Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors

by James Freeman Clarke

He quotes the passage from Eph. 1:20, 21, and says, “Can this be a creature?” We reply, “Can he be anything but a creature?—he who was set by God in this place of honor.” Does God set God, as a reward, above principalities and powers? Does God make God “head over all things in the Church”? Again: Dr. Huntington quotes, “that, at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow, and every tongue confess that he is Lord;” but he omits the conclusion, “to the glory of God the Father.”

He even quotes the passage, “Him hath God exalted to give repentance and forgiveness of sin.”

And he quotes the passage, which has staggered the strongest believers in the Trinity, where Paul declares (1 Cor. ch. 15), that, at the end, Christ will give up his kingdom to the Father, that “God may be all in all,” and explains it as meaning that “he will resume his place in the coequal Three, the indivisible One.” Has he left his place, then? Is that Orthodox? Dr. Huntington evidently thinks so; for he says, “The Son, in his character of Sonship, is retaken, so to speak, into the everlasting undivided One.” So to speak. We may speak so: “But what do we mean by it?” is the question. Did God the Son leave his place in the Godhead? Did he become less than God? Did he become ignorant? Did he suffer and die? Did he arise, and at last reascend, and take his place, “so to speak,” in the Godhead? If this is meant as real statement, what better is it than the Avatars of Vishnu? What sort of Unity is left to us? We have a Trinity of council; but where is the Unity, except of agreement? One divine Being descending, and leaving the other divine Being alone, temporarily, on the throne of the universe, until the divine Being who had descended should reascend to take his seat again “in the coequal Three and indivisible One”!

One Unitarian argument, which appears to us unanswerable, is in the fact, that the very passages in which the highest attributes are ascribed to Christ are always those in which his dependence and subordination are most strongly asserted. We could throw aside all the passages in which Jesus asserts directly his inferiority,—as, “My Father is greater than I;” “Of mine own self I can do nothing,”—and take the strongest proof-texts of the Trinitarians, and ask for no better proof for the Unitarian doctrine: “All power is given to me in heaven and earth;” “The image of the invisible God, the first-born of every creature;” “In him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.” Are these passages written of Christ in his divine or human nature? Not his divine nature; for to God the Son all power cannot be “given.” God the Son cannot be “the image of God,” or the “first-born of every creature.” The “fulness of the Godhead” cannot dwell in God the Son. They must, then, be said of him in his human nature; and, if so, they show that the loftiest titles and attributes do not prove him to be God.

V. The good ascribed to the doctrine of the Trinity does not belong to it, but to the truths which underlie it.

Dr. Huntington asserts, for example, that “the Triunity of God appears to be the necessary means of manifesting and supporting in the mind of our race, a faith in the true personality of God.”

If so, it is remarkable that the two forms of religion in which the personality of God, as absolute will, is most distinctly recognized (i.e., the Jewish religion and the Mohammedan religion), should both be ignorant of the Trinity. It is equally remarkable that the most Pantheistic religion in the world, in which the personality of God most entirely disappears (i.e., Braminism), should have a Trinity of its own. It is also remarkable, on this hypothesis, that idolatry in the Christian Church (as worship of Mary, worship of saints and relics, &c.) should come up with the Trinity, and flourish simultaneously with it.

No; it is not the Trinity which brings out most distinctly the personality of God, but the faith in a divine revelation through inspired men. If God can dwell in the souls of men, teaching and guiding them, he must be a person like the soul with which he communes. Especially does the religious consciousness of Jesus, his simple and child-like communion with the heavenly Father, bring God near to the soul as a personal being. It is not the Trinity, but the Christian faith which underlies it, which teaches the divine personality.

Nor is it the doctrine of the Trinity which is necessary for a living faith in God through Christ, reconciling the world unto himself. All that Dr. Huntington says of the evil of sin is well said, but has no bearing on the point before us. According to Dr. Huntington's own witnesses, as we have seen above, the Trinity was unknown in the earlier ages of the Church. Was reconciliation unknown? Was the forgiving love of Christ unknown? If he cannot assert this, the doctrine of the Trinity is not necessary to a living faith in a reconciling God.

Dr. Huntington argues, that only the sufferings, and actual sufferings, of God himself, can touch the sinful heart; and, therefore, the Trinity is true. The conclusion is a long way from the premise, even supposing that to be sound. But as regards the premise, he has read and quoted Mansel. Has he not verged towards the dogmatism which that writer condemns? Would it not be more modest, and better accord with Christian humility, to be satisfied with believing the scriptural assertions, that “God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son;” that “He who spared not his own Son, but gave him up for us all,—shall [pg 507] he not, with him, freely give us all things?” Is not this enough, without an argument to prove that the only way by which man can be saved is the method of a suffering God?