What is the Hindu Trimurti? How is it different from the Christian Trinity?

H. Well, popularly; but we may say in general that the immense fact of creation was unknown to the heathen. "By faith we understand," says the epistle to the Hebrews, "that the things which are seen were not made of the things which do appear." What we now feel must have been, was repelled by all the proud reasoners. A poor obscure ignorant Hebrew alone knew it. For all others ex nihilo nil fit was the practical maxim. That is a striking fact. What are the cosmogonies of other nations? Never, as I said, a creation. Matter was eternal. In India, it was pantheism. God was the soul of the world; or human passions were perfected into powerful and mysterious beings, moved in chaos, or in darkness; and systems impossible for our cold western reason to grasp were concocted. But a personal God and a creation did not enter into their minds. Brahm was at ease, asleep in the unconscious enjoyment of this state; he woke up, and the mundane egg split, the upper part becoming heaven and the lower earth. Their more serious philosophical views were, "The universe is Brahm; it comes from Brahm, it subsists in Brahm, and returns into Brahm." All the rest is a kind of maya or illusion. It is only Brahm revealing himself in various ways, first disengaging a female from himself, and then by emanations of gods who have each their goddesses, and thence into all nature, — Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, and so on, identified with created existence, while Brahm is awake, and which perishes by a great catastrophe, when he is tired. The Kalpa then is over, and he goes to sleep, and the same story (for they had not learned Dr. Temple's philosophy) exactly is reproduced over again. In this way, what our Essayist calls Providence provided for the education of an immensely greater number of the human race than it did by the Hebrew Descartes. It was pantheism connected with the powers of nature, and the idea of decay and reproduction. So that the destroyer, Siva, was the god of life. The female deities were the productive power of the gods they were connected with, while the history of Adam and Eve, whose very names were used, and Noah and his sons, ran through it all; and even the names of Shem, Ham, and Japhet, in Sama, Cama, and Prajapati (the "a" at the end not being sounded, and "Pra," meaning Lord).

"The same was in the beginning with God" (verse 2); not at a subsequent date, but "in the beginning," when no creature had commenced its existence. For this truth we are entirely indebted to God. Who could speak of such things but God? It is He Who uses John to write, and all He says is worthy of implicit faith. The Word "was in the beginning with God." His personality was eternal, no less than His nature or being. He was no mere emanation, as the Indo-Aryans dreamed in the earliest form of their thoughts known to us. For God thus was not really supreme and free, but subject to restraint necessarily incompatible with sovereignty, and ever tending to that pantheism which, making the universe to be God, denies the only true God. Thus, He was merely Tad (That), an abstract energy, yet not in self-sufficiency, but in longing for others to emanate-Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, the Creator, the Preserver, and the Destroyer. In the Hindu system developed later, as the Divinity was thus imaginatively resolved into emanations, so is the universe itself pantheistically to be an emanation rather than a creation formed by Divine will, power, and design. All is flux and illusion. What a contrast is its Triad with the Trinity, the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God! And its Avataras, even that of Krishna, late as the legend rose, how remote from the Incarnation! Thereby God and man stand for ever united in one Person, by His death the Reconciler of all creation, heavenly and earthly, and of those who by grace are to reign with Him over all things to the glory of God the Father. "I cannot but regard John 1:2 as a striking and complete setting aside of the Alexandrian and Patristic distinction of λόγος ἐνδίαθετος and λόγος προφορικός. Some of the earlier Greek fathers, who were infected with Platonism, held that the λόγος was conceived in God's mind from eternity, and only uttered, as it were, in time. This has given a handle to Arians, who, like other unbelievers, greedily seek the traditions of men. The apostle here asserts, in the Holy Ghost, the eternal personality of the Word with God" ("Lectures on the Gospels," p. 409, note).

257 Page 337. 'The Vedic gods are pre-eminently transparent. Instead of one acknowledged king, each is lord in his own domain; each is addressed as the maker of all visible things, while their features and characteristics are in almost all cases interchangeable. Dyaus and Indra, Varuna and Agni are each in his turn spoken of as knowing no superior, and the objects of their chief care are not the children of men, but the winds, the storms, the clouds, and the thunder, which are constantly rising in rebellion against them. No sooner is one conflict ended than another is begun, or rather the same conflict is repeated as the days and seasons come round.' 'The true religious instinct must point to the absolute rule of one righteous God, and cannot itself originate the idea of many independent centres of action.' That the acknowledgment of one true God turned into the recognition of power in the heavens, Sun and various elements in respect to their influence on the interests of men, is evident. But that Dyaus, Varuna and Indra at first individually supplanted one another, just as Ouranos (Earth), Kronos (Time) and Zeus did, cannot, I think, be questioned - supplanted by more human and grosser forms, as Vishnu and Siva, though these, as all Indian gods, are treated by their votaries as supreme. Brahma was but Brahm - a more intellectual conception.

