We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
The Cross and The Trinity
Out of love for humankind, Scripture tells us, Jesus emptied himself of his divine prerogatives, set aside the glory he had with the Father from before the foundation of the world, became a human being and bore our sin as he died a God-forsaken death on Calvary (Phil 2:5-7). Though Jesus remained fully God, he entered into total solidarity with humanity by becoming a full human being. And though Jesus remained sinless, he entered into total solidarity with our sin and condemnation, to the point that Paul boldly proclaimed that Christ in some sense became our sin and became our curse (2 Cor 5:21). The cross is the culminating expression of the meaning of the Incarnation and everything else Jesus was about.
The cross reveals a God of unfathomable humility and mercy who is not above stooping to appear far less beautiful than he actually is—to appear as a guilty, crucified criminal!—in order to save us and to continue to achieve his sovereign purposes. The essence or character of God is the incomprehensibly humble, self-sacrificial love displayed on the cross.
While this revelation of course never ceases to be wonderfully mysterious, I believe it can be rendered intelligible, but only when we accept that God’s eternal nature is a union of three divine Persons who eternally give themselves wholly to one another in perfect, humble, self-giving love.
As Father, Son and Holy Spirit, God is from all eternity a self-giving God who pours himself out for “another.” Indeed, this is not only something the three Persons of the Trinity do; this is who the triune God eternally is. As TF Torrance writes,
The atoning act perfected in the cross of Jesus Christ is grounded in the very being of the eternal God, that is, in the eternal being of the Holy Trinity (The Mediation of Christ, 113).
This, I contend, is the meaning of the revelation that God is love—the kind of love that is revealed when God stoops to the infinite extreme of becoming a human and dying on a cross for a race of people who could not deserve it less (I Jn 4:8; 3:16).
The revelation of the Trinity renders the revelation of God on the cross intelligible because it means that when God humbly poured himself out on behalf of humanity by stooping to the furthest extreme possible, he was not doing something foreign to himself. To the contrary, by stooping in this way, the eternal triune God was simply enveloping humans into the self-giving, triune love that he eternally is.
As paradoxical as it sounds, when God the Son stooped to the infinite extremity of taking on our God-forsakenness on the cross, he was manifesting outwardly, in time, the perfect unity he eternally enjoys with the Father and the Spirit. Because God’s true eternal nature is a perfect, other-oriented, self-giving fellowship of three divine persons, we can begin to understand the paradoxical claim that God is revealed by becoming something that is not only different from himself (a human being), but that is even utterly antithetical to himself (our sin and God-forsakenness). The infinite intensity of the perfect love that is the eternal character of the triune God is most clearly revealed in the fact that God condescended to the furthest extreme possible out of love for a race of rebels who wanted only to crucify him.
Photo credit: molossus, who says Life Imitates Doodles via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND
Category: General
Tags: Cross, Cruciform Theology, Trinity
Topics: Attributes and Character
Related Reading
God Became What He is Not To Reveal What He Is
We are saved because Jesus became the curse of the law for us (Gal. 3:13). So too, the way Christ freed us from the condemnation of sin and enabled us to “become the righteousness of God” was by becoming sin for us (2 Cor. 5:21). What is more, since the curse of the law includes enslavement to…
If Jesus Is the Whole Point, Then What’s the Point of the Old Testament? (podcast)
Greg considers the role of the Old Testament in Christian faith. Episode 554 http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0554.mp3
A Foolish and Weak-Looking God
The New Testament assumes that the God of Israel and the God revealed in Jesus Christ are one and the same God. But there also can be no question that the portrait of God that was unveiled when the Messiah arrived on the scene was in some respects quite different from what the OT had…
When the Law Demanded the Death Penalty
The Sinai covenant is significantly structured around violence. It motivates behavioral conformity by promising rewards and threatening violence. Without the threat of violence, the law looses its “teeth.” If the law is an acquiescence to sin, then the divinely sanctioned violence that is associated with it must also be considered an acquiescence to sin. The…
The Bible is NOT the Foundation
Many people imagine that the foundation of their faith is the Bible. This is viewed as the ultimate center around which everything they believe revolves. However, the foundation of the Christian faith is actually centered on a person, not a book. Whereas Islam has always presented itself as a “religion of the book,” the kingdom…
The Heresy of “Just War”
Since the time when the Jesus-looking kingdom movement was transformed into the Caesar-looking “militant and triumphant” Church, there has been a tradition of Christians by-passing the enemy-loving, non-violent teachings of the NT and instead appealing to the precedent of divinely-sanctioned nationalism and violence in the OT whenever they felt the need to justify engaging in…