cherith-header

PAPER: With Unveiled Faces: Perceiving our Lives as a Reflection of the Triune God

The following is a long-form paper from a class with Dr. Cherith Fee-Nordling in which we explored the vast implications of a orthodox Trinitarian theology and embrace of the true humanity of Jesus. I’m really not sure if I was fully a Christian before working through this…perhaps I was saved by grace…but until now I haven’t really understood how magnificent a story we tell.


Is theology inherently absurd? Since time immemorial humanity has sought to know its creator, to construct a ladder from experienced reality to that which is beyond, and yet our best attempts at ladder-building in the modern age—aided by the tools of rational inquiry and superstructures of critical thought—appear scarcely more effective than those of primitive ages.

Such is the suspicion of this would-be New Testament scholar. Despite my best efforts I find I am no closer to mastering divinity than the children in my church, and perhaps less so. Feigned humility this is not, for as I consider the forms God takes in my imagination, I spy a God that appears only vaguely Christian. Try as I might to affirm the thought “God is love”, the God I pray to is always alone: ever-observing yet solitary, ever-watchful yet silent, until his creatures come calling. The God I ‘know’ is never joyfully reminiscing as one might around a table with loved ones. Never is he what we might call ‘Trinity.’

The Bible is filled with stories that could have corrected my understanding, but I have not believed them. God is a Father and a Son and a Spirit, they said, but I believed it not. “Every tongue [will] confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father,” they said, but I knew better. I am enlightened enough to know that God cannot be reduced to quaint, anthropomorphic simplicities; God cannot be a Father in the way I might imagine. The truth is more complicated than even the technical terminology of theologians: perichoresis, hypostasis, and homoousion are as close as we may get. Father and Son may suffice for the weak of mind, but surely it would not befit deity to be clothed and constrained by language any child can understand. Or would it?

The presumption that we can perceive God by abstract thought, that we can ‘mind the gap’ so to speak, is a Greek obsession. In Hebrew thought, God is not a Trinity at all, God is the One that delivered us out of Egypt, the Shepherd of Israel, the One who would be King, perhaps a Servant who would suffer. He is the God we have known in history. In Hebrew thought, God is not a Germanic gott at all. His proper name is in-utterable. He will not be known as he is but only as he does, declaring to Moses “I will be who I will be.” The unutterable name, YHWH, is less a name than an admission that we are wholly inadequate to behold that which we seek,[1] and yet the One who cannot be named did not see fit to leave us in darkness. Revelation came. And the revelation was not an -ology or an -ism but something even a child could comprehend, and perhaps children best of all, a story. But in the course of time, even a story would not do, and so the story became one of us.

My objection to theology is by no means a new one, and of course it is not an objection to all theology. It is the contention that prevailed at the ecumenical councils; it is the contention of Athanasius against his mentor, Arius, who began theology not with the story but with philosophical principle.[2] In the end, we are grateful for councils and creeds and theology because they plot a path from Judaism, through the wasteland of Platonism, toward an embodied story that lived and breathed and had a name.

The Image of the Invisible God

The story of the Jesus of history is a particular story of a flesh-and-bone Jewish man. For many that has proved a bridge too far, and yet this was not the case early on. The earliest church could not forget what many had seen with their own eyes: this same Jesus of Nazareth with whom they walked and talked had been resurrected and exalted as Christ. Indeed, this is the core conviction that unifies the diverse voices of the New Testament.[3] James Dunn reminded us, we may question the canon and yet we cannot ignore the impact of Jesus: that these stories survived at all is testimony to the life-altering difference he made in his followers.[4] Three centuries later, Athanasius can speak of the ongoing impact of a resurrected Christ:

Does a dead man prick the consciences of men, so that why throw all traditions of their fathers to the winds and bow down before the teaching of Christ?…He makes the living to cease from their activities, the adulterer from his adultery, the murderer from murdering, the unjust from avarice, while the profane and godless man becomes religious?[5]

