Article 1 of 13 in the series “The Old Paths of Trinitarian Doctrine: Reading Edmund Calamy’s Thirteen Sermons.” This opening article also introduces the complete series.
Edmund Calamy’s Thirteen Sermons Concerning the Doctrine of the Trinity appeared in London in 1722. The title is accurate as far as the principal series goes, although the published volume actually contains seventeen sermons: thirteen on the doctrine of the Trinity, followed by four sermons defending and expounding . The present series follows the architecture of the first thirteen.
Calamy preached amid an early-eighteenth-century English controversy intensified by Samuel Clarke, William Whiston, Thomas Emlyn, and others who attempted to retain Christian language while assigning the Son and Holy Ghost a subordinate kind of deity. Calamy understood that the disagreement concerned far more than vocabulary. If the Son or Spirit possesses a deity below that of the Father, then Christianity has either introduced inferior gods or transferred divine worship to creatures. If the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each truly God, however, Scripture’s equally emphatic confession that God is one must determine how every passage is read.
The controversy therefore demanded a governing method. Calamy’s method is neither a bare appeal to ecclesiastical tradition nor an effort to solve the divine being by philosophical speculation. He proposes to receive what Scripture reveals, to gather its whole testimony, and to stop where revelation stops. The fathers and later divines may confirm, illustrate, or occasionally confuse the argument; Scripture alone is the proper standard.
That method appears in the opening pages. The Trinity, Calamy writes, is not an isolated speculation but a truth “interwoven” with the other doctrines of revelation. Christian baptism, worship, redemption, sanctification, prayer, and hope all have a Trinitarian form. The doctrine may exceed our comprehension without contradicting reason, because incomprehensibility belongs naturally to revealed knowledge of the infinite God. The question is not whether we can explain the manner of God’s triune existence. The question is whether God has revealed that he is one and that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each truly God.
Why Calamy Begins with the Father
The text of the first sermon is :
“But to us there is but one God, the Father.”
Beginning with the Father may appear unnecessary. The deity of the Father was not the disputed point among Calamy’s principal opponents. Yet his order is deliberate. The biblical marks by which the Father is known as God will later be applied to the Son and the Holy Ghost. If divine names, attributes, works, worship, and saving acts demonstrate the Father’s deity, the same evidence cannot be dismissed when Scripture assigns it to the other persons.
This also prevents a hidden equivocation. The word God cannot mean the infinite Creator when applied to the Father but only an exalted creature when applied to the Son. Calamy acknowledges that Scripture can use god figuratively for magistrates, angels, idols, or objects falsely worshipped. But when Scripture speaks properly of the true God, it identifies the one infinite, necessary, independent, eternal, omniscient, and almighty being. There is no intermediate order of genuinely divine creatures.
The Father is God because Scripture gives him the divine name, the divine attributes, the divine works, and the worship due to God alone. He creates, preserves, governs, searches hearts, forgives sins, receives prayer, and gives eternal life. These proofs establish the content of the word God. They cannot later be weakened merely because their application to the Son or Spirit is inconvenient to a preferred scheme.
Father Is a Personal Name
“Father” is not merely another word for “God.” It is a personal designation. It tells us that the one God does not first become Father when he creates, adopts believers, or sends Christ into the world. He is eternally the Father of his eternal Son.
Calamy therefore rejects the idea that God was first God and afterward became Father. He preserves an older Latin formulation:
Semper enim in Patre, ne Pater non semper sit Pater.
That is, “For the Son is always in the Father, lest the Father not always be Father.”1
He adds another ancient expression:
Sicut nunquam fuit non Deus, ita nunquam fuit non Pater.
- Edmund Calamy, Thirteen Sermons Concerning the Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1722), 21. ↩
“Just as he was never not God, so he was never not Father.”2
The point is not that Father and Son are interchangeable names. The Father is not the Son. The point is that Fatherhood belongs eternally to the Father’s personal identity. There was no divine solitude before the Son, no transition from non-Fatherhood to Fatherhood, and no created son whose arrival completed something previously lacking in God.
