God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.
—C. S. Lewis
The way Sarayu, Jesus, and Papa relate to one another in The Shack—in love, openness, mutual deference, and simple enjoyment of each other—is all either a gross and ungodly misrepresentation, or a hint at the astounding truth. It intrigued Mackenzie (106ff., 202f.), to say the least. He had never seen anything like it. He was drawn to their relationship, and their way of being. But the whole Trinity thing just didn’t make any sense to him. And what difference does the Trinity make anyway? (103).
According to Young’s Papa, “It makes all the difference in the world!” (103) and nowhere more than when we think of the possibility of love:
“You do understand,” she continued, “that unless I had an object to love—or, more accurately, a someone to love—if I did not have such a relationship within myself, then I would not be capable of love at all? You would have a god who could not love. Or maybe worse, you would have a god who, when he chose, could only love as a limitation of his nature. That kind of god could possibly act without love, and that would be a disaster. And that is surely not me.” (104)
In a variation on the argument of the medieval theologian Richard of St. Victor, Papa is saying that there can be no love (or charity, as the older writers called it) without relationship.1
For Young’s Papa, if God were alone and solitary from eternity, then being other-centered would be out of the question, for there would be no other to be centered upon. Relationship itself and fellowship, even being open, personal, and approachable, would be quite foreign to the very nature of such a solitary God. “Love,” C. S. Lewis says, “is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.”2 According to Saint Victor, “No one is properly said to have charity on the basis of his own private love of himself. And so it is necessary for love to be directed toward another for it to be charity. Therefore, where a plurality of persons is lacking, charity cannot exist.”3
Young, Lewis, and Saint Victor raise a great issue. If there is no relationship within God’s eternal being, then there is no real basis in God’s nature for caring about something other than himself, no basis for altruistic devotion to others or for loving a thing for its own sake. The love of a single-personed God would be inherently self-centered, narcissistic, and ultimately about God, not others. A solitary God could love others for their benefit only by shutting off, as it were, the fountain of his deeper and true nature. That would mean Papa would have only been pretending when she embraced Mackenzie on the porch. Hiding her real nature—self-interest, or private love—she put on the mask of acceptance, all the while waiting to see if her desires would be fulfilled. Her embrace (in this scenario) would be not for Mack’s sake, but ultimately for her own, and thus would have been conditional upon a proper response at some point.
This, it seems to me, is a huge point. Are we loved for what we can potentially bring to God’s table, or are we loved for our own sake? Does the love of the Father, Son, and Spirit come with strings attached? Is our existence about relationship, or is it about performance? Is the universe the product of divine self-interest, or need, or perhaps boredom? Are we here to do something for God, for God’s benefit?
“What’s important is this: If I were simply One God and only One Person, then you would find yourself in this Creation without something wonderful, without something essential even. And I would be utterly other than I am.”
“And we would be without…?” Mack didn’t even know how to finish the question.
“Love and relationship.” (103)
If God is alone and solitary, then in one way or another we were created for God’s benefit, not ours.4 But given that God is Father, Son, and Spirit, and given that relationship and love form the core of the trinitarian being, then we were “created to be loved” (99), and to live loved, and to love others without agenda (181f.). As Lewis says, “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them.”5
A few years ago I was playing golf with a friend when the play slowed and we found ourselves on the next tee box with the group in front of us. As we approached, an older man walked toward us, tall with silver hair. I knew immediately that he was a religious glad-hander. He even tilted his head slightly as he cupped his hand to shake mine. I literally asked myself, I wonder how long it will take before he jumps into his religious pitch? I will admit to growing shy for a moment and backing away to let my partner be the target. Sure enough, we weren’t off the tee box before the glad-hander dropped his first question, the setup.
“You boys go to church?”
I pretended not to hear and headed for my golf bag. My friend, let’s call him Samuel, answered.
“Not really… sometimes; I mean, I don’t find church very helpful, do you?”
With the touch of one who has no clue that everyone sees right through him, the glad-hander ignored Sam’s question and dropped his next.
Sam was quick. “Of course. I believe in Jesus, but that is not my question.”
With that it was time to tee off. The glad-hander and his partner gave us the tee and changed the subject completely.
There are some who would say that the glad-hander cared for Sam; that was why he wanted to make sure Sam was saved. But I beg to differ. As it turns out, Sam and I were playing golf that day because he was really struggling with the loss of his wife. He was in a lot of pain. We were having a great conversation about how Jesus meets us in our trauma, and Sam was finding some hope when the glad-hander approached us, dampening the moment with a religious spirit and spoiling our “church.”
