A Call To Rural Canada

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When I graduated from seminary and was receiving calls from various churches who wanted me to become their pastor, I had a number of calls from across the midsection of the United States. I was born and raised in Minnesota, so I knew this area quite well. I also had a phone call and then further connections with a congregation in southern Alberta, Canada. Now I didn't have any meaningful connections with Canada at that time, other than I knew it was a big land north of the United States. But I ended up going to that congregation, feeling the sense of God's call to be pastor in that congregation, a rural congregation in southern Alberta, Canada. And I was a single person. I had had several dating relationships, but I was not married and I was not currently engaged or even in a meaningfully deep relationship with any particular person. And so when I got to this congregation, there were many who asked me about that and tried to find perhaps relationships that might be of significance to me. I had a lot of help in that area. There was one pastor who was in a congregation, a very large congregation, about 30, 35 miles away. And when we first met together as a group of pastors, he said to me that, you know, that it's not good for a person to be alone in ministry. And he was certain that God had someone planned for me and that I would get married soon.

A Recipe Card Matchmaker

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And oh, by the way, and then he reached into his pocket and he pulled out a recipe card. We call them recipe cards. They're three inches by five inches, and people write recipes on them, but notes too. It could be a note card. And he had a note card in his pocket that he gave to me with the names of two females and descriptions about these females. And he said, both of these women would make good pastors wives. Now I've never met those uh women. I don't think so anyway. I certainly didn't have any meaningful interaction with them. But it was kind of interesting the kinds of things that he put behind the names. He described each of those women. He talked about their characters, he talked about their families, he talked about their demeanors, and he thought among all of the single women that he knew, and he had many in his congregation, he thought that these two women, each of them could make a meaningful pastor's wife for me, whatever that's supposed to be. And that we can have a long discussion about. The reason I bring that up is because here were two people I did not know, and I didn't know whether I wanted to know them, but I was being told by someone else, these are the kind of women I think would be very beneficial for you to get to know. And here are the kinds of things that I think are important about these women, and you should know them in this way too. And that's the way we find ourselves moving through life. We get introduced to people, and we don't necessarily know these people, and we can meet people online at a distance, and sometimes it's false and misleading, and sometimes uh we find soulmates online.

Why We Talk In Attributes

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But we always start with what are these people like? What qualities of character do they have? We call these things attributes. Attributes are the things that we say we attribute to someone else. I don't know this person, but what are the kinds of things that when I meet this person or this person comes into my range of condition that I begin to sense about this person? Well, that's the way in which we understand God too. None of us has directly met God. We have the stories in the Old Testament of people who say, well, if you meet God, you will die because no human can stand in the presence of God. We think of Moses going on Mount Sinai and having some awareness of the great power and presence of God and hearing the voice of God and all of that, and still not being able to face God directly. Even Moses coming down from the mountain, his face shines with the glory of God, and people are afraid of him because he's been in the presence of God. And we have that theme throughout the Bible. Isaiah has an encounter with God in the temple, Isaiah chapter 6. And he says out loud, he records this, woe is me, for my eyes have seen the glory of God. And he was well aware that he was in danger of losing his life because he, being so small and insignificant and imperfect, had been in the presence of the great omniscient and powerful and perfect God. So when we start talking with God, we have to be careful about the words that we use and the ways in which we think about God. And we really start out by hearing two things. We hear what others say about God, and we experience things that we believe are encounters with God, but they are beyond ordinary description. And so we talk about God in terms of attributes, ways in which we can take things we know and begin to apply them to our unlimited experiences of God in order to limit those conversations, not to limit God, but to limit those conversations in some way so that we can actually communicate them, so that we can actually talk about them. I can't, I know you, each of you, a little bit, some of you more than others. Daniel Mott and I go back a long way, and I think I know a lot about him, but he is still a mystery to me. There is so much that I do not know about Daniel Mott. I know my wife, I know my family members, but I cannot intimately know them fully. I can know them much and I can appreciate them much, but I can never be a completely understanding of every dimension of their existence. And so it is with God. We have this massive sense of God's being and character, but we can only begin to talk about little bits and pieces of that immensity by making analogies to things that we know and understand.

