The Lamb Who Stands at the Centre of the Universe

I have a very vivid memory, early on in my life as a Christian, when I encountered some folks from a different faith tradition than mine, who were quite intent on convincing me that the Church’s doctrine of the Trinity was illogical and unbiblical, a conspiratorial heresy of the Catholic Church that was, in fact, an affront to God.

I had never before encountered such animosity to a belief that I had found to be beautiful, compelling, and life giving, and it took me aback. They looked up all the usual references in the Bible that are often marshalled in defense of the doctrine of the Trinity, and presented exegetical arguments—faulty exegetical arguments, I later learned—in an attempt to convince me that God is not, in fact, Three-in-One.

Looking back, it’s curious to me that my non-Trinitarian neighbours that day didn’t ever look up Revelation 5:6 for our little game of proof-text ping pong. It’s Curious, but not surprising. Because, although it’s not often discussed in traditional defenses of the Trinity, I think Revelation 5:6 gives us one of the most profound, mysterious, and compelling visions of God as Three-in-One as I’ve ever come across in the New Testament.

St. John the Divine has just received an awe-inspiring glimpse into the Throne Room of God, where he’s seen 24 Elders (presumably representative of the whole People of God, both the 12 Tribes of Israel and the 12 Apostles of the Church), and he’s seen 4 living creatures (apparently 4 angelic beings, though they also seem representative in some way of the Creation itself, since the number 4 is usually associated with the Creation, and they take the shape of creatures associated with the creation—lions, oxen, eagles, men). There are flashes of lightning and peals of thunder, crowns being laid down and rainbows scintillating with glory.

Before discussing Revelation 5:6, we should note that in the heavenly vision of Chapter 4, John sees the Throne of the Almighty, and before the throne are 7 lamps (significantly, the word here is different than the word used in chapters 2-3 to describe the 7 lampstands of the 7 churches). Here, John clearly identifies the seven lamps as the “Sevenold Spirit of God” (4:5).

Although he glimpses someone sitting on the throne, the appearance of whoever it is on the Throne is describes in vague terms: “He had the appearance of jasper and ruby.” The image speaks of God’s beauty, his radiance, his glory, his infinite worth, but notably, it does not tell us much about God’s literal appearance; that is to say, we’re not supposed to imagine a huge piece of red crystal sitting on the throne—a literal ruby. Though John sees the Throne, and glimpses someone sitting there, he cannot truly tell what he saw. It reminds me a bit of Moses, being permitted only to see the back of God’s glory as it passed, in Exodus 33.

But then we come to Revelation 5. Here, after no one has been found worthy to open the scroll of God’s plan for bringing Justice to the earth and bringing human history to its final conclusion, John sees a lamb, looking as though it has been slain from the creation of the world.

Here is where things get interesting, and profoundly Trinitarian. As will become clear by the end of the book, the Lamb is the Lord Jesus Christ, slain for the world through his death on the cross. Notably, though, John tells us that this lamb is “standing in the midst of the throne” that is to say, at its very centre. He does not say the lamb is “sitting on the Throne,” of course, because there is already someone sitting there, but if the Lamb is standing “at the centre of the throne,” then it is impossible to extract his identity from the identity of the one sitting there. One commentor puts it like this: “Jesus Christ, the crucified, stands at the centre of the throne because he stands at the centre of the Almighty. Jesus Christ comes from and lives in the very centre of the living God! The heart of the Almighty is the heart of the Lamb” (Darrell Johnson, Discipleship on the Edge, p. 157).

It gets even more interesting, and more Trinitarian, though. Because in his description of this Lamb, John tells us that he has 7 eyes. The strangeness of a seven-eyed lamb is itself enough to tell us that this must be a symbolic description, but just to be sure, John explains: “the eyes are the Sevenfold Spirit of God.” Most commentors suggest that this reference to the “Seven Spirits of God” is picking up on Isaiah 11:2-3, where we’re told that the Spirit of the Lord will rest on the Messiah in his coming, and then the Lord’s Spirit is described with seven epithets: the Spirit of the Lord, the Spirit of Wisdom, the Spirit of Understanding, the Spirit of Counsel, the Spirit of Might, the Spirit of Knowledge, and the Fear of the Lord. Earlier in Revelation 1, John greets his readers in the name of Jesus (the one who was and is and is to come), and the “Seven Spirits which are before his throne” (1:1); later, in Chapter 3, its stated even more explicitly, that Jesus is the one who “has the Seven Spirits of God.”

