7. The incomprehensibility of the Trinity for human reason.
We dare not, on the one hand, draw a distinction between the divine person and the divine essence, because Scripture ascribes to each person, not merely the Father, but also the Son and the Holy Spirit, not only a part but the whole of the Godhead. To the Son comes παν το πλήρωμα τής ϑεότητος (Col. 2:9), and the Holy Spirit is absolutely δ ϑεός (Acts 6:4). Luther expresses it this way: 1266) Quomodo distinguatur persona a divinitate ipsa, non est rationis inquirere, nec angelis
1264) The Three Symbols. St. L. X, 1019.
1265) This point is also asserted primarily by the old Lutheran theologians against all who claim that the Trinity cannot be proven from the Old Testament. On the one hand, they say with Luther that the Old Testament testimonies to the Trinity do not have the same clarity as the New Testament testimonies. On the other hand they say with Quenstedt, I, 516: Solis Veteris Testamenti testimoniis (Christus et apostoli) Iudaeos convicerunt et mysteria haec unice ex Scripturis Veteris Testamenti demonstrarunt. Matt. 22:46; Act. 18:24. 28. Aut itaque ελεγχος Christi et apostolorum fuit sufficiens et Iudaei ex solis Veteris Testamenti testimoniis convinci potuerunt, aut inepte Christus et apostoli ex invalido et inidoneo principio cum illis disputarunt; quod dictu impium. [Google] And with Kromayer, Theol. Pos.-pol. I, 146: Mirari subit, quod haec thesis [Trinitatem ex Vetere Testamento. probari posse] ante annos non ita multos ab iis, qui Augustanae Confessionis esse volunt socii, fuerit impugnata. Nec enim ipsos praeterire potuit, quod in conflictu cum Iudaeis, Novum Testamentum non recipientibus, ex solo Vetere Testamento haec thesis a nostratibus tam firmiter fuerit asserta, ut ανίκητος καί ακίνητος hucusque substiterit. [Google]
1266) Opp. v. a.. IV, 474. German: St. L. X, 178.
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comprehensibile. Imo periculosum et cavendum est ibi, ullam esse putari distinctionem, cum sit quaelibet persona ipsissimus et totus Deus. [Google] Luther opposes the scholastics who wanted to put a distinction between divine person and divine being and judges that those scholastics did not know what they were talking about. He says: Prustranea est cogitatio et nihili Scoti et similium, qui formalem vel aliam distinctionem hic finxerunt. Nesciunt, quid loquantur vel affirment, dum talibus sapientiae pharmacis rationem iuvare volunt. Nam utcunque ista subtiliter dici videantur, ratio tamen non capit distinctionem formalem esse aliam quam realem seu essentialem. [Google] On the other hand, we must place between the three persons a distinction not merely imagined, but real, since Scripture describes the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as άλλος καί άλλος και άλλος, and only the Son, not also the Father and Holy Spirit, became man. Thus we stand before the fact which Luther, loc. cit. thus expresses, Ratio non capit, unam rem indistinctam esse tres res distinctas. [“Reason does not hold that one indistinct thing should be three distinct things.”] And this fact, like Luther, also forces us to confess: Excludenda est igitur mathematica et omnis totius creaturae cogitatio in credenda divinitate. [“Therefore mathematics and every thought of the whole creature must be excluded in believing in the divinity.”] Therefore, it cannot be warned seriously enough against all attempts to make the doctrine of the Trinity comprehensible to human reason.
The Attempts at Explanation. The Christian may be reminded of the three persons of the Godhead in the one God by things he sees in the realm of nature, but he is not to cite these things as proof or even as a confirmation of the Trinity.1267) That it is impossible to recognize and to prove the Trinity
1267) Thus Luther (1, 1150 f.) points out that the Fathers "at times adduced and used inconvenient, at times also weak proofs, as among their disciples and hearers, to establish and prove the article of the Trinity". Thus they gave occasion to the Jews to assert that "our whole doctrine of the Trinity is unjust and false." But Luther adds: "If then the foundation is taken [from the clear words of Scripture which teach the Trinity], it is well permitted to declare and adorn the matter with allegory or figure (addere lucem causae et ornare causam). So Augustine himself does not prove the Trinity from the fact that he speaks of three different powers (potentiae) in man, and yet it is a nice thought that one looks for footprints and characteristics (vestigia) of the divine Trinity in man and all creatures at the same time. As Peter Lombard also does, that every thing is ordered and created with gravity, greatness and number; again, that in every thing that has a
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from the realm of nature, results from the fact that the works of God, which refer to the creatures (the creation and preservation of the world), are common to the three persons (opera vel ad extra). On every little grass it stands clearly recognizable to every man who uses his intellect (νους): "God made me." Praesentemque refert quaelibet herba Deum. But on the little grass it is not written: "God the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit made me", because there are not three omnipotent powers and three omnipotent acts, but only one omnipotent power and one omnipotent act according to the number (una numero omnipotentia, una numero actio omnipotentiae) to each person of the divine majesty completely and undividedly. That the one true God, who made and sustains heaven and earth and all that is in them, is Father and Son and Holy Spirit, God tells and teaches us only in his Word, in which he speaks to us in human language, as one man to another man, and reveals to us, as Luther puts it,1268) , "what and how God is inwardly in himself or in his inward being." "Such things are not explored, climbed, or ascended by human reason, but are revealed above from heaven [in God's Word]." Therefore, all evidence for the Trinity taken from the realm of nature must be refrained from.
