407

CHAPTER VIII.

JESUS CHRIST INFERIOR TO GOD, THE FATHER.

SECT. I. — IN HIS NATURE AND HIS ATTRIBUTES, CHRIST INFERIOR

TO GOD.

Whatsoever essence hath its existence from another is not God.

BISHOP PEARSON.

IN Chapters V. and VI. a great amount of proof, yielded by the liberality, the learning, the unconsciousness, or the inconsistencies of Trinitarians, was adduced to show that the doctrine of a Triune God is either altogether unintelligible or absurd, and that it is not plainly and expressly declared in any one passage within the compass of the Bible; if indeed, without the aid of tradition and the church, it can at all be established. But many of these writers, particularly such as belong to Protestant ranks, while acknowledging the fact that there is no clear, explicit mention of a Trinity in Unity in the Scriptures, and that the dogma itself is far beyond the reach of human discovery, or even of human comprehension, contend that, by a certain process of reasoning, it may be deduced by the collecting and comparing of various passages relating to Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost; that divine titles, attributes, and works are ascribed in the Sacred Books both to the Son and the Spirit, equally as to the Father; and that, as nature and revelation alike declare the unity of the Divine Being, these three intelligences cannot be three separate and infinite Gods, but only three persons in one God. We have, however, already shown, by the aid of our Trinitarian brethren, that the notion of three essentially divine persons or agents must, from the very conceptions that we are obliged to form, imply the idea of three Gods, equal or unequal; and, with all reverence, we may venture to say, that, if the inferential mode of proving the Trinitarian dogma were legitimate, it would not establish its truth, but the obvious contradictions of the Volume in which it is contained. But Unitarians are not reduced to the necessity of believing that Holy Scripture teaches any doctrine so irrational. They find the clearest and most marked distinctions made by the sacred writers between God and Jesus Christ; between the universal Father and his best-beloved Son; between the Anointer and the Anointed; between the Sender and the Sent; between the primary Source of human

salvation, and the faithful Bearer, the meek and humble but perfect Per former, of his holy will, distinctions all of such a character as necessarily to imply, not two divine persons, in any metaphysical or incomprehensible sense of the term, but two distinct beings, one of whom is Supreme, and the other subordinate or inferior.

So full and so resplendent is this evidence, that, though lacking clear and explicit proofs for the doctrine of a Triune God, and though naturally desirous of inferring a plurality of persons in the Deity from texts which seem to imply an infinite nature in Christ, Trinitarians have been compelled, by the force of truth, to acknowledge that in all the circumstances in which he was placed, and in all the offices and characters which he is represented in the Christian Scriptures as sustaining, in the discipline by which he was prepared to act as the Messiah, in the instructions he delivered, in the miracles he wrought, in the goodness he exhibited, in the blessings and the warnings he pronounced, as well as in the trials he encountered, the sufferings he bore, the prayers he uttered, and the unbounded submission he manifested to the will of Heaven; and not only in all his condition and functions on earth, but also in that state of glory in which he is supposed to have existed before the creation of the universe, or to which, according to the divine decree, he was actually raised as the Lord and Ruler of the church which he had founded, he was dependent on, and inferior to, the great Being who had sent him into the world to become its Saviour; and that the honor to which he is entitled from all his followers, if not from the hosts of heaven, should not rest on him as the object of supreme veneration, but ascend through him to the original Author of the gospel, to the Spring whence flowed the existence, the goodness, the wisdom, and the power of the best and mightiest of divine Messengers; in other words, that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, TO THE GLORY OF GOD, THE FATHER."

The quotations that follow in this chapter will, we conceive, be found to bear out the remarks just made.

§ 1. AS A DIVINE BEING, CHRIST INFERIOR TO THE FATHER.

"I can of mine own self do nothing," saith our Saviour, because he is not of himself; and whosoever receives his being must receive his power from another, especially where the essence and the power are undeniably the same, as in God they are. "The Son," then, “can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do," because he hath no power of himself but what the Father gave. .... The divine essence which Christ had as the Word, before he was conceived by the Virgin Mary, he had not of himself, but by communication from God the Father. For this is not to be denied, that there can be but one essence properly divine, and so but one God of infinite wisdom, power,

and majesty; that there can be but one person originally of himself subsisting in that infinite Being, because a plurality of more persons so subsisting would necessarily infer a multiplicity of Gods; that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is originally God, as not receiving his eternal being from any other. Wherefore it necessarily followeth, that Jesus Christ, who is certainly not the Father, cannot be a person subsisting in the divine nature originally of himself; and consequently, being. . . truly and properly the eternal God, he must be understood to have the Godhead communicated to him by the Father, who is not only eternally, but originally, God. BISHOP PEARSON: Exposition of the Creed, Art. I. p. 48; Art. II. pp. 190–1.

In that state of his existence before the creation of the world, our blessed Saviour was partaker of the divine glory and happiness. He was not God the Father, who is the Principle and Fountain of the Deity; [but] he was God by participation of the divine nature and happiness together with the Father, and by way of derivation from him, as the light is from the sun. Abridged from ARCHBISHOP TILLOTSON: Sermon 43; in Works, vol. iii. pp. 185-6.

What it [the eternal generation of the Son] signifies we know not any further than this, that it is the eternal communication of the nature and image of the Father to him, as an earthly parent communicates his own nature and likeness to his son....... As for this expression, "the one true God," it is never attributed to Son or Holy Ghost, that I know of, either in Scripture or any catholic writer, though it is to the Father, whom our Saviour himself calls "the only true God;" for all three divine persons, as in conjunction with each other, being the one only true God, this title cannot so properly be attributed to any one person, but only the Father, who is the Fountain of the Deity. DR. WILLIAM SHERLOCK: Vindication of the Doctrine of the Trinity, pp. 16, 89.

