Preaching, for the Christian, is an irreducibly trinitarian activity. As such, Christian preaching will always be richer, more faithful and more powerful when it is deliberately and self-consciously trinitarian. Now by definition no Christian could deny the trinitarian nature of biblical preaching: after all, to be a Christian involves believing that the only true God is the triune God. Yet it has not always been made easy for preachers to see the connection. Surprisingly little has been written on the Trinity and preaching, and standard textbooks on preaching tend not to give much – if any – time to explaining how the Trinity should inform the preacher’s task. Trinitarianism can thus be assumed by the preacher and can thus be a sidelined irrelevance.
But what has the nature of God to do with preaching? We could all agree that ‘trinitarian preaching’ is a Good Thing, and yet the connection between the Trinity and preaching could seem so practically frail that we dismiss it as a subject fit only for the cloister. The place to start is surely with the basic Christian affirmation that God is the ground of all being. His identity and nature constitute the logic of the gospel, and of every Christian belief. In that sense, far from being a tangential nicety, the triune nature of God must shape our preaching if we are to ensure even its basic Christian identity. What I hope we will then come to see in this chapter is that, by deliberately building our understanding of preaching on the triune nature of God, preachers will find decidedly practical help.
For the bulk of this chapter I will be turning to John Calvin as an exemplar of a preacher who saw and acted upon the intimate connection between the Trinity and preaching. His presence, I hope, will not only bring cohesion and wisdom, but will also serve to prove that the connection is a mainstream and historic one, and thus no novelty.
We start, however, with Martin Luther. When Luther came to comment on John 16:13 (‘whatever [the Spirit] hears he will speak’), he made the following bold observation: ‘here’, he wrote, ‘Christ refers to a conversation carried on in the Godhead, a conversation in which no creatures participate. He sets up a pulpit both for the speaker and for the listener. He makes the Father the Preacher and the Holy Spirit the Listener.’1 It is as if, with the triune God, there is in eternity a pulpit! The first sermon – the first proclamation of the Word – was not in Acts 2, or Genesis 3, or even Genesis 1. God the Father is an eternal preacher, ever speaking out his Word; and the Holy Spirit has eternally been listening. Before any creatures were brought into being, the Holy Spirit was enjoying the ultimate sermon – a sermon he now shares with us. In the triune God there is an eternal conversation into which we have been brought.
Luther couched it in his own inimitably striking way, but the point is incontestable and basic for Christians: God is not silent or speechless; the living God is a God who speaks. That could sound a yawn-inducing claim, but the claim is not that he just happens to speak. Other gods, from Allah to Zeus, and from Baal to Yama, are all said by their worshippers to have spoken. That is not at all the point. In the triune god we find a God who cannot be Wordless. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God’ (John 1:1–2).2 Before all things, before anything was ‘made through him’ (John 1:3; cf. Col. 1:17), God had a Word to speak. The Word was God. Here is a God who does not happen to speak; by his very nature he is a speaking God.
Human preachers, then, are not the hirelings of a God incapable or unwilling to do his own publicity or teaching (as if God entertains himself with angel songs while his servants go out on the stump). Preaching is a natural expression of this God’s identity. The Spirit who speaks what he has heard enables preachers to join in with God’s own proclamation of his Son. To preach Christ is to participate in the life of God.
Since the Word is God, when God speaks he communicates nothing less than his very self. That is why in the Old Testament God’s Word can be described as the very creative power of God (Gen. 1:3; Ps. 33:6), the means by which he reveals himself (Amos 3:1), the means of God’s healing and deliverance (Ps. 107:20; Isa. 55:1). That is why, when the Word of God goes out, the very glory of God shines out: ‘For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ’ (2 Cor. 4:6). A similar point is made in Hebrews 1, where God’s speaking to us by his Son is tightly connected to the Son’s being ‘the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature’ (v. 3). As Athanasius argued at some length in Against the Heathen 3.2, because the Word is God, light, life, logic and being abound in his presence: apart from the Word all is darkness, formlessness and unbeing (see Jer. 4:22–23). Because the Word is God, it effectively creates, saves and reveals. It does what it says.
