. But it is necessity, not certainty, with which free agency is inconsistent. Free agency is the power of self-determination in view of motives, or man’s power (a) to chose between motives, and (b) to direct his subsequent activity according to the motive thus chosen. Motives are never a cause, but only an occasion; they influence, but never compel; the man is the cause, and herein is his freedom. But it is also true that man is never in a state of indeterminateness; never acts without motive, or contrary to all motives; there is always a reason why he acts, and herein is his rationality. Now, so far as man acts according to previously dominant motive—see (b) above—we may by knowing his motive predict his action, and our certainty what that action will be in no way affects his freedom. We may even bring motives to bear upon others, the influence of which we foresee, yet those who act upon them may act in perfect freedom. But if man, influenced by man, may still be free, then man, influenced by divinely foreseen motives, may still be free, and the divine decrees, which simply render certain man’s actions, may also be perfectly consistent with man’s freedom.

We must not assume that decreed ends can be secured only by compulsion. Eternal purposes do not necessitate efficient causation on the part of the purposer. Freedom may be the very means of fulfilling the purpose. E. G. Robinson, Christian Theology, 74—“Absolute certainty of events, which is all that omniscience determines respecting them, is not identical with their necessitation.” John Milton, Christian Doctrine: “Future events which God has foreseen will happen certainly, but not of necessity. They will happen certainly, because the divine prescience will not be deceived; but they will not happen necessarily, because prescience can have no influence on the object foreknown, inasmuch as it is only an intransitive action.”

There is, however, a smaller class of human actions by which character is changed, rather than expressed, and in which the man acts according to a motive different from that which has previously been dominant—see (a) above. These actions also are foreknown by God, although they cannot be predicted by man. Man’s freedom in them would be inconsistent with God’s decrees, if the previous certainty of their occurrence were, not certainty, but necessity; or, in other words, if God’s decrees were in all cases decrees efficiently to produce the acts of his creatures. But this is not the case. God’s decrees may be executed by man’s free causation, as easily as by God’s; and God’s decreeing this free causation, in decreeing to create a universe of which he foresees that this causation will be a part, in no way interferes with the freedom of such causation, but rather secures and establishes it. Both consciousness and conscience witness that God’s decrees are not executed by laying compulsion upon the free wills of men.

The farmer who, after hearing a sermon on God’s decrees, took the break-neck road instead of the safe one to his home and broke his wagon in consequence, concluded before the end of his journey that he at any rate had been predestinated to be a fool, and that he had made his calling and election sure. Ladd, Philosophy of Conduct, 146, 187, shows that the will is free, first, by man’s consciousness of ability, and, secondly, by man’s consciousness of imputability. By nature, he is potentially self-determining; as matter of fact, he often becomes self-determining.

Allen, Religious Progress, 110—“The coming church must embrace the sovereignty of God and the freedom of the will; total depravity and the divinity of human nature; the unity of God and the triune distinctions in the Godhead; gnosticism and agnosticism; the humanity of Christ and his incarnate deity; the freedom of the Christian man and the authority of the church; individualism and solidarity; reason and faith; science and theology; miracle and uniformity of law; culture and piety; the authority of the Bible as the word of God with absolute freedom of Biblical criticism; the gift of administration as in the historic episcopate and the gift of prophecy as the highest sanction of the ministerial commission; the apostolic succession but also the direct and immediate call which knows only the succession of the Holy Ghost.” Without assenting to these latter clauses we may commend the comprehensive spirit of this utterance, especially with reference to the vexed question of the relation of divine sovereignty to human freedom.

It may aid us, in estimating the force of this objection, to note the four senses in which the term “freedom” may be used. It may be used as equivalent to (1) physical freedom, or absence of outward constraint; (2) formal freedom, or a state of moral indeterminateness; (3) moral freedom, or self-determinateness in view of motives; (4) real freedom, or ability to conform to the divine standard. With the first of these we are not now concerned, since all agree that the decrees lay no outward constraint upon men. Freedom in the second sense has no existence, since all men have character. Free agency, or freedom in the third sense, has just been shown to be consistent with the decrees. Freedom in the fourth sense, or real freedom, is the special gift of God, and is not to be confounded with free agency. The objection mentioned above rests wholly upon the second of these definitions of free agency. This we have shown to be false, and with this the objection itself falls to the ground.

