Continuing the conversation . . .

R: Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.

A: Everything? What about sending people to Hell?

R: As regards Hell in particular, I’d like to come back to that later; but to speak more broadly, yes, I think God’s judgment and wrath are very much consistent with his nature, which is love. Stop and think a minute. If someone was trying to undermine your relationship with your wife and daughter—to take the extreme case, think Iago—what would your reaction be?

A: I’d be furious. I love them, I would never let anyone come between us.

R: And if someone tried to hurt them?

A: Just the same. I would defend them to the best of my ability, and whoever had threatened them would deserve whatever happened.

R: Well, that’s how God reacts to sin. He is perfectly good—the Bible says that “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all”—and he made the world good; he made us good. The Father made us so that he, the Son and the Holy Spirit could expand the circle and share their love with us, and he gave us the world as a gift so that we might enjoy its beauty and care for it.

A: Now you’re getting close to environmentalism.

R: I am, and I think rightly so; I think our theology needs to address environmental questions. (I’m not the only one, either; if you’re interested, look up Steven Bouma-Prediger or Loren Wilkinson, for starters.) We were given the earth to be its stewards, and I think we will be held accountable for what we have done with our charge; but the threat to the earth from which we must defend it is our own sin. Sin, you see, threatens everything that God has made, and most especially all of humanity, whom he loves; sin mars his creation, and hardens our hearts against him. His response is jealousy and wrath against sin—the same jealousy and wrath you would show to anyone who tried to hurt your family or your relationship with them.

A: Jealousy? Come now, I’m not a jealous person.

R: Jealousy is a threat reaction. In people we think of as “jealous,” it’s set off by anything and everything, causing all sorts of unjustified behavior; but when someone really is threatening your relationship with your wife or daughter, jealousy is the appropriate response, as long as it is within bounds.

A: It sounds rather like antihistamines in the body; when they’re set off by false threats such as pollen, they give us allergies.

R: But when germs set them off, they are an important part of the body’s defense system. Exactly. And they will not stop until the germs are dead, and the same is true of God’s reaction—something akin to an allergic reaction, I suppose—to sin: his wrath is ferocious and uncompromising. He does not tolerate sin in any way, shape or form, and he will not settle for anything less than the absolute defeat of sin. Which is where Hell comes in.

A: That I can accept. It’s the absolute defeat of sinners I find hard to take.

R: Well, as I said, we’ll come back to that. In any case, God is love, which makes sense because he is three in one. I suspect you’ve thought of God as egocentric, to demand our love and worship?

A: Yes.

R: It would be a fair charge, were he just a single person; and in fact, I’ve heard a preacher defend God against that charge by admitting it and then saying he’s justified in being egocentric because he’s so wonderful. But in truth, it isn’t that God is all wrapped up in himself, some sort of cosmic Narcissus—rather, the Father, Son and Spirit are all wrapped up in each other. Except that they invite us into their circle, to share their love, which is the reason why he created us.

The fact that God is perfect, self-giving love is the root for everything else that we can say about the character of God. His love is unflawed, and so he is good in everything he does. His wrath against sin arises out of his love, as I’ve said, as does his command that we be holy just as he is holy—he does not want us to settle for less than what he intended for us. At the same time, though he hates sin and is perfectly just, he shows great grace and mercy and patience in dealing with sinners, because even in our broken, sinful state, he still loves us greatly. He is perfectly faithful to those who follow him, for the same reason. And note that all of these statements describe him as a personal, active God; he is no impersonal force (this isn’t Star Wars, no midichlorians here) nor a distant, uncaring, uninvolved God, but three persons who relate to us on a personal level out of love for us.

A: Sounds like you see God as pretty involved in your life.

R: Not just in mine—in everyone’s, in one way or another. He is Lord over everyone, in every moment, whether they acknowledge him or not; he created everything, and he sustains it—the universe only continues to exist because he keeps it so.

A: I might have to come back to that last statement of yours. But this all reminds me of an essay I read recently called “Why Smart People Believe in God”; the author is a smart man who doesn’t, and poses the same question I asked you. Along the way, he sets out two poles: either God is a God “who pokes his finger into the muck of human experience”—I think that’s exact—who tests people, makes strange demands, tells his follower to kill his son and takes vengeance on those who cross him, or he is infinite beyond imagining, “a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere,” as someone said; and if he is the latter, then why would he pay attention to us? As I recall, the author concludes that most people who believe in God believe in the little one who cares about us, not about the big one who, it would seem, shouldn’t. You were talking earlier about God in cosmic terms, but now you’re using much more local terms, for lack of a better phrase; do you really try to hold those two together?