It means that, in speaking, God holds out more than (though not less than) information and propositions. The Word of God brings the very presence of God. When the Word of God comes to us, it is God himself, in all his life-giving glory, who comes to be with us.
This is entirely different to how it is with the words of other gods. Dagon or Quetzalcóatl might deign to speak, but their words would at most only tell you something about them. Allah might be thought an exception to this rule: he does, after all, have an eternal word beside him in heaven, the Qur’an. But it is a book Allah could do without. Allah depends on nothing. He has a word, but this word is not God. He is not by nature a God who speaks. And this word, the Qur’an, cannot therefore bring the very presence of Allah with it. It simply tells us about Allah, the character he claims for himself, and what he wants from us. When Allah gives his Qur’an, he gives something other than himself: a deposit of information and record of his will.
And the fact that the word of Dagon is not Dagon and the word of Allah is not Allah means that those words cannot be as deeply revealing as the Word who is God. The Word who is God cannot but display to us the very being of the Father, for that is who he is. The words of other gods need not say much about them. In fact, they could be more misleading than truly revealing. Allah, for example, describes himself in the Qur’an as ‘the best of deceivers’, leading men astray when he chooses.3 That cannot be with Jesus, the divine Word. Since he is God, with him a direct and unmediated encounter with God happens. He is no pale reflection of God: in seeing him we see the Father who sent him (John 14:9), for he is perfect ‘image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1:15). In him God meets with us.
All of this should be great encouragement to the preacher. Without God’s Word we simply would not know God. ‘No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known’ (John 1:18; cf. Matt. 11:27). It is because God is triune – that is, because the Father has this Word who is himself God, of his very essence – that we can confidently say that through the Word we know God.
This is a truth that needs to be heard loudly and clearly, especially in post-Christian Europe, where the situation is generally so disheartening. Faced with reams of horrifying statistics about church decline, a wearying negativity or defeatism can set in. Focused on the sheer immensity of the uphill battle before us, we can eventually develop a siege mentality. Losing the confidence to step out with the old Word of God, we circle the wagons and lose the confidence to step out into the world. Or we look elsewhere for the solution. But because of who God is preachers can know that they are not mere teachers of an unfashionable message, nor salesmen of one religious product: preachers herald the Word who is God. This is the very Word that – in the darkness – brought light, life and creation itself into being, the Word that now brings the new creation into being. The Word entrusted to the preacher is the very power of God who does not return empty, who will one day drive all darkness away for good.
We have seen, then, that the triune God is a speaking God, a God who communicates himself when he utters his Word. Now, this communication is necessarily and completely trinitarian. Martin Luther brought out part of what this means in his comments on John 16:13, that the Father speaks, the eternal Word is spoken and the Spirit hears this Word – and then passes it on to us. That very act of the Spirit – hearing and speaking – is in fact a wholly trinitarian act, for the Father and the Son send the Spirit to do that work of speaking (John 15:26). The apostle Peter put it like this:
Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and enquired carefully, enquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories. It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves but you, in the things that have now been announced to you through those who preached the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven, things into which angels long to look. (1 Peter 1:10–12)
That is, through the Spirit God breathes out the Scriptures (2 Tim. 3:16) so that in them the ‘word of Christ’, Christ the Word, may be known (Rom. 10:17; Col. 3:16).
It is worth noting the vital point here, that the Word spoken by the Father and the message made known by the Spirit of truth are one and the same. What the Father holds out is his Word; what the Spirit testifies to is the Son. The Father sends the Spirit to make known his Word – the Word through whom the Father himself can be known (John 1:18; cf. 2 Tim. 3:15).
There is more to be said, though, about the trinitarian nature of God’s self-communication. Not only is the Spirit sent to make the Son known (and, through him, to make the Father known); the Word goes out from the Father in the power of the Spirit. The sending forth of the Word is inseparable from the Spirit. ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made’, we read in Psalm 33:6, ‘and by the breath [or ‘Spirit’] of his mouth all their host.’ The psalmist is clearly alluding to Genesis 1, when the Word of God is spoken into the darkness only as the Spirit hovers over the waters to bear it forth.
