21 RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Trinity, Doctrine of the
in the faithful. This religious idea of the presence of God in Son and Spirit is replaced in dogmatics by the identity of the essence of the 4. Com- Son and the Holy Ghost with the parison of Father, with an essentially new elethe Biblical ment of postulating eternally differenand Onto- tiated subjects as contrasted with the
logical Father. (2) The New Testament con-
Forms. tains no reference to an unconditional
coordination of the Son with the Father. The Son, at least in his redemptive work, is dependent upon, and obedient to, the Father (cf. John xiv. 28; I Cor. xv. 28). The absence of similar statements concerning the Spirit is due to the representation of him as the medium of divine activity in the world and not as an independent person. While dependence of the Son upon the Father is not inconsistent with essential unity, equality and subordination are incompatible. (8) Dogma employs concepts for the construction of the immanent life in God that in Biblical terminology pertain to the record of revelation. ‘‘ Son of God ” is the name of the historic Christ, while where the preexisting mediator of revelation is referred to “Logos’”’ is used. Thus the doctrine of eternal generation as a basis for the preexistence lacks support in the Bible (‘‘ only begotten ”’ of John i. 14, iii. 16 expresses the close relation between Father and Son in regard to its stability, not its origin; and ‘ the firstborn of every creature’ of Col. i. 15 alludes to the preeminence of the author of salvation over creation, not to his origin). Particularly is there no reference in the New Testament to the procession of the Holy Spirit, in the sense of his immanent origin, but always as being sent into the world. (4) While conceiving the eternal relation of the Son and the Spirit to the Father as pretemporal and not as supertemporal, dogma does not make any further affirmations beyond what appears in the history of revelation. It converts the circuit of historical redemption into a bare counterpart of an immanent divine movement, wholly inconceivable until referred back to its historical original.
Individual voices against the doctrine of the Trinity during the Reformation (Hans Denk, J. Campanus, M. Servetus; qq.v.) were followed by Socinianism (see Socinus, Faustus, SocINIANISM),
which rejected the doctrine as opposed
5. Various to Scripture and reason, from the
Concep- standpoint of abstract Unitarian con-
tions. | ception and a moral view of religion. Arminianism (see ARMINIUS, JACOBUS,
AND ARMINIANISM) comes into contact with Socinianism only as it regards the coordination unpermissible. Rationalism renewed the Socinian contention, and supernaturalism enforced the Arminian weakening of the dogma. Pietism either treated the rationalistic speculations with respectful silence or reduced them critically. The doctrine of the Trinity seemed to find more attention from philosophers than from theologians, especially through the theosophy of Jakob Boehme (q.v.) on speculative thought. But Schelling and Hegel (qq.v.) succeeded only in divorcing the dogma from its original basis, and in confining it merely to
problems of cosmology. Schleiermacher (q.v.) demanded a reconstruction of the doctrine according to the Sabellian rather than the Athanasian point of view, while himself persisting in the presumption of an eternal and original division in the divine being. German theology was scarcely impressed with the negative Unitarianism of England and America, and presents various modern types. (1) The economic Trinity is exclusively adhered to by A. Schweizer, K. A. Hase, and R. A. Lipsius (qq.v.), while O. Pfleiderer (q.v.) assumes an ontological basis for the triad of revelation. expressed in the divine qualities of power, wisdom, and love. (2) There is a return to the immanent Trinity, not by way of revelation or experience, but of speculation. Of the two types one holds that the divine self-consciousness needs for its fulfilment a distinction between the thinking subject, the object thought of, and their resolution in unity (A. Twesten; q.v.). F. H. R. Frank (q.v.) modifies this by deducing from personality subject, predicate, and their unity, referred as hypostases in God, and from the Christian experience of God conditioning sense of guilt, guiltlessness, and transference into the state of guiltlessness. The second tendency argues, from God as love upon an adequate subject necessarily distinct from the world and of identical essence with God, the mutuality of this love coming to rest in a third person (EH. Sartorius and J. Miiller; qq.v.). K. T. A. Liebner (q.v.) combines these two types; and kindred theories on the scheme of love are worked out by I. A. Dorner and W. Beyschlag (qq.v.). In these speculative theories, however, neither the identity of the divine subject and object, nor the mutuality of their love, gives a third independent factor which can be construed as a hypostasis. The same criticism applies to the theory of Frank. (3) More definite meaning is gained when that from which God is held to separate himself is regarded not as a being identical in essence with himself, but as the world (Neo-Hegelians, C. H. Weisse and A. E. Biedermann; q.v.); yet it is obvious that such a theory is antagonistic to the scheme of Christian salvation. (4) Other theologians seek to return to subordinationism, as K. F. A. Kahnis (q.v.), who defines the Son and the Holy Ghost as “‘ God in the second and third sense of the word,” and, more cautiously, Christian Thomasius (q.v.). (5) R. Rothe (q.v.) came nearest a real revision of the dogma, not so much by distinguishing in God absolute being, absolute spiritual nature, and absolute personality, as by his concepts of the head of the created world of spirits and of the Holy Ghost as the unity of thought and existence, a theory which contains elements of a system which would connect the conditions of religious and moral life with the eternal being of God. (6) J. C. K. Hofmann (q.v.) has attempted to combine the economic and the immanent Trinity, holding that the relation of the Father and the Son is intra-divine, though comprehensible to man only in its historical self-evidence on the basis of the Bible. Avoiding any attempt to penetrate into the premundane existence of God, he claims to apprehend the historic relation of God to man in redemptive revelation at the same time sub specie e@ternitatis. A
Trinity, Doctrine of the Trisagion