Chapter 3. I Believe in…One God, the Father.
Apostle’s Creed: "I believe in God the Father Almighty;”
Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God the Father Almighty,”
The Creeds begin with these important affirmations about God.
1. There is One God.
2. He is Father.
3. He is Almighty.
These are important affirmations and we need to examine each of them.
However before we do this we will look briefly at the way God has been traditionally understood.
Traditional Thinking about God.
There were three main stages to Greek thinking about God:
1. The move from polytheistic mythology to a belief in a supreme god.
In this step the Greek thinkers had a revulsion against the pagan ideas of divinity which had been popular until that time. The “gods” were traditionally seen to be jealous, always fighting, immoral, etc. The general picture was that the “gods” were just like men, only on a grander scale. The early philosophers rejected this concept. Rather, they thought, God must be as unlike us as we can imagine him to be. Hence God was defined by the following sort of criteria:
1. We are weak, powerless – God must be all powerful, omnipotent.
2. We are ignorant – God must know all, be omniscient.
3. We are limited in time and space – God must be omnipresent and timeless.
4. We are controlled by raging emotional passions –God must be apathetic, emotionless.
5. We are bound by earth – God must never come into contact with earth. He is holy, separate.
6. We are many – God must be one.
And so on.
This has become the a priori idea of God that is held in the Western world, and it has nothing to do with the Christian revelation, it comes from
2. The Development of Monotheism.
The second stage of Greek thinking went further than this. Having established the idea of “one God” there were developed “proofs” of this “one God”. The classical proofs of God are:
(a) The Cosmological Argument.
The Argument from the existence of the universe.
Has several forms. It argues that everything in existence has a cause, and the universe itself must have an adequate cause that must be infinitely great.
(b) The Ontological Argument.
The Argument from Knowledge.
Has various forms. It argues that man has the idea of a perfect being, and as we could not have got that idea from ourselves it must have come from that perfect being himself who revealed it to us.
(c) The Teleological Argument.
The Argument from Design.
The world reveals intelligence, order, harmony and purpose. These must have a cause implying a rational, intelligent, purposeful being.
(d) The Moral Argument.
The Argument from Morality.
The universe operates by laws. This implies a lawgiver. This must extend into the area of morals and man must be responsible to this lawgiver.
(e) The Historical or Ethnological Argument.
The Argument from Religion.
Among all the peoples of the world is a sense of the divine that reveals itself in religious practice. This can only be explained with the idea that there is a higher being who has made man to be a religious being.
(f) The Argument from Intellect.
C.S. Lewis argues that the fact that man has an intellect is proof of God. He argues this from the vantage that man's intellect is clearly dependent in that when we sleep we become unaware of it, but it re-appears immediately we awake. The argument is skilfully worked out and he demonstrates that man's intellect must be dependent on a higher intellect, i.e. the Maker of intelligence, i.e. God.
(g) The Experiential Argument.
The Argument from Personal Experience.
If we follow his directions he reveals himself to us. A man with an experience of God is never at the mercy of men with arguments.
3. Defining the One God.
The Third stage to Greek thinking was an attempt to define WHAT this God was like. The culmination of this thought was found in Aristotle, who came up with the idea of the “Unmoved Mover”.
The end result was that "God", that is his essence, was thought to be substantially defined by philosophy. We are "given" an understanding of "God" that is foundational to our understanding in the Western World.
4. Problems with this approach:
1. Later philosophers have reasonably successfully eliminated the "Proofs" as being valid arguments. Probably the Sceptic Hume did the most damage here. Though we, as Christians, may feel that we would like to accept some, or all, of them as pointers to the existence of God they, in reality, carry no weight as proofs.
2. How useful is this philosophic approach? We can only answer this by asking another question: "What sort of God do we end up with as a result of this approach?"
When we ask this question, and compare the answer with the God revealed to us in Christ, we see the futility of this method of approach (see below).
3. What is revealed in the Bible is made to fit into this "given" understanding.
This approach is directly in contradiction to scripture that clearly states that God is only known "through Christ". Christ is the revelation of God. The logical conclusion of the philosophic approach, if true, is that God can be known without Christ, thus the incarnation and cross would be unnecessary.
The apostle Paul, a man well versed in Greek thought, summed up the results of this thinking in three verses:
Romans 1:23 “Claiming to be wise they became fools”.
1 Corinthians 1:21 “The world in its wisdom did not know God”.
Ephesians 2:12 “Without hope and without God in this world.”
It is at this point that Karl Barth reacted the traditional approach. There can be no knowledge of God apart from Christ - of this Barth is absolutely certain. Any claim that there is must therefore be false.
