The Unity of God

           The starting point here is the event of the self-revelation or self­ communication of the One God: the unity of God precedes the triunity.  It is a single movement in which the One God reveals Himself through Himself in order to communicate Himself to men and women.  This movement proceeds from the Father through the Son, in the Spirit, and spreads out in creation through the manifold energies of the Spirit.  This divine movement can be seen in all God’s works: the Father always acts....through the Son.....in the Spirit.

            The Father creates, sustains, upholds, reconciles and redeems the world through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. All activity proceeds from the Father, the Son is always His mediator, and the Holy Spirit the mediation. The Father is the revealer, the Son is the revelation, and the Holy is Spirit God’s method of revelation.  The Son is God’s self-revelation and also His self-communication; He is wholly related to the Father, and the same is correspondingly true of the Holy Spirit.  In this unified divine movement, the Holy Spirit appears directly as ‘Spirit of the Son’ and mediates through the Son as ‘Spirit of the Father’.  But He Himself is the efficacy1 of the  Son and Father.  The Spirit is gift, not giver. Consequently everything that happens from God’s side happens in the Spirit, every divine operation is effected by the Holy Spirit.  The divine energies flow from the Spirit into the natural world and into our spirits. There is no other name under the heavens whereby men may be saved, other than the name Jesus (Acts 2:14 ).

            Because God is Truth, then whatever God corresponds to us through His revelation is dependable.  How else are people to trust God’s promises unless God Himself proves His faithfulness in history, and unless He is in His essential nature ‘the faithful one’? For the sake of the dependability of His manifold revelations, we have to assume theologically that God is in Himself as He appears to us: ‘God remains faithful for He cannot deny Himself’ (II Tim. 2.13).

Poured Out Upon Mankind

            God is ‘beforehand in Himself what He is afterwards in His revelation, beyond time and space, uninterrupted.  The Holy Spirit (after Christ’s cross and resurrection) proceeds from the Father and from the Son, or from the Father through the Son, then this cannot be any different in God as He was ‘beforehand in Himself’, beyond time and space, uninterrupted.  The Holy Spirit as He exists in Himself is co-equal and co-eternal with the Father and the Son.  The Trinity destines Himself, and opens Himself, for the economy of salvation.   We can only reach the ‘God for us’ and discern nothing of ‘God in Himself,’ as the Great I Am.

We cannot see or know God directly in His essential nature, as God knows Himself in His Word, and as the Son knows the Father.  This is not due to God’s inaccessibility, it is due to our fallen nature and so the thermo-nuclear power of the divine movement into which we are impelled or drawn when we experience God’s self-communication can only be experienced as we can handle it, that is, from glory to glory.  In this divine movement we have God’s indwelling, as it were, and in front of us the world, as field for the proclamation of the gospel, and for acts performed in, through and by God’s Spirit.  He is the one, single, mysterious mighty God!  He is sovereign in His revelation.  Even our knowledge of His self-revelation is deter­mined by Him that is, through His Spirit — since He permits Himself to be known to us, and gives Himself to be known through His essential nature, in His operations.

            The Holy Spirit proceeds ‘from the Father and the Son’ because in salvation history He is sent by the Father through the Son, and is experienced in this way by human beings.  In a divine act, the Holy Spirit is once and for all put in third place in the Trinity, and subordinated to the Son who has subordinated Himself to the Father.  But this makes it impossible to comprehend salvation history adequately.  It is true that this order applies to the sending of the Spirit through Christ on the foundation of the resurrection, but it does not apply to Christ’s own history in the Spirit.  If Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit, baptized with the Spirit, and ministered by virtue of the energies given Him by the Spirit, then He presupposes the Spirit, and the Spirit precedes Him.  Christ comes from the Father in the Spirit.  The relations in Israel’s history with God cannot be seen in any other way either: it is through the patient, loving, liberating and guiding operation of the Spirit that Israel becomes God’s first-born son.

            Moreover, the interactions of Son and Spirit, Spirit and Son are not in any way surprising, if we get straight in our minds the metaphor which is implicit in this interaction: the unity of Word and Breath for the unity of Son and Spirit.  His words are Spirit and they are life. Where the Word of God is, there is also the breath of God in which it is uttered.  Where God’s breath brings created beings into life, there is also the Word which calls them by their names and proclaims all of His creation as good.  So it is correct to see everywhere in the Trinity God’s divine order: Father — Son— Spirit.  We see the order: God — Spirit — Word — everywhere too.  God creates all things through the breath of His life in His creative words.  Through the tempest of His Spirit (Ruach) He opens for Israel the path through the sea.  The healing and life-giving Spirit comes upon Christ and ‘rests’ on Him, if we perceive in salvation history the reciprocal coefficacy of Spirit and Word, Son and Spirit. 

Ministered By Divine Order

            If God is represented by Christ, Christ by the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit by the five fold ministries, then by way of the divine order of relationships — the Holy Spirit, with all His charismata and energies in salvation history, is seen in the operative acts of the New Testament priesthood. The Holy Spirit is then ministered through the operation of ‘the called, anointed, spiritual pastors’, their ministerial grace, their proclamation, pastoral care and administration of the sacraments and ordinances. The congregation turns into the recipients of the gifts of the Spirit, mediated through the church built upon the Rock. But in this way the Spirit does not make Christians their own determining subjects, or the rulers of their own lives, necessarily.

The doctrine of the trinity traditionally held in the mainstream Christian church can also be interpreted as a doctrine about the Trinity in the sending, since for this doctrine ‘sending’ is the quintessence[2] of the relationships of the divine persons to one another and of their shared relationship to the world, ‘The Father is always only the sender, sending both the Son and the Holy Spirit.  The Son can be sent, but only by the Father, whereas He for His part can also send, but only the Holy Spirit and those called and chosen vessels.  The Holy Spirit, finally, can be sent — and sent both by the Father and by the Son. From the discerned sending of the Son Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit through Christ, the eternal origin of these divine ‘sendings’ is manifested.

The Trinity reveals an eternal concern  which is already turned in commitment towards the world (John 3:16 ).

The Trinity is from eternity an open Trinity.  He is open for His own sendings, and in His sendings He is open for human beings and for the redemption of the whole created world, so that they may be united with Himself. The sending of the Son for the salvation of fallen creation, and the sending of the Spirit to unite created beings with the Son for the glory of the Father, reveal the love of God which goes out of Himself.  The Trinity which opens Himself and goes out of Himself can be termed the threefold God.  The threefold God is open for human beings, open for the world, and open for time.

If the Trinity in the beginning goes out of Himself in the sending of the Son and the Spirit, then God does not only reveal His love, He actually opens Himself for the experience of the world and history.  He does not merely act on the world, He invites created beings to act on Him by faith as well, and in this way He ‘experiences’ His creation.  This is not due to any deficiency, lack or need of Being.  It is the outcome of the rapturous abundance of His divine Being, which longs to communicate Himself and is able to communicate Himself.  The history of the life of God, which communicates Himself inexhaustibly in an unfathomable depth of love, is disclosed through the ‘sending’ Trinity. What is man that the creator of the universe is so mindful of?

1 Efficacy : Power to produce effects; operation or energy of an agent or force; production of the effect intended; as, the efficacy of medicine in counteracting disease; the efficacy of prayer. Milton . Syn. -- Virtue; force; energy; potency; efficiency