Frank

Now, I hope the readers of my “little treatise” on the Trinity and the Subordinationist use of 1 Corinthians 11:3, which I began in Comment #280, will carefully note and remember the following: That in speaking of the Triune God’s eternal, interpersonal and communal relations as “self-giving, self-communicating, or self-affirming,” I do so not in a literal creaturely and material sense but rather in a spiritual anthropomorphic and analogical sense. For I agree with Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, Augustine and John Calvin that not only do the Scriptures themselves use such language to communicate meaningful and significant truth regarding the transcendant, Triune God that is accessible to the finite human mind, but that in our expositions of these same truths, our language must also be used anthropomorphically and analogically, so that these truths regarding the nature and works of the Triune God can be conveyed to our contemporaries in a meaningful and significant way. Otherwise, we will fall back into the old heresies long ago repudiated by the entire Christian Church.

For our present discussion, we will use 1 John 4:9-16 both as a bridge from the previous consideration of the vital link between the consubstantiality (homoousia) and coindwelling (perichoresis) of the Three Persons who are the Triune God, as well as a guide in our examination of some important aspects of our both having a relationship with the Triune God through Christ by the Spirit and in our truly knowing God in Christ and by the Spirit. However, I will not be giving any detailed exegesis per se, but only as such as suggested by main themes to be found in this text. Now 1 John 4:9-16, in the New Living Translation, reads as follows:

9 God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. 10 This is real love–not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to [so] love each other. 12 No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression through us. 13 And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him, and he in us. 14 Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his Son to be Savior of the world. 15 All who confess that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. 16 We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.

Now some things in this text, either as statement or implication, should be obvious to us: God’s love is an out-going love, a sacrifical love, a love for others outside of himself, which moved him, in order to save us who so much needed his redeeming and healing love, sacrificed what was nearest and dearest to his heart, his one and only Son, vv. 9-10. If we truly have been reconciled to God through Christ, and have truly experienced and understood the divine self-giving, sacrificial love that seeks the welfare of others, the proof that we live in God and God in us by the Spirit is manifested by our practicing the same kind of love among one another as those whom God has redeemed and made his own people through his beloved Son, vv. 11-13. And because we have experienced God’s redeeming, sacrifical love in Christ, and because this self-giving, self-sacrificing love is poured out in us and manifested through us by the indwelling Holy Spirit, we in self-giving, sacrifical love declare the good news of redemption and reconciliation through the Son of God, inviting others to join the life-giving fellowship of love that we know and delight in as those now in fellowship with the Triune God and he with us, vv. 14-16.

But what is the theological presuppostion underlying the exposition of the Gospel given by John in this text? I am convinced it is this: Before the Triune God could enter into a loving, self-communicating, self-giving, communal relationship which focused on the welfare of those outside of himself–if such a relationship with us were to be authentic and meaningful, it first had to be grounded in and flow out from a loving, self-communicating, self-giving of Oneself for the welfare of the Others within the Triune God himself. Thomas F. Torrance explains it this way:

The Gospel tells us that God does not choose to live for himself alone, for he has become man in order to seek and save the lost, to bring human beings into reconciling relationship with himself and to share his own divine fellowship with them. And so we learn that the one Being of God is the Being of the Father who did not spare his only Son but freely gave him up in atoning sacrifice for us, and is the Being of the Son who loved us and gave himself for us, and is the Being of the Holy Spirit who for our sakes brings us through himself into communion with the Father and the Son. God’s whole Being as three divine Persons is his Being for others beyond himself, but to his Being for others beyond himself, his Being with us in our human existence in time and space, there corresponds his Being for others within himself, for that is the eternal ground in God for what he is and promises in the Gospel to be for others beyond himself. The eternal ground in God from which there flows his communion-seeking love and grace toward us, is the Communion which the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have among themselves, and let it be repeated, really are. In the Holy Trinity himself, in the mutual indwelling of the three divine Persons, each Person is who he is as Father, Son, or Holy Spirit, in hypostatic and homoousial relation to the Others, and indeed through their one Being, in being who he is for the Others. The Father is not properly the Father apart from the Son and the Spirit, and the Son is not properly the Son apart from the Father and the Spirit, and the Spirit is not properly the Spirit apart from the Father and Son, for by their individual characteristics or distinctive properties as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, they exist in and through one Another and belong to and ever live for each Other. Each Person is intrinsically who he is for the other two. They coinhere in one Another by virtue of their Being for one Another and by virtue of the dynamic Communion which they constitute in their belonging to one Another. Hence in establishing communion with us through his Son and in the Spirit, God wants us to participate in this living Communion which as Father, Son and Holy Spirit he eternally is…The one triune Being of God is to be thought of, then, as essentially and intrinsically a mutual movement of loving self-communication between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, an intensely personal Communion, an ever-living and ever-loving Being, the Being for Others which the three divine Persons have in common (Cf. “One Being, Three Persons,” The Christian Doctrine of God, pp. 132-133).

