TRINITY, DOCTRINE OF THE. I. The Biblical Doctrine.
The doctrine of the divine Trinity is the summarized statement of the historical revelation of redemption for the Christian consciousness of God. It affirms that God is not only the ruler of the universe, but the Father of Christ, in whom he is perfectly revealed, and the source of a holy and blessed life which transforms nature and is realized in the Church. It constitutes the distinctive characteristic of Christianity as contrasted with Judaism and paganism and is a modification of Christian monotheism. In this, religious thinking may stop with a mere distinction of modes of divine revelation (economic Trinity); or proceed to the assumption of three divine essences (ontological or immanent Trinity). Since the Church has completed this advance from the economic to the immanent concept, the confession of the latter is alone recognized as adequate to a full Christian belief.
I. The Biblical Doctrine: Early dogmatieians were of the opinion that so essential a doctrine as that of the Trinity could not have been unknown to the men of the Old Testament. However, no
modern theologian who clearly disr. Old tinguishes between the degrees of revTestament. elation in the Old and New Testaments can longer maintain such a
view. Only an inaccurate exegesis which
overlooks
the more immediate grounds of interpretation can
see references to the Trinity in the plural form of
the divine name Elohim, the use of the plural in
which refer to permanent forms and media of divine revelation, as the Word of the Lord in Gen.
i.;
Even in the New Testament the doctrine of the Trinity is not enunciated, though it is deduced from a collocation of passages and from the
s. New logic of their premises. The chief NewTeatament. Testament bases for the doctrine of
the Trinity so far as the person of
Christ is concerned briefly follow; for the rest see
Christology.
The primitive Christian view of the
messiahship of Jesus presupposed that he was close
to, and, in some sense, belonged to, God, as the instrument
for the realization of the divine theocracy.
Even Jewish theology had regarded the Messiah as
ideally preexistent, or, more realistically, as reserved for the millennium, though without inquiring
whether he was a creature or not. The early Church,
in like manner, held Christ to be sent from heaven
to earth
(
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II. The Ontological Doctrine: There is no reason to seek for sources or types of the doctrine of the Trinity outside of Christianity or of the Bible, though in the eighteenth century efforts were made to derive the Christian dogma from Plato, and later from Brahmanism and Parseeism, or,
I. The later still, from a Babylonian triad. Eastern Even were the resemblance between
Church, the Christian Trinity and the pagan triads far greater than it is, there could be no serious question of borrowing. The develop ment of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity i$ his torically clear, and its motives are equally well known, being almost exclusively due to Christolog ical speculation. The formulation of the dogma was ruled by the necessity of establishing the abso lute character of the Christian revelation, a process which required the closest association of the his toric Christ with the life and essence of God. At the same time, Christian faith could tolerate neither any menace to monotheism nor any lowering of the person of the Redeemer to a mere function or transitory phenomenon of the Godhead. The Apos tolic Fathers did not feel the relation of the Father and the Son to be a problem, since they either con-sidered the Son simply as an instrument of the Father, or identified him with the Father and the Holy Ghost. The apologetes, on the other hand, who adopted for their basis the concept of the Logos for the interpretation of the person of Jesus, were indeed able to assign the Logos to a place within the revealing activity of God without impairing their monotheism, but could not make sure the concentration of revelation in Christ or his specific relation to the Father. Tertullian, who first formulated the concept trinitas, conceived of a self-disclosing of the Father in the Son and the Holy Ghost for the purpose of revelation preceding revelation itself. Origen completed this phase of development by postulating the eternal independence of the Logos with God. While, however, Origen considers the generation of the Son (of the universe as well) an eternal act, thus making him a partaker of the same essence with the Father, he has no clear idea of the nature of the Holy Ghost. He ,has an idea that the spheres of the persons of the Trinity are concentric; the Father ruling the universe, the Son rational creatures, and the Holy Ghost the saints. The modalistic type of Monarchianism (q.v.) identified the persons of the Father and the Son; while Sabellius (q.v.) held Father, Son, and Holy Ghost to be successive forms of revelation, or "persons" (prosopa) of the Godhead, to which correspond three cosmic periods; namely, of creation and law, redemption, and communion. The advantage of this view was the coordination of the Son with the Father; its disadvantage, the contraction of the religious interest in the permanent mediatorship of Christ, which forced the idea of the hypostasis. A$ Arius intensified the distinction between the Father and the Son into an antithesis between creator and created, and disputed the eternity of the Son, it became necessary to connect with the eternal personal independence of the Son the assertion of his perfect divinity in the sense of,identity of substance with the Father (hornoousios). The result was its authoritative statement in the Nicene Creed (see Constantinopolitan Creed) and its argument in the theology of Athanasius (q.v.), the essential of which is soteriologieal, to conserve the essential mediatorship of Christ. Even Athanasius did not unconditionally rank the Father and the Son equal; nor does he have a technical term for the persons of the Trinity. On the other hand, he prepared the way for the homwousion of the Holy Spirit; for the Spirit, who imparts to man fellowship in the divine nature, must himself share in that nature. The doctrine of the Holy Ghost as thus developed needed only the opposition of the Pneumatomachi (see Macedonius and the Macedonian Sect) t0 be srystallized into the teaching of the Church at the Council of Constantinople in 381. By their distinction between " substance," or " essence," and " hypostasis," related to each other a$ " common " and "peculiar," the Cappadocians created a means of expressing the relation of the Trinity of persons to the unity of essence. According to Gregory Nazianzen (q.v.), the peculiar properties of the three persons
were, respectively, " the state of being not begotten,""of being begotten," and "procession," though
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choresis); though he clung to the superiority of the Father, from whom the Holy Ghost proceeded through the Son.
