the Trinity sums up the essential contents of Christianity and concentres in itself its highest practical power, that "it is the sum and summit of Christian truth." Bap- It is the central reality on which the church is organized. tism is the sacrament of admission to the Christian church. all ages and nations, whoever enters it is to see the triune name emblazoned over its gateway, and in being admitted into the church is to be baptized into the one name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. It is central in the worship of the church. Baptism itself is worship in its highest form. The confession and consecration involved in it imply that the Trinity is central in all the worship in which Christians evermore express their trust and joy in God who has redeemed them from sin. The other sacrament, the Lord's Supper, was instituted by Christ, to be observed in remembrance of him by all Christians so long as his church shall exist on earth. This sacrament also is worship in its highest form, and of that worship the God in Christ is the centre. All access to the Father is in the name of Christ and under the quickening of the Holy Spirit. Accordingly in all ages the Trinity has been the theme of the benedictions, the doxologies, and the ascriptions of praise in the Christian church. The Trinity is central in the teaching and work of the church. Christ gives his church the great commission to go into all the world and to preach the gospel. Here he institutes the ministry of the word to be perpetuated in the church through all ages. And all this is in order to make all men disciples of Christ, and to bring them into the church by baptism in the one name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Thus, evermore, as the central theme of all Christian preaching and the condensed but comprehensive formula of the doctrine of redemption which is to be preached, the Trinity is central in all Christian work, carrying the glad tidings of redemption through all the world, and gathering all men into the kingdom of Christ. It has been a common impression that the doctrine of the Trinity is only a speculative theory, "a scholastic figment," having no practical significance or power. The falsity of this impression is evident when it is seen that Christ presents this doctrine as central in the organization, the worship, the teaching, and the doctrine taught, and the work of the Christian church. II. The Trinity as revealed in the God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself gives to Christianity, as revelation, doctrine, and life, its distinctive and essential significance and power. 1. It is essential to the distinctive significance of the Christian revelation. Christianity takes up into itself all truth recognized in the ethnic religions, all that God has revealed of himself through nature, through the constitution of man and the light of reason and conscience, and through man's spiritual environment, which is the all-encompassing presence of God acting on him and presenting himself in his consciousness. But Christianity in its distinctive essence rests on the revelation of God by his action in human history redeeming man from sin, as recorded in the Bible. This action began as soon as man sinned, and culminates in Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit " on all flesh." The God in Christ, God's redemption of men through him, and the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth under his Messianic reign, and the agency of the Holy Spirit sent from the Father by the Son, are the essence of this whole historical action, and ingrained in the biblical record of it, and the conception of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is fully revealed in them, and especially is inwrought into the New Testament. 2. The doctrine of the Trinity as revealed in Christ gives significance and harmony to the system of Christian doctrines. It is like the keel of a ship, stretching the whole length of the structure, giving support to every timber, and binding the whole structure together. It has been shown that the denial of this doctrine opens the way to one-sided and erroneous views of God. It equally changes the conception of man. We lose the ideas of the dignity and worth of man, the sacredness of his rights, the equality and brotherhood of men before God, which Christ has made powers in civilization. We lose also the consecration which Christ has given to human life, and all the inspiration which comes from him to realize the ideal perfection of man in ourselves and to secure it for mankind in the kingdom of Christ. The denial changes also the conception of man as a sinner and of the nature of sin. If Christ is only a man, then man needs only instruction and development; he needs no redemption from sin. Then what we have called sin becomes only a necessary step in his development, and ceases to be sin for which the man is blameworthy. As a recent Unitarian writer says, the fall of man was "a stumble up the altar-stairs of creation into the light of a new moral universe." Thus the whole conception of God's moral government and of a moral system disappears. Man is not a personal free agent; he is evolved through the necessary processes of his nature like a plant. And the denial of redemption annuls all the doctrines of Christianity involved in the fact of redemption through Christ from condemnation and sin. The central doctrines of atonement by Christ, of regeneration and sanctification by the Holy Spirit, and of justification by faith disappear, and with them all the distinctive doctrines of the gospel of Christ. The proclamation of his coming is no more glad tidings of great joy to all the people. 