I find myself busy these days with other writing duties, so I needed to rely on a guest to meet my goal of offering a weekly entry here. And, as regular readers well know, the change of voice that comes with guest entries can be very satisfying. Mark is one of my favorite people and a delightful contributor to this site. This week he speaks to an issue all of us will recognize from hard experience. May we all pay close attention to his gentle reminder!  RNF

I had the privilege last night to listen to a very good friend of mine address a group of young adults regarding what it means to be in community.  It was a tremendous message and everyone was refreshed by his care and wisdom with the Word of God.   

As one of his illustrations he spoke of an author and accomplished scholar who had taught at Harvard and Yale.  The author shared that his participation in the inner circle of academia amounted to a constant performance.  To spend time in such settings was to be in a room full of strangers who found utility in each other—with each required to fulfill a unique and beneficial role for the others.  He realized that this elite circle was actually defined by exclusion—by who was not in it—so that inclusion demanded a constant effort to prove that you were still worthy to be there. 

I don’t exist in such rarified air as that man, but I understand what he was saying.  I lived my professional life before I met Christ in exactly that way—and sadly, too much of my life since then, as well.  I have become comfortable, even adept, in the room full of strangers.  How many men and women live in communities defined by such performance?  How many people, even within their marriages, feel that rejection lies just beyond their next failure?   What kind of community can exist in places where each day brings not a greater sense of intimacy, but a new opportunity to fail to live up to previously set expectations?  I know this world all too well! 

It is not out of the ordinary to see such circles in the workplace.  Such places require skills and contributions to keep the commerce going and gainful.  It would be foolish to expect such places to disregard performance (or lack thereof) in favor of a feeling of community.   Stewardship to the owners and the customers requires more of such enterprises.  But when the family, or the church, or the communities of love and interest devolve into such elite inner circles, something precious is lost.  Each person’s need to be part of something bigger than themselves—and to be accepted and loved just as they are—is lost. 

When we meet the first two inhabitants of the Garden of Eden in Genesis they are amazingly “self-unaware.”  They were assigned some wonderful tasks in line with the exploration and care of God’s creation.  They found purpose in the fulfillment of what God had given them to do, what He equipped them to do, and what He encouraged them to do in daily discourse.  It is hard to imagine them going through emotional crises of self-loathing and doubt.  They existed to be in fellowship.  They bore God’s own image—as does all of humanity.  That image is characterized by a special relational identity: “male and female He created them.” 

By contrast we now live in a world that exalts the self—the rugged, contract-making, self-sufficient individual.  Such individuals, we imagine, form gradually improving quid-pro-quo relationships with other individuals of substance in order to ascend the ladder of success.  We worship the image of the self-made men. Yet no such man really exists.  Regardless of the prowess of our intellect or our appeal, we owe our place in this world to the grace and the sacrifice of others.  None of us can honestly define ourselves outside of a myriad of relationships, regardless of the self-image we worship.   We are relational at our core.   We say, “I think, therefore I am,” as though the declaration makes it so.  But the truth of the matter is, “I am loved, therefore I am.” 

None of us, then, exists apart from a loving, creative act of God.  He loves us despite our fallenness and He made provision for us because of the fallenness and He invites us to come into the only relationship that has eternal significance.  And when we enter into that relationship, the doors open for genuine relationships beyond anything we could ever have imagined.  When we turn away from the allure of the world, we lose those things that are held by the power of the world.  But we gain everything.  “Jesus said, ‘Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life.” (Mark 10:29-30). The room full of strangers that demands performance gives way to a room full of brothers and sisters in the household of God.  It is Heaven on Earth. 

I forget that reality more often than I remember it.  Today I took a walk on the beach.  In Oregon at this time of year the beach is blustery and cold.  Actually, it is that way for much of the summer as well.  The waves are unsettled and wild.  As I looked at them crashing the shore I thought of how inhospitable this corner of the world can seem to the uninitiated.  This is not the sandy beach of summer dreams! 

Then the sun broke through the clouds in a burst of glory.  Above me, gliding on the wind effortlessly, were dozens of gulls.  It was a scene of peace above the tumult of the sea. The churning sea served the gulls a daily buffet of creatures and dead things for them to feast upon.  They were wonderfully cared for by their Creator.  They rode above the tide with one another—not one of them wondering if they belonged in this stream of the wind alongside the others—their identity was assured by their assigned place in nature. 

When I leave the rooms full of strangers, I am thankful for a home where I can return to find those who will receive me in love regardless of how I have performed; a place where I belong.  I am thankful for friends, like the one who spoke a blessing into my life while he shared a message with young men and women about what it means to be in community.  Having such a friend is a precious thing.  Having many of them is heavenly.

This weekend I felt like a prophet of gloom and doom as I led retreat participants in a study of Habakkuk. Why Habakkuk? Because this brief oracle and its attached prayer engages the question of God and human sin at an epic level that we all need to grasp.

