Son as Camp Adjutant

I wonder if we might think of the relationship between Father and Son as somewhat analogous to that between the Overall Leader of Camp and the Adjutant?

Exactly what heresies that initially suggests to your mind will of course depend on how your camp is run and on the sins and foibles of overall leader and adjutant!

The Overall Leader and the Adjutant are ontologically equal, yet the Overall leader has a functional authority. The Adjutant exercises rule on behalf of the overall leader and runs all things for him.

Another way of saying this might be that the Son is the Executive Officer of the Trinity who carries out all the will of the Father in the power of the Spirit.

Happy Trinity Sunday!

In a post prompted by Mr Daniel Newman on the Facebook, a very happy Trinity Sunday!

In celebration, here is the Athanasian Creed, which the Prayer Book directs should be said today (as well as on some other festivals).

Written in Latin this creed was used in the West since the 6th Century. It is not now thought to have been written by Athanasius the Great of Alexandria (c. AD 293 – May 2, 373) who defended orthodoxy at the Council of Nicea in AD 325.

1. Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is necessary that he hold the catholic faith;
2. Which faith except every one do keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.
3. And the catholic faith is this: That we worship one God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity;
4. Neither confounding the persons nor dividing the substance.
5. For there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Spirit.
6. But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit is all one, the glory equal, the majesty coeternal.
7. Such as the Father is, such is the Son, and such is the Holy Spirit.
8. The Father uncreated, the Son uncreated, and the Holy Spirit uncreated.
9. The Father incomprehensible, the Son incomprehensible, and the Holy Spirit incomprehensible.
10. The Father eternal, the Son eternal, and the Holy Spirit eternal.
11. And yet they are not three eternals but one eternal.
12. As also there are not three uncreated nor three incomprehensible, but one uncreated and one incomprehensible.
13. So likewise the Father is almighty, the Son almighty, and the Holy Spirit almighty.
14. And yet they are not three almighties, but one almighty.
15. So the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God;
16. And yet they are not three Gods, but one God.
17. So likewise the Father is Lord, the Son Lord, and the Holy Spirit Lord;
18. And yet they are not three Lords but one Lord.
19. For like as we are compelled by the Christian verity to acknowledge every Person by himself to be God and Lord;
20. So are we forbidden by the catholic religion to say; There are three Gods or three Lords.
21. The Father is made of none, neither created nor begotten.
22. The Son is of the Father alone; not made nor created, but begotten.
23. The Holy Spirit is of the Father and of the Son; neither made, nor created, nor begotten, but proceeding.
24. So there is one Father, not three Fathers; one Son, not three Sons; one Holy Spirit, not three Holy Spirits.
25. And in this Trinity none is afore or after another; none is greater or less than another.
26. But the whole three persons are coeternal, and coequal.
27. So that in all things, as aforesaid, the Unity in Trinity and the Trinity in Unity is to be worshipped.
28. He therefore that will be saved must thus think of the Trinity.
29. Furthermore it is necessary to everlasting salvation that he also believe rightly the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
30. For the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is God and man.
31. God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the worlds; and man of substance of His mother, born in the world.
32. Perfect God and perfect man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh subsisting.
33. Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.
34. Who, although He is God and man, yet He is not two, but one Christ.
35. One, not by conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of that manhood into God.
36. One altogether, not by confusion of substance, but by unity of person.
37. For as the reasonable soul and flesh is one man, so God and man is one Christ;
38. Who suffered for our salvation, descended into hell, rose again the third day from the dead;
39. He ascended into heaven, He sits on the right hand of the Father, God, Almighty;
40. From thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
41. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies;
42. and shall give account of their own works.
43. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.
44. This is the catholic faith, which except a man believe faithfully he cannot be saved.

1st and 2nd

C. S. Lewis argued that the medieval mind was preoccupied with the idea of hierarchy and equality, order and unity. Put the first things first, they thought, and the second things will follow naturally. Put the second things first and the first things will be lost.

We might think of the Father and the Son, the King of Kings and under-kings as His servants, Creator and creation, the Giver and his gifts.

As long as you choose rightly, you don't have to choose. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these things will be added to you.

Half-gods have their own God-given excellence, but you mustn't make them "God". We don't have to throw out silver to make room for gold, but don't put silver in gold's place.

(see Michael Ward, Planet Narnia, OUP 2008, pp134-137)

Trinity & Eldership

Do you think that the doctrine of the Trinity implies that each local church should ideally have 3 Elders?