Exodus Reveals A Delivering God

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And that's the way that the Bible helps us think about God when we get into its pages. If, in fact, as I've suggested before, the Bible begins with the exodus of Israel out of Egypt, where the Israelites are held under the power of the Pharaoh. And Moses meets, encounters God through the burning bush, gains a sense of the dynamics of God, the name of God, Yahweh, and is told to go back to the Pharaoh and to say to him, Let my people go. We begin to get bits and pieces of our understanding of God. And the first thing that we begin to understand about God in those stories in the early chapters of Exodus is that God is superhuman. God is transcendent. The Pharaoh is considered to be a God or the manifestation of God by the Egyptians. And now here comes someone, at least of Pharaoh's caliber, who says, Let my people go. And the Pharaoh says, No, they belong to me. And Yahweh says, No, they belong to me. And there's the showdown. It's the showdown of the superpowers between the Pharaoh who owns the Israelites and Yahweh who says they are mine. So we first encounter God as a transcendent being, as someone who loves and appreciates people, who has the capacity to fight for these people, for their identity, for their destiny. And then when the Ismailites are released from Egypt, then this God comes and settles on top of Mount Sinai, not completely, but manifests God's own self there and begins a relationship of communication with the Israelites through Moses. And so we have the covenant. And the covenant spells out a variety of things. I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods beside me, or alongside of me, or instead of me. And then there are talks about the people's relationship with God. And then there are talks about the relationship of the people with one another. Do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal. And so the first thing that we know about God from the biblical record itself is that God is all-powerful, God is transcendent, God fights on behalf of God's own people, God wishes for us to have a good life and sets parameters that ensure that we will have safety and well-being. The focus of it all is intimacy and a relationship of caring. When Moses summarizes these things near the end of his life in the book of Deuteronomy, talks about is there any other nation on earth where God has come so close, where God has said, I love you and I care about you. Is there any other nation that has had this experience? Now, what we come to know is that this God is in fact the God of all peoples everywhere, but that God has chosen to come to be with this particular people in an intimate way, to love them and care about them and set guidance for their lives in such a way that their lives gain richness, gain significance, gain safety and expressions and extending horizons that show them that they matter, that they are something of significance in this world of many individual human beings.

Genesis And God Beyond Time

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We continue to marvel at the way in which we begin to catch glimpses and bits of God along the way. The story then goes all the way back to the beginning. Well, why is this necessary and what has happened? And where did God come from, and where did we come from? And so we go back to the book of Genesis, and then God reveals God's own self to be there before time began. So we start talking about God in terms of being eternal. We are time-bound, but God is not, for God has created time itself, being outside of time. We find that God is present everywhere, omnipresent, we call it. We find that God knows all things because God is the maker of all things. So we start talking about terms in the English language like omniscient, that is, God being more aware than any of our vast arrays of computers and AI technology could ever have, that God knows more and is more understanding of things than any of that. We have other ways in which we begin to encounter God. God delights in a beautiful and well-ordered creation. So there's a creative aspect to God's identity and character, and then the creation itself unfolds in a way where there are supportive systems and arenas for belonging. And then finally we encounter God as our parent. An amazing thing, really. At the beginning of time, God informs us that God says, I'm gonna make humans as my own children. Well, we know how the process of child making happens within the human context. And that thing we know about children coming into this world is now brought backwards by God Himself into the origin of the human race. That we are uniquely made by God to reflect a number of the things that are essential to God's own character. That doesn't mean we are gods, it doesn't mean we're divine. But just like children carry with them the significance and characteristics and traits and sometimes even appearance of their parents, there is something about the relationship between God and us that allows us to understand God and certainly know that God understands us because we are made in God's image. And

