It need hardly be remarked that no A^alid objection to the doc- trine of the eternal Sonship of Christ, or, that He is Son as to his divine nature, can be drawn from such passages as speak of the Son as being less than the Father, or subject to Him, or even ignorant. If Christ can be called the Lord of glory, or God, when his death is spoken of, He may be called Son, when other limitations are ascribed to Him. As He is both God and man, everything that is true either of his humanity or of his divinity, may be predicated of Him as a person ; and his person may be denominated from one nature, when the predicate belongs to the other nature. He is called the Son of Man when He is said to be omnipresent ; and He is called God when He is said to have purchased the Church with his blood.
D. The Relation of the Spirit to the other Persons of the Trinity.
As the councils of Nice and Constantinople were fully justified by Scripture in teaching the eternal Sonship of Christ, so what they taught of the relation of the Spirit to the Father and the Son, has an adequate Scriptural foundation.
That relation is expressed by the word procession, with regard to which the common Church doctrine is, (1.) That it is incom- prehensible, and therefore inexplicable. (2.) That it is eternal. (3.) That it is equally from the Father and the Son. At least such is the doctrine of the Latin and all other Western churches. (4.) That this procession concerns the personality and operations of the Spirit, and not his essence.
The Scriptural grounds for expressing this relation by the term procession, are (1.) The signification of the word spirit. It means breath, that which proceeds from, and which gives expression and eflfect to our thoughts. Since Father and Son, as applied to the First and Second persons of the Trinity, are relative terms, it is to be assumed that the word Spirit as the designation of the Third Person, is also relative. (2.) This is further indicated by the use of the genitive case in the expressions Trvevfxa tov irarpos, tov vlov, which is explained by the use of the preposition £«, as irvevfia Ik toZ Trarpos. The revealed fact is that the Spirit is of the Father, and the Church in calling the relation, thus indicated, a procession, does not attempt to explain it. (3.) In John xv. 26, where the Spirit is promised by Christ, He is said to proceed from the Father.
That the Latin and Protestant chui'ches, in opposition to the Greek Church, are authorized in teaching that the Spirit proceeds not from the Father only, but from the Father and the Son, is evi-
478 PART I. — THEOLOGY. [Ch. VI. — The Trinity
dent, because whatever is said in Scripture of the relation of the Spirit to the Father, is also said of his relation to the Son. He is said to be the " Spirit of the Father," and " Spirit of the Son ; " He is given or sent by the Son as well as by the Father ; the Son is said to operate through the Spirit. The Spirit is no more said to send or to operate through the Son, than to send or operate through the Father. The relation, so far as revealed, is the same in the one case as in the other.
When we consider the incomprehensible nature of the Godhead, the mysterious character of the doctrine of the Trinity, the ex- ceeding complexity and difficulty of the problem which the Church had to solve in presenting the doctrine that there are three persons and one God, in such a manner as to meet the requirements of Scripture and the convictions of believers, and yet avoid all contra- diction, we can hardly fail to refer the Church creeds on this sub- ject, which have for ages secured assent and consent, not to inspi- ration, strictly speaking, but to the special guidance of the Holy Spirit.
§ 7. Philosophical Form of the Doctrine of the Trinity.
The philosophical statements of the doctrine of the Trinity have been intended by their authors either to prove it, or to illustrate it, or to explain it away and substitute some speculative theory as to the constitution of the universe for the Scriptural doctrine of the Triune God. The two former of these classes, those designed for proof, and those designed for illustration, need not be discrimi- nated. It may be remarked in reference to them all that they are of little value. They do not serve to make the inconceivable intel- ligible. The most they can do, is to show that in other spheres and in relation to other subjects, we find a somewhat analogous triplicity in unity. In most cases, however, these illustrations pro- ceed on the assumption that there are mysteries in the Godhead which have no counterpart in the constitution of our nature, or in anything around us in the present state of our existence.
We have already seen that the fathers were accustomed to refer to the union of light, heat, and radiance in the one substance of the Bun ; to a fountain and its streams ; to the root, stem, and flower of a plant ; to the intellect, will, and affections in the soul ; as ex- amples of at least a certain kind of triplicity in unity, elsewhere than in the Godhead. The last-mentioned analogy, especially, was fre- quently presented, and that in different forms. Augustine said, that as man was made in the image of the Triune God, we have