God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble—James 4:6.  The context for James’ words were affective, located in God’s jealous longing for the spirit he made to dwell in us.  Humility, James was saying, is at the heart of a proper relationship with God and it opens the door to a much deeper bond with him: “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you” (verse 8).

This promise sets out a dramatic opportunity for us to gain a stronger connection with God, but first we need to know, what is humility?  In human-to-human terms is it mainly behavioral—our waiting for others to celebrate our successes while we keep quiet?  Or is it an attitude of self-abasement—of thinking and acting as if we’re insignificant?  Or, in a more positive direction, is it a selfless devotion to others?  And how is humility best expressed to God, let alone to humans?

In James’ statement he treated pride as the negative counterpoint to humility.  That’s a clue to be followed.  Pride is something we readily sniff out in each other.  Proud people are selfish, narcissistic, arrogant, and careless towards others—hard to be around!  Pride is something I struggle with myself.  I’ve started to learn that when I take on the I’m-proud-of-myself attitude, the room starts to empty in a hurry.  So if pride and humility are eternally antithetical to each other we might do well to find the basis for our pride and then identify humility in whatever we see as its opposite.

And yet almost all of us have learned early on that pride is treated as a good quality; and that humility can be viewed as a weakness.  As children, for instance, we were often told, “I’m so proud of you!”  Or, “Be sure to take pride in your work!”  And, with that, “Stand up for your rights—don’t be a doormat!”

One question to consider is whether God himself is proud; or humble; or both; or neither.  As a starting point in asking this we find God calling people in both the Old and New Testaments to “be holy for I am holy.”  But I don’t recall his ever saying “Be humble for I am humble” or “be proud for I am proud.”

Yet there is certainly some connection between our own attitude and God’s stance in these issues.  Is it, perhaps, that God alone can be proud—given his incomparable greatness—and that we as his creation are by comparison utterly insignificant?  That seems to be a common answer, especially among those who portray God as ultimately motivated by receiving our glory.

This connection, I suspect, then sets up answers to our question of what humility is and what its evil opposite of pride is: pride is our act of being self-devoted while humility is to be God-devoted.  In this view only God is to be properly self-devoted; and we are to become more Godly by becoming the opposite of what God is!

Yet I quickly realize that this seems to be very different to what holiness calls for: that we are to be holy because God is holy.  Aren’t we meant to imitate Christ?  And isn’t it the humility of Christ that we were called to embrace in Philippians 2 where “in humility” we’re to “count others more significant than yourselves” by having “this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant” even to the point of death on the cross for our sakes.

The proper answer, then, is not to adopt a quality of character that is the opposite to God—that is, to his presumed self-absorption.  Instead we are invited to Christ’s quality of character where we discover God’s own humility.

Here’s the bottom line: as we come to grips with God’s Triune oneness we realize that when Jesus told Phillip (in John 14) that “when you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father” we also find the answer to our questions.  In Christ we see a God bold enough to embrace humility.  The Son’s crucifixion is the venue for the Father’s love to be made available to us.  The Father gave the Son over to death.  It was the Father who, in that sense, humbled himself for our sakes by sharing in the humility of the Son within their unending union and communion.  And from this came the glory of a plan that allows us to enter into this unending union and communion of the Godhead ourselves.

The sole gateway to God, we find, is to become like him even to the extent that we embrace our own crucifixion.  We no longer live for ourselves, but for him—the Triune God—who loves us even to the point of death.  How jealous is God for our spirits?  Jealous enough to die for our sakes.  What should our response be?  An awed and holy confidence that such love invites; and with that, a complete and selfless devotion in return.  We draw near to God because he first drew near to us; and then he embraces us ever more fondly as we draw even nearer to him in response.  And on and on and on.

Too many Christians, I’m afraid, have the disaffected God of the Greek philosophers in mind when they pray or when they plan their day. The Greek versions of God are all about power—about having control over everything—rather than about his forming and sustaining relationships with a treasured creation.

The full post has been published in the Cor Deo website and may be seen at www.cordeo.org.uk/a-passionate-god 

Lewis Ayres in Nicaea and its Legacy offers a helpful summary of the “pro-Nicene” theology of fourth century church leaders.  The Council of Nicaea (in 325) set out an acceptable manner for speaking of God’s oneness while still affirming his eternal distinctions as Father, Son, and Spirit.  Yet the debate over how best to speak . . .  [for more go to www.cordeo.org.uk]

Most people have never heard of Joachim of Fiore (c. 1135-1202). Yet his voice was notable in a Christian tradition that still has echoes today. He was a mystic and monk who claimed that God intended to work in human history in three stages.

The first stage was the age of the Father, that is, the Old Testament era with its divinely ordained rules that required full obedience. Then came the age of the Son, the era between Christ’s life and the year 1260. The year 1260 was chosen by taking the number of days cited in Revelation 11:3 & 12:6 (i.e. 1260 days) to be years instead of days. Thus, that year promised the arrival of a third age of the Spirit when people would finally gain direct communion with God by the Spirit’s coming to rule in the lives of individual Christians.

Joachim died well before 1260 but his followers looked ahead for the new era to come. What did they expect it would be like? The Gospel of Christ, Joachim told them, would still be valid in the third age but it would be surpassed as the letter of the law was replaced by the spirit of the law. The Spirit’s activities would also dissolve any further need for the organized and hierarchical church. Instead the Spiritualists—called the Order of the Just—would rule the Church. That was a pretty bold claim, given that the Western church operated within a well defined hierarchy from the Pope downward. The new Order would displace all of that.

Joachim drew some attention, both positive and negative. His main themes were dismissed by the Lateran Council in 1215 but he was still treated by the Catholic church as a saintly figure, though not as a saint. Dante, author of the Divine Comedy, drew on his teachings. The year 1260 came and went without any dramatic features.

