So much of the Bible is redundant.
In John 1:1, we read these words:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
This is not new information. Nor is this, in the following two verses:
He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
That’s the next two verses. It wasn’t necessary for John to say any of this. It is all there with bells on in the first three verses of Genesis:
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.
It is as plain as a pikestaff (whatever that is) that God, our Heavenly Father, was accompanied by God the Holy Spirit in the work of creating creation by a Word. Any fule kno that this is so.
It is not until John 1:14 that we run into a significant puzzle: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
The Word, who is God, becomes flesh. This one who “became flesh” is clearly Jesus, and no-one else. So he, and no-one else, is the Word who was God and who was with God in the beginning, and who made all things.
But we have already seen that the one who was with God in the beginning was the Spirit! The difficulty is obvious, for God’s Spirit and our Lord Jesus are in no way to be confused.
The only possible solution that I can think of here is that every single work of God in creation, and so, necessarily, in redemption, is at one and the same time the work of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Yet we must continue to believe that there is only one God. So there is no work external to the only true Lord of creation that is not at one and the same time a work of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.
It is this one idea that leads me to a deep unease with some of the current teaching regarding the Holy Spirit. But more on that elsewhere. First things first, though. Does this ‘Trinity’ theory, as I thought we could call it, sound right to you? Or is something missing? Advice from theologians warmly welcomed.
The only possible solution that I can think of here is that every single work of God in creation, and so, necessarily, in redemption, is at one and the same time the work of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
My first thought was, “Did God the Father hang on a Roman Cross?”
Traditionally the church Fathers used a fancy Latin phrase for this very idea – Opera Trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa – which means the external works of the Trinity are undivided. So the one God creates and redeems because there is no clash of wills between the persons. Now at any one point in the Scriptures one person in the Godhead may more obviously take the focus of the author’s attention. This doesn’t mean that the other two are on the bench. There is a complementary notion of appropriation which refers to “appropriating or assigning” a particular aspect of God’s actions in the Bible story to one particular person in the Godhead. So you may have read something like, the Father creates, the Son redeems and the Spirit sanctifies. This is the more problematic version of appropriation in that, obviously either it doesn’t matter which of the persons we refer to as they are all the same or that in certain situations, only one person of the Triune God is in action because the other two have not been specifically mentioned. Hence theologians like John Calvin described the idea of appropriating different aspects of God’s actions in creation to the different persons. So in the Institutes we read:
“Nevertheless, it is not fitting to suppress the distinction that we observe to be expressed in Scripture. It is this: to the Father is attributed the beginning of activity, and the fountain and wellspring of all things; to the Son, wisdom, counsel, and the ordered disposition of all things; but to the Spirit is assigned the power and efficacy of that activity.” I.13.18
What Calvin means here is that God the Father works in the world through His Son and by His Spirit.
Hi Craig,
No, God the Father didn’t die on the cross.
But God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. And, it was the will of God the Father that the Jesus should die.
So in both these senses, and possibly others I haven’t thought of just now, God the Father was fully involved in the redeeming work of Jesus on the cross.
David: way cool!
Hi Gordon,
A pike was basically a big spear between 3 to 6 metres in length. A pikestaff was the pike without the metal pointy bit on the end.
They were popular with the ancient Macedonians, until the Romans worked out ways to get around their formations. It was then revived in the Middle Ages, and was especially popular in the 16th century. It fell out of popularity as guns became more powerful and accurate.
I suspect the origin of the expression “as plain as a pikestaff” came from the fact that the pike was a weapon of the peasant & mercenary, who didn’t have the money to bling up their weapon as aristocrats could.
Without wanting to disagree with anything already said here, it might also be worth noting that the separation and loneliness of the second person (I know, myriad issues) on the cross might itself be important – not simply because of what it does for us – but because of what he himself becomes in relation to us by it.
The Father in sending the Son *away* ensures that he will achieve his inheritance and be glorified in his own right.
Gordon, I would suspect there is a much easier “solution” [not that I see this as a problem in any event] than what you mention.
I think you have fallen prey to the tendency to read things too much in terms of trinitarian categories and found by doing so a conundrum that does not exist.
When we read in our English translations that the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters and then ascribe an understanding of the word “Spirit of God” that is common in modern dialog but would have had no place whatever to the audience of the Torah, we are simply asking for interpretive problems.
What does Genesis 1:2 say is hovering over the surface of the waters? The ruwach of God.
What is this ruwach of God in the Genesis story? It is most definitely not the “Holy Spirit” of the Trinity, for this ruwach is what gives people life [Genesis 6:3] and when we are told that people will not live forever, it is because the ruwach will not “strive with man forever” [Genesis 6:3].
Since the Holy Spirit could not be received until after Christ’s cleansing death [Hebrews 9:14-17] yet man had this ruwach from the beginning.
In the Jewish conception of life, the “Breath of God” (translated by many English Translations as “Spirit of God,”) is what animated life and caused animals to be alive [see Genesis 6:3,17], and it is this life-giving breath that we see in Genesis 1:2, ready to inhabit all creation, animating all flesh.
Note the parallel of the “Breath of God” hovering over the waters in 1:2 right before Creation and God causing a breath [same word] to pass over the flooded earth in Genesis 8:1 to begin the second major covenantal epoch. And then this same word blew again in Exodus 14:21 preparing the Red sea parting immediately before the third covenantal epoch.