In conversation with his disciples Jesus said, ‘no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (Matt. 11:27). When, a little later, Simon Peter confessed, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’, Jesus responded, ‘Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven’ (Matt. 16:16–17).1 God has a deep, personal and eternal investment in knowing and being known. As an expression of this, he gives himself, by an act of sovereign grace, to be known by his creatures in the created arena of space and time. The trinitarian God’s eternal self-knowing and the activity of making himself known in the economy of creation and redemption are, therefore, distinct but inseparable, just as more broadly the eternal processions and the temporal missions of the Trinity are distinct but inseparable.2 So too all true human knowledge of God is in reality a subset of the triune God’s knowledge of himself: partial and subject to our epistemological limitations, but nonetheless real and true.3 Our knowledge of God is dependent on both his nature and his will. The apostle Paul would spell this out further. It is the Spirit who enables the believer to cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ (Rom. 8:15–16), the same Spirit without whom it is impossible to confess ‘Jesus is Lord’ (1 Cor. 12:3). So a trinitarian consideration of God’s activity of revealing himself is not a novelty: the New Testament itself binds together the doctrine of the Trinity and the doctrine of revelation.
Without revelation there could be no doctrine of the Trinity. That is almost self-evident. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a conclusion from natural theology. This description of God’s eternal being and nature does not ordinarily arise from our meditation upon the world around us. Aquinas’s unmoved mover, uncaused cause, unconditioned conditioner of all things, and all the rest, need not be triune.4 Despite the ‘vestiges’ or echoes of God’s triune nature in the world he has created, suggested by Augustine and others through the ages, no one has seriously suggested that the doctrine arises from our reflection upon them. They are faint, partial and imperfect confirmations of what we have heard from elsewhere.5 The knowledge of the one God as eternally Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not something that comes naturally to us. We had to be told and shown that this is what God is like. In other words, this doctrine is given to us, not achieved by us.
But to what extent might the opposite be true: that without the Trinity there could be no genuine doctrine of revelation? At one level, of course, this is nonsense. Both Judaism and Islam have doctrines of revelation while refusing to countenance any suggestion that the God who reveals himself and his will is triune. There seems no prima facie reason why a solitary monad could not make himself known just as effectively as the triune God of Christian faith. That is, until we start to examine more closely the issues surrounding a transcendent God’s making himself known within the structures of a world created and at every point sustained by him. To use the terminology of the philosophers, how can the finite possibly contain or even comprehend the infinite? Questions emerge about the necessity or otherwise of mediation when it comes to revelation. Can a transcendent God be known directly and in an unmediated fashion? Does the Creator–creature distinction, recognition of which prevents us falling into pantheism or even panentheism, have consequences for our knowing? Are Jesus’ words ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6) a reference to a covenantal decision on the part of God, or do they reflect something about God’s very nature and the way he has always related to creation?
The two questions that provide the basic structure of this chapter then are these: first, how necessary is God’s eternal triune nature to divine revelation in general and the Christian doctrine of revelation in particular? Then, what shape does God’s eternal triune nature give to the Christian doctrine of revelation?
The biblical answer to my first question is evident in the quotation with which I began: ‘no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him’ (Matt. 11:27). A similar conviction is found in the prologue to John’s Gospel: ‘No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known’ (John 1:18). Most direct of all are the words of Jesus already mentioned, ‘No one comes to the Father except through me’ (John 14:6). As one contemporary commentator has put it, ‘There is a self-enclosed world of Father and Son that is opened to others only by the revelation provided by the Son.’6 The eternal Father remains unknown and unapproached apart from the ministry of Jesus Christ, the eternal Son. More than that, our knowledge of God is firmly anchored in this eternal relation of the Father and the Son.7 Once again that picture is filled out in a more explicitly trinitarian direction when Jesus speaks of the coming of the Spirit later in John’s Gospel. On the night of his betrayal and arrest Jesus comforted his disciples:
When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16:13–15)
Further precision is called for at this point. We are not asking whether the doctrine of the Trinity is necessary for effective divine revelation. In such a case the revelation of the Lord to faithful Israelites under the old covenant would be called into question. The doctrine of the Trinity is the result of that progressive revelation of the living God in Scripture, which comes to its culmination in the resurrection of Jesus and the donation of the Spirit, and is expounded more systematically in the face of the challenges of others over the first four centuries of the Christian church. Rather, the question is whether an effective revelation of God, the one who made all things and upon whom all things that exist depend, is in fact made possible by who he is as Father, Son and Spirit. Just how deep does the claim ‘no one comes to the Father except through me’ go? What is it about the relation of Father, Son and Spirit that makes the knowledge of God possible, and not just possible but only possible at this point?