God always speaks, that is, in the power of his Spirit. His self-communication is a Spirit-enabled and Spirit-illumined speech. It is something that is both comforting and humbling for the preacher: God’s Word does not go out powerless, but the power in which it goes out is not the power of the human preacher.
Seeing how God himself speaks gives a fundamental framework to any theology of preaching. God the Father is the prime preacher, who speaks his Word and so communicates himself in the power of the Spirit. That is the trinitarian foundation on which the content, form and intent of truly Christian preaching must be built.
The first thing this means is that, since God in his speaking does not merely give information about himself, but actually gives himself, so the Christian preacher can know that he is about much more than the transferral of information. Jean-Jacques von Allmen expressed it like this:
God is not so much the object as the true source of Christian preaching. Preaching is thus speech by God rather than speech about God . . . The Holy Spirit, indeed, has as His chief ministry to make effective today – with all that that implies – what Jesus Christ said and did, and also what He will say and do. Christian preaching cannot therefore be understood apart from the doctrine of the Trinity: on the basis of the past work of His Son, and in the perspective of the work He is yet to do, God the Father gives us today, through the Holy Spirit, faith in the salvation which has been accomplished and hope in the salvation yet to be revealed.4
Allmen was seeking to express what he saw as a standard Reformed view, and by way of illustration we can compare what we might call a ‘Zwinglian’ and a ‘Calvinist’ view of preaching.
The Zurich Reformer Ulrich Zwingli taught that in the Lord’s Supper Christ’s body is not present in any sense, but only symbolized. For him the Lord’s Supper was a mere memorial pointing to a truth located elsewhere. If we take that logic into preaching, then in the same way, the point of the sermon, like the Supper, is to serve as a memorial to God’s Word. God’s Word is called freshly to mind, but no more.
Such a theology of preaching (whether or not Zwingli would expressly have owned the extension of his logic) stands in stark contrast to that articulated by his successor, Heinrich Bullinger, and championed by John Calvin in Geneva. When writing the Second Helvetic Confession, Bullinger boldly stated that ‘The Preaching of the Word of God Is the Word of God.’5 This requires a little clarification to avoid confusion. Bullinger never meant to imply that the words of a preacher somehow have the same standing and authority as Scripture. Scripture never bows to the preacher; the preacher must bow to Scripture, his preaching depending on the Word of God in its supreme authority. The word preached from the pulpit is authoritative only in so far as it is a faithful proclamation of the Word of God found in Scripture; yet in so far as it is faithful, the people hear the very Word of God. Thus the Christian faithful can be told in Hebrews to remember their leaders ‘who spoke to you the word of God’ (Heb. 13:7).
T. H. L. Parker has argued at some length in his book Calvin’s Preaching that what Bullinger articulated so succinctly was deeply decisive for Calvin’s own preaching ministry.6 He starts by asking why Calvin was so painstakingly committed, year after year, to expositional preaching. He answers that Calvin believed that through such preaching the very creative voice and Word of God would be heard. Not simply remembered or memorialized, but heard:
If the preacher faithfully hands on what he himself has learned in the school of God, then God himself ‘presides’ (CO 53.2648), he is ‘in the midst’ (CO 53.2648), as if you were showing himself visibly (CO 53.26418) or face-to-face (CO 53.26418), and his people are ‘joined’ to him (CO 53.2648). Our Lord Jesus Christ is present (CO 53.2648) and the Church is united with him (CO 53.2648). The pulpit is ‘the throne of God, from where he wills to govern our souls’ (CO 53.52040).7
Calvin is worth hearing more directly and at length on this. Preaching on 1 Timothy 3:2 (that an overseer must be ‘able to teach’), he declares:
St Paul does not mean that one should just make a parade here or that a man should show off so that everyone applauds him and says ‘Oh! well spoken! Oh! what a breadth of learning! Oh! what a subtle mind!’ All that is beside the point . . . When a man has climbed up into the pulpit, is it so that he may be seen from afar, and that he may be pre-eminent? Not at all. It is that God may speak to us by the mouth of a man. And he does us that favour of presenting himself there and wishes a mortal man to be his messenger.8
