There is no God, but the One God; and we know this One God by the Son of God made flesh in the humanity of Jesus Christ. This One God is not known any other way. He is not known by the philosophers nor made known by the philosopher-theologians. He is only and ever centrally known as He has freely made Himself Self-known in the face of Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit; indeed, He would have no face for us without the Holy Spirit. The genuinely Christian God is One (de Deo uno) in Three (de Deo trino), Three in One in eternal koinonia from His a se existence. It is by the humility of this God, as exemplified by the free obedience of the Son in the Father by the Holy Spirit, whereby this God becomes known. The theological Philistines have attempted to reason their way to this God, but only because they first became aware of this God by this Godβs Self-revelation; even as inchoate in His mediated presence through the Hebrews. In other words, it was only ever because of this triune Godβs gracious stooping to the sons of men that the notion of One God was contrived in the first place. And the mesmerizing thing about this God is that He has always already been vulnerable enough in His inner and triune life to make this impossible a possibility; that is, to be willing to be made known, even with the possibility of being mistaken for some type of mechanistic simple Monad of the brutish thinkers. Even so, this God has contradicted such triteness; even by Him becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death of the Roman cross. There is no space for the monadic on the scandalous cross; this God is altogether too complex to be imagined, even in the greatest of the philosophical imaginaries among us. This God, the triune and eternal God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in perichoretic bondedness, has taken on human blood in His own humanity as the Son of Man, Jesus Christ.
Someone else gets at the aforementioned much more eloquently thusly:
As we look at Jesus Christ we cannot avoid the astounding conclusion of a divine obedience. Therefore we have to draw the no less astounding deduction that in equal Godhead the one God is, in fact, the One and also the Another, that He is indeed a First and a Second, One who rules and commands in majesty and One who obeys in humility. The one God is both the one and the other. And, we continue, he is the one and the other without any cleft or differentiation but in perfect unity and equality because in the same perfect unity and equality he is also a Third, the One who affirms the one and equal Godhead through and by and in the two modes of being, the One who makes possible and maintains His fellowship with Himself as the one and the other. In virtue of this third mode of being He is in the other two without division or contradiction, the whole God in each. But again in virtue of this third mode of being He is in neither for itself and apart from the other, but in each in its relationship to the other, and therefore, in fact, in the totality, the connexion, the interplay, the history of these relationships. And because all division and contradiction is excluded, there is also excluded any striving to identify the two modes of being, or any possibility of the one being absorbed by the other, or both in their common deity. God is God in these two modes of being which cannot be separated, which cannot be autonomous, but which cannot cease to be different. He is God in their concrete relationships the one to the other, in the history which takes place between them. He is God only in these relationships of its modes of being, which is neutral towards them. This neutral Godhead, this pure and empty Godhead, and its claim to be true divinity, is the illusion of an abstract βmonotheismβ which usually fools men most successfully at the high-water mark of the development of heathen religions and mythologies and philosophies. The true and living God is the One whose Godhead consists in this history, who is in these three modes of being the One God, the Eternal, the Almighty, the Holy, the Merciful, the One who loves in His freedom and is free in His love.[1]
Well said, Uncle; well said.
Please notice maybe an almost unnoticed profundity when Barth refers to the history that obtains between and in and among the fellowship of the triune persons. It is within this space, this Father-Son-by-the-Holy Spirit relationship wherein all of human history and being takes place; indeed, as the electing God, the elected Man, the eternal Logos, the Son of God, graciously and freely chose to become us that we, by that act and actualism of Grace, might become human before God. It is His history, within His own Self-predestined and inner-triune life, whereby the creation obtains; wherein the redemption, the recreation, the elevation of humanity occurs. Just as the Son, before the foundation of the world, is freely Logos incarnandus (βthe Word to be incarnateβ), it is within this freedom of Godβs life by which the whole created order finds its determination. This, in the Eschaton, in the final and consummate reality actualized, and finally realized, is how it is that humanity becomes and is sustained as humanity simpliciter. That is by Godβs freedom, by the obedience and humility intrinsic to the life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, within the mysterium Trinitatis, by which anything, not least of which, humanity, exists at all; as worshippers and witnesses of their very life before God, by God, in God by the Spirit anointed humanity of the free God, the Son of Man, the Man from Nazareth, the Son in the bosom of the Father, Jesus Christ.
[1] Karl Barth,Β Church Dogmatics IV/1 Β§59 [203] The Doctrine of Reconciliation: Study EditionΒ (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 196.