However, we must also refrain from trying to derive the Holy Trinity through our human thinking (speculation) from the divine essence itself (e.g. from the divine mind and will) or from the divine attributes (e.g. from the attribute of love).1269) In this respect, the later Melanchthon already provided it within the Lutheran Church,
size, consider the length, width and thickness; that in the philosophy be ens verum unum, in the sun its substance, light and heat. With such passages it is impossible to penetrate the adversaries of the Word; but to us they are lovely similes and characteristics of the article of the Trinity, which we have otherwise founded and proved, and which is known to us."
1268) St. L. XII, 629 f.
1269) Cf. on the "Augustinian doctrine of love" De Trin. Richard of St. Victor seeks to show (De Trin. III, 14) that the fellowship of love can be in no less than three persons. (In Philippi, Glaubensl. 2 II, 172.) In our time Sartorius has become known as a representative of the "love trinity" also in America. (The Doctrine of Holy Love, Section I, 7 ff. in Philippi, loc. cit.)
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in the Corpus Doctrinae Misnicum: Filium Dei cogitatione a Patre genitum esse, quia Pater sese intuens et considerans gignat quandam substantialem sui imaginem et permanentem, sicut nostra mens accidentalem et evanescentem gignit. [“That the Son of God was begotten of the Father in thought, because the Father looking and considering himself produces a certain substantial and permanent image of himself, just as our mind produces an accidental and evanescent one.”] The Reformed philologist and theologian Keckermann († 1609) wanted to demonstrate to the anti-Trinitarians that the trinity of persons derives from the very essence of God (promanare) in the sense that God could not be God unless there were three distinct modes of existence or persons. After proving this, he would also bring testimonies from Scripture for the Trinity.1270) Both Melanchthon and Keckermann were able to appeal — in whole or in part — to a whole host of predecessors (from Augustine onward and earlier) for their construct-trinitarian ideas.1271) The Lutheran dogmatists rightly remind us very firmly that the Holy Trinity can only be known and proven from God's revelation in His Word. Quenstedt says1272) against all who want to derive the Son from the divine understanding (per modum intellectionis) and the Holy Spirit from the divine will (per modum volitionis): Destituitur autoritate Sacrae Scripturae. Nullum enim manifestum dictum in Sacris Literis pro ea re habetur, scii. Filium Dei cogitatione vel per intellectum Patris esse genitum, Spiritum Sanctum vero'per voluntatem procedere. [Google] Against Keckermann Quenstedt remarks: Nunquam obtinebit, Dei intellectum, in se reflexum, ex ista reflexione imaginem ab intelligente distinctam producere, Deique voluntatem, in se reflexam, ex ista reflexione amorem a voluntate distinctum spirare. [Google] Quenstedt points out the harm of such speculations with the words: Nihil aliud effecit [Keckermannus] istis ambagibus, quam ut, dum in lubricum rationis collocasset sublime mysterium, adversariis exponeret cavillationibus. [Google]1273)
1270) Quoted from Keckermann's Systema Theol., lib. 1, c. 3, in Gerhard, Loci, L. De Trinitatis Mysterio, § 27.
1271) Cf. Quenstedt 1, 554, Antithesis.<w:t>1272) A. a. Q, p. 559.
1273) Philippi recalled op. cit, p. 181, to a correct statement of Twesten [in his Dogmatics I, 196] that it is questionable to base one's conviction on such supposed philosophical proofs, because it corrupts the sense of true certainty and accustoms the mind to take probabilities for evidence and shadows for truth in matters of faith: because it leads to disregarding the actual divine ground of Christian conviction; because it makes the doctrine itself suspicious to the prudent, which is to be supported by such doubtful arguments. Certainly a true word!
