The development of the doctrine of Trinity
quote: (extract)
The whole history of the Jewish religion is centred in the gradual purification of the idea of God. The morality of the Jews did not outgrow their religion, but their interest was always ethical and not speculative. The highest strains of the psalmists and the most fervent appeals of the prophets were progressively directed to the great end of praising and preaching the One true God, everlasting, with sincere and pure devotion. The creed of the Jew, to this day, is summed up in the well-remembered words, which have been ever on his lips, living or dying: “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord” (Deut. vi. 4).
The definiteness and persistence of this creed, which of course is the strength also of Mahommedanism, presents a contrast to the fluid character of the statements in the Vedas, and to the chaos of conflicting opinions of philosophers among the Greeks and Romans. As Dr J. R. Illingworth has said very concisely:
“The physical speculations of the lonians and Atomists rendered a God superfluous, and the metaphysical and logical reasoning of the Eleatics declared Him to be unknowable.”3 Plato regarding the world as an embodiment of eternal, archetypal ideas, which he groups under the central idea of Good, identified with the divine reason, at the same time uses the ordinary language of the day, and speaks of God and the gods, feeling his way towards the conception of a personal God, which, to quote Dr Illingworth again, neither he nor Aristotle could reach because they had not “a clear conception of human personality.”
They were followed by an age of philosophizing which did little to advance speculation. The Stoics, for example, were more successful in criticizing the current creed than in explaining the underlying truth which they recognized in polytheism. The final goal of Greek philosophy was only reached when the great thinkers of the early Christian Church, who had been trained in the schools of Alexandria and Athens, used its modes of thought in theiranalysis of the Christian idea of God.
“In this sense the doctrine of the Trinity was the’ synthesis, and summary, of all that was highest in the Hebrew and Hellenic conceptions of God, fused into union by the electric touch of the Incarnation.”
The 1911 Encyclopedia, under CREEDS
