Chapter 13

(6) Behind the doctrine of the Incarnation looms the still more technical doctrine of the Trinity. Yet after all, it is chiefly, I believe, as a sort of necessary background or presupposition to the idea of Christ's divine nature that modern religious people, not professionally interested in Theology, attach importance to that doctrine. They accept the doctrine in so far as it is implied by the teaching of Scripture and by the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity, but they are not much attached to the technicalities of the Athanasian Creed. The great objection to that Creed, apart from the damnatory clauses, is the certainty that it will be misunderstood by most of those who think they understand it at all. The {182} best thing we could do with the Athanasian Creed is to drop it altogether: the next best thing to it is to explain it, or at least so much of it as really interests the ordinary layman--the doctrine of three Persons in one God. And therefore it is important to insist in the strongest possible way that the word 'Person' which has most unfortunately come to be the technical term for what the Greeks more obscurely called the three _huostaseis_ in the Godhead does not, and never did, mean what we commonly understand by Personality--whether in the language of ordinary life or of modern Philosophy. I do not deny that at certain periods Theology did tend to think of the Logos as a distinct being from the Father, a distinct consciousness with thoughts, will, desires, emotions not identical with those of God the Father. The distinction was at times pushed to a point which meant either sheer Tritheism, or something which is incapable of being distinctly realized in thought at all. But that is scarcely true of the Theology which was finally accepted either by East or West. This is most distinctly seen in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas: and I would remind you that you cannot be more orthodox than St. Thomas--the source not only of the Theology professed by the Pope and taught in every Roman Seminary but of the Theology embodied in our own Articles. St. Thomas' explanation of the Trinity {183} is that God is at one and the same time Power or Cause[3] (Father), Wisdom (Son), Will (Holy Ghost); or, since the Will of God is always a loving Will, Love (Amor) is sometimes substituted for Will (Voluntas) in explanation of the Holy Spirit.[4] How little {184} St. Thomas thought of the 'Persons' as separate consciousnesses, is best seen from his doctrine (taken from Augustine) that the love of the Father for the Son is the Holy Spirit. The love of one Being for himself or for another is not a Person in the natural, normal, modern sense of the word: and it would be quite unorthodox to attribute Personality to the Son in any other sense than that in which it is attributed to the Holy Ghost. I do not myself attach any great importance to these technical phrases. I do not {185} deny that the supremely important truth that God has received His fullest revelation in the historical Christ, and that He goes on revealing Himself in the hearts of men, might have been otherwise, more simply, to modern minds more intelligibly, expressed. There are detailed features of the patristic or the scholastic version of the doctrine which involve conceptions to which the most accomplished Professors of Theology would find it difficult or impossible to give a modern meaning. I do not know for instance that much would have been lost had Theology (with the all but canonical writers Clement of Rome and Hermas, with Ignatius, with Justin, with the philosophic Clement of Alexandria) continued to speak indifferently of the Word and the Spirit. Yet taken by itself this Thomist doctrine of the Trinity is one to which it is quite possible to give a perfectly rational meaning, and a meaning probably very much nearer to that which was really intended by its author than the meaning which is usually put upon the Trinitarian formula by popular religious thought. That God is Power, and Wisdom, and Love is simply the essence of Christian Theism--not the less true because few Unitarians would repudiate it.

(7) Once more let me briefly remind you that any claim for finality in the Christian Religion must be based on its power of perpetual development. {186} Belief in the continued work of the Holy Spirit in the Church is an essential element of the Catholic Faith. We need not, with the Ritschlian, contemptuously condemn the whole structure of Christian doctrine because undoubtedly it is a development of what was taught by Christ himself. Only, if we are to justify the development of the past, we must go on to assert the same right and duty of development in Ethics and in Theology for the Church of the future. In the pregnant phrase of Loisy, the development which the Church is most in need of at the present moment is precisely a development in the idea of development itself.

