The first person of the Trinity: the Father

The first problem that we face when conceiving of the Father is that He is identified as God without regard to the other persons of the Trinity. This is as true for Christians and non-Christians, for atheists and theists. We all have in our minds a supreme being who is "out there." We inherit this conception from Greek thought through the idea of the prime mover, or the demiurge.

While it may seem rationally urgent to posit the existence of a being who set the planets in their orbits, this is not a concept to be found in the Hebrew Scriptures even though we inherit two creation stories in the first chapters of Genesis. Neither of these stories amount to a theory of cosmogenesis but are rather theological statements that outline the nature of humanity as creaturely.

We must remember that Israel was a pre-scientific culture that had not searched for the laws of cause and effect that underlay natural phenomena and whose conception of the universe was dominated by theological thinking. Thus, poetic expressions of God as being in command of the creation such as the following from Job, are hymns to God and not statements of cause and effect.

..who commands the sun, and it does not rise;
who seals up the stars;
who alone stretched out the heavens
and trampled the waves of the Sea;
who made the Bear and Orion,
the Pleiades and the chambers of the south; (Job 9:7-9)

However, during the time of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century England the new natural philosophers, all, to a man, subscribed to the idea that God was active in the universe. This was particularly true of Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle.

Newton, at some time in his life thought of God as being like the ether, a substance spread throughout the universe a bit like Tertullian's thinking gas. The outcome of this was that God became objectified as part of the mechanics of the universe despite the ancient warnings, particularly in Judaism, and also in early Christianity, that God was beyond the objective.

This use of God by scientists to fill the holes in their knowledge contributed to the rise of atheism because, as scientific work continued, (read Darwinian evolution) it was found that God was not needed to fill the gaps and was therefore surplus to requirements.

The objectification of God meant that the Trinity was replaced by monotheism. It is significant that this coincided with a resurgent Anti-Trinitarianism expressed as Unitarianism or as a deficient Trinitarianism that reduced the status of the Son and had no place at all for the Spirit. In this regard, the names of prominent English intellectuals are significant: John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Clarke, John Tolland, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury and William Whiston, who followed Newton as Lucasian professor of mathematics.

The twentieth century saw a resurgence of Trinitarian theology that preserved the unknowability of the Father other than through the Son by the Holy Spirit. This means that the character of the Father cannot be merged into the speculative character of the god of philosophy or religious wishful thinking. The Son, as we discover Him in the history of the nation Israel and in Jesus of Nazareth, is the narrow gate through which God is revealed to us.

If we return to Augustine's psychological analogy of seeing an object, the Son is the object that we see, the Father is our image of that object and the Spirit is the ongoing memory of the object. From this we understand that it is the image of the Son (for Christians ultimately, Jesus) that is the Father. Of Jesus the author of Colossians writes: "He (Christ) is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.." (Col.1:15)

When we consider the image of Christ, what do we see? We see a man of his time but out of time in that he refuses to be defined by religious or civil power. He is defined by something outside of himself that allows him to welcome tax collectors, sinners and unattached women to table fellowship. By doing so he represents forgiveness and justice and the inclusion of all humankind into fellowship with God.

We see him tempted by the devil (Mat. 4:1-11) resisting all temptation to power. In this he represents personal authenticity and freedom.

We see him cleansing the temple of money changers. By this he opposes the debasing of religion to the transactional.

We see him healing the sick and raising the dead thus showing himself to be the cure of souls and bringing life out of death.

We see him steadfastly treading the road to Jerusalem and his doom, giving his life for his friends and drinking the bitter cup. He shows us by his actions that faithfulness may be kept even in the face of death. In doing so he paves the ways for the martyrs of the Church whose witness cascades down the ages.

In the Sermon on the Mount we see him overturning the hierarchy of human judgment to set us free.

We see him risen and bringing light to his disciples and to us who live under the shadow of death and nihilism.

All these things can be summed up in the word "Love".

"Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love."1John 4:8.

The way of the follower of Christ is a way that transforms us into His image. This is not a process that is completely in our control because it is a work of the Spirit. It is not as though we could decide to be like Jesus. This would rob us of our freedom and identity because our striving would be an attempt to become something we are not. Rather, the instruments of this transformation are worship, prayer and membership of the Christian community.

Contrary to popular thought, this is not a limitation of freedom but the promise of a freedom more radical than those outside of the Church can conceive. As the writer of 1 John 3:2 says:

Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

In other words, the invitation to discipleship is not an invitation to become cookie cutter Christians but to a future that is yet open to us. In terms of Trinitarian language, the image of the Son is still evolving in the Spirit and what we will become is still open, except that our transformation will be such that we will also do the deeds that Christ did.

This is no manifesto for conservatism but a fostering of eager longing to see God coming to us from the future.

Speculation about whether God exists or not and whether we believe in his existence does not address us. We will always be safely in control. However, when we ponder the image of God in the history and literature of Israel and in the Christ, we are set back on our heels. We are confronted by a love, not in the abstract, but in the flesh and blood of a real human being and we know that nothing will now be the same. This is the experience of God that is the desire of nations and the healing of all things.