We are face to face here with theological categories such as the transcendence and incomprehensibility of God. In terms of the first of these the universe is not an extension of God’s being, providing us with a route to travel back from the creation to the Creator. God created the universe ex nihilo and as something genuinely other than himself. Creation was an act of love entirely consistent with God’s eternal character as love, but it was also itself an act of grace in which God remains sovereignly free. So care is needed in affirming the words of John of Damascus from the eighth century:
Since, then, God, who is good and more than good, did not find satisfaction in self-contemplation, but in his exceeding goodness wished certain things to come into existence which would enjoy his benefits and share in his goodness, he brought all things out of nothing into being and created them, both what is visible and what is invisible.8
These words may be taken to suggest some kind of deficiency in God, something that makes his eternal existence apart from creation unsatisfactory. Yet this was not the Damascene’s intention at all. The sovereign, self-sufficient God does not need creation to fill some lack in his eternal triune life. However, he chose to go beyond himself and create a genuine other, one that did not and could not continue to exist apart from his will and yet remains distinct at the level of being.
The ancient doctrine of God’s aseity addresses precisely this point, affirming as it does both God’s perfect self-sufficiency in his eternal relations as Father, Son and Spirit and the fullness of life that grounds his movement beyond himself to creatures.9 The doctrine has its biblical warrant in both the name pronounced to Moses from the bush that did not burn ‘I am who I am’ (Exod. 3:14), and the words of Jesus ‘For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself’ (John 5:26). Just so, the Spirit is life and the giver of life (John 6:63; Rom. 8:10–11). The concept of aseity has sometimes been narrowed simply to indicate God’s independence or his absolute lack of contingency. However, when this attribute is understood in trinitarian terms it is much more than a contrastive concept. John Webster explains:
It is as Father, Son, and Spirit that God is of himself, utterly free and full, in the self-originate and perfect movement of his life; grounded in himself, he gives himself, the self-existent Lord of grace. God a se is the perfection of paternity, filiation and spiration in which he is indissolubly from, for, and in himself and out of which he bestows himself as the Lord, Savior, and partner of his creature. This triune character is the distinguishing feature of the Christian confession of God’s aseity.10
Far from being a barrier to revelation, God’s aseity, trinitarianly considered, is its essential presupposition. Precisely because God is life in himself and sufficient in himself, and because this life and sufficiency has an ad extra as well as ad intra dimension, the free act of revelation is possible without any compromise of his essential nature and character. Here we may appreciate the contribution of Karl Barth:
The biblical witness to God sees His transcendence of all that is distinct from Himself, not only in the distinction as such, which is supremely and decisively characterised as His freedom from all conditioning by that which is distinct from Himself, but furthermore and supremely in the fact that without sacrificing His distinction and freedom, but in the exercise of them, He enters into and faithfully maintains communion with this reality other than Himself in His activity as Creator, Reconciler and Redeemer.11
A monistic concept of transcendence renders any suggestion of revelation problematic. How can one who is entirely distinct and ontologically remote from all else make himself known in the created order? Where would be the point of connection that makes genuine self-communication possible?12 However, the trinitarian concept of aseity allows transcendence to be understood as relational rather than merely contrastive and to that extent isolating. If the fullness of life in God is most fundamentally relational and carries with it his freedom and determination to be the life-giver, then by analogy the fullness of God’s self-knowledge may carry with it his capacity and determination to make himself known and so to be known by his creatures through revelation. Transcendence speaks of lordship at every point, not distinction to the point of isolation. Yet God’s lordship, like everything else about him, must be understood in a trinitarian fashion and so is given content by the dynamic of knowing and being known, loving and being beloved, which is a feature of God’s eternal relations.
