Posted on January 31, 2010 by David Cartledge

Three Persons in Communion

In our Western culture we are very individualistic.  That means we see ourselves as individuals and we even relate to God as if he were an individual.  But God is not an individual.  His Oneness is not the oneness of a self-contained individual.  It is the unity of a community of  persons.  God is a Triune Community.

We use the word “community” in different ways.  The word may mean all the people who live in a particular area or place. He is well liked by people in the community.  The word may also mean a group of people who are similar in some way.  We talk about the black community and the business community.  Community may also mean friendship between different people or groups, and a sense of having something in common.

All of these fall short of what we mean when we say that God is Community.  With that in mind, I want to look at God as Three Persons in Communion.  The term communion takes us into a deeper personal oneness.

We can consider this communal life of God in two ways.

(1) Mutual Self-giving

God is love (1 John 4.10).   John does not say God has love or God is loving.  He says, “God is love”.  God loves because that is who he is.

When we hear the words “God is Love” we usually think first of God’s love towards us.  However, before we see God’s love to us we must see God as love within himself.  Our God is love because he is three persons in love relationship.    The Father has always loved the Son.  The Son has always loved the Father.  These two have always loved one another in the love of the Spirit.

Love expresses itself in self-giving.  And that is how God is love within himself.  The Father loves the Son and always gives himself to the Son.  The Son loves the Father and gives himself to the Father.  The Spirit gives himself to both the Father and the Son.

Royce Gruenler writes about this self-giving love within God as three persons. He says that within God’s love relationship there is what he calls “disposability”.  Each of the three persons is at the disposal of the others.  The Father is always at the disposal of the Son making himself available to him.  He is always there for the Son expressing his delight in him as the beloved with whom he is well pleased.  The Father is glad to put the spotlight on his Son as the one he wants to honour.  The Son always at the disposal of the Father deferring to the Father by seeking to do his will in all things.  He always looks to see what his Father is doing.  He always listens to hear what his Father is saying to him.  His face is always turned towards the Father in desire and delight.  He is always actively serving the Father to advance his purpose in the world.  He defers to the Father out of self-giving love for the Father.  The Spirit is always at the disposal of both Father and Son by making himself almost anonymous as he serves them.  He seems only to desire that they be honoured by all.   The Spirit is honoured most as he enables others to forget him and glorify the Father in the Son.

In Jesus, we see God as three persons in self-giving love towards one another.  That points us to what God has always been and always will be.  There has always been within God a movement of love between three persons.The three are always towards the others and for the others in mutual self-giving.   We are glad to see God is love towards us.  But what God is towards us flows out of what he is within himself.  All three persons give themselves freely and fully to us as the overflow of their self-giving love within themselves.  All three persons are there for one another as they  put themselves at our disposal

Kevin Giles writes about God as a “fellowship and communion of equals who share all that they are and have in their communion with each other, each living with and for the others in mutual openness, self-giving love, and support; each free not from but for the others”.

(2) Mutual Indwelling

Jesus said, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me”. Therefore, to see the Son was to see the Father.  He also said, “I and the Father are One.  They are one because Father, Son and Spirit indwell one another.  The Father is in the Son, the Son is in the Father and the Spirit is in the Father and the Son.  They are in one another mutually.

The church came to speak about this mutual indwelling as “perichoresis”.  The word has the idea of one thing containing another.  The Son contains the Father.  The Father contains the Son.  Both Father and Son contain the Spirit and the Spirit contains both Father and Son.  All three persons contain one another fully and yet they remain distinct as persons.  The Son contains both Father and Spirit wholly within himself.  Yet the Son remains the Son distinct from Father and Spirit.

Perichorises is mutual indwelling.  Each person penetrates the others and is penetrated by them.”  Each person fully contains the others and is contained by them.  This isn’t easy to grasp.  A can contains soup but soup does not contain  the can.  We dip a bucket into the sea so that the sea contains the bucket and the bucket contains the sea, but this is not the same as three persons wholly containing each other.

The distinct Persons of God actually live IN each other!  They so mutually indwell and contain one another that each person is whole God indwelt by whole God.

This mutual indwelling means that we cannot think of the three without thinking of their Oneness.