The Father, Son, and Spirit love us for our benefit, not for increasing their membership rolls, or for making themselves look good, or for anything they can get from us. There is no need in the blessed Trinity. It is an overflowing fountain of other-centered love. The shared life of the Father, Son, and Spirit is about giving, not taking; sharing, not hoarding; blessing others with life for their sake, not manipulating for divine control. The Father, Son, and Spirit are focused upon giving themselves for our benefit, so that we, too, can experience real life. They need nothing in return.
This was my point to Sam. Jesus accepts him, meets and embraces him—as he does Mackenzie—right where he is, and is gently leading him to experience his own peace and hope. He wants nothing for himself in return. The Father, Son, and Spirit don’t give to get. They meet us in our worlds, in our struggles, miseries, and joys, and they never ignore our real questions—although inside our darkness there are times when it certainly seems so.
The doctrine of the Trinity means that God is a relational being—always has been, and always will be. Relationship, fellowship, self-giving, and other-centeredness are not afterthoughts with God, but the deepest realities of the divine Being. For the Father, Son, and Spirit it is always about love, relationship, and sharing life, not about what they can get from us. We were created that we could be, that we could live and share in the life and joy of the triune God. Jesus’ Father is not holding his breath to see if we will jump through the right hoops before he decides our fate. There is no list. We are not here to “glorify God” by our religious performance. We are here to live “in the glory” of the blessed Trinity.
Let’s step back for a moment and consider two critical questions that come from Papa’s comments to Mackenzie. First, what is the foundation for believing in the love of God? Second, what do we really think about the nature of God? If we peeled the onion of divine being, so to speak, what would we find at its core? What lies at the heart of God? If God is a single person, alone from all eternity, then blessing others for their own benefit would be alien to his existence and way of being. In this case, God could not naturally love others for their sake. At best, divine altruism could only be a momentary pretense. But for Young, following the apostle John, God is love,6 or as Papa says, “I am love” (103). And here let me cite Jonathan Edwards again: “The apostle tells us that ‘God is love’; and therefore, seeing he is an infinite being, it follows that he is an infinite fountain of love. Seeing he is an all-sufficient being, it follows that he is a full and overflowing, and inexhaustible fountain of love. And in that he is an unchangeable and eternal being, he is an unchangeable and eternal fountain of love.”7 This love is not self-centered, or a private love of God’s self, which could only come with a hidden agenda, but other-centered, altruistic, and unconditional. The deepest truth of the divine being is the relationship of love of the Father, Son, and Spirit.
Is there a back door opening to another room beyond this relationship, a room in which we might discover a more profound truth about God? Is there an esoteric secret driving all that God thinks and dreams and does? The relationship of the Father, Son, and Spirit is not the foyer, but the inner sanctum, the very life of God and way of God’s being, the simmering soup out of which arise all divine thoughts, acts, and responses.
Papa embraces Mackenzie not because she is having a good hair day and her blood sugar happens to be up, but because that is who she is. She is not pretending. She is being herself. She lives and moves and has her being in relationship with Jesus and Sarayu. As she is with them, so she is with Mack, and with all of us. Papa embraces Mackenzie as a simple expression of her true nature and way of being:
“But why me? I mean, why Mackenzie Allen Phillips? Why do you love someone who is such a screw-up? After all the things I’ve felt in my heart toward you and all the accusations I made, why would you even bother to keep trying to get through to me?”
“Because that is what love does,” answered Papa. (188–89)
On a million front porches Papa will embrace a million Mackenzies. Unless, of course, there is something different and deeper about her than her relationship of love with Jesus and Sarayu.
Is there a god behind the back of the blessed Trinity, a divine Ogre in the back room, a cosmic Eeyore, perhaps, or a legalist who at any minute might appear and shame the goodness and love of the Father, Son, and Spirit? Is the relationship of the triune God under restraint, and only allowed expression on, say, Monday and Tuesday? Or is this relationship the abiding constant permeating the universe, the one free and stable, reliable and unchanging reality? If this relationship is not the truth of all truths, then something else ultimately calls the shots, and we can only hold our breath until that something else steps forward.
I suspect most of us live in the frayed world between wanting to believe that we are loved for our own sake and the fear that such love is a pipe dream. Here is a critical question: Do you believe that you can change the Trinity? Can you alter the way the Father, Son, and Spirit relate to one another? I had an argument once with a man who sternly objected to my simple declaration that the Father, Son, and Spirit love us all, and that in Jesus we have all been embraced forever.
“No! No!” he shouted. “You cannot just declare that we were all adopted in Jesus. You don’t know these people, or their hearts. You don’t know if they have repented and believed in Jesus.”
“So,” I asked, “what is God’s relationship to people before they believe in Jesus?”
“He is their Judge,” he replied. “He becomes their Father when they repent and believe.”
“So you are saying that people’s faith has the power to alter the being of God?”
“No, of course I am not saying that.”