This in turn causes us to think again about the related doctrine of divine incomprehensibility. Classically, the divine transcendence carries with it some notion of incomprehensibility. This ought not to be confused with divine ineffability, the suggestion that God is ‘completely unknowable, completely beyond all human comprehension, completely beyond all human language and conceptions’ and which in its strongest forms is self-referentially incoherent.13 In contrast, incomprehensibility acknowledges a genuine knowledge of God, but within limits generated not just by our finitude and fallibility but by God’s own perfection. God’s person, character and will remain inexhaustible (Job 11:7–9; Rom. 11:33–36). Not only are his thoughts and ways higher than those of his creatures (Isa. 55:8–9), but he alone dwells in unapproachable light (1 Tim. 6:16). Nevertheless, he is still truly known by the means he has chosen (Isa. 55:10–11; 1 Tim. 6:11–15) and there will come a day when I will ‘know’ even as I am ‘known’ (1 Cor. 13:12; cf. 1 John 3:2). The doctrine of incomprehensibility is misused when it becomes the basis for agnosticism, either about God’s person or his revealed will. Rather, particularly when it is put in a trinitarian frame, it presents to us an important aspect of God’s being and character that is genuinely known. Incomprehensibility is in the end an affirmation made about God’s nature.
One contemporary writer has put it this way:
It is important to note that the warning implied in asserting the incomprehensibility of the divine essence does not arise because we do not know enough about God, or dare not speak of God the Trinity. Rather, it is because we know God in God’s trinitarian self-revelation, and so feel compelled to invoke God by no other name, that the incomprehensibility of God must be emphasized. All we know and all we can say about God does not give us a comprehending take on God, but points us back to the divine self-communication, which we cannot but receive as a gift that constitutes the Christian faith.14
Incomprehensibility functions then as another expression of the lordship of the triune God. He is neither contained nor constrained by our knowledge of him. Not only is it true that ‘God’s revelation does not totally exhaust his being and activity’, a point made acutely by Carl F. H. Henry, but God remains the sovereign redeemer who determines how he is known.15 T. F. Torrance spells out what this means:
[E]ven when God draws near to us and draws us near to himself on the ground of the atoning sacrifice of Christ, and gives us access to himself through Christ and in his Spirit to know him, in some real measure, as he is in the inner relations of his eternal Being as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, he does not surrender (in Irenaean terms) his invisibility in the visibility, his incomprehensibility in the comprehensibility, of the incarnation, or therefore reduce knowledge of himself to what we can completely grasp or articulate.16
This idea of a true knowledge of God read against the backdrop of his inexhaustible perfection was articulated in a slightly different, and less overtly trinitarian, way by Martin Luther, who famously spoke of the hidden and revealed God (Deus absconditus and Deus revelatus). Taking a distinction he had previously used of God’s acts (he acts in a hidden way under the form of the opposite: strength revealed in weakness, life-giving in death, etc.17), Luther turned to speak about the hiddenness of God himself:
God must therefore be left to himself in his own majesty, for in this regard we have nothing to do with him, nor has he willed that we should have anything to do with him. But we have something to do with him insofar as he is clothed and set forth in his Word, through which he offers himself to us and which is the beauty and glory with which the psalmist celebrates him as being clothed.18
The inexhaustible perfection of God does not end up with silence or apophatic negations (limiting ourselves to saying only what God is not) for the reason that this perfection is ultimately relational in a way that makes his movement towards his creatures in love and light a proper reflection of who he is. Revelation is a free and sovereign activity of God but it is also an entirely appropriate activity. Recognizing this, our attention is drawn not so much to the unfathomable depths of God’s being and character but to what has been revealed: ‘The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law’ (Deut. 29:29). What is revealed is true and truly known, yet we do not, and cannot, know God as he knows himself. As Jerome put it in the fourth century, ‘It is one thing to know by equality of nature, and another by the condescension of him who reveals.’19
The eternal relation of the persons of the Trinity makes clear that God’s nature is to be self-disclosing.20 His giving of himself to himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the prior condition of his giving of himself to creatures. Put another way, ‘God’s perfection is his communication ad intra; God’s presence is his communication ad extra.’21 Communion and communication are interwoven on both levels and so qualify the theological statements about transcendence, aseity and incomprehensibility. Yet care is needed at this point too. As Scott Swain reminds us, the distinction and relation of these two levels or vantage points both need attention:
[T]he triune life of communication and communion must be considered from two vantage points, one internal to God (the divine life ad intra) and one external to God (the divine life ad extra). The triune life of communication and communion ad intra is necessary, fully actualized, and eternal – the triune God always is as he is in the full splendor of his blessed life (Exod. 3.14; Ps. 102.26–27; Heb. 13.8). The triune work of communication and communion ad extra, however, is contingent, in the process of being completed, and temporal – it is ‘an economy for the fullness of time’ (Eph. 1.10). A lot hangs on the distinction between these two modes of divine self-communication. Fail to preserve the distinction and one fails to honor the deity of God and the creatureliness of the creature. But a lot hangs on the relation between these two modes of self-communication as well. Fail to consider the relation and one fails to appreciate the wonder of the gospel: that the one who is ‘the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ is also ‘for the sake of Christ his Son my God and my Father’ [Heidelberg Catechism Q. 26].22
This leads us to consider the critically significant theological category of mediation. Such mediation seems required if God is to engage the world without jeopardizing its integrity as something other than himself. But by what means does the triune God relate to the world that is other to himself and yet always and at every point dependent upon him, no less in the field of revelation as in any other sphere? The unfolding narrative of the Bible points us to significance of the word of God as his means of bringing the creation into existence, sustaining it and directing it towards the goal he has purposed for it. The psalmist rejoices that
By the word of the Lord the heavens were made,
and by the breath of his mouth all their host . . .
