Holy Trinity How Can God Be One and Three

Doctrine of the Holy Trinity

The Doctrine of the Trinity and Anti-Trinitarian Theologies:

Servetus, Milton, Newton

The Doctrine of the Trinity

The Arian Heresy

Anti-Trinitarianism Part I: Michael Servetus

Anti-Trinitarianism Part II: John Milton

Sir Isaac Newton

The Arian heresy -- or rejection of the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity -- is actually relatively uncommon among contemporary Christian denominations; to pick one particular national example, Post-Reformation England would tolerate a broad array of theological stances -- from the dour Calvinism of the early Puritans to the sunnier Arminianism of the Wesleyan Methodists -- but more or less drew the line at anti-Trinitarianism. Yet it is remarkable that some of England's greatest intellectuals -- including the epic poet John Milton and the father of modern physics Sir Isaac Newton -- would secretly author theological works reviving the old heresy of Arius in order to disprove the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. I propose -- after a brief examination of the standard doctrine of the Trinity as it is held in common by Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglicans (among many others) -- to eludicte the theological underpinnings of the doctrine by examining the more marginal theologians -- all better known for other intellectual work -- who denied it. These include not only Milton and Newton, but the most notorious anti-Trinitarian figure of the sixteenth century, Michael Servetus. I hope by examining the theological objections to the doctrine of the Trinity, we may better understand the role that doctrine plays in less heterodox Christianity. [THESIS] In point of fact, the doctrine of the Trinity is something that a majority of mainstream Protestant sects hold in common, so in terms of its theology in the Reformation and beyond, it is clear that the doctrine of the Trinity is perhaps better examined not by those theologians who espoused it, but by those who denied it, so that we can see how objections to it reflect an emerging Enlightenment stance, a sort of Deism before the fact.

[INTRODUCTION]: The orthodox conception of the doctrine of the Trinity derives from the First Nicene Council, in which the Christian bishops were called together by the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity, Constantine. The debates of the Nicene Council would establish the version of the doctrine of the Trinity which in the form of the Nicene Creed is still in liturgical use in the Roman Catholic church:

We believe (I believe) in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, and born of the Father before all ages. (God of God) light of light, true God of true God. Begotten not made, consubstantial to the Father, by whom all things were made.[footnoteRef:0] [0: Catholic Encyclopedia, "Nicene Creed." http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11049a.htm (accessed 21 March 2011).]

The principal disagreement at the Council of Nicea was over the terminology -- then using the Greek of the New Testament -- for the word here translated as "consubstantial." This represents the Greek "homoousia" which denotes the sameness of being or substance between God the Father and God the Son. This orthodox conception of the Trinity is frequently expressed as a set of almost mathematical equivalencies, where the three persons of the Trinity individually are each equivalent to God, but no one of those persons is equivalent to another -- while at the same time holding, with the opening words of the Nicene creed, with a fundamentally monotheistic faith. Each of the three persons is actually God: as Wayne Gruden puts it "When we speak of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit together we are not speaking of any greater being than when we speak of the Father alone, the Son alone, or the Holy Spirit alone."[footnoteRef:1] The doctrine of the Trinity thus holds that, in Gruden's words, "the being of each Person is equal to the whole being of God."[footnoteRef:2] But it is this historical derivation of the doctrine from the Council of Nicaea that George Williams argues in The Radical Reformation that "the standard generic term for all those commonly called anti-Trinitarian in modern scholarly literature" would be more accurately defined as "anti-Nicene, for common to all sixteenth-century opponents of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity as three Persons in one Substance was their objection to the ultimately Greek philosophical terminology enforced by the authority of the Roman Empire and Constantine."[footnoteRef:3] [1: Gruden, Wayne. Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine. (Zondervan, 1994), p. 252.] [2: Ibid., p. 255.] [3: Williams, George. The Radical Reformation. (Westminster, 1962) p.319.]

