How Can These Things Be? Curiosity and Holy Restraint

Article 12 of 13 in the series “The Old Paths of Trinitarian Doctrine: Reading Edmund Calamy’s Thirteen Sermons.”

Calamy’s twelfth sermon turns from the content of Trinitarian doctrine to the posture of the learner. Its text is Nicodemus’s question in John 3:9:

“How can these things be?”

The question is not inherently sinful. Theology necessarily asks how biblical statements relate. Nicodemus’s fault lies in allowing inability to conceive the manner of regeneration to place Christ’s testimony under suspicion. Calamy sees the same temptation in debates about the Trinity.

Revealed Fact and Hidden Manner

Scripture reveals that there is one God; that Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are each truly God; that the three are personally distinct; and that they act according to an ordered economy in creation and salvation. Calamy regards these as revealed facts.

Scripture does not reveal the internal mechanism by which the Son is eternally begotten, the Spirit proceeds, or the three subsist in one indivisible essence. Those are questions of manner.

The distinction does not forbid theological inference. It forbids treating an unrevealed explanation as the condition upon which revealed truth may be believed. Faith rests upon the speaker’s authority, not the hearer’s ability to reconstruct the object.

Nicodemus knew that natural birth could not simply be repeated. He wrongly assumed that this exhausted what Christ could mean by a new birth. His conceptual limitation became a premature judgment of impossibility.

Incomprehensibility Is Not Contradiction

Calamy repeatedly distinguishes three categories:

1. what reason can comprehend;
2. what reason cannot comprehend but may receive without contradiction; and
3. what directly contradicts reason.

The Trinity belongs to the second category. It would be contradictory to say that God is one person and three persons in the same respect. It is not formally contradictory to confess one essence and three persons, even if we cannot imagine an instance of such existence among creatures.

Lack of a created parallel should be expected. If God is unique and infinite, created experience cannot supply a complete model of his being.

To call every inconceivable truth impossible would also destroy doctrines critics commonly retain: creation from nothing, the union of soul and body, divine foreknowledge with human responsibility, incarnation, resurrection, and regeneration. In each case we know something of the fact while failing to comprehend the mode.

The Infinite Cannot Be Measured by the Finite

Calamy asks whether the ocean can be poured into an eggshell. The image is homely but exact. A finite faculty cannot contain an infinite object.

If human beings could explain exhaustively how Father, Son, and Spirit exist as one God, either the human mind would have become infinite or God would have been reduced to a finite object. Neither is possible.

This is not an excuse for obscurity produced by careless words. Theologians should define terms, distinguish senses, test inferences, and remove genuine contradictions. But clarity about the boundary of knowledge is itself an intellectual virtue.

Calamy’s restraint opposes two kinds of pride. Rationalist pride refuses belief until God fits human categories. Speculative pride professes belief but fills revelation’s silences with confident mechanisms.

Reason Is a Servant, Not an Enemy

The sermon is not anti-intellectual. Calamy uses reason constantly. He compares texts, exposes equivocation, tests whether conclusions follow, and distinguishes contradiction from mystery. His target is autonomous reason—the demand that God’s testimony become credible only after passing a court outside itself.

Ministerial reason asks what God has said, what the words mean, how the claims cohere, and which interpretations contradict clearer revelation. Magisterial reason decides in advance what God could be and then edits the testimony accordingly.

The difference does not concern whether reason is used. It concerns the authority and limits under which reason operates.

Curiosity Becomes Cavilling

Calamy calls the corrupt posture a “cavilling temper.” It appears when a person repeatedly turns “How?” into “It cannot be,” demands answers revelation does not give, or treats difficulty as evidence against truth.

The temper may hide beneath sophistication. A critic can multiply technical questions not to learn but to prevent any conclusion from becoming settled. The standard of satisfaction continually moves: every answer generates a demand for a deeper mechanism.

Such inquiry is not neutral. It assumes that the creature has a right to withhold assent until the Creator discloses himself on the creature’s terms.

Calamy also recognizes a more pious form of the same temptation. Defenders of orthodoxy may become fascinated with assigning the precise internal ground of each personal distinction. Their intention is to protect the doctrine, but their confidence can exceed their evidence.

Analogies: Useful but Limited

The Christian tradition has used analogies drawn from the mind, memory, understanding, and love. Calamy preserves Augustine’s sentence:

Mens meminit se, intelligit se, diligit se: hoc si cernimus, cernimus Trinitatem; non quidem Deum, sed imaginem Dei.

“The mind remembers itself, understands itself, and loves itself: if we perceive this, we perceive a trinity—not God himself, indeed, but the image of God.”¹

The final qualification governs the use. The analogy is an image, not God. It may show that unity with real distinction is not meaningless, but it does not map Father, Son, and Spirit onto three faculties or activities.

Every analogy breaks down. Water in three states can suggest modalism. Three persons in a family can suggest tritheism. Sun, beam, and heat can suggest unequal derivation or parts. Analogies should remove a limited misunderstanding, not supply a hidden blueprint.

Revelation Gives Enough for Faith and Life

Calamy’s restraint is pastoral. Christians possess enough knowledge of the Trinity to be orthodox, to worship, and to enjoy communion with God. They know the Father’s love, the Son’s grace, and the Spirit’s communion. They are baptized into the triune name and blessed by the triune God.

This knowledge is not small because it is not exhaustive. A child may truly know a parent without comprehending everything about human personhood. A believer may truly know God because God makes himself known, though the divine essence remains incomprehensible.

The appropriate response is gratitude rather than resentment over the boundary. God has revealed what is necessary for salvation and withheld what creatures cannot bear.

Grow in Knowledge without Falling from Steadfastness

Calamy concludes with 2 Peter’s union of warning and growth. Believers must beware of being carried away by error and must grow in the knowledge of Christ.

Holy restraint is not intellectual stagnation. There is endless depth in what Scripture actually reveals: the relations of the persons, the missions of Son and Spirit, the unity of divine works, the shape of prayer, and the Trinitarian structure of salvation. Growth becomes unhealthy only when it abandons the path of revelation for conjecture.

The question “How can these things be?” may therefore become either the beginning of wisdom or the expression of unbelief. Asked humbly, it seeks clearer understanding under the Word. Asked as a condition of submission, it places the finite mind over the infinite God.

Previous: Article 11, “Why the Old Scheme Is Preferable.”
Next: Article 13, “Speaking the Truth in Love.”