Faith in the Trinity Not Faith in a Dogma

“One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and in you all.” —Ephesians iv. 5, 6.

There was a time when Sermons upon Trinity Sunday were expected to be controversial. On other days the preacher might address himself to the topics in which all his hearers were interested—might appeal to their conscience of evil and their desire of good—might arm them for the toils and temptations of the week. Upon this he had the privilege or the duty, whichever he might deem it, of confuting objectors and establishing his own conclusions. He might exhibit much strategical talent in choosing his position and his weapons. He might stand on the defensive, and defy the deniers of our Creeds to prove anything against a mystery which transcended all human powers of thought and reasoning. Or he might maintain that a long tradition must have a worth which a small minority of dissidents cannot shake. Or he might gather together a set of texts from different parts of the Bible, and argue that altogether they created an amount of probability in favour of the doctrine of the Trinity far exceeding the probabilities against it which might be derived from another set of texts. Or he might rely on some one especial text, maintaining that if that held its place in the Canon, the question was settled for all who did not deny the Scriptures to possess divine authority.

I do not think that those who follow the course of our Services can regard Trinity Sunday as standing apart from the other Sundays of the year, or as demanding an exceptional treatment. From Advent we appear to have been tracing a series of discoveries or manifestations of which this day records the latest and deepest. It is not that one doctrine has been added to another; all our Collects, Epistles, and Gospels have related to a Person. He has been clothing Himself in the weakness of our mortal nature; He has been showing forth power and glory through that weakness. He has been tempted by the Devil. He has endured death, has been laid in the grave, has known the secrets of the dark world, has risen again. He has ascended to His Father. He has sent the Spirit of His Father to dwell with men, to bind them together into a fellowship consisting of all tribes and nations, to awaken and govern the powers of their spirits. And this Sunday proclaims the day to be come in which, according to Christ’s promise, we may know that He is in the Father, and we in Him, and He in us, and so may worship the Father and the Son in the Unity of the Spirit. Henceforth all our Sundays are Sundays after Trinity;—Sundays in which this Name and this Worship unfold themselves in relation to the struggles, temptations, sufferings of our social and personal existence.

Services such as these, which have formed a continuous education for the people of our land from age to age, must certainly have been intended, in St. Paul’s language, to bring them into “the fellowship of this Mystery.” Our discourses must be greatly at variance with them, if we represent the Mystery as one with which common men cannot have fellowship,—which they are to contemplate as hopelessly divided from them. Any scholastical apologies, however plausible, which leave that impression upon the minds of our hearers, must tend to undermine the faith which we have thanked God to-day for giving us grace to confess. Will the argument from Tradition be more effectual for the confirmation of that faith? The best and noblest part of the Tradition witnesses of times when this faith was not the faith of a majority, but of an utterly insignificant and despised minority. Those were the times when it was maintained most vigorously. As our Collect intimates, they who confessed the glory of the Eternal Trinity and in the power of the Divine Majesty worshipped the Unity, learnt their lesson in adversity, and had to pray that they might be kept through it. Are we to cast away these healthful and invigorating recollections for the pleasure of telling opponents that they must be wrong, because the East and the West are against them, as they were once against Athanasius? What comes again of our heaping together isolated texts? This, I believe, is the fruit of it:—1st, a confused notion forced upon other minds—reacting on our own—that we are fighting for a certain notion of ours which has need of much ingenuity and special pleading to sustain it, not for a truth of God’s which can defend and prove itself; 2dly, that the Bible is an agglomeration of sentences and decrees which can with difficulty be persuaded to give out a harmonious sense; 3dly, that it is wise to suppress or conceal passages which, if there is a Revelation, are as important for our own well-being and for the discovery of God’s purposes as those upon which we insist. And if we make the stress of our reasoning rest upon some one text, God’s gracious providence, it may be, will fairly rend that one away from us, as if to teach us the difference between His methods and ours; as if to force the conviction upon us that the Name of Him who inhabiteth Eternity is not dependent on the reading of a manuscript.

The passage which I have taken from the Epistle to the Ephesians is not one which would ever be quoted by a controversialist to establish the doctrine of the Trinity. It has, I doubt not, often been seized by the opposer of that doctrine, because the word “One” occurs so often in it, and because it so clearly distinguishes the “one Lord” from the “one Father.” There has been no more unhappy consequence of our method of arguing than this, that we are supposed to have an interest in passing over those passages of Scripture which assert strongly all the dependence of the Son upon the Father, even those which speak of the oneness of the Godhead; as if each of our creeds could not be set at nought and falsified, were there not that dependence and that oneness; as if Trinity Sunday were not emphatically the day on which we profess to worship the Unity. Just because there is no dogmatic statement in St. Paul’s words—just because Unity is the subject of them—they illustrate, it seems to me most strikingly, the course which the Church takes in preparing us for this festival, as well as when she initiates us into the meaning of it.