92 The Egyptian was more strictly mythology, not cosmogony, though in ancient systems these are indeed the same. The unity of deity, or subsistence, does not appear; but their Vedas, the books of Hermes Trismegistus, are lost. But it was essentially the same as the Hindoo, save that the system common to both had adapted itself to the circumstances of the country. It was a more terrestrial and less imaginative system. Human nature took a tinge less kindly, but more righteous. The unity of the deity was less in relief, decay and return to life more prominent, and generation more than emanation, though these were all found in both. The original deity, Nef, or the Spirit, came down more into the ordinary rank of gods than Brahm; and while the eight great gods and goddesses were found in both, yet a triad of another kind was prominent — male, female, and child, as Nef, Saté, and Khonso — Osiris, Isis, and Horus: the former the more active principle, the second the passive or earth (the great mother as everywhere), and the order produced out of these. The latter triad, the Nile, or sun (for Osiris was both in certain respects, i.e., not the sun as sun, but its action on the Nile and Egypt for blessing), Isis, Egypt, and Horus, the return to blessing after Typhon, or the burning sun, had dried all up. There are traces of one divine origin, out of which all proceeded, but having no book like the Institutes of Menu, it is comparatively speaking lost. Ptha, though a great god, and the formative power, was in a certain sense a secondary one. He formed more than was an origin of all things. The Phaenician system was more historical and mythic. In all, the worship of Yoni Lingams attached to Siva, the same with Khem, and the history of Osiris, and Phallic processions of Bacchus, were, from Hindostan to Rome, the origin of a degradation of ideas and manners which need not be recalled. But it is universally recognized, that creation was unknown in these systems. There was pantheistic emanation, or eternal matter.

India has 33,000,000 gods and vile creatures of the mind, emanations of the bottomless pit, deceits of Satan. But the Bible reveals to us the only true God as one God, supreme and unique. How then is the name of God in the plural? In the light of the New Testament which teaches that there are Father, Son and Holy Spirit yet one God, we see enshrined in the first verse of the Bible the truth of the Trinity—three Persons, but one God. We Christians do not believe in three Gods. There cannot be other than one God, one supreme, eternal Being from Whom everything flows—everything material and spiritual for the blessing and enjoyment of man.

It is worthy of note that in quoting this passage Paul says, "Well spake the Holy Ghost." If we turn to Isaiah 6, we find the prophet saying in regard to this message, "Also I heard the voice of the Lord," referring to Jehovah of Hosts; and turning to John 12, we find the comment, "These things said Esaias, when he saw His glory, and spake of Him," and we have only to look at the preceding verses to discover that the "His" and "Him" refer to Jesus. How plain it is then that Jehovah of hosts is to be identified with both Jesus and the Holy Ghost — three Persons, yet one God.

I learn from the scriptures that there is one living God,1 fully revealed to us in Christ,2 and known through Him as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,3 in the unity of the Godhead, but revealed as distinctively willing,5 acting,6 sending, sent,7 coming,8 distributing,9 and other actings; or, as habitually expressed amongst Christians, three persons in one God, or Trinity in Unity. God is the Creator of all things; but the act of creating is personally attributed to the Word and the Son, and the operation of the Spirit of God.10

The Holy Ghost is a separate Personality in God. His Name is seen in conjunction with the names of the Father, and the Son, in Matthew 28 Christian baptism commits one to the confession of God as revealed by Christ, the full revelation of the one true living God being Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. There are not two Gods, or three Gods, as ignorant objectors allege; but three Personalities in one God. These three ever subsisted in the Godhead; and with regard to the Holy Spirit, He is expressly called the Eternal Spirit (Heb. 9:14). Before the worlds were made, God is (Heb. 11:3, 6); but even when heaven and earth were created these material things were not capable of bringing to light all that God is. Moreover, though Enoch and Noah walked with God, and Abraham was called God's friend, and the lord spake face to face unto Moses as a man speaks to his friend, their great intimacies did not bring to light the full truth. He was known to the patriarchs under His name of Almighty God, for the attribute of All-might pertains to the whole Godhead. Later, an advance was made when God especially linked His name of Jehovah with the nation of Israel (Exodus 6:2-3), for eternal existence and unchangeable glory (which are implied in that name) belong equally to the whole Godhead. Yet amid all the glories unfolded by the prophets, the Godhead secret w as never fully disclosed until in the fulness of time Christ came When it was no longer a question of the creation of worlds, or of the power that could sustain faith and reward it, as in Old Testament times, but rather of making purgation of sin and of revealing all that God is, the appearance of the Son of God in a concrete human form, apart from sin, necessarily brought to light His relations with the other Persons in the Trinity. Christianity therefore is based upon the knowledge of God as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

The Old Testament emphasised that there is one God and that beside Him there is no God (Deut. 6:4; Isa. 44:6). The New Testament presses the same truth: ‘For God is one, and the mediator of God and men one, the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 2:5). Christians do not believe in three Gods, as is sometimes alleged, but that the one true God is triune in His being. The full truth concerning the Trinity is revealed in the New Testament though there are verses in the Old Testament that hint at it (e.g. Gen. 1:1, 26; 11:7).

Dravidian polytheistic fertility religion and the early Aryan Vedic polytheistic religion laid the foundations of what later became Hinduism. While the earliest Vedas were blatantly polytheistic and devoted to rituals and sacrifice, the later Vedas showed a movement toward pantheism (from the word "pan," meaning "everything," and "theos," meaning "God"). According to pantheism, God did not create the world; God is the world, along with everything in it.