R: Yes. God is infinite—without end, without limits, and utterly uncontrolled by anyone or anything—and so, as theologians will say, he is transcendent, going far above and beyond our limited being and understanding; as such, he is also incomprehensible to us. We can’t understand God solely through our own reason, but only as far as he reveals himself to us, though our reason has a part to play in that. At the same time, God is immanent—

A: “Imminent”? He’s arriving shortly? By train, perhaps?

R: No, not “imminent,” but “immanent”—it’s a term coined by some past theologian: it means that God is right with us, that he is present with his creation.

A: Well, yes, if God is everywhere, then logically that would include here.

R: I don’t just mean that he is present in that sense; I also mean that he is emotionally present, that he cares about all his creation, and most especially about people. As I said, God is love. It really is a staggering thought, that a God who can hold a universe billions of light-years across in the palm of his hand would care about us; but he does.

A: It’s incomprehensible, in fact. Which you just said is one of God’s attributes, so at least you’re being consistent.

R: Yes. Of course, trying to conceive of God as both infinite and personal at the same time—it’s harder to be consistent on that. But anyway, you used the word “attribute” a moment ago; the attributes of God can be broken up into two kinds, according to my theology professor. The attributes I’ve been talking about, those which relate to the character of God and what he is like, are called communicable attributes because they are attributes he can share with us. He is personal, powerful, good, loving, faithful, etc. So, too, we are personal; we have a certain amount of power to do what we intend to do, though we are limited; and while we are sinful, we were created to be good, loving, and generally like God in character. This is part of what the Bible means when it says we were created in the image of God, but I’ll come back to that.

The rest of God’s attributes are called incommunicable attributes, and they have to do with what he is in himself. A lot of these are statements of negative knowledge—we can’t grab hold of what God is, because he’s too big for us, so we define him in part by what he is not. For instance, he is atemporal, which is to say he is not within our time stream. Does he experience time? I don’t know for sure, but I am quite certain that he is not bound to ours; he is in the past, he is in the present, and he is in the future, he sees all times at once, and all are the same to him. God is immutable—he does not change and cannot be changed; he is who he is, yesterday, today and forever. He is also impassible, which is to say that he does not experience fluctuating emotional states, nor does he feel sinful passions. This doesn’t mean that God is emotionally inert, however—after all, he is love.

More positively, he is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent—all-knowing, everywhere present, and all-powerful. This goes back to his being the author of all creation; even in human terms, the author (or authors) of a book can be omnipresent and omnipotent to their characters, though even such limited omniscience eludes us. As well, he is self-existent, as I said before, and self-sustaining; he is completely independent, needing nothing and no one else to be complete—which makes the decision of the Father, Son and Spirit to create us and love us all the more significant, because they were complete in and of themself and did not need us for anything.

A: “Themself.” Now there’s a word I never thought I’d hear.

R: God isn’t limited by our grammar, either. After all, he are one God.

A: All right, enough already.

R: I find it helps on occasion to say things like that—it jars the ear, and so jars the mind out of its ruts, which is an important thing to do whenever one is thinking about God. Anyway, I’d add one other attribute: simplicity. God is never at war within himself the way we are; he may be three persons, but in anything God does, they are totally integrated and interinvolved; the Father, Son and Spirit are each fully present and completely of the same mind and purpose in anything they do. There is no self-doubt, no disagreement, no indecision, no double-mindedness and no second-guessing.

The last thing to say about God is to go back to a couple of points I touched on earlier, that God is sovereign—he reigns as Lord over all creation—and active. This leads to the statement that everything that happens in the world happens through the providence of God. He created everything that is, and it is his will that keeps all of it in existence; he is at work in everything that happens, and nothing happens apart from his will. As the Belgic Confession, one of the confessions which my denomination affirms, puts it, he “leads and governs [all things] according to the holy divine will, in such a way that nothing happens in this world without God’s orderly arrangement.” Nothing happens by chance, nothing takes God by surprise, nothing happens apart from his will, and nothing happens despite his work; he is sovereign in everything.

A: Maybe it’s just me—though I doubt it—but something doesn’t fit together here. First you say that God is perfectly good, and now you say that when bad things happen, he’s responsible for them. So is he evil as well as good?

R: No. Whatever happens, happens because God does it—in Isa. 45:7 he declares, “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster”—but God is not the author of evil; whatever happens, happens because human beings, or the Devil, or some other creature brings it about. Both statements are true.