Ritschl, Justification and Reconciliation, 133-188, gives a good definition of this fourth kind of freedom: “Freedom is self-determination by universal ideals. Limiting our ends to those of family or country is a refined or idealized selfishness. Freedom is self-determination by universal love for man or by the kingdom of God. But the free man must then be dependent on God in everything, because the kingdom of God is a revelation of God.” John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:133—“In being determined by God we are self-determined; i. e., determined by nothing alien to us, but by our noblest, truest self. The universal life lives in us. The eternal consciousness becomes our own; for ‘he that abideth in love abideth in God and God abideth in him’ (1 John 4:16).”

Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 226—“Free will is not the independence of the creature, but is rather his self-realization in perfect dependence. Freedom is self-identity with goodness. Both goodness and freedom are, in their perfectness, in God. Goodness in a creature is not distinction from, but correspondence with, the goodness of God. Freedom in a creature is correspondence with God’s own self-identity with goodness. It is to realize and to find himself, his true self, in Christ, so that God’s love in us has become a divine response, adequate to, because truly mirroring, God.” G. S. Lee, The Shadow Christ, 32—.“The ten commandments could not be chanted. The Israelites sang about Jehovah and what he had done, but they did not sing about what he told them to do, and that is why they never did it. The conception of duty that cannot sing must weep until it learns to sing. This is Hebrew history.”

“There is a liberty, unsung By poets and by senators unpraised, Which monarchs cannot grant nor all the powers Of earth and hell confederate take away; A liberty which persecution, fraud, Oppressions, prisons, have no power to bind; Which whoso tastes can be enslaved no more. ’T is liberty of heart, derived from heaven, Bought with his blood who gave it to mankind, And sealed with the same token.” Robert Herrick: “Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for a hermitage. If I have freedom in my love, And in my soul am free, Angels alone that soar above Enjoy such liberty.”

A more full discussion of the doctrine of the Will is given under Anthropology, Vol. II. It is sufficient here to say that the Arminian objections to the decrees arise almost wholly from erroneously conceiving of freedom as the will’s power to decide, in any given case, against its own character and all the motives brought to bear upon it. As we shall hereafter see, this is practically to deny that man has character, or that the will by its right or wrong moral action gives to itself, as well as to the intellect and affections, a permanent bent or predisposition to good or evil. It is to extend the power of contrary choice, a power which belongs to the sphere of transient volition, over all those permanent states of intellect, affection, and will which we call the moral character, and to say that we can change directly by a single volition that which, as a matter of fact, we can change only indirectly through process and means. Yet even this exaggerated view of freedom would seem not to exclude God’s decrees, or prevent a practical reconciliation of the Arminian and Calvinistic views, so long as the Arminian grants God’s foreknowledge of free human acts, and the Calvinist grants that God’s decree of these acts is not necessarily a decree that God will efficiently produce them. For a close approximation of the two views, see articles by Raymond and by A. A. Hodge, respectively, on the Arminian and the Calvinistic Doctrines of the Will, in McClintock and Strong’s Cyclopædia, 10:989, 992.

We therefore hold to the certainty of human action, and so part company with the Arminian. We cannot with Whedon (On the Will), and Hazard (Man a Creative First Cause), attribute to the will the freedom of indifference, or the power to act without motive. We hold with Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 188, that action without motive, or an act of pure will, is unknown in consciousness (see, however, an inconsistent statement of Calderwood on page 188 of the same work). Every future human act will not only be performed with a motive, but will certainly be one thing rather than another; and God knows what it will be. Whatever may be the method of God’s foreknowledge, and whether it be derived from motives or be intuitive, that foreknowledge presupposes God’s decree to create, and so presupposes the making certain of the free acts that follow creation.

But this certainty is not necessity. In reconciling God’s decrees with human freedom, we must not go to the other extreme, and reduce human freedom to mere determinism, or the power of the agent to act out his character in the circumstances which environ him. Human action is not simply the expression of previously dominant affections; else Neither Satan nor Adam could have fallen, nor could the Christian ever sin. We therefore part company with Jonathan Edwards and his Treatise on the Freedom of the Will, as well as with the younger Edwards (Works, 1:420), Alexander (Moral Science, 107), and Charles Hodge (Syst. Theology, 2:278), all of whom follow Jonathan Edwards in identifying sensibility with the will, in regarding affections as the causes of volitions, and in speaking of the connection between motive and action as a necessary one. We hold, on the contrary, that sensibility and will are two distinct powers, that affections are occasions but never causes of volitions, and that, while motives may infallibly persuade, they never compel the will. The power to make the decision other than it is resides in the will, though it may never be exercised. With Charnock, the Puritan (Attributes, 1:448-450), we say that “man hath a power to do otherwise than that which God foreknows he will do.” Since, then, God’s decrees are not executed by laying compulsion upon human wills, they are not inconsistent with man’s freedom. See Martineau, Study, 2:237, 249, 258, 261; also article by A. H. Strong, on Modified Calvinism, or Remainders of Freedom in Man, in Baptist Review, 1883:219-243; reprinted in the author’s Philosophy and Religion, 114-128.