God As Parent Who Grieves

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that leads to another thing that we begin to know about God, and that's that God is grieved. God is sorrowful, God hurts. Because we, as the children of God, early on in the history of the human race, chose paths and ways of living that were different from what God had hoped would be the case. God gave us a sense of ownership of our own existence so that we could make choices. And isn't that true in relationships? When our babies are small, we control everything about their existence. We control where they can be, how they're clothed, when they're fed, how they're cleaned. We control all of those things. But if we really love our children, then along the way, we grant them willingly, lovingly, the self-independence to make choices that are different from what we might make about them. Choices that may be harmful, choices that may even deny their sense of the love we have for them. There are all sorts of things that are involved in an honest and deep and true relationship that mean that those who truly love those that even they bring into this world will not ultimately control them, that these individuals gain a sense of their own identity, even if that identity is harmful. Well, that's the story in the Bible, too. And so we begin to see God not only as one that we have similarities to in some measure, not only as someone who is transcendent and all-powerful, not only as someone who cares and who loves, but also someone who gives us the freedom to make choices, even when those choices are detrimental to ourselves, but continues to be in those relationships, involved and invested in us in such a way that the heart of God is pained and tortured by the way in which we sometimes reject the relationship or even consider ourselves not to be the children of God. And that becomes the story of the Old Testament. And we see God next as a friend, as someone who has been in many ways slighted and ignored, but chooses not to be aloof and distance and comes and speaks to Abram and says, Hey friend, how are you doing? And we see an intimacy in the relationship between Abram and God that leads to a profound relationship of friendship. Abram becomes the friend of God. And God chooses to have a unique, invested relationship with Abraham and his family, changes his name, makes certain through miraculous circumstances that his family comes along, even when Abraham and his wife are too old to have children, yet miraculously they have baby Isaac, protects the lives of Isaac and Jacob and his sons, so that a large nation is created, maintains closeness with that nation even when they don't know it or understand it, protects them through times of famine and challenge and difficulty and even persecution, brings them out with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, teaches them who they are and who God is and what is the best way to live in this world, and gives them a place of safety in a land of promise. So all of those things become part of our understanding of God, God's nearness, God's continual faithfulness. And even there, the pains continue, and we see the people of Israel responding well at the start, and then less so, and then challenging the relationship, and then turning away from the relationship. And we have the prophets coming along, and even a prophet like Hosea, who himself is in a bad marriage relationship with his wife Gomer, she's not faithful to Hosea. He's not certain that their children are biologically his because she goes out and spends time with other men. Yet he remains faithful to Gomer. And he sits down with Yahweh and they have kind of a pity party or a commiseration. And Hosea says, Boy, do I have a bad marriage? And Yahweh says, Man, do I know what you're talking about? And they compare the notes on their marriage relationship and how they wish this wasn't the way it was. And so we have this sense of being at a loss in some way, but knowing that it's got to be better than this and that it was intended to be better than this. And that's where we begin to see something brand new taking place. And that's where the prophets talk about a day when Yahweh will have to break again into human history in a powerful way, like Yahweh did with the Israelites, taking them out of slavery, out of Egypt, and making them a free people, uniquely bound to Yahweh in loving commitments of the covenant. Yahweh will have to do that again. The day of Yahweh is coming, the day of the Lord, the day of the Lord. And invariably the prophets talk about three things. They talk about it being a day of judgment and all that is restrictive and evil and not in tune with the creator's intents, that this will be judged

Prophets And The Coming Day

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and destroyed. Secondly, that there will be a spared remnant, that God will always have a people for God's own self. And there will be a group of people that come through the fires of judgment to the other side. And thirdly, that this will begin the eternal messianic kingdom where things will be the way they were intended to be, and the life that the Creator had intended for us at the beginning of time will be restored and renewed. And the prophets keep talking about this happening. And the last of those prophets is John the Baptist. And John says, I tell you, the time is coming very quickly. The time is right here. Even now, the axe is laid at the root of the tree, and the fire is coming and all of that. John said, You better repent while you still got time because suddenly it's all going to break loose and that we're going to move it to the next phase, and some of you probably aren't going to come along with the rest of us. And so there is a big repentance in among the Jewish people, the Jewish remnant of Israel. And then here comes Jesus. And John knows that Jesus is the one who's bringing the day of the Lord. In fact, John baptizes Jesus, even though he says, I'm not worthy to do this, but this is the way it's gotta be, says Jesus. And when Jesus is baptized, a voice of authority speaks from heaven, the voice of God. This is my beloved son, listen to him. And there's a visible representation of God's power and authority, like a dove emerging out of the skies and settling on Jesus. That's a specific manifestation of the Spirit of God, giving him uh power and authority and commissioning to his past. And there's Jesus himself. And so we have this sense that.

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In one scene, we're seeing something broader and newer. And here's where Jesus becomes really problematic.

