Category Archives: Doctrine Of God

Triune Time as Eternal Life and Rest

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“If any man be in Christ, He is a new creation; the old has passed away, behold, the new has come.”

Time in abstraction, that is, time thought of in a way that is not thought from God’s triune time for the world in Jesus Christ, can only lead to a life of despair and futility. The 21st century’s busy-ness that most are preoccupied with often has the tendency to glaze over the futility of life, without Christ, which can often last someone a lifetime; that is until they are finally confronted with the reality of their mortality. Indeed, the reality of mortality is ultimately to face the Firstborn from the Dead, Jesus Christ. And to finally meet the ground of all reality, and the purpose of the created order in general, after a person has “expired,” is a fearful thing indeed. It is as if such a person has finally had to come to terms with the fact that they have trampled the blood of Christ underfoot, counting it a vain thing.

Barth writes:

Again by way of anticipation, the presence of Jesus in His community is full of import for the future. His presence impels and presses to His future, general and definitive revelation, of which there has been a particular and provisional form in the Easter history. Hence even the presence of Jesus in the Spirit, for all its fulness, can only be a pledge or first instalment of what awaits the community as well as the whole universe, His return in glory. But it must never be forgotten that He who comes again in glory, this future Jesus, is identical with the One proclaimed by the history of yesterday and really present to His own to-day. The thorough-going eschatology for which the interim between now and one day necessarily seems to be a time of emptiness, of futility, of lack, of a progressive and barely concealed disillusionment, is not the eschatology of New Testament Christianity. And again it is only an unspiritual community which can tolerate such a view. The fact that the man Jesus will be includes the fact that He is; but the fact that He is does not exclude that He is “not yet.”[1]

For about a decade, starting in the mid-nineties, the Lord, as He began to do a heavy work in my life, allowed me to feel what life would be like without Him as the ground of it all. I can only describe that season of time as a literal hell. Indeed, clinically it might have been “diagnosed” as depression and general anxiety, but it went much deeper than that. Its basis was indeed spiritual. It was tied into a heavy intellectual (although not affective) doubt of God’s existence I was experiencing; even as a Christian. I felt the hell of nihilism whilst in the depths of deep depression and deep anxiety (indeed, these became mutually implicating things). I only made it through that because God is gracious.

Even so, as Barth underscores, we are included in the time of Christ; the new time of God in recreation for us (pro nobis). We have the guarantee of the eschatological time to come even as He in-breaks, by the Holy Spirit, into our broken lives while we continue to inhabit this in-between time. But His parousia (presence) is just as real and weighty now as it will finally be when the consummate reality of the revealing of the sons of God ultimately enfolds us into its full participative esse (ground) as that has been, and always will be, mediated for us in the priestly humanity of our High Priest and Brother, Jesus Christ. Take heart, even though we might experience many and deep tribulations here, Christ has overcome the world!

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/2 §47 [468] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 32–3.

Being in a Personal, Relational Relationship with God, On Triune Terms

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God is not an analogue to analyze. God instead is a triune and eternal relationship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one God (de Deo uno) in three persons (de Deo trino) to be inhabited, through Christ, and enjoyed. The Christian is in an immediate relationship with the triune God through union with Jesus Christ. We are indeed, as Christians, in an intimate and personal relationship with the living God. Not because we are persons in relationship with God—thus predicating what God’s relationality and personalist reality must be—but because God is eternally personal and [onto]relational within the inner-reality (in se) of His life. In other words, we have intimacy with God not because of some type of from below emotionalism we foist upon God, but because of who He is as personal and relational within His inner being.

It seems to me that there are some, especially those of the intellectualist orientation (often academics), who want to poo-poo the idea that Christians ought to be in this warm-hearted love relationship with God. They want to think, seemingly, that because of an identifiable movement within Protestantism, particularly as that is found in the work of Phillip Jakob Spener and Nikolaus Ludwig, count von Zinzendorf, in 17th and 18th century Germany, and then later in England, through the Keswick spiritual tradition, and also in America, within the revivalist movements, and many more threads, that such intimacy talk and religion vis-à-vis God can be dismissed and relegated to an index and categorization of church history (and sociology). Indeed, while many movements within the history of the church can be described by the intellectual and theological historians, this in and of itself doesn’t negate the theological substance that may or may not stand behind these types of shifts and orientations among the people of God through the centuries.

