2
WITHIN THE HAPPY LAND
OF THE TRINITY
(Or, God in Himself)
I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.
JOHN 17:4–5
(H)e is being itself, and as such must necessarily be infinitely happy in the glorious perfections of his nature from everlasting to everlasting; and as he did not create, so neither did he redeem because he needed us; but he loved us because he loved us.
SUSANNA WESLEY (1738)
In the following chapters, we will see that the Trinity makes all the difference in the world for practical things such as salvation, spirituality, prayer, Bible study, and church life. The doctrine of the Trinity is a practical doctrine, and has immediate implications for Christian life. In some ways, we will be answering the question that Nicky Cruz asked, “Why have three persons . . . when it confuses me so much? Why couldn’t God just be God?” It is a question that has occurred to many Christians: What is the Trinity for?
But the first and clearest answer has to be that the Trinity isn’t ultimately for anything, any more than God is for the purpose of anything. Just as you wouldn’t ask what purpose God serves or what function he fulfills, it makes no sense to ask what the point of the Trinity is or what purpose the Trinity serves. The Trinity isn’t for anything beyond itself, because the Trinity is God. God is God in this way: God’s way of being God is to be Father, Son, and Holy Spirit simultaneously from all eternity, perfectly complete in a triune fellowship of love. If we don’t take this as our starting point, everything we say about the practical relevance of the Trinity could lead us to one colossal misunderstanding: thinking of God the Trinity as a means to some other end, as if God were the Trinity in order to make himself useful. But God the Trinity is the end, the goal, the telos, the omega. In himself and without any reference to a created world or the plan of salvation, God is that being who exists as the triune love of the Father for the Son in the unity of the Spirit. The boundless life that God lives in himself, at home, within the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is perfect. It is complete, inexhaustibly full, and infinitely blessed.
IMAGINE THERE’S NO HEAVEN . . . OR EARTH
There is something even better than the good news, and that something is God. The good news of the gospel is that God has opened up the dynamics of his triune life and given us a share in that fellowship. But all of that good news only makes sense against the background of something even better than the good news: the goodness that is the perfection of God himself. The doctrine of the Trinity is first and foremost a teaching about who God is, and God the Trinity would have been God the Trinity whether he had revealed himself to us or not, whether he had redeemed us or not, whether he had created us or not.
Obviously, these “whether or not” statements are counterfactual: they are about situations that are not the case. God has in fact made himself known, has redeemed his people, and, to say the most obvious thing, has created us. That being the case, what is the good of asking hypothetical questions about what would have been the case if God had not done these things he has done? Indeed, isn’t it even ungrateful to forget, or to pretend to forget, God’s mighty acts? No, in this case, far from being ungrateful, it is an opportunity to become more grateful. Hypothetical questions are useful tools for understanding how things really are by imagining how they might have been otherwise.1 They can be used as mental cures for sick patterns of thought. If you are tempted to think that God’s triunity is something he puts on in order to reach some further goal, or to interact with the world, you can cure yourself of that tendency by thinking away the world and asking yourself: If there had been no world, would God have been Father, Son, and Spirit? If you are tempted to think of Christmas as the time when the Son of God first began to exist, you can cure yourself by asking: If the Son of God had not taken on human nature, would he still have been the Son of God?
The answer to these hypothetical questions is yes, God would have been Trinity with no world, and the Son of God did in fact preexist his incarnation. God minus the world is still God the Holy Trinity. In the words of the hymn by Frederick W. Faber:
When Heaven and Earth were yet unmade
When time was yet unknown,
Thou, in Thy bliss and majesty,
Didst live, and love, alone.2
The emphasis in these excellent lines is on God’s self-sufficient “bliss and majesty.” Faber would be quick to point out that the final word, “alone,” is very different from “lonely.” Otherwise God could not “love, alone.” Indeed, God is the only one who can love alone, for Trinitarian reasons: God the Father loves God the Son in the love of God the Holy Spirit.
Is it too bold of us to declare what God was like, or what he was doing, before creation? It requires boldness, to be sure, but only the boldness of the New Testament. One of the characteristic differences between the Old Testament and the New Testament is that the New Testament is bold to make such statements. Look, for instance, at the way the New Testament takes a step further back with its declaration of salvation: where God declares in the old covenant, “I have chosen you,” the new covenant announces that “he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world.” The prophets do not make declarations about what happened “before the foundation of the world,” but the apostles do. The main reason for this is that the coming of Christ forced the apostles to think farther back, farther down, into the ultimate foundation of God’s ways and works.
When Christ brought salvation, the apostles had to decide whether the life of Jesus Christ was one more event in the series of God’s actions or whether, in meeting the Son of God, they had come into contact with something that was absolutely primal about God himself. Christ did not leave them the option of considering him just another prophet or servant of God. They even had to decide where to start in telling the story of Jesus: With his birth? With ancient prophecies about his coming (as in Mark)? With a genealogy connecting him to Abraham (as in Matthew) or all the way back to Adam (as in Luke)? Ultimately, they knew that the best way to acknowledge Jesus as the eternal Son of God was to go back further than the foundation of the world and confess that he had been there previous even to that. That backward step behind the foundation of the world is a step into the eternal nature of God. So the Old Testament starts with the foundation of the world: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). But the story of Jesus starts before that, because the Son of God was already present by the time of the beginning: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1).
As a result, we are speaking from solid New Testament ground when we say that God was the Trinity from all eternity, or that God is Father, Son, and Spirit without reference to the creation of the world. Scottish bishop Robert Leighton (1611–1684) elaborated on this fact when his commentary on 1 Peter brought him to the phrase “before the foundation of the world” (1 Pet. 1:20):
Before there was time, or place, or any creature, GOD, the blessed Trinity was in Himself, and as the Prophet speaks, inhabiting Eternity, completely happy in Himself: but intending to manifest and communicate His goodness, He gave being to the world, and to time with it; made all to set forth His goodness, and the most excellent of His creatures to contemplate and enjoy it.3
Imagining God without the world is one way to highlight the freedom of God in creating. Thinking away the world makes it obvious that God didn’t have to make a world. Creation was not required, not mandatory, not exacted from God, neither by any necessity imposed from outside nor by any deficit lurking within the life of God. The Bible does not directly answer the question, Why did God create anything at all?4 but it does let us know what some of the most glaringly wrong answers to that question would be. It would be wrong to say that God created because he was lonely, unfulfilled, or bored. God is free from that kind of dependence.
Such divine freedom is one of the things meant by grace. Notice how deeply imprinted this aspect of grace is, even into our language: When something is gratuitous (from gratia, grace) and given to us gratis (for free), the appropriate response is gratitude (responding to gratia) or gratefulness. Sometimes when a person gets a surprise gift, he blurts out, “You didn’t have to do that!” Well, of course. That sentiment, too obvious to need saying, is a tiny meditation on the nature of the freedom that lies behind a true gift. So is the redundancy of describing something as a “free gift,” as if there were any other kind of gift. Grace calls forth gratitude, and we answer with “thank you.” This is also, by the way, why we say the word please when we ask for something. It is a shortened form of the expression, “If it pleases you,” which is a way of recognizing that the person you are asking a favor from is not your servant but a free person who isn’t required to do your bidding. Good manners are good theology.