I. The Apostle speaks first of one Lord. Those words would have at once recalled to a Jew the sentence which had been repeated to him since he could speak: “The Lord thy God is One Lord.” And surely much of the emphasis of this divine sentence lay in the word Thy. Multitudes of things surround thee and crave thy worship. There is One near thee, ruling thee, caring for thee, jealous of thee, Who claims thy heart for Himself. He is the Lord.

What impression did this name make on those Jews who had walked with Jesus in the streets and sat with Him in the ship on the lake—who had been with Him on the Mount of Transfiguration and in the Garden of Gethsemane? They had called Him Lord and Master; and He said they had done well in calling Him so, for He was that. But how could they keep this name from interfering with the homage to the One Lord whom Israel worshipped, whom no one had seen or could see? It was a deep, practical question; it affected their whole lives. Was there not a danger, an infinite danger, of those lives becoming divided; of their affections being more at war than their understandings; of their reverencing two Lords instead of One, the Visible more than the Invisible?

II. “One Faith.” The Jew had been taught to put his whole trust in the Lord God of Israel. Faith or Trust was the principle of his being; losing that, he lost everything. The different objects of sense were appealing to him every moment. He could care for them or dread them; but he could not trust them. He must have one faith, or they become his Masters; he must have one faith, or there was nothing to bind him to his brother Israelites; he must have one faith, or his manliness forsook him.

The disciples of Jesus felt that He was appealing to their faith or trust, and to the faith and trust of every person whom He healed or to whom He spake. They felt that if they gave Him their unlimited faith or trust, they were better men; that if they withheld it, they became more victims of their own senses and inclinations and follies. But how could they cherish this entire faith in Him, and also cherish it in the one Lord of whom the Law and the Prophets spoke?

III. “One Baptism.” “I baptize you with water,” said John in the wilderness. “One cometh after me, Who shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with fire.” The Baptism of John had been a witness that the One God of their fathers was calling them to turn round to Him from all the visible objects and the secret lusts to which they had yielded; that He was sending away their sins, and confirming His covenant with them. Who was this Other that was to come with a mightier power, to bestow a greater blessing? What was this Spirit with which He would baptize?

The Apostles must have often asked themselves these questions. They were forced upon them by our Lord Himself at the last Supper. There He was speaking—in language which sounded sometimes quite unintelligible to them, which sometimes sent a flash of strange light into their inmost souls—of a Comforter Whom He would send from the Father, of a Spirit of Truth, Who should teach them that He was in the Father and the Father in Him. What a sense of division from their nation, in their own hearts, must they have experienced then! What a glimpse of a Unity such as they had never dreamed of!

IV. “One God and Father of all.” One Lord the Law and the Prophets had spoken of. But this name of Father—who had uttered that? It came forth when Jesus went up into the Mount to proclaim the fulfilment, not the destruction, of that which had been said in the old time. The very essence of His discourse was gathered into that word. It penetrated all His speech, all His acts afterwards. But then was it spoken out in all its power, when He said, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, to My God and to your God.” Then did the belief of “One God and Father of all” begin to break through the Jewish exclusiveness, to prove that the Jewish election had this for its final result. One God and Father of all, because One Man Who can say, “I came from the Father and am come into the world; again I leave the world and go to the Father.”

I have shown you how each of these clauses rises above the other, and how each helps to the interpretation of the other. But I have shown you also that there is something in each which appears to threaten the perfect unity of which it bears witness. It is not till the “One Lord” had bestowed upon the disciples who were struggling to keep up the one faith in Him, the baptism of the one Spirit, that they, a set of divided men, with opposing tastes, inclinations, tempers, were able “in the power of the Divine Majesty to worship the Unity”; because they confessed the new Name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, with which they were to seal all the nations.

V. The last clause of the text, “Who is above all, and through all, and in you all,” will recall to you some words of which I spoke to you a few months ago, the words of St. Paul on Mars’ Hill, “Though He be not far from every one of us, for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.” I said that those words would be called by many Pantheistical, if they had not the sanction of an Apostle. I believe that these have been called Pantheistical, though they have the sanction of the same Apostle. I would rather men uttered this thought, at least to themselves, than that they entertained it without confessing it. For then, perhaps, they may begin to ask what that Pantheism which they dread, and have a right to dread, is; whether there is nothing in the heart of us all which responds to it and fosters it; whether it can ever be met by a mere hard, dry contradiction; whether the mystery of the Trinity in Unity, which we are considering to-day, is not that true faith which justifies all that is true in it, eliminates what is immoral and dangerous?

