A. It is essential to any proper theism.
Neither God's independence nor God's blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God's perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately leads, as in Mohammedanism, and in modern Judaism and Unitarianism, to Pantheism. “Love is an impossible exercise to a solitary being.” Without Trinity we cannot hold to a living Unity in the Godhead.
Brit. and For. Evang. Rev., Jan. 1882:35-63—“The problem is to find a perfect objective, congruous and fitting, for a perfect intelligence, and the answer is: ‘a perfect intelligence.’ ” The author of this article quotes James Martineau, the Unitarian philosopher, as follows: “There is only one resource left for completing the needful Objectivity for God, viz., to admit in some form the coëval existence of matter, as the condition or medium of the divine agency or manifestation. Failing the proof [of the absolute origination of matter] we are left with the divine cause, and the material conditionof all nature, in eternal co-presence and relation, as supreme object and rudimentary object.” See also Martineau, Study, 1:405—“In denying that a plurality of self-existences is possible, I mean to speak only of self-existent causes. A self-existence which is not a cause is by no means excluded, so far as I can see, by a self-existence which is a cause; nay, is even required for the exercise of its causality.” Here we see that Martineau's Unitarianism logically drove him into Dualism. But God's blessedness, upon this principle, requires not merely an eternal universe but an infinite universe, for nothing less will afford fit object for an infinite mind. Yet a God who is necessarily bound to the universe, or by whose side a universe, which is not himself, eternally exists, is not infinite, independent, or free. The only exit from this difficulty is in denying God's self-consciousness and self-determination, or in other words, exchanging our theism for dualism, and our dualism for pantheism.
E. H. Johnson, in Bib. Sac., July, 1892:379, quotes from Oxenham's Catholic Doctrine of the Atonement, 108, 109—“Forty years ago James Martineau wrote to George Macdonald: ‘Neither my intellectual preference nor my moral admiration goes heartily with the Unitarian heroes, sects or productions, of any age. Ebionites, Arians, Socinians, all seem to me to contrast unfavorably with their opponents, and to exhibit a type of thought far less worthy, on the whole, of the true genius of Christianity.’ In his paper entitled A Way out of the Unitarian Controversy, Martineau says that the Unitarian worships the Father; the Trinitarian worships the Son: ‘But he who is the Son in one creed is the Father in the other.... The two creeds are agreed in that which constitutes the pith and kernel of both. The Father is God in his primeval essence. But God, as manifested, is the Son.’ ” Dr. Johnson adds: “So Martineau, after a lifelong service in a Unitarian pulpit and professorship, at length publicly accepts for truth the substance of that doctrine which, in common with the church, he has found so profitable, and tells Unitarians that they and we alike worship the Son, because all that we know of [pg 348]God was revealed by act of the Son.” After he had reached his eightieth year, Martineau withdrew from the Unitarian body, though he never formally united with any Trinitarian church.
H. C. Minton, in Princeton Rev., 1903:655-659, has quoted some of Martineau's most significant utterances, such as the following: “The great strength of the orthodox doctrine lies, no doubt, in the appeal it makes to the inward ‘sense of sin,’—that sad weight whose burden oppresses every serious soul. And the great weakness of Unitarianism has been its insensibility to this abiding sorrow of the human consciousness. But the orthodox remedy is surely the most terrible of all mistakes, viz., to get rid of the burden, by throwing it on Christ or permitting him to take it.... For myself I own that the literature to which I turn for the nurture and inspiration of Faith, Hope and Love is almost exclusively the product of orthodox versions of the Christian religion. The Hymns of the Wesleys, the Prayers of the Friends, the Meditations of Law and Tauler, have a quickening and elevating power which I rarely feel in the books on our Unitarian shelves.... Yet I can less than ever appropriate, or even intellectually excuse, any distinctive article of the Trinitarian scheme of salvation.”
Whiton, Gloria Patri, 23-26, seeks to reconcile the two forms of belief by asserting that “both Trinitarians and Unitarians are coming to regard human nature as essentially one with the divine. The Nicene Fathers builded better than they knew, when they declared Christ homoousios with the Father. We assert the same of mankind.”But here Whiton goes beyond the warrant of Scripture. Of none but the only begotten Son can it be said that before Abraham was born he was, and that in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily (John 8:57; Col. 2:9).