Augustine (De trinitate; Eng. transl., NPNF, 1st ser., iii.), unlike the Greeks, taught that the unity was neither in Father, Son, nor Spirit; but in the divine being in which all three in like manner participate. Each person is the undivided deity, and the three persons are together the one
God. This is conceivable only as the 2. The idea of person is sublimated somewhat Western like a relation of the deity with itself.
Church. Augustine's interest in reducing theprominence of personality in favor of simplicity or unity was his Neoplatonism. This view diverges from the older modalism in that it rests not upon a theory of succession but of eternal coexistence and of mutual immanence, as shown by his choice of illustrations. These were the analogies of memory, intelligence, and will, resolving themselves in self-consciousness; or, again, of the lover, the loved, and love. It follows from the equality of persons that the Holy Ghost is to be regarded as proceeding from the Son as well as the Father. Thus became possible such formulations as the Athanasian Creed (q.v.). The doctrine of the immanent Trinity, which with Athanasius was most intimately connected with the doctrine of salvation, had now become fully independent of historical revelation, a subject best suited to a mystical contemplative piety. During the Middle Ages the Augustinian formulas prevailed either for mystical absorption or dialectic refinements, without inherent change. The charge of tritheiam (Roscellinus) or countercharge of Sabellianism (Abelard) lay in the nature of the inherited problem, which demanded a delicate poise between unity and difference. Richard of St. Victor (q.v.) endeavored to develop Augustine's speculations, deducing the necessity of a divine self-differentiation from the concept of love. Perfect love requires an object, and in the case of God that object can be only a person equal to himself in eternity, power, and wisdom. But since there can not be two divine substances, the two divine persons must be one and the same substance. The highest love, however, can not be limited to these two, but must rise to conctilectio, through the wish that a third be loved as they love each other. Thus perfect love necessarily leads to the Trinity; and since God is absolute power, he can correspond fully to this requirement of the concept. Thomas Aquinas (q.v.), likewise seeking to remain in. harmony with Augustine, deduced the generation of the Son from the immanent process of divine thought, and the procession of the Holy Ghost from the loving will, without reaching real personal distinctions. Duns Scotus (q.v.), though interested primarily in the latter side of the problem, dared give only a very reserved expression to his tendency.
The Reformers stood upon the ground of the Church catholic. Protestant dogmatics, placing monotheism first, considers God a single divine being in whom three subjects, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, share equally, each of the 3. Protes- three being termed a person. These tantism. persons must not be considered either real parts of the Godhead or individuals of a class, since the divine nature exists entire and undivided in each, so that to each one of them must be ascribed all divine qualities. Each person, how ever, has a distinctive hypostatio character, which has two features: one as regards its mode of being; and the other as regards its mode of revelation. The internal differences rest upon an immanent activity of the deity, and they refer not to the com mon action of the Godhead, but to the distinctive activities of the persons-the generation of the Son by the Father and - the inspiration of the Holy Ghost by the Father and the Son. This generation differs from the creation of the world in that by the latter is established an essentially different exist ence from the creator himself, whereas generation implies a person like the Father in essence. In view of these opera ad infra the three persons have distinct properties: the Father, " paternity "; the Son, " filiation "; and the Holy Ghost, " proces sion." While this would seem to imply priority of the Son over the Holy Ghost, and of the Father over both, as a matter of fact the three persons are absolutely equal in virtue of the identity of their divine essence; and mutually condition each,other. The priority of the Father relates only to " order of subsistence " not to being; it is merely logical, not real. The Father could not be the Father with out the Son, nor could they both be the eternal principles of spirit and life without the procession of the Holy Ghost. In so far as the three persons can be conceived as possessing real distinctions and individualities, the inter-divine life must be re garded as a continuous circle, issuing from the Father, and returning to him through the Son and the Holy Ghost. As regards their mode of revela tion; each of the three persons of the Trinity has specific activities: the Father, creation, preserva tion, and governance; the Son, redemption; and the Holy Ghost, sanctification. Unlike the opera ad infra, these functions (opera ad extra) are undivided activities of the deity and thus common