The knowledge of the Holy Trinity

The lectionary prescribed Luke 10:21-24 as part of the reading yesterday, and I'm struck by how beautifully trinitarian this passage is.  It begins with the Lord Jesus rejoicing in the Holy Spirit and praising the Father - so there already you have the three divine Persons.  Why is the Lord rejoicing?  At first glance it appears to be because God has concealed the truth from the wise and intelligent and revealed it to those who are, metaphorically, infants - the low status folk, the ones with nothing special to offer.  And that is surely part of it: God's plan is playing out, as the disciples see the Kingdom drawing near in Christ and their eyes begin to be opened to his identity and what that means, whilst other seemingly more likely candidates see nothing.  So Jesus praises his Father.

But as the passage goes on a deeper foundation is revealed.  How is it that God is made known through Jesus?  It is because all things have been entrusted to him by the Father, and "no knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son desires to reveal him."  The foundation of the revelation of God accomplished in Jesus is the relationship between the Father and the Son from eternity.  Because the Father knows the Son, and the Son knows the Father, the Son is really able to make the Father known, and it is the Father's good pleasure that he do so.

To put it another way, nobody truly knows God except God - how can a creature really know the Creator?  But God really does know God - the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit know one another, and know in one another the fullness of Deity which they equally and together possess and are.  God knows God.  But in the incarnation, that divine knowledge of God - the only knowledge of God which can be true - has been repeated as human knowledge.  The Son knows the Father now as a human being knows, but as the same Person and in the same relationship of total knowledge that he always had.  And when anyone else comes to know the Father through Jesus, or to see who Jesus is in relation to the Father, it is the opening up of that relationship of knowledge through the Holy Spirit so that more human beings can now truly say they know God - not in themselves, but by virtue of and in dependence on the human knowledge of the Father incarnate in the Son.

Jesus tells his disciples - just one verse before this passage - not to rejoice in the success of their mission but in the deeper truth that they belong to the kingdom.  I think here, perhaps, we see the Lord rejoicing not just in the fact that God is being made known, but in the deeper truth of his relationship with the Father - and therefore truly rejoicing in the Holy Spirit, the Person who represents most deeply the communion of Father and Son within the Godhead.  And how we should rejoice when we realise just what relationship of knowledge and love it is that we are drawn into when we glimpse something of the glory of God in the fact of Jesus Christ.

Three reasons to meditate on the doctrine of the Trinity

On Trinity Sunday, here are three reasons (many more could be given) why it is good to think long and hard on the doctrine of the Trinity:

1. To know God.  Most basically, if you want to know God, you need to think about the Trinity.  God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, from eternity to eternity.  This is not an extra, deep and ultimately optional piece of knowledge about God; it is not something obscure which is only for advanced believers.  The doctrine of the Trinity describes God's name - Father, Son, Spirit - and somebody's name is perhaps the first and most basic thing you learn about them.  In one sense the whole of redemptive history can be read as God introducing himself, over the course of thousands of years, as Father, Son, Spirit.  It is his name.  And whereas for us a name is a fairly arbitrary label - many names have meaning, but they don't really relate to who we are - God is wholly himself in every presentation of himself: his name conveys the depths of his reality.  Knowing God as Trinity is both basic knowledge - his introductory name - and deep knowledge - because God is not divided, does not hide behind his name but is his name.  To know God, meditate on the doctrine of the Trinity.

2. To understand the gospel.  I take it that the gospel is essentially the good news that Jesus Christ has given himself up to death on the cross and been raised to new life.  His broken body and shed blood are given for the life of the world, for the forgiveness of sinners, for the redemption of the nations.  But how, and why, does this work?  How does the death of one man atone for the sins of countless millions?  Why can death not hold him?  The answer is manifold, but at root it is this: it is the human life of the eternal Son of God which is offered up on the cross and raised up from the tomb.  It is God himself, God the Son, who offers obedience to God the Father, taking up our cause.  And then again, how is it that this comes to affect us?  How does what Christ did there and then come to mean something for me here and now?  It is because the same God, God the Holy Spirit, lives in me and causes me to live.  One God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit: this is at the foundation of the gospel history.