I am simply wanting to register that at a purely theological level the idea that the Christian is growing in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ entails a deeply personal and warm-hearted relationship with God, indeed, a dialogical (prayerful and worshipful) one, wherein the sheep can know the Shepherd’s voice. And this, as already noted, is not because of anything inherent to an ‘below’ urge from us to God. But instead, it is from an ‘above’ movement of who God freely has chosen to be for us in Jesus Christ; and this in correlation with who God eternally is in His triune Self. This is how the Christian encounters God, by the Spirit, through whom we affirm that Jesus is Lord. The Christian doesn’t encounter a speculatively produced pure act (actus purus) or pure being God whose reality is adumbrated by our philosophical negations and projections upon what this being must be like. No, the Christian, by definition, only is such as they come into encounter with the One who is their Brother, who is their Father, in the bond of the Holy Spirit. God determines, He pre-destines who He is in Himself to be who we become in Christ by Grace (not nature); that is, co-heirs with Jesus Christ, beholding the glory the Son has eternally shared with the Father in the bondage of the Holy Spirit.

The sum of it is that we ought to pursue this personalist, relational relationship with the living God because that is what He has already determined to be the case for us in Jesus Christ. We ought to be in doxological adoration of who He has Self-revealed and exegeted Himself to be for us in Jesus Christ; in the kerygmatic reality of the Good News that He is in proclamation. He isn’t a God out there, but a God with us, and God ‘closer to us than we are to ourselves’ (per Barth). That said, He isn’t available to be taken captive by our own untoward passions and desires. He instead sets the frame in the sobriety of His own life for us. As such, our worship and relationship with Him is predicated upon this type of discoursing, dialoguing intercourse with Him wherein what it means to be personal, relational, and intimate is dictated by who He is for us, rather than who we are towards Him (in our fallen frames of dust). He sets the boundaries of relationship relative to who He is, and because He created us to be in relationship with who He is, our re-creation in Christ finds a relational correspondence, in a fitting way, as that has been already laid for us in His telos (purpose) for the world in Jesus Christ.

Hopefully the reader is seeing how I am attempting to thread this needle. I.e., We are in a personalist, onto-relational relationship with the living and triune God on His terms rather than an abstract set of terms that we determine about Him based upon our own fallen and broken dispositions.

Thanks for reading me thinking out loud again.

God’s Triune Wrath as First an Instance of His Love

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God is love. Unfortunately, for some, this entails an inherent Marcionism. Simplistically, this entails the notion that the God of the Old Testament is not the same God we encounter in the New Testament in Jesus Christ. Often people cannot imagine how the “God of war and wrath” in the Old Testament could ever correspond with the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ in the New Covenant. But I would simply say that without the God of the Old Testament the God of the New Testament makes absolutely no sense. Jesus came as the Prophet, Priest, King (triplex munus); Jesus came in fulfillment of the Aaronic and Levitic priesthood framework; He came as the Lamb slain before the foundations of the world, as the second and greater Adam, as the seed of the woman who bruises His heel while crushing the serpent’s head. God’s wrath is really just an instance of His triune love. God is a jealous God who loves His creation more than He loves Himself (this is a rhetorical hyperbole). As such, when God sees His very good creation in a ruptured relationship with Him, He will not countenance such brokenness. His wrath is conditioned by who He eternally is as Father-Son-Holy Spirit love (which is simply a Self-givenness, one for the other, one in the other, which coinheres in the Divine Monarxia [Godhead]). He created humanity in His image, who is the Christ for us (cf. Col. 1.15); He created humanity in Christ’s humanity to be in an eternally ascendant and thus elevated and koinonial relationship with Him. The nothingness and concupiscence of sin broke that, and as a result He became sin that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (mirifica commutatio ‘wonderful exchange’).