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Let us never forget: Those who allow themselves to have their own human thoughts regarding the divine Trinity are actually allowing themselves to play the Holy Spirit. The Scriptures instruct us that only the Holy Spirit knows the depths of the Godhead and what is in God.1274) It is a self-conceit bordering on madness when a short-sighted man, who does not even know what is in his own kind, namely in man,1275) imagines that he can know what is in the majestic God, who dwells in a light where no man can come. 1276)
Since modern theology denies that the Scriptures are the Word of God, and consequently has moved from the Scriptures to the "I" of the theologizing subject, it can naturally present only human thoughts about the Trinity. And because the theologizing "I" are many, we are also confronted with a great variety and diversity of "I" thoughts about the Trinity. But we can divide the different I-products into two classes. Some of them openly let Unitarianism rise out of their ego. They declare explicitly that they consider neither the Son nor the Holy Spirit to be a divine person. Even if they still use the expressions Father, Son, Holy Spirit, they openly state that they understand by them three different "potencies", wills or modes of action of the one divine person. We have here, according to the matter — often also according to the expressions — the revival of the old modalistic and dynamistic monarchianism, respectively of Socinianism. They claim that the tres distinctae personae, which the "old orthodox" doctrine professes, leads theoretically and practically to tritheism, to the assumption of three gods. The eternal essence trinity (ontological trinity) is converted into a historical trinity (economic trinity). This is the liberal wing of modern theology. In a second class we can count the theologians who are summarized under the overall name of the "conservative" newer theology. They, too, because they have gone through the move from the Holy Scriptures into the theologizing subject, want to develop the Trinity first from their I, but then from the I they want to seek the way back from the
1274) 1 Cor. 2:11: τα τον ϑεον ονδεις οΐδεν, εΐ μη το πνεύμα τον ϑεον.
1275) 1 Cor. 2:11: Τίς γάρ οΐδεν άνϑρώπων τά τον άνϑρώπον, εϊ μη τό πνεϋμα τον άνρϑώπον το εν αντω;
1276) 1 Tim. 6:16; Jn. 1:18.
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economic Trinity to the essence Trinity. They want to prove that the threefold divine mode of action, which the Christian I experiences in itself, corresponds to a pre-worldly, metaphysical threefold relationship in God (in "the eternal depths of the Godhead"). There is a kind of feud between the liberal and conservative parties. It is not difficult for the latter to prove the former's return to Unitarianism. Unfortunately, however, the liberals are also able to demonstrate that the conservative trend with its attempts to renew the doctrine of the Trinity "for the time being" does not yet stand in harmony "with the Reformation and Old Protestantism”. They state, for example: The conservative trend indulges in attempts to construct the Trinity from the concept of "love," etc., in order to make the Trinity comprehensible to human reason in this way. Furthermore, the conservative trend teaches a subordination of the persons in their relationship to each other. Also, it does not want to grasp the concept of the person in God as an "individual" personality, but thinks that it has to adjust a new concept of "person". These are all things that do not stand in harmony with the old Protestant doctrine of the Trinity.1277) This is true, however. The conservative modern theology will not come into harmony with the Christian Church even with regard to its doctrine of the Trinity until it believes again with the Christian Church that the Holy Scriptures are God's infallible Word, completely abandons the "I" as a theological principle, and therefore also believes and teaches of the Holy Trinity only that which God Himself has revealed to us men about it in His Word.1278)
With regard to the question whether the Christian doctrine of the Trinity contradicts human reason, Karl Hase says1279) not badly: "Church doctrine does not have to get involved in a dispute on the basis of principles of reason, since it rather concedes to these [the principles of reason] everything that they demand, that the Trinity is above reason and, as soon as it wants to judge it, also against reason." Only Hase should have added that reason, which wants to judge the Trinity and deny the Trinity,
1277) Cf. Nitzsch-Stephan, p. 432 ff.
1278) Cf. a further elaboration on this point in the doctrine of Christ's person under the section "Unio personalis and the Christological Constellations of the Modern Era," Vol. II, pp. 114 ff.
1279) Hutterus Redivivus 10, p. 180.