For he spoke, and it came to be;
he commanded, and it stood firm.
(Ps. 33:6, 9)
This mediation is critical because it allows the created order to exist as genuinely the creation of God and yet as a genuine other, rather than as an emanation or extension of God’s own being. It further secures our appreciation of God’s freedom and sovereignty with respect to creation. ‘The otherness of creation consists not only in its being called into existence by God’s word, but also in its being capable of being addressed by God and of being called into communion with God.’23
It is the word spoken by God and heard by those to whom it is addressed that provides the impetus for the biblical story: from the word of blessing and then of promise in the midst of judgment in the garden, to the call of Abraham, the commissioning of Moses, the voice from the mountain after the redemption from Egypt, the words given to the prophets, and finally the coming of the one who is himself the Word:
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. (Heb. 1:1–2)
The entire biblical account of God’s dealings with his creatures is framed by his words: from ‘Let there be light’ in Genesis 1 to ‘Surely I am coming soon’ in Revelation 22. ‘No activity is as characteristic, or as frequently mentioned in the Bible, as God’s speaking.’24
To give words a prominent place in my discussion of divine mediation is fitting given my reflection on divine communication and communion ad intra as well as ad extra. Communication is not alien to God’s nature but integral to it. Christian trinitarian theism is, to borrow Kevin Vanhoozer’s phrase, communicative theism. Such a description gives appropriate prominence to the way the living God differentiates himself from the idols that are merely the projections of human religiosity: they have mouths but cannot speak (Ps. 115:5); they are like scarecrows in a cucumber field and cannot speak (Jer. 10:5); ‘Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake; / to a silent stone, Arise! / Can this teach?’ (Hab. 2:19). In contrast God ‘having spoken . . . spoke’ (Heb. 1:1–2). Christoph Schwöbel has put it well:
The conversation about God and with God is itself rooted in the fact that God engages in conversation with his creation, from creation until the consummation of God’s conversations with his creation in the Kingdom of God. Furthermore, that God engages in conversation with his creation is rooted in God’s own being as conversation so that the being of the world has its ground in the conversation that God is.25
It is against this broad canvas of mediation through speech that the incarnation of the Son is described in John’s Gospel as ‘the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth’ (John 1:14). The words spoken throughout the history of Israel provide the interpretative framework for understanding God’s living and acting within his creation as the man Jesus Christ.26 Conversely, as that to which those words have always been pointing, the incarnate life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ both confirms and clarifies them. In Jesus this mediation between God and human creation in particular is seen in greater depth. As one who is genuinely God, ‘in Jesus Christ God has given us a Revelation that is identical with himself’,27 while at the same time genuinely human and so part of the created order itself, he is uniquely suited to be the ‘one mediator between God and men’ (1 Tim. 2:5). This is a point driven home by T. F. Torrance in a variety of contexts: ‘the incarnation of the Son or Word constitutes the epistemological centre in all our knowledge of God, with a centre in our world of space and time and a centre in God himself at the same time’.28 More fulsomely:
Because Jesus Christ is God of God and man of man in himself, in Christ we who are creatures of this world may know God in such a way that our knowledge of him rests upon the reality of God himself. It is not something that is thought up and devised out of ourselves and mythologically projected onto God, but it is grounded and controlled by what God is in himself.29
Torrance may well be right to say ‘everything hinges on the reality of God’s self-communication to us in Jesus Christ’,30 but what of the Holy Spirit? Just as the Son was sent into the world, was not the Spirit sent too? If the Spirit mediates God’s purpose and presence in the created order, how is this coordinated with the mediating role of the Son? The most direct biblical testimony to this role of the Spirit is found in the Farewell Discourse of John’s Gospel (John 14 – 16). Jesus promised his disciples that he would ask the Father and that the Father would give another helper ‘to be with you for ever’ (14:16). This helper is the Spirit of Truth who proceeds from the Father and ‘he will bear witness about me’, Jesus said (15:26). He will come to guide Christ’s disciples into all truth and ‘take what is mine and