On God

Hello. From time I like to put my thinking about theological and other topics into words. I have previously placed some such articles on Christian Cambridge (the website of the Deans and Chaplains). I’ve decided here might be a better place for now because it allows me to post tentative and incomplete reflections, and also gives me the opportunity to have your input on my thoughts even if I don’t find the time to write a complete article. Having said that, I realise this is a pretty epic post, but this is one I’ve been working on for a while.

I’ve been thinking about the being of God. When God meets with Moses in the book of Exodus, he says, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” (Exodus 3:14)

This is a name which reveals who God is in himself, but it is also God’s particular covenant name through which he identifies himself as the God of Israel:

“God also said to Moses, ‘Say to the Israelites, “The LORD, the God of your fathers—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob—has sent me to you.’ This is my name forever, the name by which I am to be remembered from generation to generation.” (Exodus 3:15)

This is because God reveals who he is by what he does – God reveals that he is the one who is present by being manifestly present with his chosen people. God reveals that he is all-powerful by rescuing his people from slavery in Egypt. In this way, in revealing his name, God identifies himself both as the Creator God, the eternal self-existent God before all things, and as the covenant God, the God who chooses to relate to his people and intervene in history.

Roger Forster comments on this passage:

When God introduces himself to Moses as ‘Yahweh’, ‘I am who I am’, in Exodus 3:14, we can take the traditional view through Greek philosophical eyes and say, ‘Ah, yes, God is making an existential statement about himself – “I am the self-existing God, the God who exists in and of himself, the self-sufficient God, the God who is ultimate being, the God who exists regardless of whether people know him or acknowledge him!”‘

Well, all of that may be true, but it has nothing to do with what God was saying to Moses when he said ‘I am who I am’ or, perhaps better, ‘I am that I am’ or even ‘I am am-ing what I am am-ing’! God was trying to communicate. He was not discussing his existential state of being, but rather his evident activity and involvement in the world: ‘I am the God who your fathers worshipped! I am the God of Abraham, I am the God of Isaac, I am the God of Jacob! I will certainly be with you just as I was with them! I am that I am; I am am-ing it. I am active and at work! That’s why you can trust Me when you are before Pharaoh!’

(Roger Forster, Trinity, Authentic Media, 2004, p.21)

Forster identifies an important point here. “I am who I am” is not just an abstract philosophical statement. It is not just that God is, but that God is continually being what he is continually being. (Language tends to break down when dealing with the almighty infinite maker of all things, so this might get a bit confusing in places.) However, Forster’s keenness to stress what he views as Hebrew dynamism over Greek abstraction might suggest a false dichotomy – that this passage reveals God as the living and active God committed to his people rather than the absolute self-existent one. It seems to me that God, in revealing himself and making covenant with his people, reveals both his absolute self-existence and his dynamic relational character.

The combination of absoluteness and dynamism implied in God’s covenant name is difficult to resolve, but in the New Testament the God who revealed himself as YHWH is revealed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It is in this Trinitarian revelation that absoluteness and dynamism can be resolved. The God we worship, the God who has revealed himself to us in Jesus Christ is the one and only true God, the absolute Deity. He is also a community of three persons, who dynamically interact with one another. God is not just an abstract hypothesis – God is always living as the three persons of the Godhead continually enjoy one another by giving themselves to one another in love. So God is active being. He is not just a perfect being in a static sense but is actively being all the time. He is the ever-living God, not just the eternally existent Deity. The perfection of the Godhead is dynamic but not contingent.

Some philosophies, such as Platonism and monism, stress the absolute oneness of ultimate reality and so come to denigrate the finite and the contingent. (In some of Plato’s later works there is a tension which comes when he seems to begin to value the fragile beauty of contingent things, what Martha Nussbaum calls “the fragility of goodness”, in a way which pulled against his commitment to the Good being a single absolute entity. Some scholars think this is due to Plato having fallen in love, and thus perceiving a beauty in a particular person which could not be assimilated to an abstract impersonal Good.)

