THE

LUTHERAN CHURCH REVIEW

No. 3.-JULY, 1903.

ARTICLE I.

IS THE TRINITY A SCHOLASTIC FIGMENT?

To a man of nature, the doctrine of the Trinity ever appears as a speculative tenet, far-fetched, and slenderly supported. To a man of the world, steeped in the arts and sciences, and the broader humanities, it seems empty, useless, idle. The liberal thinker of every age has felt sure that this "scholastic figment" will be the first to fall to pieces under the grasp of enlightened reasoning. Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams, "You and I will see the time when every child born in America will be a Unitarian."

But what sort of a God would these cultured and nonChristian believers set up for the world? Under close analysis a monad is no less unthinkable than a dualism or a trinity. And a monad cannot in the end steer clear of the abyss of pantheism, while a dualism cannot escape the corollary of division, and of either conflict, or utter annihilation. If the monad is not a part of his own creation; not an evolution and an incarnation of the persistency of force, but a supreme intelligence; dependent on neither matter nor force, but the master of both, the old gnostic riddle still arises, is he the author of both? And are the loneliness and selfishness of this supreme intelligence more thinkable than the complete and perfect life

of the Father and the Son, and the Spirit proceeding from both? The Unitarian God is a God of intellect and power; and benevolence and compassion may be present; but love is absent. The idea that God is pure intelligence, the neo-platonic notion that He is pure and simple being, rò, or that He is "a single principle without community of self-conscious existence," cannot authenticate itself as any more rational to a clear mind, than the "scholastic figment of a Trinity," which the naturalist

scorns.

The Trinity is really the deepest insight into the nature of God that the human reason has gained. And it has been gained by revelation.* Strong minds, like that of Coleridge, have come to rest in it quite apart from the revelation of Christianity as a philosophic necessity. The reader will recall that Coleridge maintained specifically that the Trinity is the only form in which an idea of God is possible, unless we revert to pantheism. He goes further and says: "I affirm that there neither is nor can be any religion, any reason, but what is, or is an expansion of, the truth of the Trinity." His great pupil, Frederick Denison Maurice, actually found the reconciliation of the contradictions of speculative thought about the divine existence, in the doctrine of the Trinity. Further, he pointed out that the fellowships and relationships of earth are disclosed as having their ground and justification in the eternal fellowship which existed in the bosom of the Father. Bancroft, the historian, has carried this insight into the historical field, in his statement that some idea of the Triune God "is inherent in every system of thought which can pretend to vitality."

*Thomas Aquinas maintained that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity could be proved to be not impossible from the natural reason, "sufficit defendere non esse impossibile quod praedicat fides." Gerhard held that

this can be proved among Christians, but scarcely among heretics or the heathen. Quenstedt says: "Mysterium trinitatis ex naturali ratione nec a priori nec a posteriori demonstrari potest; ne quidem possibilitas huius mysteri e naturae lumine haberi potest, cum rationi, propria principia consulenti, absurdum videatur."

This is the inverse of the ordinary argument by analogies from the sphere of human knowledge, and of the imagines in intellectuali et rationali creatura, vestigia in irrationalibus creaturis, of the Church Fathers, and is a broader, stronger and more far-reaching statement. Luther is fond of the idea that the true Christian seeks and finds the traces of the Trinity everywhere in Creation, from the most modest flower to the most brilliant production of art.

It was this deep-rooted correspondence of the doctrine of the Trinity with the needs of man's speculative and with his spiritual life, which, according to Maurice, enabled the Church to resist the pressure of the imperial will in the ancient days of its alliance with the Roman Empire. It was this truth which in the intense struggle of Christianity with Islam enabled the seemingly difficult and complex idea of God to triumph over a seeming simplicity, which was, after all, but an empty abstraction. It was this power inherent in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, according to Maurice, which raised Christianity above Confucianism and Mohammedanism. They did not and could not rise to the Fatherhood of God because they lacked the knowledge of the Son, through whom the Fatherhood alone could fully be revealed. It was this fundamental doctrine which rendered Christianity superior to the mere and numerous incarnations of the Divine which Brahmanism confessed, and to the dream of Buddha's infinite spirit which was totally without a knowledge of the Father and Son.

It is the same insight into the necessity of the doctrine of the Trinity to the deepest spiritual life which has led modern apologists to ground their defence of the doctrine in the spiritual experience of the Christian, and to declare that it was not the Nicene Council that gave us the doctrine of the Trinity, but it was the existence of the doctrine of the Trinity in the Bible and the experience of the Christian, that gave us the Nicene Council.*

The doctrine of the Trinity, tried as by fire, in one or other of its parts has been vigorously combated from the beginning.

*Thus Stearns in "The Evidence of Christian Experience," p. 357, says: "It has been declared that the doctrine of the Trinity is a mere dogma, to be received because it is taught by revelation. But this kind of reasoning brought about the Unitarian defection. As a matter of fact, the doctrine of the Trinity is to the Christian who knows how to use his experience aright, the most reasonable of all the scriptural doctrines, since it is the deepest and most essential. In the believer's religious life the sacred three-Father, Son, and Holy Ghost-are known directly and personally. They are the fundamental facts of all the experience of the regenerate soul. They are the fixed lights in the spiritual firmament. The doctrine which confirms and formulates this fact of experience is in the highest sense reasonable. It is as reasonable as those teachings of astronomy which confirm our daily knowledge of sun and moon and stars. True, the doctrine is a mystery. But what fact is not a mystery?"