Archive for April, 2007

I try not to do too much when I go to Word Alive as I just get really tired – despite plenty of coffee and cake. However, I did make it along to all four sessions of the ‘Triune God’ seminar series. Apparently Don Carson was going to take this, but had to pull out, so we got Mike Reeves instead, a worthy replacement, who I think I actually love – in a Christian brother way.

I just realised Mike Reeves’ talks from the UCCF South-East Training weekend got lost in a deleted post, so I’ve added a new blogroll for good MP3 talks and Mike’s talks are linked there -thanks to Bish for those.

Anyway, so I went to these four sessions, which were quite hard going – firstly they were on about nap time, secondly there were lots of what to me seemed somewhat obscure old theologians and philosophers referred to (Aristotle??, Plato?? – joke, I’d heard of them), thirdly English isn’t my strong point so the addition of some Hebrew, Latin and Greek on top of that was tough, and fourthly and finally we were thinking about one triune God which is inevitably going to be mind boggling.

So we started off looking at how we define God, trying to move away from ideas of “divine being” or “substance”, but instead to look at Father, Son and Spirit. This had profound implications for speaking with people from other monotheistic faiths, especially Muslims. I guess could be tempting to find common ground, believing in ‘one’ God, but actually we believe in Father, Son and Spirit – and our Father, our God-head is profoundly different to Allah.

We then looked at how we can reconcile ‘oneness’ and trinity and different approaches in Christian theology throughout history – trying to fit the 3 into 1, and trying to understand how the 3 can be one. We learned that God is not simply 3 characters, 3 faces and that actually analogies like the Egg and H2O aren’t great ones. Rather God is three persons in loving relationship. This brings a whole new emphasis to 1 John 4:16 – “God is Love”. It’s not primarily saying that Love is an attribute or characteristic of God, no it goes much deeper to say that God is a relationship – Father, Son and Spirit are One God because of the loving relationship that joins them. God is Relationship, God is Love. So what does it mean to be in relationship with God? It means to be brought into this loving communion, to be loved by the Father as the Son is loved as the Spirit is loved – that was a Wow moment, where Mike starts to use bigger hand gestures. He then talked about “Hypostasis in Extasis” which I can’t quite remember what it means, but it was to do with the nature of who God is wanting to express his loving relationship into the world – hence creation, revelation of himself, and salvation to draw humanity back into relationship, so we went to the Scriptures to look at the Trinity in action within these themes…

Creation

Gen 1:2 – The Spirit of God moves of the water

Gen 1: 26 – Let us make man in our own image

Col 1: 16 – By Jesus all things were created

John 1: 3 – Through Jesus all things were made

Revelation

John 16 – It was great to be able to study the ‘upper room discourse’ at Sparkford 2 in the summer (and good to see at least one person from my dorm group in this seminar). The discourse is just packed with profound truths about the trinity – specifically on Revelation, from verse 13 it talks about the Spirit speaking, not on his own, but what he hears from the Son, and this not from the Son, because the Son got it from the Father in the first place.

Salvation

We didn’t look at Hebrews, but the stuff in Student Celebrations about Jesus the High Priest presenting himself as a sacrifice to the Father seems appropriate. We looked at John 17 – Jesus prays (presumably in the Spirit?) to his Father, he prays that through (the Cross?) the Son and the Father may be glorified. He prays for his disciples, for protection and unity. He prays for all who will believe (us?), praying that they may be one as we (Father and the Son) are one. The Son intercedes in prayer for his people with the Father, and ultimately on the Cross intercedes for his people by taking the Father’s punishment.

‘Cosmic Child Abuse’

One phrase used by Steve Chalke and others has been to liken the doctrine of PSA to ‘Cosmic Child Abuse’. The Father punishing the Son, can this be right in the light of what we’ve said about this loving communion of God? Firstly, there is the statement that Richard Cunningham raised, “God doesn’t forgive sin, he only punishes it” – I hope to blog on this later – if we reject this statement then we don’t have a problem, if we accept it, then we see Jesus being punished by the Father for our Sin… Love and Just Punishment are neither in conflict or contradiction, so the question is, is it more loving for the Father to punish the Son for Sin or to let the world face the punishment? I’m going with the former… but it comes back to “Hypostasis in Extasis”, the idea of God wanting to broadcast his loving relationship – redemption of humanity, through the atonement of Sin is the only way this can happen, the only way that humanity can be drawn back into the loving communion which is God.

Some people think theology is boring, or simply intellectual – actually (and Mike Reeves has helped me in moving away from any notion of those two ideas) Christian theology gives glory, fear and reverence to an awesome God!