The same logic of freedom and gratitude applies to redemption: once man had fallen, God was not strictly required to redeem. We can rest our thoughts for a moment between creation and redemption, and ask, What if God had not redeemed his fallen creatures? If thinking away creation is an uncomfortable thing to do, thinking away redemption is terrifying: God did not have to save us. There was no external necessity imposed on him, nor did he have any internal need. The perfect blessedness of God would not have been compromised by the final failure of humanity. God did not save us to rescue himself from sadness over our plight. He saved us freely, out of an astonishing abundance of generosity. There is an ancient prayer that praises God that he “didst wondrously create, and yet more wondrously renew the dignity of human nature.”5 That prayer expresses the doctrine of “double gratuity,” a term that means God created freely and also redeemed freely.6 Both are wonderful, or amazing grace. Even more than we depend on God’s free act of creation, we hang on his mercy for salvation, approaching him “without one plea” and answering his grace with gratitude.
But back behind even that double grace of creation and redemption is the sheer fact of God’s being as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The doctrine of the Trinity calls us to recognize, and ponder, and rejoice in the sheer reality of who God essentially is, at home in the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds. To recognize this is to come face-to-face with the final foundation of all God’s ways and works. And when we have carried out the thought experiment of thinking away everything we can (both redemption and creation), leaving nothing but God, we are not left with a formless and solitary divine blur. Instead we confess that God exists essentially and eternally as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Christians have much to say about grace. But the ground of grace is God’s absolute triune self-sufficiency.
THE TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY OF SUSANNA WESLEY
Christians through the ages have always grasped the connection between the self-sufficiency of God as Trinity and the graciousness of grace, but there is one evangelical who understood it especially deeply and expressed it exceptionally well. For Susanna Wesley (1669–1742), mother of John and Charles, the first thing that came to mind whenever she thought about the Trinity was this absolute self-sufficiency of God, with the accompanying sense of his graciousness in reaching out to us in total freedom. “Consider the infinite boundless goodness of the ever blessed Trinity,” she exhorted herself in her private devotional journal . . .
adore the stupendous mystery of divine love! That God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost should all concur in the work of man’s redemption! What but pure goodness could move or excite God, who is perfect essential blessedness! That cannot possibly receive any accession of perfection or happiness from his creatures.What, I say, but love, but goodness, but infinite incomprehensible love and goodness could move him to provide such a remedy for the fatal lapse of his sinful unworthy creatures?7
Because her starting point was the idea of the fullness of the life of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is “perfect essential blessedness,” Susanna recognized that the love of the “ever-blessed Trinity” is a “stupendous mystery.” When one is suitably impressed with the absolute completeness of God’s life, one recognizes that it is impossible to increase the perfection and happiness of it. As a result, the graciousness, the “infinite incomprehensible love and goodness,” of God stands out more conspicuously against this vast background of Trinitarian self-sufficiency. For Susanna Wesley, the doctrine of the blessed Trinity is what makes grace so perpetually amazing.
“We know there is but one living and true God,” she wrote in a letter to a friend in 1737, “though revealed to us under three characters—that of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Susanna wrote a few more lines about the distinct roles of the three persons in the Christian life, and then, with her thoughts elevated by these ideas of the Trinity, she broke out in praise: “Let me beseech you to join with me,” she wrote, “in adoring the infinite and incomprehensible love of God.” And:
He is the great God, “the God of the spirits of all flesh,” “the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity,” and created not angels and men because he wanted them, for he is being itself, and as such must necessarily be infinitely happy in the glorious perfections of his nature from everlasting to everlasting; and as he did not create, so neither did he redeem because he needed us; but he loved us because he loved us, he would have mercy because he would have mercy, he would show compassion because he would show compassion.8
In this model piece of theological reflection, Susanna Wesley begins with recognition of God’s infinite happiness in being God, affirms the double gratuity of divine freedom in creation and redemption, and ends with an allusion to God’s self-description (Ex. 33:19) of the only basis of his mercy: “He would have mercy because he would have mercy.” Finally, she sums up her doctrine of the graciousness of grace with the simple paraphrase: “He loved us because he loved us.”
Susanna Wesley may have been a warmhearted pietist with a burning experience of God’s grace in her own life, but she was not just expressing a heartfelt religious sentiment when she wrote this. She was also writing from a well-formed Trinitarian theology that she had thought out to the end. Her journal from about 1710 includes an impressive entry that shows how seriously she took the doctrine. She began by accusing the great Aristotle of falling into error when he taught that the world eternally existed along with God, “streamed by connatural result and emanation” from all eternity. She mused that “this error seems grounded on a true notion of the goodness of God,” which Aristotle “truly supposes must eternally be communicating good to something or other.” It is true that the Supreme Being is infinitely good and that his goodness is of a kind to be always inclined to give itself away to others. Without any further information, this speculation would demand an eternal world as the eternal recipient of God’s self-giving goodness. An eternally, essentially self-giving God would require an eternal world. But that sort of eternal world would make God dependent on the world for his own satisfaction. Without the world, God would be a frustrated giver.
The conclusion, which Susanna Wesley found utterly unacceptable, would be that God depended on something outside himself to make possible his full self-expression. Pondering this mistake in the great Aristotle’s philosophy, Susanna mused, “It was his want of the knowledge of revealed religion that probably led him into it.” Aristotle’s problem came from the fact that he had no access to the revealed doctrine of the Trinity.
For had he ever heard of that great article of our Christian faith concerning the Holy Trinity, he had then perceived the almighty Goodness eternally communicating being and all the fullness of the Godhead to the divine Logos, his uncreated Word, between whose existence and that of the Father there is not one moment assignable.9
In Susanna’s Trinitarian worldview, the eternal Son has eternally existed alongside the eternal Father, always receiving the full goodness of divinity from him. The world, therefore, does not have to bear the burden of being God’s eternal recipient of self-giving goodness. To put it another way, unless the Son were the eternal recipient of the Father’s self-giving, the world would be metaphysically necessary to the being of God. The point Susanna made here has also been seen by numerous thinkers. The Baptist theologian Augustus H. Strong (1836–1921) put it this way: “Neither God’s independence nor God’s blessedness can be maintained upon grounds of absolute unity. Anti-Trinitarianism almost necessarily makes creation indispensable to God’s perfection, tends to a belief in the eternity of matter, and ultimately, leads . . . to pantheism.”10
Susanna Wesley’s skirmish with Aristotle is a pretty tidy speculative engagement with the philosopher, and it is worth remembering that Susanna was not a theology professor but a full-time homeschooling mother when she wrote it. Little John Wesley was probably about seven years old at the time Susanna recorded these thoughts in her personal devotional journal. She obviously had a lively intellect and a mind for what mattered. What mattered, in her well-formed evangelical Trinitarianism, was that the deep Trinitarian background of the gospel stayed firmly in place so the astonishing graciousness of God’s free grace could be seen for what it is.
WHO GOD IS AND WHAT HE DOES
Susanna Wesley is a perfect case study in well-balanced evangelical Trinitarianism because she maintained a healthy sense of proportion between who God is and what God does. She was certainly passionate about what God has done to save his people, but she knew that the gospel derives its power from the infinite background of who God is. That infinite background of God’s “perfect essential blessedness” formed the ultimate horizon against which she could “adore the stupendous mystery of God’s love.” Balanced evangelical Trinitarianism does not just throw itself into the river of good news and swim away downstream; it also acknowledges the fountain from which that river flows. Like Susanna Wesley, it keeps one foot in the happy land of the Trinity and one foot on the ground of the gospel. When evangelicals lose their sense of proportion, they begin to talk as if they no longer care about the character of God unless they get something from it. The best defense against this has always been the doctrine of the eternal Trinity in itself.
