A Beautiful Vision of God (part 3)
* If you haven’t yet read part 1 or 2 of this series, click here (it’ll give you greater context for this blog)
This whole dualistic doctrine presents a real problem, in that it seeks to tear apart the truth of the Trinity’s holistic oneness. Not to mention how, in our minds, it pits the Father against the Son—posing Jesus as the loving, merciful one trying to balance the whole thing out (as if there’s one side of God that remains dark and vindictive).
Are you seeing how this is foundational in birthing wrong views of God’s indivisible oneness? They have a mental diagnosis for those who struggle with these types of polar opposite temperaments. However, I would never imagine the Father, Son, and Spirit to be like that…would you?
This whole thing has its origin in the lie of separation, specifically in the dualistic notion that the Father and Jesus are on two different pages concerning their creation. Inside of this lie, we sometimes imagine Jesus as the good cop who came to save us from the Father, the bad cop. We may not say it that abruptly, but when you look into the central atonement theory of the West (Penal Substitution Atonement), it’s hard to deny this is what’s being communicated. Sadly, the toleration and embrace of such dualistic doctrine is what Paul warned Timothy about (see 1 Timothy 4:1).
“I would submit that by viewing substitution as mollification or wrath-appeasement by means of violent punishment, we impose a gross rejection of our own twisted demands for retribution onto divine justice, reducing it to carnal vengeance. Wrath was what motivated murderous haters to crucify Jesus; vengeance was the very system God’s mercy overthrew. Calvin’s vision does horrendous violence to Trinitarian dogma, severing the Godhead, which historic Christianity had formally confessed is eternally ‘one in essence and undivided’ (Chrysostom’s ‘Divine Liturgy’). Calvin’s model rends the Trinity on Good Friday into Father-wrath against Son-mercy.” —Bradley Jersak
Although we could traverse the rabbit hole of dualistic thinking and Penal Substitution for days, I want to say this: we must settle in our hearts that the Father is just like the Son and the Son is exactly like the Father. No division, no separation, and certainly no violence towards the Other. To quote Thomas F. Torrance, “There is for us no activity of God behind the back of Jesus Christ or apart from the mission of the Spirit, for there is only one movement of God’s Love, one movement of his Grace, and one movement of divine Sanctification, which freely flows to us from the Father through the Son and in the Holy Spirit, which took concrete form in our human existence in space and time in the incarnate economy of redemption.”
It would be an absurdity to say that Jesus is nonviolent while the Father somehow is the opposite. Again, we must always keep before us the truth that Jesus came to reveal who the Father is and what he is like. If we imagine something to be true of Jesus Christ, we can rest in the fact that it is equally true of the Father. As such, if we are going to embrace and reiterate Jesus’ teachings of nonviolence (who only says what he hears the Father saying) but in the same breath declare the Father poured out his violent wrath on Jesus—to appease his own demand for justice—we have a real problem.
If we declare the Father did indeed pour out his wrath on Jesus, we’re saying that the Father was ultimately responsible for the killing of his own Son. Forgive me for the over-simplification, but we are essentially declaring that God killed God in order to satisfy God. That somehow, God’s violence saved us from…well, God’s violence.
Friends, not only is this absurd, it’s definitely not love, nor is it the image Jesus came to reveal of a loving, self-giving Father who lays down his life for his creation. I don’t care how much we want to dress it up by calling it “divine justice”; to say that God the Father aimed his wrath at God the Son in order to get some sort of payback is to image forth a narcissistic deity who only thinks of his own individual self.
In addition, if we truly believe the Father and Son are one, yet declare that, under the demands of divine payback, one had to harm the other, then we are ultimately saying God is capable of hurting himself (harming oneself is the epitome of self-hatred). This inevitably presents a gospel that is more about the demand of law than it is about the will to love. When the incarnation becomes about God coming to pay off God for a debt that we supposedly owed, the gospel—which is intended to be the image of a beautiful exchange—gets chalked up as a legal transaction. To quote David Bentley Hart, “Penal Substitution Atonement is rather like a bank issuing itself credit to pay off a debt it owes itself using a currency it has minted for the occasion and certifying its value wholly on the basis of the very credit it is issuing to itself.”
Friends, do you see how this thing starts to unravel under careful thought? Do you see how these concepts, although sometimes subtle, have the potential to provoke mistrust in the One whom Jesus came to reveal?
You see, Father, Son, and Spirit are beautifully unique and distinct in Their Persons, yet They fully exemplify what it means to live in union, fellowship, sharing, and wholehearted, other-centered love. It’s not like the Father is one way towards us and the Son another way. They’re in no way divided or at odds over humanity, nor are they warring against one another in making all things new. As a matter of fact, Jesus is not sunscreen to protect you from the red-hot retribution of a disgusted Father. He is the very face of the One that he came to reveal. When you see him, you see the Father. Simply said, They are one. They are whole.
“Within the Triune God we discover mutual love, mutual fellowship, mutual dependance, mutual honor, mutual submission, mutual dwelling, and authentic community. In the Godhead there exists an eternal, complementary, and reciprocal interchange of divine life, divine love, and divine fellowship.” —Frank Viola
For this, I can boldly say that the Father did not kill Jesus; man did. Yeah, we esteemed him stricken by God, but it was the human race that nailed him to the the cross. It was our vengeance that was poured out on the Son. Our hate, our rage. This was our contribution to the gospel. In fact, there are many passages where Jesus and others declare this to be the case. (See Matthew 16:21; 20:18-19; 26:45; Mark 9:31; 10:33-34; Luke 9:44; 18:31-33; 24:6-7; John 1:10-11; 18;3-6, 12; 19:15-18; Acts 2:23; 2:36; 3:13-15; 4:10; 4:27; Hebrews 12:1-3)
*This blog is an excerpt of my latest book, “Fascinated: Living in Awe of the Father.” If you want to read the entirety of this blog, jump on over and order it HERE