Some philosophies, such as the process thought of Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne, stress the important of the dynamic, that things have to move and change and develop in order to be alive. In this way they excuse pain and imperfection and suffering as being just part of the process of growth, and “process theology” teaches that God is caught up in the process, changing and growing into perfection along with the finite universe.

Both poles of this dilemma lead to serious problems philosophically. If all reality is contingent there is no stable point of reference to give things meaning; yet if ultimate reality is static there is no reason to attribute significance to variety and relationship. Christians have a unique solution, in that we believe in a triune God. God is not contingent – he is self-existent, not dependent on creation or anything outside of himself in order to live. Neither is God static – he is not just an abstract principle of goodness, but a community of three persons, continually loving one another, giving and receiving life and love and joy from their continual eternal interpenetration of one another. So we as Christians have a unique vantage point – the God we have come to know through Jesus Christ gives us a basis both for claiming a stable ground of meaning which allows us to think and speak meaningfully, and for valuing difference and relationship, since all things find their true meaning in relation to the triune God.

Contingency, being dependent on something else, is not in itself a bad thing. It is the status of all that is created. It is our true status. We are contingent beings, dependent on each other, on the world around us, and ultimately on God. It is when we are rightly related to God, the source of all things, that we become rightly related to all that is around us.

John tells us “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16) and also “God is light” (1 John 1:5). We are right to be reminded that it is wrong to stress one to the exclusion of the other. If all we say is “God is love” we are tempted to forget God’s pure and absolute holiness, but it seems to me that this is not because “God is love” is an incomplete statement but because our human conception of love is faulty and limited. It is God’s perfect love of all that is good which unavoidably entails his hatred of all that is evil. It is the love within the Godhead which is the standard of goodness and the ultimate basis of ethics.

The actions of God in the world can be understood as the overflow of the love between the persons of the Trinity. To debate why God chose to create the world when he was happy in himself can quickly become a fruitless discussion. But could it not be that the pleasure of the love within the community of the Godhead gave the three persons a desire to create other persons who could share in and experience that love?

We are treading on very tricky ground here, but the plan of salvation can be understood in the same way. Every so often, people ask what God spent his time doing before creating the world. Aside from the issue of what time might mean “before” creation, Calvin and Augustine suggest laconically that God spent his time building hell for people who ask such stupid questions. Some have suggested he spent his time deciding who would be saved, referring to passages such as Ephesians 1 and Revelation 13:8. To think of God spending all eternity writing a list of names seems too cold and calculating, since God is caught up in the eternal joy of a dance of mutual love. Yet Ephesians 1 does teach that we were chosen in him before the foundation of the world. Perhaps we can understand election (= God’s choice) to be the overflow of love amongst the persons of the Trinity.

The Indian Christian apologist and Bible teacher L.T. Jeyachandran suggests that John 3:16 is the overspill of John 17:24 – that it is out of the love that Father and Son have for one another by the Holy Spirit “before the creation of the world”, that “God so loved the world” enough to send his Son into the world to save us. I think he is right, although the overspill should not be understood as accidental or involuntary. Rather, it is God’s conscious choice to direct the love which he has in himself outward in order to save a people for himself.

Some of the seventeenth century Reformed theologians taught that prior to the “covenant of grace” (the agreement by which God promises to save all who trust in Christ on the basis of Christ’s finished work in living and dying for us) is the “covenant of redemption” (an agreement in past eternity when God the Father agreed to give the Son a people for himself, and God the Son agreed to come to earth to die to purchase this people for the Father, and God the Holy Spirit agreed to be the executive agent empowering the Son to carry out the work of redemption and applying this work to believers by uniting them with the Son). As with much of “Reformed scholasticism”, I am not sure if the technical precision involved in some of this analysis can be clearly demonstrated from Scripture, but the impulse behind the idea of the covenant of redemption seems to be the right one – that our salvation flows out of the eternal life of God himself and is not simply God’s reaction to historically contingent events.