exist alone. The very qualities which make a person demand another person to complete them. Love means nothing unless there is someone to love. The will must have an object upon which to express itself. Reason must have something to reason about. A completely isolated person would soon cease to be a person.
But God must be complete in Himself. If He were dependent upon something outside of Himself, He would be a finite being and therefore less than God. Hence there must be a personal relationship within the being of God and quite independent of His own creation. Infinite love requires an infinite object of love. Therefore we say that the Father eternally loves the Son, and the Spirit is the bond of affection between them. There is something social about God or He could not be a Person—in which case we would have no basis for knowing anything about Him anyway. So if we are puzzled with the idea of the Trinity, we must face an even greater puzzle without it. And we can’t escape all puzzlement when we are thinking of God.
2. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity assembles within itself the best that is to be found in non-Christian faiths in their search after God. Mohammedanism, for instance, looks to God as the all-powerful Creator and the supreme Governor of the universe. Brahmanism and other oriental faiths conceive of God as ever-present and practically identified with His creation—forms of pantheism. Pagan cults expect God to be concerned with all the various interests of human life, and have separate gods for different things. There are phases of truth in all of them. The Holy Trinity says—yes, God is supreme, He is also present in His creation, and He is definitely interested in all human affairs. All of this is expressed in the Three Persons in One God—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He is creating, sustaining, and energizing—or to put it in theological language, He is transcendent, immanent, and pervasive.
All searchings after God converge upon Jesus Christ. He is the fulfilment of all religions, and He reveals God to us in trinity. His teaching has come down to us in precept and instruction, in narrative and parable. The Church has endeavored to gather them all together in the concentrated doctrine of the Holy Trinity, not only as a summarized expression of His teachings, but as a protection to the full content of what He taught. We find that it coincides with our own experience, meets our spiritual needs, elevates our conception of God Himself, and expands our religious horizon.
Therefore, “I believe in One God the Father Almighty . . . And in one Lord Jesus Christ . . . Being of one substance with the Father . . . And . . . in the Holy Ghost . . . Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified.”
1 St. Matthew 28:19.
2 St. John 14:26.
3 Corinthians 13:14.
4 Peter 1:2.
VI
CREEDS AND DOCTRINE
In christian teaching faith always has to do with persons. It is not a matter of wishful thinking; neither is it an amiable ability to swallow things whole. Faith means the capacity for confidence in a Person.
Sometimes people say they have faith in a government. They do not really mean that. They mean they have faith in the persons who administer a government. You do not have faith in an automobile, or a fire extinguisher, or a vacuum cleaner. You have faith in the people who make such things and believe they will turn out a satisfactory product. Faith belongs to persons, not to things.
It is important to keep this straight in our Christian minds. When we stand up in church and recite the Creed, we often say “that is my faith.” Whereupon someone draws the conclusion that the Christian faith consists in the proper recitation of an ancient formula. The Creed is not your faith—it is an expression of your faith. Your faith is in God, not in any combination of words, however venerable they may be. In a derivative sense you may speak of “the faith once delivered to the saints,” meaning thereby that body of doctrine which expresses the foundation upon which your faith rests. But your faith is always in a Person.
Faith represents an attitude of life. It is far more than verbal assent to any proposition. The good old doctrine of justification by faith does not mean that you win your soul’s salvation by speaking up affirmatively in a loud voice. Your life may belie your words, in which case your statement of faith is vitiated. Justification by faith means that your hope of divine approval is justified by the fact that your life is definitely facing Christ in the path of Christian progress. You may declare it in words, but as Studdert Kennedy once put it, what you actually do is to “bet your life on God.”
I tell you that I have faith in a friend, I believe in him, I trust him. You ask why. I say it is because I know his family. I know something of his training. I am familiar with what he has done, his previous record, his reputation, what he stands for and what other people think of him. All this is the basis of my faith in him.
That is what the Church has done with our Lord Jesus Christ. At the outset the Church proclaimed her faith in Him. Why? Because, said the Church, we know His Heavenly Father, we know how Christ Himself was born into the world, how He lived a sinless life, how He did nothing but good, suffered, and died, and rose again. We know His personal representative, the Holy Spirit, and we have His matchless teachings supported by His peerless character. That is the Church’s creed—the expression of our Christian faith.
Why is a creed necessary? Why must we have doctrine anyhow? May we not swing our lives toward God, fasten our faith on Him, and let it go at that without bothering our heads over formal statements as to what it all means? There are two answers to such questions. In the first place, our minds are an important part of us and we must use them. Because faith means an attitude of life, it covers all the elements of which we are made—will, instinct, feelings, reason. We must not only love God but we must think about Him, and if we are to think intelligently we must organize our thoughts. Christian doctrine is (as we have said before) organized thinking about God.
But the Creeds themselves grow out of the second answer. Very early in Christian history certain persons began to twist the Gospel to suit their own ideas and strayed away from the apostolic tradition. Some of them said that Christ was divine but not really human. Others declared that He was a very fine man but not necessarily divine. Still others took a half-and-half position, selecting only those portions of the Gospel record which happened to fit their particular contentions. In order to protect the integrity of the Gospel the Church found it necessary to state the case in exact terms which could not be misconstrued. For example there was a queer idea propounded that our Lord did not really die—that being divine He could not die, and that the Crucifixion was not an actual event. In repudiation of any such extraordinary garbling of the facts and to clarify its own position, the Church wrote it into the Apostles’ Creed in such plain terms that it could never be misunderstood—He “was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell.” Suppose the Church had been content merely with saying that Christ really was crucified. The distorters might have replied that they fully agreed, but that the Crucifixion did not bring death to Him as we all have to face it. Then anybody could have made it mean anything he liked and the reality of our Saviour’s death would have been held in serious question. So the Church bore down on it, stating it in four ways in order that no one might mix the meaning.
You see, it is not sufficient to say, “I believe in God.” It makes a difference what kind of God you believe in. As the Archbishop of York has well said—“We tend to become like that which we worship.”1 People who worship an indulgent deity, too good-natured ever to reprove them for wrong-doing, are sure to discount sin and become self-satisfied, self-centered, and self-righteous. Those who worship a vague spirit of Goodness soon become spiritually shallow, sentimental, and deficient in the sense of personal responsibility. On the other hand, those who may worship an exacting Judge gradually turn critical themselves, censorious and unsympathetic with the frailties of their neighbors. It can scarcely be otherwise. Cast your best thoughts and aspirations toward an unworthy object and the same unworthy characteristics will be stimulated in your own life. It is far from satisfying when people say they are religious. We want to know what kind of religion they have. Adherents of a bad religion are often excused on the ground that they are very much in earnest. The