(a) The first words, “Who is above all,” would not suggest the notion of Greek or modern Pantheism to any one. They recall the words of the old Hebrew song, “O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is Thy Name in all the earth; Thou hast set Thy glory above the Heavens.” He was far above the Sun and Moon and Stars, which the Heathen were worshipping. They spoke of Him; He could not be in them. But then came the other part of the hymn, which is just as truly Hebrew, and without which indeed the other could not be so: “What is Man that Thou art mindful of Him, and the Son of Man that Thou visitest Him? Thou crownest Him with glory and honour, Thou hast set Him over the works of Thy hands.” The Lord is above Sun and Moon and Stars, because He is more related to man than He is to them. Man cannot see Him in them, because He visits him and cares for him. And yet the contrast is very wonderful! Such glory and such insignificance! What does it mean? Who can tell?

The Epistle to the Hebrews gives the New Testament interpretation of the Old Testament marvel: “We see not yet,” it says, “all things put under man; but we see Jesus, Who for the suffering of death was made lower than the angels, crowned with glory and honour.” The Son of God has stooped to the lowest condition of the creature. The Son of Man, the Head of the Race, He Who has “tasted death for every man,” is exalted far above all things. Here is the glory that is above the Heavens, brought out in union, inseparable, eternal union with the sympathy for the beggar and the outcast. The glory that is above the Heavens is the glory of an Infinite Love, which could only be revealed in a death on the Cross. We may not bow to any created thing, for He Who has united us to Himself is one with that Father Who is above all.

(b) But now comes that phrase in which Pantheism appears to lurk. He is “through all.” The words, I grant you, are startling. Would to God that they startled us more! Would to God that they made us tremble habitually! We find ourselves in a strange medley of circumstances. Some of them we call petty, some grand. Some seem to start out of the present hour; some have on them the stamp and dust of ages. We try to dispose them and manage them. The old legend of St. Peter is repeated in our experience. He asked leave to govern the world for a day. He spent that day in pursuing a single goat over the hills, and had to lament in the evening that it was too wild for his control. But there is an order in this medley of things. They belong to a Universe, not a Chaos. Whence comes their law? The old Heathen Philosopher said, “There must be a soul in them.” What was that soul? If it governed the movements of the world, must it not be a God? Here was Pantheism; here was the worship of a World-god. It was the direct contradiction of the belief in a God who was above the world. But what was that belief when it was set in direct contradiction to this? The belief of a mere Power commanding all things, sympathizing with nothing; the belief of a Power apart from all those powers in the Universe which nevertheless must be confessed by men,—must act upon them every hour. Where was the refuge from the miserable alternative for them? Where is it for us?

I believe, my brethren, only in the recognition of a Filial Word, one with that Father Who is above all, speaking through all things; in the World, as St. John says, which “was made by Him, though the world knew Him not”; actually God, and yet with God. Thus is the dream of Greek Pantheism substantiated; thus is it reconciled with the sternest Hebrew faith in God as absolute and as distinct from all His creatures; thus are we saved from the heartlessness of an all-excluding Theology, and from the equal heartlessness of an all-comprehending Philosophy.

But the deliverance is not complete if we do not contemplate Pantheism on its other side. No Heathen could be satisfied with his belief in a soul of the World. He had derived the idea of such a soul from himself. He was conscious of something which directed the movements of his bodily frame, his acts, his opinions. If the world’s soul was divine, must not his be more divine? Must he not be an emanation from the God; must he not be a God?

A more fearful conclusion than the other, yet more difficult to avoid, because if the conscience shrinks from it, there is that in us which bribes us to it, which has bribed all men since the serpent said, “Ye shall be as Gods.” Yes! but part of the serpent’s promise was fulfilled. Ye shall know evil. And the other part has been fulfilled, because it was not the serpent’s promise, but God’s. Ye shall know good. For thus speaks St. John: “In Him [the Word] was Life, and the Life was the Light of Men. And the Light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.” The good is His light shining into men’s hearts; the evil has been the selfish darkness which has tried to extinguish it. We sink into the darkness, we become isolated from our kind, wrapped in solitude and atheism, when we try to become Gods by taking credit for the good to ourselves; we rise into the highest state that men can attain—the state, not of Gods but of Sons of God—when we confess all the evil to be our own, and believe and trust in the Good which is in Christ the Word of God—when He is revealed to us as “the glory of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

When St. Paul preached Christ to the Ephesians, he took from them no treasures which they had possessed before. If they no longer

