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| The ascension of Jesus depicted in a church window in Edith Weston, Rutland |
If you want to
know what God is like, look at Jesus. That is really what this huge mouthful of
theological shorthand is saying, although historically it was crafted for a
different reason.
The early
church struggled to define the nature of Christ (and hence the relationships
within Trinity). Some people (called Docetists) said that Jesus only appeared to be fully human. Others
(later called Adoptionists) claimed that a human being was “adopted” by God as
his Son. Some settled for Christians believing in two gods (after all, much of
the rest of the then known world was polytheistic). Even today Jehovah’s
Witnesses may claim that orthodox Christians believe in three gods. The rest
struggled to maintain the difficult (and orthodox) view that Jesus was a unique
being who was both fully God and fully human at the same time.
We can’t
comprehend it, of course, but the closer we can get to expressing it may help
us to enter more fully into the practical riches of faith. The early church
wrestled with words like person,
substance and matters came to a head in the fourth century AD when Arius
reverted to the belief that Jesus wasn’t fully God. He was opposed by
theologians such as Athanasius and the Nicene Creed was the result as the
church officially took the both/and view.
But that wasn’t
the end of the story. Disputes about words continued and in the fifth century
the eastern churches wanted to stress that Jesus had one whole nature, not two
(divine and human). Western churches begged to differ and a split resulted.
That split might be on the way to healing. In 2014 an “Accord” was reached
between Anglicans and representatives of eastern Orthodox churches. It stated
that “Christ has one incarnate nature” that contains “two natures distinguished
in thought alone”.1 So that’s clear, then.
Fully God
Back to the
Nicene Creed, which stresses (at length!) that Jesus is fully God. This is what
really matters and which can make a big difference to personal faith. Jesus is
worthy of spiritual worship as God, not merely hero worship as a great man. The
term “Son” differentiates Jesus from the Father but doesn’t imply that he is an
offspring. He has existed for as long as the Father existed; long before he
emerged from Mary’s womb, long before the Big Bang. He’s not like the children
of the mythical Greek gods.
There is only
one God, comprising three persons (the third appears later in the creed). So
Jesus is “one Being with the Father”: the same God who is revealed to and
experienced by us in different ways. Any analogy is flawed, but for most of us
any analogy is probably better than none. So for example I am a son, a father,
and a husband (and several other things too). I appear or act differently in
each role, but I am still fully “me” in each “person”.
The Trinity is
important for two reasons. First, it tells us that God is multi-dimensional.
Like a ball, we can see all sides of God in one glance. Like a multi-faceted
diamond, we see God from different angles at different times and each one
sparkles with colour and surprise – but none can be taken in isolation but seen
as part of the whole. And secondly, God is a “community” in himself. He does
not exist in splendid isolation; he was never so lonely that he had to create
humans to keep him company but did so out of love and a desire to share his
riches; and he is a model for human community: unity in diversity.
The creed
labours the point about Jesus’ divinity. Jesus was eternally “begotten, not
made”. The word is important. What we beget
is the same nature as ourselves: our children are human, not less than human.
Jesus was God, not less than God. What we make,
like a home or a model, has a different nature; God made the universe and it is
separate from God, it has a different nature. On earth Jesus claimed to be
equal with God even though he was in certain ways distinct from the Father.
Ultimately that was why he was crucified. Occasionally of course he demonstrated
divine powers through his miracles, and his true nature was most clearly seen
in the transfiguration and resurrection.
C.S. Lewis put
it memorably in Mere Christianity: “A
man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a
great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who
says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make
your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or
something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill
Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let
us not come up with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human
teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”2
And that is the
relevance of this theological complexity. Jesus really is the human face of
God; the creator who became one of his own creatures; the author who took the
lead role in his own drama; the king who allowed himself to be his own subject.
So when we want to know what God is like, Jesus is the image to focus on. For a
creator to become a creature – to descend from the sublime to the subordinate –
in order to help the rest of creation out of the hole it had dug for itself is
by any standard an extreme action that can only be described as love,
especially when it resulted in God experiencing the full horror of a painful
and undeserved judicial murder at the hands of the very people he came to help.
Think and talk
1. What do these passages tell us about Jesus’
pre-existence before he was born as a human being? John 1:1-5, 8:54-59; Colossians
1:15-17.
2. What do these passages tell us about Jesus’
claim to be fully equal with God? Matthew 26:63-64; Luke 22:66-71; John 5:18, 10:30,
14:6-11; Philippians 2:5-7; Colossians 1:18-20; Hebrews 1:1-3.
3. References to the Trinity as such are rare in
the New Testament (it took centuries for people to even start to get their
heads round it). Each “Person” is seen as acting in a specific way. But there
are a few places where all three are mentioned as acting in a co-ordinated
manner. What might these tell us about how God works in our lives? Matthew
28:19-20; John 14:23-26; 2 Corinthians 13:13-14; Ephesians 2:17-18, 4:4-6;
Revelation 1:4-6. Notice too ow they work together in Romans 8:1-39.
4. Why do you think we always want to bring God
down to our level and size rather than embrace the mystery of a
multi-dimensional God who is beyond human understanding? How might this limit
our view and experience of God?
References
1. Reported in The Times, 1 November 2014
2. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Fontana books 1973, pp.52f
© Derek
Williams 2015
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