If there be no Trinity immanent in the divine nature, then Fatherhood in God has had a beginning and it may have an end; Sonship, moreover, is no longer a perfection, but an imperfection, ordained for a temporary purpose. But if fatherly giving and filial receiving are eternal in God, then the law of love requires of us conformity to God in both these respects as the highest dignity of our being.
See Hutton, Essays, 1:232—“The Trinity tells us something of God's absolute and essential nature; not simply what he is to us, but what he is in himself. If Christ is the eternal Son of the Father, God is indeed and in essence a Father; the social nature, the spring of love is of the very essence of the eternal Being; the communication of life, the reciprocation of affection dates from beyond time, belongs to the very being of God. The Unitarian idea of a solitary God profoundly affects our conception of God, reduces it to mere power, identifies God with abstract cause and thought. Love is grounded in power, not power in love. The Father is merged in the omniscient and omnipotent genius of the universe.” Hence 1 John 2:23—“Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father.”D'Arcy, Idealism and Theology, 204—“If God be simply one great person, then we have to think of him as waiting until the whole process of creation has been accomplished before his love can find an object upon which to bestow itself. His love belongs, in that case, not to his inmost essence, but to his relation to some of his creatures. The words ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8) become a rhetorical exaggeration, rather than the expression of a truth about the divine nature.”
Hutton, Essays, 1:239—“We need also the inspiration and help of a perfect filial will. We cannot conceive of the Father as sharing in that dependent attitude of spirit which is our chief spiritual want. It is a Father's perfection to originate—a Son's to receive. We need sympathy and aid in this receptive life; hence, the help of the true Son. Humility, self-sacrifice, submission, are heavenly, eternal, divine. Christ's filial life to the root of all filial life in us. See Gal. 2:19, 20—‘it is no longer I that live, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.’” Thomas Erskine of Linlathen, The Spiritual Order, 233—“There is nothing degrading in this dependence, for we share it with the eternal Son.” Gore, Incarnation, 162—“God can limit himself by the conditions of manhood, because the Godhead contains in itself eternally the prototype of human self-sacrifice and self-limitation, for God is love.” On the practical lessons and uses of the doctrine of the Trinity, see Presb. and Ref. Rev., Oct 1902:524-550—art. by R. M. Edgar; also sermon by Ganse, in South Church Lectures, 300-310. On the doctrine in general, see Robie, in Bib. Sac., 27:262-289; Pease, Philosophy of Trinitarian Doctrine; N. W. Taylor, Revealed Theology, 1:133; Schultz, Lehre von der Gottheit Christi.
On heathen trinities, see Bib. Repos., 6:116; Christlieb, Mod. Doubt and Christian Belief, 266, 267—“Lao-tse says, 600 B. C., ‘Tao, the intelligent principle of all being, is by nature one; the first begat the second; both together begat the third; these three made all things.’ ” The Egyptian triad of Abydos was Osiris, Isis his wife, and Horus their Son. But these were no true persons; for not only did the Son proceed from the Father, but the Father proceeded from the Son; the Egyptian trinity was pantheistic in its meaning. See Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 29; Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World, 46, 47. The Trinity of the Vedas was Dyaus, Indra, Agni. Derived from the three dimensions of space? Or from the family—father, mother, son? Man creates God in his own image, and sees family life in the Godhead?
The Brahman Trimurti or Trinity, to the members of which are given the names Brahma, Vishnu, Siva—source, supporter, end—is a personification of the pantheistic All, which dwells equally in good and evil, in god and man. The three are represented in the three mystic letters of the syllable Om, or Aum, and by the image at Elephanta of three heads and one body; see Hardwick, Christ and Other Masters, 1:276. The [pg 352]places of the three are interchangeable. Williams: “In the three persons the one God is shown; Each first in place, each last, not one alone; Of Siva, Vishnu, Brahma, each may be, First, second, third, among the blessed three.” There are ten incarnations of Vishnu for men's salvation in various times of need; and the one Spirit which temporarily invests itself with the qualities of matter is reduced to its original essence at the end of the æon (Kalpa). This is only a grosser form of Sabellianism, or of a modal Trinity. According to Renouf it is not older than A. D. 1400. Buddhism in later times had its triad. Buddha, or Intelligence, the first principle, associated with Dharma, or Law, the principle of matter, through the combining influence of Sangha, or Order, the mediating principle. See Kellogg, The Light of Asia and the Light of the World, 184, 355. It is probably from a Christian source.
The Greek trinity was composed of Zeus, Athena, and Apollo. Apollo or Loxias (λόγος) utters the decisions of Zeus. “These three surpass all the other gods in moral character and in providential care over the universe. They sustain such intimate and endearing relations to each other, that they may be said to ‘agree in one’ ”; see Tyler, Theol. of Greek Poets, 170, 171; Gladstone, Studies of Homer, vol. 2, sec. 2. Yet the Greek trinity, while it gives us three persons, does not give us oneness of essence. It is a system of tritheism. Plotinus, 300 A. D., gives us a philosophical Trinity in his τὸ ἔν, ὁ νοῦς, ἡ ψυχή.
Watts, New Apologetic, 195—The heathen trinities are “residuary fragments of the lost knowledge of God, not different stages in a process of theological evolution, but evidence of a moral and spiritual degradation.” John Caird, Fund. Ideas of Christianity, 92—“In the Vedas the various individual divinities are separated by no hard and fast distinction from each other. They are only names for one indivisible whole, of which the particular divinity invoked at any one time is the type or representative. There is a latent recognition of a unity beneath all the multiplicity of the objects of adoration. The personal or anthropomorphic element is never employed as it is in the Greek and Roman mythology. The personality ascribed to Mitra or Varuna or Indra or Agni is scarcely more real than our modern smiling heaven or whispering breeze or sullen moaning restless sea. ‘There is but one,’ they say, ‘though the poets call him by different names.’ The all-embracing heaven, mighty nature, is the reality behind each of these partial manifestations. The pantheistic element which was implicit in the Vedic phase of Indian religion becomes explicit in Brahmanism, and in particular in the so-called Indian systems of philosophy and in the great Indian epic poems. They seek to find in the flux and variety of things the permanent underlying essence. That is Brahma. So Spinoza sought rest in the one eternal substance, and he wished to look at all things ‘under the form of eternity.’ All things and beings are forms of one whole, of the infinite substance which we call God.” See also L. L. Paine, Ethnic Trinities.
The gropings of the heathen religions after a trinity in God, together with their inability to construct a consistent scheme of it, are evidence of a rational want in human nature which only the Christian doctrine is able to supply. This power to satisfy the inmost needs of the believer is proof of its truth. We close our treatment with the words of Jeremy Taylor: “He who goes about to speak of the mystery of the Trinity, and does it by words and names of man's invention, talking of essence and existences, hypostases and personalities, priority in coëquality, and unity in pluralities, may amuse himself and build a tabernacle in his head, and talk something—he knows not what; but the renewed man, that feels the power of the Father, to whom the Son is become wisdom, sanctification, and redemption, in whose heart the love of the Spirit of God is shed abroad—this man, though he understand nothing of what is unintelligible, yet he alone truly understands the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.”