Tritheism

“ The third is the only real difficulty, the only one which can remain long in an educated and instructed mind. The objection urged on theological or philosophical grounds by really learned men against the dogma of the Trinity, is, that it implies Tritheism. The simplest and most ordinary method of removing this objection, is by presenting the explicit and positive affirmation of the church that there is but one eternal principle of self-existent, necessary being, one first cause, one infinite substance possessing all perfections. ”

“ In the latter case, if as God He is a distinct individual by the side of the Father, you have two Gods, and as the same is said of the Holy Ghost, the consequence is Tritheism. Later there appeared people known as Tetratheists, in consequence of the teaching of Damianus, a Syrian, the Severian or Monophysite patriarch of Alexandria—Peter's successor—at the end of the sixth century. ”

“ On the whole, I saw, that however people might call themselves Trinitarians, yet if, like Stuart and all the Evangelicals in Church and Dissent, they turn into a dead letter the generation of the Son of God, and the procession of the Spirit, nothing is possible but Sabellianism or Tritheism: or, indeed, Ditheism, if the Spirit's separate personality is not held. The modern creed is alternately the one or the other, as occasion requires. ”

“ But not to urge here that, according to this hypothesis, there cannot possibly be any reason given why there should be as many as Three such individuals in the species of God which differ only numerically from one another, they being but the very same thing thrice repeated; and yet that there should be no more than Three such neither, and not Three Hundred, or Three Thousand, or as many as there are individuals in the species of Man; we say not to urge this, it seems plain that this Trinity, is no other than a kind of Tritheism, and that of Gods independent and co-ordinate too. ”

“ We will venture to say, that there has never yet been a definition of the Trinity which has not been either Tritheistic or Modalistic; and Church Orthodoxy has always stood either on Tritheistic or on Sabellian ground. In other words, the Orthodox Trinity of any age, when searched to the bottom, has proved to be Unitarianism, after all—Unitarianism in the Tritheistic or in the Sabellian disguise; for the Tritheism of three coequal, independent, and absolute Gods, is too much opposed both to reason and Scripture to be able ever to maintain itself openly as a theology for any length of time. ”

“ With respect to the doctrine of the Trinity, he confounded person with nature, and taught a species of tritheism. His partisans, however, had several variations or shades of opinion. There were, (1.) The Damianitæ, who held that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, were distinct persons; each not God in himself, but God by participation in a common divine nature. (2.) The Petritæ, sectators of Peter of Antioch, who professed to believe that each person in the blessed Trinity is in himself God, by independent nature, substance, and individuality ”

“ Worship only the God you see in Christ." Here we have the frank confession of honest and intelligent men, long and still connected with the orthodox school. And what is it? Why, that the "generally accepted" doctrine of to-day concerning God—the doctrine which "most Christians believe," is "the error of Tritheism, the doctrine that there are three Gods." And that this conception or misconception of the supreme object of worship, "is so pervasive of Christian literature and Christian teaching, that it poisons minds least aware of it." ”

“ Realism, which found reality in the universal substance, subordinating the individual to humanity and humanity to the Godhead, logically led to Pantheism; while Nominalism, finding reality solely in each disjointed unit, if applied to theology, left no choice except between Unitarianism and Tritheism. In the year 1092 a nominalist philosopher Roscellinus was condemned at Soissons for teaching Tritheism and denying the Trinity. ”

“ There is a Divine Trinity, consisting of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; and these three are the three Essentials of One God,—which [239] make a One, like soul, body, and operation in man. To conceive of a Trinity of Divine persons from eternity, is to think of three Gods; and no amount of word-playing and creed-making can prevent the mind from falling into Tritheism, as long as a Trinity of persons and not of essentials is spoken and thought of. A Trinity of persons was unknown in the Apostolic Church. ”

“ I honestly confess that I should confine my grounds of opposition to the article thus stated to its unnecessariness, to the want of sufficient proofs from Scripture that I am bound to believe or trouble my head with it. I am sure that Bishop Bull, who really did believe the Trinity, without either Tritheism or Sabellianism, could not consistently have used the argument of Taylor or of Tillotson in proof of the absurdity of Transubstantiation. ”

“ Yet this text, so plainly declaring the doctrine of Jesus, that the world was created by the supreme, intelligent being, has been perverted by modern Christians to build up a second person of their tritheism, by a mistranslation of the word λογος. ”

“ Properly understood, that doctrine is the vindication of the complete fulness of the personal life of the One God. Too often it is so held, and so preached and represented, as in this case, that monotheism is tacitly abandoned in favour of ditheism or tritheism. It needs to be plainly said, that the transaction theory is inconsistent with the trinitarian doctrine. The Three Persons are so called in our Western theology owing to defects inherent in human thought and speech. To set one over against the other as two parties to a contract, is to found a theory upon those very defects. ”

“ It pleases the imagination and gives to wisdom great power to rise to intelligible truths.
I have said that the Divinity, considered in the human understanding, is manifest under the emblem of two natural principles: hence, all the cults wherein two opposed beings appear, as in the cult of Zoroaster. This cult, which is rarely encountered as pure as among the ancient Persians, or among the followers of Manes, mingles readily with tritheism and even polytheism: it was quite recognizable in Egypt and among the Scandinavians, and much more involved among the Indians, Greeks, and Latins. ”