3. The Trinity as revealed in Christ is of vital moment in the practical experience and work of the Christian life. The doctrine of the New Testament is that the Christian life begins and goes on by faith in the God in Christ. John presents to us Christ as bringing into the world the divine light and life and love, and pouring them on human spirits to illuminate, vitalize, inspire, and transform them. Pre-eminently, it is God's love which is revealed in Christ, quickening and inspiring men to love like his. In this revelation man sees his own sinfulness, his alienation from God, his deserved condemnation, his need of forgiveness and of a mediator between God and himself. In the God in Christ the mediator is revealed, reconciling the world unto himself. In him he trusts. Through him he is justified by faith; he rejoices in the forgiveness of sin, in reconciliation and peace with God; he is transformed into Christ's likeness, inspired with his sacrificial love, the same mind is in him which was also in Christ. His life becomes a life of intimacy with God by faith in Christ, and of self-renouncing service of man in love like his. The motive, inspiration, and strength of his Christian life and work come from God in Christ and through the Holy Spirit redeeming men from sin and reconciling them to himself. As a single example I cite Professor Goltz: "My religious experience, in its origin, preservation, and growth, testifies to the central importance of the person of Christ. . . . The cross of Christ first taught me the hatefulness and curse of my sin. . . . I know no period of great stirring in my inner life, no moment of great influence upon my later course, which has not been essenVOL L- -24 tially a renewed and wider shining forth of the glory hid in the person of Christ, and a time when my heart established some new relation toward him. Whatever in my religious development and experience has not come into living contact with this focus has remained a dead knowledge and opinion, but has grown to no life and no power. My inner knowledge of God, learned not in human schools but in the school of the Holy Spirit, has concentrated itself more and more in the face of Jesus Christ. The more I learn to think, the more does God without him become to me the incomprehensible, the inapproachable, the unspeakable. God becomes all the more distant from me, the more my spirit seeks to convince itself of his reality. In Christ the fulness of life of the invisible Father comes near me as life and love, as holiness and brightness, as a being who never ends, a power ever present, and I find access to the inapproachable. In Christ is solved for me the enigma of my own heart and life, this half-way position between sense and spirit, betwixt bond and free, betwixt the entanglement in sin and death and the destiny to eternal life, between the weak impure beginning and the aim of perfection. The enigmas of the world about me also lose all their mystery, all their oppressiveness for my mind, when I consider them in the light of God's fatherly management of all things, as that is determined in Christ. . . . Only what comes from him, what beams from his hidden glory, only that has become in me light, power, peace, and blessing." In the moral system as Christ presents it, the ground of the unity of all men is revealed in their common relations to the God in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. All right character and virtuous action are "rooted and grounded in love," that is, in God's love. They are connected with and nourished by the mighty influences of God's redeeming grace sweeping through the course of human history, vitalizing and advancing the kingdom of God. The denial of the Trinity as revealed in the God in Christ changes the conception of the essential character of the right moral life. It sunders morality from religion; emphasizes man's natural ability and freedom while overlooking his dependence on God; emphasizes man's work of righteousness while overlooking the fact that man's normal development is possible 1 H. von d. Goltz, "Die Christliche Grundgedanken oder die allgemeinen Principien der Christlichen Dogmatik," § 93, p. 125. only in union with God through his free and continuous reception of God's prevenient grace and of all the divine influences coming upon and into his soul from God's all-encompassing love. Consequently this denial tends to disintegrate virtue into isolated acts. The great motives and influences which circulate through the moral system from God and vitalize it, which quicken universal love, enthusiasm for humanity and the expectation of human progress to the realization of the kingdom of God on earth, lose their power and ultimately disappear. Instead of the outflow of universal love, morality becomes a doing of duty piecemeal in obedience to the individual conscience. Virtue becomes like a child's flower-garden, cut-flowers stuck in the sand, cut off from all capacity to receive quickening and nourishment from the forces and resources of the great system. of nature. But every plant that lives and grows is rooted into the physical system, quickened and nourished by all its cosmic agencies. So every man, as to his spiritual life, is rooted in God's love, quickened and nourished by the mighty influences and agencies of God's grace sweeping through the ages, quickening the spiritual life of individuals one by one, and so vitalizing and developing his kingdom, living and growing in the world like the corn, first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear. Therefore, when we are met with objections and arguments to draw us away from Christ, we must reply in the words of Peter: "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life" (John vi. 68). Thus it appears that the belief of the doctrine of the Trinity as revealed in Christ and the denial of it do not differ merely on some minor matter of speculation or interpretation. They issue in two radically different systems; and the more fully each is understood and developed the wider the difference is seen to be. It is objected that pure monotheism, denying the Trinity, has an advantage because the belief of it rests on the constitution and religious consciousness of mankind; and that the belief in the historical Christ, historical redemption, and the Trinity "suspends the burdened heart of the world upon the attenuated thread of historical tradition, which the slightest movement of an all-pervading and restless skepticism may break." The answer is, that the revelation of God in the historical Christ takes up and 1 Christian Examiner, vol. 65, Nov. 1858, p. 386. |