By the time of this writing, the battles to formulate a Trinitarian Christology are in full swing, and yet already in the pages of the New Testament we see the church grappling with what they have seen and heard. One of the great curiosities of history is how a group of strict monotheist Jews came to regard Jesus as the Lord (2 Cor 13:14, Eph 5:20), “in very nature God” (Phil 2:6). That Paul, a zealous Jew, can say “in him the fullness of God wells ” (Col 1:19), by him all was created (Col 1:16), and at his feet the whole world shall worship (Phil 2:9) is a wonder. And yet in the early church we do not see abstract speculation, but doctrine emerging from “reflection upon what happened to Jesus.”[6] Incarnation was not an altogether foreign concept to Judaism, as YHWH had chosen to dwell in an earthly temple from the beginning and to create humanity in his image,[7] but as this man they had seen and known came to be worshipped as God, it created questions that would set off a battle for orthodoxy.[8]

The subject of the coming Christological battles would be the Jewish Messiah, but the battle lines were drawn not by Judaism but Hellenism. It was the cosmology of the Platonists that maintained a distinction between the unchanging world of ‘forms’ and the material world, and such a dualism featured prominently in the Gnostic thought that was developing concurrent to Christianity. As the two mingled, the critical questions of Christology would emerge. [9] Justin Martyr (d. ca 165) would push back against Marcion’s false polemic that pitted a cosmic Christ against Israel’s YHWH. Contra the modalist assertion that maintained the oneness of God’s monarchy by positing God in three manifestations, Tertullian (c. 160-220) was the first to use the language “Trinity” in insisting on ‘one substance in three persons.’ Irenaeus (c. 130-200) confronted the Gnostic pursuit of higher knowledge, insisting that there is none higher than God’s revelation. Though likening the Son and Spirit to the “two hands” of God at work in creation (contra the Platonic demi-urges), the Bishop insisted on the full humanity and divinity of Christ, eternal and not created, an affront to Gnostic dismissal of the created material world.

The battle had begun, and yet it would take the ecumenical councils of the following centuries to settle these beliefs as creed. The 4th century saw the rise of Arianism, following Arius’ argument for a demotion of the Son to a non-divine mediating creature. Against Arius, Athanasius (c. AD 296-373) would contend that only a fully human, fully divine incarnate Son could render an effective salvation. Despite Arius being excommunicated in AD 311, his influence drew enough following that a new emperor, Constantine, would insist on calling a council at Nicea by AD 325 to articulate a compromise position that would ostensibly unify the empire (and certainly consolidate power for the empire). The result was a Trinitarian statement of faith but a compromise of the Scriptural witness, stating the Son was “of like reality” (homoiousion) though not “of the same reality” (homoousion) as the Father. The influence of the Cappadocian Fathers and growing anti-Arian sentiment led to the Constantinopolitan council of AD 381, by which Christ was acknowledged as fully human and fully divine. Another 70 years would see the Chalcedonian reaffirmation and clarification that God was fully present in Christ such that he personally experienced a concrete historical life and death.

Despite the storied history, these creedal affirmations are commonly dismissed as irrelevant by many evangelicals today who insist (unthinkingly) on “no creed but Christ.”[10] Though the creeds surely bear the marks of their times, they affirm truths too significant to ignore. Consider, if Christ was not fully God and man in hypostatic union, the gospel falls apart. If Christ was not fully God, he has no power to forgive sins (as his interlocutors insisted).[11] If God was not fully present in Jesus, we could not say that God loves us unto death; in fact, he becomes unknowable, terrifying even.[12] If Jesus is not of “one substance” with the Father, but is instead a created mediator as the Arians suppose, he reveals nothing substantial of God. If he is not fully human, there is no hope that his resurrection means anything for humanity. His salvation can be no more than that provided by a doctor, moral teacher or social worker.[13] In the final examination, a church without a creed is in danger of losing the story and the Christ of whom it speaks.

