What Future for the Trinity?

By G.W.H. Lampe

The question we are asking is what future is there for the traditional, classical, doctrine of the Trinity, I am bound to reply, even within these walls of Trinity College, ‘Not much’.

The classical statement of the doctrine of the Trinity, the so-called Athanasian Creed, ends: ‘This is the Catholic Faith: which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved’. This has been paraphrased in less dignified language: ‘Accept my model or I’ll do you’, or rather, ‘This is God’s model: accept it or he will do you’, to which a distressingly large number of Christians in the past were eager to add, ‘and I am ready to act as God’s agent.’

Jesus was not just another prophet (though they did call him a prophet) to whom the word of God had been spoken; he was a personal embodiment of God’s address to us; he was God’s word or wisdom or spirit (in Hebrew wisdom writings those three terms are synonymous) incarnate. With this concept [there came] to be combined a different model…Under the influence, especially, of Platonist thought [logos] is God’s pre-existing agent in creation, his firstborn Son…So the way was open…for the process of personification to be completed. If Jesus is seen as the incarnation of God’s word, and if the word is taken to mean Philo’s Logos, then the Logos is, and always was, Jesus. The personal identity of Jesus is projected back on to the pre-existent Logos. He is no longer Son of God in the sense in which Adam, Israel, and the Messiah are Son of God; he is God the Son: a quite different model. [Logos/Son] has always proved extraordinarily difficult—many would say impossible—to reconcile with the assertion of the genuine manhood of the historical Jesus. 

A model which had been developed to make it possible to claim that Jesus is God, and yet to deny that God is Jesus, simply and, as it were, without remainder leads to the theological puzzle of two distinct entities…I believe that had Christians in the beginning adopted a model or inspiration to express their experience of deity in Jesus, and spoken of him as a man totally moved and inspired by God (indeed, by God’s spirit, wisdom or word, so long as these are not personified as distinct divine beings), they could have claimed for Jesus what their faith demanded without their doctrine running out into meaninglessness. 

It was in the fourth century that the orthodox doctrine of the deity of the Holy Spirit was finally worked out…it asserted the doctrine of a third ‘person’ of the deity. Yet it soon proved impossible to distinguish this entity from the other two…This presented a theological problem. If the Spirit was neither made nor begotten he would be a second ingenerate principle: there would be two Fathers. If he was begotten, there would be two Sons.

If we do substitute unitarianism for trinitarianism it must not be the unitarianism that denies the divinity of Christ. On the contrary, I believe we can assert that God was in Christ, without using the model of ‘God the Son’.