It also means that we cannot think of the One without thinking of the Three.  Gregory of Nazianzus said that, “No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish them than I am carried back to the One”.  So we cannot ever think of any one person of the Trinity without at the same moment thinking of the other two.

Because the three persons so interpenetrate and indwell each other, when one is present the other two are present also.  It is impossible to encounter one person without also encountering the others.  To meet Jesus is to encounter the Father and the Spirit through him.  When you see the Son you have before you whole God because whole God indwells him.  As the Holy Spirit indwells you, whole God indwells you because whole God indwells the Spirit.  That’s how the Father and Son make their home within you by the indwelling Spirit.

Kevin Giles writes, “The unity of God is not to be thought of in terms of one substance but rather as the most intimate, the most loving and most profound triune communion…What grounds this divine union and communion is the mutual interpenetration of the three divine persons.”

So we see Triune Communion as mutual self-giving and mutual indwelling.  The Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwell in one another and exist for one another in such a way that each is who he is only in his relations with the others.

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The Faceless God

Posted on January 24, 2010 by David Cartledge

Jesus is the Face of God.  That means all our thinking about God must start with Jesus. He is the unveiling of God.  As we look at Jesus we are able to see the inner life of God.  We see the internal relations of God as Father, Son and Spirit in personal communion.

But is Jesus the starting point for thinking about God in Western Theology? I suggest that in the west our thinking about God begins the Being of God as One essence or substance.  That means that we live before God as the Faceless Being of philosophical theism.

This Faceless Being was Aristotle’s God.  Aristotle ( 384-322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato.  He saw God as timeless, changeless and passionless.  For Aristotle, God was the “unmoved mover”.  Aristotle’s God lives in splendid isolation within his own perfection.

The theologian, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), was greatly influenced by Aristotle.  We can see this in the way that Aquinas defined God.  He decided, on logical grounds, that the investigation of the One God must come before that of the Triune God.  We must first explore the essence of God as the “simple, perfect, infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent, immutable, eternal, impassable, one.  Notice that the One Essence was his starting point.  Only after exploring fully the essence of God in terms of these abstract attributes can we move on to consider God as Trinity and then later still, God in Jesus.

The English Puritans also made the Faceless Being their starting point.  Question 4 of their Westminster shorter catechism asks, What is God?  There is a problem with that question? The catechism does not ask Who is God, but What is God?  From the start, we are to think of God as a “What” rather than a “Who”.

So what is God according to the catechism?

“God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth”.

This answer raises some questions about their view of God:

Is this the very first thing you want to say about God?

Would you describe this God as a Faceless Being?

Could this God be Allah?

In Western Theology, thinking about God begins with this abstract essence or substance.  We explore the attributes of the Essence.  The Being of god is infinite, eternal, immutable, omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. Having fully defined the One Being, we move on to look at the Triune God, but mostly in terms of proofs texts and perplexing puzzles.  Then, a long way down the line, we look at Jesus.  We say Jesus is God.  What we mean is Jesus is this Divine Being, this essence. We then have to fit Jesus into the Essence.

Does all this have any practical bearing on our daily walk with God?  I think it does.  Too many people have in their hearts the vague fear that God may turn out to be different from Jesus.

Thomas Torrance says,

“We fear that there may be “Behind the Back of Jesus” some dark inscrutable God, some arbitrary Deity of whom we can know nothing”.

Before this vague nameless dread, we can only quake and shiver as he withers our souls.    If this God has a face at all, it is frowning on us with continual displeasure over our failures to measure up to his perfection and rules.

Will God turn out to be different from Jesus?  He tells us clearly, “I and the Father are One”.   He also says, “If you have seen me you have seen the Father”.  What Jesus is and does the Father is and does.  They are one in being.  There is, in fact, no God behind the back of Jesus.  The only God is the one that we see and meet in Jesus.  Jesus is the open heart of God towards us. Therefore, God is, not one thing in himself and another thing in Jesus.    He has not shown us one face in Jesus but kept his real face hidden from us.  God is who he is as revealed in Jesus and that is who God will always be for ever.

That is why we must always start our thinking about God with Jesus.  He is the unveiling of God as persons in relation.  We keep Jesus at the centre of our vision of God and allow what we see in him to shape and colour everything else that we say about God.  If we do not begin with Jesus we will all end up living before a FacelessGod that is remote, solitary and turned in on himself in his own perfect Essence.