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Because Jesus is a monotheist. There's only one God, says Jesus. Because all of his disciples are monotheists. There's only one God, Yahweh, the God of Israel, the God of creation. Because all of the Jews are monotheists. Unlike the Romans, who have their pantheon of the gods, the Jews have but one God. And they don't even recognize that God as being able to be depicted in images or pictures or statues. And this becomes the great anathema that some have tried to do, set up images in the temple. But when

Jesus Complicates Monotheism

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Alexander the Great came in of the Greeks, he was amazed there was no image of God in the Jewish temple. So there's this sense of transcendence and power. And all these people are monotheists, and Jesus is a monotheist. And then things begin to happen. Jesus is able to do things that maybe the great leaders of the past have done, maybe Elijah and Samuel, some of these miraculous changes and healings. But it seems to be more than that. And Jesus speaks with authority. What's a rabbi? My teacher, someone who understands the scriptures and can be can explain them to me in these times and circumstances. But Jesus goes beyond. You have heard that it was said, but I say to you, and suddenly we have Jesus speaking with the authority of Scripture and with the authority of God. Is he a prophet? But then he goes beyond prophecy and he identifies with the Father, with the representation or knowledge of God as these monotheists have. Before Abraham was, I am. Well, that's the name of God. And so we have all of these things coming together. And what happens is that Jesus becomes a source of challenge for these monotheists. They understand God. They may not live always in harmony with God, but they understand God, transcendent and omniscient and omnipresent and all-powerful and creator and lover of his people and all of those kinds of things. But now this guy claims to be divine. What do you mean by that? And slowly on, the disciples begin to understand the uniqueness of Jesus, at least most of them do. Peter, James, and John are Jesus' closest buddies, and Jesus takes them onto the mountain. And there on the mountain, Jesus begins to glow with his divine identity. They have known him as a human, but now he glows with a divine identity. Once again, the voice comes out of the heavens. This is my son. I'm pleased with him. Listen to him. And Moses and Elijah show up, who are the great forerunners of the law and the prophets. So all of the scriptures dynamically speak of him. This is the person that they were all talking about. But Jesus is a problem. And this continues to be the problem for Christianity. We like to say, yeah, Jesus is the answer, but Jesus is also the problem because Jesus begins to confuse our way of thinking about God. It's easier to talk about a transcendent, impersonal, distant power than it is to talk about a person like us who also has those powers and characteristics, but is also limited to human form. And we have a hard time getting our mind around that. We'll talk more about that in the next session. But it does confuse and cloud our relationship and our thinking about God. And then the problem only deepens. Jesus does amazing things. He dies a horrible death. But then he comes back to life again. And then he teaches his disciples for a while. And when they want to restore the kingdom of Israel under him, he says, No, you've got it wrong. You don't stay here, but you'll be spread out after you get the empowering of the Holy Spirit. And then he says, Goodbye. And he leaves them. And 10 days later, wait a minute the Holy Spirit comes. And suddenly the whole thing gets messier. It was so easy in the Old Testament. All these nations have their little gods, but we have Yahweh. And Yahweh is God over gods. God is King of kings and Lord of Lords and all of that. Now suddenly we're confronted with still believing there's one God, but Jesus is God, but Jesus is not the Father. And we have the Holy Spirit coming. Jesus said, I will send the paraclete, my assistant or my lawyer or my teacher, and he will teach you all things. But the Holy Spirit is not the same as the Father, and certainly not the same as Jesus, and yet does not contradict them. And suddenly we have this weird and wild situation coming on where these monotheists now look at three different persons, entities, and begin to talk about each of those as God. Once again, we're in a situation where our words are inadequate to describe what exactly is taking place. But this is right at the core, at the center of Christian identity. So much so that when we talk about Christianity around the world, even today, it comes down to giving affirmation to things that are said in three short, we call them creeds, because that's the word in the Greek language for I believe, Prato, I believe. And these three creeds are the apostles' creed. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, his only begotten Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day he rose again from the dead, he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. From there he will come to judge