The Sevenfold Spirit of God in Revelation 5, then, seems to be a symbolic way of speaking about the Holy Spirit specifically, the “Spirit of the Lord” that rests on the Messiah, the Spirit that is actively at work in the world (the very eyes of the Lamb himself).

Once you connect all these dots, you can’t help but do the math here: if the Sevenfold Spirit of God—the Holy Spirit—is the “eyes” of the Lamb, and the Lamb is standing at the centre of the throne, one which the Almighty himself is seated, then the Holy Spirit, too, is standing there, at the centre of the Lamb, at the centre of God’s throne.

Revelation 5 has come to be, for me, one of the most goose-bump-inducing passages of the whole Bible. It’s all veiled in the mysterious symbolism of apocalyptic imagery, of course, but here we are offered a glimpse into the life of God himself—as much a glimpse, anyways, as anyone could bear, and what we see when we dare to turn our eyes to his One Single Throne, are three.

But these Three are placed in such a way, in such a place, as there could only ever, truly be One there.

So it is true, in one sense, what my non-Trinitarian neighbours were trying to tell me that day. You cannot find the word “Trinity” anywhere in the Bible. But if there is some better way to explain what John saw that day in the Throne Room of God, some doctrine or conceptualization of the divine that can account for a Throne that has the Almighty seated on it and the Lamb standing at its centre, I’ve not yet come across it.

Three Minute Theology 1.8: I Live God

When our daughter was in kindergarten, she brought home a painting she’d done one day and proudly showed it off.  A bright red flower garden with a single rose towering over all the rest, and next to that she’d printed:  “I Live God.”

“Look,” she said, “It says, ’I love God!’” 

It was only an accidental misspelling, but we’ve always felt there was something profound about that mistaken letter “i,” and to this day it hangs on our wall as a reminder that loving God is, in fact, the essence of life.

Our daughter wasn’t intentionally doing theology that day, of course, but her painting is a helpful “way-in” for thinking about the unique work of the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit.

One of the ancient creeds calls the Holy Spirit, “The Lord and giver of life”; but the very same creed says that Jesus is Lord, and that the Father is the Maker of Heaven and Earth, so in what way should we understand the Holy Spirit as both the Lord and the Giver of life?

Well: just like my daughter’s painting created an interesting (though unintentional) play on words, there is a fascinating play-on-words in the Bible that helps us get to the heart of what’s going on here.

Because in the original languages of the Bible, the word for “Spirit” is the same as the word for “wind,” and the word for “breath.”  In Hebrew the words are either ruach or neshawmaw', and they can mean spirit, or wind, or breath, depending on the context.

Like in the Creation story. It says that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and then it says that, before anything came into existence, God’s Spirit—his ruach—was hovering over the water. And so the creation began.

Later on in the Noah’s Ark story, after water has swept away all life from the earth and God wants to re-create everything, fresh and new, it says, he sent a wind—his ruach—over the water.

The point is, whenever God Creates, he does it by sending his ruach—his Spirit.

But there are even deeper layers here.  Because in the same creation story, it explains how God created the first human, and it says that God breathed into him the breath of life—his neshawmaw’—and he became a living being. 

Humans, of course, need to breathe-- without neshawmaw’, we’d die—but it’s not just our breathing that keeps us alive.  It’s actually the very breath of God, his divine Spirit.

Like it says in the Book of Job:  as long as breath—my neshawmaw’—is in me, the Ruach of God—his Spirit—is in my nostrils.  And:  “The Spirit of God (his ruach) has made me, and the breath of the Almighty (his neshawmaw’) has given me life. 

And not just humans; in one place it’s talking about all the living things in creation, and it says, “When God takes away their breath—their ruach—they die; but when he sends his Spirit, they spring to life.”

It turns out our daughter was painting truer than she knew, because anything that’s alive and breathing, if it is alive and breathing, it’s only because the Spirit breathed life into it. 

In that one sense, we all sort of “live God,” with every breath we take. 

Of course, there’s breathing and then there’s being alive; and there’s more to being alive than simply taking breaths. 

                                                                                               

So maybe that’s why Jesus, much later, explained that it wasn’t enough for us to be alive just in the “physical breath” sense of the word; we needed to be brought to life spiritually, too; we have to be born of the Spirit, is how he said it. 

