By Neil Earle
You’d have to be living on the dark side of the moon not to notice that our church – Grace Communion International – has been committed to an advanced form of Trinitarian theology these past years.
The Trinity has been called everything from “Christianity’s self-inflicted wound” to “the Cinderella Doctrine” of Christianity to the ultimate barrier against heresies. Three persons in the One God essence? Even the noted Reformed theologian Louis Berkhof confesses this idea “bristles with difficulties.”
However, that is no evidence for its inaccuracy. The common-sense Christian writer C.S. Lewis puts it in his usually stark way: “If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to worry about” (Mere Christianity, page 165).The fact is that Christians have a dilemma posed for them in Scripture: How to get from God is One (Deuteronomy 6:4) to Father Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19). The Trinity doctrine is the answer to that riddle.
Lewis the fiction writer, went on to add that true Reality is always a bit surprising. “It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.”
The Trinity is like that – somewhat difficult and obscure – and yet in Christian theology it is the fulcrum on which everything else turns. By avoiding and downplaying it we Christians run the risk of misrepresenting and erroneously presenting God. The reason is that the core theme of the new emphasis on the Trinity has to deal with the real nature of Reality itself, has to do with the key to the enormous cosmos itself in which we float as specks of dust in the noon-day sun.
That Reality is Love.
It is Love because the Trinity is reflective of the Love that exists and thrives and comes flooding outside of itself in the Godhead.
Christians do not believe that God is a monad – a cold, unfeeling, self-absorbed Deity like Rodin’s famous statue “the Thinker.” He is not even a unitary, stationary One such as Muslims conceive of Allah. There is inside God, the Trinity teaches us, an overflowing fullness and superabundance of loving relationships. The Father loves the Son, Jesus taught us, and the Son loves the Father (John 3:35). Father, Son and Holy Spirit enjoy this self-reciprocating love amongst them and yet remain One God while being distinct “entities.” There is one God essence – ousia in the Greek. Yet there are three manifestations of the One God who is Love. Christian theology takes its clue from Matthew 28:19 and 2 Corinthians 13:14 and describes them as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
There you have it, to borrow from J.I. Packer – three mysteries for the price of one.
Once you see the Trinity as existing in the superabundant Reality of Divine Love then another Christian teaching falls into place – the Creation. Love seeks always to express itself. Think of all the Hollywood movies and popular songs devoted to this one theme. The brilliant creation around us is a major expression of God’s love and a key thought in the Bible. “In the beginning God created” and “In the beginning was the Word.” The Creation immediately takes you to a deep meditation on the Trinity for Jesus prayed to the Father in John 17:5, “Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.” Again in John 17:24, “Father I want those you have given me …to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.”
Before there were neutrons and protons, atomic energy and gravity, before sun, moon and stars and all that there was the Father and the Son in the perfect love relationship and to some Christian thinkers the Holy Spirit is an expression and a manifestation of that love, a love it says he “sheds abroad” (Romans 5:5). The Spirit expresses and sheds abroad that Love throughout the entire universe – “heaven and earth are full of your glory” the ancient Psalmists keep repeating.
Creation is a cardinal Christian teaching because we are already now a new Creation in Christ. And way back there in Genesis One we read that God – Elohim, the Mighty Ones – was already in the beginning. And so was the Spirit. The Spirit brooded, hovered and moved upon the face of the chaos waters. Then God said – the Spirit too, you note – “Let there be light” and the game was on!
The Trinity thus shows Creation as a reflection and expression of the Love of God. “All things bright and beautiful/All creatures great and small” yes the Lord God made them all. All out of that superabundant fullness that is the threefold nature of God. Love without limits. Love without being circumscribed. Love from a God who made us because he wants to love us. What a contrast to the somewhat frightening and dangerous gods of Egypt and Babylon.
And this is just the start. Revelation 13:8 says that in God’s Plan Jesus Christ was destined to be slain from the foundation of the world. Just by the mere fact of creating matter and giving us creatures the power to say “No!” God knew there would be a lot of things going wrong. And Genesis Two shows us it didn’t take long. Our first parents sinned and disobeyed and God clothed them with animal skins, it says (Genesis 3:21). The killing of that animal was the first sacrifice made on this earth.
The first, but only a foreshadowing of another cardinal Christian teaching – the Incarnation, God in the Flesh. This is expressed vividly in John 1:14 which says, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory.”