declare it to you’ (16:14). Jesus will continue to be present among his disciples after his death, resurrection and ascension through the ongoing presence of the Spirit. The correlation between Jesus’ mediation and that of the Spirit is clear: the Spirit is present in the world as the one sent by the Father and the Son (14:26; 15:26; 16:17), just as the Son came into the world as the one sent by the Father (14:24; 16:5; 17:3). Luke’s Gospel provides a complementary perspective that enables us to see the Spirit’s mediation not as subsequent to or as a replacement for the Son’s mediation, since the Spirit is intrinsically and necessarily involved in the incarnation of the Son. Not only does the Spirit overshadow the virgin, enabling her to conceive, but the Spirit rests upon the incarnate Son throughout his ministry (Luke 3:21–22; 4:16–21; 11:20). The Spirit is ‘the divine agent who locates the Messiah in space and time’.31 In particular, in Luke’s Gospel, this is done through the identification of Jesus as the son of David, with all the messianic promises attached to that identification.32 Climactically, as the writer to the Hebrews observes, it is ‘through the eternal Spirit’ that Christ ‘offered himself without blemish to God’ (Heb. 9:14). The mediation of Christ and the mediation of the Spirit are not two separate mediations but inextricably bound together. There is a deep basis in reality, in God’s eternal triune life, for Calvin’s insistence that word and Spirit belong together:
For by a kind of mutual bond the Lord has joined together the certainty of his Word and of his Spirit so that the perfect religion of the Word may abide in our minds when the Spirit, who causes us to contemplate God’s face, shines; and that we in turn may embrace the Spirit with no fear of being deceived when we recognize him in his own image, namely, in the Word.33
Apart from God’s eternal triune nature, with his deep personal investment in knowing and being known that shapes the reality of his transcendence, aseity and incomprehensibility, the whole idea of divine revelation would begin to unravel. Revelation by a solitary divine being, utterly distinct from all he has made and with no need of the creation he has brought into existence is, as I have said, deeply problematic. However, the true mediation of God’s person and his purpose to us and our created existence, with all its contingency and limitations, is given in the Son who is both God and man, identified and anointed by the Spirit in the world as the Christ. In him necessary existence and contingent existence come together, as do eternity and time. The eternal self-giving of God within his own triune life is given free, sovereign expression in his reaching out to human beings to give a knowledge of himself and his purposes for us and for all of his creation. It is the dynamic relational nature of God that lies at the heart of the Christian confession of the Trinity that makes revelation possible and enables us to see that God makes himself known as he actually is:
Through the incarnation of his Son or Word, and in the Holy Spirit mediated through him God the Father does not remain closed to us but has opened himself to our human knowing. Through Christ Jesus – as Paul expressed it – and in one Spirit we have access to the Father (Eph 2.18).34
The revelation of the triune God has a particular character precisely because it is his activity. The direction of the disclosure is from God to creatures, whether the revelation be what is commonly described as General Revelation (the limited revelation addressed to all human beings in every place and across time through the structures of the created order, Ps. 19; Rom. 1) or Special Revelation (a more direct and focused phenomenon, addressed to specific people at particular times and in particular places: the prophets in Israel, Jesus to his disciples, and the apostles to followers of Christ throughout the last days, Heb. 1:1–3). God makes himself and his purposes known in a variety of ways and through a variety of means. However, since it is God who is making himself known, and he really is whom he has shown himself to be, we can discern a pattern in his revelatory activity. Similarly, while God’s revelation of himself radiates throughout the whole creation, its central address is to human beings, whom God created to be his conversation partners, so we can expect human language, words and concepts to have a critical role.35
The trinitarian shape of divine revelation has been a particular interest of Christian thinkers since the 1950s. Very largely this has been under the impress of the work of Karl Barth, who remains the Protestant theologian most responsible for a renaissance in trinitarian thinking since the mid-twentieth century. Barth famously emphasized that
the Christian concept of revelation already includes within it the problem of the doctrine of the Trinity . . . we cannot analyse the concept without attempting as our first step to bring the doctrine of Trinity to expression.36