to all three persons; for though a given function is held to be especially appropriate to the hypostatic character of a given person, the possession of the function in question is not denied the other persons. In this sense it may be said that power is especially char acteristic of the Father, love of the Son, and wis dom of the Holy Ghost. It must be borne in mind, however, that dogmatic theology does not offer these explanations as a rational perception of the matter, but it holds the Trinity rather to be a mys tery. These statements must, therefore, be con sidered rather as negative, preventing non-Chris tian views, than as positive elucidations.Turning from these ecclesiastical formulations to their Biblical basis, the essential differences are manifest: (1) The New Testament speaks of the essential unity of the Son with the Father, and regards the Holy Ghost as the indwelling of God
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Individual voices against the doctrine of the Trinity during the Reformation (Haas Denk, J. Campanus, M. Servetus; qq.v.) were followed by Socinianism (see Socinus, Faustus, Socinianism), which rejected the doctrine as opposed
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To speak of three persons in one Godhead is to use an inadequate symbol. The ancient conception of person was elastic enough to admit a recoaleseence after the distinction, but the modern idea of personality as a distinctly self-conscious, self-determining psychical unity would yield only a collective unity as well as extinguish the human self-consciousness of Christ or ascribe to him a double personality. Better is it to speak of three elements, or a threefold eternal determination of the divine being. No theory must impair the personality of the exalted Christ for Christian piety. In him divine grace takes human shape in history, and in unison with the Father he remains the head of the Church. Likewise, God's holiness, transforming the earthly, obtains its historical form in the community of redemption, which joined in the Spirit with God through Christ participates in eternal life. To avoid empty schemata and the barren field of mystical contemplation, in the interest of vital reality, the immanent Trinity must never be isolated from the revealed. The religious value of the doctrine of the Trinity consists alone in expounding the history of revelation as the self-disclosure of the eternal God. The dcitrine is a safeguard against false deistic representations of divine transcendence only when God's wisdom and love are viewed, not in an inscrutable self-evolution beyond, but as a world-immanent redeeming revelation. Against pantheism the surest weapon is the strictly personal, ethical conception of God's loving will, of necessity reverting to the historical revelation. Thus the order ever remains from the triad of revelation to unity and not vice versa, and the doctrine of the immanent Trinity can be no more than a limiting concept.
Bibliography: The question is treated historically in the works on the history of doctrine and on Biblical theology, and dogmatically in those on systematic theology (see in and under Dogma, Dogmatics). Consult also the works cited under Arianism; Christology; GOD; Holy Spirit, etc. The special literature is extensive. On the historical aide consult: T. Maurice, Dissertation on the Oriental Trinities, London, 1800; E. Burton, Testimonies of the Ante-Nicene Fathers to the Doctrine of the Trinity anal of the Divinity of the Holy Ghost, Oxford, 1831; G. S. Faber, The Apostolicity of Trinitarianism, 2 vols., London, 1832; F. C. Baur, Die christliche Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit uud Menschwerdung Gotles in ihrer geschichtlicheu Entwicklurtg, 3 parts, Tübingen, 1841-43; G. A. Meier, Die Lehre you der Trinitat in ihrer historischen Entwicklurtg. Hamburg, 1844; J. R. Beard. Historical and Artistic Illustrations of the Trinity, London, 1846; C. Morgan, The Trinity of Plato and Philo-Judceus, ib. 1853; C. P. Caspari, Der Glaube an die Trinitat Galles in der Kirche des 1. christlichen Jahrhunderts, Leipsic, 1894; L. L. Paine, Critical Hist. of the Evolution of Trinitariareism, Boston, 1900; idem, Ethnic Trinities and their Relation to the Christian Trinity, ib. 1901; A. Beck, Die Triuit&tslehre des heiligen Hilarius you Poitiers, Mainz, 1903; A. Dupin. Le Dogme de la Trinite daps les trois premiers siecles de feglise, Paris, 1907; W. S. Bishop, The Development of Trinitarian Doctrine in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, A Study in Theological Definition, London and New York, 1910; J. Lebreton, Les Origines du dogme de la Trinity, Paris, 1910.
For the doctrinal and apologetic side consult: J. Kidd, Au Essay on the Doctrine of the Trinity: attempting to prove it by Reason and Demonstration founded upon Duration arid Space, London, 1815; F. Schleiermacher, in his Works, part L, vol. ii.; R. W. Landis, A Plea for the Catholic Doctrine of the Trinity, Philadelphia, 1832; J. Zukrigl, Wissenschaftliche Rechtfertigung der christlichen Trinitatslehre, Vienna, 1846; J. Wilson, Unitarian Prin-
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