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is no longer reason, but the climax of unreason. In his exposition of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, Luther repeatedly points out how unreasonable it is when we poor men, who do not understand the nature of the nature surrounding us and our own nature, want to judge God's nature with our human thoughts and especially deny the scriptural doctrine of the Trinity. He says, for example: 1280) "If it were a matter of sophists here, I would very well be able to do it, and I am neither a Jew nor a Turk. But I thank my God, who has done me the grace, that I do not dispute about such an article, whether it is true or rhymes, but because I see that it is so actually conceived and founded in the Scriptures, I believe God more than my own thoughts and reason and do not care at all how it can be true that there is only one being and yet three different persons in such a unified being, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. For it is not a matter of disputing whether it is true, but whether it is founded in the Word of God. ... Therefore, since the Word of God, as we have now heard, stands clear and plain, and since such an article has been so gallantly contended for by the holy Fathers, let us stick to it and not argue much about how Father, Son and Holy Spirit can be one God. Poor man, if you use all the art of the world, you cannot know how it is that your eyes can see a high mountain ten miles away; again, if you are asleep, how it is that you are dead in body and yet alive. If then we cannot know the least thing about ourselves, is it not great folly and presumption that we climb up with our thoughts (in the devil's name) and with our reason actually want to grasp God in fine majesty and speculate what he is? But why don't we do this to ourselves first and ask, where our ears, eyes and other limbs remain with their effect when we sleep? There one could disputate and speculate without driving." Further:1281) "We [Christians] feel well that such doctrine [that God is man and in the one Godhead three different persons] will not nor can enter into reason; we do not need a high Jewish
1280) Sermon on Trinity Sunday, St. L. XIII, 664 ff.
1281) The Three Symbola, St. L. X, 1007. 1018.
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reason to show us such; we believe such knowingly and willingly. We also confess and experience that where the Holy Spirit does not shine into the heart through reason, it is not possible to grasp or believe such an article and to remain with it, but there must remain a Jewish, arrogant reason, which mocks and ridicules such an article and thus sets itself up as judge and master over the divine being, which it has never seen nor can see, nor does it know what it judges or what it writes or says about; For God 'dwells in a light where no one can approach', 1 Tim. 6:16, but must come to us, yet hidden in the lanterns', and, as Jn. 1:18 stands: 'No man hath seen God at any time; the Son in the Father's heart hath revealed it unto us; and Moses saith before, Ex. 33:20: 'No man can see me, neither live'. ... We are too coarse fellows, who in such high things more and higher esteem our blind and poor reason than the Scriptures show us. For the Scriptures are God's testimony of Himself, and reason can know nothing of divine essence, and yet will judge of that which it does not know. That is right, to judge the blind by the color."
Following this, we would like to point out some accusations or rather denigrations with which the Unitarianism of our time tries to discredit the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. First of all, there is the assertion that the Trinity doctrine of the early church is an "artificial theory" invented by the theologians of the early church, a human or "philosophical" speculation. So quite recently again Hörst Stephan.1282) Before him, Ritschl even dared to claim that "ecclesiastical-political reasons kept him [Luther] as well as his successors to the reproduction, as unchanged as possible, of the doctrine of Christ's person and of the Trinity."1283) Such wild addresses, which virtually turn historical truth on its head, are effective because of the audacity with which they are uttered. The historical truth is this, that the old dogmatists not merely reject in principle or in theory any philosophical construction of the Trinity, and therefore reject Melanchthon's attempted construction as somnium Philippi [Philip’s dream], but demonstrably actually took everything they said about the
1282) Glaubenslehre 1921, p. 193.
1283) Die christl. Lehre von der Rechtf. u. Versöhnung 3 II, 18.
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"intra-Trinitarian" relationship in God from God's self-revelation in Scripture. The dogmatists can say with Luther:1284) "That we recognize and believe such one God, how he is three different persons within his Godhead, they should look at the Scriptures with us. For we have not invented it of ourselves, nor could we invent it, if Scripture did not move us to do so." Taking the Scriptural evidence for the Deity of Christ and the Trinity from both the New and Old Testaments, Luther adds:1285) "Make a hole through it, whoever can; I cannot." We have also already demonstrated above that what Luther and the dogmatists teach of the Holy Trinity is not "philosophy" and "artificial theory," but the clear doctrine of Scripture. The modern critics of Luther and the dogmatists would also recognize the "orthodox" doctrine of the Trinity as the doctrine of Scripture, if they could again take Scripture for the Word of God and really go to Scripture with Luther and the dogmatists.
