Is the Trinity easily intelligible?
The problem is that religions are not based on what their sacred texts say, but on what believers think these texts say. Unless one already believes in the Trinity by other means, say, because it is the historical faith of the church expressed in the creeds, one will not find the Scriptures speaking of Father, Son and Spirit as the three Persons of one God. Anglican apologists committed themselves to a circular argument. The Bible’s miracles, especially the miracles Jesus performed, were thought to give the Bible rational credentials for being God’s revelation. If we think it implausible that God’s revelation would contain any unreasonable propositions, we would have to think the doctrine that God is three Persons in one substance is reasonable in order to find it in Scripture. Works of Catholic apologetics pointed out that it is ‘as equally unreasonable and as seemingly repugnant, to say that One is Three, as to say a Body is not what it appears’, that is, to say that the bread consecrated by the words ‘This is my body’ has become the body of Christ.[1] Ironic Catholic interjections about the equal difficulty of finding the Trinity and Transubstantiation in Scripture played into these debates. In An Answer to a Late Dialogue between a new Catholick Convert and a Protestant, to Prove the Mystery of the Trinity to Be as Absurd a Doctrine of Transubstantiation (1687), the Anglican William Sherlock observes that his faith will not stomach ‘that which is unreasonable and absurd’. He claimed the Trinity was above reason, but not contrary to it.6
Sherlock later tried to present ‘a very easie and intelligible Notion of a Trinity in Unity’.7 Unfortunately, Sherlock’s description of the three Persons of the Godhead as three minds or centres of consciousness was mocked by Deists and Unitarians as effectively Tritheist. Under the cover of criticising three Roman deities, the Unitarian- Deist Matthew Tindal (1653-1733) satirized a Trinity consisting of three separate minds:
Had the Heathen believ’d God to have been a purely spiritual, invisible Being, they could never have supposed him visible to Mortals; or have thought that an unlimited Being cou’d appear under the limited Form of a Man ... or that an Omnipotent Being cou’d any more be present in one Place, or Creature, than another; or that such a Being cou’d be confi’d to a small Spot of Earth, while another equally omnipotent was in Heaven, and a third descending from thence &. Or that one God cou’d be sent on the Errand of another God, after the Manner that God Mercury was by God Jupiter; tho’ there was nothing to absurd for the Heathen to believe, after they had destroy’d the Unity of God.8
Tindal was pretty much a Houyhnhnm in his conception of religious symbols.
The alpha Houyhnhnm, though, was John Locke (1632-1704). Locke demonstrated that faith contains nothing unreasonable by defining it as dutifully obedient to reason. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), he contends that the ‘object of faith’ is what God has revealed, and reason must be the judge of knowing exactly what God has revealed: ‘nothing that is contrary to and inconsistent with the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged, or assented to, as a matter of faith.’[2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
Reason, says Locke, is ‘the discovery of the certainty or probability of such propositions or truths, which the mind arrives at by deductions made from such ideas which it has got by the use of its natural faculties, viz. by sensation or reflection’. Reason works on ideas, which emerge from sensations. It deduces proposition from ideas which originate in sensations. Faith, by contrast, does not derive from deductions from ideas. Rather, says Locke, ‘Faith...i s the assent to any proposition ... upon the credit of the proposer, as coming from God in some extraordinary way of communication. This way of discovering truths to men we call revelation’ .10 Rather than buying the item ‘cash down’ on the basis of ideas emerging from sensations, one buys the truths of faith on credit from God. But why is it reasonable to buy truths on credit from God? What makes it rational to believe the Bible is God’s Word? Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) claims that the ‘proposer’ is Jesus Christ in the Gospels, and the evidence Jesus offers, making it rational for us to credit that he is God’s emissary, is his miracles and fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy. Jesus’ miracles are his credit card, making rationally credible his claim to speak on God’s behalf. Jesus showed himself to be the Messiah by his miracles and by claiming the prophesied Kingdom of God had come. Locke does not think Jesus said he was the Messiah, but he thinks the Gospel writers say so. Locke’s ‘article of faith’ is that Jesus was the Messiah. It is reasonable to have faith that the Bible is God’s revelation because in it Jesus the Messiah performs miracles, acts which are evidence that he was on a mission from God.
For Locke, Jesus is the Messiah, but is he the second Person of the Trinity? If, on Locke’s account, we make an inference from Jesus to God, then Jesus is not God. The Reasonableness of Christianity does not mention the Trinity. When called on this, Locke both denied that he was a Unitarian and sarcastically demanded to see a different Bible, one which refers unequivocally to the Trinity:
My Lord, my Bible is faulty again; for I do not remember that I ever read in it either of these propositions in these precise words, ‘that there are three persons in one nature, or, there are two natures in one person’. When your Lordship shall show me a Bible wherein they are set down, I shall then think them a good instance of propositions offered me out of Scripture ... they may be drawn from the Scripture: but I deny that these very propositions are in express words in my Bible.11
Scripture exegesis becomes the test which faith must pass, and we know in advance that Scripture will not offend our reasoning minds by deciding to read it as a string of literal propositions. Faith does not, according to Locke, assent to any proposition it does not understand, and here he had the Reformers’ rejection of any type of fides implicata on his side.
- [1] p. 78.
- [2] Dixon, ‘Nice and Hot Disputes’ pp. 81-82.
- [3] William Sherlock, Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, cited in Dixon, ‘Nice and Hot Disputes’ p. 101.
- [4] Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as Creation (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 74-75.
- [5] Locke, Essay, IV.18.10, p. 613.
- [6] Locke, Essay, IV.18.2, p. 608.
