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Pressing into the Trinity we are doing what in Psalm 27 David said he could do all the days of his life: we are gazing upon the beauty of the Lord.
the Athanasian Creed, a statement of faith from the fifth or sixth century, which begins: “Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic [that is, the church’s orthodox] faith; which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. And the catholic faith is this: that we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity.”
What would we say is the article of faith that must be held before all others?
For what makes Christianity absolutely distinct is the identity of our God. Which God we worship: that is the article of faith that stands before all others. The bedrock of our faith is nothing less than God himself,
the Trinity is the governing center of all Christian belief, the truth that shapes and beautifies all others.
First of all, if God’s very identity is to be The Creator, The Ruler, then he needs a creation to rule in order to be who he is. For all his cosmic power, then, this God turns out to be pitifully weak: he needs us.
If God is The Ruler and the problem is that I have broken the rules, the only salvation he can offer is to forgive me and treat me as if I had kept the rules. But if that is how God is, my relationship with him can be little better than my relationship with any traffic cop
I can never really love the God who is essentially just The Ruler. And that, ironically, means I can never keep the greatest command: to love the Lord my God.
The other way to think about God is lamp-lit and evenly paved: it is Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It is, in fact, The Way.
Well, just the fact that Jesus is “the Son” really says it all. Being a Son means he has a Father. The God he reveals is, first and foremost, a Father.
Before he ever created, before he ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was a Father loving his Son.
Athanasius.
according to John. This God, he says, is love in such a profound and potent way that you simply cannot know him without yourself becoming loving.
And just as a fountain, to be a fountain, must pour forth water, so the Father, to be Father, must give out life. That is who he is. That is his most fundamental identity. Thus love is not something the Father has, merely one of his many moods. Rather, he is love.
the Father makes known his love is precisely through giving his Spirit.
Throwing the Father, Son and Spirit into a blender like this is politely called modalism by theologians.
Hilarius
With wits like a rapier and manners like a lamb, he gave his life and liberty to defend the Son’s eternal deity.
When you start with the Jesus of the Bible, it is a triune God that you get.
The Trinity, then, is not the product of abstract speculation: when you proclaim Jesus, the Spirit-anointed Son of the Father, you proclaim the triune God.
It is one of the profoundest questions to ask: If there is a God, why is there anything else?
for eternity this solitary god can have had nobody and nothing to love. Love for others is clearly not his heartbeat. Of course he would probably love himself, but such love we tend to think of as selfish and not truly loving.
One of them is “The Loving.” But how could Allah be loving in eternity?
if Allah needs his creation to be who he is in himself (“loving”), then Allah is dependent on his own creation, and one of the cardinal beliefs of Islam is that Allah is dependent on nothing.
And so, as he gloriously goes, “shines” and “radiates” out from his Father, he shows us that the Father is essentially outgoing.
That is why the Son goes out from the Father, in both creation and salvation: that the love of the Father for the Son might be shared.
And so, just as the Father decided to include us in his love for the Son, to share it with us, so the Son chose to include us in his love for the Father.
But as Luther discovered, through Jesus we may know that God is a Father, and “we may look into His fatherly heart and sense how boundlessly He loves us. That would warm our hearts, setting them aglow.”[2]