And do you think the nature of the Father and the relations of the persons suggests that there should be some kind of "lead" Elder?

Goodness, Truth, Beauty

Goodness - God Himself - Father
Truth - God's Word - Son
Beauty - God's Works - Spirit

?

Jottings on the Trinity

Here are some notes on a single sheet of A4 (as a Word document) about the Trinity along with some creedal statements about the Trinity (Apostles, Nicene, Athanasian Creeds, Chalcedonian Definition & some of the 39 Articles).

We said the Athanasian Creed at out midweek meeting yesterday. According to the Book of Common Prayer, of course, we should say it in church 13 times a year, including on Christmas Day, Epiphany, Ascension, Whitsun, Trinity Sunday.

The Son: Equal but Different

This ought to be at the front of my mind, of course, and Mike Ovey would be ashamed of my need to ask, but given that I never studied Christian Doctrine properly (!), I wonder if you could give this the once over for orthodoxy. I'm thinking of preaching this kind of thing on Sunday morning with as few big words as possible.

(1) The Son is ontologically and essentially equal to the Father

(2) The Son is enternally relationally subordinate to the Father. This relational subordination is both according to his nature as Son and voluntary.

(3) According to his human nature, the Incarnate Son is inferior to the Father.

This "equality but difference" provides a model for the submission of wives to husbands in marriage and of members to elders in the church.

Elohim - "the gods is"

With a nervous feeling about my lack of Hebrew…

I don’t remember ever coming across this before:

Donald Macleod points out that the name most commonly used of God in the Old Testament, Elohim, is plural, although when used of God it is always used with singular verbs and adjectives. Macleod says it is as if we were to say, “The gods is”. Macleod argues that God had good reason for calling himself Elohim and that it “fits beautifully with the fact that in him there is a fullness of fellowship. The New Testament disclosure of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is the best, and possibly the only, explanation of God giving himself a plural name.” (p13)

Shared Life: The Trinity and the Fellowship of God’s People (Christian Focus, 1994)

Preaching the Trinity

God willing, I'll be preaching on the doctrine of the Trinity on Trinity Sunday morning (18/5/08).

Any tips or pointers to resources / sermons, esp. free ones on line, gratefully received.

What do you think the most important things to say are?

What are the leading practical applications of the doctrine of the Trinity?

I've chosen John 17:1-26 as the reading, but I guess that isn't immutable.

In the evening the vicar is planning to preach on 'Why the Trinity?' using 1 Peter 1:1-2 but I don't know in detail what he intends to say.

I've got hold of Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity in Scripture, History, Theology and Worship (P&R, 2004) and I'm hoping to spend some time with that in my preparation. His part 4 deals with some "Critical Issues":

The Trinity and the Incarnation

The Trinity, Worship, and Prayer

The Trinity, Creation, and Missions

The Trinity and Persons

Trinity, Community, Relationship, Mission and Ministerial Formation

Maybe if we are thinking about how the theological resources of the doctrine of the Trinity can be related to ministerial formation (as I am a bit) maybe relatedness and relationships are highlighted. Ministerial formation is at its best when it is in an ordered community of love, like the Triune life of God himself.

May we say that in the Triune life the Son and the Spirit are "formed" for mission since they are sent out into the world?

By the way, when I was talking about things to mention in the ministerial formation essay I'm working on, I think it may be an unspoken marking criterion that no essay which fails to include the phrase "missio Dei" may be awarded a grade above a lower second (or whatever that is on some new fangled marking scale). Oh for the days of alpha, betta, betta, query minus!

Probably Incoherent Trinitarian Musings

An interesting discussion on the way back from vicar training last night around things Trinitarian, such as, should we begin with the one-ness or the three-ness and how do we best describe the unity and diversity in the Godhead. I’m not quite sure where all this got us and if we avoided heresy, but it was stimulating to talk about it and perhaps worth revisiting some rambling thoughts here to see if I’ve got any of it straight in my own head! It made me wish I’d been in Rev’d Dr Mike Ovey’s Trinity Lectures. It’s a shame we so quickly get into foreign words like hypostasis, substantia and ousia and that East and West didn’t seem to understand one another. Corrections welcome.

It seemed to me my interlocutor wasn’t the greatest fan of talking of one substance as the basis of unity. I can understand that there are dangers in thinking of some extra substance of goodness that stands behind the Persons and makes them God. My friend wanted to describe the unity of the persons of the Godhead and their divinity in terms of relationships.

