Hegel and the TrinityThe Hegelian dialectic came up somewhat in this evening's bible study. Attempting to locate my notes on Hegel, I instead came across a section of a short work by Dabney:
The Confession firmly asserts the doctrine of a trinity in the Godhead, substantially as it had been taught in the Nicene and Athanasian creeds. It teaches that while God is one infinite, single, spiritual substance, there have been from eternity three modes of subsistence, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, whose distinctions are real, permanent and personal. It avows that this is a divine fact, presenting a mystery, insoluble for man's limited mind; and it attempts no solution. It contents itself with proving the august fact simply by God's testimony. Now, they well knew that there were attempted rationales current throughout the patristic, medieval and Reformation ages, upon which many theologians had labored, and with which the grandest human intellects, as that of Aquinas, had supposed themselves satisfied. Taking the contents of the human consciousness as their pattern, they theorized that the infinite intelligence must have eternally and necessarily evolved the word from itself in the very exercise of its function of thought; and the Spirit, or practical subsistence, from the continuous exercise of its functions of appetency [desire] and will. They said that the unitary Godhead is actus purus [pure actuality]: its essential functions of thought, emotion, and free choice are identical with and constitute its substance. Hence its subsistence in the trinitarian mode, said they, is obvious, natural and necessary. The Father is the eternal power of thought and choice. The Son or Word but the eternal, continuous stream of thought-activity which the central power forever and necessarily emits, and the Spirit is the active emotion and free choice which the infinite thought cannot but evoke, as it is objectified in the divine consciousness. Now, does this metaphysic give us objects which satisfy the meaning of Scripture, where it testifies to us that the three subsistences, while each divine, are distinct and personal? Or does it give us mere abstractions in the place of persons? Does this theory, or does it not, destroy the fundamental distinctionof the reason between substance and its powers? Is it not virtually that Heraclitic idealism revived in our age by Hegel? Does not the theory involve the monstrous assumption that to think is to create, so that God gives to the second and third persons, as well as to his created works, no other substantive entity than that which a human mind gives to its ideas by thinking them? And does not all of this set us on the high road to pantheism? The Assembly knew that popes and archbishops sanctioned this attempted rationale of the Trinity (as they continue to do to our age). But the Assembly says not one word about it; it passes it all by in dead silence, neither approving it nor deigning to refute it. Why? Because it is wholly extra scriptural. Were it of true value, the Assembly would have said the same, because its mission did not lead it a single step beyond God's word.
R. L. Dabney, The Doctrinal Contents
of the Confession: Its Fundamental and Regulative Ideas and the Necessity and Value of Creeds
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