God And The Priority Of Love by Beth Felker Jones

The following article has been reposted with permission from Beth Felker Jones. Check out the original post at her Substack: Church Blogmatics.

Understanding the Mystery of the Holy Trinity

We should not be surprised to discover that God, being God, goes beyond human categories and assumptions, and we should be suspicious if we find our theologies supposing themselves capable of handling the mysteries of God …

Sometimes the limits of theology come from humans being human, and those limits are proper and even benign. But sometimes theology’s limits are revealed to be something more sinister than limitations of finitude and are instead revealed as sinful limitations. Here, perhaps, the blinders of sin prevent us from imagining a sensibleness that goes beyond the sinful common-sense of violence and reaches into the trinitarian sense of consensus. 

A hearty appreciation of the magnitude of sin will ask us to search for the limits of our imaginations and may open us to the mysterious Triune consensus in which the coincidence of threeness and oneness does not mean violence or domination or assimilation but, instead, threeness and oneness together mean community and peace.

Theology must respect the limits of human finitude and tremble before the limits of human sin. For this reason, I have little interest in solving any “problem” of oneness and threeness, though I am happy to talk of the “mystery” thereof. As a “problem” though, the thing can only be reductive. As a “problem,” the thing ignores the mystery and fecundity of analogy, denies God’s fundamental holy otherness, and so imagines God in violent competition with God. 

As a “mystery,” oneness and threeness is revealed in scripture as the wholeness of the God of Israel. The Triune God is, without doubt, an integer, whole and full in oneness and threeness, but God’s Triune integrity cannot be reduced to human understandings of number …

What Does the Bible Teach About the Trinity?

The oneness of the God of Israel is about who we do and do not worship, and when Jesus rightly receives our worship, we are recognizing him as the One God revealed in both testaments … 

I want, then, to speak of and practice the mystery of divine threeness and oneness through invoking and witnessing to the Triune God rather than through trying to solve a supposed logical problem which God has revealed as unproblematic in that it is no impediment to the love of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit for one another and for the world … 

The church does this work of witness when it recognizes the work of Jesus and the Spirit as the gift of the Father and when it does the difficult intellectual and spiritual work that would eventually bear fruit in the creed we now call Nicene, the best efforts we have been able to offer at speaking of God in a way that coheres with the surprising fullness of the biblical witness, a witness that is full of God’s one-ness and three-ness. 

The church is able to witness to the Triune God because “the Lord, the Spirit” removes veils from faces and displays glory in the people of the body of Christ, who are “being transformed” (2 Cor 3:18). The church tells the Triune story when it speaks, preaches, and testifies to the resurrection of Jesus, who lays down his life and takes it up again, having “received this command from” (Jn 10:18) his Father. We invoke and witness to the Trinity when we trust that “the Advocate, the Holy Spirit” is indeed the one sent by the Father in Jesus’s name and when we allow the Spirit to do the work of teaching us and reminding us of Jesus and converting us through him (Jn 14:26). We trust and witness to the Trinity when we come to the Father through Jesus (Jn 14:6) and accept that Jesus himself has shown us the Father (Jn 14:10), and we practice the doctrine of the Trinity when we keep Jesus’s commandments (Jn 14:15) just as Jesus practices it when he does “as the Father has commanded” him and, in so doing, lets “the world” know that he loves his Father (Jn 14:31).

We witness to the Triune truth when we live the kingdom life of “peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17) and, in doing so serve Christ in a way that is “acceptable to God” (Rom 14:18). This kingdom dynamic makes sense because the oneness and threeness of the Triune life is sense.

Living the Trinity

I will close this … section … with reflection on a pair of biblical passages which help us to enter into the oneness and threeness who is the God of love. First, from the fifth chapter of 1 John:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments … Who is it that conquers the world but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth. There are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood, and these three agree … And this is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life … We know that we are God’s children, and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know him who is true; and we are in him who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. Little children, keep yourselves from idols. (1 Jn 5: 1-2, 5-8, 11-12, 19-21).

This passage is a lived doctrine of the trinity, for in it we see the eternal relationships of Father, Son, and Spirit invoked as definitive for human relationships with God and with one another. Our love for the Father is naturally connected to our love for the Son and to our living in love for one another and through obedience to God. We are invited to participate in Jesus’s relationship with his Father and so in Jesus’s victory over the world. And we are invited to participate in the Spirit’s true testimony, which is to the eternal life we share with the Son. We are “in him,” and so we are in a life which participates in the inter-triune relationships. The last verse quoted above, with its warning to reject idols, is part and parcel of this lived doctrine of the trinity. When we are in this God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — we are drawn into a certain life, a life of love, and we reject other ways of life, the ways of the violent world which Jesus has conquered.

We find another source for living the doctrine of the trinity in Paul’s rich thought in Ephesians. Paul sends “grace” and “peace” “from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Eph 1:2). Even his greeting participates in the triune life.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will …I n Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory (Eph 1:3-5, 11-14).

The Father blesses and chooses; he wants us “for adoption” through Jesus and so we receive the status of children, the inheritance that is Jesus’s. The purpose of the inheritance is our ability to live in testimony to the triune love, to “live for the praise of his glory” (v. 12). We are sealed by the spirit and so pledged to the life Paul here imagines for us.

The Role of the Father in the Trinity

Because the Father is the one from whom the Triune unity flows, and so has a Fatherly priority, we sinners are prone to imagine priority as something which could be lost and so we imagine a father who protectively guards His priority. In the sinful life, at odds with God, we have no tools for imagining a secure life, a life free from any need of such defensive guarding. We grasp and strive, hoard and guard. If we come by any priority, we immediately fear its loss. We play zero sum games and worry about allocation of scarce resources. We build fences and thrones. We lock gates and draw blinds. Where we close, the Father opens.

For the Father is utterly secure in his Fatherliness, and that Fatherliness never has known nor never could know any lack. In his all-sufficient, unoriginate, almightiness, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is powerful to be the one who he is, and this Father is the one who gives good gifts. The Father gives good gifts in freedom, never thereby to be diminished. This seems true both in the love life of the Godhead, wherein the Father is all-powerful unto eternal generation and inspiration and all-powerful unto sharing his glory fully with the Son and the Spirit. And this seems true in the love the Triune God offers to the world, wherein the Father gives his Son in the Spirit, and with that giving, gives every other good gift as well. The Father’s all-powerful gift giving nature is so plenteous, it opens up even the Triune life itself, drawing human beings into that life as we are enabled to share the status of the Son in the Spirit; “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are” (1 Jn 3:1a). In giving the only begotten son of the Father, God is revealed as the one who “so” loves the world, drawing men and women into God’s own “eternal life” (Jn 3:16).

Contemporary theology is in desperate need of a recovery of the Father. So much theology has given up on the Father, consigning any idea of fatherliness to hopelessness and hierarchy, but it is only in the Father’s fatherliness that the hierarchy which, among other things, underwrites demonic conversion by coercion instead of Spirit-led conversion by consensus, can be undone. The Father’s fatherliness undoes hierarchy and coercion. The Father’s fatherliness is steadfast love, unshakable and unassailable. It is the Father’s love for the Son and the Spirit and the Father’s love for us all, consensus-love.