3. To delight in our blessings.  The gospel tells us that we are invited in to share the love that has always existed between Jesus and his Father; it tells us that we are given the life which Jesus has in himself, having been granted it from his Father.  The doctrine of the Trinity helps us to see that we are beckoned, indeed welcomed, into the life of God himself.  As we are joined to Christ by faith and by the Holy Spirit, we share in the love which the Father eternally has for his Son in the unity of the Spirit.  We are given by grace to share in the divine life of God.  The Spirit poured out on us, enabling us to pray and to praise, is nothing other than God himself - a God who is close at hand as well as far away, inhabiting our own hearts.  To meditate on the Trinity is to gain deep insight into the manifold ways in which we are blessed as believers.

Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit -
as it was in the beginning, is now, and shall be forever.
Amen!

The Lord is One

Deuteronomy 6 contains one of the foundational statements of Jewish, and thereafter Christian, theology:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might."

The first part - verse 4 - is the Shema, the central confession of the faithful Jew.  God is One.  I think that means two things. 

Firstly, God is unique.  This does not necessarily mean that Deuteronomy is teaching a rigorous monotheism here; in fact, the book seems to maintain the reality in some sense of other gods and spiritual powers.  Even when Moses affirms that "the Lord is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other" the context implies a comparison with other 'gods'.  The uniqueness of Yahweh, the God of Israel, is not simply a matter of alone-ness.  Rather it is that none of the other 'gods' or powers or whatever you want to call them are this God, the Creator of all and the Redeemer of his people.  He is unique.  What other 'god' has ever tried to save a people out from the midst of another nation?  What other 'god' has ever spoken to his people and entered into saving relationship with them?  As we move towards the New Testament, we have to add: what other 'god' has humbled himself to human flesh and Calvary's cross to redeem a people for himself?

Martin Luther in his Large Catechism asks: "what does it mean to have god?  Or what is God?"  His answer is: "a god means that from which we are to expect all good and to which we are to take refuge in all distress".  In other words, what you trust is your god.  I think this helpfully illuminates the meaning of Deuteronomy.  The Lord is God, the one and only; he is the one from whom we are to expect all to good, and in whom we are to take refuge in all distress.  He and he only, because he is the only real Saviour.

But second, God is united.  God is always himself.  He is not in any sense divided.  In this he stands in contrast with the ancient deities, who might appear differently in different sacred sites.  He also stands in sharp contrast with us.  We often find that we are divided against ourselves, hardly knowing what it is that we want or who it is that we really are.  Not so God.  He is always God.  That means that he is always dependable, always the same.  The Lord is One, and therefore he can be our God.

It's worth noting in passing that, theologically speaking, the fact that God is One is also the foundation of the church's doctrine of the Trinity.  Because God is One, we can take Jesus absolutely seriously when he says that to see him is to see the Father.  Wherever the Son is, there is the Father and the Spirit.  Therefore, in Jesus, we have a true revelation of God, God without remainder.

Between verse 4 - the theological affirmation - and verse 5 - the instruction to Israel - there is an implied 'therefore'.  Because God is One, you shall love him with all your heart, soul, and strength.  The logic is simple: because he is the only god, in the sense discussed above - the only source of good and only refuge of our souls - he is to receive absolute loyalty, love, devotion.  That could be terrifyingly totalitarian, and indeed it would be if any human being were to make such a claim on our loyalty.  But to love God wholeheartedly does not eclipse the love of other things.  Rather, it orders the love of created things, such that in loving God wholeheartedly we find ourselves loving other people and indeed all God's creation appropriately - and we find that our love for those created things flow back into love of the Creator.  Because God is really God, the source and fountain of all good, he is not a black hole sucking in all our devotion and love, but the one in whom we really learn what it is to love in the first place.

