2. The Doctrine of the Trinity is not self-contradictory.
This it would be, only if it declared God to be three in the same numerical sense in which he is said to be one. This we do not assert. We assert simply that the same God who is one with respect to his essence is three [pg 346] with respect to the internal distinctions of that essence, or with respect to the modes of his being. The possibility of this cannot be denied, except by assuming that the human mind is in all respects the measure of the divine.
The fact that the ascending scale of life is marked by increasing differentiation of faculty and function should rather lead us to expect in the highest of all beings a nature more complex than our own. In man many faculties are united in one intelligent being, and the more intelligent man is, the more distinct from each other these faculties become; until intellect and affection, conscience and will assume a relative independence, and there arises even the possibility of conflict between them. There is nothing irrational or self-contradictory in the doctrine that in God the leading functions are yet more markedly differentiated, so that they become personal, while at the same time these personalities are united by the fact that they each and equally manifest the one indivisible essence.
Unity is as essential to the Godhead as threeness. The same God who in one respect is three, in another respect is one. We do not say that one God is three Gods, nor that one person is three persons, nor that three Gods are one God, but only that there is one God with three distinctions in his being. We do not refer to the faculties of man as furnishing any proper analogy to the persons of the Godhead; we rather deny that man's nature furnishes any such analogy. Intellect, affection, and will in man are not distinct personalities. If they were personalized, they might furnish such an analogy. F. W. Robertson, Sermons, 3:58, speaks of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as best conceived under the figure of personalized intellect, affection and will. With this agrees the saying of Socrates, who called thought the soul's conversation with itself. See D. W. Simon, in Bib. Sac., Jan. 1887.
Ps. 86:11—“Unite my heart to fear thy name”—intimates a complexity of powers in man, and a possible disorganization due to sin. Only the fear and love of God can reduce our faculties to order and give us peace, purity, and power. When William after a long courtship at length proposed marriage, Mary said that she “unanimously consented.” “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind” (Luke 10:27). Man must not lead a dual life, a double life, like that of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The good life is the unified life. H. H. Bawden: “Theoretically, symmetrical development is the complete criterion. This is the old Greek conception of the perfect life. The term which we translate ‘temperance’ or ‘self-control’ is better expressed by ‘whole-mindedness.’ ”
Illingworth, Personality Divine and Human, 54-80—“Our sense of divine personality culminates in the doctrine of the Trinity. Man's personality is essentially triune, because it consists of a subject, an object, and their relation. What is potential and unrealized triunity in man is complete in God.... Our own personality is triune, but it is a potential unrealized triunity, which is incomplete in itself and must go beyond itself for completion, as for example in the family.... But God's personality has nothing potential or unrealized about it.... Trinity is the most intelligible mode of conceiving of God as personal.”
John Caird, Fundamental Ideas of Christianity, 1:59, 80—“The parts of a stone are all precisely alike; the parts of a skilful mechanism are all different from one another. In which of the two cases is the unity more real—in that in which there is an absence of distinction, or in that in which there is essential difference of form and function, each separate part having an individuality and activity of its own? The highest unities are not simple but complex.” Gordon, Christ of To-day, 106—“All things and persons are modes of one infinite consciousness. Then it is not incredible that there should be three consciousnesses in God. Over against the multitudinous finite personalities are three infinite personalities. This socialism in Deity may be the ground of human society.”
The phenomena of double and even of triple consciousness in one and the same individual confirm this view. This fact of more than one consciousness in a finite creature points towards the possibility of a threefold consciousness in the nature of God. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 102, intimates that the social organism, if it attained the [pg 347]highest level of psychical perfection, might be endowed with personality, and that it now has something resembling it—phenomena of thought and conduct which compel us to conceive of families and communities and nations as having a sort of moral personality which implies responsibility and accountability. “The Zeitgeist,” he says, “is the product of a kind of collective psychology, which is something other than the sum of all the individual minds of a generation.” We do not maintain that any one of these fragmentary or collective consciousnesses attains personality in man, at least in the present life. We only maintain that they indicate that a larger and more complex life is possible than that of which we have common experience, and that there is no necessary contradiction in the doctrine that in the nature of the one and perfect God there are three personal distinctions. R. H. Hutton: “A voluntary self-revelation of the divine mind may be expected to reveal even deeper complexities of spiritual relations in his eternal nature and essence than are found to exist in our humanity—the simplicity of a harmonized complexity, not the simplicity of absolute unity.”