We can now ask, “So what?” Did he offer something we need for today? Not really. And I’m certainly not trying to promote him or his ideas here. In fact, I’m convinced he was way off base.

But Joachim and his followers did illustrate a problem that has lingered in Christianity as a whole. That is, the sort of discussions about the nature of the Godhead and about the deity of Christ didn’t extend to an additional discussion of the roles and nature of the Spirit. We had the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Council of Chalcedon in 381 that offered us, respectively, touchstone debates for the first two concerns; but there was never an early and equivalent council devoted to the Spirit.

Over 250 years after Joachim we meet Martin Luther. In Luther’s day the promise of a third age of the Spirit was still alive for some, but Luther himself was at best only vaguely aware of such themes. He did, however, recognize the importance of the Spirit in the Bible and also held that the Spirit engages believers both in conversion and in ongoing faith. His first publication was, in fact, a German translation of the medieval mystical work, the Theologia Germanica which invited readers to a more immediate form of spirituality. So when Luther began to resist the hierarchy of the Roman-led Catholic church while promoting a more lively spirituality, some of the radical Spiritualists of the day saw him as a possible representative of a new order of the Spirit.

Two of these figures were the “prophets” Nicholas Storch and Markus Stubner from Zwickau who came to Wittenberg to meet Luther. Luther quickly rejected them and what they taught. Later a separate spiritual movement led by Thomas Müntzer—who was also dismissed by Luther—produced the ill-fated Peasants Revolt. Then yet another effort to promote the new and immediate leadership of the Spirit emerged in the town of Münster, an effort that was also crushed. The net result of these Spiritualist efforts was a widespread disavowal of the Spirit’s active role in Reformation theology and practice. He was not a welcome presence if his work was to overthrow the church as an ordered body; and his purpose was to give some leaders divine—and sometimes dubious—prerogatives! What the radicals did accomplish was to scare away any additional Spirit-advocates for nearly a century.

I offer this historical content as background for this question: what is the biblical role of the Spirit? Does he only work through established church authorities and activities today—as something of an undercover presence? Or have we entered into the new age of the Spirit, characterized by his unique works of leading and speaking through Spirit-anointed activists? Or is there some happy medium somewhere between the extremes?

All I can do is raise the question here. Any efforts to answer need to be book-length efforts. And in recent decades there have been some projects offered along that line. Here the most we can do is to suggest some key elements that must be part of any conversation.

First, we need to embrace God’s call for us now to live by the Spirit rather than by the “flesh”. Luther properly recognized that Christ’s coming signaled a new work of God in history. Luther looked, especially, to Galatians as central to this claim: there he found that any effort to make the Mosaic Law into a basis for spirituality is broken. Why? Because the Law looks to human performance rather than to Christ. So while it offers certain moral boundaries it must never be treated as the focus of faith. Instead Christ alone is to be the focus of faith. And the Spirit’s work is to elevate Christ in our hearts—to open the eyes of our hearts to see God as fully revealed in Christ. Luther was absolutely on target here.

Second, any efforts to elevate the status of the Spirit to a new position of functional primacy in the Trinity violates the eternal reality of the Father-Son-and-Spirit communion. In the Bible we find the Father and the Son to be uniquely devoted to each other in an eternal exchange of love and glory—a reality celebrated by Jesus in John 17:24. The Spirit never seeks to displace that unique dyadic reality, but he does eternally facilitate that bond of love by communicating the love of the Father to the Son, and vice versa. In an insight offered by Jonathan Edwards we notice that the Bible never speaks of the Spirit’s love for the Father, or of the Spirit’s love for the Son. Instead he faithfully carries the mutual love of both the Father and the Son—as the one who searches the “depths of God” (1 Corinthians 2:10)—back and forth between the Father and the Son throughout eternity.

We, once we are united to Christ, are then drawn into this exchange by the Spirit’s communicating ministry. Thus, we are reborn into God’s life by the coming of the Spirit as he “pours out God’s love in our hearts” (Romans 5:5). Such a role does not reduce the Spirit’s full deity and personal participation in the life of the Godhead, but it does explain how God’s relational being is sustained as the Spirit serves the Father, the Son, and the Bride by eternally and actively witnessing to this affective mutual devotion.

To say more about his personhood, the Spirit can be grieved and quenched when we, mere mortals, despise his ministry. And Jesus warned his audiences that to dismiss the Spirit’s communicating, witnessing, and coaching ministry is an unforgiveable sin. Even as the incarnate Son, Jesus responded to the Spirit’s leading throughout his life and ministry on earth. And in that reliance he set up a model for us to follow. So Luther was correct in his dismissal of the radical Spiritualists of his day who tried to modify God’s eternal status of relations. The Son reveals the Father to us, and the Spirit elevates the Son in our hearts—but, although deserving and receiving worship as one present in the Godhead, the Spirit never seeks to be uniquely elevated in our worship.

Finally, we need to learn how to respond to the Spirit’s leading. How does he do this? Not, as Joachim or the Spiritual radicals of Luther’s day proposed, by bringing about new directions in human conduct through the teachings of self-appointed Spirit-spokesmen.

Instead the Spirit illuminates the Word that he has stirred in the hearts of Bible writers. That is, the Spirit first worked in the hearts of the Bible writers, moving them to hear and report God’s heart to us, the readers. And now he moves in our hearts to hear what God wants us to know by completing the Heart-to-heart-to-heart progression of revelation. So we will never understand what the Bible is telling us unless we have the Spirit whispering in our hearts, “Listen to this, because God loves you!”

Then and only then do we become true Bible students and true Christians: by responding to that love with our own love for Christ. So Luther was right, once again, in his call, “sola scriptura.”

As for Joachim’s notions: never mind!