For such folly, we need look no farther than the absence of the doctrine of the ascension in the modern Protestant church. For many today, the ascension is a “reversal or undoing of the incarnation,” as C.S. Lewis lamented, in which Jesus presumably leaves his body behind to return to deity. This incipient Gnosticism is in part responsible for the rise of non-biblical “rapture” eschatology, but this is just the tip of an iceberg. A gnostic Jesus has little bearing on our embodied existence and little concern for the created world. Such a view was employed in Athanasius’ day to justify a hierarchy of humanity akin to racism.[14] And yet the problem goes deeper: a disembodied Christ is not a reigning Christ. A spiritual Jesus that lives only “in my heart” cannot take the throne in this world, and hence poses no threat to the powers of this age (this, perhaps, is the attraction). As Gerrit Dawson observes, “A spiritualized Jesus allows the kings of the world to run free without restraint from the church, and allows the church to run after the things of the world without the downdraft pressure of the return of the embodied Christ.”[15] Is simple forgetfulness to blame? The history of modern critical scholarship suggests otherwise, as historical Jesus scholars have long sought to ‘free’ Jesus of his Jewishness, a task made harder if a Jewish man now actually sits at the right hand of the father.[16] If Jesus still has a body, as those who saw him ascend would attest (Acts 1:3-9), then gnosticism then and modern liberalism now should be rejected out of hand.

If he will return just as they saw him go (Acts 1:11), meaning ‘in the flesh’, it reorients our understanding of his ongoing work. A Jesus of flesh and bone means God has not abandoned the physical universe.[17] An ascended human means Christ’s humiliation really did lead to exaltation. A Jesus with actual hands to rule the world means that our ministry is to simply join him (never replace him!). A Christ in a new physical body means hope that he will “transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body” (Phil 3:21).[18] A returning embodied Savior means that “’A Hand like this hand shall throw open the gate of new Life to thee!’ We shall be greeted by a face—the face of Jesus—that has a form we recognize.”[19] If, as Wright says, “there is already a human being at the helm of the world…then the whole project of human self-aggrandizement represented by eighteenth-century European and American thought is rebuked and brought to heel…[we can] give up the struggle to be God.”[20] Admitting so will require that we acknowledge the particular Jesus of history, though this too is good news. For if “He bears upon His person the marks of Calvary, He bears also in His heart he  memories of Cana of Galilee, of Simon’s house, of the spot outside the little town of Bethany where Mary wept beside her brother’s grave and he wept with her.”[21]

The Ascending and Descending Mediator of Our Humanity

As centuries passed, these stories receded from view and Jesus the man again became a Christ of abstraction. This time the abstraction had become dogma. The changing tide of Enlightenment would bring much needed re-examination of theology,[22] and yet the new inquiry would proceed with the supreme confidence in the rational mind as the measure of all things. Augustine had warned that intellect would not be enough, revelation is a precondition of theology,[23] and yet the modern project would proceed with blind optimism. It would take the devastation of an atomic bomb and the Holocaust to reveal to the West the poverty of their pursuit of Eden. It would take a theologian, one Karl Barth, grappling with that war to remind the Church that one cannot pursue knowledge of God as one does an object in a laboratory.

As it happens, this two-fold problem—utter failure to realize human potential and utter failure to know God—was the age-old problem. Salvation would require far more than enlightened minds, it would require a mediator.[24] The world would need a salvation fit to the disease.[25] For if the human dilemma was knowledge, a teacher would suffice. If the predicament was moral debt, a lawyer might do. If sickness, a doctor. But if there exists a disintegration of all creation, a separation from its creator, the Creator himself may need to be called in. If there exists in humanity a fundamental distortion, humanity’s “glory of God forsaken for a lie,” then a new human might be needed. It could be no ordinary human, nor an unseen creator; to connect heaven and earth a mediator would be required.