But how can we tell (it may be asked), if we once admit that the development of Religion does not end with the teaching of Christ, where the development will stop? If we are to admit an indefinite possibility of growth and change, how do we know that Christianity itself will not one day be outgrown? If we once admit that the final appeal is to the religious consciousness of the present, we must acknowledge that it is not possible to demonstrate _a priori_ that the Christian Religion is the final, universal, or absolute Religion. All we can say is that we have no difficulty in recognizing that the development which has so far taken place, in so far as it is a development which we can approve and accept, seems to us a development which leaves the {187} Religion still essentially the Religion of Christ. In the whole structure of the modern Christian's religious belief, that which was contributed by Christ himself is incomparably the most important part--the basis of the whole structure. The essentials of Religion and Morality still seem to us to be contained in his teaching as they are contained nowhere else. All the rest that is included in an enlightened modern Christian's religious creed is either a direct working out of the principles already contained there, or (if it has come from other sources) it has been transformed in the process of adaptation. Nothing has been discovered in Religion and Morality which tends in any way to diminish the unique reverence which we feel for the person of Christ, the perfect sufficiency of his character to represent and incarnate for us the character of God. It is a completely gratuitous assumption to suppose that it will ever lose that sufficiency. Even in the development of Science, there comes a time when its fundamentals are virtually beyond the reach of reconsideration. Still more in practical life, mere unmotived, gratuitous possibilities may be disregarded. It weakens the hold of fundamental convictions upon the mind to be perpetually contemplating the possibility or probability of fundamental revision. We ought no doubt to keep the spiritual ear ever open that we may always be hearing what the Spirit saith unto {188} the Churches. But to look forward to a time when any better way will be discovered of thinking of God than Jesus' way of thinking of Him as a loving Father is as gratuitous as to contemplate the probability of something in human life at present unknown being discovered of greater value than Love. Until that discovery is made, our Religion will still remain the Religion of him who, by what he said and by what he was, taught the world to think of God as the supreme Love and the supreme Holiness, the source of all other love and all other holiness.

LITERATURE

The literature is here too vast to mention even the works of the very first importance: I can only select a very few books which have been useful to myself. The late Sir John Seeley's _Ecce Homo_ may be regarded as in the light of modern research a somewhat uncritical book, but it remains to my mind the most striking expression of the appeal which Christ makes to the Conscience of the modern world. It has proved a veritable fifth Gospel to many seekers after light. Bishop Moorhouse's little book, _The Teaching of Christ_, will serve as an introduction to the study of Christ's life and work. A more elaborate treatment of the subject, with which I am very much in sympathy, is Wendt's _Teaching of Jesus_. The ideal life of Christ perhaps remains to be written. Professor Sanday's Article on 'Jesus Christ' in Hastings' _Dictionary of the Bible_ may be mentioned as a good representative of moderate and scholarly Conservatism or Liberal Conservatism. Professor Oscar Holtzmann's _Life of Jesus_ is based on more radical, perhaps over-radical, criticism. Professor Harnack's {189} _What is Christianity?_ has become the typical expression of the Ritschlian attitude. The ideas of extreme Roman Catholic 'Modernism' may be gathered from Loisy's _l'Evangile et l'Eglise_ and _Autour d'un Petit Livre_. Professor Gardner's three books--_Exploratio Evangelica_, the shorter _An Historic View of the New Testament_, and _The Growth of Christianity_--may be especially commended to those who wish to satisfy themselves that a thorough-going recognition of the results of historical Criticism is compatible with a whole-hearted personal acceptance of Christianity. Dr. Fairbairn's _Philosophy of the Christian Religion_ and Bousset's _What is Religion?_ are especially valuable as vindications of the supreme position of Christianity combined with the fullest recognition of the measure of Revelation contained in all the great historical Religions. Allen's _Continuity of Christian Thought_ suggests what seems to me the right attitude of the modern thinker towards traditional dogma, though the author's position is more decidedly 'Hegelian' than mine. I may also mention Professor Inge's contribution to _Contentio Veritatis_ on 'The Personal Christ,' and some of the Essays in _Lux Hominum_. Though I cannot always agree with him, I recognize the high value of the Bishop of Birmingham's Bampton Lectures on _The Divinity of Jesus Christ the Son of God_ and the accompanying volume of _Dissertations_.

[1] In their assertion of the necessity of Development, and of the religious community as the origin of Development, the teaching of the Abbe Loisy and the Roman Catholic Modernists seems to me to be complementary to that of the Kitschlians, though I do not always accept their rather destructive critical conclusions.

