The passage of scripture that pushes me the most on how I think about God, especially God as the triune God is Philippians 2:6–11, the Christ hymn:
. . . who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.[1]
This passage is a key to understanding how Paul thought about God and sheds some profound insights into who God is as the triune God.
New Testament scholar David Fredrickson, in “What Difference Does Jesus Make for God?,” boldly argues that if we don’t understand how Jesus changed God in his death on the cross, we won’t understand who God is as God. He looks at this passage and sees Paul defining God in radical new ways. He argues that many of the New Testament authors asked an ontological question very different from those asked by modern theologians: what difference does Jesus make for the being of God? This question was driven by the belief that when God freely chose to respond to what Jesus did, when Jesus emptied himself and became obedient to the point of death, when Jesus was lifted up and given the title of Lord, God was fundamentally changed. Jesus is now equal with God not in substance but in participation through speech in communal decision-making. In other words, since God gave the identity of Lord to Jesus, God is no longer a hierarchical God.[2]
Fredrickson sees Paul redefining God in this passage from simply being God the Father and the Spirit of God to being a truly triune God. Jesus is now part of the conversation of God, part of the decision-making process of God. When Paul named God as Father without the understanding of Lordship, which is now in Jesus, he fundamentally changed our understanding of God through Jesus’ self-sacrificing act on behalf of humanity and God’s responding self-sacrificing act on behalf of Jesus. Paul has defined God in terms of mutual self-giving in relationship.[3]
Humanity’s voices are brought into conversation with the voices of God by Jesus enslaving himself to humans and being obedient to the point of death. In a sense, being human is now a part of who God is. God is now in relationship with humanity in a radical new way through Jesus. We are now free to participate in the equality that already exists within God through Jesus.[4]
Gary Simpson argues that when God sent the Spirit to resurrect Jesus, God made Jesus’ friendship with sinners a new part of the character of God. In other words, sinners are now friends with God, and God is now a friend to sinners. In the act sending the Spirit to resurrect Jesus because of what he did, God validated who Jesus was in his death on the cross, and that changed who God now is for us. God is now known to us through Jesus in his willingness to suffer and die out of love for us. In this reciprocal dependence of the Father and the Son through the Spirit, the crucified God is the one and only trustworthy God. This also makes God a missional God: a triune God through God as Father but not Lord, through Jesus’ slavery and obedience to death, and through the Spirit’s resurrection of Jesus and calling of the church into being.[5]
This means two key things for missional preaching. First, because it shows the triune God to be nonhierarchical, willing to enslave Godself to us and die for us, we as Christians, and especially as the Church, must not relate to the world from a power over stance. We need to embrace the world relationally, just as God is relational in God’s self. Because of who God is and what God has done and is doing, we as the Church must remain open to constantly changing in how we relate to God’s creation. Second, it means that we as the Church cannot assume that we will remain in a place of privilege or relevance. We must always go to the people around us, just as Jesus and the Spirit have come to us. The very nature of God as triune means that the church has no grounds for turning in on itself or focusing most of its energy on itself. Rather we have the lived example of God coming to us. Now God expects us to go to those around us with the same good news of God’s kingdom. Understanding God as triune frees missional preaching to be about God as God is active in our world relating to us out of love.
[1] New Revised Standard Version. All scripture unless otherwise specified will be from this translation.
[2] David Fredrickson, “What Difference Does Jesus Make for God?” Dialog 37 (1998): 104–105.
[3] Ibid., 105–6.
[4] Ibid., 106.
[5] Gary Simpson, “No Trinity, No Mission: The Apostolic Difference of Revisioning the Trinity,” Word & World 18 (1998): 271.
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