This is all of course a very Jewish story, the mediator having come through the “womb of Israel” as Torrance would tell it.[26] The “logic of Christianity” is not an abstract spiritual reality, but is encoded in the very history of Israel. Theirs is a story of Creator and creation, slavery and exodus, idolatry and sacrifice, temple and priest.[27] As we have noted, the Creator cannot be known but by self-disclosure, and Israel understood God’s intent to dwell in his creation from creation onward, as other gods would a temple (Is 66:1). Just as other nations placed images of their gods in the temple, believing them filled by the spirit of the deity, YHWH had placed bearers of his image in his earthly temple (Gen 1:27), filling them with his breath, his very Spirit (Gen 2:7, cf. Jer 10:12-14; 51:15-19). Humanity was designed in God’s likeness, created to carry on His work, given the mandate to cultivate as co-regents such that the creation would give praise to its maker (Gen 2:15). In time, distrust of YHWH’s goodness and provision would tempt humanity to usurp YHWH’s throne, an abdication of their very nature as image-bearers of YHWH’s glory (Gen 3:6). The problem was not fruit ‘pleasing to the eye’, the primordial choice was a distortion of true humanity (Isa 6:9). It would result in the worship of a lie and an idolatry of a false self-image, expressed in the unholy use of created things (Rom 1:22f). They would be exiled from YHWH’s presence, bringing ruin on the temple and the entire created order (Gen 3:16-18). Hope remained only by YHWH’s mercy, still present through his clothing of their nakedness and restraint of mortality (Gen 3:20-24).

As exile from Eden was recapitulated in the flood, enslavement in Egypt, and exile in Babylon, so would YHWH’s deliverance return. Again and again, God would make a way: in the burning bush, confronting Pharaoh, in the giving of law and the tabernacle, and in the temple and the priesthood. Again and again, God would raise up a new Adam: a priest or prophet or king given to restore the presence of YHWH on earth. The very nation of Israel would be called forth as kingdom of priests (Ex 19), bearing witness to the world of YHWH’s presence and restoring humanity’s vocation (Ex 34, 40). Again and again, Israel would fail, their prophets declaring them “prostitutes”: cursed by idolatry to become like the “blind and deaf gods” they worship, staggering naked from God’s presence, and leaving the creation in utter darkness (Isa 6, Ezek 10).

As centuries passed, the prophets would also speak of restoration by a return of God’s Spirit (Isa 32:15; 35:1-7; 41:116-17; 43:19-20; 44:1-5). All things would be reversed with the coming of a new covenant, the restoration of humanity, and a restoration of creation (Isa 59:21, Ezek 36:26-7, Jer 31:33, Joel 2:28). There were hints that it would require a new son of Adam (Dan 7), a son given to reign on David’s throne (Isa 9). He would be filled by the Spirit of the Lord (Isa 61) and he just might be the Servant who would bear the sins of many as an offering (Isa 53).[28]

It should be clear by now that the gulf between Israel’s story and our own is one of great distance. But if this story is indeed the logic of salvation—this particular Jewish story—then we cannot replace story with Greek abstraction, even if they appear as orthodox as ‘personal Lord and Savior.’ It should also be clear that we cannot do away with theological discourse, for as Gerrit Dawson reminds us, “Our doctrines are not merely speculations imposed on Jesus, but rather arise from reflection upon what happened to Jesus as well as what he said and did.”[29] We turn now to an examination of his life.