And then again, because God is united, wholehearted love of him is the only way to bring our fragmented and sin-shattered lives together.  "Unite my heart to fear your name", prays the Psalmist.  Take, O God, this bundle of contradictions that I call myself, and, by orienting it around your great self, bring it to order and sense.  God alone is great enough to be the sun at the centre of the solar system of your life.  This is why in Jesus we see the only real example this fallen world has ever known of true humanity - life properly oriented, lived out of a centre in God which makes the disparate whole and the complex simple.

Our Triune God saves

I've been thinking a little bit this week, having preached from Romans 5:1-5 on Trinity Sunday, about the way that the Christian revelation of God as Trinity-in-Unity affects our understanding of salvation.  A couple of things to note from the passage:

Firstly, it is God who saves, from first to last.  We have peace with God through Christ, whom Paul has already described as having been put forward by God as a sacrifice of propitiation.  The Father initiates, the Son carries through the plan of faithful obedience and sacrifice.  And the Holy Spirit is described as given to us, pouring out God's love into our hearts.  So from the initial and eternal plan, through its accomplishment in incarnation and atonement, right down to the subjective application of that plan into the hearts and lives of individuals - this is all God.  Our God saves, from first to last.

Second, though, it seems to me that understanding Trinity makes this salvation relational, and preserves the reality of humanity in the whole carrying through of the process.  If God were not Triune, if he were the monad God of monotheism, then it would be a supremely grotesque thing to say 'God saves, from first to last', because it would imply a puppet show.  Here is God, pulling the strings of salvation, and his human marionettes dance out their involuntary lives of praise.  But God is Triune - he is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.  He is not only the Father - God above us, transcending us, sovereign from his throne in heaven; he is also the Son - God with us, our brother, taking on and sharing our nature, sovereign in our place, even the place of the cross; and then again, he is God the Holy Spirit - God within us and behind us, the God in whom we all live and move and have our being, sovereign in and through our real human lives, actions, and freedoms.  He is God who saves, in every way, from first to last; but he is the Triune God who saves, and that makes a great difference.

It also means that when we say 'God saves' what we primarily mean is 'God welcomes us, even us sinners, into the eternal relationship and love which he is in himself, the love of the Father for the Son and the Son for the Father within the unity of the Holy Spirit'.  And that is really something.

The God who is

The Athanasian Creed is long and repetitive.  Its insistence again and again that God is like this and therefore isn't like that can get a bit boring.  It feels like a product of a fastidious age, when people spent far too long defining the finer points of theology and probably didn't spend enough time being 'practical' and perhaps neglected things like 'mission' and 'worship' because they were tied up credalising (not a real word).

In fact the point is simple, and highlights the major blind spot of our own age.  God really exists, and because he really exists (rather than being a construct of a human mind), he exists in a particular way.  If something is made up, you can think of it in any way you like; if something is real, then unless you conform your thoughts about it to the reality then you simply don't know it.

The God who is has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - the three, and yet still the one God; in fact, the one God just as and only as he is the Three.  Insisting that we think of God in this way is simply insisting that we treat God as a real. existing thing.  In other words, it is a ridiculous demand if God is made up - and that God is made up is the first article of faith of the modern world.

Aiding and Abetting

Today I've been thinking about the Homoiousians.  I imagine you think about them from time to time as well, but just in case they've not been at the forefront of your mind recently, let me remind you who they were.  The Homoiousians were the moderate party in the fourth century debates about the person of Christ.  They positioned themselves between the Homoousians on the one hand (note the lack of 'i' - homo rather than homoi) and the Arians on the other.  To boil it right down, whilst the Homoousians said that God the Son was of one being with the Father, and the Arians said that God the Son was unlike the Father, the Homoiousians said that the Son was similar to or like the Father in his essence and attributes.

As we all know (right?), the Homoousians ultimately won the day; the Gospel story required the relationship between Father and Son which they championed.  Arianism has been denounced as heresy by all branches of the Christian church.

