Newton and the Trinity

Rom 8:5 "For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, set their minds on the things of the Spirit."

While the spirit gives life the flesh/law brings death. This understanding, so central to Scripture, insists that the realm of the gospel is properly the ordering of the soul’s allegiances; who is Lord. The gospel is not directed towards the existence of the supernatural, understood as an order of nature. Rather, if the concern of the gospel is the Lordship of Christ and the coming of the kingdom, then the spiritualisers, in our case Newton and Clarke, miss the point by pointing to the existence of a spiritual being who gave the planets their lateral motion.

By understanding the Lordship of God as a lordship over physical causality Newton displaced the lordship of Christ in the lives of believers, with a physical law.

There is a crucial difference between the traditional trinitarian understanding of how God acts in the world via the Son in the power of the Spirit and Newton’s conception of God as physical cause.

The first is personal and has to do with the creation of new selves through the recreation of the imaginary world in which believers live, the second is impersonal and cosmic and strays into the world of natural science.

The first is eschatological, looking towards a fulfilment of all things in the present/future, the second is static and momentary. Newton’s conception, like all antitrinitarian conceptions of God, was religiously incompetent because it placed a chasm between the believer and God, it displaced the salvation of the world in the Christ event with a physical explanation.

What happened in the 17th century, with the discovery of nature and its laws, was that theological language was transformed. Instead of the things of the spirit being grace, love and fellowship as in the trinitarian blessing, spirit became an order of nature, an immaterial substance. Being an order of nature it came under the scrutiny of natural science that is even now in the process of rejecting it and leading its practitioners to atheism.

The rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity has various theological outcomes. A subordinationist Christology, in which Christ was not of one substance with the Father, means that, because Jesus was not God, his death on the cross and resurrection could not have complete divine authority. He could not be, in Luther’s terms “the crucified God” and his death could not give satisfaction for the sins of the whole world.

One possible result of this is that he becomes the moral exemplar that believers were invited to imitate. He becomes the one who teaches us how to live as God wants us to live. The church becomes a collection of like-minded believers who are intent on living the good life in imitation of Jesus. While the church is a moral community, that is not its primary nature. In the absence of the Triune God the identity of the church may be based on morality that could easily become law, the same law that Paul opposed to Spirit. When the Trinitarian nature of God is not taken seriously a theology of presence is displaced by a theology of ethical imitation.

This is a quite different from the church that celebrates the presence of the crucified and risen one and identifies itself with that presence i.e. the body of Christ. This is the origin of the sacerdotal authority of the church by which it forgives sins and ordains in the apostolic succession.

In our world dominated by natural science, the church finds itself driven into a corner having to defend the existence of the spiritual understood as the polar opposite of the material. For this is how the question is posed. By attempting to defend this position it strays into the realm of natural science and finds its position untenable.

In response, the church should sidestep the argument and claim that the one whom atheists reject is not the one in whom the church believes. Rather, the God who reveals himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is another altogether. The authors of scripture did not share our view of the material world and would not have made a distinction between the natural and the supernatural: that distinction came about in the 17th century after nature became an object of investigation. Thus they had not problem describing events as miraculous. However, their description of these events universally pointed to a human and personal reality that may be called spiritual in that it was to do with the psyche of men and women and the health or disease thereof. In other words they were not spiritualisers like Newton and Clarke; they pointed towards all too human realities that are experienced by us all.

This means that when the new atheists point to the non-existence of the supernatural or immaterial they miss the point completely and miss the God whom Christians worship.