From the start, the evangelists announce that this Jesus is mediating the news of salvation from the Lord (Lk 3:4-6, cf. Isa 40:3). He is the one filled by the Spirit (Lk 3:16, 22) to announce the restoration of all creation (4:18f; cf. Is 61) and to inaugurate it with signs and wonders. He is the one empowered by the Spirit to overcome temptation (Lk 4:1f). He is the long awaited one, and yet in him Israel’s wineskins are burst; he exceeds every expectation.[30]   When the Spirit comes at his baptism, it is revealed that he is the Son (Lk 3:22), and to say that He is the Son means there is a Father. In the Old Testament, God was only known in part, hidden by an in-utterable name, only seldom as a Father. Now, Jesus introduces him as “our Father”: no longer a metaphor, but the personal name of God, the name that is to be hallowed.[31] More significantly, he declares that He and the Father are one (Jn 10:30) and if you have seen Him you have seen the Father (Jn 14:9). In doing so, Jesus was claiming more than new revelation from God, he was claiming to be that revelation, mediating God the Creator to creation.[32] As the church of the Patristic era worked through the implications, they would conclude that the Father was fully revealed in the Son, the heart of the Nicene Creed and the centerpiece of Trinitarian theology.[33] If Father and Son are indeed one, the Father is personally present in the crucifixion.[34] To declare their being homoousion (one substance) means God really is the Suffering Servant and the Son truly is Immanuel, God with us.[35] The crucifixion becomes, as Moltmann said, an “inner-Trinitarian event.”[36] Likewise, the kenotic self-emptying of incarnation is not an emptying of divinity, but the very expression of the God that is love.[37] As Torrance insists, “Everything—and I mean EVERYTHING—hangs on ‘the unbroken relation in being and act between Jesus Christ and God’ as centralized by the Nicene Creed because without Christ as Mediator we could know NOTHING of God.”[38] To say Christ is mediator means he has not only brought revelation, but that he is the incarnation of God…and yet there is more.

If we maintain with the creeds that the Son is fully God and fully man, he is not only answering one side of our dilemma, the inability to know God, but also our inability to fulfill the human vocation. He becomes the true human Adam was created to be, the priest Israel had failed to be, and the only King that is worthy to reign. In other words—He is the conclusion of Israel’s story. If this conclusion should seem obvious to the hearer of their story, it is much less so to modern evangelicals. For many today, Christ is our sacrifice and little more. His sacrifice is good news to be sure, but without the story his sacrifice is easily misconstrued as an external judicial transaction by which the Son plays “let’s make a deal” with the Father, pleading for us in a distant, heavenly realm.[39] (Should it then surprise us if we doubt the stories Jesus told of the Father?) The writer of Hebrews knows there is much more to the story: “by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy” (Heb 10:14)

The creedal councils affirmed that it is by his fully human life, as much as his fully human death, that we are saved.[40] By his life, Jesus could recapitulate the human story, succeeding where Adam’s race had failed. By his fully human life, he joined the long line of sinners in Matthew’s genealogy, revealing God’s purpose not to destroy humanity, but to “sum up in himself our sinful stock, precisely in order to forgive, heal and sanctify it in himself.”[41] By his humanity, the very power of death would be broken (Heb 2:14-15).

By his ascension in the body, He is able to mediate our humanity, offering up our flesh as priest before the throne of God (Heb 7:23-27). But only if he is fully human (Heb 2:17). A Docetic Jesus could not bring the worst of humanity before God, he could not “strike at the very root of evil in the enmity of the human heart to God”[42] because he could not carry true humanity in himself to God.[43] He could not “pave the way” of our exaltation, as Tertullian put it. [44] For this reason, the church maintained for five centuries that “the unassumed is unhealed.”[45] Jesus must have been (and still be) fully human.

By his perfect surrender to the Father’s will, a truly human Son could “bend back” human self-will to the will of the Father.[46] Only a human truly tempted in the wilderness and in Gethsemane and on the cross could offer us help in our condition (Heb 2:18, 4:15). Only by human obedience could the image of God restored in humanity.[47] Try as we might to climb this ladder ourselves, our faith is but an empty vessel, as Calvin concluded. Our salvation rests upon the faithfulness of Christ. It is upon this rock, of his faithfulness in our betrayal, that his church is now built.[48]

How could he achieve all this where others had failed? The creeds insist with Paul’s kenotic hymn that it was not by his special divine power. Calvin concluded that the answer to this great mystery was by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit; only by the doctrine of the Spirit is Christ kept human.[49]  Only as a Spirit-filled human can he recapitulate our humanity, restoring our image-bearing true humanity.[50] It can only be so, because only if he is a finite human empowered by the Spirit can we hope to be like him. Only as a Spirit-filled human can he be the firstborn of the new creation.

