Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 88:351 (Jul 1931)
Article: The Necessitation Of The Trinity
Author: C. Norman Bartuett

BSac 88:351 (July 1931) p. 329

The Necessitation Of The Trinity

C. Norman Bartuett

I. The Impossibility Of A Unipersonal Absolute

The author assumes his readers to be confirmed theists. That, apart from the postulate of a Supreme Being, the universe becomes an inexplicable riddle is too obvious to require amplification. The limits of time and space at the disposal of the writer prevent, and the purpose he has in view makes unnecessary and superfluous, any resume, however cursory, of the age-long ontological, cosmological, and teleological arguments whereby men have sought to prove the existence of God. We shall hold with Kant that God cannot me metaphysically proved, but can be experimentally known. If there be a God, he must be personal. An impersonal God is a sheer absurdity.

It is, of course, only too well known that many theists who believe firmly in a personal God are yet far from being Trinitarians. In fact many even go so far as to denounce our trinitarian faith as a tritheism that possesses no more objective validity than any one or all of the myriad varieties of polytheism so rife in the history of human credulity. The doctrine that God is three Persons and yet only one God they sweep aside as something impossible and inconceivable.

Not in a spirit of cruel mockery, but with a sincerely constructive purpose we now proceed to show that the position taken by anti-trinitarian theism is utterly untenable. There are inescapable trinitarian implications in theistic personalism.

A unipersonal Deity is an impossibility, irreconcilable with logic and unrealizable in fact. The very absoluteness of God necessitates eternal personal distinctions in the Godhead. Infinity of attributes in the Supreme Being involves a plurality of Divine Persons. God must be more than one Person, else he cannot be God. Realizing that these assertions will be fiercely attacked, we now proceed to en-

BSac 88:351 (July 1931) p. 330

trench ourselves philosophically and psychologically in the bold position we have taken.

Deity, we are warranted in postulating, must be possessed of infinite perfection in every particular. Were he less than personal, he would lack the most vital element in Absolute perfection. Now it is the contention of the writer that a unipersonal Deity would be de-deified ( to coin a word) by his own deity. A solitary Absolute would inevitably be more or less depersonalized through the sheer tyranny of the mechanical operations necessarily involved in his own absoluteness. Let us approach this somewhat abstruse conception along the road of analogy from human experience. Personality is largely a relative matter. Some individuals possess a much more fully developed personality than do others. And a sing...