And he was talking about the way the Holy Spirit brings us alive to the love of God, and opens our spirits to the Story of Jesus, and brings us into a life-giving relationship with him. 

Because when God breathes into us like that, that’s when we discover he’s the Lord and Giver of Life, in every sense of the word.

Three Minute Theology 1.4: It's Not What You Know, It's Who

There are different ways a person can know someone. You can know objective facts about them—what colour their eyes are, whether or not they’ve had their appendix out. Stuff like that.

Or you can know them personally: what their passions are, what makes them tick, what that funny look they sometimes get on their face means, without them having to tell you. You can know a lot about a person in that first way, without ever coming to know them in this second way.

Theologians sometimes differentiate between two different ways of understanding the Trinity, too. We can use the Trinity as a way of describing what God is like in his inner life, or we can use the Trinity to describe how God relates to us in a personal way.

The word “ontological” describes this first way of understanding the Trinity. “Ontological” means “having to do with one’s essence or being,” and the “Ontological Trinity” is a way of trying to describe what you might see if you could open a window on heaven and peak into God’s throne-room: God as God is in and of God’s-self.

The phrase “economic Trinity” describes this second way of understanding the Trinity. The “economic Trinity” is a way of describing how God is at work and has been at work in history—in creation, in world history and in our own personal lives: God in relationship with us.

Think about it like this: as the Son of God, Jesus taught his followers to pray to God as “our Father in Heaven”; and if we take him at his word and do pray like this, it’s only because the Holy Spirit has confirmed the truth of Jesus’ words in our hearts.

In other words, we come to know God as the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit.

The story of Jesus’ baptism shows us the same thing from a slightly different angle. John the Baptist baptizes Jesus and then it says, as he was coming up out of the water, the Spirit came upon him in the form of a dove and a voice from heaven said, “This is my Beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.”

Again: God reveals himself as Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit.

Our relationship with God has this same Trinitarian “shape” going the other direction.

Take prayer, for instance. Often when people pray they feel alone and kind of inadequate, like their words are just bouncing off the ceiling.

Yet the Bible teaches that when Christians pray, the Holy Spirit actually puts the prayer of Jesus in our hearts, who mediates for us as our Great High Priest, bringing our prayers before the Father in Heaven.

It’s never just us praying to God on our own. We pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit.

Or take our worship. Because we’re flesh-and-blood human beings, we never really give God the love, honor and glory he deserves; yet Jesus, who was fully God and fully human, poured out his sinless life, as a perfect act of worship on our behalf. And when we believe in Jesus, the Holy Spirit unites our lives with his life, so that our worship, as imperfect as it is, is offered with his perfect worship: to the Father, through the Son, by the Holy Spirit.

A lot of Christians don’t get especially excited about the Church’s teaching about the Trinity, because they tend to think of it in terms of that first way of knowing God: cold, objective facts about what God is like, in and of himself; and they don’t think about it in this second way, as the very bedrock for our whole relationship with God.

But that’s what it is. It’s how we know God—how we’re able to know God—and it’s how we live with God. For a Christian—prayer, worship, ministry, service, discipleship—all of it is only possible because we know God, as Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit.

Three Minute Theology 1.3, Sounds Like the Trinity

One of the implications the Trinity is that God exists in eternal, loving community within God’s-self.  The Father begets the Son, the Son does the Father’s will, and the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, as a bond of love between them. 

The ancient theologians used the Greek word “perichoresis” to describe this relationship.  Perichoresis is difficult to translate.  Literally, it sort of means “rotating-forward-around,” and it’s trying to get at the way the Persons of the Trinity move in and through and around each other.  Any activity of one is always an action of all three; and yet whenever God is at work, it’s still possible to differentiate between the unique work of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The word did not originally have the connotation of “a dance,” but in popular theology, “perichoresis” is often translated as “a dancing around,” and is used to suggest that there is a joyful “dancing around each other” going on between the Persons of the Trinity.

This is difficult to visualize, but perhaps a non-visual metaphor may help. 

In music, a chord is made up of three notes, played together at the same time.  A major chord, for instance, is made up of the first, the third, and the fifth notes of a given scale.  If you took the C scale, let’s say, and played the ‘C,’ the ‘E’ and the ‘G,’ you would have a C Major chord.