The coming of God to dwell in human flesh to pay our penalty – perfect God and perfect man united in Jesus Christ – again, not something the Jewish thinkers were expecting – this takes us to the Theology of the Cross. As the son of a Jewish carpenter and a Palestinian villager, Jesus Christ lived among us long enough to give us a picture of what God is like, the best picture yet. At every step Jesus revealed the Trinitarian love of God at work. He was inclusive – he healed synagogue’s ruler’s daughters and poor blind beggars alike. He was Holiness on the march. He touched lepers and made them well, he stood up for the underdog and the demon-possessed and said his Kingdom was for the less, the least and the lost.
The Incarnation showed us God in action and a God who was willing to go the ultimate limits to reconcile us back to the divine Trinitarian love that is bigger than the universe because out of it came the universe itself.
Trinity, Creation, Incarnation – that’s quite a story unfolding so far.
Just imagine: a God who created us so he could love us. What a far far cry from Homer’s gods in the Iliad or the frightening wolf-headed half-god-men of Egypt. Even the Jewish people could not imagine what was going to happen through the death of Jesus on the cross. His death and resurrection tore open any veil or barrier that existed between God and humanity and made perfect salvation available at last. All this is summarized by the word “Atonement.” As the song says, “With his blood he has saved me/with his power he has raised me/To God be the glory.”
The death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus to be our ultimate Reconciliation to God the Father through the power of the Spirit is rooted in Trinitarian Love, first, foremost, and always. Now we begin to grasp some of what St. Paul called the height, the length and the breadth and the depth of the Love of God (Ephesians 3:18).
With Jesus heading the Church in heaven the Holy Spirit could now assume his indispensible role as the Leader of the Church on earth. Over and over again this is seen in the Acts of the Apostles which a wise man has said should be called “the Acts of the Holy Spirit.” Paul wants to go east into Turkey. No. The Holy Spirit overrules him: “Go west” (Acts 16:1-8). Philip, fresh from a great evangelistic victory in usually hostile Samaria, is told to greet a foreign dignitary sitting in his chariot by the same Spirit (Acts 8:29). The Spirit gives Peter the wit to discern a dangerous plot in the Jerusalem church and two people drop dead (Acts 5:1-11). That’s the Spirit of power and might and of the fear of the Lord.
Love can include a measure of fear, else there is no justice, no accountability.
The Spirit opens the doors for the Church to do its proclamation which is another core Christian teaching. Hindus and Buddhists believe in introspection and mediation but Christians are supposed to take their good news to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8. Martin Luther thought the preaching of the Gospel was the only sacrament Christians needed to pay attention to because, said he, it included everything else, including all we have been speaking about so far. He may have been right.
So now where are we?
Trinity. Creation. Incarnation. Atonement. Proclamation. Look where it all starts. We have come a long way from Creation, even. We have travelled back into the sacred precincts of the Godhead itself through the mediation of Christian thinking working upon the infallible Word. Charles Spurgeon wrote that there can be no greater subject than the Godhead itself: “Everything is swallowed up in its immensity.”
For the alert Christian this will always be so. Trinity, Creation, Incarnation, Atonement, Proclamation – quite a drumbeat of utterly distinctive Christian truths. And it says three things to those of us who are here today.
First, it shows us evangelism is not as hard as we think. God already goes ahead of us. One of our main jobs, says Christian teacher Cathy Deddo, is to discern where God is working and to try to get in line with that. One of my pastoral colleagues was led to convert a young biker just from four chats at Starbuck’s coffee shop. It can happen anywhere when we are alert to the miracle-working power of God, a God who is Spirit and thus not confined to church buildings, cathedrals or televangelism.
Second, God loves us so much – especially the less, the least, and the lost – that he will even use “we of little faith” to reach them. Philip was a deacon, not an apostle, yet the Spirit used him to bring a foreign town to the obedience of Jesus the Jewish Messiah (Acts 8:4-13). The timing has to be right and it has to be of God but it can happen. “Fishers of men,” Jesus called us. Caught any fish lately?
Thirdly, the Good News is really really good. Springing out of the irresistible love inside the Holy Trinity, the debt of sin has been paid, the ransom price has been met, our sins are forgiven and God is not mad at you. In fact, he wants to include you right now in his embracing love if you will bow your head and accept him into your life.
The Trinity – where would we be without it?