Faith and Practice. Frank E. Wilson
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of God, we must organize our thoughts of God or we will never make any constructive progress. That is what we mean by theology—organizing our thoughts about God. We may never be entirely successful, but we can never stop trying.
One of our great difficulties is that we must use words to express ourselves. Since words are a human invention, it is scarcely to be expected that they can ever adequately describe God. Yet they are the only tools at our disposal. Even though we use them with the utmost care we are often confused by the changing shades of meaning which accompany the growth of any living language. Particularly is this true of the English tongue. In our Prayer Book the collect for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity says, “Lord, we pray Thee that Thy grace may always prevent and follow us.” Two or three centuries ago the word “prevent” meant to “go before,” and it was quite in order to pray that God’s grace might go before us and follow us, surrounding us with His gracious Presence. But in the course of time “prevent” has come to mean “to stop” or “to interfere with,” which is not at all what the prayer intends to say. Yet when we have become accustomed to certain forms of devotional expression, it is not easy to change the language.
Or take a word like “rest.” It has several meanings. It means to relax, and it also means to set something down. A negro servant always used to say, “Can I rest your hat?” But this word also means that upon which something is placed, like a book rest. And besides these meanings it also means the “remainder” or that which is left over. When we say a person has gone to his rest, it is a gentle way of indicating that he has died. And so on.
Many centuries ago Christians began to formulate their faith and struggled hard to find words which would be reasonably expressive. The terms they hit upon acquired a certain technical significance, but in the ordinary growth of language many of those same terms took on other meanings in common conversation. Thus we often have to do a little explaining because we cannot rearrange the whole language of theology every time popular usage adds something to the meaning of a word here and there. This is true in the case of the Church’s doctrine of the Holy Trinity.
When the word “person” is used in casual speech, it at ones suggests a separate, distinct, individual human being. Therefore the trinitarian formula, “three Persons in One God,” is quite likely to imply to the average mind three Gods somehow or other combined into one Deity. But that is precisely what the Trinity does not mean. The unity of God (monotheism) is the very heart of all Christian teaching. The words “person” and “substance” were very carefully chosen to indicate that which was united in the unity. “Substance” refers to the essential Being of God which is always one. “Person” does not mean a separate being but a distinct Self. There are three Selfs in one Being—or three Persons in one God. For want of better names we call them Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (or Holy Spirit, which means the same thing), and we differentiate their operations as we attribute creation to the Father, redemption to the Son, and sanctification to the Holy Spirit.
Now, of course, this is raising us into a very thin atmosphere where we are likely to become bewildered. Remember, we are attempting to describe God and our little minds are not altogether efficient instruments for such a task. We can get some insight through analogies, though we recognize that no analogy can go all the way. In my own life I consist of three selfs. I am the subject, object, and umpire of my own actions. When I have a problem to solve, I talk it over with myself and eventually pass judgment on the conversation. Sometimes I say my better self has won the argument. I am a three-fold human being—yet I am only one.
Here is a table which is a material unit. It is made up of length, breadth, and height. Each one is that particular table, yet the table itself requires all three of them.
Or consider the sunlight. It consists of the source of light, the rays which come from the source, and the illumination which is produced. It is not sunshine without all three of them, but each one is distinct from the other two.
Take the well-known combination of hydrogen and oxygen which we call H20. Here it may be found as water, over there it may be ice, and in another place it will be steam. They are all different, but in essence they are exactly the same.
The root, the trunk, the branch are all one wood. The fountain, the stream, the river are all one water. The past, the present, the future are all that mysterious thing which we call time.
Neither any one of such analogies nor all of them taken together can give anything like an exhaustive description of the Holy Trinity but they are at least suggestive. They point the way toward what God must mean to us and check it in with our common experience of life. For our whole conception of God has been a development through the centuries from lower to higher levels as we have advanced in our appreciation of His revelation of Himself. In primitive times people thought of many different gods, which meant polytheism. Then they began to think of one Supreme God while still allowing for the possible existence of other gods, which is what we call monolatry. From that it was a simple step to monotheism—faith in one God beside whom there can be no other. Finally came the unfolding of the One God in three Persons, which is the Holy Trinity.
This is the progressive advancement which one finds in a study of the Holy Scriptures. Traces may be discovered of ail these various stages with hints of God’s three-fold Being appearing here and there and gradually rising above all others. The New Testament is full of allusions in thoroughly personal terms to God the Father, to Jesus Christ as His divine Son, and to the sanctifying activity of the Holy Spirit. Yet the whole Christian record is solidly committed to the essential unity of the One God. In several places this is summed up in very definite trinitarian statements. Our Lord’s “Great Commission” at the close of St. Matthew’s Gospel says emphatically—“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”1 In our Lord’s last discourse as related by St. John we read—“But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in My name, He shall teach you all things.”2 The final benediction in St. Paul’s second Epistle to the Corinthians shows clearly what his teaching must have been—“The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.”3 And the opening salutation in the first Epistle of St. Peter is to the same effect—“Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ.”4 And the practice of the early Church bears this out, for we find in the earliest records (dating from about the end of the first century) that Christians were following literally the injunction given in St. Matthew’s Gospel to baptize converts in the triune Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The subsequent history of the Church leaves no question as to the steady teaching of the Holy Trinity in all parts of Christendom.
People who would like to reduce the Christian religion to a handy system of ethics will be sure to ask why this needs to be so. Admittedly the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is beyond our intellectual grasp, and why should we be loaded down with an intellectual puzzle when a simple faith in the One God might answer all of our needs? The quickest reply is to say that our needs may not be so easily supplied. The divinity of our Lord and the active operation of the Holy Spirit must somehow be fitted in with our faith in the One God if the integrity of the Gospel is to be preserved at all. Certain very practical considerations on these two points will be discussed in later chapters, but just here we would touch on two useful reasons for a doctrine which no one would be likely to manufacture out of his own imagination.
I. In recent years much study has been devoted to the question of personality and we know more about it than we used to. What we have been learning fits neatly into the doctrine of the Holy Trinity which was defined long before anyone ever thought of modern psychology. God must be personal if he is to have any significance to us. You can’t have faith in an idea, you can’t worship a principle, you can’t love an abstraction. The whole of human life is built around the personal equation. It would indeed be a puzzle to conceive of a Creator of a thoroughly personalized human life who was not Himself possessed of personal qualities. That would be too much like thinking of an author who could not read or a singer without a voice. Our imaginations would expire under such a strain.
Well—the