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The Trinity In Experience and Theology
By Henry P. Van Dusen

OF all the beliefs of Christian faith, the most mysterious and the most mystifying to the ordinary Christian is the Trinity. Mysterious not in the right and desirable sense that it serves remind us of the greatness of God and the manifoldness of his rations, and so to enlarge and enrich our thought of God, but mysterious in the undesirable sense that it baffles and confuses us in trying to think of God worthily.

We tend to think of the doctrine of the Trinity as not only the most obscure and mystifying but also perhaps the most abstruse and culative of all Christian beliefs. It is important to recognize that the Trinity is, in the first instance, not a dogma of theology at all but a datum of experience. Historically the Trinity of experience long antedated the Trinity of dogma. In Canon Hodgson's striking epigram: "Christianity began as a trinitarian religion with a unitarian theology." ¹

The three-fold designation of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is present within the New Testament in two crucial passages of imense influence upon early Christianity-the Great Commission and Baptismal Formula attributed to the Risen Christ which concludes the Gospel of Matthew, and the Great Benediction which concludes is Second Letter to the Corinthians. These two "Trinitarian" phrases worked their way into the heart of Christian thinking through frequent repetition in the worship of the Christian Churches, worship which sought to voice not what theologians presumed to be true of the Being of God but what ordinary Christians knew to be true of their experience of God. Moreover, the three-fold distinction was a constitutive element of Paul's most creative and central teaching as in Romans 8, and of the Fourth Gospel in the crucial passage which places on the lips of Jesus the Promise of the Counselor, the Spirit of truth, whom the Father will send in his name and who will

¹ Leonard Hodgson, The Doctrine of The Trinity, p. 103.

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bear witness to him and guide his followers into all the truth. These great passages in both Paul and John are, again, declarations of experience, of what was already most assuredly known to be fact in the life of the first-century Christian Church.

Whatever we make of the Trinity of dogma, the Trinity of experience remains. Indeed, the crucial question in all speculative thought about the Trinity is precisely this: whether it is legitimate, indeed necessary, to recognize as true of the inmost reality of the Divine Being distinctions which are indisputably real within our experience of the Divine Being.

The Doctrine of the Trinity is not basically an attempt to foise upon Christian credulity an unintelligible and incredible speculation regarding Ultimate Reality; it is the effort to discover what must be true of ultimate Reality because of what our experience of that Reality tells us. Affirmation of the Trinity and some attempt to explain it are an inevitable and inescapable corollary of Christian certitude.

I

What, if any, light may the history of Christian thought about the Trinity yield for our present-day understanding of it?

The earliest attempt at a definitive formulation of the Trinity was the work of that remarkable trinity of Eastern theologians known a the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their friend and colleague Gregory of Nazianzus. They begin rightly, with an honest and humble confession of the incomprehensibility of the Divine Nature and the limitations of human speculation. Gregory Nazianzus declares: "It is difficult to conceive God but to define him in words is an impossibility…. In my opinion it is impossible to express him, and yet more impossible to conceive him … and this, not merely to the utterly careless and ignorant, but even to those who are highly exalted and who love God, and in like manner to every created nature. " ²

Despite this forthright recognition of the impossibility of the attempt, Basil, as a good speculative theologian, cheerfully goes on to interpret the relations of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit within the Godhead in terms of the then accepted discrimination of substance from hypostasis, and he explains the Trinity as affirming one ousia.

² Gregory, Nazianzus, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. VII, p. 289 Oratio xxviii, iv.

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or substantia or "substance" or "nature" in three hypostases or personae or " persons." Basil writes his brother Gregory of Nyssa: "Many, not distinguishing in theology the common substance from the hypostases, fall into the same fancies and imagine that it makes no difference whether substance or hypostasis be spoken of…. Some nouns which are used to cover many and various objects have a more general sense like man. When we employ this word we designate the common nature, not some particular man to whom the name especially belongs. For Peter is no more man than Andrew or John or James. Hence, as the word embraces all that are included under the same name, there is need of some mark of distinction by which we may recognize not man in general but Peter or John. There are other nouns which stand for a particular object and denote not the other nature but a separate thing having nothing in common, so far as its individuality goes, with others of the same kind, like Paul or Timothy. . . . If then you transfer to theology the distinction you have drawn in human affairs between substance and hypostasis you not go wrong.³

This statement is of the utmost importance not only because of its historic influence, but also because, in its last sentence, it sets frankly the method most frequently employed in all subsequent trinitarian speculation: "to transfer to theology the distinctions drawn in human affairs."