“ But to this it may be replied, that when we say the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, are God, we do not say they are distinct Gods, for the distinction between them respects their personality, not their deity: and when we assert that they are all Eternal, or Almighty, we do not suppose that their duration, or power, are distinct; and the same may be said of all other divine perfections that are attributed to them, the perfections are the same in all of them, though the persons are distinct. So that the charge of Tritheism lies in a narrow compass: they say that there is one divine Being, so do we ”

“ Such was the ancient Triad made to say of himself, in an inscription found in the ruins of the temple at Sais in Egypt, "I am all that has been, all that is, and all that shall be, and no mortal has lifted yet the veil that covers me;" and such was the Triunity referred to as the God Universe by Pliny, the Roman philosopher and naturalist, who, flourishing in the first century of the Christian era, wrote that he is "An infinite God which has never been created, and which shall never come to an end. To look for something else beyond it is useless labor for man and out of his reach. ”

“ But they do us wrong and falsify our teaching; for we do not conceive of the Trinity as in the nature of three men or of three angels. We regard it as one divine essence, an intimacy surpassing any earthly unity. The human body and soul are not so completely one as the Triune God. Further, we claim the Holy Scriptures teach that in the one divine essence, God the Father begot a son. Before any creature was made, before the world was created, as Paul says, "before the foundation of the world," in eternity, the Father begot a Son who is equal with him and in all respects God like himself. ”

“ If the Holy Spirit is a distinct Person from God the Father, then the third Person, and not the first person in the Trinity, nor the second person, must on the Trinitarian view be regarded as the Father of Jesus, for it is written, “the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.” And yet the Trinitarian hypothesis is, that it was neither the third person, nor the first, but the second person in the godhead, that took humanity into union with his deity. ”

“ Now the Trinitarians must allow us the privilege of taking our faith from ourselves, not from them, and in carving out for us this employment, the Lecturer at Christ Church would set us to the task of disproving our own convictions, of overthrowing our own interpretations, of answering and opposing ourselves. There is only one point of difference between the Trinitarians and ourselves upon this subject, and that is the only point to which their arguments never have a reference. They maintain and we maintain that the Holy Spirit is God. ”

“ That the Trinity is a mystery was a law of theology so absolute as in a degree to hide the law of philosophy that the Trinity was meant as a solution of a greater mystery still. In truth, as a matter of philosophy, the Trinity was intended to explain the eternal and primary problem of the process by which unity could produce diversity. Starting from unity alone, philosophers found themselves unable to stir hand or foot until they could account for duality. ”

“ A trinity therefore—it is singular how this form forces itself upon the human mind—but a trinity very different from the Christian conception of the trinity, since it comprises a father and two striving brothers: a triad that approaches the antique cosmogony of which we find a reflection in Hesiod, in Chaos, Gaea, and Eros. If I live I shall go deeper into ancient thought. Those ancient philosophers lived in more intimate contact with nature than any of their successors, and, moreover, collected the thousand-year-old wisdom of the whole Orient. ”

“ With having, in spite of this, not only persisted in his errors and infected many with them, but with having lately had another book clandestinely printed at Vienne, in Dauphiny, filled with the like heresies and execrable blasphemies against the Holy Trinity, the Son of God, the baptism of infants, and other sacred doctrines, the foundation of the Christian religion. Item. With having in the said book called all who believe in a Trinity, tritheists, and even atheists, and the Trinity itself a demon or monster having three heads. ”

“ The conception of the Trinity is again an attempt to express the union of Divine and human, "the inauguration of the Divine Nature within human life." The dogma, however, involves ideas of a particular generation, and so threatens to become, and has indeed become, burdensome to a later age which no longer holds these ideas. Further, the doctrine of the Trinity has mixed up a fundamental truth of religion with abstruse philosophical speculations, and this has provided a stumbling-block rather than a help. ”

“ If the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is distinguished from the avatars of Hinduism, and the incarnations of Thibetan Lamaism, by its regenerative moral force, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity is no less distinguished from the pseudo-trinities of Neo-Platonism and its modern developments by the fact that for eighteen centuries it has been the safeguard of a pure Monotheism against everything which menaces the life of religion. ”

“ Then he told me frankly both his name and his family. "Trypho," says he, "I am called; and I am a Hebrew of the circumcision, and having escaped from the war [4] lately carried on there, I am spending my days in Greece, and chiefly at Corinth."
"And in what," said I, "would you be profited by philosophy so much as by your own lawgiver and the prophets?"
"Why not?" he replied. "Do not the philosophers turn every discourse on God? and do not questions continually arise to them about His unity and providence? Is not this truly the duty of philosophy, to investigate the Deity?" ”

“ To the common, ignorant peasant, no such trouble occurred, for he knew the Trinity in its simpler form as the first condition of life, like time and space and force. No human being was so stupid as not to understand that the father, mother, and child made a trinity, returning into each other, and although every father, every mother, and every child, from the dawn of man's intelligence, had asked why, and had never received an answer more intelligible to them than to philosophers, they never showed difficulty in accepting that trinity as a fact. ”

“ He is the creator of all things, and a pure spirit, answered the Christian catechist. Is not this Trinity a wonderful idea? said the young students to each other, after hearing Saccas. Christianity, said Origen, teaches a Trinity far more awful and wonderful, and far more reasonable, too--a Trinity, not of ideas, but of persons. The new school talked of the inferior gods that ruled the lower world, and of the demons, good and bad, who executed their behests. The Christian philosopher explained the great fact of creation, and laid down the true doctrine of guardian angels and tempting devils. ”