Idle musings of a bookseller

[In Rom 8:11] Paul puts all three persons of the Trinity into one verse not once but twice, saying in essence that the Spirit of the Father who raised the Son from the dead now indwells the baptized believer and “will also quicken your mortal bodies by [the same] Spirit” (KJV). In a cursory reading, it is easy to miss the repetition with which Paul intends to convey the mighty action of God, who, in Christ, by the Spirit, has brought into being a new Adam, a new humanity. This is the great set of events that bestows upon us nothing less than the righteousness of God for the living of our lives.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 554 (emphasis original)

Weed: The Father and the Son Love Us in Different Degrees

Then there is the teaching that Christ won God over to our side by dying for us. Some people imagine that. I have heard evangelists tell about an angry God with His sword raised to destroy a sinning man, and Jesus rushes in and the sword falls on His head. He died and the sinner lived. It might be good drama, but its very poor theology, for there is not a word of truth in it. The Father “so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16). And it was the love of the Father that sent the Son to die for mankind.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 157

In our preaching, teaching, and learning we must emphatically reject any interpretation that divides the will of the Father from that of the Son, or suggests that anything is going on that does not proceed out of love. As we shall see again and again, God’s justice and God’s mercy both issue forth from his single will of eternal love.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 163

God is a God of judgment and a God of grace. Both judgment and grace are in the New Testament. And both judgment and grace are in the Old Testament. God is always the same, without change: Father, Son and Holy Ghost.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 156

Weed: Christ Is for Us, God Is against Us

Some say that Christ the Son differs from the God the Father. That is one weed I want you to pull out of your mind, never allowing it to grow there. The misconception is that Christ is for us and God is against us. Never was there any truth in that at all. Christ, being God, is for us. And the Father, being God, is for us. And the Holy Ghost, being God, is for us. The Trinity is for us. It was because the Father was for us that the Son came to die for us. The reason that God is for us is why the Son is at the right hand of God now, pleading for us. The Holy Spirit is in our hearts. He is our advocate within. Christ is our advocate above. And all agree. There is no disagreement between the Father and the Son over man.—A.W. Tozer, Experiencing the Presence of God, 155–56

Closely related is a striking passage in II Corinthians that begins: “All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself,” thereby nailing down the indispensable affirmation that the Father is acting, not over against the Son, but through and in the Son, whose will is the same as the Father’s. The awesome transaction is taking place within God.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 100 (emphasis original)

The important thing for our discussion here is Paul's announcement (kerygma) that God, in the person of his sinless Son, put himself voluntarily and deliberately into the condition of greatest accursedness — on our behalf and in our place. This mind-crunching paradox lies at the heart of the Christian message.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 100

God is the triune God. He is one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus of Nazareth was not a free-floating holy man. If he is not the second person of the Trinitarian Godhead and the only-begotten Son attested in the Nicene Creed, then God’s self was not directly involved at Golgotha. In that case, Jesus would be detached from the eternal plan of God shown forth in the history of Israel, and the cross would be a random event of no more than passing interest.—Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion, 12

480 Thou, Whose Almighty Word

1 Thou, whose almighty word
   chaos and darkness heard,
   and took their flight;
   hear us, we humbly pray,
   and where the gospel day
   sheds not its glorious ray,
   let there be light.

2 Thou, who didst come to bring
   on thy redeeming wing,
   healing and sight,
   health to the sick in mind,
   sight to the inly blind,
   O now to humankind
   let there be light.

3 Spirit of truth and love,
   life-giving, holy Dove,
   speed forth thy flight;
   move on the water's face,
   bearing the lamp of grace,
   and in earth's darkest place
   let there be light.

4 Holy and blessed Three,
   glorious Trinity,
   Wisdom, Love, Might;
   boundless as ocean's tide
   rolling in fullest pride,
   through the earth far and wide
   let there be light.
                         John Marriott
                         The Methodist Hymnal, 1964 edition

<idle musing
A good solid trinitarian hymn. It only occurs in about 500 hymnals and I don't ever recall singing it.
</idle musing>

463 We Believe in One True God

1 We all believe in one true God,
   Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
   Ever-present help in need,
   Praised by all the heav'nly host,
   By whose mighty power alone
   All is made and wrought and done.

2 We all believe in Jesus Christ,
   Son of God and Mary's Son,
   Who descended from his throne
   And for us salvation won,
   By whose cross and death are we
   Rescued from all misery.