In the balance, we recognize that only by asking theological questions of the particularly Jewish story can we hope to understand the story. Only if we maintain the threefold affirmation of Father, Son and Spirit can we behold his salvation. Only if we are Trinitarian can humanity and its garden be restored.

Bearing His Image with Ever-Increasing Glory

As the story of Israel makes clear, God’s purpose in salvation is not evacuation. His intention is restoration of his entire ‘temple’, creation, but for that his image-bearing creation must be restored. Ezekiel had foreseen such a day when God would restore the exiles, cleansing them of their idols, giving them a new heart, spirit, law, and land, His presence among them again (Ezek 36:24-32). All that is desolate would “become like the garden of Eden” (36:35-36) and all that is dead would live again (37:7-8) because his Spirit, his very breath, would be put in them (37:5-6). He would restore them to everlasting peace under a Shepherd-King David such that even the nations would know the “I am the Lord,” as he is “proved holy before their eyes” (Ezek 36:25, 37:24-28). The words of prophets were indeed fulfilled in the presence of Jesus (Lk 4:21, cf. Heb 1), for he is not only the shepherd king, the lamb that was slain, and the promised Messiah, “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation” (Col 1:15). In other words, he is the restoration of all the it means to be human; he is the first of us to fully image God—but only the first! Since Christ is the pioneer and perfecter of our faith (Heb 2:2), it follows that we shall be made like him. Now that we look on the Lord’s glory with “unveiled faces that reflect his glory,”[51] Paul declares that we “are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory.” By what power is this accomplished? By the same power that indwelled Jesus, Paul says, by “the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18).

It should be clear, now, that our salvation is not a rescue from the body and from creation, but a restoration to our full human vocation to gloriously bear God’s image to his creation. If the Son is the first of us, we should expect that what is said of Jesus will be said of us, and indeed much of it is by Paul in Romans 8. This same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead is giving “life to our mortal bodies” (vv.11). By the Spirit we are overcoming sin (vv.13). By the Spirit we are being adopted to sonship, able to cry as Jesus did, “Abba, Father” (vv.15). By the Spirit we groan for redemption, causing the whole creation to groan as it awaits us.[52] (vv.19,23). By the Spirit our two-way prayer life is mediated with God (vv.27). All of this is so we might be “conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters” (vv.29). And so, the creation with us might be “liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God” (vv.21).

The church fathers concluded that all of this can be so only because God has revealed himself as a Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit. If we accept their conclusion, three persons of one substance, existing in mutual, self-giving love, humanity is rescued from idolatry and restored to its original design. The gender complementarity of Genesis 2, rather than a curse to be cast off or a subordination to be maintained, becomes a “finite echo” of a Trinitarian God that exists in self-giving, mutual love.[53] The mandate of dominion, rather than a concession to human selfishness and pride, becomes what creation is to our Trinitarian God: the overflow of love that creates, empowers, cultivates.[54] It is not a stretch to say, as Torrance does, that God’s threefold giving of himself as Father, Son and Spirit is our salvation.”[55]

Trinitarian Theology Might Well Change Everything

It has become quite fashionable in the Western church as of late to talk about justice. Whether the problems are economic or ethnic or ecological, talk is on the rise, and yet it is not always so clear that action is rising with it. I confess I am all too guilty of stopping with “hashtag activism.” I find it far easier to be against the sin of others than to engage injustice myself, particularly if the problem is among the poor and marginalized. I have spent much of my life dabbling in ministry to or with the poor, and yet I often find myself lacking compassion, patience or faith for anything that does not serve my agenda. When I say agenda, I mean my hope to cultivate my own little corner of creation—a local church—and say, “I did that!” I have told myself that it is an ambition to accomplish something of value, but it may just be an insistence on the results white, Western men like me have come to demand. Taking the “very nature of a servant” is not in my game plan. But enough confession.