God is love. He loves all of humanity in His vicarious humanity which stood in the gap between He and us because no one else could or would. Jesus, as the Baptizer exclaimed, is indeed the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.’ As the author to the Hebrews (Paul) says: “there no longer remains any other sacrifice for sin.” Christ is God’s first human, the firstborn, the first fruits of God for the world/us. This is how we know God’s wrath is first an instance of His love for us, in that ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.’ God’s wrath cannot ever be thought away from or apart from His conditioning triune love. When ‘our theologies’ fall into that trap we end up with a distorted and nomist view of God, wherein God becomes simply the Judge, and not the Judge judged for us (pro nobis).

Because of this realization I can look out at the world and feel compassion, as if looking longingly at sheep without the Shepherd. My heart genuinely breaks for people who don’t have Christ; as Paul said “I wish all were like me, yet without these chains.” God desires to show His love in actualized ways wherein all of humanity might indeed ‘taste and see that God is good.’ God’s justice is coming, and yet has always already come in the cross of Jesus Christ. The very foundation of the cross is in fact the cruciformed (cross-shaped) triune life of the eternal God. If we don’t approach a reading of the Old Testament from this crossshaped lens we might fall prey to the siren call of the culture writ large as best represented in the thought and activity of Marcion (the heretic).

The Christian God’s ‘Multiplicity, Individuality and Diversity of Perfections’: Mysterium Trinitatis

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When reflecting on the Holy Trinity, given the reality that it is as they say mysterium Trinitatis, I think it is best to recognize this doxological reality and allow that to shape the way the Christian wades into this Holy of Holies. Epiphanius once wrote:

God is one, the Father in the Son, the Son in the Father with the Holy Spirit . . . true enhypostatic Father, and true enhypostatic Son, and true enhypostatic Holy Spirit, three Persons, one Godhead, one being, one glory, one God. In thinking of God you conceive of the Trinity, but without confusing in your mind the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is the Father, the Son is the Son, the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit, but there is no deviation in the Trinity from oneness and identity.[1]

When thinking the Trinity it is a constant, as Barth would say, dialectic between thinking the one and the many, the many and the one; the reality of unity and multiplicity, and multiplicity and unity; or oneness (De Deo uno) and threeness (De Deo trino), and threeness and oneness. To complicate matters even further, the discussion of how the perfections or attributes of God can be spoken of as one and many, many and one; particularly given the inseparability of God’s operations ad extra (opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa) as those reflect the in se origins of relation (or processions) of God’s antecedent eternal life. Here we enter the locus that is typically identified as God’s simplicity. But it is good to remember, as Epiphianus does above, that to think of God’s so-called simplicity, this ought never be devoid of thinking this from the triunity of God. We can affirm, and should affirm, that God is non-composite in His inner life; but this does not, nor should not entail the notion that God’s oneness nor His threeness can be thought away from each other—they must always be thought into each other in the koinonial and co-inhering life of eternal and filial relationship that God was, is, and always will be. Barth attempts to tackle these things in this way:

The multiplicity, individuality and diversity of the perfections of God are those of His simple being, which is not therefore divided and then put together again. In God multiplicity, individuality and diversity do not stand in any contradiction to unity. Rather the very unity of His being consists in the multiplicity, individuality and diversity of His perfections, which since they are His are not capable of any dissolution of separation or non-identity, and which again since they are His are capable of genuine multiplicity, individuality and diversity. The plurality which is to be predicated of God can therefore, even in its multiplicity, because it is the multiplicity of God, signify only the unity. The unity which is to be predicated of God must with equal necessity, because it is in reference to God, signify the plurality. Every individual trait which is to be affirmed of God can signify only the one, but the one which is to be affirmed of Him must of necessity signify also every individual trait and the totality of all individual traits. Every distinction in God can be affirmed only in such a way as implies at the same time His unity and therefore the lack of essential discrepancy in what is distinguished. But again, it would not really be the unity of God if no distinctions were recognised and confessed. Our doctrine therefore means that every individual perfection in God is nothing but God Himself and therefore nothing but every other divine perfection. It means equally strictly on the other hand that God Himself is nothing other than each one of His perfections in its individuality, and that each individual perfection is identical with every other and with the fulness of them all.[2]