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

2. That they take away all motive for human exertion

To this we reply that:

(a) They cannot thus influence men, since they are not addressed to men, are not the rule of human action, and become known only after the event. This objection is therefore the mere excuse of indolence and disobedience.

Men rarely make this excuse in any enterprise in which their hopes and their interests are enlisted. It is mainly in matters of religion that men use the divine decrees as an apology for their sloth and inaction. The passengers on an ocean steamer do not deny their ability to walk to starboard or to larboard, upon the plea that they are being carried to their destination by forces beyond their control. Such a plea would be still more irrational in a case where the passengers’ inaction, as in case of fire, might result in destruction to the ship.

(b) The objection confounds the decrees of God with fate. But it is to be observed that fate is unintelligent, while the decrees are framed by a personal God in infinite wisdom; fate is indistinguishable from material causation and leaves no room for human freedom, while the decrees exclude all notion of physical necessity; fate embraces no moral ideas or ends, while the decrees make these controlling in the universe.

North British Rev., April, 1870—“Determinism and predestination spring from premises which lie in quite separate regions of thought. The predestinarian is obliged by his theology to admit the existence of a free will in God, and, as a matter of fact, he does admit it in the devil. But the final consideration which puts a great gulf between the determinist and the predestinarian is this, that the latter asserts the reality of the vulgar notion of moral desert. Even if he were not obliged by his interpretation of Scripture to assert this, he would be obliged to assert it in order to help out his doctrine of eternal reprobation.”

Hawthorne expressed his belief in human freedom when be said that destiny itself had often been worsted in the attempt to get him out to dinner. Benjamin Franklin, in his Autobiography, quotes the Indian’s excuse for getting drunk: “The Great Spirit made all things for some use, and whatsoever use they were made for, to that use they must be put. The Great Spirit made rum for Indians to get drunk with, and so it must be.” Martha, in Isabel Carnaby, excuses her breaking of dishes by saying: “It seems as if it was to be. It is the thin edge of the wedge that in time will turn again and rend you.” Seminary professor: “Did a man ever die before his time?” Seminary student: “I never knew of such a case.” The decrees of God, considered as God’s all-embracing plan, leave room for human freedom.

(c) The objection ignores the logical relation between the decree of the end and the decree of the means to secure it. The decrees of God not only ensure the end to be obtained, but they ensure free human action as logically prior thereto. All conflict between the decrees and human exertion must therefore be apparent and not real. Since consciousness and Scripture assure us that free agency exists, it must exist by divine decree; and though we may be ignorant of the method in which the decrees are executed, we have no right to doubt either the decrees or the freedom. They must be held to be consistent, until one of them is proved to be a delusion.

The man who carries a vase of gold-fish does not prevent the fish from moving unrestrainedly within the vase. The double track of a railway enables a formidable approaching train to slip by without colliding with our own. Our globe takes us with it, as it rushes around the sun, yet we do our ordinary work without interruption. The two movements which at first sight seem inconsistent with each other are really parts of one whole. God’s plan and man’s effort are equally in harmony. Myers, Human Personality, 2:272, speaks of “molecular motion amid molar calm.”

Dr. Duryea: “The way of life has two fences. There is an Arminian fence to keep us out of Fatalism; and there is a Calvinistic fence to keep us out of Pelagianism. Some good brethren like to walk on the fences. But it is hard in that way to keep one’s balance. And it is needless, for there is plenty of room between the fences. For my part I prefer to walk in the road.” Archibald Alexander’s statement is yet better: “Calvinism is the broadest of systems. It regards the divine sovereignty and the freedom of the human will as the two sides of a roof which come together at a ridgepole above the clouds. Calvinism accepts both truths. A system which denies either one of the two has only half a roof over its head.”