Pondering the eternal, essential Trinity is the most concrete and biblical way of acknowledging the distinction between who God is and what he does. God is eternally Trinity, because triunity belongs to his very nature. Things like creation and redemption are things God does, and he would still be God if he had not done them. But Trinity is who God is, and without being the Trinity, he would not be God. God minus creation would still be God, but God minus Father, Son, and Holy Spirit would not be God. So when we praise God for being our creator and redeemer, we are praising him for what he does. But behind what God does is the greater glory of who he is: behind his act is his being. In the sentence “God saves,” the subject, “God,” is the foundation of the predicate.
As is the case with so many of the deep things of God, it is possible to consider the depth of God’s being behind his acts at two levels: in a preliminary way, without yet invoking the doctrine of the Trinity, or in a more concrete way, with explicit reference to the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Old Testament often shows, in a striking way, the truths that will be unpacked and intensified in a more Trinitarian fashion in the New Testament. So in this case. The distinction between who God is and what he does is an important element of the Old Testament’s way of offering praise to God. In Psalm 86:10, for example, the psalmist declares both: “For you are great and do wondrous things; you alone are God.” Even more strikingly, Psalm 119:68 has the brief sentence, “You are good and do good,” or, in the King James Version with its now-antiquated verbs, “Thou art good, and doest good.” We will see the New Testament intensification of this motif when the internally triune God behaves in an externally Trinitarian way; that is, when God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, saves us by being Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for us. We could paraphrase the psalm’s “Thou art good, and doest good,” with the extension, “Thou art triune, and doest Trinitarian works.” But we should never rush to new covenant clarity if it means leaving behind old covenant profundity.
In this case, the Old Testament itself gives us more than enough to meditate on: God’s being is the ground of his actions for us. When God does great and mighty things, his behavior, or performance, is in accordance with his own character. His behavior flows from his character; it is good because he is good. But his character is greater than his behavior, because it is essential to him. He could have withheld any particular behavior; he will go on to carry out more behavior; but he is who he is. There will be further divine performances grounded in his character, but his character itself is immutable. “I the Lord do not change” (Mal. 3:6).
The Puritan Thomas Manton (1620–1677), commenting on “Thou art good, and doest good,” called it a “compellation and confession of God’s goodness, both in his nature and actions.” “God is good of himself, and doth good to us,” Manton paraphrased the verse. First he dwelt on the goodness of God’s nature:
He is good of himself, good in himself; yea, good itself. There is none good above him, or besides him, or beyond him; it is all from him, and in him, if it be good. He is primitively and originally good, autagathos, good of himself, which nothing else is; for all creatures are good only by participation and communication from God. 11
Indeed, “all candles are lighted at his torch,” said Manton. The second half of the verse, “and doeth good,” does not have the same infinite depth to it, because it is an event within the story of God’s life with the world he freely created. “When God made the world, then was it verified, He is good, and doeth good.”12 We are always prone to ingratitude, but Manton was especially concerned that we should cultivate gratitude toward God for who he is. The only way to do that is to dwell on the subject:
It is the fruit of deep and ponderous meditation. Glances never warm the heart, it is our serious and deliberate thoughts which affect us. . . . To be ravished with love, affected with love, always thinking of love, speaking of love, expressing their sense of love, that is a work behoving saints.13
The contemporary praise song “Good to Me” strikes the right proportion when it directs us to sing the three lines to God, “For you are good / for you are good / for you are good to me.”14 Two-thirds of our attention on the goodness of God, followed by one-third on how he has directed that goodness toward us—that is just about the right ratio for the Christian affections if they are to correspond to God’s being and act. On the other hand, it is possible to sing that song as if everything before the words “to me” is just a way of triple-underlining what God has done on your behalf: good, good, good to me. But a better way of underlining what God has done on our behalf is to keep it securely anchored in his own inherent goodness.
TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY TO THE RESCUE
The priority of who God is over what he does may seem too obvious a point to spend much time on, and it may also seem like something nobody disagrees with. But, in fact, people routinely make a host of objections against this prioritizing. They say that while it is a fine, spiritual thought to focus on who God is in himself, it is too abstract and formless a task. All we know of God is what he does, specifically what he does for us. While it may be logically true that God’s being is greater than his acts, it is irrelevant to us once we have acknowledged it intellectually, since it is always God’s acts that we are dealing with.
Then there is the practical problem: even if we consent that it is some sort of spiritual duty to acknowledge the greatness of God’s inherent character over and above his external actions, how are we supposed to keep our attention focused on something like the being of God? If we turn our attention from the recitation of God’s actions for us (creation, election, the incarnation, the sending of the Spirit, daily mercies), we have nothing specific to think about and will be reduced to saying “you are good” over and over. Finally, objectors say that God himself is adequately glorified when we are grateful for his actions toward us; we do not need to try to go beyond that to some higher level of adoring God in himself. We have an interest in what God has done for us, they say, and it would be a kind of false humility to try to rise above gratitude for the benefits we get from God.
These are all sensible objections, but it is precisely here that the doctrine of the Trinity can be spiritually helpful. Consider for a moment how the doctrine of the Trinity enters the consciousness of a Christian. A person hears the gospel and accepts it. That person is conscious of being a sinner, and of being saved from the penalty and power of sin by Jesus Christ. But as soon as he begins reflecting on that salvation, he has to ask, how did Jesus bring about this salvation? The answer is: through his death and resurrection, Jesus paid for my sin by making atonement to God. That is how the Bible portrays the predicament we are in and the deliverance that Jesus brings. As soon as this answer is given, though, it raises another question: Who must Jesus Christ be, if he is capable of saving people in this way? The answer is that he must be fully human and fully divine. See how the logic of salvation works its way out into ever wider circles of understanding. Beginning with the awareness of salvation, the Christian is driven to understand what salvation is (atonement) and who the savior must be (the Son of God incarnate).
But there is a further question to be asked as the logic of salvation unfolds. If Jesus is divine, then who must God be? If we are serious when we add “God” to the description of Jesus, we must be equally serious that, in some way, “Jesus” is to be added to the description of God. The eternal Son, who in the fullness of time became incarnate for us and our salvation, belongs essentially to the definition of the true God. As soon as a person is converted to Christian faith, and that faith begins seeking understanding, the logic of salvation leads inevitably through these steps: from the experience of salvation, to the nature of salvation, to the nature of the savior, to the nature of God. You can see the ripple effect of faith seeking understanding, radiating outward from its first thought in Diagram 2.1.
As we see in Diagram 2.1, with each outward step we turn our attention from what is most immediately available to us and try to discern what larger realities are presupposed. We have to look away; we couldn’t understand our experience of salvation fully if we just kept analyzing that experience more and more deeply or minutely. We have to turn our attention to the reality outside of our experience, which gives our experience its character: the work that Jesus did for us. The same logic applies at the next circle, where we can only get so far in contemplating the work of Christ before we have to look to what it is founded on: the person of Christ. And finally, the confession that Jesus is God requires us not just to concentrate on Jesus but to turn our attention to our very idea of God.