However, it seems to me we need something more than relationships to ground the unity – and that we can usefully describe what it means to be divine or the One God of the Bible (such as uncreated) without necessarily having to talk of persons and relations. I guess mutual indwelling (perichorisis) – relationship language – does help us out in describing the unity. We could also say something about agreement of purpose and will, but it seems to me that we also need to talk of shared attributes.

As I had understood it, the relationships between the members of the Trinity ground their distinctiveness. The Son is all that the Father is except Father, and so on. You could say this strong statement of unity actually emphasises relationships since it is the relationships alone that are highlighted as distinguishing the persons. It is the relationship of eternal begetting / begottenness that makes the Son the Son and not the Father. Otherwise he shares all the attributes of the Father and is God (holy, wise, powerful, loving etc.) just as much as the Father is.

However, I guess we ought to say that the Son is God as the Son (in a Sonly way, in eternally begotten relationship with the Father) and so on. The persons are all that they are always in relationship to one another. They have their attributes as who they are in relationship, interdependently and in unity.

I think my friend also had some questions about some ways of talking about simplicity, but I cant quite remember / grasp what they were?

We don’t want to start parcelling out attributes amongst persons. We might call the Son the Wisdom of the Father but we don’t want to say the Father isn’t wise! The Father is never without the Son so I don’t know how much sense it makes to try to isolate the persons. For example, would the Father know an Other, or indeed know himself in an Other without the Son? Presumably not. But that’s just a way of saying we must be Trinitarian. All the persons are essential and eternal and any monadic account of “God” or “god” is inadequate.

My friend said he thought Calvin wasn’t very happy with Nicene-creed language of the Son as “God from God” etc. and stressed that it is poetic. We don’t have a reference for this? I guess the battle is to hang on to the fact that Jesus really is God, not God in some weaker sense. Sure, you might say the Son is True God in himself but all the persons are always only what they are in relationship.

It is also interesting to ask what we should make of John 5:26, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son to have life in himself.” So that would seem to mean that there is a prior sense in which the Father has life in himself in which the Son does not? Clearly we must say the Son is eternal and uncreated but do we say he gets his life from the Father by virtue of / in his eternal begetting / begottenness? Is self-existence therefore an attribute of the Godhead or is it also an attribute of the Father but not of the Son? However, I guess the Father is only the Father in so far as he begets. So the Father is also dependant on the Son in terms of relationships: it is (eternally) having a Son that makes the Father a Father. The Father has no independent-apart-from-the-Son life as Father. Which is happy since in any case there wasn’t when he was not.

Mmmm.

Passionate, Simple Docrinal Preaching (Article 1)

Rather foolishly, perhaps, I have set myself to preach on Article 1 of the 39 Articles of Religion of the Church of England at our main morning service on Sunday 16th September.

I shall consult Griffiths Thomas, The Principles of Theology, which is an exposition of the articles, of course. Good to be able to read something positive about Anglicanism by a Welshman. And the English Prayer Book has a helpful modern language version of the aricles.

The Bible reading is going to be Exodus 3 (God's name is I AM WHO I AM, implying his eternality, unity, asceity, perhaps?).

The sermon will be largely doctrinal but I think it will be necessary to show that these are biblical doctrines, not just made up philosophical gobbledygoook.

I also need to show why these things matter and what their practical application is.

In general the title of the 39 articles says they are for:

… for the avoiding of diversities of opinions and
for the establishing of consent touching true religion

Noble aims: unity & truth.

I'm starting to think, though, that one sermon on the 1st Article is pretty impossible:

Article 1: Of faith in the Holy Trinity

There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in the unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

So much there! That gives you maybe 2.5 mins on impassibility in your 30 min sermon, if you're lucky.

In particular, does anyone have any tips on preaching the simplicity and impassibility of God? How would you explain "God... without parts, passions"? Is there one text for each you'd turn people to? And a main practical application?

Which bit of the article should I do the children's talk on?

In fact, I wonder if the Article might not give us a sermon series. Something like:

(1) The One God
(2) The Living God
(3) The True God

(3) The Everlasting God - The Eternality of God
(4) The God without a body - The Spirituality of God (or is there a better way of putting that?)
(5) The God without parts - The Simplicity of God

(6) God's infinite power
(7) God's infinite wisdom
(8) God's infinite goodness

(9) God the Maker
(10) God the Preserver

(11) The Three Persons: Father, Son and Spirit
(12) The Trinity: One in Substance, power and eternity

Do you think there's enough material for each of these sermons? Would they all be worth doing? Or should they be broken down more: e.g. a sermon on homoousios, God the Preserver of the invisible things, and so on?