But my thinking today has not really about the Trinitarian and Christological controversies of yesteryear.  Rather I've been thinking about the role played by the 'moderates', the Homoiousians, in all this debate.  They were a varied bunch.  Some were very slippery characters; they had Arian sympathies, but lacked the courage of their convictions.  Others were simply concerned for the unity of the church; they wanted to try to acommodate the views of as many as possible (whilst ruling out the extremes of Arianism).  Others just felt that it wasn't as important as everyone was making out; they just wanted to preach the gospel without getting mixed up in this abstract argument.

History has not judged their efforts kindly, nor should it.  Whatever the motives, good or bad, the attempt to moderate and compromise and hold people together led to the Homoiousians advocating, or at least tolerating, heretical doctrine.  They did not, in the final analysis, speak the truth about God.  Had they been allowed to triumph, the Gospel would have disappeared.  In the end, whatever they hoped to achieve, they were in fact aiding and abetting the enemy.

I've been thinking about Homoiousians as I reflect on the role some people I respect very much are playing in the big debates in the church today - especially around gender and sexuality.  I worry that in trying to be gentle, kind, moderate...  they're running the danger of being on the wrong side.  When it comes down to it, on this and all issues, we have to listen and speak.  If God said nothing on the subject, we'd jolly well better shut up.  But if he spoke, we'd better hear what he says and articulate it clearly.  No messing around.  No fudging, no hedging, no softening the edges.  Rather, gentleness with clarity.

Why the Trinity?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the doctrine of the Trinity is essentially a grand bit of metaphysics - beautiful, but somewhat abstract and esoteric.

It isn't.

The doctrine of the Trinity is quite simply the only way to make sense of the story, and that in two different ways.  

On the one hand, the doctrine is the only way to make sense of the Biblical story, the gospel story.  When Jesus talks to his Father, and promises his followers that he will send the Spirit from the Father, and when he says that seeing him is seeing the Father, or that the presence of the Spirit is his own presence...  How can we make sense of that without the Trinity?

On the other hand, the doctrine is the only way to make sense of my personal story as a Christian, my everyday story.  When I pray, I speak to the Father in Jesus' name - and at the same time, I am aware that I would not, left to myself, pray at all; it is only the presence of Another within me that motivates and empowers me...  How can I make sense of myself without the Trinity?

The doctrine of the Trinity is just the only way of describing the actor(s) in this drama which makes sense of what they actually do.

God is One

A belated thought for Trinity Sunday...

In recent weeks, one question that has been revolving around my mind has been this: can we, in our own voices as 21st century Christians, recite the Nicene Creed?  As a Christian with some concern for both catholicity and orthodoxy, that the question should occur at all is worrying.  I've been led to it by arguably the most important clause, which declares that the Lord Jesus Christ is "of one substance with the Father" - that is to say, homoousios.  The significance of this word for the debates over Trinitarian theology in the fourth century, and therefore for all subsequent Christian thinking, can hardly be overstated.  This was, ultimately, the dividing line between the Nicene party, which was eventually triumphant as the standard of Christian orthodoxy, and the Arian heresy and all those who would compromise with it.  It really matters.  It answers the question 'is Jesus really God?' with an emphatic yes.

So why might we not be able to say it with our own voices?

The problem is that the Nicene definition operates within a particular metaphysical view of the world which is alien to us.  The idea of 'substance', which lies at the heart of the debate, is just not one that exists in contemporary ontology.  The language of three 'persons' 'subsisting' within one 'substance' is alien to us.  I'm not at all suggesting that we should ditch the creed; we can understand it, if we do the work, and we can understand what was meant by it and why it mattered and therefore continues to matter.  We can (and should) say it in their voices, or perhaps in the voice of the church universal, but I don't think we can say it in our voices.  I don't think that indicates a fundamental problem; the metaphysics in which the Trinitarian dogma was expressed was never drawn from the gospel.  It was the scaffolding, and if that scaffolding no longer works for us, we can move on, albeit maintaining the appropriate respect for the language in which the essential truth has been communicated and safeguarded in the past.

The question, really, is 'how do express this truth in a post-metaphysical age?'  How do we say it in our voices?