The Reformer was fully aware of the downright audacity of this (often repeated) claim. Elsewhere he therefore sought to substantiate it:
When a man is the envoy of his prince and has complete authority to do what is committed to his charge, he will so to say borrow the prince’s name. He will say, ‘We are doing this; we instruct; we have commanded; we want that done.’ Now, when he speaks like this, he is not intending to take anything from his master. So it is with God’s servants. . . . It is said that the ministers are sent to enlighten the blind, to deliver the captives, to forgive sins, to convert hearts. What! these are things which belong to God alone . . . For there is nothing more properly his own than to pardon sins; he also reserves to himself the converting of the heart. Now, nevertheless it is the case that he imparts all these qualifications to those whom he appoints to convey his word and declares to them that he does not separate himself from them, but rather shows that he uses them as his hands and his instruments.9
Though not explicitly stated here, Calvin’s argument builds on a concealed trinitarian substructure. That is, because God does not simply talk about himself, but communicates himself in his Word, so the proclamation of his Word by human preachers means the holding out of God himself in all his glory and grace. Considering Calvin’s thoughts on 2 Corinthians 5:20, T. H. L. Parker summarizes:
It has become quite clear that with ‘the school of God’ we are not thinking of preaching as a purely educative exercise, and with ‘ambassadors for Christ’ we are not to consider only a repetition of instructions . . . What is daily preached in Geneva, Calvin is saying, is that God is gracious, that Jesus Christ has made the satisfaction for our sin. But when this message is preached, its reality is present and (how could it therefore be otherwise?) effective. It was not simply declared that God is a gracious God; in his Word God was being gracious in St Pierre and La Madeleine and St Gervais in May 1555. It was not only declared that Christ died for our sins, but before the eyes of the Genevans as of the Galatians fifteen hundred years earlier Jesus Christ was evidently set forth, crucified among them (Gal. 3.1). This is the language of revelation.10
The fact that God is triune, and always speaks in a trinitarian way, should inform both the content and the intent of Christian preaching.
In terms of content – and I start at rock bottom here – the fact that God is triune must mean that Christian preachers preach the Trinity. And on more than one-off specials like Trinity Sunday. If this is who God is, then to preach the Trinity is not to indulge in esoterica, but to distinguish the living God from idols. As Calvin put it:
God also designates himself by another special mark to distinguish himself more precisely from idols. For he so proclaims himself the sole God as to offer himself to be contemplated clearly in three persons. Unless we grasp these, only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God.11
This means it simply will not do for Christian preachers to mouth a vague or general theism. How, then, will the glory of the living God be distinguished from the glory of all others? A faithful servant of this God will be eager to speak in trinitarian language as often and as clearly as possible, knowing our natural propensity to squash God into our own fallen perception.
‘Preaching the Trinity’ really (unfortunately) requires a little explanation. All too easily that could be taken to mean that, every now and again, the preacher departs from his usual expository ministry and puzzles his congregation with the question of how three can be one. Out with the verse-by-verse that week; in with talk about triangles and 3-in-1 hair shampoo. But the Trinity is not an addendum to the gospel of Jesus, a side room for those ready to move on: the triune God is the God of the gospel. To preach the Trinity is simply to preach the Father who is made known by his Son Jesus Christ in the power of the Spirit. It is, in fact, no more than to preach Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God anointed with the Holy Spirit. Note the trinitarianism of the simple summons to faith in Jesus found in John’s Gospel: ‘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 20:31). Perhaps part of the difficulty is all the technical theological jargon associated with the Trinity: extrabiblical words that can give the impression that the Trinity is an extrabiblical doctrine. But those words – homoousion, hypostasis, essence, and so on – were formulated specifically to protect what the church saw in Scripture, not add to it. To preach the Trinity is to herald the God made known in Scripture.