Karl Barth:
“God cannot be known by the powers of human knowledge, but is known only by his own freedom, decision and action. Man can conceive of a supreme being, but he has not thereby thought God. God is thought and known only when he makes himself apprehensible. Knowledge of God is not a possibility that is open for discussion.”
The Fathers of the Church in framing the Nicene Creed were of similar opinion:
“Nicene theologians contrasted these two approaches to God:
1. From his Son - i.e. from his own nature.
2. From his works - i.e. from what he has made out of nothing in complete difference from his nature.
If we start from nature to understand God (as in Greek philosophy) then the following consequences are inevitable:
1. When we start (from nature) we can only think and speak of him in vague, general and negative terms, only about his absolute separation from us. This approach does not really tell us anything about who God is or what he is like in his own nature.
Gregory Nazianzus:
“If we cannot say anything positive about what God is, we really cannot say anything accurate about what he is not.”
2. We inevitably come to think of the Son himself as one of God's created works, thus to think and speak of God in a way it is not personally grounded in God himself, but in an impersonal way far removed from what he is in himself.
3. If we go this way, trying to reach knowledge of God from some point outside of God, we are inevitably flung back upon ourselves, in the last resort it is our own opinion what we think about both the Son and the Father.
Athanasius argued that it was more accurate to approach God as Father through the Son, than to approach him through his works and by tracing them back to him as their uncreated source. “Piety and truth belong together in authentic knowledge of God through Jesus Christ his Son…”
The Church Fathers went on to say:
“This approach (from nature) is self-willed and not devout, nor is it accurate…God may only be known out of himself, i.e. by revelation, and this is what happens in Jesus Christ his Son…
“If we are to have knowledge of God we must be given a point of access to him that is both in God himself and in our creaturely existence this is what we have in the incarnation. It is only with the incarnation of the Son that true knowledge of God has been brought within the range of our human understanding in a positive way.”
“The relation of Father/Son was seen by the Council as central and also as primary over the creator/creation relation. Creation was to be understood in the light of the Father/Son relation and not vica versa…”
This is the difference between revelation and philosophy. Philosophy can only give us a god who is our own ideas, distant from us, unknown and unknowable. Revelation puts us in direct contact with God as he is in himself.
The God of Philosophy vs The God of Christ.
We only have to compare the end products of the two ideas of God to see that the god of philosophy is in no way related to the God revealed in the Bible through Christ.
The highest point of thinking in Greek philosophy, which is where we must end up if we travel this route, is Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover”.
| Aristotle. Cannot touch material realm. Apathetic. Solitary in mathematical Unity. The opposite of everything we are. Cannot Change. Cannot hear, speak, etc. Cannot act. Unmoved. Impersonal. | God in Christ. Became incarnate. Cares, Loves, Gets angry, A Trinity in Communion. Man is God's image. We are told that God changes his mind. Communicates with us. Answers prayer. Active. Intensely Personal. |
There are many other comparisons we could make but these are sufficient to show the results of the philosophic quest for God are nothing but a futility. It is a creating of a god "after our own image", or in this case, in the exact opposite image to what we are.
If this is the result of the philosophic approach then we can clearly see it is a dead end, and is not a road worth going up in the first place.
It is striking that when we pick up most Western handbooks on theology that this is, in fact, where they begin. God is “proved” by philosophy, then his nature defined by a theology grounded in this philosophy. Eventually Christ is added into the picture – but only after sin has been discussed! Christ is not seen to be the revelation of God, but the answer to the problem of man’s sin. The result of this sort of theology is that we end up with a distorted view of who God is, not seen through the revelation of God in Christ, but through the enterprise of the minds of men.
The Relevance of Apologetics.
There is a division of Christian learning called "Apologetics".
This term comes from the Greek word meaning "To make a defense" and is a legal word coming from the law courts.
The aim of Apologetics is usually seen to be to attempt to show the reasonableness of Christian teaching.
In the early Church Apologetics centred on creating an intellectual defense of the essential propositions of the Christian message, the incarnation, Trinity, resurrection, etc. Indeed the task of the theologian was (and still is) apologetics, the making of the Christian message clear and understandable in the culture where it was being preached. In this sense all true theology is apologetics.
In the modern sense Apologetics has become the attempt to prove the essential propositions of the Bible from a rational (i.e. Enlightenment) point of view. This is an entirely different enterprise. What is being attempted here, amongst other things, is a philosophic activity to prove the existence of God. As we have already seen this is a futile exercise, primarily because it ends up not proving God, but "proving" the possibility of some divine being of our own definition. It does not, and cannot, demonstrate the existence of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ - for the simple reason that this God is only known in and through Christ.
