missionary activity he went from city to city preaching and teaching the “tradition” and organizing congregations of Christians. But he was always under pressure to seek out new fields, and there were enemies on his track only too eager to tear down what he had erected as soon as he moved on to another place. St. Paul soon felt the necessity of following up his work by correspondence. He conceived the idea of writing letters (“epistles”) addressed, not to an individual person, but to a congregation for public reading. A few personal letters that he wrote have been preserved, but most of them were sent to entire congregations, often with instructions to send copies to neighboring congregations. These letters were not intended to introduce Christ to people who had no knowledge of Him. They were written to reinforce the teaching the Apostle had already given, to answer questions and to deal with local problems of spiritual discipline and Christian behavior. St. Paul’s epistles always presupposed a knowledge of the Gospel on the part of his readers. Any attempt to understand them is hopeless unless this fact is kept quite clear.
It was about the year A.D. 50 that St. Paul sent his first letter to the Thessalonians, which is the earliest Christian writing to come down to us. Other epistles followed. It is significant to note that all of these epistles had been composed before the first of the four Gospels was committed to writing. When some critics insist that the simple Jesus of the Gospels was subsequently distorted by St. Paul’s subtle theology, it is well to remember that his epistles were all in circulation before any of the Gospels appeared. And it is not likely that the Church would have put its seal on Gospel records which were in conflict with the prevailing teaching about Christ—eventually gathering both into the canon of Holy Scripture.
From the very beginning, the Apostles were the accredited teachers. They had been His chosen companions, they had seen Him in action, and they had been trained by Him personally to fill the role of leaders. Those books which were written by Apostles, or by those who were close enough to the Apostles to give an accurate statement of apostolic teaching, were accredited by common consent and incorporated in the New Testament canon.
This is the Bible which continues year after year to be the best seller in the book market. It has been carried all over the world. It has been translated into a thousand languages and dialects. It has brought comfort, consolation, and enlightenment to countless numbers of people for the past nineteen centuries. No book has ever been under such persistent, critical scrutiny as this Book. It has been studied by the best minds of the ages—sometimes sympathetically, and often in a spirit of hostility. But through it all the Bible has come with flying colors, all the better authenticated because of the searching study to which it has been subjected. No intelligent person can afford to be ignorant of it. No Christian person can escape a sense of reverence for it.
1 St. Matthew 5: 43–44.
2 Exodus 21:24.
3 St. Luks 11:19.
4 Numbers 21:14–20; Joshua 10:12–13.
5 Exodus 15.
6 Judges 5.
7 Acts 1:1.
8 I Thessalonians 2:15.
V
THE HOLY TRINITY
Somewhere G. K. Chesterton has written—“It is the saint who tries to get his head into the heavens; it is the atheist who tries to get the heavens into his head; and it is his head that splits.”
As has already been said in a previous chapter, we cannot explain God because our heads are too little and our brains too feeble to accommodate Him. Nevertheless, if we are to do any orderly living we must have some orderly thinking behind it. Likewise if we are to pursue the will of God, we must organize our thoughts of God or we will never make any constructive progress. That is what we mean by theology—organizing our thoughts about God. We may never be entirely successful, but we can never stop trying.
One of our great difficulties is that we must use words to express ourselves. Since words are a human invention, it is scarcely to be expected that they can ever adequately describe God. Yet they are the only tools at our disposal. Even though we use them with the utmost care we are often confused by the changing shades of meaning which accompany the growth of any living language. Particularly is this true of the English tongue. In our Prayer Book the collect for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity says, “Lord, we pray Thee that Thy grace may always prevent and follow us.” Two or three centuries ago the word “prevent” meant to “go before,” and it was quite in order to pray that God’s grace might go before us and follow us, surrounding us with His gracious Presence. But in the course of time “prevent” has come to mean “to stop” or “to interfere with,” which is not at all what the prayer intends to say. Yet when we have become accustomed to certain forms of devotional expression, it is not easy to change the language.
Or take a word like “rest.” It has several meanings. It means to relax, and it also means to set something down. A negro servant always used to say, “Can I rest your hat?” But this word also means that upon which something is placed, like a book rest. And besides these meanings it also means the “remainder” or that which is left over. When we say a person has gone to his rest, it is a gentle way of indicating that he has died. And so on.
Many centuries ago Christians began to formulate their faith and struggled hard to find words which would be reasonably expressive. The terms they hit upon acquired a certain technical significance, but in the ordinary growth of language many of those same terms took on other meanings in common conversation. Thus we often have to do a little explaining because we cannot rearrange the whole language of theology every time popular usage adds something to the meaning of a word here and there. This is true in the case of the Church’s doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
When the word “person” is used in casual speech, it at ones suggests a separate, distinct, individual human being. Therefore the trinitarian formula, “three Persons in One God,” is quite likely to imply to the average mind three Gods somehow or other combined into one Deity. But that is precisely what the Trinity does not mean. The unity of God (monotheism) is the very heart of all Christian teaching. The words “person” and “substance” were very carefully chosen to indicate that which was united in the unity. “Substance” refers to the essential Being of God which is always one. “Person” does not mean a separate being but a distinct Self. There are three Selfs in one Being—or three Persons in one God. For want of better names we call them Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit, which means the same thing), and we differentiate their operations as we attribute creation to the Father, redemption to the Son, and sanctification to the Holy Spirit.
Now, of course, this is raising us into a very thin atmosphere where we are likely to become bewildered. Remember, we are attempting to describe God and our little minds are not altogether efficient instruments for such a task. We can get some insight through analogies, though we recognize that no analogy can go all the way. In my own life I consist of three selfs. I am the subject, object, and umpire of my own actions. When I have a problem to solve, I talk it over with myself and eventually pass judgment on the conversation. Sometimes I say my better self has won the argument. I am a three-fold human being—yet I am only one.
Here is a table which is a material unit. It is made up of length, breadth, and height. Each one is that particular table, yet the table itself requires all three of them.
Or consider the sunlight. It consists of the source of light, the rays which come from the source, and the illumination which is produced. It is not sunshine without all three of them, but each one is distinct