Spurgeon, Autobiography, 1:176, and The Best Bread, 109—“The system of truth revealed in the Scriptures is not simply one straight line but two, and no man will ever get a right view of the gospel until he knows how to look at the two lines at once.... These two facts [of divine sovereignty and of human freedom] are parallel lines; I cannot make them unite, but you cannot make them cross each other.” John A. Broadus: “You can see only two sides of a building at once; if you go around it, you see two different sides, but the first two are hidden. This is true if you are on the ground. But if you get up upon the roof or in a balloon, you can see that there are four sides, and you can see them all together. So our finite minds can take in sovereignty and freedom alternately, but not simultaneously. God from above can see them both, and from heaven we too may be able to look down and see.”

(d) Since the decrees connect means and ends together, and ends are decreed only as the result of means, they encourage effort instead of discouraging it. Belief in God’s plan that success shall reward toil, incites to courageous and persevering effort. Upon the very ground of God’s decree, the Scripture urges us to the diligent use of means.

God has decreed the harvest only as the result of man’s labor in sowing and reaping; God decrees wealth to the man who works and saves; so answers are decreed to prayer, and salvation to faith. Compare Paul’s declaration of God’s purpose (Acts 27:22, 24—“there shall be no loss of life among you.... God hath granted thee all them that sail with thee”) with his warning to the centurion and sailors to use the means of safety (verse 31—“Except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved”). See also Phil. 2:12, 13—“work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who worketh in you both to will and to work, for his good pleasure”; Eph. 2:10—“we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God afore prepared that we should walk in them”; Deut. 29:29—“the secret things belong unto Jehovah our God: but the things that are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.” See Bennet Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 252-354.

Ps. 59:10 (A. V.)—“The God of my mercy shall prevent me”—shall anticipate, or go before, me; Is. 65:24—“before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear”; Ps. 23:2—“He leadeth me”; John 10:3—“calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.” These texts describe prevenient grace in prayer, in conversion, and in Christian work. Plato called reason and sensibility a mismatched pair, one of which was always getting ahead of the other. Decrees and freedom seem to be mismatched, but they are not so. Even Jonathan Edwards, with his deterministic theory of the will, could, in his sermon on Pressing into the Kingdom, insist on the use of means, and could appeal to men as if they had the power to choose between the motives of self and of God. God’s sovereignty and human freedom are like the positive and the negative poles of the magnet,—they are inseparable from one another, and are both indispensable elements in the attraction of the gospel.

Peter Damiani, the great monk-cardinal, said that the sin he found it hardest to uproot was his disposition to laughter. The homage paid to asceticism is the homage paid to the conqueror. But not all conquests are worthy of homage. Better the words of Luther: “If our God may make excellent large pike and good Rhenish wine, I may very well venture to eat and drink. Thou mayest enjoy every pleasure in the world that is not sinful; thy God forbids thee not, but rather wills it. And it is pleasing to the dear God whenever thou rejoicest or laughest from the bottom of thy heart.” But our freedom has its limits. Martha Baker Dunn: “A man fishing for pickerel baits his hook with a live minnow and throws him into the water. The little minnow seems to be swimming gaily at his own free will, but just the moment he attempts to move out of his appointed course he begins to realize that there is a hook in his back. That is what we find out when we try to swim against the stream of God’s decrees.”

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

3. That they make God the author of sin

To this we reply:

(a) They make God, not the author of sin, but the author of free beings who are themselves the authors of sin. God does not decree efficiently to work evil desires or choices in men. He decrees sin only in the sense of decreeing to create and preserve those who will sin; in other words, he decrees to create and preserve human wills which, in their own self-chosen courses, will be and do evil. In all this, man attributes sin to himself and not to God, and God hates, denounces, and punishes sin.

Joseph’s brethren were none the less wicked for the fact that God meant their conduct to result in good (Gen. 50:20). Pope Leo X and his indulgences brought on the Reformation, but he was none the less guilty. Slaveholders would have been no more excusable, even if they had been able to prove that the negro race was cursed in the curse of Canaan (Gen. 9:25—“Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren”). Fitch, in Christian Spectator, 3:601—“There can be and is a purpose of God which is not an efficient purpose. It embraces the voluntary acts of moral beings, without creating those acts by divine efficiency.” See Martineau, Study, 2:107, 136.

Mat. 26:24—“The Son of man goeth even as it is written of him: but woe unto that man through whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had not been born.” It was appointed that Christ should suffer, but that did not make men less free agents, nor diminish the guilt of their treachery and injustice. Robert G. Ingersoll asked: “Why did God create the devil?” We reply that God did not create the devil,—it was the devil who made the devil. God made a holy and free spirit who abused his liberty, himself created sin, and so made himself a devil.