This approach is an attempt to "prove" Christianity "scientifically" and is a quest for God based on Enlightenment presuppositions. It can only be a dead end as these presuppositions rule God out of the picture in the first place, as we have already discussed in chapter 2.
Christian Thinking about God.
1. God is One.
Christianity is what is called a monotheistic religion. By this we mean that we believe that there is only one God. Conviction of this truth was given to the
Exodus 3:14 “Yahweh asher Yahweh”, “I am that I am”.
I.e. Yahweh who creates/brings into being".
Yahweh alone is God - all others are forbidden from the beginning.
Yahweh has no rivals - he is the creator of all things without intermediary or assistance, no pantheon or consort, hence no myth developed. If Yahweh is creator of all, then all other is not God by very definition.
He does have a heavenly host - his angels.
Is the Hebrew belief monotheism?
Monotheism implies no other gods exist.
Thus it is not monotheism in a philosophical sense but it was a practical monotheism.
How did
Deuteronomy 6:4. “The Lord your God is one.”
In both Greek and Hebrew thought the only real kind of unity understood was the mathematical type, i.e. free from internal complexity. God was popularly thought of and worshipped as one numerically.
However the Hebrew language has two different words for “one”. The first means “mathematical oneness” the other means “a unity made up of parts”. This second is used in Genesis 2:24 where it describes how husband and wife, “two”, are “one”. It is this Hebrew word that is regularly used to describe God as “one”. So there is a hint that mathematical unity is not what was intended, even if that was what was popularly understood.
The idea of God in the
Because of its roots in Judaism the Church could not be anything other than monotheistic.
Greek philosophy also held monotheism was an intellectual necessity - Monism.
Thus the church was compelled to be monotheistic from two directions.
However, the divine revelation had been given in the divine action in Christ and the Spirit. What the Church had to do was grasp the significance of this revelation for the doctrine of God. The revelation in Christ demanded a revision of:
1. The theological idea of God.
2. The philosophical idea of unity/one.
The idea of mathematical oneness was such as to make reconciliation impossible if the full weight was to be given to the empirical evidence of the Christian revelation. Either the idea of oneness had to change or the revelation had to go. Both ideas could not coexist. The heresies of the first 500 years were all attempts the deal with this question: “How do we understand God in the light of Christ?” Each heresy falls into one of two errors – either it stuck to a mathematical idea of “one” so rejected the divinity of Christ, or it implicitly rejected monotheism, ending up with some form of Tri-Theism. The
The doctrine of the Trinity is not absurd because the idea of unity has two different senses - neither of which is metaphorical - the mathematical sense and the internally constitutive sense. It can be predicated of God in both senses. The idea that the Fathers of the Church committed the Church to an absurdity springs from a confusion of thought whereby the criteria of one definition of “one” is applied to the other definition of “one” where it is out of place. We shall discuss this at the appropriate place in the blog.
2. God is Father.
The revelation given to the Church is that God is Father. We see this clearly in that Christ lived in relation to God as a Son. If he was a Son then he shared in the same nature as his Father. This immediately fronts us with several realities about God. These realities are part of the essential nature of God. They are not “add ons” but are the crux of the matter. They are the essence of what and who God is and what God has been for all eternity. They are:
1. God is personal.
2. God is not alone.
3. God is Father.
Explanation:
“Father” is a title, a functional position, belonging to a person. When the Bible uses the word “Father” it is not referring to the process of sexual reproduction, but to the function and office of Fatherhood by which character is transmitted.
It is the very essence of God that he is Father. Fatherhood is not an incidental add-on to the nature of God, a function or office he takes on when he feels like it, or that he took on at a particular point of time or eternity. The Church has always understood that Fatherhood is the very nature and essence of God.
Athanasius argues for this in the following way:
1. The revelation of God through Christ in history must be our guide to understanding of who God is (This is our reference point).
2. Christ saves us from our sins. (This is the great fact of Christian experience).
3. But only God can save us from our sins (This is axiomatic).
4. Therefore Christ must be God (A logical conclusion as we know forgiveness through Christ).
5. However it is evident that God is “the God of Christ”. Thus there is something in God that Christ is not. Christ is not the “fullness of God” in the sense that he reveals a complexity in God, a multiplicity of “persons”.