Creeds And The Trinity Named

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the living and the dead. And I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. And the creed, the apostles' creed, says, I believe in God, and I believe that Father, Son, and Spirit are all God. And I believe that each of these has a unique role to play in the whole of it. The Father in creating and sustaining all things, the Son in providing salvation and direct contact with the human race and the Holy Spirit in terms of empowering the people of God and creating the church and its expressions in the society, leading us toward an end in which everything will be resolved. The second of those creeds is the Nicene Creed, and it takes all of the stuff of the Apostles' Creed, but then elaborates more fully on the divinity of Jesus, because the Apostles' Creed really focused on the humanity of Jesus. And now, in some issues, some controversies, some discussions, some communications that were taking place, the divinity of Jesus seemed to be challenged. And we'll look more at that next session. And so there was an emphasis in the Nicene Creed with talk about Jesus' divinity. So the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed basically both say the same thing. There is one God, but that God exists as Father, Son, and Spirit. And here are those areas of their primary activity and concern. And then comes later on the Athanasian Creed, which is from about the same time and probably wasn't written by Athanasius, but it does reflect the way that Athanasius talked about these things in some of the church councils. And here there's a clear indication of the uniqueness of the Trinity. There's a sense of the three persons and how they're related to one another and the full divinity of each of these, but the unique roles they play, but they're undivided from one another. And so we have an articulation even more significant in sort of a philosophical way of what the Trinity is about. The Trinity is a word that's not found in the Bible, Old Testament or New Testament. But how are we now supposed to take these things? And in our understanding of God, that deepens and grows along the way in understanding the attributes of God, in trying to be introduced to God and introduce others to God. How do we talk about God? And this has been sort of the ongoing problem of the Christian church. The Jewish non-Christian answer is that poof. There was only one God. That's what the scriptures say. God is transcendent, God is creator, God is ultimate, God is wise and just and loving, but God is also powerful and God punishes sin. And so there's this ongoing carrying forward of the key elements of our understanding of the attributes of God in the Old Testament. And where that affects and shapes the life of Jewish believers who are sisters and brothers to Christians in so many ways, it leads

Judaism And Islam Challenge Christianity

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to a kind of theological doubt. Not necessarily deep, but sometimes deep, but this sense of almost a form of deism where there is a God who is powerful and who has made all things, but that God lives at a distance from this world, and God has engaged our particular people, and we are responsive to God. Our history is that of always being responsive to God. And now the best we can do is try to bring healing into our world in part until God finally breaks in and shows up and transforms everything at the end of time. And so our task is to do commandments, to do mikvots, to do little things that bring healing and light into this darkened world. We are not necessarily to evangelize, we are not necessarily to seek the transformation of society. We know we're living in a compromised and broken world. We do believe there is a God above and outside this world, but we live in this world simply to try to obey God as best we can and bring evidence of God through the good deeds that we do. That's the primary way in which I've received the understanding of God through my Jewish friends. On the other hand, there is another group in this world, the other great monotheistic religion, and that's Islam. And Muhammad was born in the 600s, and Islam became a powerful religion and a spreading religion in the 700s and beyond. And the religion of Islam, the