Indeed, Barth is at his best dialectical form as he discusses the Trinity; this passage is a perfect example of how he attempts to speak of God’s oneness in one movement, and then the threeness in the next key; and allow each chord of the Divine orchestra to play its note in concert again with the whole piece. This is the right way to think the Trinity in my view. We shouldn’t attempt to crack this nut; we must simply attempt to think along with its melodic reality and allow its res to usher us into the Holy place that it is. We see Barth doing this rather masterfully here; he attempts to hold the whole Monarxia together by simply engaging its whole reality in terms of emphasis here, emphasis there, and back again. Soli Deo Gloria!

[1] Epiphanius, Anc., 10, cited by T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 234-3.

[2] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §28 The Doctrine of God: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2009), 78.

*repost, Trinity Sunday.

Getting Beyond an Optical God: The Father-Son as the Pattern

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Torrance is discussing the impact that dualistic Hellenism has had upon Western-thought-forms; namely the precedence that classical thought has given to the optical mode of thinking and verification (so the obsession with empiricism, etc.). TFT is highlighting the impact that this methodology and epistemology can have upon our construal of God’s “Father-hood” and “Son-hood,” and how Christian/Patristic theology, primarily through Athanasius’ influence, eschewed this “Hellenizing” effect by reifying it through Christian ontology.

The contrast between Christianity and Hellenism could hardly be greater than at this fundamental level, where biblical patterns of thought governed by the Word of God and the obedient hearing of faith (υπαÎșοη της πÎčτΔως) conflict sharply with those of Greek religion and philosophy. The issue came to its head in the Arian controversy over the Father – Son relation at the heart of the Christian Gospel. Are the terms ‘father’ and ‘son’ to be understood as visual, sensual images taken from our human relations and then projected mythologically into God? In that event how can we avoid projecting creaturely gender into God, and thinking of him as grandfather as well as father, for the only kind of father we know is one who is son of another father? To think of God like that, in terms of the creaturely content of images projected out of ourselves, inevitably gives rise to anthropomorphic and polymorphic notions of deity and in fact to polytheism and idolatry. However, if we think from a centre in God as he reveals himself to us through his Word incarnate in Jesus Christ, then we know him as Father in himself in an utterly unique and incomparable way which then becomes the controlling standard by reference to which all notions of creaturely fatherhood and sonship are to be understood. ‘God does not make man his pattern, but rather, since God alone is properly and truly Father, we men are called fathers of our own children, for of him every fatherhood in heaven and earth is named.’ Unique Fatherhood and unique Sonship in God mutually define one another in an absolute and singular way. As Athanasius pithily expressed it in rejection of Arian anthropocentric mythologising: ‘Just as we cannot ascribe a father to the Father, so we cannot ascribe a brother to the Son’.[1]

[1] T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, 69-70.

Job’s Dramatic Irony: Getting God Right Through Suffering Rather than Nature

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The biblical book of Job, literarily, operates with what is called dramatic irony. Here is how the Oxford Dictionary defines dramatic irony:

a literary technique, originally used in Greek tragedy, by which the full significance of a character’s words or actions are clear to the audience or reader although unknown to the character.[1]

As a reader, or even movie-watcher, we the audience have the capacity to read or watch with this type of ‘irony.’ We can skip to the end, and then read the beginning to the end, knowing what the final outcome is. Or we can read through a book or watch a movie in total, and next time we come to read or watch said book or movie we will already know what the characters present in the storyline remain unaware of throughout. Indeed, the drama of our lives before God, could be characterized as a dramatic irony as understood in Christ. We have the capacity, in God’s life of Grace, who is the Christ, to know how it all ends. We don’t have the details of how that looks in our daily and personal lives, but we know the One who does; and in a general way, with important specifics in tow, we know what we can expect in the end/Eschaton. As such, we can look at our unfolding stories in light of the End, the Beginning and End, and rest in the knowledge that no matter what we walk through, both the deep waters and the fire, in this cruci-shaped life, we will indeed resurrect.

