Article 8 of 13 in the series “The Old Paths of Trinitarian Doctrine: Reading Edmund Calamy’s Thirteen Sermons.”
Calamy has argued that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Ghost is God. He now turns to the equally non-negotiable confession of 1 Corinthians 8:4:
“We know that there is none other God but one.”
The sequence matters. The deity of the three persons does not permit a conclusion of three gods. The unity of God does not permit us to deny the deity of the Son or Spirit. Christian doctrine must receive both sets of scriptural statements without weakening either.
One Divine Nature
There is and can be only one God, one divine nature. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost do not possess three instances of deity as three human beings possess three instances of humanity. Human nature can be multiplied because each person is a separate finite substance. Divine nature is infinite, necessary, and indivisible.
Calamy’s description is mainly negative, and intentionally so. God’s unity excludes partition, composition, rivalry, and multiplication. We know that God is one more clearly than we know how the three persons subsist in that unity.
Augustine’s formulation captures the balance:
Trinitas haec, unus Deus ex quo omnia, per quem omnia, in quo omnia. Ita Pater et Filius et Spiritus Sanctus, et singulus quisque horum Deus, et simul omnes unus Deus; et singulus quisque horum plena substantia, et simul omnes una substantia.
“This Trinity is one God: from whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things. Thus the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: each of them is God, and together all are one God; each of them is the full substance, and together all are one substance.”1
Each person is fully God, not one-third of God. Yet the three together are not a collective deity assembled from parts.
God’s Unity Is Unique
Calamy insists that no created analogy fully reproduces divine unity. One man is a single member of a species containing many. The visible sun may be one in our sky, but another sun is not intrinsically impossible. One kingdom can be divided or rivalled.
God is not one in any of those ways. His unity is unique:
Hic Deus unus est, non duo aut plures duobus, sed unicus… sed ita unus est, ut nulla unitas similis isti in mundo reperiatur.
- Calamy, Thirteen Sermons, 228. ↩
“This God is one—not two, nor more than two, but unique… He is one in such a way that no unity like his is found in the world.”2
The warning is important. Analogies such as mind, memory, and love; root, stream, and river; or sun, light, and heat may illustrate a limited relation. They become dangerous when treated as models that explain the divine being. God’s unity is not the unity of a created system.
The Scriptural Witness to One God
The Old Testament proclaims divine unity from beginning to end: “The Lord our God is one Lord”; “I am God, and there is none else”; “Before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.” The first commandment excludes every rival object of worship.
The New Testament repeats rather than revises that monotheism. Jesus confesses the Shema. Paul contrasts the living and true God with idols. James says there is one God. Christian revelation distinguishes Father, Son, and Spirit more clearly, but it never introduces a pantheon.
Calamy therefore refuses a common escape: one supreme God with inferior divine beings beneath him. Educated pagans often held something similar. They could acknowledge one highest ruler while worshipping subordinate gods. The gospel does not baptize that hierarchy.
The Creator-creature distinction leaves no middle category. A being either possesses the infinite divine nature or depends upon the one who does. An “inferior God” is a contradiction because inferiority in essential perfection is creatureliness.
“There Are Gods Many, and Lords Many”
In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul acknowledges that many are called gods and lords, whether in heaven or earth. Calamy reads the language in its polemical setting. Idols are nothing with respect to the deity attributed to them. The beings worshipped by pagans do not become proper gods because people name them so.
The apostle contrasts those reputed deities with the Christian confession: one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things. The Son is not inserted among the “lords many.” He stands within the Creator’s identity and work.
Nor does “one God, the Father” exclude the Son any more than “one Lord Jesus Christ” excludes the Father from lordship. Paul distributes divine titles according to personal order while affirming one Creator. The passage is a Christian reformulation of monotheism around Father and Son, not a division between a true God and a semi-divine agent.
No Restricted Sense in Which Only the Father Is God
Some argued that there is one God in the highest sense—the Father—while the Son may be God in a lower sense. Calamy rejects the equivocation. Scripture may use the word figuratively, but there is no proper sense in which the true God is more than one.
If “God” is used properly of the Son and Spirit, they possess the one divine nature. If it is used only metaphorically, then Christian worship of them becomes unintelligible. The text gives no third option in which a created being is genuinely but dependently divine.
This is why Calamy sees the new subordinationist scheme as an importation of pagan structure into the church. He preserves the rebuke:
Ausi sunt… Ariani et Macedoniani Deum magnum et parvum inducere, immo Deum creatum, Hellenismum in Ecclesiam introducentes.
“The Arians and Macedonians have dared… to introduce a great God and a lesser God—indeed, a created God—bringing paganism into the Church.”3
The language is severe because the issue concerns the identity of God and the lawfulness of worship.
Necessary Existence and the Impossibility of Rival Gods
Calamy also reasons from divine perfection. God exists necessarily and possesses every perfection infinitely. Two independent infinite beings could not be distinguished by perfection: if one lacked something, it would not be infinite; if neither lacked anything, there would be no differentiating boundary.
The argument is not offered as a philosophical proof of the Trinity. It clarifies why biblical monotheism is not the accidental fact that only one deity happens to exist. God’s unity belongs to who God is.
Father, Son, and Spirit therefore cannot be three independent necessary beings. Their personal distinctions exist within the numerically one divine essence.
Unity Guards Worship and Salvation
The doctrine delivers Christian worship from division. Believers do not distribute ultimate trust among three centres of power or fear disagreement within heaven. The Father’s will, the Son’s will, and the Spirit’s will are not competing divine policies.
The triune works of creation and salvation are undivided. The Father creates through the Son in the Spirit; the Father redeems through the incarnate Son and applies redemption by the Spirit. Personal order enriches the work without dividing its source.
Calamy’s eighth sermon therefore closes one danger and opens the next question. God is one. Yet Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are not merely three names for one person. The following sermon asks what distinction Scripture requires us to confess within this incomparable unity.
Previous: Article 7, “The Spirit Who Knows the Things of God.”
Next: Article 9, “One God, Three Distinct Persons.”
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