word Islam means submission, is also akin to that of Judaism and Christianity, but especially Judaism, a transcendent creator God. The difference primarily between Judaism in its conceptions about God and Islam in its conceptions about God is that Judaism tends to be a little bit, sense God, a little bit more aloof, and we have our responsibilities here, whereas Islam understands God to be much more active and perhaps militant and directly calling on us to be more directly obedient to God in hierarchies of power, both transcendent and in human society. Both of these ways of thinking about God reflect the Old Testament revelations we have about God. One is more passive, one is more active, but they both understand God to be this transcendent entity that affects life on planet Earth in one way or another. And both of them point fingers toward Christianity as saying, you have messed things up, you have confused this thing, you don't really own monotheism anymore. You don't talk about one God, you talk about three gods. You've got the God of the Old Testament. Is that God the same as Allah of Islam? There's debates about that. But you, the Muslims, say you see Jesus far too significant. He is great to be sure, but he is one of the greatest of the prophets of God. He is not God himself. And the Jews would say, you think rightly that Jesus was a powerful rabbi and a very important rabbi at the turn of the common era, at the time of the Roman Empire and all of that. And Jesus was a very good Jewish rabbi, but he was not God. He was a teacher of the things of God. And then everybody's a little bit confused about how the Holy Spirit comes in. What do we do with the Holy Spirit? Where does that come from? And how are we supposed to see this? And Judaism will say, well, God is pervasive in this world through our conversations and our lives and the influence that we give to this world. And that's the spirit of God that lives here. And the Muslims will say, well, it's that energizing that we feel when we are battling for the things that are right. And it leads us to holy warfare sometimes within ourselves or in our cultures or in our societies. And so that becomes the energizing spirit. And that's not quite where Christians are at. And so the big thing that Christianity has had to wrestle with is how do we talk about God? Remember, I talked about a pastor friend at the start of this session, and he handed me a little card that had two names on it and descriptions of those particular individuals. How do we now take the name of God and begin to communicate it to others in our societies? And that's a very real problem and concern because we are trying to take the transcendent and make it imminent in a meaningful way. And we are trying to take something that is truly complex and simplify it in a way that others say, oh, yeah, I get it. Not easy. Now, are we going to pit the New Testament over against the Old Testament? And sometimes this is what we do as Christians. We begin to say, well, the God of the Old Testament, they didn't really understand him, and now we more fully understand him. But if we're really true to the scriptures, we understand that God spoke in times in the Old Testament that reflected the character of God that we've come to know more fully in the New Testament. There's a sense of personalization, there's a sense of imminence, there's a sense of spiritual wafting and power in various places in the Old Testament. We can talk about these as foreshadowings of the Trinity, but there's not enough there to make a great case for it. But it's not unreal. I remember when Calvin Miller was talking one time, great uh Christian writer of a previous generation. He was saying that when he was six years old and he went to country school, that the teacher had to get information from each of the students. There weren't that many in the one-room country school. And so she took, while she gave assignments, she took each of the students one at a time to the front, set the young child on her desk and would fill out a form. No computers, no modern technology. You fill out forms, and the forms they get passed along, and all of that information gets codified somewhere. And so he sent Calvin, she said, Calvin will come here. And he came to the front, he sent, she set him on his deck on her desk, and