I do think it's something we need to think about.  The threat of a bald monotheism is always lurking, where Father, Son and Holy Spirit disappear into the mush of an undifferentiated godhead.  And then the gospel becomes impossible; the story makes no sense without these characters.  However, the bigger issue on my mind at the moment is how we avoid tritheism.  I've heard a number of people teaching on the subject of the Trinity in a way which, to my mind, does not adequately guard against this danger - perhaps because more effort is going into watching the other door to ensure monotheism doesn't sneak in.  Still, it is not sufficient to say that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one because of their relationships; social Trinitarianism is built on an overly-literalistic (and anachronistic) interpretation of the word 'person'.  Three persons in relationship is true but insufficient as an expression of the unity of God.  Also, any system which can allow God to be described as a 'committee' - I have heard this taught - is wide open to tritheism, if it is not already in the middle of it.

So my question is, if 'substance' doesn't work for us, how do we say 'God is One' in a way which will shut out tritheism fully and finally whilst allowing the telling of the gospel story with all its inter-Trinitarian interactions?

Revelation and the Trinity

In Jesus Christ, we see God revealed. That is the presupposition, or rather the foundational occurrence, of all true theology. But this raises two further questions:

1. Who or what is it that Christ reveals? To say 'God' in the abstract is highly problematic. If Christ reveals 'God' in the abstract, can we still make room for an assertion of the deity of Christ? That is to say, can Christ reveal 'God' and be 'God'? The concept of Christ as "God revealed" pushes us to a definite, and not abstract, notion of God standing behind Christ. In the gospel accounts, and most especially in John, Jesus expresses this in terms of his relationship with the Father - the two are one; anyone who has seen Christ has seen the Father. Jesus the Son reveals the Father.

2. How is it that I see God revealed in Christ? This question is raised most acutely when we consider that there are many others who have access to the same information and have the same, or even superior, faculties who do not see this. From the point of view of faith in Christ, with the shadow-revelation of depravity that comes with that, we have to see the only the divine could have overcome our blindness. Again, John's gospel is very helpful in setting out the relationship of Christ to the Spirit, whom he sends to lead his disciples into truth. Jesus the Son is revealed by the Spirit.

The answers to these two questions lead to a further affirmation: these three - the Father, Son and Spirit - are really and truly One. If the Son truly reveals the Father to the extent that anyone who sees him sees also the Father, then Father and Son are One; and what is more, they are One God - how could the saying be true otherwise? And if the Spirit truly makes the Son known to us as God - if he truly takes from what is Christ's and gives it to us, and if Father and Son truly come to dwell in us through his indwelling - then the Spirit, too, is One God with the Father and the Son.

The doctrine of the Trinity can be extrapolated from the presupposition that Jesus Christ reveals God; the assertion that Jesus Christ reveals God can only be true in the context of that doctrine.

Good Friday

The most important thing that has ever happened in (or out of) the history of the world is remembered today. I've been pondering something that was said at the time.

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

The speaker was of course Jesus. He was already crucified; it would not be long before he died. His suffering - physical, mental, emotional, spiritual - was more than I can describe. But this is the heart of it. Forsaken by God.

How forsaken? Bear in mind, this will only make sense if you acknowledge and confess with the church that this man is also the eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Divine Trinity - a person who has always enjoyed perfect relationship with God the Father. But then also bear in mind that acknowledging and confessing this makes it impossible that he should be so forsaken. God forsaken by God?

Pondering this cry from the cross, I find myself staring into a deep abyss of profound agony and profound love. God the Holy Trinity - the one whom the church delights to call indivisible - is, in some sense at least, divided. As Christ takes on his shoulders the sins of the world (my sins!), he stands before the Father as the guilty one. He, the guilty one! And God is too pure to even look upon evil... What agony.

But what incredible love. God the Holy Trinity sees the world of humanity cut off from himself - cut off from the relationship we were made for, by our own will and act. Does he reject us? No. He takes it into himself. Jesus Christ will be the cut-off one. The alienation and mess of our rampant atheism and godlessness will be taken into the nature of God himself. What was an external relationship of judgement is taken in and made an internal one.

My Lord, what love is this?