Rescue
The realization of the Genesis promise took time. As the story unfolds, God spent centuries preparing a people as the matrix for this realization. The history of Israel in ancient times shows the divine pedagogy at work. Through events, persons, and institutions, God set up the conceptual framework without which the manner in which the promise was kept could not have been understood. For example, God rescued Israel from Egyptian slavery through the exodus. A key part of the rescue was the sacrifice of a lamb that averted divine judgment if only people availed themselves of it—an event and a sacrifice that believing Jews celebrate at Passover to this day. God raised up Moses as his agent to put the rescue into effect and to teach his people his design for life, especially the famous Ten Commandments, which centuries later Jesus summed up as love for God and love for neighbor.
The career of Jesus definitively realizes the Genesis promise. He is the agent God sent to accomplish an even greater rescue than ancient Israel experienced. But he was not merely a servant of the divine purpose as Moses was. Instead God sent the Son of his eternal affection. Moreover the problematic that Jesus addressed was not political oppression but sin. Sin is that great spoiler that alienates us from the divine life and from one another, and for which we remain accountable before our Creator and liable to his judgment. Still further, the sacrifice offered was not a lamb but that of this Son in willing self-sacrifice. He took the judgment we deserve.
The opening chapter of the Gospel according to John provides a handy presentation of many of these ideas. John starts the story in eternity: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and was God. He was with God in the beginning” (John 1:1–2). Clearly here is an understanding of God that is complex: “the Word was with God and was God.” According to John we are loved with a holy love by a God who is one yet complex. This God so held the world of men and women in his affections that he gave his unique Son so that whoever entrusts himself or herself to him has everlasting life (John 3:16).
“Trinity” soon became the name to sum up this complexity as the early church thinkers wrestled with the finer details of the nature of God as found in the Christian Bible. Of course, introduce that term “Trinity” and eyes might glaze over. To understand the biblical story, however, requires no less. Once God had taught a people (Israel) that there is only one God and that idols are foolish—one of the great lessons of the Old Testament—then and only then was it safe to unveil the inner reality of who the one God really is: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—one of the great lessons of the New Testament.
The Trinity is, of course, thoroughly unimaginable. We must, however, distinguish the unimaginable from the inconceivable. That is to say, I cannot form a mental picture of God as Trinity. If I do I find I have a ridiculous mental image of a committee of three meeting on a cloudbank. But to affirm one God in three Persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit—is not a logical contradiction. It does not parallel attempting to tell the logical story of square circles. Nor is it to assert that there is one God who is three Gods. Now that’s a different story; it is not the Christian one.
Moreover, the concept of God as Trinity is immune from that critique as old as Xenophanes (c. 570–475 BC) and taken up in recent centuries by Feuerbach (1804–72), Marx (1818–83), and Freud (1856–1939). Xenophanes of Colophon argued,
Yes, and if oxen and horses or lions had hands, and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do, horses would paint the forms of gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and make their bodies in the image of their several kinds. The Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair.47
In other words the God/gods in our religious stories worldwide are simply projections of our individual selves or of our societies, just as the ancient Greek gods claimed to live on Mount Olympus. This is a fair critique of much religion in the world today, but of the unimaginable Trinity? I suggest not. The God of the biblical story is no made-up God.
Moreover, if the ultimate reality is the Trinity, then the concept of the Trinity has explanatory power. A longstanding question is: If there is a Creator, why did God create in the first place? Was it out of some divine necessity? After all, a value such as love is a relational value. Love presupposes some other as its object. So did God create out of divine loneliness? This is a serious question to put to any version of theism. Christian theism, however, which is Trinitarian in construal, presents a God who is eternal love on the inside: love among Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creation then becomes not an act of divine necessity but an act of divine grace. That is to say, God in creating did what need not have been done. Creation is an overflow of divine largesse.
The story in the Gospel of John does not stay in eternity. This Word is the agent of creation who enters the creation itself, but not without preparation (John 1:3–9). John the Baptist is sent to prepare the way. In fact this Word—still so mysterious—is in the world, the world that he had made. Yet the world rejects his light and life. He even comes to his own (to Israel as its rightful king as well as the whole world’s), and the story is the same (John 1:10–11; 19:33–36). However, some do respond and those who trust themselves to him become God’s children (John 1:12). Amazingly, the Word becomes flesh (human) in order to reveal the true nature of God as Father (John 1:14). This Word is the Father’s Son and has a name, Jesus the Christ (John 1:17).
The Gospel of John is clear that no one has seen God at any time, but it is this Jesus who has made him known (John 1:18). Pascal says, “God being thus hidden, any religion that does not say that God is hidden is not true, and any religion which does not explain why does not instruct.”48 Later in the opening chapter, John the Baptist, the preparer of the way, identifies the Word, the Son, Jesus Christ, as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” Our sins hide God’s face from us, as it were. This is the answer to Pascal’s Why? In Jesus we find the rescuer and the sacrifice to which the older Scriptures pointed and the one who enables us to turn our faces toward God.