To move up a level: preaching the Trinity involves more than merely slipping the words ‘Father, Son and Spirit’ into every sermon. Such tokenism equally betrays a belief in the peripherality of the Trinity. If people are to know the gospel of the triune God, then the very syntax and structure of that gospel must be clearly seen to be trinitarian. Take John Calvin again, as an example of this done well. In the first real outline of his theology, his preface to Olivétan’s New Testament (1535), he gives the following succinctly trinitarian summary of the gospel: ‘Scripture is also called gospel, that is, new and joyful news, because in it is declared that Christ, the sole true and eternal Son of the living God, was made man, to make us children of God his Father, by adoption.’12
The very structure of Calvin’s Institutes (final 1559 edition) follows an explicitly trinitarian shape.
Book One, on ‘The Knowledge of God the Creator’, is concerned especially with the Father and explains how, through Scripture, we may know the triune God. ‘In scripture, from the creation onward, we are taught one essence of God, which contains three persons’ (the title of ch. 13). Book One also explains our plight as a fallen race: in ‘this ruin of mankind no one now experiences God either as Father or as Author of salvation, or favorable in any way, until Christ the Mediator comes forward to reconcile him to us’.13 Calvin thus not only spoke of God in expressly trinitarian terms, but the very nature of the human problem was also conceived by him in trinitarian terms: sinners cannot now experience God as Father.
Book Two, on ‘The Knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ’, is concerned especially with the Son and how he brings us ‘to God our Author and Maker, from whom we have been estranged, in order that he may again begin to be our Father’.14 Here Calvin makes plain the trinitarian logic and framework of redemption: the Son comes from the Father to share with us his sonship:
His task was so to restore us to God’s grace as to make of the children of men, children of God; of the heirs of Gehennna, heirs of the Heavenly Kingdom. Who could have done this had not the self-same Son of God become the Son of man, and had not so taken what was ours as to impart what was his to us, and to make what was his by nature ours by grace?15
Calvin saw that it is insufficient to conceive or speak of salvation as simply being about ‘reconciliation with God’. While true, such language on its own fails to grasp the full wonder of the Son’s redemption. It is only when Christ’s work is viewed in its full trinitarian magnificence that we can grasp how ‘the only Son of God . . . has adopted us as his brothers’.16 Only then can the Christian know real confidence before the Most High, love him and dare to call him ‘Father’.
Book Three, on ‘The Way in Which We Receive the Grace of Christ’, is concerned with the Spirit’s application of the Son’s redemption to believers. Calvin asks, ‘How do we receive those benefits which the Father bestowed on his only-begotten Son – not for Christ’s own private use, but that he might enrich poor and needy men?’ He answers, by ‘the secret energy of the Spirit, by which we come to enjoy Christ and all his benefits’.17 In fact, he argues, it would be right to say that the first title of the Spirit is
the ‘Spirit of adoption’ because he is the witness to us of the free benevolence of God with which God the Father has embraced us in his beloved only-begotten son to become a Father to us; and he encourages us to have trust in prayer. In fact, he supplies the very words so that we may fearlessly cry, ‘Abba, Father!’ [Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6].18
‘Spirit of adoption’ being the first title of the Spirit, Calvin could not have made more plain the primal and determinative significance of the triune being of God for salvation and the Christian life.
