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a. Some of these illustrations or analogies were taken from inanimate nature or from plant life,
as the water of the fountain, the creek, and the river, or of the rising mist, the cloud, and the
rain, or in the form of rain, snow, and ice; and as the tree with its root, trunk, and branches.
These and all similar illustrations are very defective. The idea of personality is, of course,
entirely wanting; and while they do furnish examples of a common nature or substance, they
are not examples of a common essence which is present, not merely in part, but in its entirety,
in each of its constituent parts or forms.
b. Others of greater importance were drawn from the life of man, particularly from the
constitution and the processes of the human mind. These were considered to be of special
significance, because man is the image-bearer of God. To this class belong the psychological
unity of the intellect, the affections, and the will (Augustine); the logical unity of thesis,
antithesis, and synthesis (Hegel); and the metaphysical unity of subject, object, and subject-
object (Olshausen, Shedd). In all of these we do have a certain trinity in unity, but no tri-
personality in unity of substance.
c. Attention has also been called to the nature of love, which presupposes a subject and an
object, and calls for the union of these two, so that, when love has its perfect work, three
elements are included. But it is easy to see that this analogy is faulty, since it co-ordinates two
persons and a relationship. It does not illustrate a tri-personality at all. Moreover, it only refers
to a quality and not at all to a substance possessed in common by the subject and the object.
C. The Three Persons Considered Separately.
1. THE FATHER OR THE FIRST PERSON IN THE TRINITY.
a. The name “Father” as applied to God.
This name is not always used of God in the same
sense in Scripture. (1) Sometimes it is applied to the Triune God as the origin of all created
things, I Cor. 8:6; Eph. 3:15; Heb. 12:9; Jas. 1:17. While in these cases the name applies to the
triune God, it does refer more particularly to the first person, to whom the work of creation is
more especially ascribed in Scripture. (2) The name is also ascribed to the triune God to express
the theocratic relation in which He stands to Israel as His Old Testament people, Deut. 32:6; Isa.
63:16; 64:8; Jer. 3:4; Mal. 1:6; 2:10; (3) In the New Testament the name is generally used to
designate the triune God as the Father in an ethical sense of all His spiritual children, Matt.
5:45; 6:6-15; Rom. 8:16; I John 3:1. (4) In an entirely different sense, however, the name is
applied to the first person of the Trinity in His relation to the second person, John 1:14,18; 5:17-
26; 8:54; 14:12,13. The first person is the Father of the second in a metaphysical sense. This is
the original fatherhood of God, of which all earthly fatherhood is but a faint reflection.