The doctrine is not stated directly in scripture but can be assumed logically from various sources in the New Testament; for example, Matthew 28:19 enjoins "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." Given the heavy Pauline influence on mainstream Christianity in the years between Christ's actual ministry and the Council of Nicea, it is easy to see why this particular passage (with its emphasis on the conversion of the gentiles) would prove to be so doctrinally evocative. But the Trinity is derived scripturally from the fact that the New Testament will continue to refer to God the Father in the manner of the Old Testament, while at the same time also referring to Jesus as God (as in "our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ," Titus 2:13) and referring to the Holy Spirit as God (as when Saint Peter rebukes Ananias in Acts 5:3-5, equating his crime with lying to the Holy Spirit and therefore lying "before God"). To a certain degree, the Old Testament offers some confirmation of this conception of God as more than one person, as one of the Hebrew words used to refer to God in the Old Testament, "elohim," is itself a Hebrew plural. Of course the New Testament offers plenty of instances in which the Son and the Father are obviously clear and distinct persons (e.g. John 3:16) and the preponderance of these is taken to be a way of distinguishing between these different aspects of the divine. Yet ultimately, as Grudem notes, the Trinity serves as a kind of focus for mystical contemplation:

But if each person is fully God and has all of God's being, then we also should not think that the personal distinctions are any kind of additional attributes added on to the being of God . . . Rather, each person of the Trinity has all of the attributes of God, and no one Person has any attributes that are not possessed by the others. On the other hand, we must say that the Persons are real, that they are not just different ways of looking at the one being of God...the only way it seems possible to do this is to say that the distinction between the persons is not a difference of 'being' but a difference of 'relationships.' This is something far removed from our human experience, where every different human 'person' is a different being as well. Somehow God's being is so much greater than ours that within his one undivided being there can be an unfolding into interpersonal relationships, so that there can be three distinct persons.[footnoteRef:4] [4: Grudem, 253-4.]

Gruden might have summarized this more succinctly with Tertullian's credo quia absurdum, but the point is clear. The triune nature of the Trinity is, in itself, a sort of religious mystery.

The initial case against the Trinity was stated at the Council of Nicea by Arius, who held that if God the Father begat God the Son, then the status of being "begotten" automatically entailed a time before existence, and therefore the Son was created ex-nihilo. The introduction of the concept of "homoousia" was intended to cover the various stances held by Arius and his followers, which concluded therefore that the Son was in some way of a different or lesser substance than the Father as a result. But it is important to note the implications of the doctrine of the Trinity upon the rest of Christian doctrine. If God the Father demands the sacrifice of his own Son to redeem mankind from sin, then a strict Arian conception -- in which God the Father is also greater than and somehow different ontologically from the Son -- makes the Crucifixion seem like the central event in a rather crude human-sacrifice cult, and defines God as a sort of tyrant. This seems like the central reason why mainstream Christianity would hold to the doctrine of the Trinity without serious challenge until the Reformation. The major theologians of the Reformation, as noted, were all firmly Trinitarian. To find a theologian whose views are willing to deny the doctrine of the Trinity, we must turn to Michael Servetus. Servetus is famously conceived of in modernity as having been a sort of protomartyr to science (in the same vauge way as Giordano Bruno): he himself was a formidably learned Spaniard with contributions to medical science, including a Galenic treatise on the health benefits of syrups, and would ultimately -- and fatally -- publish two works on the doctrine of the Trinity. The first was a work entitled On the Errors of the Trinity, which would arouse tremendous concern among the more orthodox Reformation theologians. Servetus begins with an elaborate show of piety, with his concerns for establishing a view of the "true Christ":

In investigating the holy mysteries of the divine Triad, I have thought that one ought to start from the man; for I see most men approaching their lofty speculation about the Word without having any fundamental understanding of Christ, and they attach little or no importance to the man, and give the true Christ quite over to oblivion. But I shall endeavor to recall to their memories who the Christ is. However, what and how much importance is to be attached to Christ, the Church shall decide. Seeing that the pronoun indicates a man, whom they call the human nature, I shall admit these three things: first, this man is Jesus Christ; second, he is the Son of God; third, he is God.[footnoteRef:5] [5: Servetus, Michael. The two treatises of Servetus on the Trinity. ( Harvard University Press, 1932.) p. 6.]