Where do I or anyone find the capacity and resources to love and serve those on the margins? I am increasingly convinced that it is in having our faces unveiled before a Trinitarian God and our fellow image-bearers. Jesus told a story about works of mercy done for “the least of these,” and how we might subsequently discover we had done these acts “unto him.” Even as I heard others affirm Christ’s promised ‘presence among the poor’, my imagination could not conceive it a reality. It is perhaps a good moral fable, but nothing more, for the depths of the knowledge of God could not actually be encountered in anything or anyone so mundane. Or could they?

Recently, in the reading of “womanist theology,” work written from the perspective of black American women, I discovered something unexpected. I discovered that there exists a personal knowledge of God that is entirely inaccessible to me apart from a connection with a sister whose acquaintance I have never made. In the work of Jacquelyn Grant I encountered the prayers of a nameless, forgotten black female slave who lived long ago in the deep American south.[56] She prays,

“Come to we, dear Massa Jesus…we ain’t got no buggy for send and fetch [you]. But Massa, you ‘member how you walked dat hard walk up Calvary and ain’t weary but [think] about we all dat way[?] We know you ain’t weary for to come to we. We pick out de [thorns], de prickles, de brier, de backsliding’ and de quarrel and de sin out of you path so dey shan’t hurt [your] pierced feet no more…We all [us] ain’t got no good cool water for give when you thirsty. You know Massa, de drought so long, and the well so low, ain’t nutting but mud to drink. But we [gonna] take de [com]munion cup and fill it wit de tear of repentance, and love clean out of we heart. Dat all we hab to gib you good Massa.”[57]

Tears filled my eyes as I read, not at all in pity for the speaker, but in humble awe of what a compassionate, selfless love she conveys for Jesus. And more than that, the recognition that this compassionate, selfless love could only be possible if it were the very love of Christ himself, reflected in her as one might see a face in a mirror. I confess I have never experienced such a selfless love for Jesus, nor such compassion. It is likely that I could not do so—ever—at least on my own. God in his wisdom recognized that, though lacking nothing, his glorious light could increase if reflected in the faces of billions of image-bearing children, and that then like a diamond, his brilliance would pierce into every known darkness.

My imagination is broken; I can hardly conceive of a God that is ever-giving, ever-loving, three and yet one. Neither does the God of imagination look like a selfless, compassionate, despised bearer of burdens. Nor does he look like a rejected carrier of sorrows, nor a slave crushed by the iniquities of us all—that is to say the Christ of my sub-conscious is nothing like this poor, black, slave woman. And yet what else could he look like? Who else could reflect him as he is? When we perceive that our God is a eternally the Triune Father, Son and Spirit, unceasingly drawing us into their loving communion, we can be freed from our idolatrous agendas, faces unveiled to see his likeness reflected in the ‘least of these’, and restored ourselves to a fully human life. And tears are now rolling down my face…


[1] Thomas F. Torrance, “The Christian Apprehension of God the Father,” in Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism, ed. Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992), 126.

[2] Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Downers Grove, Ill.: IVP Academic, 2012), 22.

[3] James D. G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity, 1st ed. (London: SCM, 1977), 369.

[4] James D. G. Dunn, A New Perspective on Jesus: What the Quest for the Historical Jesus Missed (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Academic, 2005), 23.

[5] Saint Athanasius, On the Incarnation: Saint Athanasius, trans. John Behr (Yonkers, N.Y: St Vladimirs Seminary Pr, 2012), 59–61.

[6] Gerrit Dawson, Jesus Ascended: The Meaning of Christ’s Continuing Incarnation (London: T&T Clark, 2004), 90.

[7] Crispin Fletcher-Louis, “God’s Image, His Cosmic Temple and the High Priest,” in Heaven on Earth: The Temple in Biblical Theology, ed. T. Desmond Alexander and Simon J. Gathercole (Carlisle England: Paternoster, 2004), 84.