Later this week I’ll speak to a group with the task of comparing a “Trinitarian” to a “non-Trinitarian” understanding of God. It’s an important topic; and I probably should have launched the Spreading Goodness site with this question since it stands behind much of what we’ve offered here since beginning. On the other hand it’s a complex topic with a huge range of engagement so I approach it with respect and a sense that this is just an initial foray that will certainly call for corrections and further development.

That said, this comparison may or may not be familiar to many readers. For some it will create a response of, “What you’re talking about?” while for others, “Please! Not another dose of this topic!” It depends on what circles we run in. Let’s start with that as context.

Christians of all orthodox varieties affirm the doctrine of the Trinity as a crucial truth: that God exists eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit; but not all agree on much beyond that triadic label. Today there are, in fact, some wide variations of understanding in place even among evangelical Christians. Given those differences “Trinitarian Theology” refers to an effort by some to clarify and reform views of the Trinity that are, according to Trinitarian reformers, broken.

Broken by what measure? By measure of the creedal statements endorsed by the major 4^th century church councils—e.g. Nicaea in 325 and Constantinople in 381. That means that the label “non-Trinitarian” as used above is a misnomer because it refers to real Christians who affirm the Trinity at some level but who either aren’t alert to the issues at stake here; or who are informed, but who don’t fully engage or embrace the Nicaea-Constantinople tradition. This brief entry, then, aims to orient the former group—those who are still unaware of the conversation—rather than to convince the latter crowd.

My own awakening to the topic came during my doctoral days at King’s College London where I participated in the weekly seminars of the Institute for Theological Research led by the late Colin Gunton, a noted Trinitarian scholar. I first attended the seminars as a guest (liable to be exiled if spare seats weren’t available!) because my own research was not in systematic theology (Gunton’s department) but in church history. My subject was a 17^th century Puritan preacher, Richard Sibbes. I attended the Research seminars just to round out my exposure to theological traditions, both old and new.

It was a happy accident. Sibbes, I discovered, was an avid student of the major figures of the 4^th & 5^th centuries—the so-called Nicene and Post-Nicene fathers. He not only examined that era but he also recognized how these early Trinitarian views were later engaged and promoted by Martin Luther and John Calvin, among others, as key tenets of the Protestant Reformation.

At the same time Sibbes—moved by what he found—gently but firmly resisted a new movement in his day. That movement—now called Post-Reformation Scholasticism—sought to restore key values and axioms of medieval Aristotelian Christianity. It was a model best represented by the 13^th century scholar, Thomas Aquinas, hence “Thomism”.

The new movement found widespread traction in Sibbes’ day given that in the 16^th-17^th centuries European and British universities all relied on Aristotle’s works as the curricular core of undergraduate education. So when students moved on from their undergraduate studies to graduate studies in theology, they found that the earlier works by Aquinas had already synthesized Aristotle’s philosophy with theology—so they embraced the Thomist package. That synthesis, in turn, did much to shape what became the Westminster tradition. Ironically it was Thomas’s theology that Luther & Calvin had energetically dismissed years earlier. And that opposition was rooted in some of the key differences between the Thomistic view of the Trinity and the Nicene version.

Let me return, then, to what I found at King’s College. Many of the theology faculty and PhD students there were tracing Barthian theology. Barth, I soon discovered, had also been captured by the major figures of the 4^th & 5^th centuries—the same Nicene and Post-Nicene fathers that Sibbes loved. Barth then traced the way in which the Trinitarian views of those fathers were developed and transmitted by the Protestant Reformation through figures like Martin Luther and John Calvin. Gunton, as a Barth scholar, was aware of all this.

A purpose of Gunton’s research seminar was to allow doctoral students to present aspects of their research. So when the time came for me to offer a presentation of Sibbes’ theology—with Gunton as the host that day—he was clearly surprised. It turned out that the common ground between Sibbes and Barth was deep and wide. Barth, it turns out, was also resistant to any place for Aristotle’s influence in the Christian faith.

That surprise connection then set up my sense of partnership with current Trinitarianism, a movement that today owes much of its energy to the works of a Scottish clan, the Torrances, especially two brothers, James and Thomas (or T. F.). An American scholar, Robert Jenson (Gunton’s doctoral mentor), is another key figure here. My own postdoctoral studies have remained oriented to the Puritan era so I only have a passing exposure to what these men have written, but what I have read of them aligns well with Trinitarian figures like Sibbes and those he influenced, including Jonathan Edwards [on this connection, see Amy Plantinga Pauw, The Harmony of All].

What, then, are some of the differences between Trinitarians and non-Trinitarians? For lack of space let me list just four here. We’ll also call the latter tradition Western Theists because the movement is mainly a product of the West (over against the more overtly Nicene Eastern Church) and they do, of course, affirm the Trinity.

Where to begin? For Trinitarians any discussion of God must engage the Trinity as its starting point. Western Theists, on the other hand, locate the Trinity as a secondary feature within the larger conversation about God’s essential being. In virtually every expression of Western theology—including Aquinas, Turretin, Hodge, and Erickson—the standard approach is to take up the Trinity as a primary topic only after ten or more expositions of God’s monad-like attributes and being, as in Aquinas who touches on God’s existence, simplicity, perfection, goodness, infinity, immutability, eternity, unity, and more (26 in total) before reaching the Trinity. Whatever benefits these lists offer—and there are certainly some—they effectively restructure God’s actual self-portrayal. In the Bible there is, instead, a priority given to God’s relationality as in John 1:1, a text that consciously echoes and expands Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning” of Genesis we find a God who comes speaking in his triune reality, “Let us make man in our image” and “In the beginning [of John's gospel] was the Word and the Word was with God”.

