These three personages then are of equal dignity in the Godhead, according to the teachings of the New Testament, which teachings, I pray you keep in mind, we most heartily accept.
This simple Christian teaching respecting the Godhead, gave birth to what in ecclesiastical history is called "The Apostles' Creed." A vague tradition hath it that before the Apostles dispersed to go into the world to preach the gospel they formulated a creed with respect of the Church's belief in God. Whether that tradition be true or not, I do not know, and for matter of that, it makes little difference. Suffice it to say that the so-called "Apostles' Creed," for two centuries expressed the faith of the early Christians upon the question of God. It stands as follows:
I believe in God, the Father, Almighty; and in Jesus Christ, his only Begotten Son, our Lord, who was born of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost, was crucified under Pontius Pilate, buried, arose from the dead on the third day, ascended to the heavens, and sits at the right hand of the Father, whence he will come, to judge the living and the dead; and in the Holy Ghost.
This was the first formulated Christian creed upon the subject of the Godhead, so far as known; and the ancient saints were content to allow this expression of their belief to excite their reverence without arousing their curiosity as to the nature of God. Happy, perhaps, for this world, certainly it would have contributed to the honor of ecclesiastical history, had this simple formula of the New Testament doctrine respecting God been allowed to stand sufficient until it should please God to raise the curtain yet a little more and give definite revelation with respect of himself and especially of his own nature. But this did not satisfy the so-called Christians at the close of the third and the beginning of the fourth century. By a succession of most bitter and cruel persecutions, the great, strong characters among the Christians by that time had been stricken down; and, as some of our historians record it, only weak and timorous men were left in the church to grapple with the rising power of "science, falsely so-called."[A] For a long time the paganization of the Christian religion had been going on. The men who esteemed themselves to be philosophers must needs corrupt the simple truth of the "Apostles' Creed" respecting the three persons of the Godhead, by the false philosophies of the orient, and the idle speculations of the Greeks; until this simple expression of Christian faith in God was changed from what we find it in the "Apostle's Creed" to the "Athanasian Creed," and those vain philosophizings and definitions which have grown out of it, and which reduce the dignity of the Godhead to a mere vacuum—to a "being" impersonal, incorporeal, without body, without parts, without passions; and I might add also, without sense or reason or any attribute—an absolute nonentity, which they placed in the seat of God, and attempted to confer upon this conception divine powers, clothe it with divine attributes, and give it title, knee and adoration—in a word, divine honors!
[Footnote A: See Mosheim's Eccl. Hist. Cent. iv. bk. ii, ch. i, (note.)]
Let us now consider the form of God. In those scriptures which take us back to the days of creation, when God created the earth and all things therein—God is represented as saying to someone:
Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. * * * So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them.
Now, if that were untouched by "philosophy," I think it would not be difficult to understand. Man was created in the image and likeness of God. What idea does this language convey to the mind of man, except that man, when his creation was completed, stood forth the counterpart of God in form? But our philosophers have not been willing to let it stand so. They will not have God limited to any form. They will not have him prescribed by the extensions of his person to some line or other of limitation. No; he must needs be in his person, as well as in mind or spirit, all-pervading, filling the universe, with a center nowhere, with a circumference everywhere. We must expand the person of God out until it fills the universe. And so they tell us that this plain, simple, straightforward language of Moses, which says that man was created in the image of God—and which everybody can understand—means, not the image of God's personality, but God's "moral image!" Man was created in the "moral image" of God, they say.
It is rather refreshing in the midst of so much nonsense that is uttered upon this subject, in order to hide the truth and perpetuate the false notions of a paganized Christianity, to find now and then a Christian scholar who rises out of the vagaries of modern Christianity and proclaims the straightforward truth. Let me read to you the words of such an one—the Rev Dr. Charles A. Briggs; and this note will be found in the Manual that your Improvement Associations will use the coming winter. It may be said, of course, by our Presbyterian friends, that Dr. Briggs is a heretic; that he has been cast out of their church. Grant it; but with open arms, he has been received by the Episcopal church, and ordained into its priesthood; and has an influence that is considerable in the Christian world, notwithstanding the door of the Presbyterian church was shut in his face. But however heretical Dr. Briggs' opinions may be considered by his former Presbyterian brethren, his scholarship at least cannot be challenged. Speaking of man being formed in the image and likeness of God, he says:
Some theologians refer the form to the higher nature of man [that is, to that "moral image" in likeness of which it is supposed man was created]; but there is nothing in the text or context to suggest such an interpretation. The context urges us to think of the entire man as distinguished from the lower forms of creation,—that which is essential to man, and may be communicated by descent to his seed.—The bodily form cannot be excluded from the representation.[A]