This matters because a temporal or voluntary Son cannot disclose an eternally paternal God. If the Son begins to exist, then the Father begins to be Father, and change is introduced into the divine life. Calamy instead reasons from divine immutability and the scriptural names: the Father eternally has the Son; the Son eternally belongs to the identity of the Father as Father.
One in Deity, Distinct in Person
The first sermon already anticipates the balance that the later sermons will develop. Father and Son are one according to deity, but they are not one person. Calamy cites the Latin summary:
Pater et Filius unum sunt secundum Deitatem, non unus secundum personas. Hac una voce et Sabellius excluditur, et Arius confutatur.
“The Father and the Son are one according to deity, not one person. By this single statement Sabellius is excluded and Arius refuted.”3
The distinction is exact. Against Sabellian confusion, the Father is not the Son. Against Arian division, the Son is not a lesser divine being outside the one God. Christian confession must neither collapse the persons nor divide the essence.
Calamy’s phrase “one according to deity” must not be reduced to agreement of purpose. Creatures can agree while remaining numerically separate beings. The Father and Son possess the same indivisible divine nature. Their unity is therefore deeper than moral harmony, while their distinction is more real than changing names or temporary roles.
The first sermon does not attempt to explain how the Son is eternally begotten. Calamy is cautious about theories of “origination” that add no scriptural clarity and can easily suggest superiority and inferiority. Revelation gives us the eternal relations and personal names; it does not give creatures an internal anatomy of God.
Divine Monarchy without an Inferior Son
To confess “one God, the Father” is not to identify the Father as one supreme deity above the Son and Spirit. Paul’s statement occurs within an explicitly Christian confession that immediately names “one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.” The apostle does not place a creature beside the Creator. He distinguishes Father and Son within the divine work and identity.
The Father may rightly be called the fountain in the order of persons and saving missions. The Son is sent by the Father, and the Spirit proceeds and is sent. But an order of relation is not an inequality of essence. The Father does not possess more deity, more eternity, more wisdom, or more power. If these perfections belong to the divine nature, then each person who is truly God possesses them fully.
This distinction between personal order and essential inequality will govern the rest of the series. Calamy does not erase the Father’s personal property or the order revealed in redemption. He denies that “first” in relation means “greater” in deity.
A Doctrine for Worship and Adoption
Calamy never permits the doctrine to remain an intellectual exercise. Because the one God is the Father of Jesus Christ, believers approach the Father through the Son and by the Spirit. The gospel does not reveal an abstract first principle but the Father who adopts sinners in his beloved Son.
The practical movement is important. The Trinity is not a barrier placed between the Christian and God. It is the form of communion with God. The Father purposes and gives; the Son accomplishes and mediates; the Spirit applies and indwells. These are not works of three gods cooperating from a distance. They are the undivided works of the one God, personally ordered according to Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Calamy therefore closes by calling his hearers to adore the Father as the Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, to receive the offered mercy, and to live as children devoted to his service. Knowledge of the Trinity should issue in assurance, gratitude, obedience, and worship.
The Road Ahead
The remaining sermons proceed cumulatively:
- the proper deity of the Son;
- extended replies to objections against the Son’s equality;
- the deity and personality of the Holy Ghost;
- the unity of the Godhead;
- the real distinction of the three persons;
- the antiquity and coherence of Nicene doctrine;
- the limits of theological curiosity; and
- the inseparability of truth and love.
That order is itself an argument. Calamy does not begin with a speculative diagram and then force biblical texts into it. He begins with the scriptural identity of each person, holds fast the scriptural confession of one God, acknowledges the distinctions revealed in the economy of salvation, and refuses either to deny the mystery or pretend to comprehend it.
The first sermon therefore supplies the rule for all that follows: receive the names and works God has revealed, give each divine person the honour Scripture gives him, preserve the unity Scripture asserts, and do not allow an imagined explanation to overrule the text.
Next: Article 2, “The Son Is the True God and Eternal Life.”