THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

Grace
The importance of grace in the New Testament.

Part 2
Related Issue

The cross and the Trinity

In my booklet Understanding the Trinity, I give the reasons Christians believe God is a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. I also give reasons why this makes sense. The Biblical reasons have to do with such things as the number of times they are all mentioned together in the New Testament; the way in which they are given different functions, though all working together; the relationships that are said to exist between them; the claims that Jesus made such as only God could make, though he constantly spoke of his Father as someone separate from himself; and the obvious personal characteristics that are assigned to each of them.

As we have seen from the book of Acts, the first Christians used terms for Jesus that could only rightly be applied to God. Not only was he the promised Messiah, he was the Lord and the one appointed to judge the living and the dead. Whatever doubts they may have had about who he really was, the resurrection had convinced them he was no mere human being. However, though they did not hesitate to proclaim him as Lord and the only Saviour of men and women, and though Jesus must have taught them a great deal during the forty days he spent with them after his resurrection (see Acts 1:3), there were still many issues to work through. In fact Jesus had indicated during his last meal with them before his crucifixion that it would take time to work it all out, but that the Spirit would guide them into all truth (John 16:12, 13).

Over the first three centuries of the Christian Church some issues were hotly debated, usually in response to heresies and false views that sprang up from time to time. Most of these centred round the person of Jesus, his divine and human nature and his relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit. After many disputes, upheavals and changes of fortune between the Councils of Nicea in A.D. 325 and Constantinople in 381 the church finally turned its face unambiguously against Arianism, the belief that Jesus, though superior to humans, had originally been created by the Father and was thus an inferior being, a view still held by Jehovah’s Witnesses today. The Council of Chalcedon (451) rejected the view that Jesus’ human nature was separate from his divine person, stating that he was “one person in two natures” which are united “unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably”! Debate also centred around the person and ministry of the Spirit, who, as Nicea affirmed, “with the Father and the Son is to be worshipped and glorified.”

It is not my purpose to go over these debates, even if I could understand them all. I don’t claim to be a theologian. However, there are some issues here that are important for a true appreciation of Christianity and the Trinitarian nature of God. Over the last century the cross and grave have become determinative in theological circles for our understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity. Karl Barth was one who gave a lead to this. In volume IV of Church Dogmatics he insisted that we look directly upon Christ’s cross and grave in order to discern the truth of God’s nature. This truth was explored further by the two prominent theologians of the Trinity, Eberhard Jungel and Jurgen Moltmann, and has been looked at by others since. What follows is my own attempt to deal with these from my own simplified understanding, particularly as they relate to the significance of what actually happened on the cross. The source of my deductions is always what I believe to be the teaching of the New Testament. I will touch on some of the early church debates again in the chapters "The Cross and the Problem of Suffering" and "Why Easter Saturday?"

I would select as the three most important issues that relate both to the nature of the Trinity and our understanding of what happened on the cross: first, the full divinity of Jesus; second, the full humanity of Jesus; and third, the relationship that existed between the Father and the Son as Jesus bore our sins.

1) George Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, sums up the basic reason the full divinity of Jesus is so important in Christian thinking in his book on the cross, The Gate of Glory (Hodder and Stoughton,1986,©):

“To claim that Jesus Christ is not God himself become man for us and our salvation” writes Professor Tom Torrance, “is equivalent to saying that God does not love us to the uttermost.” Indeed, if God’s love stops short of Calvary we may have a God who loves—but not one whose love is complete …

We can now begin to see why the early Christians fought so tenaciously for the doctrine that Jesus was truly God, because any other option spells the death of the atonement. Jesus does not need to be God to set a moral example; he does not need to be God to be a brilliant and inspiring teacher. But he does need to share the nature of God if he is the Saviour in the sense of reconciling man to God and restoring man to his former dignity. At this point we can, perhaps, begin to answer Bultmann’s famous question: “Does Jesus help me because he is the Son of God or is he the Son of God because he helps me?”

The late Methodist leader Dr Donald English once observed, “The wonder of the cross is not the blood, but whose blood it was and to what purpose it was shed.” If we try to explain away all the emphasis in the New Testament that Jesus is a fully divine being,[41] and to be worshipped as such, then we devalue the constantly affirmed statement that what happened on the cross was due to the love of God. God did not send a subordinate to do his work for him, he came himself in the person of Jesus. Peter can declare to the crowds in the temple, “You killed the author of life” (Acts 3:15). Paul states that “the rulers of this age” had “crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). To put it bluntly, they put God to death. Again, Paul explains, “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:19). It is the fact that the one hanging on the cross was truly God which safeguards the truth that “God is love” (1 John 4:8).

[41] I deal with this more fully in the booklet Is Jesus Really God

2) It is our understanding of the cross which also safeguards for us the true humanity of Jesus. Unless he had been truly human, then he could not have borne our sins as our
representative in our place. Paul underlines this when he declares that Jesus was “born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship” (Galatians 4:4, 5). It was only as one who was fully under the demands of his Father’s moral requirements, as we ourselves are, that he could redeem us sinners who had failed to live up to those demands.

