Archive for the ‘Paterology’ category

One Year With Karl Barth: God The Father

June 8th, 2009

Barth affirms that the Father, Son and Spirit are part of the one God, but this section of CD emphasizes the uniqueness of the Father.  Barth asserts that the dignity, lordship, and even the superiority of Jesus is subordinate to the “theos”.

In the so-called Synoptic Gospels this approach is especially prominent. It almost sounds like a false note, and is certainly an enigma, when even and precisely in these Gospels Jesus is called Kyrios. For what is Jesus here but a single pointer to the Lord whose kingdom (not His own) Jesus announces and declares by word and deed in a way that hardly distinguishes Him either formally or materially from John the Baptist, in relation to whom as the only One who is good (Mk. 10:18) Jesus associates Himself with His disciples in the address: Our Father!, whose will He very definitely differentiates from His own (Mk. 14:36), to whom He prays, as is repeatedly emphasised, and obedience to whom seems to be in the last resort the whole meaning of His calling and work. He is thus called the (ἅγιος) παῖς* of God like David and the Servant of the Lord of Isaiah 53…

Barth concludes that jesus’s authority and lordship was only a manifestation of the Father’s.

Looked at along these lines the lordship of Jesus as the Son of God is obviously only a manifestation, exercise and application of the lordship of God the Father. The essence of the deity ascribed to Jesus is to make clear and impart and give effect to who God the Father is, who God is in the true sense, and what He wills and does with man. It is to represent this God the Father.

Barth seems to define the nature of Father through the lens of the Son. Most significantly, Barth sees that the most important aspect of God the Father is that his “fatherhood” goes beyond the analogy of human parentage, but that the Father, through the death and resurrection of the Son, is the Lord of both life and death for all creation. Let me close then with a summaratoin from Barth’s own words.

God our Father means God our Creator (cf. for this Deut. 32:6 and Is. 64:7). And it should be clear by now that it is specifically in Christ, as the Father of Jesus Christ, that God is called our Creator. That God is our Creator is not a general truth that we can know in advance or acquire on our own; it is a truth of revelation. Only as that which we know elsewhere as the father-son relation is transcended by the Word of Christ the Crucified and Risen, only as it is interpreted by this Word, which means, in this case, only as it acquires from this Word a meaning which it cannot have of itself, only in this way may we see what creation means. But in this way we can see. The Father of Jesus Christ who according to the witness of Scripture is revealed in Jesus His Servant has the qualities of a Lord of our existence. The witness to Him leads us to the place where the miracle of creation can be seen. It bears witness to the holy God, the God who alone is God, the free God. It is this witness that we have to understand with the help of the basic statements of the doctrine of the Trinity.

For Barth, uniqueness of God the Father, and Creator, is only manifest as our father because he is first the Father of Jesus the Son and we come to the knowledge and experience of the Father through Jesus’ death and resurrection.

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* All quotes from Karl Barth, Geoffrey William. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, Church Dogmatics, Volume I The Doctrine of the Word of God, Part 1, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 384-.
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The Triple Point of God

April 21st, 2009

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” Romans 1:20

One of my favorite college courses was Thermodynamics.  It was my strongest science class and–call me a geek–I still enjoy reading books on the stuff when I can.  One of the coolest parts of science is discovering how God reveals Himself through His creation.

The Trinity is one of the most difficult concepts of the Christian faith, (just check out Barth and Zacharias).  There are tons of analogies and models people use to try and comprehend this unity in diversity.  Without a doubt, the one model that makes the most sense is found in what thermodynamacists call “The Triple Point“.
In simple terms, the Triple Point is when the Temperature and Pressure conditions are in perfect balance so that a substance can exist simultaneously in all three phases.  For example, water exists in one of three primary phases; solid, liquid or gas.   But when the temperature and pressure are just right, water can be a solid, a liquid and a gas at the exact same time.   Here is a simple graphic illustration of the Triple Point.

Triple Point is the coexistence of all three phases in perfect equilibrium.