Learning Trinity Through Everyday Analogies

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then she said to him, Calvin, what is your dad's name?

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Well, Daddy. No, I I mean, what name does your dad have when other people talk to him?

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Well, he's daddy. Who do you think he is? And she tried the same with his mom.

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Calvin, what's your mom's name? Mommy?

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No, I mean, what name does she go by when she's with other people? Why do you say my mommy has another name? My mommy doesn't have another name. And there was this argument between Calvin and his teacher. And at the end of school, he ran home and he blew into the house, and his mom was there, and he said, Mommy, mommy, the teacher, she did a bad thing today. She said, You have another name. I know that's not the case. And Calvin says his mom did something that he never expected. She said, Come and sit on the chair. They sat at the kitchen table, and she said, Now I know you've always known me as mommy, but my real name is Ethel. And he said it sounded obscene, like one of the variations on gas.

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You can have regular, or you can have unlettered, or you can have Ethel.

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But that was the first that he realized that his mom's personality and her engagement with the world was larger than had been registered in his small mind. It didn't stop her from being the person he had always known. But he began to understand who she was in a much bigger way. And that's kind of what happens to us when we move into the New Testament. God has always been God, God has always been a Trinitarian God. The Father, the Son, and the Spirit have always existed. But only recently have we come to know what God is like within God's own purview of things, not just in my limited understanding of God. And then we have to begin to think about now how do we describe that to others? And there have been two major ways in which we have come to try to express the things. Remember again, God exists beyond our ability to put him in a box to limit God in some way. But we do use attributes to try to explain more fully the transcendent in terms we have come to recognize in our own existence. And there have been two major ways in which this has been taking place within the Christian tradition. One of those is the way in which Augustine, sometimes we call him Saint Augustine, great teacher, pastor, theologian from North Africa. From where there used to be the rivalry between Rome and its northern African challengers, you know, all of those kinds of things from history. But that's where Augustine lived for most of his life. And he became a great teacher and a great instructor in the faith, and he wrote many things. And when he was trying to explain God to those who are coming to know Christian faith, he talked about God in what we have come to call the psychological analogy. Analogies are ways in which we take stuff that is not generally known and put it in terms that people have concepts that can sort of get grasp this and understand this. When the psychological analogy is basically this. Well, you see before you one person. I tend to be one person. Here I am. I'm limited by this body and this personality and all of these kinds of things. Now you know me in one way. My wife knows me in another way. In my relationship with my wife, I am always her husband. I can never not be her husband. It is the way in which our relationship is always shaped and known. And with our daughters, I am always known as their father. They cannot be with me in the same kind of relationship, essentially, that my wife is, or that you are with me. And when I teach in my classes at home college and other places, I am known sometimes as professor or doctor or my teacher. And I'm known fully in each of those ways, and yet each of those is a distinct entity. I can never be father to my students, and I never can never be husband to my children, and I can never be professor to my girls. They know me as who I am. And so there are, says Augustine, within our understanding of God, limited as it is, there is only one God, just as you know me as one person, but that God lives in and fully these three identities. And these three identities are not confused, just like I can never be child to my wife. So I that relationship is unconfused, but I am fully husband to my wife, and I'm always fully parent to my children. Each of those understandings of who I am is unique and independent from the others. Yet they are all consumed and subsumed in this one person that I am. So it is with God, one God, but Father and Son and Holy Spirit and these entities or these ways in which we come to know God are distinct from one another. This is a great way of thinking about God, and it comes to expression in other ways that we sometimes try to build our insights about God. For instance, we talk sometimes about an A having a shell and a white and a yoke, but it's one A. Or we talk about H2O being a vapor or a liquid water or being ice, a solid. And it's still H2O, but it exists or we experience it in different ways. The downside to this understanding of the Trinity, this psychological analogy, is that it also tends toward what has come to be known as modalism, where we sort of see the one God kind of popping up in different roles at different times, and there is no deepening sense of the uniqueness of each of the persons. They are sort of masks that God wears in very various places at various times. So that's the psychological analogy. The great Cappadocians, about the same time, this is Gregory and Gregory and I forget the other one right now. The three Great Cappadocians, who were brothers, and then their friend along with them, Basel is the third one. They lived in what we would call Central Eastern Turkey today, Old Asia Minor. And around the same time as Augustine, they were beginning to reflect on how we can explain God in what came to be known as a different sort of way. And this way is generally understood to be called the sociological analogy. And here we begin to talk about God in a somewhat different way. Let's start with this. Those of us who are viewing these things right now, we are in different places, but each of us is fully human, at least I assume that each of you are fully human. And how many humanities are we sharing here today? Well, we could start talking about the others who are in this group. We could start talking about others who sit next to us or others in our societies. Are they fully human or are they not fully human? But no, generally we acknowledge there's just one humanity, and that each of us is fully human, yet in our unique way. Everything that humanity is about, I am about. I am fully human. And humanity lives and gives expression to everything that is me. Yet I am fully human in a very different way than you might be, than someone else might be. We look different, we sound different, even the way we use language or we engage in relationships with one another is different from one another. And yet that person, that person, that person, each person is fully human, but expresses the fullness of that humanity in a different way from the others. And so what we begin to talk about is something along the lines of genus and species. That there's only one humanity on planet Earth, but that there are many different persons who each are fully human in a unique way. And so there is but one divinity, but there are only three. There cannot be more, there cannot be less, but there are three who are uniquely divine, and each of them is fully divine, but fully divine in a unique manner. And we see something of this in reflecting, in reflection, sort of a reverse reflection in the Bible itself. We know that when Jesus leaves, he says to his disciples, go into all the world, teach them to observe all that I've commanded you, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So we have that. We have Paul at the end of 2 Corinthians giving the Trinitarian blessing, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God the Father, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit with you all. But there's one even more powerful expression of that in the New Testament, and that's in the book of Revelation, where as we see the unfolding movement toward the end of time and the coming, looming judgment of God, in one small section, particularly Revelation 12, 13, and 14, we see