Christology. Western theology continues to be plagued by impulses toward Unitarian defections—whether covertly or overtly. A problem with the attribute-list vision of God is that an essential-God-who-is-behind-the-shared-deity-of-Jesus is suggested. This, then, sets up the misimpression that there is a greater and truly ultimate Deity in the Father who resembles the monadic deities of Aristotle, Judaism, and Islam. This, in turn, sets up an implicit subordination of being between the Father (as the “real” source of deity) and the lesser Son (as his mere extension, with an implicit prospect that he himself was created). The student of this system then shares in Philip’s request to Jesus, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us” (John 14:8). Christ’s sharp response to him, then sets out a Trinitarian counter-vision, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father!” It is only in the Son that we gain a clear picture of God! He is our proper starting point in coming to God. And then, through the Son’s disclosures of the Father’s love and glory, we engage our relational God in proper terms [see the great prayer of Jesus in John 17].

Pneumatology. Western theology finds it difficult to characterize the Spirit in robust and personal terms, no matter that the Nicene fathers called for just that. He, instead, tends to be an explanatory and mysterious force who accomplishes God’s desires, often as an “it” rather than “him”. Trinitarian theology, in stark contrast, centers in the divine communion of God—the Perichoresis—as a reality facilitated by the Spirit’s eternal work of mutual interpenetration. He takes all that is in the Father and shares it with the Son; and takes all that is in the Son and shares it with the Father in a mutual reciprocity so that all that is in the Father is in the Son, and all that is in the Son is in the Father; and all of this is shared by and through the Spirit who is both the Spirit of the Son and of the Father. The Spirit, then, is the one through whom we, too, are bonded in a real participatory union in the Son, and through the Son, with the Father. Thus life eternal comes to us by the Spirit’s communion.

Love. We read that “God is love” in John 4:8&16, yet in Western Theism love is, at best, treated with a certain embarrassed silence. One looks in vain for a Western based systematic theology that gives love the prominence it receives in the Bible as God’s great motivation and his greatest commandment for humanity. Why? Because the God of Western Theism is characterized mainly by his powers—as the great “unmoved mover”—which leaves no place for him to be “moved” by anything in his creation. This sets up a commitment to anthropopathic explanations of God’s love—that his love is actually a function of his will, and that he lacks any affective-or-responsive qualities. Instead we hear that God covets glory for himself while love languishes: duty always trumps desires in Western Theism. Then our human anthropology is reinterpreted in light of a disaffected divinity so that volition—finding and obeying God’s will—has primacy, and not our response of love to the God who first loved us. In a Trinitarian reading of the Bible, on the other hand, we find the Father as the great lover, the Son as his beloved, and the Spirit as the communicator of that Love. There is a divine passion that in no way threatens God’s stability or his eternal purposes: in love he chose us before the world was even created! This offers us a mystery that only eternity may resolve as there we will continue to experience Christ’s love that surpasses knowing.

There’s so much more to this! In fact the great opportunity for those of us who have been drawn to the communion of God’s love there are a host of corrections in our theology called for in light of the Trinity. Sin, for instance, is a relational violation rooted in absolute disaffection (“hatred”) that Jesus overcomes by his own loving atonement. So, too, revelation is no longer seen as merely contractual and rational but as the passionate and compelling disclosures of the Triune God’s love for us.

So I conclude by inviting readers to never quit exploring all that the Triune God offers us: “Oh, taste and see, the LORD is good!”

This weekend was full: I was asked to be the Sunday speaker at a church missions conference. My assigned text? Matthew 22:37-39,

“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: Your shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

The decision by church leaders to focus here surprised me. I would have expected to develop the standard text for missions conferences—28:18-29—that begins, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations . . .” Yet I was delighted by their selection because the text gives church missions a proper motivational basis: love.

An MA student, Jonathan M, whose research thesis I supervised about a decade ago made the same connection. He examined the proper motivation for missions: Is it driven by duty? Or birthed out of love? His answer was that Christian mission begins in God’s heart, in the love that pours out of the Triune communion.

I didn’t have Jonathan’s thesis with me but the central premise was strong and easy to recall: much of modern missions is defined by duty, but the truly biblical basis for missions is in the divine love: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

And we must not to stop there. In the very next verse we find Christ’s elaboration of his Father’s purpose for humanity: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”

God’s plan, then, was formed upon these foundations: 1. His love. 2. His willingness, in that love, to give up his Son. 3. His ambition in this love to save people from the throes of spiritual and, eventually, physical death. And, 4. To bring into the Triune life all who respond to this love, since his life, alone, is eternal.

What holds people back from receiving this overflow of God’s love is another love: [T]he light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their works were evil” (3:19). God’s mission is to bring us to the Son yet most people prefer to love their independence from God. This independence is also a separation from his eternal life. It is to live in “darkness.” This desire for darkness, then, serves as their own exercise of self-judgment.

All that seems to be clear enough. Once it’s boiled down the problem Jesus raises here is that people don’t really like God! That’s not to say they don’t like what God offers—all his good gifts that come with the creation—but God, himself, leaves them cold. His moral light is too bright for those whose deeds are cheap and shabby; or, as in the case of men like Nicodemus (his immediate audience), whose deeds are meant for human glory but are not aligned with God’s glory [see both John 5 and 12 on this].

So the moral barrier for the disaffected non-believer is immense and only the Father is able to draw anyone out of stubborn disaffection and into a love for the Son. Yet today he is pleased to use us who already love the Son as his agents. I’m afraid, though, that the church, herself, has also built a needless barrier by sometimes turning this mission of love into a grinding duty.

How so? I believe that the language of “commandment” in Matthew 22, and elsewhere, causes many people to miss that this calling is birthed in the love we have just seen. This because we tend to link commandments to our willpower. So that the “greatest command” is read as “our greatest task.” And with that we can slip into sending out moralists to warn the world of their duty to obey God. In the moralist framework it’s not that obedience saves the missionary’s target audience, but—given the focus on our own willpower—obedience signifies that they are probably saved.

