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This Doctrine at the Reformation.

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the doctrine. It has been said that they retained it, only because they were still unconsciously fettered by the Catholic subserviency to authority; and that they would have given it up, if they had been excited to a full discussion of the subject. But as to their being embarrassed by mere authority, this was not the case at first; they did not deny the doctrine, but laid no stress upon it; Melanchthon, in the first editions of his Loci, passed it by altogether, and spoke with depreciation of the labors which the Scholastics bestowed upon it. Nor can it be said that there was no polemic inducement to abandon the doctrine; for it is well known, that at the time of the Reformation there were many who doubted, and many who attacked it, and that there were several attempts to give it another form. And yet we see Melanchthon himself, by occasion of these doubts and attacks, in the later editions of the Loci again returning into the path which he had left; we see him with increasing earnestness interpreting, proving and defending the doctrinal positions of the church, with more and more thoroughness; with a zeal in which he seems almost to forget his natural mildness, we see him contending against the opponents of the doctrine, in special controversial treatises. And why all this, if he had not become more and more convinced, that, with the doctrine of the Trinity, the very foundation of our Evangelical faith would be undermined, and that if we followed the Holy Scriptures, we could come to no other result than that already attained by the church? That he was ignorant of the objections that might be brought against it, cannot be assumed, when we see how frequently he speaks of the severe struggles which he foresaw it would encounter; nor can it have been mere authority by which he silenced these objections in his own mind, since he constantly refers his readers to the declarations of Scripture, which, he says, must be received with all simplicity. Or, can we perhaps say, that the polemical inducement did not come from the right quar ter? That would be to make the convictions on which our church is based too much dependent upon accidental circumstances! And from what quarter should it have come? From whatever quarter it might have come, we may be assured that it would have found the Reformers firm in their faith in Christ as the only ground of all justification and redemption; and on this account also, firm in their conviction of the divinity of Christ; for, if they abhorred even the opinion that any one could do something of himself for his own justification, as casting dishonor upon Christ, how could they have been satisfied with an opinion, by which his

dignity was directly lowered? But with the Consubstantiality of the Son, the whole church doctrine of the Trinity is virtually given to every one, who holds so firmly to the word of the Bible as not to be satisfied with a Sabellian interpretation of it; especially if he allows as little weight as did Luther to those objec

1 Luther especially expresses so deep a feeling of the connection of the whole of Christianity with the doctrine of Christ's person, and of this with the Trinity, that it is impossible to suppose that he was merely led by circumstances to hold it fast. Conf. his Remarks upon the Three Confessions (Works, Walch's edition, Th. 10. S. 1198 sq.) published in 1533: "I have remarked in all the histories of the whole of Christendom, that all those who have rightly had and held that chief article about Jesus Christ, have remained good and true in the right Christian faith; and though they may have erred and sinned in other things, yet they have held out to the last. For whoever stands right and firm in this, that Jesus Christ is true God and man, died for us and is risen, will agree to and stand by all the other articles; thus it is most true, what St. Paul says, that Christ is the chief good, ground, soil, and the whole sum, to whom and under whom all the rest is gathered together;—for thus it is determined, says St. Paul, that in Jesus Christ the whole perfect divinity shall dwell bodily or personally; hence, he who does not find or get God in Christ, shall never more, and no where, be able to find God out of Christ, though he go above heaven, under hell and beyond the world; for here will I dwell, says God, in this man, born of Mary the virgin, etc.-Again I have also remarked that all error, heresies, idolatry, scandals, abuses and evil in the churches, have come originally from this, that this article about faith in Jesus Christ has been despised or lost; and when one looks at them in the light and rightly, he sees that all heresies fight against this dear article about Jesus Christ, as Simeon says of him, that he is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be spoken against." Similar to this, in his Commentary upon Galatians (1535) chapter 3:13. Conf. also his Auslegung des andern Artikels, preached in the castle at Torgau, 1533; Sermon upon John xiv.-xvi, 1538 (specially John 14: 13); and, von den letzten Worten Davids, 1543.

