THE HOLY TRINITY
God, as Christianity reveals Him, is no cold or remote Being, no
abstract Principle-of-All-Things, reposing aloof and impersonal in the
stillness of an eternal calm. He is rather the boundless energy of an
eternal Life--"no motionless eternity of perfection, but an
overflowing vitality, an inexhaustible fecundity, the everlasting
well-spring of all existence." He is the eternal Creator of all
things; not indeed in any sense which commits us to a literal
acceptance of the mythology of Genesis, but in the sense that the
created universe has its origin in His holy and righteous will, and
that upon Him all things depend. "In affirming that the world was made
by GOD, we do not affirm that it was ready-made from the beginning."
The work of creation is still going on. GOD is eternally making all
things new.
The nature of GOD, in so far as the mind and affections of man are
capable of knowing Him and entering into relationships with Him, is
revealed in Jesus Christ His Son, and the revelation is completed and
made intelligible by the manifestation of the Holy Spirit. S. Paul
expressed the practical content of GOD'S self-disclosure in his phrase
"the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of GOD, and the
fellowship of the Holy Ghost." Later Christian thinkers worked it out
into the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the conception of GOD as at
once Three in One, and One in Three.
To the plain man the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is something of a
puzzle--on the face of it an arithmetical paradox; suggestive,
moreover, of the abstract subtleties of speculation rather than of the
concrete realities of religious life. But the doctrine did not have
its origin, as a matter of historical fact, in any perverse love of
subtlety or speculation. It certainly arose out of living realities of
spiritual experience. It arose as the result of an attempt, on the
part of the earliest Christian believers, to think out the meaning of
what had happened in their religious lives, and to express it in
speech and thought. What was this thing that had come to them, this
thing which had changed their whole outlook upon the world, which had
transformed their very inmost souls and made them new men, full of a
new vision and a new hope? Something tremendous had happened in their
lives. They were confident that it held the secret of _all_ life, for
them and for others. It was a new, an overwhelming, a conclusive
revelation of GOD. They proclaimed it: they were constrained also to
think about it. They had to find ways of expressing it. They had to
think out what it meant.
There was Jesus Christ. Who was He? What did He mean? What was His
relation to man, and to GOD? Certainly He had shed light upon GOD, and
upon GOD'S nature. Through His teaching, His character, His life and
death, the conception of GOD was filled with a new meaning. In Him GOD
was revealed with a fulness that had never been before. He disclosed
more of GOD'S inmost character, and more of the relation which He
bears to men. "He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father"--the
disciples felt that this witness was true. By admitting to their
thought of GOD all that the life of Jesus brought, they filled with
fresh glory Christ's favourite word for GOD--"your Father which is in
Heaven."
In Jesus, they felt, GOD was expressed: His relationship to GOD was
unique. They found the Divine in Him as in no other. They knew that
GOD was in that life because He had spoken and acted there. "Through
the eyes of Jesus" GOD looked out upon the world, and in Jesus' love
and purity and yearning for the sinful and the heavy-laden, GOD
Himself became visible. They knew now what GOD was like. GOD was like
Christ. It was His glory that shone in Jesus' face. It was a new
vision of Him when "Jesus of Nazareth passed by." In the grace--that
is, the beauty, the glory and attractiveness--of the Lord Jesus Christ
they saw a revelation of the love of GOD, a love that yearned over the
fallen and the sorrowful, a love that suffered, and through suffering
brought redemption.
But there was something more. It was not simply that in Jesus Christ
GOD had been brought near, so that they felt they knew GOD as never
before. There was in the experience which had come to them more than
simply a Revealer and a Revealed. There was the Spirit which took
possession of them, a transforming inward Power: a Power able to
reproduce in them, by a process of growth from more to more, that
character of Christ in whose lineaments they had discerned the nature
of the eternal GOD Himself. There was a Presence abiding in their
midst, dwelling within them, a Breath of the Divine Life which every
Christian knew: a Presence which brought strength and comfort, power
and love and discipline, and bore fruits of love and joy and peace.
Who or what was it? An influence from on high? Yes: but it seemed more
intimate, more personal than any mere "influence," more indissolubly
one with them, knitting them into a fellowship in which they were
united with the Father and the Son. "Truly our fellowship is with the
Father, and with His Son Jesus Christ." The Spirit which bore such
fruits in them, which brought them into so intimate a fellowship with
GOD in Christ, they recognized as the Spirit of GOD, as the Presence
in them of very GOD Himself. GOD, they felt, was not a Being far off,
an Influence telling upon men from a distance. He was the very secret
of life, "closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet," so that
each soul was meant to be a sacred "temple of GOD," "GOD abiding in
him and he in GOD." GOD came in the Son, GOD had come also and equally
in the Spirit. The Eternal Source of all things, who was known and
worshipped as the Living One even before Christ came, was made more
fully known in Christ, and now He was still more intimately made known
in the inmost spiritual life of every day.
That was Christian experience. That was the experience out of which
the doctrine of the Trinity arose. It arose out of an attempt to think
the thing out. If we to-day find the doctrine difficult, at least the
experience was and is both simple and profound. And we cannot help
thinking about it.