Unitarianism has repeatedly demonstrated its logical insufficiency by this “facilis descensus Averno,” this lapse from theism into pantheism. In New England the high Arianism of Channing degenerated into the half-fledged pantheism of Theodore Parker, and the full-fledged pantheism of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Modern Judaism is pantheistic in its philosophy, and such also was the later Arabic philosophy of Mohammedanism. Single personality is felt to be insufficient to the mind's conception of Absolute Perfection. We shrink from the thought of an eternally lonely God. “We take refuge in the term ‘Godhead.’ The literati find relief in speaking of ‘the gods.’ ”Twesten (translated in Bib. Sac., 3:502)—“There may be in polytheism an element of truth, though disfigured and misunderstood. John of Damascus boasted that the Christian Trinity stood midway between the abstract monotheism of the Jews and the idolatrous polytheism of the Greeks.” Twesten, quoted in Shedd, Dogm. Theology, 1:255—“There is a πλήρωμα in God. Trinity does not contradict Unity, but only that solitariness which is inconsistent with the living plenitude and blessedness ascribed to God in Scripture, and which God possesses in himself and independently of the finite.”Shedd himself remarks: “The attempt of the Deist and the Socinian to construct the doctrine of divine Unity is a failure, because it fails to construct the doctrine of the divine Personality. It contends by implication that God can be self-knowing as a single subject merely, without an object; without the distinctions involved in the subject contemplating, the object contemplated, and the perception of the identity of both.”
Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 75—“God is no sterile and motionless unit.” Bp. Phillips Brooks: “Unitarianism has got the notion of God as tight and individual as it is possible to make it, and is dying of its meagre Deity.” Unitarianism is not the doctrine of one God—for the Trinitarian holds to this; it is rather the unipersonality of this one God. The divine nature demands either an eternal Christ or an eternal creation. Dr. Calthorp, the Unitarian, of Syracuse, therefore consistently declares that “Nature and God are the same.” It is the old worship of Baal and Ashtaroth—the deification of power and pleasure. For “Nature” includes everything—all bad impulses as well as good. When a man discovers gravity, he has not discovered God, but only one of the manifestations of God.
Gordon, Christ of To-day, 112—“The supreme divinity of Jesus Christ is but the sovereign expression in human history of the great law of difference in identity that runs through the entire universe and that has its home in the heart of the Godhead.”Even James Freeman Clarke, in his Orthodoxy, its Truths and Errors, 436, admits that “there is an essential truth hidden in the idea of the Trinity. While the church doctrine, in every form which it has taken, has failed to satisfy the human intellect, the human heart has clung to the substance contained in them all.” William Adams Brown: “If God is by nature love, he must be by nature social. Fatherhood and Sonship must be immanent in him. In him the limitations of finite personality are removed.” But Dr. Brown wrongly adds: “Not the mysteries of God's being, as he is [pg 349]in himself, but as he is revealed, are opened to us in this doctrine.” Similarly P. S. Moxom: “I do not know how it is possible to predicate any moral quality of a person who is absolutely out of relation to other persons. If God were conceived of as solitary in the universe, he could not be characterized as righteous.” But Dr. Moxom erroneously thinks that these other moral personalities must be outside of God. We maintain that righteousness, like love, requires only plurality of persons within the God-head. See Thomasius, Christi Person und Werk, 1:105, 156. For the pantheistic view, see Strauss, Glaubenslehre, 1:462-524.
W. L. Walker, Christian Theism, 317, quotes Dr. Paul Carus, Primer of Philosophy, 101—“We cannot even conceive of God without attributing trinity to him. An absolute unity would be non-existence. God, if thought of as real and active, involves an antithesis, which may be formulated as God and World, or natura naturans and natura naturata, or in some other way. This antithesis implies already the trinity-conception. When we think of God, not only as that which is eternal and immutable in existence, but also as that which changes, grows, and evolves, we cannot escape the result and we must progress to a triune God-idea. The conception of a God-man, of a Savior, of God revealed in evolution, brings out the antithesis of God Father and God Son, and the very conception of this relation implies God the Spirit that proceeds from both.”This confession of an economic Trinity is a rational one only as it implies a Trinity immanent and eternal.