But are they truly saved if they fail to reciprocate God’s self-sacrificing, affective love? How many of the Pharisees were, in fact, outstanding commandment-specialists, yet without love? Isn’t the call to an affective love the point of 1 John 4—that God’s love for us first captures us and then spills out as a love for others? And that our love for God and for neighbor signals our genuine participation on his life of love—a life overflowing from the Triune, relational one, of whom John says, “God is love”?

How, then, does “command” undermine the meaning of love for some? By a widespread Stoic bias that treats commands as ultimately located in our will; with our will then seen as the overseer of our unreliable affections. When this tradition is in play, the command-keeping Stoics will take a text like John 14:21—”Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me”—to turn Christ into a moralist, and love into a task. And with such a defective version of Christ comes a sense that spirituality is formed in duties rather than in desires; from our self-moved will and not our Christ-moved affections.

The portrayal of God’s mission in John 3 helps us to get it right. And in Matthew’s gospel—where we started—we find that the Triune initiative is also located in God’s love. In Christ’s baptism, the Spirit descends on the Son and the Father proclaims, “this is my beloved Son”. So, too, on the Mount of Transfiguration: “This is my beloved Son; listen to him!” (chapters 3 & 17). The Father offers his love by sending us his Son whom he loves and whom he calls us to love, with him. So it is that in Matthew 28, the so-called great commission is expressed in the context of the Trinity—”in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

The word “command”, then, must be read as a feature of God’s love. The command is no different from a marriage counselor’s call to a husband whose heart has gone cold: “Love your wife!” The call is to revive that which has been buried in the debris of false loves. In Matthew 22 Christ is calling us to respond to the Spirit’s work as he breathes new life into the spiritual corpse left by Adam’s fall. The Lover calls out to us to love in return.

Implicit in all this is that our freedom is located not in our “free will” but in our “free hearts”—hearts that abandoned God as we, in Adam, became lovers of self rather than lovers of God. It was displayed in Adam’s newfound self-awareness as a man “naked” before God—when he had once, in love, been unselfconscious before God.

God will never force us to love him. But he calls us to the love we were first made for. For those of us who have heard God’s heart, our deepest desire is to share that love with others: this is a proper basis for Christian mission, something God’s heart supports.

Who is God? And what is he like?

A primary answer to this question is that God exists in communion. That is, the bedrock reality of God is his triune existence: he is One who exists eternally as the Father, Son, and Spirit. The Father is distinctly and only the Father; the Son is distinctly and only the Son; and the Spirit is the distinct and only communicator between the Father and the Son. The Father exists only as he has the Son; and vice versa. And the relational bond of God—his communion—is his basis of being.

Let me restate the point with a slight variation: no other true or reliable expression of God, description of the divine, or foundation for life exists apart from the reality of an eternal, communing, triune One.

This certainty is what makes Christianity unique and uniquely true. It is the point where we, as followers of Christ, bring life and light into a world blinded by the Fall. Call it a confessional statement or a creedal commitment if you like, but the truth is more than a sterile or abstract assertion; more than a mere proposition. Instead it is the basis of life. We derive our relational bonding as humans from our creation by the relationally bonded Godhead. He exists in love; as love. We were birthed out of that love and are made to love both him and each other.

The reason for my regularly returning to the theme of God’s triune communion is that I find most Christians to be either blind to it—and therefore sub-Christian in their faith—or at least wary of it because it doesn’t seem to have much basis either in our day-to-day experience or in our training in the church.

By that I mean that we tend in our day-to-day life to think numerically, as in “one and three are separate numbers”. So God is either a “one” or a “three”. The tendency, then, is to think of God the Father as the “real” God—the true “One”—with the Son and the Spirit as his aids, extensions, or add-ons—and sometimes, his “form for the day”: what has been called monarchianism, modalism, or monarchial modalism. I find this informal solution to the numerical challenge of God’s being to be common as I listen to Christians talk about “God” as an exclusive and singular source of power and rule: as in, “I know that only God can help.”

The problem I want to raise here is that the church is all too slow to feel the weight of the problem of a monadic God. In my own experience of training in an evangelical Portland-area Bible college, and later in a Chicago-area divinity school, I was taught to affirm God as a “Trinity” but then we spent almost all our time chasing God’s attributes as if he was a monadic figure who consists in mostly non-relational qualities: in his “omni’s” and in his aseity, his impassibility, his immutability, and so on.

This version of God is, again, monadic in the sense that Aristotle could (and did) say almost exactly what we were saying about God, even though Aristotle was not a Trinitarian believer but a worshiper of a God who exists as the ultimate cause—the great Singularity who moves all else but who is, himself, immovable.

As I eventually came to teach what I had been taught at the same Portland-area Bible college of my undergraduate studies, I began to feel uncomfortable with that content. Why? Because in my continuing cycles of Bible reading I was often finding the God in the Scriptures to be very different in presence and personality to the God of my training. So I quit teaching in order to pursue a doctorate with that question in view: why this difference?

What I discovered in my study of Richard Sibbes and his predecessors—and, to my surprise, also in a cluster of 20^th century figures known as “Trinitarian theologians” who had gathered at King’s College London where I studied—was a more biblical and relational basis for God’s being.

First let me say that a Trinitarian theologian differs from a Christian who simply says “Of course I believe in the Trinity” (as something required of all orthodox Christians) and then goes on to restate views taken both directly and indirectly from either Aristotle or Plato or both. The latter—classical theists—are satisfied to finally mention the Trinity as a subordinate topic well down the line from God’s “more important” issues, i.e. his set of attributes. Yet their conception of God is never dynamically defined by the Trinity. The Trinitarians, on the other hand, take the Trinity to be the sole starting point for theology. They would say that nothing can be said about God that is true unless it begins with his relational Triunity.

Let me add a caveat that there are any number of Trinitarian theologians in print today whose works I can cheer at many points but who make some claims that I have yet to see supported in the Bible! So I would invite every follower of Christ to be like the Bereans (see Acts 17:11) in comparing theological claims made by teachers with what the Scriptures offer.