[2] In his Essay in _Lux Mundi_ (1889). He has since developed his view in his Bampton Lectures on _The Incarnation of the Son of God_ and a volume of _Dissertations on Subjects connected with the Incarnation_.

[3] I venture thus to translate 'Principium' (_arche_); in Abelard and his disciple Peter the Lombard, the famous Master of the Sentences, the word is 'Potentia' (L. I. Dist. xxxiv.): and St. Thomas himself (P. I. Q. xli. Art. 4) explains 'Principium' by 'Potentia generandi Filium.'

[4] Thus in _Summa Theologica_, Pars I. Q. xxxvii. Art. 1, the 'conclusio' is 'Amor, personaliter acceptus, proprium nomen est Spiritus sancti,' which is explained to mean that there are in the Godhead 'duse processiones: Una per modum intellectus, quae est processio Verbi; alia per modum voluntatis, quae est processio amoris.' So again (_ibid._ Q. xlv. Art. 7): 'In creaturis igitur rationalibus, in quibus est intellectus et voluntas, invenitur repraesentatio Trinitatis per modum imaginis, inquantum invenitur in eis Verbum conceptum, et amor procedens.' In a friendly review of my Essay in _Contentio Veritatis_, in which I endeavoured to expound in a modern form this doctrine, Dr. Sanday (_Journal of Theological Studies_, vol. iv., 1903) wrote: 'One of the passages that seem to me most open to criticism is that on the doctrine of the Trinity (p. 48). "Power, Wisdom, and Will" surely cannot be a sound trichotomy as applied either to human nature or Divine. Surely Power is an expression of Will and not co-ordinate with it. The common division, Power (or Will), Wisdom, and Love is more to the point. Yet Dr. Rashdall identifies the two triads by what I must needs think a looseness of reasoning.' The Margaret Professor of Divinity hardly seems to recognize that he is criticizing the Angelical Doctor and not myself. If Dr. Sanday had had the formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, the result, if less metaphysically subtle, might no doubt have proved more easily intelligible to the modern mind; but the 'identification' of which he complains happens to be part of the traditional doctrine, and I was endeavouring merely to make the best of it for modern Christians. I add St. Thomas' justification of it, which is substantially what I gave in _Contentio Veritatis_ and have repeated above: 'Cum processiones divinas secundum aliquas actiones necesse est accipere, secundum bonitatem, et hujusmodi alia attributa, non accipiuntur aliae processiones, nisi Verbi et amoris, secundum quod Deus suam essentiam, veritatem et bonitatem intelligit et amat' (Q. xxvii. Art. 5). The source of the doctrine is to be found in St. Augustine, who habitually speaks of the Holy Spirit as Amor; but, when he refers to the 'Imago Trinitatia' in man the Spirit is represented sometimes by 'Amor,' sometimes by 'Voluntas' (_de Trin._, L. xiv. cap 7). The other two members of the human triad are with him 'Memoria' (or 'Mens') and 'Intelligentia.'

With regard to the difficulty of distinguishing Power from Will, I was perhaps to blame for not giving St. Thomas' own word 'Principium.' The word 'Principium' means the _pege theoteos_, the ultimate Cause or Source of Being: by 'Voluntas' St. Thomas means that actual putting forth of Power (in knowing and in loving the Word or Thought eternally begotten by God the Father) which is the Holy Ghost. I am far from saying that the details of St. Thomas' doctrine are not open to much criticism: a rough correspondence between his teaching and any view of God's Nature which can commend itself to a modern Philosopher is all that I endeavoured to point out. The modern thinker would no doubt with Dr. Sanday prefer the triad 'Power, Wisdom, Love,' or (I would suggest) 'Feeling, including Love as the highest form of Feeling.' The reason why St. Thomas will not accept such an interpretation is that his Aristotelianism (here not very consonant with the Jewish and Christian view of God) excludes all feeling or emotion from the divine nature; 'Love' has therefore to be identified with 'Will' and not with 'Feeling.' I cannot but think that the Professor might have taken a little more trouble to understand both St. Thomas and myself before accusing either of us of 'looseness of reasoning.'