Pfleiderer, Philos. Religion, 1:299—“Evil has been referred to 1. an extra-divine principle—to one or many evil spirits, or to fate, or to matter—at all events to a principle limiting the divine power; 2. a want or defect in the Deity himself, either his imperfect wisdom or his imperfect goodness; 3. human culpability, either a universal imperfection of human nature, or particular transgressions of the first men.” The third of these explanations is the true one: the first is irrational; the second is blasphemous. Yet this second is the explanation of Omar Khayyám, Rubáiyat, stanzas 80, 81—“Oh Thou, who didst with pitfall and with gin Beset the road I was to wander in, Thou wilt not with predestined evil round Enmesh, and then impute my fall to sin. Oh Thou, who man of baser earth didst make, And ev’n with Paradise devise the snake: For all the sin wherewith the face of man Is blackened—man’s forgiveness give—and take!” And David Harum similarly says: “If I’ve done anything to be sorry for, I’m willing to be forgiven.”

(b) The decree to permit sin is therefore not an efficient but a permissive decree, or a decree to permit, in distinction from a decree to produce by his own efficiency. No difficulty attaches to such a decree to permit sin, which does not attach to the actual permission of it. But God does actually permit sin, and it must be right for him to permit it. It must therefore be right for him to decree to permit it. If God’s holiness and wisdom and power are not impugned by the actual existence of moral evil, they are not impugned by the original decree that it should exist.

Jonathan Edwards, Works, 2:100—“The sun is not the cause of the darkness that follows its setting, but only the occasion”; 254—“If by the author of sin be meant the sinner, the agent, or the actor of sin, or the doer of a wicked thing—so it would be a reproach and blasphemy to suppose God to be the author of sin.... But if by author of sin is meant the permitter or non-hinderer of sin, and at the same time a disposer of the state of events in such a manner, for wise, holy, and most excellent ends and purposes, that sin, if it be permitted and not hindered, will most certainly follow, I do not deny that God is the author of sin: it is no reproach to the Most High to be thus the author of sin.” On the objection that the doctrine of decrees imputes to God two wills, and that he has foreordained what he has forbidden, see Bennet Tyler, Memoir and Lectures, 250-252—“A ruler may forbid treason; but his command does not oblige him to do all in his power to prevent disobedience to it. It may promote the good of his kingdom to suffer the treason to be committed, and the traitor to be punished according to law. That in view of this resulting good he chooses not to prevent the treason, does not imply any contradiction or opposition of will in the monarch.”

An ungodly editor excused his vicious journalism by saying that he was not ashamed to describe anything which Providence had permitted to happen. But “permitted” here had an implication of causation. He laid the blame of the evil upon Providence. He was ashamed to describe many things that were good and which God actually caused, while he was not ashamed to describe the immoral things which God did not cause, but only permitted men to cause. In this sense we may assent to Jonathan Edwards’s words: “The divine Being is not the author of sin, but only disposes things in such a manner that sin will certainly ensue.” These words are found in his treatise on Original Sin. In his Essay on Freedom of the Will, he adds a doctrine of causation which we must repudiate: “The essence of virtue and vice, as they exist in the disposition of the heart, and are manifested in the acts of the will, lies not in their Cause but in their Nature.” We reply that sin could not be condemnable in its nature, if God and not man were its cause.

Robert Browning, Mihrab Shah: “Wherefore should any evil hap to man—From ache of flesh to agony of soul—Since God’s All-mercy mates All-potency? Nay, why permits he evil to himself—man’s sin, accounted such? Suppose a world purged of all pain, with fit inhabitant—Man pure of evil in thought, word and deed—were it not well? Then, wherefore otherwise?” Fairbairn answers the question, as follows, in his Christ in Modern Theology, 456—“Evil once intended may be vanquished by being allowed; but were it hindered by an act of annihilation, then the victory would rest with the evil which had compelled the Creator to retrace his steps. And, to carry the prevention backward another stage, if the possibility of evil had hindered the creative action of God, then he would have been, as it were, overcome by its very shadow. But why did he create a being capable of sinning? Only so could he create a being capable of obeying. The ability to do good implies the capability of doing evil. The engine can neither obey nor disobey, and the creature who was without this double ability might be a machine, but could be no child. Moral perfection can be attained, but cannot be created; God can make a being capable of moral action, but not a being with all the fruits of moral action garnered within him.”