It may be that sometimes we think we would rather be content to say
simply with S. John that "GOD is Love." And that is truly the simplest
of Christian creeds. If we were able fully to understand it, it would
be sufficient. "Holy Trinity, whatever else it may signify, is a mode
of saying 'Holy Love.'" But as a matter of fact it is only through the
revelation of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the fellowship of
the Holy Spirit that we can ever come to understand the love of GOD.
In the Christian Gospel GOD is revealed first as Father, secondly as
Sufferer, thirdly as the Spirit of eternally victorious Life: and it
takes the whole threefold revelation to express with any fulness the
rich wonder of what is meant by saying that GOD is Love. Our minds
cannot help passing from the contemplation of the threefold character
of GOD'S self-revelation to the thought of a certain threefoldness in
GOD Himself. We have to find room and place for such a thought--the
thought that GOD is _eternally_ Love, that He is _eternally_ Father,
Son, and Spirit--and yet at the same time not depart from the
fundamental Christian conviction that GOD is One.
It is to be feared that many Christian people do sometimes come
dangerously near to believing in three separate Gods, and what we call
Unitarianism is a one-sided protest against such a tendency. GOD is
indeed a unity: and so far Unitarianism is right. But Unitarianism is
less than the full Christian faith in GOD, because it fails to do
justice to the full riches of Christian experience, the many-sided
wonder of GOD revealed in Christ, and made real to us here and now by
the operation of the Spirit in our hearts. We are driven to say that
GOD is not only One, but Three in One.
Nevertheless, if any one finds the _theory_ of the Holy Trinity
difficult let him not be overmuch dismayed. Let him learn to know GOD
as Father and Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour: let him learn to know
the Holy Spirit as an energy of eternal life and inspiration in his
heart. He will then be _in effect_ a Trinitarian believer, even though
the theologians seem to him to talk a language which he does not
understand: even though--to tell the truth--he is not greatly
interested by what they say.
At the same time, there is need that people should think out the
meaning of the Christian revelation of GOD: perhaps that they should
think it out afresh. It is possible to be technically orthodox and
correct in doctrine and yet to miss the true reality of what GOD
means. The conception of GOD as Father implies that GOD has eternally
a Son: the life of Jesus Christ as Son of God reveals to us the
quality of that Divine Fatherhood to which His Sonship corresponds.
The Spirit, as the Divine Energy proceeding from the Father and the
Son, is the assurance that the life of GOD can never be self-contained
or aloof, but is for ever going forth from Himself, so as to be
eternally operative and active, alike in the processes of Nature and
in the lives of men. For "the Spirit of the Lord filleth the world,"
and the Divine Wisdom "reacheth from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordereth all things."
It follows that Christianity, the religion of the Spirit, can never
stand still. Not stagnation, but life, is its characteristic note,
even "that Eternal Life which was with the Father, and hath been
manifested unto us." The Church which is truly alive unto GOD, and
aflame with the spirit of allegiance to Him who for the joy that was
set before Him endured the Cross, the Church which is truly quickened
and inspired by the Spirit of Truth and Love and Power, will always be
ready to "live dangerously" in the world, not shrinking timorously
from needed change or experiment, not holding aloof from conflict and
adventure and movement, but facing courageously all new situations and
new phases whether of life or of thought as they arise, shirking no
issues, welcoming all new-found truth, bringing things both new and
old out of her treasure-house, so that she may both "prove all things"
and also "hold fast that which is good."
There are conceptions of GOD proclaimed from Christian pulpits which
are less than the full Christian conception of GOD. The GOD who is
eternal Energy and Life and Love, the GOD who is revealed in Christ,
and whose Spirit is the Spirit of Freedom and Brotherhood and Truth,
is neither the tyrant God of the Calvinist, nor the dead-alive God of
the traditionalist, nor the obscurantist God of those who would decry
knowledge and quench the Spirit. Neither, again, is GOD the God of
militarists, a God who delights in carnage--even though it should be
the carnage of Germans; or the God who is thought of by His
worshippers as being mainly the God of the sacristy, a kind of
"supreme Guardian of the clerical interest in Europe." Least of all is
GOD the commonplace deity of commonplace people, a sort of placid
personification of respectability, the GOD whose religion is the
religion of "the Conservative Party at prayer."
He is a consuming Energy of Life and Fire. His eyes are "eyes of
Flame," and His inmost essence a white-hot passion of sacrifice and of
self-giving. At the heart of His self-revelation there is a Cross, the
eternal symbol of the almightiness of Love: the Cross which is the
source and the secret of all true victory, and newness of life, and
peace.
This, and none other, is the GOD whom truly to know is everlasting
life, and whom to serve is liberty. For He it is who has made us unto
Himself, with hearts that are restless until they rest in Him. To do
His will is to realize the object of our existence as human beings:
for it is to fulfil the purpose for which we have our being, the end
for which we were created; even to glorify GOD, and to enjoy Him for
ever.