I owe my wife another debt of gratitude, which is no surprise to any of you who know us. I’ve been trying for a while now to figure out how to make expandable post summaries work on this blog, but Blogger’s FAQ didn’t seem to work. Turns out it’s a consequence of the switch to New Blogger, and they haven’t caught up with the change. So, my wife went hunting and found Hackosphere, a blog which (among other things) provides the necessary instructions and code—and we’re in business. I’ve already tested the code on the longest post I’ve written to date, and it worked perfectly.

In celebration, I’m going to repost my credo posts, this time with the credo actually in the post, below the jump. As I noted earlier, this is something I wrote as part of my ordination process; I wound up writing it as a conversation between myself and a friend of mine who was an avowed agnostic. This conversation is of course my own creation, but a lot of it comes out of discussions we actually had. (Again, these chunks are quite long—in MS Word, around seven double-spaced pages of 12-point Times New Roman, somewhere shy of 2,000 words.)

A: I’ve been meaning to ask you something for a while now. As we’ve discussed baseball and life and other minor issues, your Christianity has come up now and again, but we’ve never pursued that issue very far for its own sake; and it has always puzzled me why intelligent, educated people believe in God. That just doesn’t make sense to me, and I’ve always wanted to ask why that should be. The problem is, you have to be careful who you ask that sort of question, since it’s a very personal matter; but you seem to me to be someone who wouldn’t mind. So tell me, why do you believe in God?

R: What do you mean?

A: For one thing, your belief seems so unnecessary. Since Darwin, we have no need of that hypothesis, as someone said. More importantly, though, if you don’t need him to prop the system up, how can you believe in him? The Christian God, so far as I can tell, wants to restrict your freedom to think and your freedom to act; he wants to rule certain lines of thought and opportunities for self-expression and self-fulfillment out of court before you ever get the chance to consider them. It seems to me that all believing in God does is narrow your life and your mind. Why on earth would you? Is what you get in return really worth it?

R: Do you really want answers to your questions, or are they just rhetorical?

A: If you have good answers to offer, I’m interested to hear them, if that’s what you mean.

R: Have a couple hours you aren’t using? Because I think the most basic thing underlying your question is that you don’t really know what I believe; if you want an answer with any depth, you need to understand where I’m coming from before you understand why.

A: Well, I have the time, and I’ll admit I have more to learn about Christianity; but I don’t have a great deal of patience with theology, “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin” and that sort of thing.

R: Theology gets a bad rap, unfortunately, from people who associate it with those kind of abstracted discussions. But really, theology is a pretty practical thing. It’s just whatever you believe about God; a friend of mine calls theology the science of God, and I think that’s a good way to put it. If you don’t believe there is a God, that’s the center of your theology—or atheology, I suppose—and then whatever your belief that there is no God does to your view of the world would be part of your theology as well. If you say that because there is no God, we human beings need to work our hardest to take care of each other and the world because we’re on our own, we’re all there is––

A: I do believe that, you know that.

R: Yes, I do—well, that’s a theological statement. That’s your theology, or part of it.

A: I hadn’t thought of my beliefs in those terms before.

R: And mine begins at a very different place, with the belief that there is a God, and a very particular God at that, and that God stands in relation to us and to the world in a very particular way. Specifically, it begins with the belief that God created all of everything, and that as a result he is God over all of everything.

A: Interesting. You say he’s God because he created everything, not just because he wants to play God.

R: Right. Think of a novel for a minute. The person who wrote the novel created those characters––

A: Even if they only cut them out of cardboard.

R: True. But the author created those characters, wrote every word that comes out of their mouths, set every decision they make, and determined how the book would end. You might say that the author was God to those characters. But does that make that author any more Godlike anywhere else? No. His authority, or hers, comes from the fact of authorship. In the same way, only in a much bigger way, God has authority over everything and is in control of everything that happens because he is the author of everything.

A: I’d never noticed that word linkage before. But are you suggesting that God might be just a member of a race of gods?

R: Umm, no. In fact, that’s an important point. God is not one of a race of anything; he is unique. One of the names for him in the Bible is “I Am”—as it’s rendered in Greek, “The One Who Is.” He is the one who was not created by any other, and he is the source of everything else that exists. He didn’t come from anywhere; he has always been.

A: So the universe started out with God, surrounded by nothing. How can that be? That doesn’t make any sense. God must have come from somewhere, and he must have been someplace.