How, then, in the view of the Cappadocian theologians, are the three "persons" of the Godhead different from each other? Is one to be thought of as Creator, another as Redeemer, and the third as Sanctifer? Not at all, all three "persons" function in all three Divine activities. Rather, the Father is unbegotten while the Son is eternally begotten; the Father, does not proceed while the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds. The differentiation is no longer, as it was for Paul and John and the Early Church, a difference in the operation of the Divine Being in his creation and upon human life testified by observation and experience, but a description of distinctions within the Godhead for which there is no definable basis, and perhaps can be no basis, within our assured knowledge of God. The Trinity of speculation has triumphed over the Trinity of experience. And the resulting conception verges precariously toward tritheism. In the meantime, reflection regarding the Trinity in Western

³ Basil, Epistle 38, to his brother Gregory of Nyssa.

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Christendom had moved along somewhat different lines. Here, the determinative mind was that of the great Augustine. It must always be borne in mind that Augustine, like the Western theologians generally, was passionately concerned to safeguard the unity of God in men's thought of him. Therefore with him the stress falls on the divine unity while recognizing the three-fold expression of that unity," just as the Eastern theologians generally are most interested in elaborating the distinctions within the Godhead while formally affirming the unity.

How, then, does Augustine explain the distinction of Father, Son, and Spirit within the Godhead? He discovers the most helpful suggestions, not as the Cappadocians in the analogy of the relations of individual men to each other, but principally in analogies drawn from the inmost self-consciousness of every man. At different places, Augustine elaborates three alternative analogies which are not altogether mutually consistent or readily reconciled. The Trinity may be likened to: (1) Memory, Understanding, and Will-three faculties, of one and the same person; (2) Mind, Self-knowledge, Self-love, also, three aspects of the same individual; (3) The Lover, the Beloved, Love-obviously not three faculties or aspects of a single self-consciousness but rather of the relations of separate beings. As with the Cappadocians, this third explanation tends strongly toward tritheism; its more serious inadequacy is that the "Third Person," love, is hardly more than a relationship.

In summary, classic Christian thought, making its beginning in the indubitable three-fold experience of God as testified by the New Testament, is at one in holding that this Trinity of experience must be a reflection (mirror) of the inner nature of the Divine Being, of an ontological Trinity. And it is also at one in seeking an understanding of how this can be done by positing in the Godhead distinctions discovered within human experience, that is by the method of frank anthropomorphism. Not only did the Trinity of experience give birth to the Trinity of speculation. The Trinity of speculation builds upon human experience. Not however-and just here is the dubious point of departure from sound procedure-upon men's experience of God but their experience of themselves, that is by the method of anthropomorphism. It does so along two alternative lines: (1) Starting with the three Persons of the Deity and the problem of how the three Persons can be one God, it studies the relations of

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human persons to each other, and finds in them a suggestion of the relations of the Divine Persons within the Godhead (the Cappadocian Fathers and the Eastern Church generally); (2) Starting with the unity of God and the problem of how the one God can be conceived as three "persons," it examines the working of the human soul at its "highest, and pictures the inmost Being of God as analogous-on the assumption that man is truly made in the image of God (Augustine characteristically, and the Western Church prevailingly).

II

Space does not permit us to follow the tortuous course of trinitarian speculation through succeeding centuries. Nor is it necessary to do so. For and this fact of the highest interest-though there are ingenious and sometimes suggestive elaborations and modifications in details, all interpretations move along the same two alternative lines. There is no novelty in principle of interpretation.

In our own day, however, in contemporary theology, there have been three re-interpretations of the Trinity of more than usual originality and power.

(1) One, as might be anticipated, comes from the mind of Karl Barth. For, to the astonishment of many, Barth's theology proves to be thoroughly and insistently trinitarian. He declares:4 "We begin the doctrine of revelation with the doctrine of the Triune God. God himself in unimpaired unity yet also in unimpaired difference is Revealer, Revealed, Revealedness…. One in three of his own modes of existence, which consist in their mutual relationships-Father, Son and Holy Spirit." Once again, the phrases are reminiscent of Augustine. Like Augustine, Barth never tires of categorical insistence upon the unity of God. "Not three divine 'I's,' but thrice of the one divine I." But he goes on to affirm -with equal emphasis: "Anti-trinitarianism falls into the dilemma of denying either the revelation of God or the unity of God." He continues: "We prefer to say, the three 'modes of being' in God, rather than three 'persons.' "This "means that the one God, i.e., the one Lord, the one personal God is what he is not in one mode only, but … in the mode of the Father, in the mode of the Son, in the mode of the Holy Spirit." And Barth adds: "The ancient concept of Person . . . has today become obsolete."