You may have noticed that each of those concentric circles is in fact another level of theology. We can redescribe these circles in systematic theological terms. At the center, the point of impact on our experience, is soteriology, or the doctrine of salvation. Soteriology is a doctrinal field that includes things like justification, regeneration, conversion, and sanctification. Soteriology is grounded in the atonement, the objective work of Christ. Christ’s work is grounded in his person, meaning the doctrine of the incarnation. And finally, the doctrine of the incarnation presupposes the doctrine of the Trinity. Scottish theologian James Denney called the doctrine of the Trinity “the change in the conception of God which followed, as it was necessitated by, the New Testament conception of Christ and His work.”15 So faith seeking understanding moves directly to the biggest doctrines of Christian theology: soteriology, atonement, the incarnation, and the Trinity (see Diagram 2.2)
If you notice, in Diagram 2.2, how much bigger the outer circle is, you can begin to see how Trinitarian theology can help us maintain a proper sense of proportion. The Trinity is bigger than you and your salvation and has other things going on in the parts of the circle that don’t overlap with your circle. Those other parts of the Trinity circle are the rest of the fullness of God’s own life, the happy land of the Trinity. It is not possible to draw it to scale, because it is infinite, boundless, and finally inconceivable. There are parts of that happy land that you don’t go to, and you never will. I cannot describe to you what happens there and neither can anybody else, for God has remained silent about those regions. Trinitarian theology should never be an attempt to transgress the boundary marked by God’s Word in Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
That sense of proportion is something that Trinitarian theology can bring to the Christian life. A concentric diagram like this can help us gain that perspective, see how the most important doctrines flow into each other, and unpack the implications of what God has done for us. But in the process, it nevertheless obscures something else. It takes for granted the fact that all our thinking starts where we are, and then works outward from that center point. That is true enough, since in the process of learning we begin with what is closest and clearest. But the resulting diagram is not so much an objective map of the theological territory as it is a chart of How Everything Looks from Where I Am Standing. If you mistake it for a map, you will suffer from the optical illusion of parallax error and draw the conclusion that you are the center of all God’s works and ways, as if the incarnation of the Son, and the eternal being of the triune God, are centered on you. Even if this approach is not self-centered in the sinful sense, it is intentionally salvation-centered and thus unreliable in establishing the big picture of doctrines as huge as Trinity, incarnation, and atonement. There must be some larger map on which we can more helpfully locate our “You Are Here” marker.
A more objective map of the theological territory can be produced by switching from the order of knowing, which traces how we become aware of truths, to the order of being, which traces how those truths are related to each other, without reference to our learning about them. That map would be something like Diagram 2.3.
Of course, the scale of Diagram 2.3 is still not proportional, since it includes the infinite God. If we started with a shape representing who God is and then drew a proportionally sized shape representing what God does, the second shape would be invisibly tiny. On this diagram, which is meant to show the right perspective rather than the actual proportion, the relative size of the big triangle can suggest only that we should recognize the infinitude of the triune God over against the more focused nature of his works: the incarnation, the atonement, and your own little salvation, down there at the foot of the cross.
Though the relationships mapped out on the more objective diagram are a great step forward in theological understanding, the concentric circles diagram is still superior in two ways. First, being centered on our experience, it is a better guide to which part of the Christian message ought to be emphasized for all practical purposes. It would be preposterously hyper-intellectual to begin a description of the Christian faith with the Trinity and the incarnation before ever approaching the human situation. Second, and closely related, is the fact that the New Testament is mostly devoted to the things in those inner circles of the concentric diagram: sin, forgiveness, and the utter competence of Jesus to save those who trust him. The Trinitarian presuppositions of these central truths get only a few pages of exposition in the Bible. But they bear the same kind of weight that is borne by God’s testimony to Job, that he is the kind of majestic creator who has lots of interesting things going on that are far beyond Job’s understanding. Most of the Bible is not about that, but only a fool would fail to take it into account in dealing with God. As the horizon and background of everything that happens in the Bible, Trinitarian and incarnational theology are crucially important if we are to understand the foreground properly. But even when we have done our important work of elucidating and commenting, we should never imagine that we have made an improvement on the New Testament’s way of delivering the truth.
GOD LIFE IS LIVELIER THAN ALL OTHER LIFE
The clear categories of systematic theology can be helpful in the task of setting our affections in order. But nobody gets saved by getting the diagrams right. What’s at stake here is ultimately a spiritual issue. We ought to take God so seriously that we consider him more interesting than ourselves. In fact, if we had a proper sense of proportion, we would think of the life of God as the liveliest of all lives. In his classic work The Religious Affections, Jonathan Edwards proposed that one of the best ways to tell if a person is genuinely converted is to see if he has a sense of how good the things of God are as things in themselves. When a person is saved, he is able to perceive the goodness of God as something delightful in its own right; there is “a change made in the views of his mind, and relish of his heart, whereby he apprehends a beauty, glory, and supreme good, in God’s nature as it is in itself.”16 Of course the saints are boundlessly grateful to God for what he does on their behalf, but that gratitude alone is easily explained on purely human grounds. What sets the redeemed mind apart from the natural mind is that, beyond and behind the benefits of what God does, it can distinguish who God is in himself. This is what they delight in the most:
They do not first see that God loves them, and then see that He is lovely, but they first see that God is lovely, and that Christ is excellent and glorious,and their hearts are first captivated with this view, and the exercises of their love are wont from time to time to begin here, and to arise primarily from these views;and then,consequentially, they see God’s love, and great favor to them.17
Edwards makes a persuasive case, but many readers of The Religious Affections are left with the questions: Is this too high a standard? Is it really possible to be so theocentric in our thoughts of God? Can we learn to “first rejoice in God as glorious and excellent in Himself, and then secondarily rejoice in the fact that so glorious a God” is our God? Is there a way for our thoughts to become so God-centered?
Anglican churchman Robert Hawker (1753–1827) was convinced that there was a way and that the spiritual benefits of learning to think theocentrically would be immense: “Were it possible to divest ourselves of that selfishness which inseparably cleaveth to our present fallen nature,” he wrote, “our apprehensions of the Son of God, in his own personal glory, would rise to a standard far above any ideas we can now form, and open a contemplation at once most blessed and delightful.”18 Again, Hawker made that crucial distinction between what the Son of God has done for us, and who he is:
For although all that the Son of God hath done, and wrought, and sustained, and suffered, for his church and people is great, yea, incalculably great and precious in her esteem, yet his person far exceeds all.19
Hawker found a uniquely powerful way to help his readers adopt this God-centered point of view. In a short doctrinal tract defending the divine sonship of Christ, Hawker set aside all other lines of biblical evidence and argued his case solely from the express statements in which God the Father tells us what he thinks of his Son. Especially in those places where the voice of the Father speaks from heaven (Matt. 3:17; 17:5 and parallels), God the Father declares that he is already “well pleased” with his “beloved Son,” without reference to his works. “And I pray the reader . . . to observe with me,” said Hawker, “that it is the person of God’s dear Son which is above every other consideration in the esteem and affection of God the Father.” The Father loves the Son for the incarnation, for the redemption, for “the whole of what he hath done, is now doing, and will to all eternity do, for his body the church.” But these acts are secondary to the thing that the Father finds most precious and delightful in the Son: “It is the Son of God, as Son of God; his person, and not his works, which fills the heart of the Father with delight.”20
The main point of Hawker’s book is to demonstrate from Scripture that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God. But when he chose to focus on the Father’s testimony about the identity of the Son, he opened up a realm of biblical interpretation that is altogether remarkable, because it is the realm of conversation within the Trinity. In attempting to find out how we should think about Jesus, the biblical evidence leads us further up and further in, to the relationship between the Father and the Son.
There is somewhat very delightful even in the bare contemplation of it. For the consideration of the person of the Son of God, as he is in himself,and independent of his relationship to his people,opens to a subject at once both sublime and blessed. . . . And as God the Father is more glorious in what he is in himself, than in all his ways and works towards his creatures, so God the Son is more glorious in himself, and his own personal glory, in common with the Father and the Holy Ghost, in the essence of the GODHEAD, than in all the grace and love he hath manifested to his people. His love to us is indeed precious;yea,very precious;and as the apostle saith, “we love him because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19.) Nevertheless, had he never loved us, had he never taken our nature, nor done and suffered for us, what that love prompted him to do and suffer; yea, had we never been, the Son of God, as Son of God, would have been what he is in himself, in his divine nature, from all eternity and to all eternity,being “One with the Father,over all,God blessed for ever.Amen.”21
Amen, indeed. Pondering what God the Father thinks of his own Son introduces us to the “sublime and blessed” subject of the eternal conversation that is the fellowship within the Holy Trinity.
