Category Archives: Doctrine Of God

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 ā€œGod of war and wrathā€ 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 serpentā€™s head. Godā€™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 Christā€™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 ā€˜wonderful exchangeā€™).

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 ā€˜Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.ā€™ As the author to the Hebrews (Paul) says: ā€œthere no longer remains any other sacrifice for sin.ā€ Christ is Godā€™s first human, the firstborn, the first fruits of God for the world/us. This is how we know Godā€™s wrath is first an instance of His love for us, in that ā€˜while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.ā€™ Godā€™s wrath cannot ever be thought away from or apart from His conditioning triune love. When ā€˜our theologiesā€™ 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 donā€™t have Christ; as Paul said ā€œI wish all were like me, yet without these chains.ā€ God desires to show His love in actualized ways wherein all of humanity might indeed ā€˜taste and see that God is good.ā€™ Godā€™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 donā€™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 Godā€™s operations ad extra (opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa) as those reflect the in se origins of relation (or processions) of Godā€™s antecedent eternal life. Here we enter the locus that is typically identified as Godā€™s simplicity. But it is good to remember, as Epiphianus does above, that to think of Godā€™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 Godā€™s oneness nor His threeness can be thought away from each otherā€”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 Godā€™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 shouldnā€™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,Ā cited byĀ T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith,Ā 234-3.

[2] Karl Barth,Ā Church Dogmatics II/1 Ā§28 The Doctrine of God: Study EditionĀ (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 dualisticĀ HellenismĀ has had upon Western-thought-forms; namely the precedence thatĀ classicalĀ thought has given to theĀ opticalĀ mode of thinking and verification (so the obsession withĀ empiricism, etc.). TFT is highlighting the impact that this methodology and epistemology can have upon our construal of Godā€™s ā€œFather-hoodā€ and ā€œSon-hood,ā€ and how Christian/Patristic theology, primarily through Athanasiusā€™ influence, eschewed this ā€œHellenizingā€ 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 (Ļ…Ļ€Ī±ĪŗĪæĪ· Ļ„Ī·Ļ‚ Ļ€Ī¹Ļ„ĪµĻ‰Ļ‚) conflict sharply with those of Greek religion and philosophy. The issue came to its head in the Arian controversy over the FatherĀ ā€“ Son relation at the heart of the Christian Gospel. Are the terms ā€˜fatherā€™ and ā€˜sonā€™ 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. ā€˜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.ā€™ 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: ā€˜Just as we cannot ascribe a father to the Father, so we cannot ascribe a brother to the Sonā€™.[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 ā€˜irony.ā€™ 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 Godā€™s life of Grace, who is the Christ, to know how it all ends. We donā€™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 Jobā€™s story, we have many of the details. We know that God judged, and in the end found Job faithful, and Jobā€™s friends faithless (not even acknowledging the youngster, Elihuā€™s existence). But I was thinking, as I just finished reading Job again: when you listen to Jobā€™s ā€œfriendsā€ and their ā€œcounselā€ or ā€œberatementā€ 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 Jobā€™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 Godā€™s judgement on his life. Throughout the plotline of Jobā€™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 Godā€™s ways, and thus arriving at horrifically bad conclusions as they approached their ā€œfriend,ā€ brother Job.

I was just thinking, I donā€™t want to operate like one of Jobā€™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 ā€œI know that my Redeemer lives, and at last He shall stand on the earth.ā€ I donā€™t want to think God based on my own wits, or othersā€™, 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:Ā 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 Christā€™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 22:37ā€“40. Let me share that now, with a concluding remark following. It is taken from Barthā€™s Church Dogmatics III/2 Ā§45:

For a true understanding, we can and must think of what is popularly called the twofold law of loveā€”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): ā€œJesus 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. Ā On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.ā€ For Barth, the ground of love, is indeed, Godā€™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 Christā€™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 ā€œHe first loved us, that we might love Him [and our neighbors].ā€ 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 Jesusā€™ 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 (ā€˜the God to be incarnateā€™).

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

God, Our Father; Not Our Judge: The Judge judged

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When God is understood as the unmoved mover, the Great Law-giver in the sky; when God is known to work through decrees, in a God-world relation; when God is understood as a pure being (or pure act actus purus); when God is known to have ad hoc favorites among the massa of humanity; there is no place for disobedience.

The above is to say the following: if God is first understood as the Judge rather than the Father, if He isnā€™t known as the Judge judged, as the Father of the Son by the Holy Spirit, then all that is left, to understand who is in and who is out, is whether or not a purported Christian follows the Law to a T (in emulation of Christā€™s active obedience for the so-called elect). But if God is, indeed, understood to be our Father, as He surely is, according to Scripture; then, there is plenty of room for disobedient children. The Old Testament is replete with examples like this, as is the New Testament. Not that this is the ideal, of course. But if a personā€™s ā€œassuranceā€ and reality of salvation is contingent upon an outward display of obedience (for all to see); if this is the summum bonum, that is, to be constantly striving to live up to a righteousness that was already out of reach to begin with; then, indeed we are all most to be pitied among men.

My only point with this post is to underscore the fact that the way we think God, in a doctrine of God, has radical consequences towards the way we view the world, and our lives within that world. If I understand my relationship to God to be based, primarily, upon a filial relationship, rather than a forensic one, I will know that no matter what happens He will never leave me or forsake me. The nomists donā€™t have this understanding of God, and so they are always uncertain on whether or not they are actually going to make it. They canā€™t run to God as their abba Father, I mean in their piety they will say they can; but in reality, bubbling underneath the whole paradigm, God remains a Monad, a singularity who is pure act. In this frame, these folks, in the background, constantly have this gnawing fear that God, in the end, might decide in all of his arbitrary might, that they werenā€™t in fact one of the elect; that He had only given them a temporary faith, that appeared real, all their live long days, but in fact was only a temporary faith. These folks wonā€™t have recourse to cry out to God as their dearly beloved Father, they simply can only slump back into the dregs of performance, and hope that God, the Judge, in the end, in fact did die for them in the humanity of Jesus Christ.

To think God, biblically, is to think the following: ā€œOur Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name . . ..ā€ This is the basic ground of who God is for us, in His eternal life, as He freely elected to become human in the Son, that we might become sons and daughters in the grace of the hypostatically unioned life that the Man from Nazareth actually is. When God is for us, because God is our Father, as co-heirs with Christ, who can be against us? There is no decree, no artificial covenant (of works/grace), that stands behind the back of Jesus Christ. When we see the Son we see the Father without remainder. Take heart bruised reed, there really is a real hope of life eternal in the God who is our Father of the Son in the bond of the Holy Spirit. Rejoice!

Eternity’s Christ and Triunely Conditioned Reality

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Eternity isn’t some abstract future happenstance. Eternity is in fact God’s triune Life. He alone is eternal. He, by grace and adoption, brings us into participation with Him through Christ. This is the eternity we stand before, and within. It is not some type of cosmic expanse, or some energy/force that just supposedly is the primal one; a pantheistic or monistic concept (think Eastern mysticism, or Western New Agism). Time and space in fact have an empirical beginning, that is by inferential deduction. But even more so, time and space have a personal beginning, that is ‘in the beginning God … and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ There is a relational and personal and loving concrete ground that stands behind, and that currently upholds all things, from moment-by-moment, by the Word of God’s triune power. But this is the inner reality of the created order, including all of its cosmic ramifications; whether terrestrial, or stellar; seen or unseen; that is, God’s triune life of interpenetrating and eternal love. This is the eternity we stand before, and within; as He graciously, and firstly elected to be for us, in us, and with us for all time, now, and forevermore.