Yet Servetus soon arrives at the point which would so enrage John Calvin, in which he declares that those who believe in the doctrine of the Trinity are not monotheists at all, but "tritheists," and he refers to the Trinity itself as a "Cerberus," referring to the three-headed dog that guards the gates of Hell in pagan mythology. Servetus would soon be apprised of the horrified reception his work rejecting the theology of the Trinity would receive, and he would quickly publish a hastily written Two Dialogues on the Trinity in which he wholly retracted his earlier doctrine:

All that I have lately written, in seven Books, against the received view as to the Trinity, honest reader, I now retract; not because it is untrue, but because it is incomplete, and written as though by a child for children. Yet I pray you to keep such of it as might help you to an understanding of what is to be said here. Moreover, that such a barbarous, confused, and incorrect book appear as my former one was, must be ascribed to my own lack of experience, and to the printer's carelessness. Nor would I have any Christian offended thereby, since God is won't sometimes to make his own wisdom known through the foolish instruments of the world. I beg you, therefore, to pay attention to the matter itself; for if you give heed to this, my halting words will not stand in your way. [footnoteRef:6] [6: Ibid., p. 186.]

However by this time it was too late. Servetus was in Calvin's Geneva, and was soon charged with heresy and burnt at the stake. Calvin's biographer Bouwsma notes that "the confrontation between Calvin and his adversaries may help to explain the trial and execution of Servetus, which occurred when tensions in Geneva were at their height: each side needed to demonstrate their zeal for orthodoxy." (27). Yet as with the similar case of Giordano Bruno and the Catholic inquisition, the willingness to die for a heresy which was ultimately trending in the direction of pantheism -- Bruno's fascination with metempsychosis and Servetus' with anti-Trinitarianism both seem designed to point toward a conception of God which would look forward to the one advanced later during the Enlightenment by Spinoza (reminding us of Albert Einstein's cry "I believe in Spinoza's God!") which may account for their both being considered not particularly outlandish heretics, but as sort of scientifically-minded Harvard Unitarians avant la lettre.

Although Servetus' work would be burnt widely after he himself was burnt, his sharp theological critique of the doctrine of the Trinity would nonetheless find further life among the more radical thinkers of the Reformation. I would like to look at two of these in England, and see how they derived inspiration from Servetus to speculate, even if neither published their anti-Trinitarian views while alive. The first is the poet and political revolutionary John Milton, author of the Christian epic poem Paradise Lost. The English Marxist historian Christopher Hill, in his biography relating Milton to the social and theological currents of the early seventeenth century, gives a ghoulish long catalogue of punishments and tortures (including beheadings and disembowellings) to which Milton would have been sentenced under English law if he had published De Doctrina Christiana and been prosecuted for each individual heresy expressed therein. (The role of the English monarch as both head of state and head of the established Church in this time period meant that heretics were subject to capital punishment, as the martyrdom of numerous English Jesuits in the period will attest.) Hill goes on to define Milton's theological stance thus:

He was a radical Protestant heretic. He rejected Catholicism as anti-Christian: the papist was the only heretic excluded from his wide tolerance. Milton shed far more of mediaeval Catholicism that did the Church of England. His great theological system, the De Doctrina Christiana…rejected the Trinity, infant baptism and most of the traditional ceremonies, including church marriage; he queried monogamy and believed that the soul died with the body. He cannot reasonably be claimed as 'orthodox'… How many of those whom we call 'Arminian' in seventeenth-century England had read Arminius? Milton had; but his learning was exceptional. I see him in permanent dialogue with the plebeian radical thinkers of the English revolution, and I see him drawing on the same traditions as they drew on -- traditions which include Servetus…[footnoteRef:7] [7: Hill, Christopher. Milton and the English Revolution. (Viking, 1978). pp3-5.]

Milton's Treatise on Christian Doctrine was, therefore, written in secret -- the manuscript would not surface until the early nineteenth century, when it was discovered in a cabinet and published. It therefore cannot be claimed that Milton was an open influence on other theologians of the time, but his views are fascinating. Milton intends to derive all doctrine from strict scriptural justification, and Milton follows up Arius' original conception to argue that Christ "was begotten of the Father in consequence of his decree," therefore "the decree itself must have been anterior to the execution of the decree" and thus it was "within the limits of time" and not out of eternity that Christ was begotten.[footnoteRef:8] Milton also introduces humanistic forms of Biblical criticism, as when he justifies ignoring what he sees as "the clearest foundation for the received doctrine of the essential unity of the three persons" in John 1:7 ("there are three that bear record in Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and these three are one.") He does so on the basis that "this verse is wanting in the Syriac and the other two Oriental versions, the Arabic and the Ethiopic, as well as in the greater part of the ancient Greek manuscripts."[footnoteRef:9] [8: Milton, John. A Treatise on Christian Doctrine. (London, 1825). pp93-5.] [9: Ibid., p.96.]