Furthermore, I am convinced this understanding of the homoousion and perichoresis, as regards the Unity and Diversity of the Triune God and which has been championed by Athanasius, Gregory Nazianzen, John Calvin and Thomas F. Torrance, alone preserves both the Christological and Pneumatic core of the Gospel necessary for our truly knowing and having fellowship with the Triune God as a whole, and for our truly knowing and having fellowship with God the Father in particular. Stanley Grenz comments:

[That] God can only be known by a divine self-disclosure that occurs fully and ultimately only in Jesus Christ led the patristic thinkers to confess that Christ is consubstantial with the Father and to apply the same term to the Holy Spirit as well. In this manner, the term homoousion provided the Church with the theological key that could unlock and bring to explicit formulation the implicit trinitarianism of the New Testament. Because the incarnate Son and the Holy Spirit are of the very same being and nature as God the Father, Torrance argues, God has become truly knowable. More specifically, the concept of the homoousian means that “Jesus Christ is…not a mere symbol, some representation of God detached from God, but God in his own Being and Act among us, expressing in our human form the Word which he is eternally in himself, so that in our relations with Jesus Christ we have to do directly with the ultimate Reality of God.” (Cf. Stanley Grenz, Rediscovering the Triune God: The Trinity in Contemporary Theology, Fortress Press, 2004, p. 208)

Now if I may say so in a guarded way, as suggested earlier above, since the Three Persons of the One Triune God share not only the same divine Being and its attributes, then they must also share a common love-life and mindset, without violating their distinctiveness as the Three Persons. A love-life and mindset which the Holy Spirit himself possesses and participates in, every bit as much as the Father and the Son. And when the Holy Spirit comes to indwell those who confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, and we allow him to reproduce the love-life and mindset of Christ within us, what does he do among us, who form not only the Body of Christ, but also the Living Temple of God himself? He reproduces that mutual loving, that mutual self-communicating, that mutual self-giving for the welfare and full actualization others that marks the inner life of God himself and which he desires to be reproduced in his redeemed people. Moreover, he not only gifts and calls men and women to ministry to one another within the Church (Cf. 1 Jn 4:9-16 with 1 Cor. 12:1-13; Eph. 2:11-22; and Phil. 2:5-11), but because he is of one heart, mind and will with both the Father and the Son, he gifts and calls with their full approval and blessing. That is the truth of God in Christ Jesus.

And I hope what I have said thus far, not only encourages all my brothers and sisters in Christ, but especially those of my sisters who have been hurt by those who have denied their gifting and calling, charged them with being unfaithful to Christ and his Word, and of dishonoring the will and wishes of our Heavenly Father. Not only is this a diabolical lie, which falsely paints our Father as a stingy and overbearing tyrant towards his own daughters, but also denies our Lord’s own teaching on this very subject. For did not our Lord Jesus himself teach us this about the Father’s free and generous gift of love, the Holy Spirit, for all of us: “You fathers–if your children ask for a fish, do you give then a snake instead? Or if they ask for an egg, do you give a scorpion? Of course not! So if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him” (Luke 11:11-13, NLT).

Cheryl, it looks like I’ll have to do one more “little treatise” to adequately with the past and present Anti-trinitarian and subordinationist use of 1 Cor. 11:3 itself. I hope you will pardon me and grant me a further dispensation to complete this task. But I wanted to give as full and positive exposition of the truly biblical and orthodox Doctrine of the Trinity as I could, before moving on to what will be a necessary, though not enjoyable critique. Thanks