Theology Thursday: The Triune God
There is much that we can learn about the Triune God in this book of essays. Bryan Chapell writes of justification and that life that comes from death, reminding the reader to look beyond those circumstances of our lives that cause us to waiver, to the God whose love never waivers. This sense of being rooted in God is expanded upon by Richard Phillips who speaks a very apt word considering our contemporary fixation with the pursuit of happiness. Happiness in the biblical sense is a blessedness or holiness of life, spent in pursuing God in ways that are truly pleasing to him.
Kevin DeYoung exposes our tendencies to create God in our own image and from our own presuppositions. We need ‘more than our own sincere opinions of the truth’ and have ears open to the God who speaks of himself clearly. Part of this right thinking about God is explained by Richard Phillips as he helps us to reconcile wrath with love, a love that has to be righteously angry with those things that try to extinguish it. With the language of the Book of Common Prayer he has us contemplate the agony that was Christ’s, in love for us, as he underwent that separation from God that is no longer ours because of Christ’s work on the cross.
When it comes to understanding the person of the Son, D A Carson touches on the functional subordination that is the Son’s in his obedience to the commands of the Father. He makes a case for the pre-incarnation subordination and perhaps hints at but doesn’t flesh out the eternal subordination which would be the natural logic of his argumentation here. Over the Eternal Subordination of the Son, the Evangelical world is divided and so the reader would need to go elsewhere to pursue this trajectory. Joel Beeke, with an old-time pastor zeal expands on the righteousness that is imputed to the faithful as a result of Christ’s work on the cross – Christ propitiated that ‘offended justice’ of God, as he describes it. Iain Duguid takes a different angle on the cross and explores Christ the kinsman redeemer who frees us from slavery by becoming a ransom for many. Joel R Beeke like Richard D Phillips takes us once more to the agony that Christ experienced at his cry of abandonment, his ‘sinnership’ so that we might experience sonship. Kevin DeYoung’s appeal is that we attend to the God who has revealed himself in the Christ who comes to us in real time, space, and geography and whom we cannot afford to ignore.
As we begin to contemplate the Spirit we are taken first to the cross and that moment of Christ’s glorification. It was here where ‘wrath’ and ‘mercy’ kissed and the subsequent gift of the Spirit could become a reality for us. Michael Horton takes us on an expansive journey with the Spirit as we view his work in the Testaments Old and New: the Spirit who manifests in temple, witness, and glory. Philip Graham Ryken expands on Bryan Chapell’s explanation of the gospel movement for us from life to death, to explain how this happens by the Spirit, a mystery that Nicodemus probes and then seems to have taken into his life. Hywel Jones looks at the liberty that comes with life in the Spirit. The Spirit leads us not away from the world in renouncing it but into the world to engage with it in holiness.
At the close of the book we come back to where we began and contemplate the work of Christ who ultimately becomes our advocate and our paraclete, him who pleads for us, defends us against that wrath of God, that we have understood as the place where love and mercy meet.
Marszalek, Rachel. Review of Ronald L. Kohl, ed., The Triune God (Phillipsburg, NJ.: P&R, 2014). Churchman 128/4 (2014): 373–374.
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