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.