"Center and soul of every sphere,
Yet to each loving heart how near!"
Not only is God lovingly present to every Christian heart, but at the same time He is personally revealed by every human form through which He is permitted to live and love and serve. The pity of it all is that we so often prevent God from using His own body, in which we too live, by causing it to express in word and deed that which is contrary to His thought and love.
Before we take up the subject of the Incarnation, it may be well to consider what is meant by the trinity.
2. The idea of the trinity and how it came about
When we say that God is a trinity we do not mean that there are three Gods. There is just one God who, as we have repeatedly said, is a Loving Intelligent Will.
The idea of the trinity came about in this way:
The early Christians were so deeply impressed by Jesus, and so warmly attached to their Master, that they instinctively adored and worshiped Him; for, somehow, He brought God to them even as He brought them to God. Yet the Christians, like the Jews, strenuously opposed the worship of more than one Divinity. Their stout opposition to Polytheism provoked the retort from their heathen neighbors that Christians should not be so particular about the number of Gods, because they worshiped at least two, a Father God and a Son God,—and three, if they added a Holy Spirit God. So it is not strange that the Christians, to justify their own conduct, were driven to a profound study of Deity. And though they made some grave mistakes, nevertheless they discovered some vital truths concerning the nature of personality which greatly enlarged and enriched their conception of God. It must be remembered that in the early Christian centuries many thought of God as something very remote and placid, like a sea of bliss; being infinitely happy and self-contained, He was at perfect rest. Such a One would not contaminate Himself by being identified with nature or man. To the Christian Gnostics and Jews, the idea that God became incarnate and suffered death on the cross was repugnant. Some believed that it was beneath God even to create a world like ours. They, therefore, attributed creation to lesser divinities. However, in the third century Origen stoutly maintained that God must have created the world. Yet so eminent a man as Origen believed that He created it for "tainted souls."
After much study, the Church Fathers arrived at the conclusion that God was somehow Three in One, a sort of society within Himself,—and they were right. For without something like a social experience in one's self, it is impossible to be a person at all. This is equally true of God or man. To be a person one must know himself, and this he could not do if he were not able to keep company with himself. The pen with which I am writing is not a person because it has no capacity for self-communion. But because I hold fellowship with myself I am a person. Since every human being keeps company with himself more than he does with all other persons put together, may God have mercy on him if he is bad company, if he is not safe to be left alone with himself. A tree may stand alone in infinite solitude, companionless; but for better, for worse, a man must forever remain in his own company, hearing praise or condemnation from his own heart. How is this possible, unless there is something in a man's individual experience that resembles society? In self-knowledge, as in all knowledge, there are the knower and the known. When we commune with ourselves we are, at the same moment, the subject and the object of our own experience. The self that sees may fittingly be called the father of our personality, and with equal propriety the self that we see may be called the begotten of our personality. Thus something resembling father and son is experienced in our first step toward self-knowledge. Whether the capacity to be our own subject and object amounts to much or little, it was this that the Fathers saw and rightly attributed to God.
Furthermore, there is yet another step to be taken in the act of coming to true self-knowledge. By what power does one determine that the person with whom he communes is himself? There is something in our experience resembling a third person, one who recognizes both subject and object and bears witness that they are one. The reader may say, "I can see the first and the second, but I cannot see the third." The self that sees the first and the second is the third. This power by which we complete the unity of our being is by no means trivial, as some may think. There are abnormal personalities who successfully achieve the subjective and objective in their experience and keep up an abnormal communion with themselves from morning till night, who cannot witness true. So they insist that they are "General Jacksons" or "Jesus Christs" or great "railroad magnates." Their personalities have broken down, not because they lack self-consciousness, but because they lack the power of coming to unity. A perfectly sane person, therefore, is subject, object, and witnesser all in one. If God were not this kind of trinity He would not be a person at all.
To grasp so clearly the significance of personality was a great spiritual achievement. The Church Fathers did more than they realized; they described the elements inherent in all personalities. They saved God to the intellect and to the affections by bringing Him out of remote obscurity into the blazing light of moral and spiritual personality. God is personal because He is triune; that is, because He is complex enough to keep company with Himself and to know Himself. If the reader asks "What does all this amount to for us?" my answer is, "It amounts to the difference between a personal God and the deity who is an 'immobile placid sea of bliss.' In the second place it shows the difference between the God who is a Loving Intelligent Will and the materialist's god who is no more than a blind Samson. It also discloses the essential likeness between all personalities, however much they may differ in development."