(c) The difficulty is therefore one which in substance clings to all theistic systems alike—the question why moral evil is permitted under the government of a God infinitely holy, wise, powerful, and good. This problem is, to our finite powers, incapable of full solution, and must remain to a great degree shrouded in mystery. With regard to it we can only say:

Negatively,—that God does not permit moral evil because he is not unalterably opposed to sin; nor because moral evil was unforeseen and independent of his will; nor because he could not have prevented it in a moral system. Both observation and experience, which testify to multiplied instances of deliverance from sin without violation of the laws of man’s being, forbid as to limit the power of God.

Positively,—we seem constrained to say that God permits moral evil because moral evil, though in itself abhorrent to his nature, is yet the incident of a system adapted to his purpose of self-revelation; and further, because it is his wise and sovereign will to institute and maintain this system of which moral evil is an incident, rather than to withhold his self-revelation or to reveal himself through another system in which moral evil should be continually prevented by the exercise of divine power.

There are four questions which neither Scripture nor reason enables us completely to solve and to which we may safely say that only the higher knowledge of the future state will furnish the answers. These questions are, first, how can a holy God permit moral evil? secondly, how could a being created pure ever fall? thirdly, how can we be responsible for inborn depravity? fourthly, how could Christ justly suffer? The first of these questions now confronts us. A complete theodicy (Θεός, God, and δική, justice) would be a vindication of the justice of God in permitting the natural and moral evil that exists under his government. While a complete theodicy is beyond our powers, we throw some light upon God’s permission of moral evil by considering (1) that freedom of will is necessary to virtue; (2) that God suffers from sin more than does the sinner; (3) that, with the permission of sin, God provided a redemption; and, (4) that God will eventually overrule all evil for good.

It is possible that the elect angels belong to a moral system in which sin is prevented by constraining motives. We cannot deny that God could prevent sin in a moral system. But it is very doubtful whether God could prevent sin in the best moral system. The most perfect freedom is indispensable to the attainment of the highest virtue. Spurgeon: “There could have been no moral government without permission to sin. God could have created blameless puppets, but they could have had no virtue.” Behrends: “If moral beings were incapable of perversion, man would have had all the virtue of a planet,—that is, no virtue at all.” Sin was permitted, then, only because it could be overruled for the greatest good. This greatest good, we may add, is not simply the highest nobility and virtue of the creature, but also the revelation of the Creator. But for sin, God’s justice and God’s mercy alike would have been unintelligible to the universe. E. G. Robinson: “God could not have revealed his character so well without moral evil as with moral evil.”

Robert Browning, Christmas Eve, tells us that it was God’s plan to make man in his own image: “To create man, and then leave him Able, his own word saith, to grieve him; But able to glorify him too, As a mere machine could never do, That prayed or praised, all unaware Of its fitness for aught but praise or prayer, Made perfect as a thing of course.” Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 268-270, 324, holds that sin and wickedness is an absolute evil, but an evil permitted to exist because the effacement of it would mean the effacement at the same time both for God and man, of the possibility of reaching the highest spiritual good. See also Martineau, Study of Religion, 2:108; Momerie, Origin of Evil; St. Clair, Evil Physical and Moral; Voysey, Mystery of Pain, Death and Sin.

C. G. Finney, Skeletons of a Course of Theological Studies, 26, 27—“Infinite goodness, knowledge and power imply only that, if a universe were made, it would be the best that was naturally possible.” To say that God could not be the author of a universe in which there is so much of evil, he says, “assumes that a better universe, upon the whole, was a natural possibility. It assumes that a universe of moral beings could, under a moral government administered in the wisest and best manner, be wholly restrained from sin; but this needs proof, and never can be proved.... The best possible universe may not be the best conceivable universe. Apply the legal maxim, ‘The defendant is to have the benefit of the doubt, and that in proportion to the established character of his reputation.’ There is so much clearly indicating the benevolence of God, that we may believe in his benevolence, where we cannot see it.”

