THE ONE LIVING WAY
03/09/23 08:00
We do well to think of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and believe that God is mediated to us by the Christ who walks with us and lives in us. God is not ‘the force’ or ‘the law’ and certainly not an ‘unmoved mover’.
HIS PERSONHOOD
Thomas Torrance explains that, “When we think and speak of God from the perspective of the Creator/creature relation .. we can only think and speak of him in vague, general and negative terms, at the infinite distance of the creature from the Creator where we cannot know God as he is in Himself...
RELATE GOD THROUGH JESUS
“In such an approach we can do no more than attempt to speak of God from his works which have come into being at his will through his Word, that
is, from what is externally related to God, and which as such do
not really tell us anything about who God is or what he is like in
his own nature…” This is why the basic commandment is that we should not make any image of God – whether this be a sculpture or a religious construct that we posit as a representation of Him. As such, a legalised god with a legalistic gospel is a subtle idolatry that dishonours Christ and withers those who practice this parody.
REAL LIFE IS TO KNOW GOD IN JESUS CHRIST
“God may be known only out of himself. Thus
if we are to have any true and precise scientific knowledge of
God, we must allow his own nature, as he becomes revealed to
us, to determine how we are to know him, how we are to think
of him, and what we are to say of him.” This is why we have the Gospel of Jesus and the apostles and not some self-invention or ‘cunningly devised fable’ that we honour as our distinctive.
THE ONE LIVING WAY
God speaks to us of Himself in His Son. “That is what happens when we approach God as Father through Jesus Christ his Son, for the Son is of one and the same nature and being as the Father. 'The fullness of the Father's Godhead is the being of the Son, and the Son is the whole God.' He is God of God, the one way of access to God the Father.” (1)
NOT A GENERALITY, CONSTRUCT OR A LEGALITY
God is not a generality or anything less than the Christ who is God and man and our union with God in person. That God came among us as Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Man, means that God explains who He is to us by His expression as a human being – the incarnation. The incarnation lived is Christ in us by the Spirit revealing Christ and imparting Himself to Jack, Jean and Cynthia.
(1) Thomas Torrance. The Trinitarian Faith The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Faith. 51,52.