G. K. Chesterton, in a few enigmatic lines, evoked how hauntingly this eternal conversation lurks at the back of the biblical revelation:
The meanest man in grey fields gone
Behind the set of sun,
Heareth between star and other star,
Through the door of the darkness fallen ajar,
The council, eldest of things that are,
The talk of the Three in One.22
Someone has said that the doctrine of the Trinity is not so much heard in the New Testament as it is overheard. The negative part of that statement probably denies too much,23 but the positive part is important to notice. One of the most powerful features of the Trinitarianism of the New Testament is that it is revealed to us largely in the conversation between the Father and the Son. The hearers of the New Testament get to listen in on the prayers of Jesus the Son to his God and Father. All through his ministry he converses with the Father in a way that prompts his disciples to ask him for instruction in prayer. Even in the darkness of the cross itself, the Son keeps up an intimate running dialogue with his Father. Jesus is confident that his prayers are heard and that the Father is with him, and in a few spectacular instances of a voice speaking from heaven we get to hear the Father declaring his attitude toward his beloved Son. All this inner-Trinitarian conversation is intentionally held in public, for our instruction. What must have passed in private between Father and Son in the unity of the Holy Spirit is more than we can safely guess. But what they said to and about one another for us to overhear is not only a solid foundation for the doctrine of the Trinity, but it is also a marvelous invitation to us to be included in that conversation.
One of the things we want from the doctrine of the Trinity is a proper spiritual orientation. We want some cognitive assistance in learning to think from a center outside ourselves, and in laying aside for a moment the ways we benefit from what God has done for us. Since all of us are indebted to God’s mercy, and approach the majesty of the person of the Son only through what he has done for us, where could we turn for a disinterested testimony to the infinite value of the Son’s person? The answer, as obvious as it is fascinating, is that we can turn to the Father’s testimony about the Son. When the Father expresses his love for the Son, he cannot possibly be doing it out of self-interest or because he has something to gain. Where could we ever find a more objective point of view about who Jesus is? And of course the Son’s testimony about the Father is just as valuable for us. We hear all this through the words of Scripture brought home to us by the Holy Spirit, who inspired them. When we hear Father, Son, and Holy Spirit bear witness to each other in this manner, we are overhearing the doctrine of the Trinity from three privileged insiders, and learning about nothing less than the inner life of God. As Gerald Bray has said, in receiving this New Testament revelation “Christians have been admitted into the inner life of God.”24
This inner life that God lives, in the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, is a livelier life than any other life. We know about it because we have overheard Father, Son, and Holy Spirit talking amongst themselves with the intent that we overhear them and be brought into the conversation. Simply knowing that the life of God in itself is the liveliest of all lives is a medicinal correction to our sick, self-centered thinking. But while we are thinking about the eternal, internal Trinity, there are three mistakes we should avoid making: (1) we should not settle for a kind of grudging acknowledgment of the fact; (2) we should not build up our knowledge of it by mere negatives; and (3) we should not fill out our knowledge of it with lush mythological imaginings.
First, we should not settle for a grudging acceptance of the fact that the life of the eternally triune God is a great and lively thing in itself. The crucial thing here is not that we examine some arguments and conclude that God would be God without us, or that God’s eternal life is a life in Trinity, on the basis of some scriptural passages and the force of argument. The crucial thing is that we should rejoice in it. The knowledge that God enjoys perfect blessedness is a great thing. Even if it stays a kind of secret at the back of our minds, as something that we cannot say much about, it nevertheless exerts a tremendous gravitational pull on the rest of our thoughts and affections. Thomas Traherne said, “I have found that things unknown have a secret influence on the soul, and like the centre of the earth unseen violently attract it.”25
Second, we should not build up our knowledge of the eternal Trinity by mere negatives, taking our own experience of life as the standard and then subtracting from it anything that would not characterize God’s life. This negative approach to the knowledge of God may have its place, but that place is not here in the doctrine of the Trinity. In this doctrine we know only what God has positively revealed, so argument by negation has a limited place. We have already seen how counterfactuals can be helpful, when we imagined away everything but God and concluded that he would still be the Trinity. But the problem with overusing this negative mode of thinking is that when you have subtracted everything you can imagine from the internal life of God, you are left with nothing in your mind to think about, and it becomes impossible to conceive of that blankness as being more lively and interesting than what you have subtracted.
The life of God, considered in itself, is not still, or uneventful, or boring. If you think away the green grass and the course of history and the sidereal time of geological movement and all the music you have ever heard, what you have left is God. What you have to do with what is left is somehow acknowledge that he is more than what you have thought away. If you start with the baptism of Christ as an inner-Trinitarian conversation in which the Father and the Son are talking about our salvation, and take away the Jordan River, the incarnation, and the office of Messiah, you are left with no movement, shape, or color to focus on. But you still have to insist that the eternal divine conversation is bigger, livelier, and more wonderful than the things you have subtracted. It is impossible to get, by subtraction, to the absolute fullness of God’s eternal life. That life is so full that everything else comes from it, as a small trickle from an infinite plenty.
Third, we should not fill out our knowledge of the life of the eternally triune God with elaborate, mythological imaginings. This is the perfect place for some realism and restraint in the use of the imagination in theological thinking. We know that God’s life as Father, Son, and Spirit is eternally rich and full, but we do not know its details, and we should not manufacture them. We cannot describe the geography of the happy land of the Trinity. We do not know what kind of music the persons of the Trinity listen to, or what they cook for each other, or who does the dishes, or if they carpool. We do not know if they hold hands and do some kind of liturgical round-dance, as has often been suggested in some of the more purple theological literature. The perfect life of the blessed Trinity is lived above all worlds, including all worlds that we can fill out with imagined furnishings.
The main practical reason for learning how to think well about the eternal life of the Trinity is that it is the background for the gospel. The blessedness of God’s inner life is the only thing that is even better than the good news. The life of God in itself is the source of all the riches that fund the economy of salvation. It is also the guarantee that God’s grace is based on his character rather than on anything outside himself. Recall Susanna Wesley’s statement: “He loved us because he loved us.” This is why Paul calls the Christian message “the gospel of the glory of the blessed God” (1 Tim. 1:11). William Burkitt (1650–1703) explained why Paul used this phrase:
He styles God the giver of that gospel, the blessed God; to signify thereby unto us, his transcendent mercy and excelling goodness, in that being infinitely happy in the enjoyment of himself and his divine perfections, and incapable of any profit from, or advantage by, his creatures, he was yet pleased to give us his Son, his gospel, his Holy Spirit, to qualify us for, and bring us to, the enjoyment of himself:According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God.26
The glory of the gospel is grounded in the blessedness of God, the eternal Trinity.
ETERNAL FATHER, ETERNAL SON,
ETERNAL SPIRIT
We have seen that God is triune at the deepest level, at the level of who he essentially is rather than merely at the level of what he does. We have described how we ought to think about the fact that God is not just the Trinity when he chooses to go out to do things, but that he is Trinity “at home,” as it were, in the happy land of the Trinity. God is Trinity primarily for himself and only secondarily for us. One of the consequences of this is that the Father has always been the Father, the Son has always been the Son, and the Holy Spirit has always been the Holy Spirit.