Any thoughts or tips or things I can plagarise or look at, most welcome.

1+1+1=1?

In the context of a Frame-esque perspectival account of assurance, Dr Field claims that 1+1+1=1.

This obviously has explanatory usefulness when thinking about things Trinitarian, but it seems to me to have the disadvantage that, as far as I know and not to put too fine a point on it, it’s not true.

Why not say 1x1x1=1, which I believe is true?

Of course this still has the disadvantage that 1x1 and 1x1x1x1 also equal 1, but then there are similar difficulties for 1+1 and 1+1+1+1, aren’t there?

Can a mathmo tell is something boffiny about this?

God angrily punished the Son

There's been some discussion over on Revd Michael Jensen's blog (27th Feb, arising from Pierced For Our Transgressions) about whether or not we should say that God was angry with the Son and punished him. Michael denies, but I think we must affirm if we are to have penal substitution, the justice and mercy of God and the gospel.

I would say:

The triune God was angry at the elect in the Son, and hence both at us and at the Son-in-his-union-with-sinners (who are joined to him by faith in the Spirit) and rightly therefore God punished us in the Son and the Son in his union with us.

Obviously God the Father was always well pleased with his Son as Son and one might almost say the Son's obedience to death especially pleased the Father. It would be wrong for God to punish the innocent Son but not for God to punish the Son in his union with sinners, since they really are one.

This is at the heart of the gospel: that I and my sins are punished in the Son so that I do not have to experience the penalty for sin in myself (only in the Son). God's wrath is poured out, I am punished, my sin is paid for but I go free.

I reckon some people might have a difficulty with this which tracks back to a suspicion of rationality and logical inference / distinctions that can't always be read off the surface of a particular biblical text?

Incarnation and the possibility of meaning, speaking etc.

By the time you have thought with Paul Ricoeur (Interpretation Theroy, p25) of “… the kind of intentional exteriorization that writing exhibits….” and “… Plato’s critique of writing as a kind of alienation…” you have to say that the incarnation of the Word is the precondition of the possibility of all successful speaking, writing and meaning.

The Son is “the kind of intentional exteriorization” of the Father: he is begotten.

The Son is made even more “external” in his incarnation as he wills to become Man in a meaningful way that speaks to men.

In the inter-Trinitarian relations and the incarnation there is no alienation required or implied. Plato’s “problem” is solved since the Word does not change in becoming: he remains entirely himself. The Father’s eternal begetting of the Son is not a “loss” to him but a gain in meaning as he knows Himself in a new way in the Son.

Dedications

Prefaces are sometimes the best bit of books, and I love a good dedication.

My favourite might be that of Father Dr Thomas Weinandy in Does God Change? (nicely situated opposite the Nihil Obstat!).

Today I saw this in Ian Green's The Christian's ABC on Chatechisms and rather liked it:

Q. To whom is this book dedicated, with love and gratitude?

A. Judith (Prov. 18:22)

The Scripture proof is a nice touch, I think, even if it doesnt quite prove the point - but then the same is true of many Scripture proofs. The Westminster Divines did not want to include them, I understand, but parliament insisted.

I think Peter Leithart is dedicating his books to each of his children in turn: he is both very fruitful and prolific, so that's happy.

Trinity / Triads?

I guess every time one sees 3 things (a traid) its tempting for the Christian to think this is somehow related to or reflects the Trinity. Of course in a way everything is related to the Trinity and reflects the glory of the Triune God, but that’s another (related) story.

On this, see John Frame, The Doctrine of God, (P&R, 2002) Appendix A: “More Triads”, p743ff.

He gives, Frame says:

a list of triads… that have sometimes been thought to reflect or illumine the Trinity in some way…. I have tried to weed out those that seem to me to be obviously arbitary, contrived, or uninteresting…. I do not place any theological weight on these examples…. These triads are of some interest and they may in some measure reflect, illumine, or provide evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity…. I have been building up this list for many years, and I have lost track of many sources….

Frame cites locution, illocution and perlocution from Austin, How To Do Things With Words, as example 64 and meaning, author’s intention and hearer’s understanding as example 66 on p747.