We prove this (a) from those passages which speak of the existence of the Word from eternity with the Father; (b) from passages asserting or implying Christ's preëxistence; (c) from passages implying intercourse between the Father and the Son before the foundation of the world; (d) from passages asserting the creation of the world by Christ; (e) from passages asserting or implying the eternity of the Holy Spirit.
(a) John 1:1, 2—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”; cf. Gen. 1:1—“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”; Phil. 2:6—“existing in the form of God ... on an equality with God.” (b) John 8:58—“before Abraham was born, I am”; 1:18—“the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father” (R. V.); Col. 1:15-17—“firstborn of all creation” or “before every creature ... he is before all things.” In these passages “am” and “is” indicate an eternal fact; the present tense expresses permanent being. Rev. 22:13, 14—“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (c) John 17:5—“Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was”; 24—“Thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world.” (d) John 1:3—“All things were made through him”; 1 Cor. 8:6—“one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things”; Col. 1:16—“all things have been created through him and unto him”; Heb. 1:2—“through whom also he made the worlds”; 10—“Thou, Lord, in the beginning didst lay the foundation of the earth, and the heavens are the works of thy hands.”(e) Gen. 1:2—“the Spirit of God was brooding”—existed therefore before creation; Ps. 33:6—“by the word of Jehovah were the heavens made; and all the host of them by the breath [Spirit] of his mouth”; Heb. 9:14—“through the eternal Spirit.”
With these passages before us, we must dissent from the statement of Dr. E. G. Robinson: “About the ontologic Trinity we know absolutely nothing. The Trinity we can contemplate is simply a revealed one, one of economic manifestations. We may supposethat the ontologic underlies the economic.” Scripture compels us, in our judgment, to go further than this, and to maintain that there are personal relations between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit independently of creation and of time; in other words we maintain that Scripture reveals to us a social Trinity and an intercourse of love apart from and before the existence of the universe. Love before time implies distinctions of personality before time. There are three eternal consciousnesses and three eternal wills in the divine nature. We here state only the fact,—the explanation of it, and its reconciliation with the fundamental unity of God is treated in our next section. We now proceed to show that the two varying systems which ignore this tripersonality are unscriptural and at the same time exposed to philosophical objection.
2. Errors refuted by the foregoing passages.
A. The Sabellian.
Sabellius (of Ptolemais in Pentapolis, 250) held that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are mere developments or revelations to creatures, in time, of the otherwise concealed Godhead—developments which, since creatures will always exist, are not transitory, but which at the same time are not eternal a parte ante. God as united to the creation is Father; God as united to Jesus Christ is Son; God as united to the church is Holy Spirit. The Trinity of Sabellius is therefore an economic and not an immanent Trinity—a Trinity of forms or manifestations, but not a necessary and eternal Trinity in the divine nature.
Some have interpreted Sabellius as denying that the Trinity is eternal a parte post, as well as a parte ante, and as holding that, when the purpose of these temporary manifestations is accomplished, the Triad is resolved into the Monad. This view easily merges in another, which makes the persons of the Trinity mere names for the ever shifting phases of the divine activity.
The best statement of the Sabellian doctrine, according to the interpretation first mentioned, is that of Schleiermacher, translated with comments by Moses Stuart, in Biblical Repository, 6:1-16. The one unchanging God is differently reflected from the world on account of the world's different receptivities. Praxeas of Rome (200) Noetus of Smyrna (230), and Beryl of Arabia (250) advocated substantially the same views. They were called Monarchians (μόνη ἀρχή), because they believed not in the Triad, but only in the Monad. They were called Patripassians, because they held that, as Christ is only God in human form, and this God suffers, therefore the Father suffers. Knight, Colloquia Peripatetica, xlii, suggests a connection between Sabellianism and Emanationism. See this Compendium, on Theories which oppose Creation.