3 We confess the Holy Ghost,
   Who from both fore'er proceeds,
   Who upholds and comforts us
   In all trials, fears, and needs.
   Blest and holy Trinity,
   Praise forever be to thee!
                         Tobias Clausnitzer
                         Trans. by Catherine Winkworth
                         The Methodist Hymnal, 1964 edition

<idle musing>
Wow. For a hymn that only occurs in 50-odd hymnals, this one sure shows a lot of variation. The basic theme stays the same, but the words are all over. I couldn't find one that aligned fully with the Methodist hymnal I'm going through.

You can definitely tell that the hymnwriter is a Western Christian and not Eastern Orthodox: "Who from both fore'er proceeds" is something only a Western Christian would say. The filioque clause is still a hotly debated issue between East and West. </idle musing>

The first thing to be said, is that the hypostatic union must be looked at only from the perspective of God’s amazing act of grace, in which God the Son freely descended into our human existence, and freely assumed human being into oneness with his divine being. That was an act of sheer grace. He did not need to do it. He did not owe it either to himself or to man to do it; it is an act grounded only in the pure overflowing love of God. It is in no sense a two-sided event, for even though there is within it, in the unity of divine and human natures, act of God and act of man, the whole act of incarnation, including all the divine and human acts within the hypostatic union, is grounded solely and entirely and exclusively in the act of God's grace.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 206

If Christ is not God, if God is not fully and wholly present in Christ and identical with Christ, then God does not reconcile the world to, himself, and the work of Jesus is not eternally valid, but is only temporal and contingent and relative. If Christ is not God, then the love of Christ is not identical with God's love, and so we do not know that God is love. We may know that Christ is love, but if he is not really God in the complete sense, then all we have in Jesus Christ is a revelation of man, of humanity at its noblest reaching up into the clouds. If Christ is not God, then we do not have a descent of God to man. Thus as the obverse of the fact that Christ's real humanity means that God has actually come to us and dwells among us, Christ's deity means that God himself has come to save us. The dogma of the humanity of Christ asserts the actuality in our world of the coming of God, and the dogma of the deity of Christ asserts the divine content of our knowledge and salvation, the objective reality of our relation to God himself. The dogma of the deity of Christ means that our salvation in Christ is anchored in eternity: that it is more sure than the heavens.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 188

The humanity of Christ is also essential to God's act of reconciliation, for the actuality of atonement is grounded upon the fact that in actual human nature it is God himself acting on our behalf. Thus any docetic view of the humanity of Christ would mean that God only appears to act within our human existence, or that his acts are only of tangential significance, that they do not really strike into the roots of our existence and condition, and have no relevance to our need. Atonement is real and actual only if and as the mediator acts fully from the side of man as man, as well as from the side of God as God. If the humanity of Christ is imperfect, atonement is imperfect, and we would then still be in our sins. If Jesus Christ is really and truly man, then his death for sin is an act of God himself in human nature, and not just an external act upon human nature. But if atonement is to fulfil its object, it must be not only act of God upon man, but act of man in response to God, man's sacrifice, man's oblation, satisfaction by man for sin before God. Apart from the human obedience and human life and death of Christ, apart from his human sacrifice, we have nothing at all to offer to God, nothing with which we can stand before God, but our sin and guilt. But here in the full humanity of Jesus, as it is joined eternally to his deity in incarnation and atonement, man's destiny as man is actually assured and restored to its place in God from which it has fallen; man's wrong has been set aside in and with the judgement accomplished upon the humanity of Christ, and now in his humanity our new right humanity has been established before God.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 186

Again, if Jesus Christ is the Word of God to us, he is the Word of God antecedently and eternally in the Godhead. Not only is he the Word of God uttered by God in the incarnation, but the Word eternally spoken by the Father in the communion of the Holy Spirit within the holy Trinity. Were that not so, the revelation we are given in Christ would not have eternal validity or ultimate reality. That is why the fourth Gospel begins with the wonderful prologue of the eternity of the Word in God, for it is from the eternal God that the Word proceeded, and all that follows in the Gospel — all that Jesus said and was in his dependence as the incarnate Son upon the Father — goes back to and is grounded in that eternal relation of Word to God within God. Similarly, the epistle to the Hebrews begins its exposition of the high priestly work of Christ by teaching that the Son came forth from the Godhead, the Son by whose word all things were created. It is that Son who came and manifested himself, and now in the incarnation stands forth as the divine servant Son to fulfil his work of atonement in entire solidarity with man, eternal Son of God though he was. But all that Jesus did has reality and validity just because it rests upon that eternal relation of the Son with the Father, and therefore reaches out through and beyond the span of years in his earthly ministry into God.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, 176