For advocacy of the view that God cannot prevent evil in a moral system, see Birks, Difficulties of Belief, 17; Young, The Mystery, or Evil not from God; Bledsoe, Theodicy; N. W. Taylor, Moral Government, 1:288-349; 2:327-356. According to Dr. Taylor’s view, God has not a complete control over the moral universe; moral agents can do wrong under every possible influence to prevent it; God prefers, all things considered, that all his creatures should be holy and happy, and does all in his power to make them so; the existence of sin is not on the whole for the best; sin exists because God cannot prevent it in a moral system; the blessedness of God is actually impaired by the disobedience of his creatures. For criticism of these views, see Tyler, Letters on the New Haven Theology, 129, 219. Tyler argues that election and non-election imply power in God to prevent sin; that permitting is not mere submitting to something which he could not possibly prevent. We would add that as a matter of fact God has preserved holy angels, and that there are “just men” who have been “made perfect” (Heb. 12:23) without violating the laws of moral agency. We infer that God could have so preserved Adam. The history of the church leads us to believe that there is no sinner so stubborn that God cannot renew his heart,—even a Saul can be turned into a Paul. We hesitate therefore to ascribe limits to God’s power. While Dr. Taylor held that God could not prevent sin in a moral system, that is, in any moral system, Dr. Park is understood to hold the greatly preferable view that God cannot prevent sin in the best moral system. Flint, Christ’s Kingdom upon Earth, 59—“The alternative is, not evil or no evil, but evil or the miraculous prevention of evil.” See Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:406-422.

But even granting that the present is the best moral system, and that in such a system evil cannot be prevented consistently with God’s wisdom and goodness, the question still remains how the decree to initiate such a system can consist with God’s fundamental attribute of holiness. Of this insoluble mystery we must say as Dr. John Brown, in Spare Hours, 273, says of Arthur H. Hallam’s Theodicæa Novissima: “As was to be expected, the tremendous subject remains where he found it. His glowing love and genius cast a gleam here and there across its gloom, but it is as brief as the lightning in the collied night—the jaws of darkness do devour it up—this secret belongs to God. Across its deep and dazzling darkness, and from out its abyss of thick cloud, ‘all dark, dark, irrecoverably dark,’ no steady ray has ever or will ever come; over its face its own darkness must brood, till he to whom alone the darkness and the light are both alike, to whom the night shineth as the day, says ‘Let there be light!’ ”

We must remember, however, that the decree of redemption is as old as the decree of the apostasy. The provision of salvation in Christ shows at how great a cost to God was permitted the fall of the race in Adam. He who ordained sin ordained also an atonement for sin and a way of escape from it. Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:388—“The permission of sin has cost God more than it has man. No sacrifice and suffering on account of sin has been undergone by any man, equal to that which has been endured by an incarnate God. This shows that God is not acting selfishly in permitting it.” On the permission of moral evil, see Butler, Analogy, Bohn’s ed., 177, 232—“The Government of God, and Christianity, as Schemes imperfectly Comprehended”; Hill, System of Divinity, 528-559; Ulrici, art.: Theodicée, in Herzog’s Encyclopädie; Cunningham, Historical Theology, 2:416-489; Patton, on Retribution and the Divine Purpose, in Princeton Rev., 1878:16-23; Bib. Sac, 20:471-488; Wood, The Witness of Sin.

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

IV. Concluding Remarks

1. Practical uses of the doctrine of decrees.

(a) It inspires humility by its representation of God’s unsearchable counsels and absolute sovereignty. (b) It teaches confidence in him who has wisely ordered our birth, our death, and our surroundings, even to the minutest particulars, and has made all things work together for the triumph of his kingdom and the good of those who love him; (c) It shows the enemies of God that, as their sins have been foreseen and provided for in God’s plan, so they can never, while remaining in their sins, hope to escape their decreed and threatened penalty. (d) It urges the sinner to avail himself of the appointed means of grace, if he would be counted among the number of those for whom God has decreed salvation.

This doctrine is one of those advanced teachings of Scripture which requires for its understanding a matured mind and a deep experience. The beginner in the Christian life may not see its value or even its truth, but with increasing years it will become a staff to lean upon. In times of affliction, obloquy, and persecution, the church has found in the decrees of God, and in the prophecies in which these decrees are published, her strong consolation. It is only upon the basis of the decrees that we can believe that “all things work together for good” (Rom. 8:28) or pray “Thy will be done” (Mat. 6:10).

It is a striking evidence of the truth of the doctrine that even Arminians pray and sing like Calvinists. Charles Wesley, the Arminian, can write: “He wills that I should holy be—What can withstand his will? The counsel of his grace in me He surely will fulfill.” On the Arminian theory, prayer that God will soften hard hearts is out of place,—the prayer should be offered to the sinner; for it is his will, not God’s, that is in the way of his salvation. And yet this doctrine of Decrees, which at first sight might seem to discourage effort, is the greatest, in fact is the only effectual, incentive to effort. For this reason Calvinists have been the most strenuous advocates of civil liberty. Those who submit themselves most unreservedly to the sovereignty of God are most delivered from the fear of man. Whitefield the Calvinist, and not Wesley the Arminian, originated the great religious movement in which the Methodist church was born (see McFetridge, Calvinism in History, 153), and Spurgeon’s ministry has been as fruitful in conversions as Finney’s. See Froude, Essay on Calvinism; Andrew Fuller, Calvinism and Socinianism compared in their Practical Effects; Atwater, Calvinism in Doctrine and Life, in Princeton Review, 1876:73; J. A. Smith, Historical Lectures.

