BEFORE THE WORLD WAS CREATED THE TRINITY OF GOD WAS NOT.

1. The Sacred Scripture teaches that God is one, and reason enlightened by the Lord sees it there and thence. But that God was triune before the world was created, the Sacred Scripture does not teach, and reason enlightened therefrom does not see. What is said in David concerning the Son, "This day have I begotten thee," is not from eternity, but in the fulness of time; for the future in God is present, thus to-day; in like manner as in Isaiah:-

Unto us A Boy is born, unto us a Son is given, whose name is God, Hero, the Father of eternity.

2. What rational mind, when it hears that before the creation of the world there were three Divine Persons, called the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, does not say within itself while thinking of them, "What is meant by a Son born from God the Father from eternity? How could He be born? And what is the Holy Spirit proceeding from God the Father through the Son from eternity? And how could He proceed and become God by Himself? Or how could a person beget a person from eternity? and both produce a person? Is not a person a person? How can three Persons, of which each is God, be conjoined into one God, otherwise than into one person? And yet this is contrary to theology, and this to that. How can the Divinity be divided into three Persons, and yet not into three Gods, when yet each Person is God? How can the Divine essence, which is one, the same, and indivisible, fall into number, hence be either divided or multiplied? And how can three Divine Persons be together and take counsel together in a non-extense of space, such as was before the world was created? How, from Jehovah God, who is One, and thence Sole, Infinite, Immense, Eternal, and Omnipotent, could there be produced three equals to Himself? How can a Trinity of Persons be conceived of in the Unity of God, and the Unity of God in a Trinity of Persons? Besides the idea of plurality destroys the idea of unity, and vice versa. Perhaps it would have been possible for the Greeks and Romans also to unite all their gods into one, which were many, by identity only of essence." 3. The rational mind, in revolving and reflecting upon a Trinity of Persons in the Divinity from eternity, might also consider of what use was it that a Son was born, and that the Holy Spirit went forth from the Father through the Son before the world was created? Was there a use for three to consult how the universe should be created? And thus that three should create it? When yet the universe was created by the one God? Neither was there occasion that the Son should redeem, when yet redemption was effected after the world was created, in the fulness of time; nor that the Holy Spirit should sanctify, because as yet there was no man to be sanctified. Therefore if there were those uses in God's idea, still they were not [realized] before the creation of the world, but after it actually existed; from which it follows, that the Trinity from eternity was not a real Trinity, but ideal, and still more so is a Trinity of Persons. 4. Who in the church, while reading the Athanasian Creed, is able to understand this? That it is of the Christian verity, that each Person by Himself is God, and yet that it is not lawful by the Catholic religion to account them three Gods? Is not religion thus to him something other than truth? and that in truth three Persons are three Gods, but that from religion they are one God? 5. A trinity of Persons in the Divinity before the world was created, did not come into the mind of any one from the time of Adam down to the advent of the Lord, as is clear from the Word of the Old Testament, and from histories concerning the religion of the ancients. Neither did it come into the mind of the Apostles, as is evident from their writings in the Word. Neither did it come into the mind of any one in the Apostolic Church, which was before the Council of Nice, as appears from the Apostles' Creed, in which no Son from eternity is mentioned, but a Son born from the Virgin Mary. A Trinity of Persons from eternity is not only above reason, but opposed to it. It is against reason that three Persons created the universe; that there were three Persons, and each one God, and not three Gods but one, and then three Persons and not one Person. Will not the New Church about to come call this age of the old church benighted or barbarous, when they worshiped three Gods? Similarly irrational are those things which are derived from that Trinity. 6. A Trinity of Persons in the Divinity from eternity was first taught by the Nicene Council, as appears from the two Creeds, the Nicene and the Athanasian. And afterwards it was received by the churches as the principal dogma, and as the head of the doctrines, after that time even to the present day. There were two reasons why that Trinity was given forth by the Council of Nice; the first was, that they knew not how otherwise to dissipate the scandals of Arius, who denied the Divinity of the Lord; the other, because they did not understand what is written by the evangelist John (Chap. i. 1, 2, 10, 14; xvi. 28; xvii. 5). How these things are to be understood may be seen above. 7. The Divinity before the world was created as believed according to the Nicene Council and the churches after that, to consist of three Persons each of which was God, and that from the first Person was born a second, and from these two went forth a third, is not only above the understanding, but contrary to it, and the faith of a paradox, which is opposed to the rational understanding. It is a faith in which there is not anything of the church, but a persuasion of the false, such as obtains with those who are insane in religious matters. But still it is not here said of those who do not see [these things to be] contradictory and contrary to the Sacred Scripture and yet believe them, that they are insane in religious matters; thus it is not said of the Council of Nice, nor of the churches derived from it after that time, because they did not see.