the well-known combination of hydrogen and oxygen which we call H20. Here it may be found as water, over there it may be ice, and in another place it will be steam. They are all different, but in essence they are exactly the same.
The root, the trunk, the branch are all one wood. The fountain, the stream, the river are all one water. The past, the present, the future are all that mysterious thing which we call time.
Neither any one of such analogies nor all of them taken together can give anything like an exhaustive description of the Holy Trinity but they are at least suggestive. They point the way toward what God must mean to us and check it in with our common experience of life. For our whole conception of God has been a development through the centuries from lower to higher levels as we have advanced in our appreciation of His revelation of Himself. In primitive times people thought of many different gods, which meant polytheism. Then they began to think of one Supreme God while still allowing for the possible existence of other gods, which is what we call monolatry. From that it was a simple step to monotheism—faith in one God beside whom there can be no other. Finally came the unfolding of the One God in three Persons, which is the Holy Trinity.
This is the progressive advancement which one finds in a study of the Holy Scriptures. Traces may be discovered of ail these various stages with hints of God’s three-fold Being appearing here and there and gradually rising above all others. The New Testament is full of allusions in thoroughly personal terms to God the Father, to Jesus Christ as His divine Son, and to the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit. Yet the whole Christian record is solidly committed to the essential unity of the One God. In several places this is summed up in very definite trinitarian statements. Our Lord’s “Great Commission” at the close of St. Matthew’s Gospel says emphatically—“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”1 In our Lord’s last discourse as related by St. John we read—“But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things.”2 The final benediction in St. Paul’s second Epistle to the Corinthians shows clearly what his teaching must have been—“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.”3 And the opening salutation in the first Epistle of St. Peter is to the same effect—“Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.”4 And the practice of the early Church bears this out, for we find in the earliest records (dating from about the end of the first century) that Christians were following literally the injunction given in St. Matthew’s Gospel to baptize converts in the triune Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The subsequent history of the Church leaves no question as to the steady teaching of the Holy Trinity in all parts of Christendom.
People who would like to reduce the Christian religion to a handy system of ethics will be sure to ask why this needs to be so. Admittedly the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is beyond our intellectual grasp, and why should we be loaded down with an intellectual puzzle when a simple faith in the One God might answer all of our needs? The quickest reply is to say that our needs may not be so easily supplied. The divinity of our Lord and the active operation of the Holy Spirit must somehow be fitted in with our faith in the One God if the integrity of the Gospel is to be preserved at all. Certain very practical considerations on these two points will be discussed in later chapters, but just here we would touch on two useful reasons for a doctrine which no one would be likely to manufacture out of his own imagination.
I. In recent years much study has been devoted to the question of personality and we know more about it than we used to. What we have been learning fits neatly into the doctrine of the Holy Trinity which was defined long before anyone ever thought of modern psychology. God must be personal if he is to have any significance to us. You can’t have faith in an idea, you can’t worship a principle, you can’t love an abstraction. The whole of human life is built around the personal equation. It would indeed be a puzzle to conceive of a Creator of a thoroughly personalized human life who was not Himself possessed of personal qualities. That would be too much like thinking of an author who could not read or a singer without a voice. Our imaginations would expire under such a strain.
Well—the study of personality shows clearly enough that a person cannot exist alone. The very qualities which make a person demand another person to complete them. Love means nothing unless there is someone to love. The will must have an object upon which to express itself. Reason must have something to reason about. A completely isolated person would soon cease to be a person.
But God must be complete in Himself. If He were dependent upon something outside of Himself, He would be a finite being and therefore less than God. Hence there must be a personal relationship within the being of God and quite independent of His own creation. Infinite love requires an infinite object of love. Therefore we say that the Father eternally loves the Son, and the Spirit is the bond of affection between them. There is something social about God or He could not be a Person—in which case we would have no basis for knowing anything about Him anyway. So if we are puzzled with the idea of the Trinity, we must face an even greater puzzle without it. And we can’t escape all puzzlement when we are thinking of God.
2. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity assembles within itself the best that is to be found in non-Christian faiths in their search after God. Mohammedanism, for instance, looks to God as the all-powerful Creator and the supreme Governor of the universe. Brahmanism and other oriental faiths conceive of God as ever-present and practically identified with His creation—forms of pantheism. Pagan cults expect God to be concerned with all the various interests of human life, and have separate gods for different things. There are phases of truth in all of them. The Holy Trinity says—yes, God is supreme, He is also present in His creation, and He is definitely interested in all human affairs. All of this is expressed in the Three Persons in One God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He is creating, sustaining, and energizing—or to put it in theological language, He is transcendent, immanent, and pervasive.
All searchings after God converge upon Jesus Christ. He is the fulfilment of all religions, and He reveals God to us in trinity. His teaching has come down to us in precept and instruction, in narrative and parable. The Church has endeavored to gather them all together in the concentrated doctrine of the Holy Trinity, not only as a summarized expression of His teachings, but as a protection to the full content of what He taught. We find that it coincides with our own experience, meets our spiritual needs, elevates our conception of God Himself, and expands our religious horizon.
Therefore, “I believe in One God the Father Almighty . . . And in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . Being of one substance with the Father . . . And . . . in the Holy Ghost . . . Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.”
1 St. Matthew 28:19.
2 St. John 14:26.
3 Corinthians 13:14.
4 Peter 1:2.
VI
CREEDS AND DOCTRINE
In christian teaching faith always has to do with persons. It is not a matter of wishful thinking; neither is it an amiable ability to swallow things whole. Faith means the capacity for confidence in a Person.
Sometimes people say they have faith in a government. They do not really mean that. They mean they have faith in the persons who administer a government. You do not have faith in an automobile, or a fire extinguisher, or a vacuum cleaner. You have faith in the people who make such things and believe they will turn out a satisfactory product. Faith belongs to persons, not to things.
It