Calvinism logically requires the separation of Church and State: though Calvin did not see this, the Calvinist Roger Williams did. Calvinism logically requires a republican form of government: Calvin introduced laymen into the government of the church, and the same principle requires civil liberty as its correlate. Calvinism holds to individualism and the direct responsibility of the individual to God. In the Netherlands, in Scotland, in England, in America, Calvinism has powerfully influenced the development of civil liberty. Ranke: “John Calvin was virtually the founder of America.” Motley: “To the Calvinists more than to any other class of men, the political liberties of Holland, England and America are due.” John Fiske, The Beginnings of New England: “Perhaps not one of the mediæval popes was more despotic than Calvin; but it is not the less true that the promulgation of his theology was one of the longest steps that mankind have taken towards personal freedom.... It was a religion fit to inspire men who were to be called to fight for freedom, whether in the marshes of the Netherlands or on the moors of Scotland.”

Æsop, when asked what was the occupation of Zeus, replied: “To humble the exalted and to exalt the humble.” “I accept the universe,” said Margaret Fuller. Some one reported this remark to Thomas Carlyle. “Gad! she’d better!” he replied. Dr. John Watson (Ian McLaren): “The greatest reinforcement religion could have in our time would be a return to the ancient belief in the sovereignty of God.” Whittier: “All is of God that is and is to be, And God is good. Let this suffice us still Resting in childlike trust upon his will Who moves to his great ends unthwarted by the ill.” Every true minister preaches Arminianism and prays Calvinism. This means simply that there is more, in God’s love and in God’s purposes, than man can state or comprehend. Beecher called Spurgeon a camel with one hump—Calvinism. Spurgeon called Beecher a camel without any hump: “He does not know what he believes, and you never know where to find him.”

Arminians sing: “Other refuge have I none; Hangs my helpless soul on thee”; yet John Wesley wrote to the Calvinist Toplady, the author of the hymn: “Your God is my devil.” Calvinists replied that it was better to have the throne of the universe vacant than to have it filled by such a pitiful nonentity as the Arminians worshiped. It was said of Lord Byron that all his life he believed in Calvinism, and hated it. Oliver Wendell Holmes similarly, in all his novels except Elsie Venner, makes the orthodox thinblooded and weakkneed, while his heretics are all strong in body. Dale, Ephesians, 52—“Of the two extremes, the suppression of man which was the offense of Calvinism, and the suppression of God which was the offense against which Calvinism so fiercely protested, the fault and error of Calvinism was the nobler and grander.... The most heroic forms of human courage, strength and righteousness have been found in men who in their theology seemed to deny the possibility of human virtue and made the will of God the only real force in the universe.”

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

2. True method of preaching the doctrine

(a) We should most carefully avoid exaggeration or unnecessarily obnoxious statement. (b) We should emphasize the fact that the decrees are not grounded in arbitrary will, but in infinite wisdom. (c) We should make it plain that whatever God does or will do, he must from eternity have purposed to do. (d) We should illustrate the doctrine so far as possible by instances of completeness and far-sightedness in human plans of great enterprises. (e) We may then make extended application of the truth to the encouragement of the Christian and the admonition of the unbeliever.

For illustrations of foresight, instance Louis Napoleon’s planning the Suez Canal, and declaring his policy as Emperor, long before he ascended the throne of France. For instances of practical treatment of the theme in preaching, see Bushnell, Sermon on Every Man’s Life a Plan of God, in Sermons for the New Life; Nehemiah Adams, Evenings with the Doctrines, 243; Spurgeon’s Sermon on Ps. 44:3—“Because thou hadst a favor unto them.” Robert Browning, Rabbi Ben Ezra: “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, The last of life, for which the first was made: Our times are in his hand Who saith ‘A whole I planned, Youth shows but half; trust God: See all nor be afraid!’ ”

Shakespeare, King Lear, 1:2—“This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune (often the surfeit of our own behavior) we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting on; an admirable evasion of man to lay his disposition to the charge of a star!” All’s Well: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull.” Julius Cæsar, 1:2—“Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

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