Now: a C chord is a single auditory experience—that is:  you hear it as a single thing.  Yet at the same time, the Chord is made up of three distinct, individual notes—C, E and G.  And each of these notes completely fills up the sound-space.  There is no ‘part’ of the chord where one of these three notes isn’t fully present, and you can always distinguish each individual note within the chord.

The notes of a C Major chord, we might say, inter-penetrate each other in a “perichoretic dance.”  That is to say, whenever you hear a C major chord, you are always hearing three individual notes, and yet at the same time, you’re hearing a single chord.

This musical analogy helps us get at the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in ways that visual metaphors simply can’t. 

For instance, in a chord, there is no hierarchy between the notes—you can play them in any order, and yet it’s always the “First” or “Tonic” note that determines the Nature of the Chord. 

The “Fifth” note, or the “Dominant” is always directly determined by the Tonic note.  Whatever your tonic note is, the next note is going to be a perfect fifth above it, in this case “G.” 

The third note, while seemingly third in importance, actually determines the tonal quality of the whole chord: if we play a perfect third, we get a major chord, if we drop it a half step, we get a minor chord, even though the other two notes stay the same.

In a similar way, the Father begets the Son—like the tonic note determines the dominant—and the Holy Spirit flows out from the Father and Son, expressing the bond of love between them—like the perfect third harmonizes between the first and the fifth, making  it a major chord and not a minor.  

And like the Persons of the Trinity, each of these notes completely “interpenetrates” the other, making an indivisible sound without losing their unique, individual identity.

While this is difficult to wrap our heads around, the way the Persons of the Trinity exist in a perfect relationship with each other, where each is fully One with the other and yet maintains their unique Personhood, is crucial to the Christian Faith, because Jesus said that he wanted this same kind of unity for us.  “That you may all be One,” is how he said it, “just as the Father is in Me and I in him, and that you may also be in us.”

Three Minute Theology 1.2, The Trinity in 3D

Christians sometimes use the word “mystery” to describe certain aspects of their faith. God coming to us as a human being in the Incarnation is a mystery; so is the way Jesus could be both fully God and fully human.

When Christians use the term Mystery, they don’t mean it in the Sherlock Holmes sense of the word—as in, a puzzle to be solved, or a secret to be discovered. A “mystery” is a truth about God that is apparently contradictory, which human reason could never arrive at on its own, and we could only know because God revealed it to us.

The Trinity is a Mystery in this sense of the word. Like all Mysteries of our Faith, there is no perfect “analogy” for the Trinity—no perfect way to represent humanly how God is One single God and at the same time, three distinct Persons.

Sometimes people will compare the Trinity to an egg, which is a single thing, and yet it has three parts—a shell, a yolk and a white. This analogy fails, however, in that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not just three “parts” of one God, they are three distinct persons.

Sometimes people use the analogy of water, which is one single substance but can appear in three distinct forms—ice, liquid and steam. This analogy fails, too, in that the same water can’t be ice, liquid and steam, at the same time, whereas the three Persons of the Trinity are not just three different “forms” of the same God, but three distinct Persons existing at the same time.

All analogies are bound to fail, but there is a way to imagine how something could be both three distinct things and at the same time, one single thing.

Imagine a world that only exists in two dimensions. There is backwards and forwards, left and right, but there is no up or down. The inhabitants of this world are all flat, two dimensional shapes—circles, squares and so on. They have no knowledge of the third dimension, and no frame of reference for conceiving of “up” or “down.”

Now imagine that a three-dimensional being like myself entered this flat world—maybe I reached three fingers of my hand in, for instance.

My hand, of course, is one single thing, but as it enters into the 2-dimensional world, what will all those 2 dimensional creatures experience?

Won’t they perceive it as three separate circles?

Three 2-dimensional shapes that are completely separate and distinct, and, as far as they can tell, not attached in any way? You can go around each of them, and each of them can move separately.

But what if you or I, who exist in three-dimensional space, were explain to our 2-D friends that what these three distinct circles are really one single hand—and if they could only get “up” above their two-dimensional world, they would understand how these three circles are, at the exact same time, One?

Wouldn’t they say, “What’s ‘Up?’”

Would they even have a frame of reference for making sense of a statement like this, that the three circles they very clearly see are separate, are, at the same time, one single Thing?