2 Luther speaks against all intermixture of reason, even to lessen the apparent hardness and difficulty of this doctrine, and to make it more comprehensible, in a way which might seem objectionable, were it not made honorable by the strength of faith which he expresses. Conf. among other things his, disputatio de anno 1539, d. XI. Jan., and the disputatt. de unitate essentiae et de distinct. personar. d. a. 1545, in the Opera Latina Jenens. tom. I. (S. 528 and 534 of the edition of 1564). "When logic objects to this doctrine, that it does not square with its rules, we must say, Mulier taceat in ecclesia." By reason and philosophy nothing can be said about these majestic things; but by faith all things may be rightly said and believed." "Reason is like a line which touches the whole sphere, but only at one point, and does not grasp the whole." "He who wishes not to wander in his inquiries, and not to be oppressed by the glory of the majesty, let him by faith touch and lay hold of the Son of God manifest in the flesh; for this brightness of the Father's glory touches an object and becomes a reflex ray, illuminating every man that comes into the world."-Since we shall not probably soon have a

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Grounds of the Opposition to the Doctrine.

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tions which are said to be taken from reason, and which have really operated much more strongly against the doctrine than all the arguments drawn from Biblical Theology. But we would not be understood to deny, what a bare inspection shows, that our theologians took the doctrine, after they had become convinced that it was Scriptural, into their systems of theology almost in the very shape which the Scholastics had given to it. And why should they not do this? Is it in Doctrinal Theology alone, that we can never look upon a labor as already completed? And even when Gerhard1 confesses, that the doctrine of the primitive church, the consent of the most esteemed ecclesiastical writers, and the decisions of the most famous councils have had a certain weight in confirming us in our conviction of the correctness of our interpretation of Scripture, and thus giving us vantage-ground against the opponents of the doctrine; no one can find this unreasonable, who believes that the truth, under the coöperation of the Spirit of truth, must approve itself as true in history also; at any rate, this is something wholly different from receiving a doctrine on mere anthority, and without personal conviction.

But if the doctrine of the Trinity seemed to those who composed and defined our doctrinal systems, to be a necessary result of Scriptural interpretation, and to have its foundation in Christian consciousness, how shall we then account for the opposition, which, in later time, has been raised against hardly any dogma so loudly as against this? In part, unquestionably, from this, that there are many, who neither have a conscious experience of the redemption which is effected only by the Son of God, or of the sanctification which is applied only by the Spirit of God; and who are not inclined, on the bare testimony of Scripture, to adopt mysteries which seem inaccessible to natural reason. But there are also many, to whom the biblical and religious basis of the doctrine is sure and dear above everything else, and who are yet not satisfied, but rather restrained and repelled, by the form in which the doctrine is held in the church. Even where they do not entirely misunderstand it, they yet see in it a dead and dry formula, in which they cannot take any interest, since the original occasions and aims of the formula have long since passed

complete edition of Luther's Latin Works, it were much to be wished that the theses which he put up at different times in Wittenberg, and in which he has expressed most precisely his views upon the most important doctrines, might be made more accessible by a special reprint.

1 Gerhard, Exeg. III. 1. 15 sq.

away. The very character of these formulas, they say, which are rather negative than positive, which ward off error rather than promote clear insight, is such that they find nothing explained by them, no difficulties solved, no truth disclosed. While on the other hand, these same formulas are hindrances and disturbances in the way of one's own attempts to get a clear view of the bib lical system, by means of his own free reflections, or to adapt them to his other ideas and convictions, according to his own wants. and way of thinking. And, certainly, it may easily become a consequence of such definite doctrinal propositions, that while they guard against error, they also restrain the free movements of mind, and establish a dead uniformity in the place of a living and manifold development; and, on this account, even for historical treatment, those times in which men were endeavoring to approach the truth in different ways, though they may have been sometimes by-ways and false ways, seem more attractive than those in which they believed that they had attained the goal, and must keep precisely to the levelled track. And if any one now longs for a return of this earlier freedom and mobility, in the belief, that then the interest in our doctrine would be far more fresh and living than it is with the constant repetition of the same traditional forms of speech; if he believes that he must seek after, or has found, another mode of exhibiting it, which corresponds as well or better with the Scriptures and with Christian experience, which is less exposed to misapprehension, which is more free from doubt and objections, which ensures more profound disclosures, or at any rate, is more simple; shall we then put him off, by merely holding up in opposition the doctrine of the church? This would be to act neither in the spirit of our church, which never puts the inferences and deductions of men on a line with the words of Scripture; nor in a truly philosophical spirit, which cannot give the same authority to that which is the result only of our reflections with that which forms a part of our direct religious experience. Consequently, one might have much to say against the doctrine of the Trinity, in the form in which it is held by the