We meet the triune God as he gives himself to us in the history of salvation, as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Specifically, we meet the Trinity as the incarnate Son, his heavenly Father who loves the world and elects a people, and the Holy Spirit of Pentecost, whom Jesus and the Father poured out on all flesh after the ascension of Christ. We meet them, that is, in the middle of their missions for us and our salvation. We might say that we meet a salvation-history Trinity, in the Bible and in our Christian experience. But the persons of the Trinity have a depth of life behind those missions, and that infinite depth is precisely what the actual doctrine of the Trinity points to.
Each of the three persons is unique in the way they reveal to us this dimension of infinite depth behind their presence, so we ought to attend to them in different ways. Perhaps the easiest one to understand is the Son. When Jesus Christ was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary and born in Bethlehem, he began his incarnate existence. He became fully and truly human, without ceasing to be fully and truly divine. But he, the person who became incarnate, had already existed before his human birth. He preexisted, in the absolute sense of the term. This is not true of any other human beginning, and it is the chief difference between Jesus and the rest of the human family (more foundational than his virgin birth or his sinlessness). All other humans come into existence from a state of nonexistence, and can only be said to preexist in the improper sense that in the hearts of their parents, or in the providence of God, plans and provisions have been made for them. But when it comes to the Son of God, we have a case of actual preexistence. It is not a paradox, for we do not say that Jesus preexists his own existence; we only say that the Son preexists his incarnation. The pre-in the doctrine of the preexistence of Christ points backward from his taking on human nature; that is the event which this person exists pre-.
Previous to the Word becoming flesh (John 1:14) by taking on human nature, the person who is Jesus Christ already existed. Admittedly, it is odd to call this person “Jesus Christ” before his birth in Bethlehem and his receiving a human name (Jesus) and title (Christ). You could say, if you wanted to be very precise, that he may have existed, but he wasn’t Jesus Christ yet. That is a distinction worth making. But there are several reasons not to enforce such scrupulosity in the way we talk about him. First, we know this person, and we have to call him something. “Unincarnate Word” is just not warm enough to call to mind all that we know about him based on his time among us. Second, there is biblical warrant. On those rare occasions when the Bible explicitly points back to the eternal depth behind the incarnation, it usually anchors its statements in the concrete name of Jesus. When Paul, for example, talks about the eternal Son and calls him Christ Jesus (“have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God . . .” Phil. 2:5–6), we should not rush to correct him: “Oh Paul, the pre-incarnate one was not yet Jesus nor Christ.” Paul may be using the kind of shorthand we use when we say, “The sixteenth president of the United States was born in this cabin.” At the time he was born, of course, he wasn’t the sixteenth president of the U.S. and he may not yet have been named Abraham; he was an unnamed, mewling infant. And before Abe Lincoln was conceived, he was nothing, unless you want to count as preexistence such things as a twinkle in his father’s eye, or the plan for Lincoln in the foreknowing mind of God. But unlike Abe Lincoln and everybody else, Jesus Christ was already somebody before he was the newborn infant of the first Christmas.
We should take note of the reason why all created analogies break down at one crucial point in understanding the doctrine of Christ’s preexistence. When we say that Jesus Christ existed “pre” his incarnation, we do not mean he preceded it by any finite amount of time. The Son of God preexisted his incarnation the way the Creator preexisted creation: infinitely. Preexistence may be easy to say, but that one little syllable, pre-, is a quantum leap from Here to There, from time to eternity. Before you have finished saying that syllable, you have left behind everything measurable and manageable. Following the biblical argument that leads to this affirmation is one thing, but once you have followed the trail to the place where you confess, with the Christian church of all ages, the preexistence of Christ, you have framed a thought that catapults you into the being of God. Jesus Christ preexisted his incarnation eternally, as God.
But who was this person before he took on the nature of humanity, the name of Jesus, and the title of Christ? He was the Son of God. When the biblical authors say that God sent his Son into the world (John 20:21; Gal. 4:4; 1 John 4:14), gave his Son for the world’s salvation (John 3:16; 1 John 4:10), or spoke definitively through his Son (Heb. 1:1), they are presupposing that the Son was already in existence as the Son, a person present with God the Father from eternity. He did not become the Son when he became incarnate; God did not so love the world that he gave somebody who became his Son in the act of being given. God, already having a Son, sent him into the world to become incarnate and to be a propitiation for our sins. So when the apostles encountered Jesus Christ, they were encountering “that which was from the beginning . . . the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us.” That is why they could claim to have “fellowship . . . with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:1–4).27
Jesus Christ, then, is eternally the Son of God; or, he is the eternal Son, the second person of the Trinity. He is God the Son, in the first place, for Trinitarian reasons. He is called Son because he is the Son of the Father from all eternity. When he becomes incarnate, he becomes the son of Mary, the promised son of David, the Messiah. But there was never a time when he became the Son of God; that is who he eternally and essentially is. For us and our salvation, the eternal Son became the incarnate Son.
Having paid close attention to how the eternal Son made himself known, we can also see how, in the same central event of salvation history, the first person of the Trinity revealed the eternal depth behind his personhood. The first person of the Trinity is God the Father. God is called the Father, in the first place, for Trinitarian reasons. He is the Father because he is Father of the Son, from eternity, at home in the happy land of the Trinity. He did not become the Father at Christmas, or at any point in human history, or in any pre-temporal history. He did not undergo any transformation from being not-the-Father to being the Father. There was never a time when he existed as a solitary God without his Son, so he was always God the Father. This is a straightforward implication of confessing the deity of Christ. If Jesus is God the Son, God must always have included Son and Father.
Usually when we think about God the Father, we are tempted to consider his fatherhood as being grounded in something else besides this core Trinitarian basis. We tend to associate his fatherhood with the things he has freely chosen to do in salvation history. For example, God the Father predestined the chosen ones to be adopted as sons (Eph. 1:5), an act in which he determined himself to become the adoptive Father of the elect. But great as this saving, adoptive fatherhood is, it belongs in the sphere of something God does, not something that determines who he is. He would have been God the Father if he had never adopted created sons and daughters, because he would have been God the Father of God the Son. It is understandable that when we think of God the Father, our minds and hearts leap first to this gracious adoptive fatherhood. But there is something behind that adoptive fatherhood, and when we ask about the essential grounding of God’s fatherhood, we must look further into the being of God, where we find a foundation of fatherhood that does not presuppose us. It would be a mistake to make the fatherhood of God the Father depend on human sons and daughters: he was the Father before we got here.
An even bigger mistake, however, is the more common one of thinking that the main reason God is “the Father” is that he has created, or “fathered,” the world. In the few places where the Bible does talk about God as the parent of all creation, or the Father of all humanity, it tends to use this language in a metaphorical or poetic way (see Job 38:28; Acts 17:28). The main idea in Scripture is not that every creature already is a child of God the Father but that those who receive Jesus are given the right to become sons of God (John 1:12) on the basis of the work of Jesus, the essential Son of God. There was a school of thought in nineteenth-century liberal theology that proclaimed the central idea of Christianity to be “the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.”28 Turned into a system, this idea of universal fatherhood was theologically disastrous. Classic FOGBOM (Fatherhood Of God, Brotherhood Of Man) liberalism made the gospel seem like a description of a general state of affairs rather than an announcement of what God has done in Christ; it was never able to account for sin or recognize the need for a costly redemption; and it quickly lost its grip on the doctrine of the Trinity.