The fact that Christ is all of God, or that all of God is in Christ, does not mean that there is nothing of man in him, but the opposite, that all of man is in him. Torrance used to explain that in the logic of grace, ‘All of grace does not mean nothing of man. All of grace means all of man.’ The knowledge that forgiveness and salvation is all of grace liberates us out of ourselves into union with Christ, freeing us to live fully and freely out of him. All of grace means all of man, just as the action of God in Christ means all of man in Christ.—Introduction to Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, xlvi

For Torrance, the union of God and man in Christ is the basic fact of the Christian faith. The ‘hypostatic union’ (from hypostasis, the Greek word used for ‘person’) is the union of God and man in the one person of Christ, or the doctrine of ‘two natures (divine and human) in one person’. The hypostatic union established in the incarnation means that there is now a permanent union of God and man in the person of Christ. In him, in his living person, God and man are now united for all time. That means that Jesus, in his one person, is the living bond between God and man, the living heart of revelation and reconciliation and indeed himself the fact of revelation and reconciliation.—T. F. Torrance, Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, xxxiv

Because Jesus Christ is God, he not only makes God known but what he does is the work of God. His word and deed is the word and deed of God. His love and compassion is the love and compassion of the Father. When he forgives that is the very forgiveness of God. This is likewise a point on which Torrance lays immense stress, the identity between the act of Jesus and the act of the Father. What he does is what God does. Torrance would often say, ‘There is no God behind the back of Jesus’. In other words, there is no other God than the one we see in Jesus and no act of God other than the act of Jesus. The word and act of Jesus and of the Father are identical. The deity of Jesus is therefore the guarantee that the reconciliation we see and receive in him is the reconciliation of God himself.—Incarnation: The Person and Life of Christ, xxxi

The doctrine of the Trinity can be regarded as the outcome of a process of sustained and critical reflection on the pattern of divine activity revealed in scripture, and continued in Christian experience. This is not to say that scripture contains or sets out an explicit doctrine of the Trinity; rather, scripture bears witness to a God who demands to be understood in a Trinitarian manner.—Alister McGrath, Theology: The Basics (2nd ed.), 103

271 Burleigh. 10. 10. 10. 10.

1 Lead us, O Father, in the paths of peace;
   Without Thy guiding hand we go astray,
   And doubts appall, and sorrows still increase;
   Lead us through Christ, the true and living Way.

2 Lead us, O Father, in the paths of truth;
   Unhelped by Thee, in error's maze we grope,
   While passion stains and folly dims our youth,
   And age comes on, uncheered by faith and hope.

3 Lead us, O Father, in the paths of right;
   Blindly we stumble when we walk alone,
   Involved in shadows of a mortal night;
   Only with Thee we journey safely on.

4 Lead us, O Father, to Thy heav'nly rest,
   However rough and steep the pathway be,
   Through joy or sorrow, as Thou deemest best,
   Until our lives are perfected in Thee.
                         William H. Burleigh
                         The Methodist Hymnal 1939 edition

<idle musing>
Reading the lyrics, I was struck by the fact that it would have made a great Trinitarian hymn if the other two members of the Trinity had been mentioned. But, when I checked out the bio of the author and found out he was Unitarian, it made sense. Oh, and it isn't very popular, occurring in under 200 hymnals. His bio mentions that his hymns were more popular in Britain than the US, and that they were more popular outside Unitarianism than within it.
</idle musing>

Underlying Gregory's trinitarian analysis is the firm conviction that isolated texts of Scripture should be read in light of the overarching biblical narrative; because the Holy Spirit has inspired all the biblical authors, it is perfectly legitimate to allow one text to shed light on another. Rather than producing a forced harmony, the comparison of texts acknowledges the Spirit's overriding authorship of the entire Bible. Because the New Testament Scriptures are in continuity with those of the Old Testament, Gregory feels free to interpret the Old in light of the New. To fail to do so is to practice a wooden literalism that fails to observe the Bible's deeper unity in the Spirit.—Christopher Hall, Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, 76–77