1 On this account Luther, in his adınirable Confutatio rationis Latomianae (Opp. Lat. Jenens. tom. II. p. 430, translated in Walch Th. XVIII. S. 1455), will not have even the word ouoovoioc forced upon him; (Si anima mea odit vocem ¿μoovcios, et nolim ea uti, non ero haereticus, quis enim me coget uti, modo rem teneam, quae in concilio per scripturas definita est?) although in other places (e. g. in his work upon Councils and Churches, where he treats of the Nicene council) he shows that he sees the necessity of it in setting aside erroneous views.

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The Importance of this Form of the Doctrine.

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1847.] church, and yet we might find him agreeing with us in essentials; but whether and how far the latter, would in the end be decided by his relation to the former. This form of the doctrine, then, must be held fast, so far as it expresses, on the one hand, what must always be considered by the Christian consciousness, as the chief element, the relation of the Persons to the opera ad extra, especially the oeconomica; on the other hand, so far as it expresses the general tendencies, from which our reflections should not deviate, either on the side of Modalisin or of Tritheism, if we would not put ourselves into opposition with the Bible. So far as this, the church doctrine remains, as we said above, the regulative and corrective, not only of the popular, but also of the philosophical mode of presenting the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. And that very thing, which in other respects might be an objection to it, its negative rather than positive character, makes it so much the more adapted to such a use; since, within the assigned boundaries, it leaves room for a diversity of methods of explaining the doctrine, according to the wants of different minds, especially, if in doing so, they proceed with that liberality, which keeps in view the thing itself rather than the letter. Presupposing such a regulating statement, we gladly grant a relative degree of truth and value to the varied attempts which have been made to illustrate this doctrine.2 And

The very least, according to our view, which should be conceded to the doctrine as held by the church is, " that the views to which it stands opposed are also," according to the Bible, "actual misapprehensions," (Steudel's Glaubenst. S. 435). When, on the other hand, Baumgarten-Crusius (Bibl. Theol. § 41. S. 408), maintains, "that the New Testament conjunction of Father, Son and Spirit has no connection with the higher Christology, and with that higher idea of Spirit which views it as a person:" and when v. Cölln (Bibl. Theol. § 205. Th. 11. S. 282), asserts, "that the names Father, Son and Spirit are not to be taken as distinguishing three subjects (persons), but that the one true God is called Tarp, vios and vɛuua in different relations;" this seems to me to be only a new evidence, how little honest intentions and a philosophical fitness for a so-called purely historical view of things, can ensure one against the influence of dogmatic prejudices, rationalistic no less than ecclesiastical.

As when Daub (Einleit. in d. Dogmatik, S. 65, 66), finds in the doctrine of the Trinity an expression of the knowledge of God as the revealer (i. e. one who can reveal), the revealed and the self-revealing; or Nitzsch (System d. Christi. Lehre), that relation of our Christian experience (considered both as a state and a process) to the divine nature, according to which we pay homage, in the Son, to the divine love as speaking and mediating; in the Spirit, to that love as imparting itself to us and giving life; and, in the Father, to that love both as original and also as the result of the mediation; or Steudel (Glaubensl. 8.432), the idea of God, actualized as the ground and condition of all being, as the most intimate alliance of God with all being, and as the imparting of God