Section II C

No Pretense that Either the Doctrine of the Trinity or the Doctrine of the Hypostatic Union is Expressly Taught in the Scriptures

Andrews Norton

Here, then, we might rest. If this proposition has been established, the controversy is at an end, as far as it regards the truth of the doctrines, and as far as it can be carried on against us by any sect of Christians. Till it can be shown that there is some ESSENTIAL mistake in the preceding statements, he who chooses to urge that these doctrines were taught by Christ and his Apostles must do this, not as a Christian, but as an unbeliever. If Christ and his Apostles communicated a revelation from God, these could make no part of it, for a revelation from God cannot teach absurdities.

But here I have no intention of resting. If I were to do so, I suppose that the old, unfounded complaint would be repeated once more, that those who reject these doctrines oppose reason to revelation; for there are men who seem unable to comprehend the possibility that the doctrines of their sect may make no part of the Christian revelation. What pretense, then, is there for asserting that the doctrines in question are taught in the Scriptures? Certainly they are nowhere expressly taught. It cannot even be pretended that they are. There is not a passage from one end of the Bible to the other on which one can by any violence force such a meaning as to make it affirm the proposition, "that there are three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and these three are one God, the same in substance, equal in power and glory"; or the proposition that Christ "was and continues to be God and man in two distinct natures and one person for ever."[i] There was a famous passage in the First Epistle of John (v. 7), which was believed to affirm something like the first-mentioned proposition; but this every man of tolerable learning and fairness, at the present day, acknowledges to be spurious. And now this is gone, there is not one to be discovered of a similar character.

THERE IS NOT A PASSAGE TO BE FOUND IN THE SCRIPTURES WHICH CAN BE IMAGINED TO AFFIRM EITHER OF THOSE DOCTRINES THAT HAVE BEEN REPRESENTED AS BEING AT THE VERY FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIANITY.

What pretense, then, is there for saying that those doctrines were taught by Jesus Christ and are to be received upon his authority? What ground is there for affirming that he, being a man, announced himself as the infinite God, and taught his followers also that God exists in three persons? But I will state a broader question. What pretence is there for saying that those doctrines were taught by any writer, Jewish or Christian, of any book of the Old or New Testament? None whatever --if, in order to prove that a writer has taught a doctrine, it be necessary to produce some passage in which he has affirmed that doctrine.

What mode of reasoning, then, is adopted by Trinitarians? I answer, that, in the first place, they bring forward certain passages, which, they maintain, prove that Christ is God. With these passages they likewise bring forward some others, which are supposed to intimate or prove the personality and deity of the Holy Spirit. It cannot but be observed, however, that, for the most part, they give themselves comparatively little trouble about the latter doctrine, and seem to regard it as following almost as a matter of course, if the former be established. Now there is no dispute that the Father is God; and it being thus proved that the Son and Spirit are each also God, it is inferred, not that there are three Gods, which would be the proper consequence, but that there are three persons in the Divinity. But Christ having been proved to be God, and it being at the same time regarded by Trinitarians as certain that he was a man, it is inferred also that he was both God and man. The stress of the argument, it thus appears, bears upon the proposition that Christ is God, the second person in the Trinity.

Turning away our view, then, for the present, from the absurdities that are involved in this proposition, or with which it is connected, we will proceed to inquire, as if it were capable of proof, what Christ and his Apostles taught concerning it.