“Had sight of Proteus coming from the sea,
Or heard old Triton wind his writhed horn,”

the voice of Him who spoke to His disciples on the Lake of Tiberias might be heard in the billows of the ocean, might rise to them out of its depths. Every dear familiar hill might have the sacredness and the awfulness of that Thessalian hill in which the Thunderer sat, for from every one might be heard the echoes of that voice which said on the mountain of Galilee: “Blessed are the poor in spirit;” “Blessed are the pure in heart.” The fountains had their old honour, for each one who brought his pitcher to them had a right to the words which were spoken once in Samaria: “The water which I will give thee shall be in thee a well of water springing up to everlasting life.” No old hero who had done good deeds for his city or his land could want any portion of his former glory. New glory must belong to him. For He Who is called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, had been the author of every right deed and worthy impulse. Greeks had been right in saying that whatever had the true sign of humanity upon it had been divine; only the inhuman, false elements which had mixed with them were from beneath, and were doomed to destruction. And thus, brethren, even thus it behoves us with purged ears to hear the Co-eternal Word speaking to us through sea and earth and air; thus should all the harmonies of Nature be received by us not as hers, but as His. And when those harmonies are disturbed by jarring notes from the cries of our fellow-men, let us not be content till we can discover through them also the voice of a Lord, Who alone makes us capable of understanding each other, without Whom no utterance would come forth from us, for there would be no thought in us. It is awful to think that if we take the wings of the morning, or ascend into Heaven, or dive into Hell, we cannot escape from the Divine Presence. It may be more awful to think that we can converse with no friend or no enemy, but some message comes to us through them from God. But could we bear that it should be otherwise? If the world succeeded, if men succeeded, in causing that God should not speak through them, should not manifest Himself through them, would not they succeed in annihilating themselves;—would not Death be the universal lord?

(c) There is yet one clause more. According to one reading it corresponds exactly to those which preceded, “Above all, through all, in all.” That which our translators have adopted sacrifices the symmetry of the sentence. But the change directly suggests a meaning which is certainly latent in the other. I cannot doubt that St. Paul wished the Ephesians to recollect that God, Who was above all and through all, was in them all; that His presence was the only cause of their fellowship and unity. It was the lesson which he had been inculcating on them throughout his letter. No men had been more possessed than they were by the belief of spiritual agencies and spiritual communications. Their city had been the favourite haunt of enchanters; fifty thousand pieces of silver had been the value of the books of curious arts which they burned. They did not need to be told of a Spirit ruling and working among men. But it was all-important that they should know what manner of Spirit it was. A Spirit of divination and imposture, or a Spirit of truth? A Spirit of self-exaltation, or a Spirit that cultivates humbleness and the surrender of all high conceits and imaginations? A Spirit of division, or a Spirit of love? This was the question for the city of Ephesus to consider in the time of St. Paul. Brethren, is it not the question for the cities of England to consider in the nineteenth century? We have not fallen upon a time when spiritual influences and powers are thought impossible, or are derided. That unbelief which was prevalent a century ago has been vanquished. There are openings in our day for as many kinds of spiritual delusion and imposture as prevailed in the Roman Empire during the first century. If a few have entered and have been cherished by the wise as well as the foolish, there is no reason why a multitude that we cannot dream of should not darken the air and defy all scientific exorcists to banish them. Now then it is needful, above all things, to declare what Spirit we believe is intended to have dominion over the wills and reasons, not of a few men, but of all. Now it is needful to testify that the Spirit with which we are baptized is the Spirit Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; the Spirit Who strives with the pride, malice, lusts, uncharitableness, that are working in us for the ruin of us all; the Spirit Who is working in all that they may submit to the one Lord; Who will bring into harmony the different fragments of the one Faith that are scattered through all the world; Who will baptize all at last with that fire which shall consume all that is corrupt and false in His Church and Universe; Who will not allow our spirits to rest till they have ascended through the Filial Word to the Father of all; Who will make all that is above us, all that is around, all that is within us, into His Temple; Who will enable us to offer our souls and bodies as holy and acceptable sacrifices to Him.

Brethren, these, I think, are the lessons, the deep, practical lessons which Trinity Sunday contains for us. I have said that there is in our modern society the capacity for all the dark superstitions that have invaded former ages. I have said that I see no escape from that danger unless we fully recognize a Spirit such as Whit-Sunday proclaims to us. May I not say on this day, that Unity is, consciously or unconsciously, the end for which we are all striving? The end sometimes looks hopelessly distant, sometimes very near. Must it not be hopelessly distant, must not the attainment of it be impossible, if it is dependent on some decrees, dogmas, maxims of uniformity, compromises or eclectical schemes of creatures so ignorant, so narrow, so self-exalting as we are? Must it not be very near, if it is involved in the very Nature of the Father of all; of the Son, by Whom we were created and redeemed; of the Spirit, Who worketh in us to will and do of their good pleasure;—if we have been adopted into God’s Family, and baptized with His Name, that we may show forth His Unity?