Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘God is love’: those three words could hardly be more bouncy. They seem lively, lovely, and as warming as a crackling fire. But ‘God is a Trinity’? No, hardly the same effect: that just sounds cold and stodgy.
truth is that God is love because God is a Trinity.
For God is triune, and it is as triune that he is so good and desirable.
Yet Christianity is not primarily about lifestyle change; it is about knowing God. To know and grow to enjoy him is what we are saved for – and that is what we are going to press into here.
‘The Trinity,’ some helpful soul explains, ‘is a bit like an egg, where there is the shell, the yolk and the white, and yet it is all one egg!’
I hate this anmaology/metaphore it ldoes not glorify god in the slighted if anything it belittles the trinity its ovrer simplistic and does nothing l
There is one other problem people can have with the Trinity: that the word never appears in the Bible. Now
Scriptural? Really? ‘Then what about Deuteronomy 6:4?’ I hear my many Muslim readers cry. ‘Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.’ One, not three. But the point of Deuteronomy 6:4 is not to teach that ‘The Lord our God, the Lord is a mathematical singularity’. In the middle of Deuteronomy 6, that would be a bit of a bolt from the blue to say the least. Instead, Deuteronomy 6 is about God’s people having the Lord as the one object of their affections: he is the only one worthy of them, and they are to love him alone with all their heart, soul and strength (Deuteronomy 6:5). In fact,
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Steel yourself for the thunders of 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.’
And yet. The unflinching boldness of the Athanasian Creed forces us to ask what is essential for Christian faith.
That, ironically, is often why we struggle with the Trinity: instead of starting from scratch and seeing that the triune God is a radically different sort of being from any other candidate for ‘God’, we try to stuff Father, Son and Spirit into how we have always thought of God.
So when we come to the Trinity, we feel like we’re trying to squeeze two extra persons into our understanding of God – and that is, to say the least, rather hard. And hard things get left. The Trinity becomes that awkward appendix.
take, for example, how the Qur’an explicitly and sharply distinguishes Allah from the God described by Jesus: Say not ‘Trinity’. Desist; it will be better for you: for God is one God. Glory be to Him: (far exalted is He) above having a son.1 Say: ‘He, Allah, is One. Allah is He on Whom all depend. He begets not, nor is He begotten. And none is like Him.’2
In other words, Allah is a single-person God. In no sense is he a Father (‘he begets not’), and in no sense does he have a Son (‘nor is he begotten’). He is one person, and not three. Allah, then, is an utterly different sort of being to the God who is Father, Son and Spirit. And it is not just incompatibly different numbers we are dealing with here: that difference, as we will see, is going to mean that Allah exists and functions in a completely different way from the Father, Son and Spirit.
The irony could not be thicker: what we assume would be a dull or peculiar irrelevance turns out to be the source of all that is good in Christianity. Neither a problem nor a technicality, the triune being of God is the vital oxygen of Christian life and joy.
There are two very different ways or approaches to thinking about God. The first way is like a slippery, sloping cliff-top goat-path. On a stormy, moonless night. During an earthquake. It is the path of trying to work God out by our own brainpower. I look around at the world and sense it must have all come from somewhere. Someone or something caused it to be, and that someone I will call God. God, then, is the one who brings everything else into existence, but who is not himself brought into being by anything. He is the uncaused cause. That is who he is. God is, essentially, The Creator, The
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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.
theologian Karl Barth put it starkly: Perhaps you recall how, when Hitler used to speak about God, he called Him ‘the Almighty’. But it is not ‘the Almighty’ who is God; we cannot understand from the standpoint of a supreme concept of power, who God is. And the man who calls ‘the Almighty’ God misses God in the most terrible way. For ‘the Almighty’ is bad, as ‘power in itself’ is bad. The ‘Almighty’ means Chaos, Evil, the Devil. We could not better describe and define the Devil than by trying to think this idea of a self-based, free, sovereign ability.1
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 (meaning no offence to any readers in the constabulary). Let me put it like this: if, as never happens, some fine copper were to catch me speeding and so breaking the rules, I would be punished; if, as never happens, he failed to spot me or I managed to shake him off after an exciting car chase, I would be relieved. But in
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Being a Son means he has a Father. The God he reveals is, first and foremost, a Father. ‘I am the way and the truth and the life’, he says. ‘No-one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6). That is who God has revealed himself to be: not first and foremost Creator or Ruler, but Father.
Jesus tells us explicitly in John 17:24. ‘Father,’ he says, ‘you loved me before the creation of the world.’ And that is the God revealed by Jesus Christ. Before he ever created, before he ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was a Father loving his Son.
