http://www.ccel.org/ccel/berkhof/systematictheology.

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measured. The original form of personality is not in man but in God;

His is archetypal, while man's is ectypal. The latter is not identical
with the former, but does contain faint traces of similarity with it.
We should not say that man is personal, while God is super- personal (a
very unfortunate term), for what is super-personal is not personal; but
rather, that what appears as imperfect in man exists in infinite
perfection in God. The one outstanding difference between the two is
that man is uni-personal, while God is tri-personal. And this
tri-personal existence is a necessity in the Divine Being, and not in
any sense the result of a choice of God. He could not exist in any
other than the tri- personal form. This has been argued in various
ways. It is very common to argue it from the idea of personality
itself. Shedd bases his argument on the general self-consciousness of
the triune God, as distinguished from the particular individual self-
consciousness of each one of the Persons in the Godhead, for in
self-consciousness the subject must know itself as an object, and also
perceive that it does. This is possible in God because of His trinal
existence. He says that God could not be self-contemplating,
self-cognitive, and self-communing, if He were not trinal in His
constitution. [37] Bartlett presents in an interesting way a variety of
considerations to prove that God is necessarily tri-personal. [38] The
argument from personality, to prove at least a plurality in God, can be
put in some such form as this: Among men the ego awakens to
consciousness only by contact with the non-ego. Personality does not
develop nor exist in isolation, but only in association with other
persons. Hence it is not possible to conceive of personality in God
apart from an association of equal persons in Him. His contact with His
creatures would not account for His personality any more than man's
contact with the animals would explain his personality. In virtue of
the tri-personal existence of God there is an infinite fulness of
divine life in Him. Paul speaks of this pleroma (fulness) of the
Godhead in Eph. 3:19 and Col. 1:9; 2:9. In view of the fact that there
are three persons in God, it is better to say that God is personal than
to speak of Him as a Person.

2. SCRIPTURAL PROOF FOR THE DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY. The doctrine of

the Trinity is very decidedly a doctrine of revelation. It is true that
human reason may suggest some thoughts to substantiate the doctrine,
and that men have sometimes on purely philosophical grounds abandoned
the idea of a bare unity in God, and introduced the idea of living
movement and self-distinction. And it is also true that Christian
experience would seem to demand some such construction of the doctrine
of God. At the same time it is a doctrine which we would not have
known, nor have been able to maintain with any degree of confidence, on
the basis of experience alone, and which is brought to our knowledge
only by God's special self-revelation. Therefore it is of the utmost
importance that we gather the Scriptural proofs for it.

a. Old Testament proofs. Some of the early Church Fathers and even some
later theologians, disregarding the progressive character of God's
revelation, gave the impression that the doctrine of the Trinity was
completely revealed in the Old Testament. On the other hand Socinians
and Arminians were of the opinion that it was not found there at all.
Both were mistaken. The Old Testament does not contain a full
revelation of the trinitarian existence of God, but does contain
several indications of it. And this is exactly what might be expected.
The Bible never deals with the doctrine of the Trinity as an abstract
truth, but reveals the trinitarian life in its various relations as a
living reality, to a certain extent in connection with the works of
creation and providence, but particularly in relation to the work of
redemption. Its most fundamental revelation is a revelation given in
facts rather than in words. And this revelation increases in clarity in
the measure in which the redemptive work of God is more clearly
revealed, as in the incarnation of the Son and the outpouring of the
Holy Spirit. And the more the glorious reality of the Trinity stands

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