Book Four, on ‘The External Means or Aids by Which God Invites Us Into the Society of Christ and Holds Us Therein’, is concerned especially with the church. Having already covered the creative and redemptive work of Father, Son and Spirit in Books One to Three, Calvin takes his explanation of baptism as an opportunity to summarize the trinitarian shape of the Christian faith:
All the gifts of God proffered in baptism are found in Christ alone. Yet this cannot take place unless he who baptizes in Christ invokes also the names of the Father and the Spirit. For we are cleansed by his blood because our merciful Father, wishing to receive us into grace in accordance with his incomparable kindness, has set this Mediator among us to gain favor for us in his sight. But we obtain regeneration by Christ’s death and resurrection only if we are sanctified by the Spirit and imbued with a new and spiritual nature. For this reason we obtain and, so to speak, clearly discern in the Father the cause, in the Son the matter, and in the Spirit the effect, of our purgation and our regeneration.19
It was not at all a question of unnecessarily wedging trinitarianism in, though. Calvin held that baptism belongs at the very beginning of our faith because of how our faith is trinitarian to the core. Elsewhere he writes:
There are good reasons why the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, are expressly mentioned; for there is no other way in which the efficacy of baptism can be experienced than when we begin with the unmerited mercy of the Father, who reconciles us to himself by the only begotten Son; next, Christ comes forward with the sacrifice of his death; and at length, the Holy Spirit is likewise added, by whom he washes and regenerates us, (Tit. iii.5,) and, in short, makes us partakers of his benefits. Thus we perceive that God cannot be truly known, unless our faith distinctly conceive of Three Persons in one essence; and that the fruit and efficacy of baptism proceed from God the Father adopting us through his Son, and, after having cleansed us from the pollutions of the flesh through the Spirit: creating us anew to righteousness.20
The One held out by the Father, and the One to whom the Spirit of truth testifies, is the eternal Son who comes ‘from the Father, full of grace and truth’ (John 1:14). He is the truth and glory of God; in him the grace of God is found. That is why the law finds its fulfilment in him (Rom. 10:4), and why the prophets, the apostles and all the Scriptures testify about him (Luke 24:27, 44–46; John 5:39–40, 46).
Calvin argued this point at some length in his preface to Olivétan’s New Testament. Indeed, he wrote:
it is not only the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, the angels, the prophets and apostles that bear witness to Jesus Christ . . . all the elements and all the creatures have given Jesus Christ the glory . . . There has been nothing in heaven or on earth which has not witnessed that Jesus Christ is God, Lord and Master, and the great Ambassador of the Father sent here below to accomplish the salvation of mankind.21
Jesus Christ is ‘the beginning, the middle, and the end of our salvation . . . It follows that every good thing we could think or desire is to be found in this same Jesus Christ alone.’22 What all that means is this:
This is what we should in short seek in the whole of Scripture: truly to know Jesus Christ, and the infinite riches that are comprised in him and are offered to us by him from God the Father. If one were to sift thoroughly the Law and the Prophets, he would not find a single word which would not draw and bring us to him. And for a fact, since all the treasures of wisdom and understanding are hidden in him, there is not the least question of having, or turning toward, another goal; not unless we would deliberately turn aside from the light of truth, to lose ourselves in the darkness of lies. Therefore, rightly does Saint Paul say in another passage that he would know nothing except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.23
For the preacher, the application is straightforward: if the desire of the Father, the work of the Spirit and the purpose of Scripture is to make Jesus known, so too the preacher must seek to ‘draw and bring us to him’. For the preacher there cannot be ‘the least question of having, or turning toward, another goal’. And no preacher need worry that that necessarily means leapfrogging or manhandling his scriptural text: the ultimate purpose of his text is to testify in some way to Christ.
To know Christ is what we were made for; it is the essence of life and wisdom – the life and wisdom of the Father now shared with us in the Spirit:
What more would we ask for, as spiritual doctrine for our souls, than to know God, to be converted to him, and to have his glorious image imprinted in us, so that we may partake of his righteousness, to become heirs of his Kingdom and to possess it in the end in full? But the truth is that from the beginning God has given himself, and at present gives himself more fully, that we may contemplate him in the face of his Christ. It is therefore not lawful that we turn away and become diverted even in the smallest degree by this or that. On the contrary, our minds ought to come to a halt at the point where we learn in Scripture to know Jesus Christ and him alone, so that we may be directly led by him to the Father who contains in himself all perfection.24
It would be wise at this point if we got more specific. For a ‘Christ’ could be preached who is not the eternally beloved of the Father or the subject of the Spirit’s testimony. The ‘Christ’ set forth could be a good man and no more; he could be a godlet, or a God with no Father. Such distortions of Christ would utterly distort the gospel proclaimed.
First of all, if the Father did not eternally love the Son ‘before the foundation of the world’ (John 17:24), then we have no basis on which to say that eternally God is love (1 John 4:8). From what, then, would any grace and mercy spring in him? And why should we love him?