In the instance of Job’s story, we have many of the details. We know that God judged, and in the end found Job faithful, and Job’s friends faithless (not even acknowledging the youngster, Elihu’s existence). But I was thinking, as I just finished reading Job again: when you listen to Job’s “friends” and their “counsel” or “beratement” of him, at first blush it sounds like they might be offering many profound insights with reference to the character and action of God. But what we know, even from the beginning of the story, is that Job’s friends, while stating, surely, some true facts about God, that they were working off a faulty natural theological assumption based on their own lights. They presumed that Job must have been in some sort of vile sin, thus justly undergoing God’s judgement on his life. Throughout the plotline of Job’s travail, he grows in the grace and knowledge of the LORD, while his friends stay static, thinking of God through static terms, based on their own naturalistic reasoning, their own prefabricated notions in regard to God’s ways, and thus arriving at horrifically bad conclusions as they approached their “friend,” brother Job.

I was just thinking, I don’t want to operate like one of Job’s friends. I want to be Job instead. I want to know who God is as I trust and depend on the One who alone raises the dead. With Job I want to be the one who says “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last He shall stand on the earth.” I don’t want to think God based on my own wits, or others’, thus arriving at faulty and crooked theology and its attending spirituality. I want to know God through the shape of His cross in Jesus Christ; depending upon His grace, which is sufficient, thereby genuinely coming to know the true who-ness of God from His inner-life, as I participate in that through the mediatory person of Jesus Christ, through union with Him by the re-creative and bonding work of the Holy Spirit.

[1] Oxford Dictionary, accessed 05-05-2024.

An Even Quicker Word on the Trinity: Generation

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The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in-generate in their inner and eternal being. Some want to think in terms of an origin of relation, and thus call the Father in-generate and the Son and Holy Spirit, following, generate. Here we get the notion of “eternal generation,” with the Father as the aitea or source of the Godhead. I affirm eternal generation, but only in a liminal way. That Father isn’t anymore the Father than the Son is the Son in relationship to the Father and vice-versa. This is a necessary and eternal relationship that resists, ultimately, the idea of generation and even in-generation.

I accept certain grammars in terms of heurisms, but then they break.

See my other recent post on the Trinity: click here

A Quick Word on the Trinity

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The Father is not God by Himself, then the Son and the Holy Spirit on the side. This is a common mistake; a view that Christians, often, subconsciously, make. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are One in Three / Three in One; the three persons in interpenetrative subject-in-being relationship constitute what is called the Divine Monarxia (Godhead). To think the Father as the top God, and the Son and Spirit, as the under Gods is to think in terms of what is called subordinationism and or also tri-theism (a type of “Christian polytheistic” false-doctrine). These are historically considered deeply heretical beliefs about who God is. Christians are indeed monotheists, we believe in One God, but we are Trinitarian Monotheists. The One is the Three / the Three is the One. Muslims and Jews are what is called Unitarian Monotheists; which entails the rejection of the mysterium Trinitatis (mystery of the Trinity).

Why does this matter?: Because, get God wrong get every other descending doctrine wrong.