This is not really an analogy for the Trinity itself, as much as it is an analogy for how the Trinity is a Mystery. God, if he is indeed the Creator of the Universe, must exist in dimensions further beyond us than the third dimension is beyond our imaginary 2-dimensional world.

And though there is no way for 3-dimensional beings like us to conceive of how God could be Three distinct Persons and at the same time One Single God, it’s certainly not a blind leap of Faith to accept it that he is.

At any rate, after their encounter with Jesus, whom they worshipped as God, and after their filling with the Holy Spirit, whom they experienced as God, this what the first Christians came to believe: that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, One God, now and forever.

Three Minute Theology 1.1: Good God Talk

So, what can you do in three minutes?  Listen to your average pop song... take a commercial break...boil an egg... and now, do some theological reflection!  Allow me to invite you to check out my new project for 2015, a YouTube channel I started called "Thee Minute Theology."  It was inspired by a YouTube channel my kids really like called MinutePhysics.  The idea is to take a specific theological concept from the Christian Faith, and explain it in a creative video that is 3.5 minutes or less (I tried for three minutes even but couldn't quite cram it all it).  The goal is to do one video a week (I've already got the next 51 planned out, so stay tuned!).  Anyways, grab a coffee, take a breather, and turn your mind and your imagination towards God for a minute or three.  Today's topic: The Trinity.  (Thought I'd ease into it).

Enjoy.

When I was a kid, my Grandma would correct me if she heard me using bad grammar. For instance, if I told her something like, “My friend draws good.” She would say, “No, Dale, he doesn’t draw ‘good.’ He draws ‘well.’”

Grammar lays out the basic rules of a language, to ensure we’re speaking correctly; and if you grew up with a Grandma like mine, you’ll know that good grammar is essential to effective communication.

So: Christians believe that God is Trinitarian. The word “Trinity” mean “Three in One”; and to say that God is a Trinity means he is one single, undivided God, and yet, at the very same time, Three distinct Persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

This can cause a lot of confusion among non-Christians, who know as well as we do, that 1+1+1=3; so either the Christians worship three different gods or they just can’t do simple math. Even many Christians find the idea of the Trinity difficult to explain, so they don’t tend to emphasize it a lot.

This confusion comes, in part, because often we think about the Trinity as though it were sort of a “schematic” that describes what God’s inner workings look like. And because God is God and we’re not, any attempt to sketch out a “schematic” for God is bound to fail.

So: perhaps a better way to think about the Trinity is as a “Grammar for God Talk.” Just like “English Grammar” lays out the guidelines for using the English language correctly, the “Trinity” lays out the guidelines for speaking correctly about God.

You see: the very first Christians were all 1st Century Jews, and they took the teaching of the Torah very seriously when it says that “The Lord your God is One God and you shall love Him with all your heart.”

There’s only One God; that’s the most basic rule of God-grammar.

But at the same time, they had encountered the man Jesus Christ, a 1st Century Jew who taught them to pray to God as if they were talking to a loving Father. And then they saw him crucified and rise again the third day. And here’s the thing: their encounter with the living Jesus was *so profound* that they began to worship him as God.

So: Jesus is God. That’s another rule of God-grammar.

But then, if someone were to ask them: “Are you saying that Jesus is the same as God the Father?” They would have had to say, “No.” Jesus is fully God, otherwise we couldn’t worship him; but at the same time, he spoke to God as his Heavenly Father, and taught us to do the same.

So Jesus is not God the Father. To say that would be bad grammar.

Of course, 50 days after Jesus’ resurrection, the Holy Spirit came, and filled those first Christians up to over-flowing with his love; and the experience they had of the Holy Spirit was just like the experience they had of Jesus , so they started talking about the Holy Spirit in the same way as they did Jesus.

The Holy Spirit is God. Good God-grammar.

But: the Holy Spirit reveals Jesus to us, and reminds us of his teaching. So he’s not the Son or the Father; to say that would be bad grammar.

The Trinity, then, lays out the guidelines for speaking correctly about God.

There is only one God. The Father is God, the Son is God and the Holy Spirit is God. The Son is not the Father and the Holy Spirit is not the Son. All those statements are good grammar.

But if we say that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are all just different “appearances” the same single God, or if we talk about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, as though they were three different gods, or one was not god, in each of those cases, we’re using bad grammar.

But: if we say something like: “The grace of God, Father Son and Holy Spirit be with you all.” In that case, we’re speaking good. About God.