In fact, we should not even set out in our understanding of God by thinking of God primarily as Creator (naming him ‘from His works only’) – that, as we have seen, would make him dependent on his creation. Our definition of God must be built on the Son who reveals him. And when we do that, starting with the Son, we find that the first thing to say about God is, as it says in the creed, ‘We believe in one God, the Father.’
And if God is a Father, then he must be relational and life-giving, and that is the sort of God we could love.
The most foundational thing in God is not some abstract quality, but the fact that he is Father. Again and again, the Scriptures equate the terms ‘God’ and ‘Father’: in Exodus, the Lord calls Israel ‘my firstborn son’ (Exodus 4:22; see also Isaiah 1:2; Jeremiah 31:9; Hosea 11:1); he carries his people ‘as a father carries his son’ (Deuteronomy 1:31), disciplines them ‘as a man disciplines his son’ (Deuteronomy 8:5); he calls to them, saying: ‘As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him’ (Psalm 103:13) and ‘ “How gladly would I treat you like
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Isaiah thus prays ‘you are our Father . . . you, O LORD, are our Father’ (Isaiah 63:16; see also Isaiah 64:8); and a popular Old Testament name was ‘Abijah’ (‘The Lord is my father’). Then Jesus repeatedly refers to God as ‘the Father’ and directs prayer to ‘Our Father’; he tells his disciples he will return ‘to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’ (John 20:17); Paul and Peter refer to ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ (Romans 15:6; 1 Peter 1:3); Paul writes of ‘one God, the Father’ (1 Corinthians 8:6), of ‘God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ’ (1 Corinthians
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Since God is, before all things, a Father, and not primarily Creator or Ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly. It is not that this God ‘does’ being Father as a day-job, only to kick back in the evenings as plain old ‘God’. It is not that he has a nice blob of fatherly icing on top. He is Father. All the way down. Thus all that he does he does as Father. That is who he is. He creates as a Father and he rules as a Fathe...
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The French Reformer, John Calvin, appreciating this deeply, once wrote: we ought in the very order of things [in creation] diligently to contemplate God’s fatherly love . . . [for as] a foreseeing and diligent father of the family he shows his wonderful goodness toward us . . . To conclude once for all, whenever we call God the Creator of heaven and earth, let us at the same time bear in mind that . . . we are indeed his children, whom he has received into his faithful protection to nourish and educat...
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It was a profound observation, for it is only when we see that God rules his creation as a kind and loving Father that we will be...
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Now, God could not be love if there was nobody to love. He could not be a Father without a child. And yet it is not as if God created so that he could love someone. He is love, and does not need to create in order to be who he is. If he did, what a needy, lonely thing he would be! ‘Poor old God’, we’d say. If he created us in order to be who he is, we would be giving him life.
No, ‘Father,’ says Jesus the Son in John 17:24, ‘you loved me before the creation of the world.’ The eternal Son, who according to Colossians 1 is ‘before all things’ (v. 17), the one through whom ‘all things were created’ (v. 16), the one Hebrews 1 calls ‘Lord’ and ‘God’, who ‘laid the foundations of the earth’ (Hebrews 1:10), he it is who is loved by the Father before the creation of the world. The Father, then, is the Father of the eternal Son, and he finds his very identity, his Fatherhood, in loving and giving out his life and being to the Son.
the Son is the eternal Son. There was never a time whe...
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If there was once a time when the Son didn’t exist, then there was once a time when the Father was not yet a Father. And if that is the case, then once upon a time God was not loving sin...
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Commenting on Hebrews 1:3, which says that the Son is ‘the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being’, the fourth-century theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, explained that: as the light from the lamp is of the nature of that which sheds the brightness, and is united with it (for as soon as the lamp appears the light that comes from it shines out simultaneously), so in this place the Apostle would have us consider both that the Son is of the Father, and that the Father is never without t...
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The Father is never without the Son but, like a lamp, it is the very nature of the Father to shine out his Son. And likewise, it is the very nature of the Son to be the one who shines out from his Father. The Son has his very being from the Father. In fact, he is t...
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Jesus also says ‘the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me’ (John 14:31). So it is not just that the Father loves the Son; the Son also loves the Father – and so much so that to do his Father’s pleasure is as food to him (John 4:34). It is his sheer joy and delight always to do as his Father says.
Overall, the Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved. The Bible is awash with talk of the Father’s love for the Son, but while the Son clearly does love the Father, hardly anything is said about it. The Father’s love is primary. The Father is the loving head. That then means that in his love he will send and direct the Son, whereas the Son never sends or directs the Father.