Purple Energy, An Analogy on the Trinity

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The Trinity: An Illustration

Just as one flame contains three realities in a single fire, so there is one God in three persons. How? The flame is made of a shining brightness, a purple energy, and glowing heat. It has a shining brightness so that it can give light, a purple energy so that it can be active and alive, and a glowing heat sot that it can burn. The shining brightness represents the Father, who reveals His brightness to believers in His fatherly care. The purple energy contained with the brightness (by which the same flame manifests its power) represents the Son, who from the Virgin took a body in which the divine nature demonstrated its miraculous powers. The glowing heat represents the Holy Spirit, who pours Himself glowingly into the minds of believers. But where there is no shining brightness, no purple energy, and no glowing heat, there is no flame to be seen. Likewise, where neither the Father, nor the Son, nor the Holy Spirit is honoured, God receives no worthy worship. And so, just as we see these three realities in the one flame, so we must understand three persons in the unity of the divine nature.

Hildegard of Bignen

Scivias, Book 2, chapter 2, section 6[1]

 

[1] Cited by Nick Needham, 2000 Years of Christ’s Power: Volume 2: The Middle Ages, 7th to 15th Century (Scotland, UK: Christian Focus Publications Ltd., 2016), 194.

Love God, Love Neighbor: The Great Commandment Grounded in the Incarnation

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Leave it to Barth to see an analogy of the incarnation (the hypostatic union) as the inner-theological basis of the Great Commandment found in Matthew 22:37–40. Let me share that now, with a concluding remark following. It is taken from Barth’s Church Dogmatics III/2 §45:

For a true understanding, we can and must think of what is popularly called the twofold law of love—for God and neighbour (Mk. 12.29-31 and par.). It is no accident that it was Jesus who summed up the Law and the prophets in this particular way. He was speaking primarily and decisively of the law of His own twofold yet not opposed but harmonious orientation. He declared Himself, and therefore the grace of God manifested in Him, to be the sum of the Law. The two commandments do not stand in absolute confrontation. It is clear that Jesus did not regard love for God and love for the neighbour as separate but conjoined. Yet they are not identical. In Mt. 22.38 the command to love God is expressly called the first and great commandment, and the command to love the neighbour is placed alongside it as the second. God is not the neighbour, nor the neighbour God. Hence love for God cannot be simply and directly love for the neighbour. Yet the command to love the neighbour is not merely an appended, subordinate and derivative command. If it is the second, it is also described as like unto the first in Mt. 22.39. A true exposition can only speak of a genuinely twofold i.e., a distinct but connected sphere and sense of the one love required of man. It has reference to God, but also to the neighbour. It has the one dimension, but also the other. It finds in the Creator the One who points it to this creature, fellowman. And it finds in this creature, fellow-man, the one who points it to the Creator. Receiving and taking seriously both these references in their different ways, it is both love for God and love for the neighbour. Thus the structure of the humanity of Jesus Himself is revealed in this twofold command. It repeats the unity of His divinity and humanity as this is achieved without admixture or change, and yet also without separation or limitation.[1]

What a beautiful explication of our passage (Mt. 22:37-40): “Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” For Barth, the ground of love, is indeed, God’s triune life. But as God has elected freely to come into union with our fallen humanity, thus giving us His elect humanity in Christ (in the great reversal), humanity, in Christ’s vicarious humanity for us, comes to participate in the eternal life of love that God indeed is. It is because of who God has been, and is, as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that “He first loved us, that we might love Him [and our neighbors].” And it is within this nexus of miraculous grace, of God become human, that the impossible possibility of us coming to have capacity to love God, and then others, as the necessary and organic consequent of that, comes to fruition.

Some unitarians might want to argue that the grammar and thinking of Nicaea and Chalcedon goes beyond Holy Scripture. But in fact, as Barth so lucidly recognizes, it is that very reality, which has come to be signified by said grammar, that underwrites, not only the Dominical teaching, but the total teaching of both the New and Old Testaments. The very sum of the whole old covenant, as Barth rightly recognizes in Jesus’ framing, proleptically anticipates the fact that the Son of Man would indeed finally come bringing God and humanity, humanity and God, God and neighbor, neighbor and God into an elevated participatory life with Him; sharing in the glory that the Son has always already shared with the Father by the Holy Spirit, indeed as the Deus incarnandus (‘the God to be incarnate’).

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §45 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 14.