6. The gospel history reveals that Christ stands in relation to God as a Son to a Father.
7. Thus God is shown in the earthly life of Christ to be Father, and Christ his Son, and the Spirit his power.
8. Christ is the incarnation of the pre-existent Logos.
9. If Christ were only “Son”, i.e. God, in his incarnation, and not in his pre-existent state as Logos, then he would not be God at all, for God is eternal and the Logos would also have to be God, and thus eternal, for Christ to be truly divine. Otherwise he could not save us from our sins. Thus the personalities we see in the historical revelation are not just modes of the one being, but real persons with eternal distinctions.
10. This led Athanasius to a general principle that became the basis of understanding the Trinity:
The relationships and actions of the divine persons
as seen in the historical life of Christ (i.e. the economy)
must be the same as the relations and actions
of the divine persons in eternity (i.e. in their essence/nature).
If this is not so, Athanasius argued, then what we see in Christ in the incarnation is not really a manifestation of God, so God is not revealed in Christ, and Christ cannot save us from our sins.
11. Thus the relationships seen in the economy exactly correspond to the relationships of God in his essence.
12. God is revealed in Christ as “Father”, thus Fatherhood is the very essence and nature of God. Also Christ is revealed as “Son”, thus his relationship to the Father in eternity was and is that of "Son".
How this works out in Trinitarian theology we will see later, but the key point here is for us to see that in his very nature, his essential being, God is Father. And this is an eternal feature of his nature.
Thus it is clear that:
1. God is essentially a person.
2. God cannot be alone, neither now nor in eternity past as:
a. Personality requires other personalities to relate to, and
b. Being the Eternal Father implies an Eternal Son.
3. The very essence of God is that he is Eternal Father.
This lead to a revision of the Greek philosophical idea of “essence”. Prior to the Christian revelation “god” was philosophically seen to be the essence of all there was. “Essence” was some kind of primeval "goo" that was the underlying reality beneath everything else, a sort of eternal bog out of which everything else emerged. This is the common view of Monistic religions such as Hinduism.
The Christian Church redefined what “essence” meant when it defined the nature of God. “Essence” was redefined as "personality". Thus the Church was making a bold statement which attacked the very foundations of knowledge and understanding of ultimate reality.
The understanding of the Church is that ultimate reality is a Person – God the Father, thus personality is the most valuable thing in the universe. This is the ground of the Christian understanding of the value of the individual, and gives the individual immeasurable value.
This has tremendous implications for us today. Western philosophy, grounded in materialism, has no theoretical basis by which it can give value to the individual. Individual value and rights are assumed to be true, but there is no ground for that belief.
Materialistic evolution identifies humankind as just an advanced form of peat bog, and thus we have no reason to value individuals who we perceive as having no value. This was the conclusion Polanyi came to watching the atrocities of the communist revolution in
This is where Modern Scientism ends up: People are expendable, the system and its vision are what is important. People are, after all, not the ultimate reality.
Christianity offers a radically different worldview right here: Personality is the fundamental thing in the universe and so individual personalities have ultimate value. And this value is grounded in the fact that God is personal.
3. God is Love.
Having established that God is One and God is Father in relation to the Son and Spirit, the Church then asked, “What is the nature of this relationship?” Clearly the answer was to be found in the revelation of God in Christ. What we see there is a relationship of absolute love and trust, perfect communion between the Father, Son and Spirit. We shall look more at this when we discuss the Trinity, but for now we only need to stress that the nature of the eternal God is revealed in the Economy, thus the Eternal Nature of God is that God is Love.
4. What God is not.
Most people have a belief in God, but that belief has the fundamental idea that God is a judge. This is the foundational belief of every religion except Christianity. Every religion assumes that somehow at the end of life there is a judgement and this is inescapable. It is only in Christ that we know that God is Love and that judgement can be escaped. If we try to approach God through nature, philosophy or conscience (i.e. religion) we will always end up with the idea that God is Judge. What can be discovered of God in this broken world can only lead us to this conclusion. This world is unfair, so her must be a judgement ro right the wrongs of this life.
However the Christian revelation declares that God is, in his very Essence, Love, and in that essence judgement has no place. God is judge, but this is not in the same sense that God is Love. The difference can be described as follows:
Love is the very essence of God; it is that which makes up who he is. God is Love.
Judgement is a function God has had to take on because of the sin of mankind, because of the need for a moral universe. Before sin came into existence God was not a judge, but he was Love; after the last judgement God will no longer be judge, but he will still be Love. Thus Love is eternal and part of the essence of God; judgement is temporary and not part of the essence, the “Real Stuff of God”.
This has important implications for us in our relationship with God. We must approach God, in the first instance, with an awareness of his judgement of our sins. We, however, do not get freedom from these by pleading on his justice, but on his love as shown in Christ. Once we have passed our sin onto Christ an amazing thing happens – through the death of Christ we are translated into the