For me, the Triple Point is a beautiful picture of YHWH who exists in the balance of Time and Eternity as Father, Son and Spirit–each one with a unique phase, yet each one existing in perfect equilibrium that cannot be divided–one from the other.
Even if understanding the Triple Point does not answer every question about the Trinity of YHWH, it should at least demonstrate the possibility of the diversity in unity that is God.
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Posted in Christology, Paterology, Pneumatology, Science, Systematic Theology

Unity in Diversity of the Triune God

April 17th, 2009

On Monday I posted about Karl Barth’s view on the trinity.  In response to some of the questions I have had come in to me, I would like to share this short video clip from Dr. Ravi Zacharias.  Anyone who knows me is aware that I have a total man-crush on Ravi’s brain… so I will simply allow him to speak to “the unity of diversity in the community of the Trinity.”

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Posted in Christology, Paterology, Pneumatology, Systematic Theology

One Year With Karl Barth: The Trinity

April 13th, 2009


It is obvious that no difference can be or is made here by the distinction which is made in Holy Scripture itself between Yahweh dwelling on Sinai and Yahweh dwelling in Jerusalem, or in the New Testament the distinction between the Father and the Son, or the distinction manifested in the contrasts between Good Friday, Easter and Pentecost. The man who prays to the Father, who believes in the Son and who is moved by the Holy Ghost is a man whom the one Lord meets and unites to Himself.

The revelation of Scripture is clear, says Barth, in that God is One and “God’s triunity does not imply any threat to but is rather the basis of the Christian concept of the unity of God.” According to Barth, the concept of trinity is nothing more than an attempt to explain and confirm the name “Yahweh-Kyros” revealed in the Old and New Testaments. The threefold repetition of Father, Son and Spirit, does not indicate a faith in three unique names or different objects; but faith in one name and one God (Yahweh-Kyros). There is not a threefold essence, says Barth, or a threefold divinity, but one God alone.

Barth rightly observes that the use of the term “person” has always been a source of confusion when understanding the Trinity.  This he prefers to use the term “mode” or “way of being” as a replacement.

What we have here are God’s specific, different, and always very distinctive modes of being. This means that God’s modes of being are not to be exchanged or confounded. In all three modes of being God is the one God both in Himself and in relation to the world and man. But this one God is God three times in different ways, so different that it is only in this threefold difference that He is God, so different that this difference, this being in these three modes of being, is absolutely essential to Him, so different, then, that this difference is irremovable.

Thus, the repetition of eternity within eternity, says Barth, is the expression of unity within the three modes of God–what he calls “triunity”.  He expresses this “triunity” in the follow manner.

If Christ is not very God, what else can faith in Him be but superstition?…

If revelation is to be taken seriously as God’s presence, if there is to be a valid belief in revelation, then in no sense can Christ and the Spirit be subordinate hypostases…

Only the substantial equality of Christ and the Spirit with the Father is compatible with monotheism.

Barth goes on to make a very interesting assertion that has some bearing on the contemporary discussion of Trinity in a completely relational concept. Certain writers today continually asser that God exists as Trinity because he needed the essential relationship between Father, Son and Spirit. Barth seems to have a much different view that would vitiate this assertion.

God is One, but not in such a way that as such He needs a Second and then a Third in order to be One, nor as though He were alone and had to do without a counterpart, and therefore again—this will be of decisive significance in the doctrine of creation and man and also in the doctrine of reconciliation—not as though He could not exist without the world and man, as though there were between Him and the world and man a necessary relation of reciprocity. In Himself these limits of what we otherwise regard as unity are already set aside. In Himself His unity is neither singularity nor isolation. Herewith, i.e., with the doctrine of the Trinity, we step on to the soil of Christian monotheism.

What implications do Barth’s teachings have on your view of Trinity?

* All quotes from Karl Barth, Geoffrey William. Bromiley and Thomas F. Torrance, Church Dogmatics, Volume I The Doctrine of the Word of God, Part 1, 2d ed. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2004), 348-383.

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Posted in Christology, Paterology, Pneumatology