[8] Declan Marmion and Dr Rik van Nieuwenhove, An Introduction to the Trinity (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 50–55.

[9] The Gnostic questions began within the 1st century, and are to some extent addressed (or as some would have it, adopted) by the fourth evangelist.

[10] Never mind that it was the creeds that shaped the biblical canon, these affirmations are a result of centuries of rightly dividing the Scripture from human philosophy and error, they are dismissed only at great peril.

[11] Thomas F. Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, Revised edition. (Colorado Springs: Helmers & Howard Publishers, 1992), 57.

[12] Ibid., 59.

[13] Ibid., 61–62.

[14] J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.

[15] Dawson, Jesus Ascended, 55.

[16] Ibid., 50.

[17] Julie Canlis, “The Geography of Participation: In Christ Is Location, Location, Location,” 2017, 8.

[18] I was helped here a great deal by the insights of Cherith Nordling, in a work yet to be published.

[19] Citing an unkown source, Dawson, Jesus Ascended, 5.

[20] N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 114.

[21] William Milligan, The Ascension and Heavenly Priesthood of Our Lord. Cited in Dawson, Jesus Ascended, 51.

[22] Colin Gunton, The Christian Faith: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001), 92–93.

[23] Marmion and Nieuwenhove, An Introduction to the Trinity, 90.

[24] Colin E. Gunton, Christ and Creation: The Didsbury Lectures, 1990, Reprint edition. (Eugene, Or: Wipf & Stock Pub, 2005), 67. I LOVE this book.

[25] Gunton, The Christian Faith.

[26] Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 11.

[27] Gunton, The Christian Faith, 80.

[28] Rikk E. Watts, “The New Exodus/New Creational Restoration of the Image of God,” in What Does It Mean to Be Saved? Broadening Evangelical Horizons of Salvation, ed. John G. Stackhouse (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2002), 15–41. Isn’t this also the most wonderful essay?

[29] Dawson, Jesus Ascended, 90.

[30] Gunton, The Christian Faith, 72.

[31] Torrance, “The Christian Apprehension of God the Father,” 132.

[32] Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 56.

[33] Ibid., 54.

[34] Ibid., 109.

[35] Ibid., 113.

[36] Jurgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 206.

[37] Gunton, Christ and Creation, 84.

[38] Torrance, “The Christian Apprehension of God the Father,” 134.

[39] Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 63.

[40] Dawson would remind us that “life, not death is essence of the atonement” according to Lev 17:11. In Jesus Ascended, 130–32.

[41] Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 41.

[42] Ibid., 31.

[43] Dawson, Jesus Ascended, 125.

[44] Ibid., 65–66.

[45] Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 39.

[46] Ibid., 80.

[47] Gunton, The Christian Faith, 74.

[48] Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 80–84.

[49] Canlis, “The Geography of Participation: In Christ Is Location, Location, Location,” 7.

[50] Cherith Fee-Nordling, “Ascension, Communion, and the Hospitality of the Priest-King,” n.d., 3.

[51] The NIV’s preference of ‘contemplate’ seems unfortunate in light of the story of the image-bearer. Amen.

[52] Torrance vividly describes us as “priests of creation…interpret[ing] the books of nature, to understand the universe in its wonderful structures and harmonies, and to bring it all into orderly articulation, so that it fills its proper end as the vast theatre of glory in which the Creator is worshipped and praised.” in Transformation and Convergence in the Frame of Knowledge: Explorations in the Interrelations of Scientific and Theological Enterprise (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998), 263. GORGEOUS.

[53] Gunton, Christ and Creation, 101.

[54] Ibid., 103.

[55] Torrance, The Mediation of Christ, 126.

[56] I recognize the potential peril of appropriating such a precious prayer for the purposes of my own discovery, but I must share it here.

[57] Jacquelyn Grant, “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Experience as a Source for Doing Theology, with Special Reference to Christology.,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, 002–Revised edition ed. (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 1993), 281–82.

Comments are closed.