⁴ The Doctrine of the Word of God, Vol. 1, Part 1, pp. 339, 400, 403, 404, 407, 413, 420.

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(2) In seeming direct contradiction, Canon Leonard Hodgson insists upon the soundness of the classic formula of "three Persons," and seeks to make it intelligible and convincing through an interesting analysis of the nature of unity. ⁵ He reminds us, as we have already noted, that "Christianity began as a trinitarian religion with a unitarian theology"; that is to say, the problem with which we must wrestle is not how to believe in a triune conception of God, but how to interpret theologically a trinitarian experience of God. The, Christian dilemma has always been unitarianism vs. tritheism. Christian faith, in fidelity to its knowledge of God in experience, desires to declare a three-fold Deity, but can it succeed in doing so without sacrificing the unity of God? The concept of unity, he holds, may be used in two contrasted senses. There is mathematical unity involving the absence of multiplicity. But there is also organic unity, in which multiplicity is embraced within an "Internally constitutive unity." "This world is the world wherein the ultimate unities of reality are made known to us not in their unity but in their multiplicity." In this recognition, it is possible to conceive of three" Persons in one God. As Professor D. M. Baillie rightly suggests Hodgson's interpretation which is representative of contemporary Anglicanism tends toward "tritheism," as Barth's, so influential upon contemporary Reformed theology, inclines toward "modalism." ⁶

(3) Much the most original and suggestive re-interpretation of the Trinity in these latter years has come, however, not from the speculations of a theologian, but from the testimony of a layman, or rather a laywoman. Dorothy Sayers' The Mind of The Maker is the most brilliant and stimulating work of lay theology in our day, as well one of the boldest efforts to comprehend the Christian affirmation of the Trinity ever penned.

Miss Sayers draws the materials for her effort altogether from the data of creative originality as she knows it in her own experience as writer, and as she discovers it in the creative work of others-writers artists, etc., and as it is verified in the appreciation of artistic creation by those who rightly comprehend what is offered them. The creative artist begins with an "Idea" in the mind. This must, by its own inner logic, body itself forth into the world in a creative act ("Energy"). But this is not the conclusion of the matter. That which the creator has envisioned, and has given forth, must itself act

⁵ The Doctrine of The Trinity, esp. p. 108.
⁶ God Was In Christ, pp. 133 ff.

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to communicate the "Idea" and the "Energy" to reader or beholder. It even returns to the artist to bring added understanding of his own creative Idea ("Power") and thus to complete the full cycle of creation. ⁷

III

What conclusions, then, can we set down regarding the Christian belief in the Trinity? We have seen that, at every stage of Trintarian formulation from the third century to the present day, speculation regarding the inner Being of the Godhead has moved along two alternative lines: (1) Analogy from men's relations with each other to relations within the Divine Being; and (2) Analogy from individual human consciousness to the inmost character of the Divine consciousness , justified by the basic recognition that "man is made in the image of God." These two alternative lines spring respectively from concern for the three-fold manifestation of God, and from concern for the unity of God. Let us re-appraise these two methods.

(1) Is it possible to think of the Divine Being as a society of Divine Persons, analogous to a society of human persons? This was the attempt of the Cappadocians with their somewhat crude analogy of Peter, James, and John. It seems to be implied in Augustine's third figure of Lover, Beloved, Love. It is suggested, though disavowed, in Barth's triad of Revealer, Revealed, Revealedness. It is vigorously advocated by speculative disciples of the modern social emphasis. It is ably defended today by such Anglican theologians as Canon Hodgson.

The answer is: It is possible so to think of the Godhead. Let us attempt a fresh illustration. Let us imagine triplets, as alike as the proverbial "three peas in a pod--born of the same lineage, possessing identical equipments of mind and heart and will, so intimately akin at they think alike and feel alike and desire alike in all respects and every moment. Let us suppose that they are wholly one in purpose, together bent on the united realization of the same great Design; let us say, the prosecution of a military campaign. But, the effectively to accomplish their common End. they agree upon a division of responsibility. One is assigned the role of Chief-of-Staff, remaining at headquarters, in continuous contact at all times with brothers on the field of battle, and at all points in complete of thought and plan with them. The second brother is

⁷ The Mind of The Maker, 1941, by Dorothy L. Sayers. From pp. 40-41.