Dorothy Sayers, the detective storywriter and medievalist, wrote in her short piece The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, her own summation of the story:
Whatever game He [God] is playing with creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work to the worst horrors of pain, humiliation, defeat, despair and death. . . . So that is the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like other men He had made, and the men He made killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero.49
For her, of course, Jesus was no dead hero. (This is the case likewise for the writer of the Gospel of John.) As she wrote in an essay on the Easter story, “God did not abolish the fact of evil: He transformed it. He did not stop the crucifixion: He rose from the dead.”50
Incidentally the story of the cross shows us why all stories cannot be equally true. The cross is the symbol of Christianity worldwide. Islam, however—to take one example—claims that Jesus did not die on the cross.51 On the Islamic view it is impossible that Allah would allow such a great prophet to perish in that way. Someone has clearly got the story wrong. If I may update an observation of the philosopher E. S. Brightman: A universe in which both Christianity [Brightman said, Roman Catholicism] and Islam [Brightman said, Christian Science] were true would be a madhouse. The principle of non-contradiction needs to be observed. “A” cannot be non-“A” at both the same time and in the same respect. A typewriter cannot be blue all over and red all over at the same time and in the same respect. For make no mistake: both Christianity and Islam claim that their foundational stories are not merely useful fictions, or, to use Plato’s expression, “a noble lie.”
Indeed there is no reason to embrace either the story of Jesus or that of Muhammad unless the seminal story speaks of what happened in real space and real time. And to look no further than the Gospel of John, there we find the writer makes the claim that “we have seen his glory,” and in another place writes of the reality of Jesus’ death: “The man who saw it [blood and water flow from Jesus’ side] has given testimony, and his testimony is true” (John 1:14; cf. 19:35).
What follows from taking this narrative seriously, rooted as it is in a real coming and a real cross? In brief, on this view—as with the idea of creation in the divine image—we matter. We are not cosmic orphans. We are not the chance products of time and chance. We are not subject to a blind fate. Nor are we subject to a cruel deity. King Lear thought that we were: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’gods, / They kill us for their sport.”52 Nor has the Creator abandoned us. Our experiences of evils may challenge such claims. Writer Arthur Koestler was wrong to suggest that God has left the phone off the hook when it comes to human misery. If the biblical story of the incarnation (the Word became flesh) is to be believed, then God has come among us under the conditions of real human life. It is a long-standing debate among theologians as to whether God can suffer. Older theology argued No (e.g., Thomas Aquinas). Generally speaking, more recent theologians say Yes (e.g., Jürgen Moltmann). Be that as it may, the incarnation at the very least shows us that God knows what it is to weep a human tear as Jesus did at the tomb of his friend Lazarus (John 11:35) and to die a human death (John 19:30). On the Christian view, evil is being addressed, and the universe is not indifferent to the wrong we do.
The story of the cross also shows that the problematic of human wrongdoing cannot be solved by anything less than a radical remedy. Education can ameliorate the human predicament but it is naïve to think that it alone can bring in utopia. To think so is to fall into what might be termed “the Socratic fallacy.” This is the notion that if one knows the truth one will do it. Historically speaking, some highly educated folk have proved to be moral monsters. The Nazi era comes to mind. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, had an earned doctorate in eighteenth-century romantic literature from the University of Heidelberg. In our present context the Socratic fallacy can be wedded to another. This fallacy could usefully be described as “the technocratic fallacy.” Cultural analyst Os Guinness sums up the attitude this way: “A breakthrough a day keeps disaster at bay.” If only it were that simple. The scientific enterprise is a most worthy one and a singularly great achievement of the human spirit. However, there is a scientism that displays a confidence in science—albeit narrowly construed—that goes well beyond what the scientific method can accomplish. This “ism” is not so much science as ideology. Scientism is one of the more unfortunate expressions of modernity (the Enlightenment). A concern for argument and evidence is one of the more fortunate. The problem lies not in science per se or technology per se but in us who wield it. For example, consider the double-edged sword of nuclear energy. We have the nuclear bomb and nuclear medicine. We can exterminate a city or heal a cancer sufferer.
In sum: the supreme rescue story of the Bible constitutes that part of the frame of reference that helps us to understand why Jesus is so special. Further, it helps me grasp how the goodness and love of God can be believed in a world such as our own with its beauties and its terrors, its delights and its dangers. And still further it helps me to comprehend how I can find peace when I become acutely aware of my true moral status before a holy, loving God who will not overlook human wrongdoing forever, including my own. Yet God has provided through the coming and cross of Christ what I cannot do for myself: he has provided in Jesus a mediator and reconciler. Jesus lived an other-person-centered life in his humanity that should be true of each one of us but isn’t. In other words, he lived the divine design for human life: love for God and neighbor. The value of his faithfulness to the divine design can be put to our account if we avail ourselves of it. He also died the death we deserve because of our wrongdoing so that we might not face God’s judgment if we avail ourselves of its value. He makes an extraordinary exchange possible. Martin Luther drew an analogy for that exchange by writing of a marriage. The riches of Christ become that of his bride the church and the great debts of the bride are swallowed up by those riches.53 And this Jesus is returning. Creation awaits its restoration and its King. There are limits, however, to the divine patience.