R: But then where did that place come from? Who made it? Who came before God, and where did they come from? No, if you stop and think about where everything came from, you only have two possible answers: either the universe has always existed, in some form or another, in which case it has no beginning or end, or there was a point in time when the universe did not exist and there was nothing—in which case there must have been someone there to create it out of nothing, and that someone must have always existed, without beginning or end; and we can argue back and forth, but we can’t wrap our minds around either possibility. Either way, our minds aren’t that big.

The point I’m trying to make is that our relationship to God begins with the fact that he created us, and the whole world in which we live. Wait, I can see you wanting to argue that point, but if we head off on the whole Darwin-evolutionism-creationism argument, we’ll never come back to your question. That’s an argument for another hour. I believe, for reasons both biblical and, yes, scientific, that God created all that is and as such has both complete authority and complete power over all that is. Having said that, you hit the question: who is this God?

First and foremost, he is triune—three in one.

A: Ahh, the Trinity. I never have understood that.

R: Well, that’s partly because it isn’t all that understandable by our limited minds. We do the best we can to explain the Trinity and understand how God can be both three and one, but in the end it’s a mystery.

A: Isn’t that just like a Christian. You get hit with a question you can’t answer, you just say, “It’s a mystery.”

R: It makes sense, though. We are limited creatures, after all; if God is big enough to be God over the whole universe, wouldn’t you expect him to be too big for us to completely understand? And if he were small enough for us to wrap our minds around, would he still be big enough to be God?

A: I’ll have to think about that.

R: Anyway, the doctrine of the Trinity is central to our understanding of God, for a lot of reasons, so it’s essential to come to some understanding of it. I like the way Stan Grenz, one of my professors, explains this doctrine in one of his books. He says that the doctrine of the Trinity can be summarized in four statements: “God is one,” “God is three,” “God is a diversity,” and “God is a unity.”

First and most basic, God is one. We worship only one God, not many, and we assert that there are no others. But second, God is three: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This isn’t just how we perceive him, it’s how he is; the one being of God exists in three distinct persons.

A: That doesn’t make any sense.

R: Like I said, our minds aren’t big enough to understand it. But then, you’re an educated man, you have a solid understanding of science for a non-scientist, right?

A: Yes, but I don’t see your point.

R: You know what physicists have determined about the nature of light, that light is both a wave and a particle? Can you explain how that can be, since the two seem to be mutually exclusive?

A: No, I can’t, but that’s what the evidence says. And yes, I see where you’re going; I’ll grant that the nature of light presents similar problems to the doctrine of the Trinity.

R: Reality is bigger than we are; someday we may be able collectively to understand how everything in the world fits together, but even then no one person will be able to grasp more than a small part of that understanding. And it’s entirely possible that we will never fully understand the nature of light, or quantum mechanics, or other such ques­tions. But whether we do or not, God will still remain orders of magnitude greater than his creation in which we live, too great for us to control.

A: Control?

R: Knowledge is power, right? I think the reason we aren’t content with a God we can’t fully understand, analyze, and describe in comprehensible terms is that any such God is beyond our ability to predict and control. That’s much of the drive behind the hard sciences, after all—the desire to reduce all the mysteries of the universe to things we can identify, label, explain, and control. I’d say it’s most of the drive behind psychology, the desire to extend our control over ourselves and others so that we can fix whatever we decide is broken. But if God remains beyond our understanding, he’s a threat, because we can’t control him—we can’t predict what he’ll do next.

A: Fine; point taken. Back to the subject, please?

R: Sorry for the digression. God is one; God is three. He is one being; he is three persons. It’s important to keep those in balance. Sometimes those of us in the Western church—Catholics and Protestants—tend to talk as if “God” is a single person, the “real” person above the three members of the Trinity. I knew a man in my denomination, a candidate for ordination like me, who rejected the doctrine of the Trinity for just this reason: he asked, “If there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then who is ‘God’?” The answer is that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, but he couldn’t find that balance; he concluded that “God” must be a fourth person and rejected the doctrine of the Trinity as a result.

Anyway, God is a diversity, and he is also a unity; you might say that God is unity in diversity. The Father, Son and Spirit are three different, distinct persons, and they fulfill different roles, but at the same time they are a unity. They have different functions, but every act involves all three, and they are one in being; they are utterly united in love. This is why John can say in 1 John 4 that “God is love,” because in the very being of God, the Father, Son and Spirit are and have always been in relationship, loving each other, dedicated to each other. It is that love between them which is the central element of God’s nature and character, and it is that love which drives everything he does.