636
Difense of an Essay, &c.
DEC.
When we say in the Athanasian Creed, "the Father is God," we mean by it, as Waterland says, that He is possessed of "all perfection," that He is possessed of the "Divine nature;" by which phrase we understand “the sum of the Divine perfections; " we mean that all the essential attributes, necessary existence, eternity, omnipresence, omniscience, &c., &c., are predicable of the Father. Next, when we say "the Son is God," we mean that he is possessed of “all perfection," possesses the same Divine nature, has the same essential attributes, &c.; and so of the Holy Spirit. And lastly, when we say, "they are not three Gods but one God," we affirm that there is only one Being possessed of this divine nature, having these essential attributes; that, to use the words of the Athanasian Creed, "the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all one.""
There can be no doubt the same thing is meant when we affirm in the words of this Creed, "they are not three Gods, but one God,” as when it is said just above "the Godhead is all one." Godhead (from God and hade, state) means simply the state or condition of being God: hence, this word is defined by Johnson and Webster as, "Godship; deity, divinity, divine nature or essence." If God meant ruler, the noun formed from it would mean the state or condition of being ruler; if no nature is indicated by the word God, but only a relationship, the words Godhead, divinity, &c., would only mean the state or condition of being or standing in that relationship to others: they would not "indicate essence or nature."
I can not here refrain from adverting to Dr. L.'s very remarkable views of the Divine nature, i, e. that in which it consists.
He says, Letters, p. 56, “Dr. Boone believes that the idea of a Divine na- ture lics in the word God. Now the nature of God is spiritual; 'God is a Spirit,' was the account given by God himself manifest in the flesh. The peculiarity by which God, as he is revealed to us in the Scriptures, is distin- guished from all other spiritual Beings as to nature, is, that in his infinite and incomprehensible spiritual essence there exists a Trinity of hypostases, or, as we term them in English, Persons. This is the only divine nature. And the idea does not lie in the word God." Following up this very peculiar notion of what is meant by "the divine nature,” his reductio ad absurdum is, that, if the word God indicates nature, then none but Trinitarians have any idea of God. When enumerating the peculiarities that distinguish God from all other spiri-
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* To show that this method of viewing the word God as expressing “the Di- vine nature" is not peculiar to the Athanasian Creed, and to the writers of the Church of England, I will here append Knapp's statement of the doctrine of the Trinity See Art. 4. §33, 2. “The doctrine of a Trinity in the Godhead includes the three following particulars (ride Morus, p. 69, § 13): viz., (a) There is only one God-one divine nature; § 16, (b) but in this divine nature, there is the distinction of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, as three (called subjects, porsons, and other names of similar import in the language of the schools); and (c) these three have equally and in common with one another, the nature and perfections of supreme Divinity.This is the simple doctrine of the Trinity, when stripped of refined and learned distinctions. According to this doctrine, there are in the Divine nature THREE inseparably connected with one another, possessing equal glory, but making unitedly only ONE God'