Back to my concern: what I find striking is that our current issues were also present early in church history. In reading the 4^th century Father, Gregory of Nyssa, for instance (one of the three Cappadocians noted for their role in the Nicene discussions of Christ’s deity) I found discussions about how God exists.

They [Gregory's non-Christian foes] charge us with preaching three Gods, and din into the ears of the multitude this slander, which they never rest from maintaining persuasively. [NPNF 5:326]

What did Gregory then offer as a non-tritheistic response? One answer was to defend God’s triune relationship in writing. His concern in On the Holy Trinity was to insist that the Spirit exists in “community with the Father in the Son” not only in his attributes but also in his place in the Godhead [NPNF 5:327]. Gregory held that it is only in a relational God that we have a transforming relationship from him, with him, and towards each other: “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit alike give sanctification, and life, and light, and comfort, and all similar graces” [5:328].

Let me extend his point by arguing that without a God who exists eternally in community, as a communion rooted in distinctions, and as expressed through communication, we have no basis for love or full self-understanding. Then without love we become tragic and selfish points of dissolving insignificance. With love-from-God, on the other hand, we are bonded into the fabric of God’s communion.

To elaborate what I noted earlier: love exists between persons, not as a singular capacity or individual-based attribute. There must be at least a lover and a beloved for love to exist. God, then, “is love” and we are created because of that love and for that love to be extended to us and through us to each other—see 1 John 4 here.

We now need to return to the question we started with: what is God like? The answer is that he is a relational being whose communion of love constitutes his intrinsic community and explains all of his communication. Any considerations of God must start here if we hope to make headway. And in the Son we find the clearest expression and invitation to the opportunity to know God as he really exists. He is the Father’s beloved, so that in our union with him through our saving faith we become beloved as well.

The invitation stands before us, then, to know Christ and to make him known as one who loves us with an overflowing triune love. May we pursue it and enjoy it!

Allen Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in the 1980’s as a criticism of the growing relativism in the modern academy and in society at large. That relativism has two axioms: first that everyone should be free to hold their own opinion without having others criticize them; and, second, that every viewpoint is equally legitimate.

In effect Bloom was criticizing a new absolute that no claims of truth can be absolute. Setting aside the confused circularity of the claim that relativism is an absolute value, Bloom’s main complaint was that relativism precludes learning. If every member in a classroom has the right to claim special privilege for their personal point of view then no one is ever ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in what they believe. The teacher, then, is left to offer a forum for students to express their thoughts to each other: they explore possibilities and teachers facilitate the process.

Bloom’s complaint, viewed after some passing of time, was at the same time overstated and astute. That is, despite his concerns some departments of the academy are still anchored in non-relative certainties: the tangible fields of botany, engineering, meteorology, and aeronautics, to name a few. The students are either correct or incorrect in presenting their research—outcomes are measured by stable empirical evidence.

Other fields of learning, however, are indeed susceptible to encroaching relativism. Social studies, for instance—including religious studies and ethics—are often held to be free from any absolute standards. Professors in this milieu are expected to stir new and broader thinking so that individuals have enough colors in their personal palette of life to paint their own unique pictures. The metaphor of the visual arts is particularly apt in such cases because the freedom once reserved to artists is now a freedom granted to historians, theologians, psychologists, and to any others who reflect on the human condition.

As Bloom—a professor at the University of Chicago—shows us, not all academics embrace this relativism but it is a growing presence. I recall, for instance, attending a history conference for University of London doctoral students in the early 90’s. The liveliest event was an animated debate between an historian who viewed his work as a creative art in which he was free to promote his own values. His opponent, by contrast, held that while interpretive variations will always exist in historical studies it is incumbent on the ‘good’ historian to offer an accurate—’true’—portrayal of events. In an earlier era the former view would never have been welcomed in serious company.

So, too, the extension of relativism into many Christian communities is now a fact of life. It plays a role, for instance, in the emerging church movement where personal authenticity and sincerity are often valued more than a concern for biblical or creedal truth. A personal point of view, strongly held, is admired as long as the person who holds it knows not to promote it as an exclusive view that others must embrace. Each participant is seen to have a role in producing a unique community of worship that displays God best through unconstricted multiplicity. Freedom is an ultimate value.

Now let me shift gears a bit. Bloom’s complaint and the flavor of my review to this point can be aligned with the so-called neo-conservatism of today—aligned with those axiomatically committed to the past as superior to the claimed progress offered by modernity and post-modernity. My concern, however, is in a different place: that the great tensions of life need to be framed not as issues of old versus new—of absolutes versus relativism—but as a competition between a relational view of life and a devotion to individualism.

Let me press the point indirectly with a bit of personal narrative. For a time I was an elder at Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon—notable to some as the spiritual home of Don Miller who wrote Blue Like Jazz; and the pastor, Rick McKinley, also an author and a conversation partner with leaders of the emergent church movement. While his contact with the latter group may cause some to dismiss Rick I find him to be a breath of fresh air. He is happily devoted to the Bible even as the church he leads promotes the importance of authentic community and artistic, spiritual creativity.

In practice I found that the Imago Dei Community represents a healthy reformation—even if I’ve had qualms at points. Imago differs from more traditional churches: from the behavioral spirituality found in some settings, for instance; or the existentially active but content-modest worship found in other places. Instead Imago Dei expresses a robust relational commitment to Christ. Sundays at Imago offer a spiritual lens that magnifies the biblical Christ without hesitation or apology. The view is often striking, sometimes convicting, and, at the least, regularly encouraging.

Let me say more. At its heart each Imago service invites members to meet with God in every moment of the morning. Not to renew church traditions one more time, but to hear something fresh as offered out of God’s heart through the Word. This takes place as the speaker honors what the Bible offers, not to create experiences for the sake of experience, but to experience God’s love by the Spirit’s presence in the Word, worship, and in sharing at the Lord’s table. It is a time when the events of the week at the office and at home can be reviewed within the divine context of faith and community. Ultimate self-concern—the motor of individualism—loses meaning in the presence of real faith.