But it is not only nineteenth-century liberals who made the mistake of thinking first of creation when they hear God called “Father.” It is an easy mistake to make if we let our minds be guided by a general symbolism of fatherhood instead of by the main lines of biblical teaching. The generalized, cosmic idea of fatherhood is probably one of the reasons many people visualize God as an old, white-haired, bearded man. God the cosmic father is always devolving into God the cosmic grandpa in the popular mind. Scripture, by contrast, points to something very specific and much less sentimental when it calls God “the Father.” It points to the fact that within the life of the one God, there is an eternal relationship of fatherhood and sonship. The first person is Father for Trinitarian reasons first of all. He is the Father of the Son by definition. That is who he is. Consequent to that is what he does: he acts to become the Father of those whom he predestined for adoption as sons (Eph. 1:5). Finally, in an extended or poetic sense, it may sometimes be appropriate to depict God’s general love and care for all his creatures by using a parenting metaphor. But to start with cosmic fatherhood is exactly backwards. God did not have the world as his son; he so loved the world that he gave his only Son (John 3:16).
The same logic that we have seen with the Father and the Son applies also to the Holy Spirit: he is who he is for Trinitarian reasons, as the eternal third person of the Trinity. Based on that Trinitarian identity in which he exists together with the Father and the Son, he freely steps into the history of salvation and does what he does. The work of the Spirit is closely linked to that of the Son at every point. It is the Spirit who brings about the Son’s incarnation by causing his conception in the womb of the virgin. It is the Spirit who anoints and empowers the Son in his messianic mission. And the Spirit is finally, at Pentecost, poured out on all flesh only when the Son’s work is completed. The Spirit’s work is to indwell believers, applying the work of Christ directly and personally to them. He is who he is as the eternal Spirit, and he does what he does in salvation history as the Spirit of Pentecost.
Because the eternal Son became the incarnate Son, we had much to say about his sonship. Tracing the line back from his appearance in Bethlehem is how we learned anything about the Trinity at all, for this is the central event in which God revealed that he had a Son. We had relatively less to say about the Father, and most of it was directly connected with the Son: the Father is the person of the Trinity who is obviously at the other end of the relationship that makes the Son the Son. But we have least of all to say about the eternal divine person who is the Holy Spirit, not because he is any less God, or any less a person, or any less related to the other persons of the Trinity. He is all those things, just as fully as the Father and the Son are. But his self-revelation is less direct than the Son’s, and his relationship to the other persons is not as immediately evident as the Son’s and Father’s, whose mutual relationship is built into their very names. We should avoid the urge to fabricate more concrete things than have actually been revealed about the Spirit or to pretend that our knowledge of the Spirit’s corner of the Trinitarian triangle is as intricately detailed and elaborated as the Son’s.
The New Testament obviously features these three characters, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Classically, Christian theology has traced these persons back to an eternal Trinity of God in himself. Since this threefoldness belongs to what God actually is rather than being only something he freely does, it has been called the ontological Trinity, the essential Trinity, or the Trinity of being. Theologians have also called it the immanent Trinity, because immanent means “internal to” itself.
There are not many alternatives to taking this mental step back into the eternal Trinity. One alternative would be to say that God in himself is really unipersonal but that when he reveals himself to us, he reveals himself in different aspects as Father, Son, and Spirit. But that would mean that a unipersonal God shows himself as tri-personal, which is not properly showing himself at all, but showing precisely what he is not. Another alternative would be to say that a merely unipersonal God was first the Father, then the Son, and then the Spirit. But that kind of serial monotheism cannot do justice to the biblical episodes in which the Father and the Son address each other in interpersonal communication. A one-personed God who puts on different masks for different tasks, or goes into different modes when he is in different moods, or plays different roles with different rules, is not the Trinity of the Christian faith.
Another alternative to the classical position would be to admit that there are three persons in the one being of God but to refuse to apply the names “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” to those three, except in their outward actions. That is, we could say that the three persons we encounter in salvation history do actually reveal that the one God is eternally and internally three persons but restrict the names “Father” and “Son” and “Holy Spirit” to the level of what God does for us and shows us in salvation history. We would then remain agnostic about what the three persons might be in themselves, at home in the happy land of the Trinity. Here, for us, they might be Father, Son, and Spirit. But if we took this third alternative, we would have to say nearly nothing about who they are in themselves. Perhaps they would be indistinguishable if it were not for the incarnation, or perhaps only they could tell each other apart by some unrevealed, secret distinctions. As far as we would know, however, there would be no Father, Son, or Spirit in heaven: only The Anonymous Three.
To settle for such limited knowledge of the Trinity would be a theological tragedy, not as bad as the heretical modalisms of the other alternatives but still quite debilitating for Christian faith. We know much more than that there are three somebodys in God. When the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, the glory that he showed the apostles was “glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14). We have met the Son and the Holy Spirit, in person, as the Father has sent them into human history. The Christian experience of salvation is an encounter with the true God as he truly exists: as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We certainly do not know everything about the persons of the Trinity, but what we do know extends all the way into who God is, internally, eternally, and essentially.
Once we have confessed that the one God is a Trinity of the eternal Father, the eternal Son, and the eternal Spirit, there is one more conceptual step we should take. It is the step that makes the best sense of the biblical revelation of the Trinity, and it is also the step recommended by the classic tradition of Christian doctrine. The basic idea is that there are relationships of origin in the life of the Trinity. Once again, the best place to see this is in the revelation of who the Son is. The second person of the Trinity is eternally the Son of the Father, but there are certain elements of sonship, as we know it among humans, that could not apply to a son who is eternal and essential. For one thing, he could not be younger than his father. For another thing, he could not be one of many possible sons, because he exhausts the totality of essential son-ship in himself. For similar reasons, he could not have a mother. When all these aspects of sonship as we know it are subtracted, what is left? Two things. First, the Son cannot be a different kind of being than his Father. A Father may create a statue or a house out of something besides himself, but a Son comes from his very being. He is not a lower order of being but is on the same level as the Father. Second, the Son stands in that relationship of originating from the Father—he comes from the Father. The classic word for that relation of origin is begetting, so we say that the Father begets the Son.
If we wanted to speak as minimally and modestly as possible about it, we could say that the relationship between the Father and the Son is that the Father fathers the Son. But what we want is a more direct way of characterizing the relationship, not just a repetition of the same term. We could say the Father sires the Son, but sire is an old-fashioned word that now evokes only thoughts of horse-breeding. What Christian doctrine has classically said is that the Father begets or generates the Son. Beget is also an old-fashioned word, but for most hearers it carries with it no connotations beyond sounding like the King James Version of the Bible. If we call it eternal begetting or eternal generation, we are only guarding ourselves against possible misunderstandings. It is not that once upon a time the Father begat the Son, having previously not begotten the Son. No, the eternal Father and the eternal Son have always existed together, the Son always standing in this relationship of from-ness or begottenness from the Father. Once again, the same logic extends to the Holy Spirit, though, once again, with less explicitness or clarity. He is eternally from the Father, but since he is not the Son, we use a different word to secure and specify his eternal relation. Traditionally, since “Spirit” means “breath,” the word “breathing” has been applied to the relation of origin of the Spirit.
This is the classic way of describing the eternal life of the triune God in itself. In the happy land of the Trinity above all worlds, God eternally exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is who God is, in absolute logical priority over what he freely chooses to do. Without reference to creation or redemption, the perfectly blessed life that God lives is a life as the Father who always has his only begotten Son and his uniquely breathed-out Spirit in fellowship with him. The ontological Trinity (also called the immanent Trinity) includes these eternal relations of origin.