Revelation And The Unholy Trinity

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these images that John is looking at. And he sees the dragon who has power over creation, sweeping stars out of the heavens and spewing waters out of its mouth, fighting this pregnant woman who gives birth to the Messiah, and she's spared and she's given safety by God. And then continuing that fight on planet Earth and calling out the beast from the sea that has seven heads and ten horns, and it screams as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, but then it has a fatal wound and it comes back to life again. Then the dragon also calls out the beast from the earth, chapter 13 as well. And the beast comes, and when the beast appears, signs and wonders happen, and fire falls out of heaven. And in very quick order, we see these three, and they're all evil, and they're all attacking God through attempting to attack the people of God. And what's striking about these three is that the dragon has power over creation, not creative power, just destructive power. And we see the beast from the sea exploring the powers of society, king of kings, lord of lords, and frankly, showing power over death itself, having a fatal wound, which is healed. And then we see the beast from the earth, and when that beast appears, fire falls from heaven and signs and wonders take place. And the task of the beast is to cause all people to worship the first beast, the one who had the fatal wound that's healed. And we begin to see: whoa, John is seeing mirror images of the Holy Trinity, the Father with power over creation, the Son who is King of kings and Lord of Lords, who went through death and came back alive, and the Holy Spirit who comes with fire from heaven and with signs and wonders, and then attempts to urge all people to worship the first beast, the one who had the fatal moon. I mean, this is straight out a reciprocal doppelganger kind of thing, where the Holy Trinity is mirrored by the unholy trinity. And so there's this sense, even in the pages of the Bible, that the idea of the Trinity is deeply at the center of Christianity, so much so that when people try to fight against the God of Christianity, they fight it in Trinitarian ways, false Trinitarian ways, unholy worship of deities or false messiahs or lying spirits that are present in our world. And then what's really interesting is that at the end of this, all of the people of earth in Revelation chapter 13, the mark of the beast is put upon them. What's the mark of the beast? This calls for special understanding, says John, and the one who's revealing these things to John. The mark of the beast is the mark of a man. It is 666. Now, some have interpreted that in a variety of ways, Emperor Nero and others throughout history. But when it comes down to it, if you think of the book of Revelation, every time God does something special, what happens? It's a perfect seven. And in chapter 14 of the book of Revelation, as it gets started, we're told that the only people who have managed to avoid being marked with the mark of the beast are those who carry the mark and name of God. Well, what can be being said here is that the mark and name of God is being baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, so that the mark of the beast, which is limited, it promises a lot. Six, but seven is what's needed. We have the seven, seven, seven of baptism that marks us as the children of God, as the daughters and sons of God who live under the care and protection of the Trinitarian God, Father, Son, and Spirit. And that's a powerful thing. Now, what the great Cappadocians said is we have to try to think about God in terms of that, not trying to start with the one and figure out how we can some, in some maybe diabolical way, start talking about three. But let's talk instead about the three. This is the sociological analogy, and show how they are uniquely one, just as there are many human beings, but one humanity. So there are three who are God, but there is only one God. And this has had a profound effect on my life in a unique sort of way, because I have Jewish friends and I have Muslim friends, and my Jewish friends they say, When are you going to stop talking about Jesus? And my Muslim friends say, When are you going to get it together and stop having three gods? There's just one God. What comes to my mind is this within Judaism, there's a sense of fatalism. That, yeah, God did this thing and God made everything, and God matters, but God is kind of distant and remote, and the best we can do is try to keep doing the right things until God makes everything right again. We don't know if it's going to happen. We don't know when it's

A Relational God At The Center

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time to happen. Boy vey, let's just try to be good people. On the other hand, we have Muslims, my Muslim friends, who say, Well, it's all about the one God, and the one God is powerful. And God says, You are my people, and you have to keep in line. And so God speaks, and how do we hear God? Well, only some of us are prophets, and the prophets speak the very word to us, that is, even especially the greatest of those prophets, Muhammad. And so we have the Quran, which is the very speech of God, and we must obey the speech of God, and the men must listen to the speech of God, and they must govern their wives and women faithfully, and then produce children. And so you see this hierarchy of power structures. And I think to myself, that's all possible and that's good. But could it be that rather than a distant God who doesn't seem to involve God's own self with things here too much, or a power at the center of the universe that demands obedience and submission, Islam? Could it be that instead, at the center of all things, at the heart of creation, at the core of existence itself, is a relational community of three who love each other perfectly and fully so that they are in fact one, and that the greatest value that nurtures human identity being made in the image of God is relational one, where we don't fully know ourselves till we know ourselves in community with God who loves us, but also with one another. It changes the character of my understanding about myself, but also my religion and my sense of place in this world. And that I think is a pretty big thing.