With such a relational worship as context, let me return to Bloom on the one hand, and the relativists on the other. The question at stake in their debate must be relocated to a relational context. Per Bloom’s concerns, are there some set of absolute truths that undergird every aspect of education which, by extension, can enlarge the personal capacities of the learner? Or is authentic personal creativity—the stuff of post-modernity—a better measure of education?

Our answer is that if there is no divine-relational context in either case then both are ultimately empty—unable to transcend the coming Day of the Lord by finding a place in eternal communion with a triune God and his saints in the new heavens and the new earth.

The biblical answer, in fact, is that any claims of scientific or social truth are only as absolute as the Creator makes them to be. In Jesus we find the one by whom and for whom all things are created. All patterns, rules, principles, realities, and principles of the creation are located in the one who tells us “I am . . . the Truth”. This is the ever-creative, ever-loving Son who delights the Father with his ongoing good works and offers them to the Father in a relational offering. We, in turn, exist in the fabric of God’s triune relationship and not the other way round! And here it is, I’m sure, that Christ delights to tease us with the mysteries of his unending creativity that stand behind the relativity of quantum physics and the older stability of Newtonian descriptions of the empirical universe.

In this context—of God’s triune eternal, mutual glory of shared love—we find true Creativity as a living companion. The creation is not our final ‘absolute’. Instead we find absolute love, accompanied by an appropriate jealous wrath, in meeting God through the Son and by the Spirit. We were made by him and for him; apart from him we are in hell.

Adam and Eve chose the latter course by turning away from their relationship with God—seeking to be “like God” as independent beings. They loved their own pretensions to morality and meaning. Yet to seek any form of life away from God is like a shadow seeking to exist as its own being. The autonomous shadow-person is only and always a nothing—a moving Lie—of darkness forever linked to, while despising, what is real.

In all of sin, then, there is a desire to create a unique and transcendent reality but this ambition turns out to be nothing more than a Nietzschean act of volition—and ultimately an empty existence. True exercises of human creation are all rooted in faith as worship. Anything else only exists as passing shadows. Even the insistence by Bloom and his kin that truth can be discovered through academic disagreements and debates leads us to a dead end if that learning is separate from worship. Any version of education that is not done as an act of worship only expresses the closing of the human heart—the pathway to nothingness.

Listen, then, to Jesus as he speaks from within his communion of the Godhead on our behalf: “Father, sanctify them in the truth: your word is truth.” It is only in God that we find our way to truth and meaning in a broken world. Let us go there, then, and worship him in every moment of life. There we are truly open-minded and freely creative.

I was asked to speak about encouragement. Given the topic I guessed that at least some of the retreat participants already knew about its negative alternatives, of discouragement and its lurking big brother, depression.

The assignment turned out to be more challenging than I expected. I first considered what the option of simple volition might offer—the answer of the simple ditty from a decade or two back, “Don’t worry; be happy!” A nice sentiment, but winsomely misguided and impossible to apply. It’s like telling a person to turn on the lights during a power outage.

So I next asked myself, “And what causes emotional disruptions?” Let me stay with the analogy of electrical power. That’s like asking a lineman in charge of the power grid, “And what are the most common reasons for you to be called out?” His answers might include broken lines caused by storms; burned out fuses; short circuits; power plant problems; and more. Yet the problem is usually somewhere in the transmission network rather than in the power plant itself. Nowadays most of the developed world has reliable power generation systems, so that’s the last point of concern.

Here’s a question, then. Does the analogy of the electric power grid actually apply to our soul concerns? I’m convinced it does. As just suggested, lost electric power can be assessed in three steps: is the problem in the source; in the transmission; or in the appliance I’m using? In other words a working appliance assumes an uninterrupted connection to the power source. So our analogy presumes that encouragement and discouragement are relational, with encouragement gained from a source outside ourselves: from an emotional power source.

We must be careful, though, not to insist that restored relationships are the immediate solution to every form of discouragement. A post partum depression, for instance, can be traced to the mother’s physical state—a function of chemistry. I also know of some who experience seasonal depressions and need a good sunshine cure.

We also can be discouraged by impersonal circumstances that disrupt our lives—the loss of a job, or some sort of property loss. So let me say from the outset that what follows next must always be an invitation, not a task.

With that said, here is what I came to in preparing my talks: the deepest sorts of discouragement come from broken bonds of love. Courage for life, on the other hand, comes from being loved. To put it in terms of what I’ve written before about God’s being, we are made as transitive beings: designed for relationships in the image of God’s own Triune relationality. Call this the need to love and to be loved. Without both of these we begin to lose our courage for life.

But, on the other hand, in the love the Spirit pours out in our hearts—a love more profound than the superficial romantic and sexually construed love of our culture—we find the ultimate basis for deep encouragement. It offers us a way forward emotionally when darkness wraps its coils around us. Certainly this is what Paul had in mind when he offered some otherwise implausible instructions:

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:4-7)

So the power supply for emotional encouragement is this love of God offered to us by God through Christ and expressed to our hearts by the Spirit.

Some readers are certain to ask, “Is it really that easy? Aren’t we back to humming ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ with this sort of advice.” The answer is, absolutely not.

What makes all the difference is the reality that the “Lord is at hand”—that is, he is immediately concerned with our welfare and alert to our needs. Our requests have someone “on the other end”—God—who is listening to us with a devotion of love for us that was expressed through the cross. It is this relational certainty that brings peace.

That’s not to say that God won’t allow us to experience hard times; or that his love requires him to maintain our personal financial, social, and physical security. What he offers, instead, is the embrace he shares with his Son who died on the cross for our sake. This love is poured out to us by the Spirit so that we begin to have emotional access to it in our activity of rejoicing. Or, to put it another way, we begin to engage God’s reality rather than our own self-absorbed view of life as soon as we begin to tell him how much we delight in him.

