"The Bible's teaching about Christ", by Viktor Rydberg (1862) (Part 7)
At first, our examination will be limited to the question, whether the doctrine of the Trinity is immediately biblical.[1]
[1]
That she is not sensible, at least from a human point of view, is fairly universally recognized even by her followers. However, from the origin of the dogma until the present time, there has been no lack of attempts to reconcile reason with her. Those who engaged themselves in such attempts, have never got further than to more or less ingenious analogies and usually ended with forgetting or despairing of their task, in that they urged reason to submit to dogma. The best that could be said about the subject, is already said by Augustine, and still the comparison set up by him between the three persons in the one divine essence and the three basic abilites in the one human being leads to a completely different opinion than the ecclesiastical one. That we even in our days, in dogmatic works and church newspapers, get to see these analogies resumed and fused with Alexandrian logos speculations or medieval scholastic or Hegelian conceptual definitions, has its explanatory basis therein, that the thought, which has allowed himself to be imprisoned in the shackles of dogma, however cannot deny himself so far, that he is not trying to extract a scientific content from the dogma. At some point, another experience ought to have contributed, too, namely that the price for profundity cannot be won more easily than by working in the mystical, this mysterious could now be genuine mysticism, that is deep, but vaguely sensed and vaguely expressed truths, or inauthentic mysticism, i.e. pure nonsense. People do not comment, after all, something they don't understand somehow! Ergo is the commentator profound, preferably if his comments are as mysterious as that, which he comments upon. So the great crowd of believers reason, which is already characterized by one of the oldest fathers and writers of the Christian Church, with remarkable sincerity. (Simplices quique, ne dixerim imprudentes et idiotae, quorum major semper credentium pars est [Tertullian adversus Praxeam].)
As for the actual philosophers, they have either rejected or merely nominally accepted the doctrine of the Trinity. What those in the latter case have so called, has been entirely different from the doctrine of the Church, as it is formulated in the so-called St Athanasius' symbolum (which Athanasius certainly did not author). This symbolum is perhaps the strangest piece of scripture, that ever appeared in the world. It begins and ends with condemning anyone who does not believe in it to eternal damnation and contains between these two condemnations a chain of contradictions. As these cannot be reasoned away, they are recognized as such also by their defenders but with the addition that the fault does not lie with the Synods, which formulated the in the symbolum existing clauses, but with human reason, which would be incapable of grasping one in the contradictions inherent higher context. How these apologists learned, that such a context incomprehensible to reason really would hide in the contradictions in question, thereof they are unable to inform us. They simply assume that St Athanasius' symbolum is a divine mystery, with which they understand a revealed truth, which is so high, that the limited beings to whom she has been revealed are unable to understand her. (The contradiction, which lies in calling a truth "revealed", as she is presented in an admittedly incomprehensible manner, and the futility of such a revelation
does not cause them any qualms.)
