3. Unity.
By this we mean (a) that the divine nature is undivided and indivisible (unus); and (b) that there is but one infinite and perfect Spirit (unicus).
Deut. 6:4—“Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah”; Is. 44:6—“besides me there is no God”; John 5:44—“the only God”; 17:3—“the only true God”; 1 Cor. 8:4—“no God but one”; 1 Tim. 1:17—“the only God”; 6:15—“the blessed and only Potentate”; Eph. 4:5, 6—“one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, and through all, and in all.” When we read in Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 25—“The unity of God is not numerical, denying the existence of a second; it is integral, denying the possibility of division,” we reply that the unity of God is both,—it includes both the numerical and the integral elements.
Humboldt, in his Cosmos, has pointed out that the unity and creative agency of the heavenly Father have given unity to the order of nature, and so have furnished the impulse to modern physical science. Our faith in a “universe” rests historically upon the demonstration of God's unity which has been given by the incarnation and death of Christ. Tennyson, In Memoriam: “That God who ever lives and loves, One God, one law, one element, And one far off divine event To which the whole creation moves.”See A. H. Strong, Christ in Creation, 184-187. Alexander McLaren: “The heathen have many gods because they have no one that satisfies hungry hearts or corresponds to their unconscious ideals. Completeness is not reached by piecing together many fragments. The wise merchantman will gladly barter a sack full of ‘goodly pearls’for the one of great price. Happy they who turn away from the many to embrace the One!”
Against polytheism, tritheism, or dualism, we may urge that the notion of two or more Gods is self-contradictory; since each limits the other and destroys his godhood. In the nature of things, infinity and absolute perfection are possible only to one. It is unphilosophical, moreover, to assume the existence of two or more Gods, when one will explain all the facts. The unity of God is, however, in no way inconsistent with the doctrine of the Trinity; for, while this doctrine holds to the existence of hypostatical, or personal, distinctions in the divine nature, it also holds that this divine nature is numerically and eternally one.
Polytheism is man's attempt to rid himself of the notion of responsibility to one moral Lawgiver and Judge by dividing up his manifestations, and attributing them to separate wills. So Force, in the terminology of some modern theorizers, is only God with his moral attributes left out. “Henotheism” (says Max Müller, Origin and Growth of Religion, 285) “conceives of each individual god as unlimited by the power of other gods. Each is felt, at the time, as supreme and absolute, notwithstanding the limitations which to our minds must arise from his power being conditioned by the power of all the gods.”
Even polytheism cannot rest in the doctrine of many gods, as an exclusive and all-comprehending explanation of the universe. The Greeks believed in one supreme Fate that ruled both gods and men. Aristotle: “God, though he is one, has many names, because he is called according to states into which he is ever entering anew.”The doctrine of God's unity should teach men to give up hope of any other God, to [pg 260]reveal himself to them or to save them. They are in the hands of the one and only God, and therefore there is but one law, one gospel, one salvation; one doctrine, one duty, one destiny. We cannot rid ourselves of responsibility by calling ourselves mere congeries of impressions or mere victims of circumstance. As God is one, so the soul made in God's image is one also. On the origin of polytheism, see articles by Tholuck, in Bib. Repos., 2:84, 246, 441, and Max Müller, Science of Religion, 124.
Moberly, Atonement and Personality, 83—“The Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end and sum and meaning of Being, is but One. We who believe in a personal God do not believe in a limited God. We do not mean one more, a bigger specimen of existences, amongst existences. Rather, we mean that the reality of existence itself is personal: that Power, that Law, that Life, that Thought, that Love, are ultimately, in their very reality, identified in one supreme, and that necessarily a personal Existence. Now such supreme Being cannot be multiplied: it is incapable of a plural: it cannot be a generic term. There cannot be more than one all-inclusive, more than one ultimate, more than one God. Nor has Christian thought, at any point, for any moment, dared or endured the least approach to such a thought or phrase as ‘two Gods.’ If the Father is God, and the Son God, they are both the same God wholly, unreservedly. God is a particular, an unique, not a general, term. Each is not only God, but is the very same ‘singularis unicus et totus Deus.’ They are not both genericallyGod, as though ‘God’ could be an attribute or predicate; but both identicallyGod, the God, the one all-inclusive, indivisible, God.... If the thought that wishes to be orthodox had less tendency to become tritheistic, the thought that claims to be free would be less Unitarian.”