1 1 2 The Triunity of Personality [CH. 



ties, the beings at once became persons composing one 

 Real Person, yet differentiated from one another in the 

 emphasis of functioning. But because a perfect per- 

 sonality must be perfectly balanced in its functioning, 

 it becomes clear that the personality must itself be a 

 complete unity made up of these three differentiated 

 persons, each of which is an essential part of personality, 

 yet, by a strange apparent contradiction, is a person 

 itself. Moreover it is not that we lay an artificial stress 

 in thought upon first one and then another of these 

 activities. An appeal to experience excludes the possi- 

 bility of this. For consider the experience of Christians. 

 They do in fact claim, not on grounds of intellect, but of 

 revelation and of their individual experience, that God 

 did create, that God in Jesus Christ was in fact the In- 

 carnate Mediator of the Creative Will, which will He 

 had mediated as the Logos 1 , and that God was actually 

 the Indwelling Spirit of Freedom, guiding the world into 

 all Truth, which Truth is the free experience of Reality. 

 And universal experience backs them up. There is a 

 world, when all is said and done; there is purpose not 

 chaos; there is emotion; there is progress towards free- 

 dom. At least, the intellect affirms these things. Since 

 there is a world, in which certain classes of phenomena 



1 It may be said that the stress we have laid on the Mediatorial 

 aspect of the Son's activity exaggerates one side and lands us, or 

 tends to land us, in the same demiurgic conception that spoiled 

 Gnosticism, or the impersonality that ruined Philonism. If the 

 criticism were valid, we should find ourselves, in fact, drifting into 

 the quicksand of Docetism, on which so much of Eastern Patristic 

 theology found shipwreck, or narrowly escaped it. But really 

 against onesided emphasis of this kind we have guarded ourselves 

 most carefully by our insistence on the personal self-identity of 

 the Logos as eternal Being ; an aspect that will become more and 

 more prominent as our study goes deeper; and by our categorical 

 statements that Christ's personality did not begin with the 

 Incarnation, but was, rather, limited thereby. 



