You can’t have a “Versus” God! What I mean is, you can’t place God in competition against himself, and still end up with a Triune personal God who is love. And yet this is exactly what we have operative in much of the Christian tradition, especially in the classical theistic movement (the most immediate and popular example of this is in the teaching of John Piper, Matt Chandler, and others in this trajectory). You will often hear it said that God’s grace and mercy and love are on display in salvation (election), but his wrath and justice are on display in his condemnation of sin (reprobation); it is as if when these ‘parts’ and ‘pieces’ (the parts and pieces that when added together equal ‘God’ … some will want to call these parts and pieces, “attributes” or “properties”) are added together, that at this point we have God. But this is to, what the philosophers call, ‘essentialize’ God (the idea that he cannot be what he is without all of his necessary attributes or parts being present in order to equate to his being as God). But what is missing in this picture? Let me suggest the answer; what is missing is that God is not a conglomerate of attributes, instead he is one God, three persons. He is a subject-in-being who as Torrance says it ‘onto-relate’ or interpenetrate one another with the result that this ‘fellowshipping’ amongst the persons of the God-head (traditionally, ‘Monarchia’) is the shape of God. It is as God loves the other (or as McCormack might say it: give each other their being), that God is God; and it is this concept of God as love that then shapes the rest of his activities. There is a unity to God in this that is Tri-unity and personal; it undercuts a conception of God that places God in competition with himself as the classical theistic trajectory does. God’s being as Triune is his act, and his act is his being; if this is so, then he is personal, and there is no rift in his persons, since his being is one and not many (this would be tri-theism, or I might suggest social trinitarianism).

Anyway, I am just thinking out loud with this post. I am not really trying to explain this too much (obviously). But maybe you will have something to add or substract to what I’ve written. I will assert though, that if what I am saying is true (about God), then the theology that John Piper, and others like him, teach, is simply wrong!