If I were asked to put my finger on the greatest weakness in present-day thought I should unhesitatingly point out the subject of personality. Men are falling down like ten-pins before the intellectual difficulties of believing in a personal God; and many of them are even doubting the spiritual personality of man. And this is largely due to the fact that they are unable to form any mental picture of personality. One of the beautiful surprises for this generation is that the Fathers in working out the personality of God found the only conception of personality that is true to universal experience. They did not realize that they were analyzing the human spirit as well as God, because their thought was wholly on Him. But they saw God through their own personalities, and if they had not borne God's image they never could have analyzed the personality of God. In this generation we turn their analysis of God upon ourselves and find that it tallies perfectly with our experience. We at last see that the triune, or personal, man soul is the child of the triune, or personal, God Soul; and thus a deeper bond is established between the Father and His child.
The use to which the Church Fathers put this analysis of God's personality was both fortunate and unfortunate. It was fortunate because it enabled them to continue their belief in the deity of Jesus and, at the same time, their belief in the oneness of God. They were still able to oppose polytheism, and yet come to Jesus as the fountain of divine blessing. They worshiped God in the face of Jesus. In other words, they believed in a genuine Incarnation. This was fortunate beyond all calculation. Just how fortunate it was we shall have to illustrate to the best of our ability when we come to the subject of Incarnation. Thus far I have not discussed the Incarnation, neither have I had Jesus in mind while considering the trinity. For in whatever sense God is a trinity, He was such before Jesus was born.
Before discussing the divinity of Jesus we must briefly call attention to the unfortunate use which the Fathers made of their analysis of the personality of God. They thought they had solved the question of Christ's divinity when they took this objective element in the experience of God and clothed it with flesh. Though they denied that these distinctions in God were properly named by the word person, yet they admitted their inability to think of a better term. Then they so wrenched God's personality apart as to send His objective self, which was simply an element in His experience of self-consciousness, into the world to be the Messiah. And though they stoutly maintained that these three elements in God were indivisible, yet God's subjective self could stay far away in heaven while His objective self could go to earth as a man. At the same time each of the three elements in God's experience of self-hood could perform all the functions of a full personality. This was doing the worst possible violence to the personality of God; and it has wrought confusion from that day to this. As we have already seen, it takes these three elements in God's experience to make Him any person at all. The common use made of the subjective, objective, and witnessing elements in the personality of God is pure Tri-Theism, regardless of how they are united. God does not have three personalities that can be scattered about in the universe.
The idea that God's objective experience can go off on a journey, or that it can return to heaven while His witnessing experience in turn goes to earth, leaving the subjective and objective in heaven, is religious illiteracy. Neither God nor any part of God ever goes or comes. The triune, or personal God, is never far enough off to come anywhere. There is no place in the universe where for a moment He is not. He is always the Father, and Creator, and Intelligent Will in whom all creation lives, and moves, and has its being. The second element in God's own act of consciousness did not become incarnate in Jesus; the conscious God Himself entered the life of man.
The baptismal formula, "In the name of God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit," has no reference to the triple element in God's self-consciousness. It beautifully represents the three ways that we are to look at God, if we are to see Him in the fulness of His glory. First, we think of God as He is in Himself, and as He must be to His own infinite thought. Second, we think of Him as He has expressed Himself in nature, in humanity and, best of all, as He has revealed Himself in His obedient Son Jesus. Third, we think of God as the still small voice within, the Soul of our souls, the One to whom we speak when we have shut the door; the one to whom we whisper our deepest secrets, and ask Him if He loves and forgives us. Beyond the fact that the trinity constitutes God a person, it has nothing to do with the deity of Jesus. How God became incarnate is another question; a question to which we now gladly address ourselves.
3. Was Jesus God or a good man only?
At a meeting of city ministers, addressed by one of their own number, the speaker took from Jesus the last shred of divinity. According to this minister, Jesus was a prophet sent from God, and the best of men, but nothing more. A progressive Jewish rabbi asked if this were not the present attitude of all intelligent ministers, and whether they did not, for the sake of expediency, leave the pew in ignorance of their real belief. In the opinion of the rabbi, Jesus was one of the greatest of Jewish reformers, but not the founder of Christian religion. His contention was that Paul founded the Christian Church on a peculiar, psychic experience which came to him on his way to Damascus.
"The Divinity of Jesus" was then assigned to me as a topic for the next meeting. Naturally, I turned to the Scriptures to see what they had to say concerning the relation of God to man. Though expecting to find on this subject a marked degree of difference between the Old and New Testaments, yet I was wholly unprepared for the facts as they appeared. Before presenting my findings, I asked the rabbi to consider whether Jesus was a "Jewish reformer," or a Jewish fulfiller,—it being my conviction that He was the latter. I then stated that, having examined the Old Testament on the relation existing between God and man, I failed to find a single passage recognizing God within the human life; and that no greater surprise than this had come to me in my recent study of the Scriptures. In the Old Testament, the nearest approach to the immanence of God in the soul was the following:
"I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh," and "Is not my dwelling with the humble in heart?" But even here the divine Spirit was only upon them or with them. Never, so far as I could discover, did He dwell in them. In some twenty-four hundred verses, God was represented as sustaining many beautiful and terrible relations to men. This relationship was symbolized by birds, beasts, and natural elements, to the very limit of the imagination. After the most solemn warnings and attractive promises, God would depart from His people for a season and then return with rewards and punishments according to their faithfulness. He scrutinized their inmost thoughts; in fact, He did everything except enter their lives.
On turning to the New Testament, however, I found a startling contrast. God dwelt not only in the hearts but in the bodies of men. "For know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? Yea, ye are the temple of the living God." "Know ye not that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?" "Walk in the Spirit and ye shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." Jesus said, "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, show us the Father? Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?" "The Father abiding in me doeth His works." "In that day ye shall know that I am in the Father and ye in me, and I in you." "If a man love me he will keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him."