Is it really necessary to affirm these eternal relations of origin? I believe it is. The doctrine of the Trinity is not something we have learned from general logical principles, from natural revelation, or from common sense. It is a truth about God that is only made known by special revelation. As a result, Trinitarian theology needs to handle its knowledge in a particularly careful way. Above all, the doctrine of the Trinity should not be stated in a way that goes one step beyond what God has revealed. The secret things belong to the Lord! Evangelical Protestants are likely to be good guardians of that boundary line. But there is another boundary line marking off the opposite error: we should also take pains to ensure that we make the most of everything that has been revealed. Trinitarian information is a precious theological commodity, and we should never be found falling short of receiving what God has made known. The things revealed belong to us and to our children forever! Eternal divine sonship is revealed, and calling it eternal generation has been the classic Christian way of ensuring that we keep a firm grasp on the meaning of sonship.29 Trinitarian theology affirms this about God the Trinity: the Son and the Spirit stand in particular relationships to the Father, and those relationships are relationships of origin. The Son and the Spirit come from the Father and always have.
A GOSPEL THAT STARTS OUTSIDE OF YOU
The rest of this book is about how the Trinity is the gospel. The fact that God the Father saved us by sending the Son and the Holy Spirit: this is the good news. This chapter, though, has taken one step back from the incarnate Son and the outpoured Spirit, and we have contemplated the depth of God’s triune life in itself. Whereas the Trinity in salvation history just is the gospel, the Trinity in itself is the background of the gospel. It is the presupposition of the good news, since “God for us” makes sense only if there is such a thing as “God in himself.” In order to prepare ourselves to understand the good news better, we have tried to peer into the infinite depth out of which that gospel comes to us. The burden of this chapter has not yet been the actual gospel, and we have not yet looked closely at the Father’s sending of the Son and the Spirit. In order to contemplate the ontological Trinity, of course, we had to start with the salvation-historical Trinity. We couldn’t have started anywhere else, because the Trinity is a revealed doctrine, and it was revealed when Christ and the Holy Spirit showed up. It was the sending of the Son on the mission of incarnation and atonement that gave us the starting-point for discerning his eternal sonship and revealed the proper meaning of the fatherhood of God the Father. We followed a parallel line for the Holy Spirit, from his sending at Pentecost back into his eternal procession from the Father.
But we have also said that the eternal life of God in himself is something “even better than the good news,” if it is possible to say so reverently. What we mean by this is that God’s eternal life as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a thing of infinite blessedness and perfection. There is a blessed God at the core of the glorious gospel. God in himself is perfect, and perfectly happy. Being perfect, he cannot essentially improve. Susannah Wesley told us that God is “perfect essential blessedness,” a being “that cannot possibly receive any accession of perfection or happiness from his creatures.” He can make happiness and blessedness available to those creatures because he always already has it. This vision of a God with no unmet needs is a glimpse of the depths of the living God and the fund out of which he spends himself so freely in the economy of salvation.
The good news, in other words, starts far outside of us, in the life of the blessed Trinity which is complete in itself and suffers from no lack. This is not a cold abstraction, but a great thing worth praising God for. John Piper has worked hard to remind Christians that “God’s glory consists much in the fact that he is happy beyond our wildest imagination.” His 1986 book Desiring God is mostly devoted to the way “Christian hedonism,” or living to enjoy God, works its way out in every area of the Christian life (Scripture, prayer, money, missions, marriage, suffering, etc.). But Piper builds all these practical points, necessarily, on the solid foundation of “the happiness of God” as an eternal Trinitarian event of the Father and the Son rejoicing in each other’s presence. While he admits that “we stand at the foothills of mystery in all these things,” Piper also affirms that “the Scriptures have given us some glimpses of the heights.”30 Those heights are Trinitarian:
Within the triune Godhead (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), God has been uppermost in his own affections for all eternity.This belongs to his very nature, for he has begotten and loved the Son from all eternity.Therefore God has been supremely and eternally happy in the fellowship of the Trinity.31
It may seem counterintuitive to start so far back in the divine mystery of God’s own being, if the goal is to change lives. The cry in our day always seems to be for a practical doctrine of the Trinity, for relevance, application, and experiential payoff. Indeed, it is true that the doctrine of the Trinity changes everything about Christian life. But the wisest Christian teachers have always known that shortcuts to relevance are self-defeating. In bypassing the deep sources of reality, they not only miss the truth but ultimately deliver less practical benefit. When it comes to the difference that the doctrine of the Trinity can make in our lives, it is crucially important that we begin with a recognition of God in himself before moving on to God for us. What we need to begin with is a profoundly impractical doctrine of the Trinity. With that in place, we can really get something done.
Some of the benefits of taking our stand on the doctrine of the ontological Trinity can be clarified by double negatives. This doctrine expels bad ideas about God. Just think of the many unworthy ideas and attitudes about God that the doctrine of the Trinity can help us name, reject, and even deride. The doctrine of the Trinity expels unworthy ideas about the perfection of God’s life. It is unworthy to think that God without us is lonely or bored. God is not looking for something to do in the happy land of the Trinity. God did not create the world in order to fill the drafty mansion of heaven with the pitter-patter of little feet. God is not pining away for companionship in a lonesome heaven. Good theological reflection, taking its lead from the Bible, would always reject the idea of divine loneliness or boredom. But as soon as you entertain the truth of the doctrine of the ontological Trinity, the unworthiness of the idea of a lonely or bored God becomes patently obvious. The triune God is one, but not solitary. Nothing that God does in creation or redemption is done because God lacked employment and occupation. The incarnation of the Son of God was not undertaken as an excellent adventure to provide diversion from the dullness of being the eternal Son. All these ideas are unworthy of God, as the doctrine of the Trinity makes obvious.
The doctrine of the Trinity expels a host of unworthy ideas about God’s love. The tri-personal love of God is not a love that needs any completion. Consequently, we should avoid presenting the gospel in a way that suggests God is begging us to come back home so he can finally be happy again, as if our redemption repairs a breach that ruptured the blessedness of God. It is unworthy of the glorious gospel of the blessed God to give the impression that we are begging for people to please be reconciled to God so his life won’t be ruined by sadness. It is an alienation of affections to think that the love at the heart of the universe is a romantic love in which the creature yearns for the Creator or in which God yearns for the souls of the lost. That kind of love takes second place to the love we have learned about from Jesus: the love of the Father for the Son, and the Son for the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. It is certainly true that God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.32 But behind that famous “spiritual law” is the eternal love of the Father for the Son in the happy land of the Trinity. “Nothing shines more radiantly in the New Testament than the eternal love of the Father for the Son (John 1:18; 5:20; 17:24, etc.),” wrote Bishop H. C. G. Moule.33
The doctrine of the Trinity expels a host of unworthy ideas and attitudes about God’s glory. God displays his glory to creatures, chiefly through redemption. But it is unworthy to think that God without us would have nobody to show his glory to. The Father is always delighting in the beloved Son, and the Son is always adoring his holy Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit. Robert Leighton said, “It is most true of that Blessed Trinity, Satis amplum alter alteri theatrum sumus”; that is, each is to the other a theater large enough.34 Furthermore, God arranges all things to the end that they promote and proclaim his own glory, but the doctrine of the Trinity shows one of the ways that this divine self-glorification is unselfish. In it, the persons of the Trinity bring about the more conspicuous display of each other’s glory.
In this glance at the way the doctrine of the Trinity expels unworthy ideas, we have taken a very negative approach to what the doctrine shows about God. It shows that God is not lonely, or bored, or selfish. But if we turned it around and said it in a positive way, we would simply say that God is love. Not by coincidence, this is also how the Bible puts it. This is what the doctrine of the Trinity helps us learn with greater precision: that God is love. The triune God is a love that is infinitely high above you, eternally preceding you, and welcoming you in.