“Well, it seems that way to me. You are saying that if someone believes, then God becomes their Father, but if they don’t, he remains their Judge. Apart from the startling fact that you assume God as Judge is more fundamental than God as Father,8 what happens to God if they cry out, ‘I do believe; help my unbelief’?9 Is Jesus’ Father like a windshield wiper, moving back and forth between being a Father and a Judge?”
Needless to say, the argument did not end well, with both of us convinced that the other had lost his mind. I will have more to say later on the importance and necessity of faith and repentance, and on divine judgment, but for now the point is that we are not to confuse the character of God with where we are in our journey of faith, or lack of it. The other-centered love of the Father, Son, and Spirit is the eternal truth of the divine nature, and it is blessedly not dependent upon our faith, or upon anything that we may or may not do, including praying the Sinner’s Prayer. As Athanasius said, “The Holy Trinity is no created being.”10 There was never a time when the Father was alone without the Son and the Spirit. Long before the foundations of the world, the character of God was in place. Whether we believe or not, whether we are good or not, whether we ever do one thing right or not, the character of the triune God remains what it is, and always has been, and always will be—love. We are not so powerful as to change the Father, Son, and Spirit.
This is one of many reasons that the Trinity is so critical. For if God were alone and solitary from eternity, then there was nothing for God to love until he created. In that case the solitary God could only become a lover, for he was not one by nature, and this love could only be a love that grew out of his aloneness and self-interest. And it’s more than possible that whatever it was that caused the single-personed God to create and to become a lover could change, and the solitary God would then go back to his essential, nonloving nature. The love of this God is caused by something outside of his being. And is this not what we all fear? That something outside the being of God causes him to love us, that his love is conditioned by something other than his nature, and thus that we are the ones who must get it right, trip the love wire, make God’s love happen, and keep it happening? No wonder we are so exhausted and unhappy.
“Why do you love us humans? I suppose, I…” As he spoke he realized he hadn’t formed his question very well. “I guess what I want to ask, is why do you love me, when I have nothing to offer you?”
“If you think about it, Mack,” Jesus answered, “it should be very freeing to know that you can offer us nothing, at least not anything that can add or take away from who we are…. That should alleviate any pressure to perform.” (202)
The Christian God is a lover from all eternity, because this God exists as Father, Son, and Spirit in a relationship of other-centered love and beautiful togetherness. The Trinity means that, before Creation, God is love: “Love is the deepest depth, the essence of his nature, at the root of all his being.”11 “God is no lonely monad or self-absorbed tyrant, but one whose orientation to the other is intrinsic to his eternal being as God.”12 “In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.”13 The cause of the love of the triune God is not outside the relationship of the Father, Son, and Spirit. There are no trip wires, no conditions, no reasons, and no way that we can cause the blessed Trinity to love us—or to stop loving us.
Papa’s point with Mackenzie is that because relationship and love exist within the being of God from all eternity, we have something we can believe in that we don’t cause to be so by our faith, or negate by our unbelief. We are accepted as we are, known and loved for our benefit, embraced forever, because love is the nature of the blessed Trinity. So, with the apostle Paul, we can say, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”14
Here is a reality we can cling to in the midst of abuse and fear, of dying and death, of shame and guilt and doubt, and in the midst of our Great Sadness. We certainly may feel cut off, or left out, or abandoned, and who among us does not have a bundle of proofs that it must be so, and hasn’t left a trail of wreckage behind us in our pain? But unless the Holy Spirit morphs into a narcissist, and the Father rejects his Son, and Jesus decides he would rather have a divorce, we will never be abandoned or forsaken: “Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and Son. So long as there dwells harmony, so long as the Son loves the Father with all the love the Father can welcome, all is well with the little ones.”15 For from all eternity the triune God is love, and the Father, Son, and Spirit relate to us out of their own relating to one another. They love us with their love. There is no other way of being for the triune God.
Jesus’ Father loves even Missy’s murderer, loves him for his liberation, too (224ff.)—as he does all of us who have made a horrible mess of our lives and the lives of others, and all of us who still believe we are just fine, even the religious glad-hander so lost in his self-importance. “We is all you get, and believe me, we’re more than enough” (87). “The God who is—the I am who I am—cannot act apart from love” (102). And love loves the beloved into the freedom to live loved, and to share love; and this love, as my friend Bruce Wauchope says, “picks up the costly tab” of our incessant disasters, and ever works to turn them into good for us, for others, and for all creation. “Because that is what love does” (189). Such is the astonishing truth of the blessed Trinity. It is not an accident that “Fear not” is the most frequent command in the Scriptures.