Why is this so? Barth’s answer occurs just a few pages earlier: ‘God reveals Himself. He reveals Himself through Himself. He reveals Himself.’37 God is the subject, object and means of revelation. This is why we must affirm that revelation is essentially personal and not a matter of theoretical knowledge that can be accessed or understood apart from the person of God. The goal of revelation is not just knowledge about God but the knowledge of God. Yet while Barth was certainly emphasizing the personal character of God’s revelation – it is God’s self-revelation at root – he was insisting on more than that. Divine revelation has a threefold character as a direct correlate of God’s eternal triune nature. God is the one doing the revealing. God is the one revealed. God is himself the only means by which this revelation can happen.38 He speaks. He joins himself to us through the mediation of the Son. He draws us to himself through the ministry of the Spirit.
At this point it is helpful to compare Barth’s emphasis with that of his old protagonist Emil Brunner.39 Brunner tended to overplay the personal character of revelation to the exclusion of propositional content (as if personal and propositional are two mutually exclusive forms of revelation):
what God wills to give us cannot really be given in words, but only in manifestation: Jesus Christ, God himself in persona is the real gift. The Word of God in its ultimate meaning is thus precisely not ‘a word from God’, but God in person, God Himself speaking, Himself present, Immanuel.40
The problem lies with what he denied rather than what he affirmed. He was certainly right to warn against an abstract analytical approach to revelation. Revelation is indeed a revelation of the triune God and his purposes, and while revealing himself necessarily involves revealing the truth about himself, it is always deeply and unavoidably personal. Here he and Barth were in complete agreement: ‘What God speaks is never known or true anywhere in abstraction from God Himself. It is known and true in and through the fact that He Himself says it, that He is present in person in and with what is said by Him.’41 However, Barth would also insist
God does reveal Himself in statements, through the medium of speech, and indeed of human speech. His word is always this or that word spoken by the prophets and apostles and proclaimed in the Church. The personal character of God’s Word is not, then, to be played off against its verbal or spiritual character.42
We are taken further towards the heart of the matter when we speak of divine revelation as irreducibly relational. Colin Gunton drew attention to the way John’s Gospel makes use of the idea of mutual indwelling when speaking about the knowledge of God that derives from revelation: ‘The knowledge of which he speaks is first of all the knowledge by acquaintance that is a function of the interrelatedness of persons.’43 Is it not because Jesus Christ, ‘the only God’, is ‘at the Father’s side’ (John 1:18) that he is able to ‘exegete’ him? At the other end of the Gospel, in Jesus’ high priestly prayer, does he not talk about ‘those who will believe in me through their [the apostles’] word’ that ‘they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me’ (John 17:20–21)? Put another way, ‘communication in its deepest sense is a matter of self-giving, a “making common” of one’s life . . . it is the basis of interpersonal fellowship and communion’.44 God’s self-revelation arises out of his eternal relatedness and is the means by which he is known by his creatures. It is as he makes himself known that these creatures are able, from their side as creatures, to enter into relationship with him.
In more explicitly trinitarian terms God’s revelation is a revelation of the Father by the Son in the Spirit. Of course, this is fully articulated only in the New Testament, where Jesus speaks of no one coming to the Father except through him (John 14:6), and Paul writes of how it is the ‘Spirit of his Son’ sent by God himself, who enables us to cry ‘Abba! Father!’ (Gal. 4:6). However, from this vantage point we are able to look back to God’s dealings with Israel as the work of him who is eternally Father, Son and Spirit. The God whom faithful Israelites came to know, and in whose promises they came to trust, is none other than the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who with his Father gave the Spirit so that the prophets might speak the word of God. ‘For no prophecy was ever produced by the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit’ (2 Peter 1:21). We are brought back again to the words of Jesus with which we began (Matt. 11:27) and the realization that revelation arises in the context of the Father–Son relation and is perfected in our experience by the work of the Holy Spirit.