This is not a mind-game, either, of saying something we don’t really believe. The point is that the Lord really is at hand, expressing his love to us both through the Scriptures and through the Spirit who is present to us as we read and respond to the Scriptures.

In other words we begin to reciprocate God’s already-present-love once we begin to rejoice. We are simply living out an appropriate response to his many initiatives on our behalf. In rejoicing we find our eyes being opened to see why our rejoicing is so proper and fulfilling. We rediscover worship, and with worship the “transmission line” between our hearts and God’s heart is restored.

So as I’m here in Cambodia, speaking to a wonderful group of believers about encouragement in an emotionally difficult setting, all I’ve done is to make God and his love for us our focus. And although we are just halfway through the retreat we already have some rich measures of new courage instilled in our hearts. And it will only get better. For that we rejoice!

British Professor Colin Gunton caught my attention when he said, “I prefer not to speak of God’s attributes but of his perfections.” He pressed the point by noting that the language of attribution centers on the perceiver rather than on the one perceived. So any attributes suggest our human capacity to assign labels to God on his behalf. Gunton preferred, instead, to use the language of God’s perfections because, while denoting God’s inherent qualities, they suggest our place as responders to God rather than as initiators.

It struck me as a small but appropriate corrective to a human impulse to view and represent God in terms defined more by our interests than by the priorities and emphases of God’s own self-disclosures in the Bible. My question for this entry is whether Gunton’s proposal might be sharpened.

But first we should ask why Gunton even raised the matter. I don’t recall that he offered a reason, but the move suggested a response to an underlying impulse in theology: a human tendency to reshape what we know of God in terms of our own interests. That is, to engage God’s self disclosures as resources for selfish personal benefits.

To engage God as a source of personal benefit is not necessarily wrong, of course, if all we mean to do is ask how we should respond properly to him. But what if sin plays a role in the reshaping process? Augustine, after all, treated sin as self-love—”concupiscence”—and Luther treated it similarly, as a “curving in” on ourselves so that as sinners we perpetually seek to serve ourselves. And assuming that even theologians are fallen—although many are repentant and have grown in real faith—the Fall will still account for a human bias towards domesticating God and his word: of making God into a resource for human self-love. Aaron, for instance, claimed that his golden calf was actually just an image of Yahweh—even as the fallen impulses of the Israelite nation turned this “God” into an excuse to have an unseemly party.

If such a distortion is present even in speaking of God’s attributes, what are the results? One feature is a preference to treat all of God’s self-disclosures as intransitive qualities—whether speaking of them as attributes or as perfections. That is, to treat God as a collection of essential and divine, but non-relational, resources. Take holiness, for instance. If God is seen to be holy, what does that actually mean? If we treat him as a resource, and if we are living as sinfully autonomous (“self-loving”) perceivers, then we may be reshaping God into an infinitely large container of something called holiness.

That is, since by using an intransitive perspective of God we portray him in static terms—as a self-contained essential being—then we, as those made in God’s image, are free to see ourselves as little bits of this intransitive God who also contain some measure of holiness. So, too, we begin to see ourselves as carriers of goodness, love, faithfulness, and so on, to the degree that we draw upon these communicable attributes. God is, in this approach, our Genie and we are the beneficiaries as we rub up against him on Sundays to gather measures of God-ness for ourselves.

But by recognizing that God discloses himself as triune and relational—as the eternal Father-Son-and-Spirit God—we find a transitive and relational being rather than an intransitive monad or singularity defined by a set of essential qualities. And here even Gunton’s proposed language of perfections may fail if the identified perfections do not take on the underlying relationship in which all God’s qualities exist.

Transitivity, after all, speaks to the subject-object or one-and-other state of being that is common to our experience. A transitive verb, for instance, identifies some sort of relationship between two or more objects or actors. To say “I believe you”, for instance, is a transitive sentence. An intransitive verb, by contrast, lacks any relationship. “I am” is intransitive.

Why is this important? For at least two reasons. First, transitivity is inherent to God’s triune, relational being: to the God who spoke, “let us make man in our image”. If we are to maintain our faith in the Father-Son-and-Spirit God then we must adopt language appropriate to that bedrock reality of being.

Second, we must repent of our fixation on a “capacity”-based view both of God and of ourselves. By that I mean our fallen tendency to see personhood mainly as intransitive states of being. If I think of myself, for instance, as constituted by a set of skills, learnings, powers, and purposes, I have actually begun to see myself as a monadic and relatively autonomous self-moved entrepreneur.

Let us turn again to God’s holiness, then. Will it differ to speak of God’s holiness from within the revealed context of his eternal relational being—rather than to speak of his attributes or perfections in static essential terms?

Yes. Holiness must be seen, trinitarianly, not as some ethereal moral quality but as the moral ethos of God’s dynamic mutuality. So that all that has ever existed in God’s eternal, glorious communion has a label: love. And the quality of that love is holiness. That is, nothing unseemly or impure—something inappropriate to God’s mutual, active love—is able to exist in the context of that love.

We must also reengage all of God’s so-called attributes from within the triune insights of biblical theology. For instance, if we speak of God’s immutability, impassibility, omniscience, omnipotence, and so on, what difference does it make if we start the conversation from within the transitivity of God’s eternal triune communion? Frankly I believe we will find some misfits—especially to the degree that Christian theology has assimilated the lists of God’s qualities rooted in Aristotle’s a-relational Metaphysics, all of which are notable for being anchored in an essentially monadic “self-moved mover.”

So I applaud the late Colin Gunton for raising an important question. Our task now is to take it up, while reading our Bibles, to see where it might lead us. My confidence is that the God we begin to describe as a result will be far more attractive than the God represented in some of our current systematic theologies.