Let me make two additional points here. First, all the characteristics of God are expressions of this core nature of relationship and love.16 The holiness of God, for example, is an expression of the utter uniqueness, the singularity of the trinitarian love. There is nothing like it in the universe. It is in a class by itself, set apart, incomparable. Its beauty, its goodness, its joy is one of a kind. The righteousness of God speaks not of the conformity of the Father, Son, and Spirit to a law of some sort that stands above them, but of the sheer rightness of their relationship.
Likewise, the wrath of God is not the opposite of love, as if the two were vying for control in God’s relationship with humanity. The love of the Father, Son, and Spirit does not play second fiddle to divine anger. As Papa said, “There is a lot to be mad about in the mess my kids have made and in the mess they’re in. I don’t like a lot of choices they make, but that anger—especially for me—is an expression of love all the same” (121). Wrath is the love of the triune God in passionate action, saying “No!” It is love’s fiery opposition to our destruction. Likewise, the judgment of God is not the divine “dark side” finally having its say. To judge is to discern, to see into a matter and understand what is wrong in order to make it right and whole. Thus, as Pope Benedict said, “The judgment of God is hope, both because it is justice and because it is grace.”17 And as Sophia says in The Shack, “Mackenzie, judgment is not about destruction, but about setting things right” (171). The faithfulness of God, the blessedness and fullness, the power and wisdom, the joy and patience are all trinitarian and relational; all are fueled by, and expressions of, the same astonishing, other-centered love of the Father, Son, and Spirit. The blessed Trinity does nothing that is not motivated by love.
Second, everything changes if we think of the relationship of the Father, Son, and Spirit as simply a characteristic of God, or one among many characteristics, and not the fundamental truth. Take holiness again. If relationship is not the deepest truth of God’s being, then the holiness of God is not a relational idea at all.18 And if holiness is not a description of the utter uniqueness of the trinitarian life, what is it? The door is now wide open for our idea of holiness to be filled with all manner of notions. And that is what has happened in our Western conversation. The holiness of God was detached from the relationship of the Father, Son, and Spirit, and reconceived within the world of Roman law, becoming a legal idea. Instead of holiness being a name for the incomparable love of the Father, Son, and Spirit, it became a matter of law, morality, and ethical perfection (109–10).
If you start with the Father, Son, and Spirit, then the larger story of creation is about love and relationship and sharing life. “My purpose from the beginning was to live in you and you in me” (114), says Papa. If you don’t start here, then creation is about something else. And what would that something else be? Law? External obedience to a distant deity? Ethical purity? Fear? Glorifying God? Promise and rewards?
In the mix and flow of Western history, a legal understanding of holiness slipped behind the fellowship of the Father, Son, and Spirit and became the fundamental truth about God—at least in our minds. This holiness is not relational, not trinitarian, not the expression of love. And without our knowing it, this legal view of holiness was carried back into God’s inner sanctum, so to speak. How this happened over time is a long story, but you can see something of the point.19
When legal holiness became foundational for our idea of God, the biblical story was reframed in terms of law, guilt, and punishment. God is holy (legally speaking). We have failed; there must be restitution. The story of Jesus’ coming and death then followed this larger story, and his death was understood as God’s punishment for our sins. God, on this reckoning, is too holy (legally speaking) to look upon sin, and turned his back upon his own Son when our sin was placed upon him on the cross. In our place, Jesus suffered God’s punishment for our sins. You may be familiar with this version of the story.
But Young puts nail scars on Papa’s wrists, too (97, 104, 109, 166, 224); and rightly so, for how could the One who dwells in the bosom of the Father suffer and his Father not experience his pain? What agony did Jesus bear that his Abba and the Holy Spirit did not also feel? How could there be a dreadful split between the Father and his Son? And how could there be a fundamental character difference between them, such that Jesus could embrace sinners, and indeed “become sin,”20 as the apostle Paul says, and the Father be unable even to look upon us? Recall Jesus’ words: “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” “I and the Father are one.” Papa puts it simply: “We were there together” (98); “We were all in him” (188).
As we shall see, Jesus did not come to suffer punishment inflicted by his Father, or to twist his Father’s arm to accept us. We belong to the Father, Son, and Spirit; we always have, and always will. Jesus died because we are loved forever, and had gotten ourselves into such a profound and astonishing mess that it was utterly impossible for us to know this love and experience its freedom, joy, and life.
There are two worlds of thought here, and each world ripples out of an assumption about God’s fundamental character. For Young, there is nothing deeper about God than the relationship of love between the Father, Son, and Spirit. This love is good. It is right. It is incomparable. It is powerful. It is other-centered, beautiful, constant, long-suffering, full of joy and peace and free-flowing togetherness, and full of fiery opposition to our destruction. And it is this love of the Father, Son, and Spirit that frames the story of creation and history, and opens the way for us to see the astonishing dream the blessed Trinity has for the human race, and the breathtaking costs the Father, Son, and Spirit are willing to suffer together (98) to see it fulfilled.