Habakkuk, we remember, was told of God’s plan to discipline sinful Judea with a devastating invasion by the Chaldeans. We know from other Bible content and general history that the prophecy was fulfilled as promised and led to a seventy year national exile for Jewish captives. But what does Habakkuk teach us today as those who are not facing a God-pronounced invasion?

At a minimum it prepares us to respond by faith to national and international tragedies, whether old or new, with a certainty that God’s hand is present and the events remain under his control. For the Jews in Habakkuk’s day the impact of the events would have been on the order of the great disruptions of our own last century—of World Wars I & II. In both ancient and modern times wars shatter societies: any sense of personal or national security is disrupted. Wherever the immediate conflict takes place the results are horrifying. I can think, for instance, of bas-relief images of a besieged Judean city on display in the British Museum that depict the gruesome warfare of that era. They would compare in violence with photos taken during recent wars.

Let us recall the particulars. The oracle begins as Habakkuk charged God with being passive in the face of Judea’s violent sins—”Why do you make me see iniquity, and why do you idly look at wrong?” God came back with a shocking reply, that the ungodly Chaldean army would be his instrument to confront that sin: “they [the Chaldeans] fly like an eagle swift to devour. They all come for violence, all their faces forward” [1:2,8&9]. Judea, a small nation once known for its affiliation with God as his “chosen people” would soon be crushed by this cruel superpower.

Habakkuk was stunned. God’s judgment was over the top—completely disproportionate and inappropriate for a God of his moral stature! He told God as much: “You who are of purer eyes than to see evil . . . why do you idly look at traitors and remain silent when the wicked swallow up the man more righteous than he?” [1:13] Habakkuk, we notice, had become a moral relativist. Judea, once tagged by the prophet as “wicked” [1:4] was now “more righteous” than the Chaldeans!

God responded with a confrontation and five “woes” and then ended the dialog. In his response God ignored Habakkuk’s sliding moral scale—of the less righteous and the “more righteous”—and set out, instead, just two types of people [2:4]: those who are “puffed up” and the one who is “righteous” because he lives “by his faith.” Just two types of humanity? Yes, just two: the arrogant who are quick to charge God with error—as Habakkuk had just done—and those who trust God. Which will it be?

That simple moral polarity has since echoed through history. The apostle Paul took on God’s challenge in Habakkuk as the launching text of his letter to the Romans: “The righteous shall live by faith” [1:17] and he repeated it in his letter to the Galatians [3:12] as a counterpoint to any forms of self-righteousness. The author of Hebrews also cited this text [10:38] as the measure of those who please God. For Martin Luther the use in Romans of Habakkuk 2:4 was key to his own calling as he set out “faith alone” as a sign of true reformation. In each case the later writers understood the stark issues at stake: human pride always defies God’s word; either that or a person repents.

In his closing prayer Habakkuk announced his own response: he would trust God even in the face of the coming army—”my legs tremble beneath me. Yet I will quietly wait for the day of trouble to come upon people who invade us. Though the fig tree should not blossom . . . and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the LORD; I will take joy in the God of my salvation” [3:16,18]

Habakkuk offers at a national level what the book of Job offers at a personal level: a divine disclosure that God rules over evil yet without initiating that evil. As in Genesis 50:20, with a nod to Romans 8:28, Satan and his human servants can purpose events that are evil but God’s good purposes will always be at work even in those evil events. The difference between Job’s suffering and the promised suffering of Judea was that Job was blameless and Judea was guilty. Job was stretched; Judea would be disciplined.

What both books also share in common is God’s confrontation of the fallen human instinct to judge him. He dismisses Satan’s promise to Adam and Eve that by adopting a free will “you will be like God, knowing good and evil” [Genesis 3:5]. Their sin was to grasp at the status of God—to attempt to weigh God’s character with their personal scale of right and wrong. In Adam God must now answer to us and to our sliding scales of morality.

In Job God answered his struggling servant—who in his suffering challenged God’s fairness—with the same issue of Habakkuk: where do you stand on human pride? He asked Job to answer him: “Pour out the overflowing of your anger, and look on everyone who is proud and abase him. Look on everyone who is proud and bring him low” [40:11-12]. For all his complaints Job was most unlike God because he could not move a proud heart into humility—even his own. That is a miracle that God alone can manage.

If we can say anything in response to Habakkuk’s little book it should be this: “rejoice in the LORD.” No matter what comes our way in days to come—whether personal tragedies, economic collapse, or even foreign invasion—we are called to live by faith. Adam unleashed sin in the human experience, spurred on by Satan and his minions, and God now allows the sloshing of sin that fills the world—through those who are puffed up rather than living by faith—and he tells us to trust him, no matter how that sin spills over us. The evil day will eventually end; and the day when the faithful and the truly righteous are honored will come soon enough.

In the meantime let us read books like Habakkuk and Job, and then trust God no matter what comes. God knows best and he loves us. Let all of us who have faith in this God—who always overcomes evil with good—share a proper response: let us rejoice!

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!