Second, without belief that God the Father has an eternal Son, of his very being, whom he sent to be our Saviour, we are left with a creature who simply would not have the right to allow us to be known as the sons of God. Perhaps we would be left with a man, powerless to do any more than inspire us to win our own way to God. Take these famous words from Charles Gore as he considered Nestorianism (the idea that Jesus was a man in close relationship with the Son, a man helped along by God’s grace):
Inadequate conceptions of Christ’s person go hand in hand with inadequate conceptions of what human nature wants. The Nestorian conception of Christ . . . qualifies Christ for being an example of what man can do, and into what wonderful union with God he can be assumed if he is holy enough; but Christ remains one man among many, shut in within the limits of a single human personality, and influencing man only from the outside. He can be a Redeemer of man if man can be saved from outside by bright example, but not otherwise. The Nestorian Christ is logically associated with the Pelagian man . . . The Nestorian Christ is the fitting Saviour of the Pelagian man.25
In other words, the triunity of God fundamentally affects how we conceive both the person and the work of Christ. Since the Son is God himself, one with his Father, we clearly need and have a divine Saviour. The fact that God would step in to our rescue shows the gravity of our need: evidently, by ourselves, even if we were assisted, we could not save ourselves. And the fact that God himself has come to our rescue shows we have a gospel of grace. A helpless humanity, a gracious God and a sufficient Saviour: such must be the preached emphases of a trinitarian gospel.
The triune God has a particular intent in communicating: he speaks and makes himself known through his Word in order that we may enter into the divine life. In his high priestly prayer Jesus says:
O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them. (John 17:25–26)
The Son comes to us from the Father to share with us his life of knowing the Father, being loved by the Father and loving the Father in return. In that way we who are made in God’s image are conformed to him by the Spirit, loving the Father as the Son does and loving the Son as the Father does. It means that the knowledge of himself that God shares is not a bare cognition. We may say that the triune God who is love is not truly known where he is not truly loved.
This was of signal importance to John Calvin as he fought the Roman Catholic notion of an ‘unformed’, ‘implicit’ faith that accepts church teaching without any movement of the heart towards trust in God or filial love and fear of him:26
We are called to a knowledge of God: not that knowledge which, content with that empty speculation, merely flits in the brain, but that which will be sound and fruitful if we duly perceive it, and if it takes root in the heart.27
Calvin considered this so vital that he dedicated the second chapter of his Institutes to the claim that ‘piety’, ‘trust’ and ‘reverence’ are requisite components of any true knowledge of God. ‘We shall not say that, properly speaking, God is known where there is no religion or piety.’28 He believed this to be the case because of the sheer glory and goodness of God: such a God cannot be known without being adored. ‘How’, he asked,
can the mind be aroused to taste the divine goodness without at the same time being wholly kindled to love God in return? For truly, that abundant sweetness which God has stored up for those who fear him cannot be known without at the same time powerfully moving us.29
For the preacher it means that a sermon cannot be confused with a simple lecture. The preacher has a greater responsibility (a responsibility that demands a deeper integrity): God shares knowledge of himself in order that we may be affected, that we may be ‘wholly kindled to love God’, just as the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father. Preaching should foster sincere worship. And Calvin was clear that such heartfelt worship is precisely what is most essentially and practically transformative for the Christian, what is most productive of true obedience. That is because love for God enables true love for neighbour (1 John 4:7–21). The first table of the law (concerning worship) is the foundation for the second (concerning love for neighbour), and only in that order can the law be fulfilled.30
As Luther put it, God the Father is an eternal preacher, and thus preaching finds its ultimate rationale and shape in the very nature of God. The Trinity therefore underpins the highest view of preaching, and practically preserves it from being confused with mere lecturing, moralizing or entertaining. When by the Spirit a preacher holds out God’s Word, he proclaims more than a message: he participates in the divine life, wielding the very power of God to raise dead sinners to enjoy the loving life of God.
© Michael Reeves, 2016