Referring to the latter of these passages, Dr. SOUTH (in his "Animadversions," p. 135) says: "Whence I infer that then neither can the expression of' God,' or 'the true God,' be properly attributed to the Son or to the Holy Ghost; forasmuch as the terms 'one God' and 'one true God,' or 'one only true God,' are equivalent; the term 'one God' including in it every whit as much as the term 'one true God' or 'one only true God,' and the term 'one true God,' or 'one only true God,' including in it no more than the term one God.'"' This witty and sarcastic divine is much displeased with Dr. SHERLOCK for making an admission from which the inference may be drawn that Christ can in no proper sense be called God, and says that Sherlock "seldom turns his pen but he gives some scurvy stroke at it.”

All power and all knowledge are expressly ascribed to the Son of God in several plain passages. . . . The terms "Father" and "Son" convey to us no meaning, if they do not imply that the one derived his being from the other; and this is confirmed, when we read that the Son's power and glory and dominion were all given him by the Father.DR. W. S. POWELL: Charge III.; in Discourses, p. 215.

I know that I have you [the grave Unitarian of the older school] on my side, because you are the principal evidence for what I have been maintaining. You never have made up your mind to abandon the name "Son of God." You find it in the Gospels. Your desire to assert the letter of them, against what you suppose our figurative and mystical interpretations, forces you to admit the phrase. You not only do so, but you make the most of it. You quote all the passages in which Christ declares that the Son can do nothing of himself, that the Father is greater than he, as decisive against the doctrine of our creeds. You do a vast service by insisting upon them, by compelling us to take notice of them. They are not merely chance sentences, carelessly thrown out, inconsistent with others which occur in the same books. You are right in affirming that they contain the key to the life of Christ on earth. You have suggested the thought you could not, consistently with your scheme, bring it forthat what he was on Never can I thank you

to us, ward, but it was latent in your argument, earth must be the explanation of what he is. enough for these hints, for the help they have been to me in apprehending the sense and connection of those words which you cast aside. If the idea of subordination in the Son to the Father, which you so strongly urge, is once lost sight of, or considered an idle and unimportant school-tenet, the morality of the gospel and its divinity disappear together. You have helped to keep alive in our minds the distinction of the persons; and that, I believe, is absolutely necessary, that we may confess the unity of substance. - F. D. MAURICE: Theological

Essays, No. V. pp. 70-1.

We have quoted more than is essential to our purpose, to avoid any appearance of injustice to our author. But the small side-thrusts at the แ grave Unitarian" will scarcely ruffle his skin; and the position, that, because Christ is inferior to and distinct from the Father, he must possess a unity of substance with him, tends certainly to give no finishing blow to the life of Unitarianism. But this is to our purpose: Mr. MAURICE, emphatically agreeing with Antitrinitarians on this point, confesses the doctrine of the gospel to be, that Christ, the Son of God, is subordinate to the Father. If this language has any meaning, it will follow, as a truism, that the Son

of God is a different being from God, and cannot be put on a perfect equality with Him who is his Superior.

In his next paragraph, Mr. MAURICE takes in good part the "very strong and earnest protest" of the Unitarian “against idolatry;" and, if we mistake not, he implies that, without that protest, Trinitarians would have been liable to worship three Gods, instead of three distinct persons, the first of whom properly ranks, in his conception, as Supreme; but he quietly and good-naturedly turns round, and tells the Unitarian that he, too, needs to be on his guard, lest, from the sincerity and fervency of his admiration, he sets the man Jesus Christ "above God." To every friendly suggestion, let us all, whether Trinitarian or Unitarian, give heed!

When our Lord adds, οὐδεὶς ἀγαθὸς, εἰ μὴ εἰς ὁ θεὸς [“ There is none good but one, that is, God"], we are to understand, with Bishops PEARSON and BULL, the sense to be, that there is no being originally, essentially, and independently good, but God. Thus the Father, being the Fountain of the whole Deity, must, in some sense, be the Fountain of the goodness of the Son. Accordingly, the Antenicene fathers were generally agreed that ayatos ["good"] essentially and strictly applied only to God the Father; and to Christ only by reason of the goodness derived to him as being "very God of very God." - DR. S. T. BLOOMFIELD, in his Greek Testament; note on Matt. xix. 17.

Similarly, MARESIUS, quoted with approbation by Dr. WHITBY, and· followed by WILLIAM TROLLOPE.

"My Father is greater than I." He who imparts omnipotence from himself must stand thus, in internal relation, to him who receives that omnipotence, without derogating from the equality of the power imparted; as, even in the capacity of human paternity, there is an essential relation to sonship, which can only be expressed by "greater." The Father is still the "God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," whether in time or in eternity; whether in our Lord's assumed human nature, or in the mystery of his eternally generated divine nature. Though "the Father has put all things under the feet of the Son, yet it is manifest,” as St. Paul reasons, "that He is excepted who did put all things under him." These, therefore, are "the great God, and our Saviour," described in Tit. ii. 13. — GRANVILLE PENN on John xiv. 28; in Suppl. Annotations to the Book of the New Covenant, p. 66.

A volume of extracts of a similar character might easily be made; but the above, with those previously given in pp. 392-6, will suffice to show, that, even granting the antiscriptural doctrine of Christ's possessing a truly divine nature and most of the divine attributes, we must, on the showing of many learned Trinitarians, regard him as inferior to the universal Father.