Phases of Faith; Or, Passages from the History of My Creed

by Francis William Newman

In this period I first discerned the extreme difficulty that there must essentially be, in applying to the Christian Evidences a principle, which, many years before, I had abstractedly received as sound, though it had been a dead letter with me in practice. The Bible (it seemed) contained two sorts of truth. Concerning one sort, man is bound to judge: the other sort is necessarily beyond his ken, and is received only by information from without. The first part of the statement cannot be denied. It would be monstrous to say that we know nothing of geography, history, or morals, except by learning them from the Bible. Geography, history, and other worldly sciences, lie beyond question. As to morals, I had been exceedingly inconsistent and wavering in my theory and in its application; but it now glared upon me, that if man had no independent power of judging, it would have been venial to think Barabbas more virtuous than Jesus. The hearers of Christ or Paul could not draw their knowledge of right and wrong from the New Testament. They had (or needed to have) an inherent power of discerning that his conduct was holy and his doctrine good. To talk about the infirmity or depravity of the human conscience is here quite irrelevant. The conscience of Christ's hearers may have been dim or twisted, but it was their best guide and only guide, as to the question, whether to regard him as a holy prophet: so likewise, as to ourselves, it is evident that we have no guide at all whether to accept or reject the Bible, if we distrust that inward power of judging, (whether called common sense, conscience, or the Spirit of God,)—which is independent of our belief in the Bible. To disparage the internally vouchsafed power of discerning truth without the Bible or other authoritative system, is, to endeavour to set up a universal moral scepticism. He who may not criticize cannot approve.—Well! Let it be admitted that we discern moral truth by a something within us, and that then, admiring the truth so glorious in the Scriptures, we are further led to receive them as the word of God, and therefore to believe them absolutely in respect to the matters which are beyond our ken.

But two difficulties could no longer be dissembled: 1. How are we to draw the line of separation? For instance, would the doctrines of Reprobation and of lasting Fiery Torture with no benefit to the sufferers, belong to the moral part, which we freely criticize; or to the extra-moral part, as to which we passively believe? 2. What is to be done, if in the parts which indisputably lie open to criticism we meet with apparent error?—The second question soon became a practical one with me: but for the reader's convenience I defer it until my Fourth Period, to which it more naturally belongs: for in this Third Period I was principally exercised with controversies that do not vitally touch the authority of the Scripture. Of these the most important were matters contested between Unitarians and Calvinists.

When I had found how exactly the Nicene Creed summed up all that I myself gathered from John and Paul concerning the divine nature of Christ, I naturally referred to this creed, as expressing my convictions, when any unpleasant inquiry arose. I had recently gained the acquaintance of the late excellent Dr. Olinthus Gregory, a man of unimpeached orthodoxy; who met me by the frank avowal, that the Nicene Creed was "a great mistake." He said, that the Arian and the Athanasian difference was not very vital; and that the Scriptural truth lay beyond the Nicene doctrine, which fell short on the same side as Arianism had done. On the contrary, I had learned of an intermediate tenet, called Semi-Arianism, which appeared to me more scriptural than the views of either Athanasius or Arius. Let me bespeak my reader's patience for a little. Arius was judged by Athanasius (I was informed) to be erroneous in two points; 1. in teaching that the Son of God was a creature; i.e. that "begotten" and "made" were two words for the same idea: 2. in teaching, that he had an origin of existence in time; so that there was a distant period at which he was not. Of these two Arian tenets, the Nicene Creed condemned the former only; namely, in the words, "begotten, not made; being of one substance with the Father." But on the latter question the Creed is silent. Those who accepted the Creed, and hereby condemned the great error of Arius that the Son was of different substance from the Father, but nevertheless agreed with Arius in thinking that the Son had a beginning of existence, were called Semi-Arians; and were received into communion by Athanasius, in spite of this disagreement. To me it seemed to be a most unworthy shuffling with words, to say that the Son was begotten, but was never begotten. The very form of our past participle is invented to indicate an event in past time. If the Athanasians alleged that the phrase does not allude to "a coming forth" completed at a definite time, but indicates a process at no time begun and at no time complete, their doctrine could not be expressed by our past-perfect tense begotten. When they compared the derivation of the Son of God from, the Father to the rays of light which ever flow from the natural sun, and argued that if that sun had been eternal, its emanations would be co-eternal, they showed that their true doctrine required the formula—"always being begotten, and as instantly perishing, in order to be rebegotten perpetually." They showed a real disbelief in our English statement "begotten, not made." I overruled the objection, that in the Greek it was not a participle, but a verbal adjective; for it was manifest to me, that a religion which could not be proclaimed in English could not be true; and the very idea of a Creed announcing that Christ was "not begotten, yet begettive," roused in me an unspeakable loathing. Yet surely this would have been Athanasius's most legitimate form of denying Semi-Arianism. In short, the Scriptural phrase, Son of God, conveyed to us either a literal fact, or a metaphor. If literal, the Semi-Arians were clearly right, in saying that sonship implied a beginning of existence. If it was a metaphor, the Athanasians forfeited all right to press the literal sense in proof that the Son must be "of the same substance" as the Father.—Seeing that the Athanasians, in zeal to magnify the Son, had so confounded their good sense, I was certainly startled to find a man of Dr. Olinthus Gregory's moral wisdom treat the Nicenists as in obvious error for not having magnified Christ enough. On so many other sides, however, I met with the new and short creed, "Jesus is Jehovah," that I began to discern Sabellianism to be the prevalent view.