Thomas Torrance served in World War 2 as a Padre.  He often recalled an event that deeply affected him during the conquest of Italy,

“When daylight filtered through I came across a young soldier (private Phillips) scarcely twenty years old lying mortally wounded on the ground, who clearly had not long to live. As I knelt down and bent over him, he said “Padre, is God really like Jesus?” I assured him that he was … As I prayed and commended him to the Lord Jesus he passed away.”

God is really like Jesus because he is the Face of God.  In the Incarnate Son, God has opened himself up to us his own inner life as three persons in communion.

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Jesus, the Face of God

Posted on January 17, 2010 by David Cartledge

The Father’s Son became human in Jesus.  That means Jesus is the unveiling of God.

18No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son,* who is close to the Father’s heart,* who has made him known. John 1.18

Apart from the Incarnate Son God remains hidden.  We cannot know him.  No one has ever seen God.  No one can ever see God.  He remains hidden from us.  Religion may try to see God but it just comes up with a nameless and faceless being that we call God.  Only in Jesus do we see the face of God.

Thomas Torrance writes,

“When we look into the face of Jesus Christ and see there the very face of God, we know we have not seen and cannot see God anywhere else or in another way but in him, for he is God himself become human, and there is no God except the God who has come and meets us in Jesus”.

Jesus is the face of God.  In him, God has opened himself up to us as he is within himself.  He has shown to us the internal relations of God as a community of love.

In Luke 10.21-22.   We hear Jesus speaking to his Father out of the Triune community of love.

21 At that same hour Jesus* rejoiced in the Holy Spirit* and said, ‘I thank* you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.*

The Son rejoices in the Spirit before the Father.

At Jesus’ baptism, the Father sent the Spirit to remain on Jesus.  Here, in Luke 10.21, we see that the Spirit the Father sent is the Spirit of joy in the Father.  And that joy of the Spirit springs up from the heart of the Son to the Father.  With deep joy, The Son thanks the Father for revealing great things to little children.  Here we see that Life in the Trinity is the Son delighting in the Father with great joy.  That joy is expressed in and by the Spirit.  And the Father always responds by saying. “this is my Son with whom I am well pleased”.  All three persons are included in the expression of joy.

The Son testifies, “all things have been handed over to me by my Father”.

The Son speaks to his Father as Lord of heaven and earth.  His Father is the Sovereign Lord who does what he chooses with all things that he rules over. What the Father has chosen to do is hand everything over to the Son.  Why?  Because he loves his Son and is well pleased with him.  Listen to Jesus,

35The Father loves the Son and has placed all things in his hands.

… John 3:35.

The Son speaks of the exclusive knowing of Father and Son.

22All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son

What kind of knowing is Jesus talking about here?  And why is the knowing of these two persons so exclusive?

Jesus knows who the Father is from within the Being of God. I know myself within my own being as no one else knows me.  The Son knows the Father from within his own being because the Father and Son are one in being.  That means the Son knows the Father more intimately and deeply than anyone can ever know the Father.

The Father and Son know one another personally as one being.  The being of God is love.  God is love.  So at the centre of their knowing is love. In the face of Jesus, we see that God is love towards us and what he is towards us he is within himself.  The Son and Father know one another as one being in love relationship.

The Son claims that we can only know who the Father is as the Son reveals him

22All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.’

The Son does not reveal to us as one who has some truth about God to make known.  He is the Father’s Son one in nature with the Father.  He is, therefore, the very unveiling of God in person.  He alone knows who the Father is because he is one with the Father in being.  That means the revelation of God is not the revealing something about God, but God revealing himself out of himself in such a way that he who reveals and he who is revealed are one and the same.

The face of Jesus reveals to us the relating of Father and Son in the Spirit.  We only see God as Father and Son relating to each other.  There is no other way to see God.  We only know the Son as Son relating to his Father.  We only know the Father as Father relating to his Son.

Having spoken to the Father Jesus turned to speak to his disciples.  He said to them,

23  ‘Blessed are the eyes that see what you see! 24For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it…

The disciples see the face of Jesus.  In his face, God is unveiled as persons in love relationship.

This makes them truly blessed!

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