Another claim from the Unitarian side is that the orthodox doctrines burden the human spirit with "dead formulas" and are downright obstructive to Christian piety. It is enough to understand the Son of God as the "revealer" of divine love. On the other hand, it must be said that precisely that which is taught Unitarianly of Christ as the Revealer of divine love remains as a "dead formula" in the human mind and is completely "worthless" "religiously and dogmatically". However, the Son is the Revealer of divine love against sinful humanity. But he is this revealer in his satisfactio vicaria, as the Lamb of God who bears the sin of the world, as the Son of God who became man in the fullness of time and placed himself under the duty and rebuke of divine law in the place of man.1286) This Son of God the Holy Spirit transfigures in the hearts of men until the Last Day, so that they believe it through the action of the Holy Spirit.1287) On the other hand, what the Unitarians say about God's love without Christ's satisfactio is a falsehood, and the Holy Spirit, because He is the Spirit of truth, does not indulge in the transfiguration and confirmation of falsehoods. Therefore
1284) The Three Symbols," St. L. X, 1017.
1285) Sermon on the Sunday of Trinity X, 669.
1286) Jn. 1:29; Gal. 4:4-5; 3:13.<w:t>1287) Jn. 16:14.
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all pious-sounding Unitarian addresses of the "fatherhood of God" remain in the realm of human imagination and self-deception when the essential deity of Christ and his vicarious satisfaction are denied. They are also experienced as "dead formulas" as soon as the forcibly repressed realization of personal sinfulness and damnability asserts itself in contestation and mortal need. Horace Bushnell, Ritschl, William Harper and others also provide historical evidence of this in our time.1288) We would like to refer again to a remark in Karl Hase's Hutterus Redivivus. The rationalist Klein had said in his dogmatics1289) against the old church doctrine of the Trinity, among other things, that the church formulas were nothing but "empty words" in which one could not think of anything certain. Nor is it possible to see "what influence belief in this mystery could have on our happiness and virtue". Hase answers him:1290) "For a bliss that dwells only on earth, and for a virtue that, according to Kantian religion, needs a God only to reward its poor deeds, the dogma [of the Trinity] certainly has no meaning. But for a bliss that can exist as bliss only in peace with God, and for a virtue that feels so poor in its most sublime works that it calms itself only in faith in a redemption and sanctification, faith in a redeeming and sanctifying God has such significance that without it true virtue and bliss are not possible at all."
Finally, it has been objected in ancient and more recent times against the "orthodox" doctrine of the Trinity that in practice it leads "necessarily to tritheism". If three distinct persons were assumed in the one God, then the worship of God (the cultus divinus) would be divided among Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and thus the unity of the cultus divinus would be lost.
1288) Cf. vol. II, p. 442 f.
1289) Presentation of the Dogmatic System of the Protestant Church. System d. ev.-protest. Church together with historical and critical remarks. Remarks. Jena 1822, p. 197 f.
1290) Hutterus Redivivus 10, p. 181. Hare is known to be a rationalist himself. He personally believed neither the essential deity of Christ nor the essence trinity. But he was annoyed — he was an "aesthetic rationalist" — by the shallowness with which the vulgar rationalists and the "new church" dogmatists criticized the old church doctrine. Therefore, in his Hutterus Redivivus, he takes Hutter's point of view (which he admittedly does not always succeed in doing) and from here turns against rationalism.
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In response to this, it should first be said that the Holy Scriptures teach and require the worship of the one God in three persons. Christian baptism is to be in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Scripture further requires that all honor the Son as they honor the Father, adding, "He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him.", Jn. 5:23 Therefore, the early church dictum is scriptural: Trium personarum est unus cultus divinus. [“The divine worship is one of three persons”] But Scripture also gives us more detail on this point. There can therefore be no question of a "division" of worship, because in each person there is not, say, only a third of the Godhead, but the whole divine majesty, in the Son by the eternal birth, in the Holy Spirit by the eternal breathing or going forth from the Father and from the Son; or as Luther expresses it, as we have already heard, Quaelibet persona totus est Deus.[“Each person is God as a whole.”]1291) In the Son is παν το πλήρωμα τής ϑεότητος and the Holy Spirit ό ϑεός.1292) Hare remarks against Klein: "All the arts of recent exegesis have not been sufficient to erase from the New Testament the traces of the deity of Christ, which may well be interpreted away from individual passages, but in its totality stands indelibly." Further, "He who calls upon God as Father honors at the same time the Son and the Holy Spirit; for God the Father is Father to us men only through the vicarious satisfaction of the Son and through the revelation of the Holy Spirit. He who honors the Son thereby honors both the Father who sent Him, John 5:23, and the Holy Spirit who transfigures the Son in the hearts of men, John 16:14. He who worships the Holy Spirit thereby worships both the Father and the Son; for the Holy Spirit is the Spirit both of the Father (Matt. 10:20: τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ πατρὸς) and of the Son (Gal. 4:6: τὸ πνεῦμα τοῦ υἱοῦ).