The doctrine of the Trinity, far from being merely academic, is the expression of the most fundamental human experience, and, we shall see later, it is of much practical use. Only the view that God is transcendent, majestic, almighty, the creator of the universe and standing outside it, can fully satisfy the human mind. Yet we know that he must also be immanent, in the world, close to us, giving us life; "in him we live, and move, and have our being". And this is an absurd contradiction without the mediation of the second Person of the Trinity. This experience is common to all men, though only the Christian revelation adequately expresses it, that is why the idea is hinted at, groped after, throughout the Old Testament: Jehovah the God of all, the Messiah, his anointed, and the indwelling Wisdom.
Without this conception of God as Unity-in-Trinity, which itself sets Christianity apart from any other system, religion must tend towards one of two things. Either it is immanental and worldly, like Confucianism, which becomes very largely ethical. It fails to face the fact—never mind the theory— of original sin and experience proves that however laudable it may be to proclaim the brotherhood
of nations and to exhort men to love one another, it has singularly little effect; it just does not work.
And it must be admitted that the type of so-called Christianity that puts all the emphasis on the moral teaching of Jesus is not likely to fare much better. Or non-Trinitarian religion is transcendental, or other-worldly, to the point of complete world renunciation, like a good deal of Eastern religion. This faces the fact of present evil but the only hope is to escape from it altogether and become "absorbed" in God. Not unnaturally, such religion reaches great heights of a certain type of mystical and contemplative prayer. The One tries to influence the world for good and fails, the other is not interested in the world at all: neither is very efficient.
What we must do is to consider one or two points about the Incarnation itself, upon which it all depends. As briefly as possible, Jesus Christ is perfectly God and perfectly man; because he is God he has the power of redemption, because he is man he is in a position to use it. Now when we say that Christ is man, we mean two interrelated things; he is truly and perfectly a man "like unto us in all things, sin except" but he is also a new humanity, summing up the whole human race in himself. In Dr Mascall's words: "There is thus in Christ a new creation of manhood out of the material of the fallen human race. There is continuity with the fallen race through the manhood taken from Mary; there is discontinuity through the fact that the Person of Christ is the pre-existent Logos." (Word, Son of God, eternal second person of the Trinity.) "In Christ human nature has been re-created by
the very God who was its first creator; and the new creation is effected, not like the first creation by the mere decree of omnipotent Will—'Let us make man in our own image'—but by the creator himself becoming man and moulding human nature to the lineaments of his own Person. Christ is thus quite literally the Second Adam, the man in whom the human race begins anew; but while the
first Adam was, in all his innocence, only God's creature, the Second Adam is the Creator himself. In him human nature is made afresh, and in him the mysterious distortion which succeeding generations have inherited from man's first disobedience, and which theology knows as original sin, has no place."
The tremendous fact is that our fallen human nature can be redeemed, or renewed, or regenerated, by this new manhood of Christ; we can really share in the new humanity of Christ and, of special importance here, we can really share in his redemptive work. This new humanity of Christ is a permanent thing, it is not simply the human nature of Christ which he "had" during his life on earth,
but the new all-embracing humanity now risen, ascended, and glorified- unrestricted by time and space, in which we can truly share. When we speak about "putting off the old Adam and putting on the new Man" we are not talking of possible moral effort but of a certain acquired status. Dr Mascall sums it up thus: "It is almost universally assumed to-day that becoming a Christian means in essence the adoption of a new set of beliefs or the initiation of a new mode of behaviour. A Christian would be defined as one who ' believes in Christ' or ' worships Christ' or ' tries to follow Christ's teaching'.
Now it is far from my purpose to belittle either Christian dogma or Christian ethics. Nevertheless, it must be pointed out that to define the essence of Christianity in terms either of belief or of practice involves the neglect of two principles that are fundamental to all sound theology. The former of these is that the act of God precedes and is presupposed by the acts of man: ' Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us'; 'Ye have come to know God, or rather to be known of God.'
The second is that what a being is precedes what it does; our actions are a consequence of what we are. ... It will follow from this that the Christian should be defined not in terms of what he himself does, but of what God has made him to be. Being a Christian is an ontological fact, resulting from an act of God.
"What, then, is this act by which God makes a man into a Christian? It is, the New Testament assures us, incorporation into the human nature of Christ, an incorporation by which the very life of the Man Christ Jesus is communicated to us and we are re-created in him. 'I am the vine; ye are the branches'; ' If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature', or 'there is a new creation'; we have been 'grafted into' Christ like shoots into a tree. The Christian is a man to whom something has happened, something moreover which is irreversible and which penetrates to the very roots of his being; be is a man who has been re-created in, and into, Christ.
"Now the basis of this ontological change by which a man becomes a Christian is the permanence of the human nature of Christ. We have already seen . . . how necessary it is to hold that the divine Word really became flesh, that he united to himself, unconfusedly and inseparably, a concrete human nature, and that that human nature, though glorified by his Resurrection and Ascension and no longer subject to the limitations which governed it during the period of his humiliation, is nevertheless still in existence and still fully human. As the Epistle to the Hebrews teaches, it is with his manhood still intact and for ever united to his divine Person that Christ has entered into the realm of the 'heavenlies', there to make perpetual intercession for us. The re-creation of manhood in Christ was not finished when, in the womb of Mary, he had united a perfect and unblemished human nature to himself, or even when in that human nature, by his death on Calvary, he had, as our representative, offered to the Father the oblation of love and obedience that we were powerless to offer ourselves. The truth is not merely that in Christ the new creation was effected on our behalf, but that through our union with him it is to be brought about in each one of us. Becoming a Christian means being re-created by being incorporated into the glorified manhood of the ascended Christ, so that, in the words of the Epistle to the Ephesians, we are raised up with him and made to sit with him in the heavenly places, in Jesus Christ."