That turns out to be hugely significant, as the apostle Paul observes in 1 Corinthians 11:3: ‘Now I want you to realise that the head of every man is Christ, and the head of the woman is man, and the head of Christ is God.’ In other words, the shape of the Father-Son relationship (the headship) begins a gracious cascade, like a waterfall of love: as the Father is the lover and the head of the Son, so the Son goes out to be the lover and the head of the church.
‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you’, the Son says (John 15:9). And therein lies the very goodness of the gospel: as the Father is the lover and the Son the beloved, so Christ becomes the lover and the church the beloved. That means that Christ loves the church first and foremost: his love is not a response, given only when the church lo...
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dynamic is also to be replicated in marriages, husbands being the heads of their wives, loving them as Christ the Head loves his bride, the church. He is the lover, she is the beloved. Like the church, then, wives are not left to earn the love of their husbands; they can enjoy it as something lavished on them freely, unconditionally and maximally. For eternity, the Father so loves the Son that he excites the Son’s eternal love in response; Christ so loves the church that he excites our love in response; the husban...
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The Father loves his Son in a very particular way, something we can see if we look at the baptism of Jesus: ‘As soon as Jesus was baptised, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”’ (Matthew 3:16–17) Here, the Father declares his love for his Son, and his pleasure in him, and he does so as the Spirit rests on Jesus. For the way the Father makes known his love is precisely through giving his Spirit. In Romans 5:5,
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It is all deeply personal: the Spirit stirs up the delight of the Father in the Son and the delight of the Son in the Father, inflaming their love and so binding them together in ‘the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 13:14). He makes the Father’s love known to the Son, causing him to cry ‘Abba!’ – something he will also do for us (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). And let’s be clear, that ‘Abba!’ is said with joy, for the Spirit so makes the Father known to the Son that the Son rejoices. ‘At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of
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in Genesis 1 the Spirit appears as the power by which God’s Word goes out into the lifeless void. In the very beginning, God creates by his Word (the Word that would later become flesh), and he does so by sending out his Word in the power of his Spirit or Breath.
‘Son’ and ‘Anointed One’ are sometimes almost synonymous
Richard argued that if God was just one person, he could not be intrinsically loving, since for all eternity (before creation) he would have had nobody to love. If there were two persons, he went on, God might be loving, but in an excluding, ungenerous way. After all, when two persons love each other, they can be so infatuated with each other that they simply ignore everyone else – and a God like that would be very far from good news. But when the love between two persons is happy, healthy and secure, they rejoice to share it. Just so it is with God, said Richard. Being perfectly loving, from
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not, then, that God becomes sharing; being triune, God is a sharing God, a God who loves to include. Indeed, that is why God will go on to create. His love is not for keeping but for spreading. A
Throwing the Father, Son and Spirit into a blender like this is politely called modalism by theologians. I prefer to call it moodalism. Moodalists think that God is one person who has three different moods (or modes, if you must). One popular moodalist idea is that God used to feel Fatherly (in the Old Testament), tried adopting a more Sonny disposition for thirty-odd years, and has since decided to become more Spiritual. You understand the attraction, of course: it keeps things from becoming too complicated.
Son is just a mood God slips in and out of, then for us to be adopted as children in the Son is no great thing: when God moves on to another mood, there will be no Son for us to be in.
Now, because the Father, Son and Spirit are persons who have real relationships with each other (the Father loving the Son and so on), Christian theologians have happily and unabashedly spoken of the fellowship of the Trinity. The eighteenth-century theologian Jonathan Edwards could write about ‘the society or family of the three’, even going so far as to say that the very ‘happiness of the Deity, as all other true happiness, consists in love and society’.7 But (and this is a big but) that is not to say that the Trinity is like a club that the Father, Son and Spirit have decided to join. They
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Cheerful by name, cheerful by theology: that was Hilarius. (Today he is ponderously styled ‘Hilary of Poitiers’, but that only shows what a sad state we are in.) With wits like a rapier and manners like a lamb, he gave his life and liberty to defend the Son’s eternal deity. He argued powerfully that the followers of Arius, who held that the Son had begun to exist at some point, were making a disastrous mistake: saying that there had not always been a Son meant that God had not always been a Father. Thus God is not fundamentally a Father, not essentially loving and life-giving, but something
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If the Bible ever comes out with an image, it is in Genesis 1 and 2. Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26–7)
ancient Babylon’s creation myth, the Enuma Elish. There, the god Marduk puts it bluntly: he will create humankind so that the gods can have slaves. That way the gods can sit back and live off the labour of their human workforce. Now Marduk is more plain-speaking than most other gods, but whatever the religion, most gods since have tended to like his approach. And who can blame them? His reasoning is profoundly attractive. If you are a god.