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given the task of Commander of the Vanguard, a special assignment within their total plan of battle, but one of supreme importance. The third brother holds a roving commission, Liaison-man, moving freely over the whole field, maintaining contact between his two brothers and their widely dispersed forces, and even penetrating the ranks of the enemy to seek to win them to the great objective. It is possible to think of three persons, even human persons, thus one.

Now, alter the terms of reference. Substitute, as the End in view, for the winning of a military campaign, the winning of mankind into partnership in the Divine Purpose and into fellowship with the Divine Reality; substitute, for three brothers, joint military commandants, three Persons of the single gracious redemptive Godhead. We have a suggestion of how we might conceive the Divine Trinity in such fashion. The great question is: Are we justified in hypothesizing some such community of Persons within the Godhead, and is it necessary to do so? The values of so thinking of God are its stimulus to imagination, its enrichment of our always inadequate and earth-bound thoughts of the ineffable and inexhaustible Deity. Its danger is that, even with the best safeguards, we think of three! Gods, not one God; that is to say, it tends toward tritheism.

(2) And the alternative method-analogy from human conscienceness to the Divine consciousness? This was the favorite line of reasoning of Augustine, of Western theologians generally, of Hegel! We can hardly imagine a more stimulating and persuasive development of it than that of Dorothy Sayers. It is suggestive of the richness of the Divine nature and his experience-the diversities of expression possible within a single consciousness. Its danger is a too literal application of a too limited analogy.

Is there still a third candidate for the method of analogy? I believe there is; and one which, as far as I am aware, has never been adequately exploited and attempted in the schools of theology. It the analogy of an individual human person in three aspects of his self-expression, in three functions and sets of relationships.

Harry Emerson Fosdick, I believe it was, who employed this analogy, in seeking to make the Christian Trinity intelligible an meaningful, not to theological pundits, or to "grass-roots " preachers, but to American schoolboys. He took, as his illustration, Theodore Roosevelt. There were at least three ways in which Theodore Roosevelt could be, and was in fact, known by his contemporaries;

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there are at least three avenues which anyone today desiring to comprehend that rich and dynamic person in his fullness must follow; there are three contrasted sources of understanding of him on the basis of his own self-disclosure in his writings. The separate avenues seem to lead to three persons, three Theodore Roosevelts. And so it will appear unless one recognizes that he is being introduced, not to three persons, but to one person in three aspects.

In the first place, there was Theodore Roosevelt-the public figure, the politician, the statesman, the President of the Republic. All of us have seen photographs of him, in long black frock coat, stern eyes staring sharply through eyeglasses-severe, aloof, austere-as he unfailingly seemed to those who called on him in the presidential office or knew him only in official relationships. That Roosevelt is portrayed by his own pen in his Autobiography.

And there was also Theodore Roosevelt-the sportsman, the huntsman, the military campaigner, the explorer-a robust, tough, virile man-among-men-seeking the recovery of physical health on the Western plains, leading his Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, stalking big game in the Amazon or African wilds. If you would be introduced to that Roosevelt by himself, read his book, The Winning of the West.

But there was a third Theodore Roosevelt, known to few, but with what precious memories and in what contrast to either the forbidding statesman or the rough plainsman-gentle, winsome, boyish, incurably mischievous playmate of the young, burrowing his nose into the great rug before the open hearth of his beloved retreat at Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay, in some wild frolic. If you would meet him, turn to his Letters to His Children.

Which was the true Theodore Roosevelt? One might have ought that he knew well one of these "persons"; never suspecting at there was another, two others. The three avenues of acquaintance lead to three different Theodore Roosevelts; no, not "three persons," but one person in three separate "modes of operation." If this can be true of almost any finite person-and a hundred others might be substituted-how much more of the Infinite Person, the Living God.

In our attempts to comprehend, even though inadequately, the Being of God, we are on right lines to employ the method of humanana logy, anthropomorphism, reading God's nature in terms drawn

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from human experience at its noblest, both because this is a sound corollary of our basic certitude that "man is made in the image of God" and is supported by the authority of Jesus' unfailing practice and repeated injunction ("if you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more your Father in Heaven"); and also because we have no other way to think when we try to conceive God. But our analogies should be drawn, not from a multiplicity of persons, not from the distinction of faculties or function within each person, but from the familiar reality of the measureless variety and richness of a single whole person in his manifold experience and expression.