God Revealed in Christ

Dr. Martineau, of the Unitarians, wrote a wonderful paper many years ago. It is called “A Way Out of the Trinitarian Controversy.” He reminds Unitarians that all their conceptions of God are taken from the character of the Son, and that their real object of worship is the God revealed in Christ.

Only in Christ do we know God. Without the Son God is to us a dark blank of infinite possibility; a mere mute immensity. He states the doctrine in a way which few Trinitarians will object to accept. The Father is God in Himself; the Son is God manifested in the universe and in history, and brought to focus in the drama of Redemption; while the Holy Ghost is God in communion with our inner spirit.

It is from a letter written to him by a clergyman in the North of England: “I have just returned from a united prayer meeting at which ministers of all denominations were present, and have been struck by the way in which the prayers of all the earnest and able men present point to the fact that Trinitarianism does supply a real need. The prayers were prayed almost entirely to Jesus as God, Jesus as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. The Heavenly Father was for the most part a great far-off Original, of whose love they could only say that but for Jesus Christ they could never have believed in it, and but for a belief in Jesus Christ’s power as co-equal with the Father they would still despair of its continued and steady presence by means of the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.”