Yet revelation is essentially relational when viewed from another angle as well. It is relational in its goal. Once again it is John’s Gospel that gives us warrant for describing revelation in this way. With reference to the Old Testament Jesus could say to the Jews who opposed him, ‘You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may life’ (John 5:39–40). The goal of God’s revelation in those Scriptures was to announce his promise and so prepare the way for the coming of the Christ in order that men and women might find life in him. This too is the purpose behind John’s Gospel itself:
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples, which are not written in this book; but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name. (John 20:30–31)
God’s revelation of himself to creatures does not have as its goal self-actualization or autonomy. Instead it calls for a response to the one who has made himself known and on whom our very life depends at every point. It calls for faith and acknowledgment, obedience and worship. John Owen drew revelation, response and God’s divine nature together in his discourse on the Holy Spirit:
His Being, absolutely considered, as comprehending in it all infinite, divine perfections, is the formal reason of our worship; but this worship is to be directed, guided, regulated by the revelation he makes of that being and of those excellencies unto us. This is the end of divine revelation, – namely, to direct us in paying that homage which is due unto the divine nature.45
One further consideration is crucial. Precisely because it is the decision of the triune God whose self-sufficiency and transcendence are intrinsic and inviolable, revelation is an expression of God’s lordship. This has been a concern of theologians as diverse as Karl Barth and John Frame. Barth insisted:
In terms of the doctrine of the Trinity, knowledge of revelation as it may arise from the witness of Scripture means, in all three moments of the event, knowledge of the Lord as the One who meets us and unites Himself to us.46
God always remains one ‘who does not need us but who does not will to be without us’.47 Frame’s four-volume magnum opus is entitled A Theology of Lordship and he justifies summarizing Scripture’s teaching on God under the concept of divine lordship in this way:
throughout redemptive history, God seeks to identify himself to men as Lord and to teach and demonstrate to them the meaning of that concept. ‘God is Lord’ – that is the message of the Old Testament; ‘Jesus is Lord’ – that is the message of the New.48
Once more it is the work of the Spirit that identifies Jesus as the Christ (Rom. 1:4) and enables us to confess him as Lord (1 Cor. 12:3).
The essential correlate of the lordship of God is that the revelation God provides of himself is authoritative. God never ceases to be Lord and what he makes known about himself and his purposes stands over and judges all human thought. In contrast to Paul Ricœur’s vision of a ‘non-heteronomous dependence’,49 the revelation of God comes to us from outside us and reshapes our thinking. It has a claim on us. As others have noted, this is what lies at the heart of the modern offence with the appeal to revelation.50 To come to such a conclusion would seem to violate one of the cherished principles we have inherited from the Enlightenment, namely the autonomy of the individual. Nevertheless, if this is what God has made known about himself and everything else, then it carries his authority and such authority stands over any claim we may have to discern the truth, to distinguish good from evil, for ourselves. What matters most is not our thoughts about God, but God’s thoughts about God, and us, and all things.51
Revelation that takes its shape from the triune nature of God’s eternal life finds its focus in the Son as the one who truly makes the Father known, but who is known as Lord and as the Son of God only by the ministry of the Spirit. In this way the centrepiece of God’s revelation is the gospel (Rom. 1:1–6). It is a message that can never be viewed apart from the one in whom it is embodied and who remains in every way the ‘one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus’ (1 Tim. 2:5). In him we truly know God. In him alone we truly know God. By means of his Spirit, the Spirit of God, who searches even the depths of God, we have been given a glimpse of ‘what God has prepared for those who love him’ (1 Cor. 2:9–10). Our knowledge of God now is not exhaustive. God cannot be contained or mastered by us since he remains the Lord in every sense: transcendent, self-sufficient and incomprehensible. Yet he can be truly known because it is in his eternal nature to give of himself and in his sovereign, loving freedom he has determined to give of himself to men and women. As he spoke the world into being in the beginning, so he still speaks. ‘No longer do I call you servants,’ Jesus told his disciples, ‘for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you’ (John 15:15).
© Mark D. Thompson, 2016