However, it is the writer of Hebrews who develops this theme most fully. In chapter 2 he explains how it was necessary for Jesus to be made “lower than the angels for a little while” (v. 9). In order to bring “many sons and daughters to glory”, it was necessary that he should suffer and become “of the same family” as us (vv. 10, 11). He is therefore “not ashamed to call [us] brothers and sisters” (v. 11). And it is particularly in relation to the cross that it was necessary for him to become part of his own creation in becoming fully flesh and blood. “Since the children have flesh and blood, he too shared in their humanity so that by his death he might break the power of him who holds the power of death—that is the devil—and free those who all their lives were held in slavery by their fear of death. … For this reason he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people” (vv. 14-17). Later he adds that, being fully human, Jesus was “tempted in every way, just as we are—yet he did not sin” (4:15).

This means, of course, that God in the person of Jesus was willing in his becoming human, and particularly by his crucifixion, to identify with and be united to what is essentially alien and different to his own nature, that is our mortality and fallenness, even to the point of death. This is a point that is emphasised by theologian Eberhard Jungel.

So if Jesus is both fully God and fully human, how do these two natures relate within his person? This was much debated in early centuries, but putting the matter as simply as I believe it can be put, I think the following points are clear enough in the New Testament. First, in becoming fully human in the womb of Mary, Jesus did not cease to be God. After all, God cannot stop being God! Second, during his time on earth he was indeed “lower than the angels” and “like his brothers and sisters in every way” (Hebrews 2:9, 17). In other words, it was his choice to submit to his Father in heaven and rely only on those resources that are available also to us. The unusual things he did, such as calming the storm and healing the sick, were not from his own resources, but were the work of his Father through the Spirit within him. This is a constant theme of John’s Gospel (e.g. 5:19; 14:10). Though Jesus was both fully God and fully human, he was obviously one person and not a split personality. At least on this point I believe the Council of Chalcedon, quoted above, got it right.

So it is in his role as being Son of God yet fully human that he is perfectly fitted to be the “one mediator between God and human beings” (1 Timothy 2:5).

3) Concerning what happened to the relationship between the Father and Jesus as he bore our sins on the cross, I believe it is necessary to accept that the cry of Jesus, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” represents a reality as to what had actually happened, rather than a mere feeling. His Father had indeed forsaken him at this time. In the light of all the emphasis we have in the New Testament letters that he “bore our sins”, was “made sin” and “became a curse” for us, I don’t see how it is possible to deny that there must have been a very real rending asunder of the divine family as the Father dealt with all the world’s evil once for all. Jurgen Moltmann, in Crucified God, speaks of the awful experience which “divides God from God to the utmost degree of enmity and distinction”. We have to recognise that both Father and Son suffer the cost of their surrender, though differently.

The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son. The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father.

How could this be? After all, the members of the divine Trinity enjoyed a relationship that was of such closeness and intimacy that they could be described together as being one God (Deuteronomy 6:4), though the Hebrew word used here, echad, can speak of a plurality within a singularity. Jesus described this relationship in these terms: “I am in the Father and the Father is in me” (John 14:10) and this kind of phrase occurs about 18 times in John’s Gospel. The early church used the word perichoresis to describe this unity or interpenetration that existed within the Godhead, without losing their relational distinctiveness. Roger Forster, in his excellent book Trinity,[42] says:

This is a transliterated Greek word, probably deriving from peri, meaning “around” and choreuo, meaning “to make room”, “go forward”, or “give way”—in other words, meaning ‘to dance’, or ‘dance around’. This word was used in pagan worship when dancing around a particular altar.

[42] Ichthus, 2004, ©.

I believe the answer to the above question must lie in the ministry of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is closely associated with the life and ministry of Jesus. It was through the activity of the Spirit that he was conceived in the womb of Mary (Luke 1:35). It was the Spirit who empowered his ministry (Matthew 3:16; Luke 4:18; Matthew 12:28). He was sustained by the Spirit (Luke 10:21). It was by means of the Spirit he was raised from the dead (Romans 1:4; 8:11; 1 Peter 3:18). The writer of Hebrews tells us that it was also “through the eternal Spirit” that he “offered himself unblemished to God” (9:14). It must have been the Spirit who not only gave Jesus the strength to go through hell for us, but also to maintain the link between Father and Son. Alan Lewis, in Between Cross and Resurrection, argues powerfully for this and makes the connection between Jesus’ separation from his Father and our own alienation from God:

For the Spirit is revealed between the cross and the grave to be the unifying go-between who holds the Father and the Son together when in self-abandonment to sonlessness the Father gives up the Beloved One to death and hell. And because the eternal Son, fatherless and liquidated, is flesh of our own flesh, God united to the utmost of our perishableness, the Spirit who unites the Father and the Son through their separation also holds together humanity and God, the Creator and the creatures. Thus does death within the living Trinity secure God’s even closer union with humanity in its mortality and guilt, on the very boundary of their deepest alienation and furthest separation.

Jungel, in Mystery, speaks of this relationship that existed between the Father and Son, even in Jesus’ godforsakenness and hellish isolation, from a slightly different perspective:

Pointedly, and yet expressing the heart of the matter, the Johannine Christ says, “For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it again” [John 10:1]. And thus he is the beloved Son who, in the midst of his separation from the Father, relates to him.

But, as Lewis adds, “It is the Spirit, proceeding from the Father and the Son, who both preserves their differentiation and prevents their disintegration.”

There are truths here that are far beyond human understanding, but one thing is clear; it is
the doctrine of the Trinity that makes some sense of the cross and provides some foundation for beginning to appreciate the amazing love of God, a subject to which we now turn.

Home

Copyright

About the Author

E-mail

Links

BUY RESOURCE MATERIAL

Site design by ttdesign.com