A little later, I fell in with a book of an American Professor, Moses Stuart of Andover, on the subject of the Trinity. Professor Stuart is a very learned man, and thinks for himself. It was a great novelty to me, to find him not only deny the orthodoxy of all the Fathers, (which was little more than Dr. Olinthus Gregory had done,) but avow that from the change in speculative philosophy it was simply impossible for any modern to hold the views prevalent in the third and fourth centuries. Nothing (said he) WAS clearer, than that with us the essential point in Deity is, to be unoriginated, underived; hence with us, a derived God is a self-contradiction, and the very sound of the phrase profane. On the other hand, it is certain that the doctrine of Athanasius, equally as of Arius, was, that the Father is the underived or self-existent God, but the Son is the derived subordinate God. This (argued Stuart) turned upon their belief in the doctrine of Emanations; but as we hold no such philosophical doctrine, the religious theory founded on it is necessarily inadmissible. Professor Stuart then develops his own creed, which appeared to me simple and undeniable Sabellianism.

That Stuart correctly represented the Fathers was clear enough to me; but I nevertheless thought that in this respect the Fathers had honestly made out the doctrine of the Scripture; and I did not at all approve of setting up a battery of modern speculative philosophy against Scriptural doctrine. "How are we to know that the doctrine of Emanations is false? (asked I.) If it is legitimately elicited from Scripture, it is true."—I refused to yield up my creed at this summons. Nevertheless, he left a wound upon me: for I now could not help seeing, that we moderns use the word God in a more limited sense than any ancient nations did. Hebrews and Greeks alike said Gods, to mean any superhuman beings; hence derived God did not sound to them absurd; but I could not deny that in good English it is absurd. This was a very disagreeable discovery: for now, if any one were to ask me whether I believed in the divinity of Christ, I saw it would be dishonest to say simply, Yes; for the interrogator means to ask, whether I hold Christ to be the eternal and underived Source of life; yet if I said No, he would care nothing for my professing to hold the Nicene Creed.

Might not then, after all, Sabellianism be the truth? No: I discerned too plainly what Gibbon states, that the Sabellian, if consistent, is only a concealed Ebionite, or us we now say, a Unitarian, Socinian. As we cannot admit that the Father was slain on the cross, or prayed to himself in the garden, he who will not allow the Father and the Son to be separate persons, but only two names for one person, must divide the Son of God and Jesus into two persons, and so fall back on the very heresy of Socinus which he is struggling to escape.

On the whole, I saw, that however people might call themselves Trinitarians, yet if, like Stuart and all the Evangelicals in Church and Dissent, they turn into a dead letter the generation of the Son of God, and the procession of the Spirit, nothing is possible but Sabellianism or Tritheism: or, indeed, Ditheism, if the Spirit's separate personality is not held. The modern creed is alternately the one or the other, as occasion requires. Sabellians would find themselves out to be mere Unitarians, if they always remained Sabellians: but in fact, they are half their lives Ditheists. They do not aim at consistency; would an upholder of the pseudo-Athanasian creed desire it? Why, that creed teaches, that the height of orthodoxy is to contradict oneself and protest that one does not. Now, however, rose on me the question: Why do I not take the Irish clergyman at his word, and attack him and others as idolaters and worshippers of three Gods? It was unseemly and absurd in him to try to force me into what he must have judged uncharitableness; but it was not the less incumbent on me to find a reply.

I remembered that in past years I had expressly disowned, as obviously unscriptural and absurd, prayers to the Holy Spirit, on the ground that the Spirit is evidently God in the hearts of the faithful, and nothing else: and it did not appear to me that any but a few extreme and rather fanatical persons could be charged with making the Spirit a third God or object of distinct worship. On the other hand, I could not deny that the Son and the Father were thus distinguished to the mind. So indeed John expressly avowed—"truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ." I myself also had prayed sometimes to God and sometimes to Christ, alternately and confusedly. Now, indeed, I was better taught! now I was more logical and consistent! I had found a triumphant answer to the charge of Ditheism, in that I believed the Son to be derived from the Father, and not to be the Unoriginated—No doubt! yet, after all, could I seriously think that morally and spiritually I was either better or worse for this discovery? I could not pretend that I was.

This showed me, that if a man of partially unsound and visionary mind made the angel Gabriel a fourth person in the Godhead, it might cause no difference whatever in the actings of his spirit The great question would be, whether he ascribed the same moral perfection to Gabriel as to the Father. If so, to worship him would be no degradation to the soul; even if absolute omnipotence were not attributed, nay, nor a past eternal existence. It thus became clear to me, that Polytheism as such is not a moral and spiritual, but at most only an intellectual, error; and that its practical evil consists in worshipping beings whom we represent to our imaginations as morally imperfect. Conversely, one who imputes to God sentiments and conduct which in man he would call capricious or cruel, such a one, even if he be as monotheistic as a Mussulman, admits into his soul the whole virus of Idolatry.

Why then did I at all cling to the doctrine of Christ's superior nature, and not admit it among things indifferent? In obedience to the Scripture, I did actually affirm, that, as for as creed is concerned, a man should be admissible into the Church on the bare confession that Jesus was the Christ. Still, I regarded a belief in his superhuman origin as of first-rate importance, for many reasons, and among others, owing to its connexion with the doctrine of the Atonement; on which there is much to be said.