The description of the Trinity in the Athanasian Creed was frustrating for me for a long time. What does it mean to say that there is one God with three Persons? It’s all well and good to say “eternally begotten”, but it’s almost a senseless phrase. In fact, the whole creed is full of concepts that make very little sense on their own: without explanation, it’s a very unhelpful way to think about the Trinity.

Fortunately, there is explanation. Justin Martyr, regarding the phrase “eternally begotten”, writes:

We see things happen similarly among ourselves, for whenever we utter some word, we beget a word–yet, not by any cutting of, which would diminish the word in us when we utter it.

Eternally Begotten is thus a reference to John 1:1. So in the (rough) spirit of the Athanasian Creed, I present a series of logically progressive points connecting the creed through Justin Martyr’s explanation to John 1:1, and then to other points on the nature of Jesus.

In the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.
-John 1:1-4

On the relationship of Jesus to The Father
1: “The Word” in John 1:1-4 refers to Jesus Christ, the son of God.

2: Jesus Christ may be thought of as eternally begotten of the Father, as a word may be begotten by its speaker.

3: Jesus Christ may be thought of as the only begotten son of the Father (John 3:16) in that He represents the entirety of the Word of God, first in that He fulfills the Word which had previously existed in law (Matthew 5:17), and second in that He is that word incarnate (John 1:1).

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On the relationship of Jesus to creation
4: The thoughts of God are innumerably vast (Psalm 139:17-18). God being unchanging can be thought of as having knowledge rather than thoughts insofar as thoughts are changing and sovereign thoughts are brought to pass.

5: Creation exists as the result and herald of the glory of God, in that it is the perfect display of all the attributes of God (Psalm 19:1-6).

6: This glory is displayed in the exemplification of the attributes of God: goodness (Psalm 107:1), from which spring both holy justice (Hebrews 9:22) and loving mercy (Romans 5:8).

7: Salvation is the perfect exemplification of all of these attributes: justice and mercy both satisfied in a single act.

8: This being the case, all of creation is centered around the singular act of the salvation of mankind.

9: This being the case and Jesus Christ being the agent of that salvation, Jesus Christ is the incarnation of the entirety of the thoughts, knowledge, and Word of God with regard to mankind.

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On the relationship of Jesus to the believer
10: We being adopted as sons of God of whom Christ is the firstfruits, are therefore intended as the embodiment of the Word of God in some respect.

11: Sanctification is the process by which we, becoming more Christlike, come to embody the Word of God.

Creation is such that God is the ultimate good for it. Good is thus absolute with respect to creation as we know it. But is it absolute with respect to God? That is, could God create something such that God Himself is not its ultimate good?

Don’t get me wrong; this is not a “Can God create a rock so big…” question, which is a logical contradiction in that if God has sovereignty to create such a rock, such is greater than the sovereignty to manipulate it in any way. Neither is the answer so obviously ‘yes’, pointing to the unsaved, whose fate was ultimately ordained by God. Though their fate was ordained by God, it does not follow that God is not for them the ultimate good. Their fate is a result of God withholding Himself from them, and He is still for them the ultimate Good, even as they suffer the lack thereof.

Ultimately, however, the question rests on free will. Free will requires God to delegate some degree of His sovereignty to humanity in order to come to Him of their own accord. However without free will, then it doesn’t even make sense to think that God could delegate His sovereignty.

This might seem to be an unrelated thought, but the answer to the first question rests on whether God can delegate His attributes. If God can create something such that its ultimate good was not its creator, then its ultimate good must be found in something else - something created. This requires God to delegate some degree of His goodness.

I think most Christians would be wary to answer that God could indeed create something of that sort, and for good reason. It requires God to be less than an absolute good for everything. Why then is free will such a sacred cow in peoples’ minds? In just the same way, it requires God to be less than sovereign with respect to the outcome of history and the salvation of the Elect - an equally unacceptable belief.

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-It’s pretty common to hear that creation exists for the glory of God. I believe this is a much better answer than any human-centric answer, such as that God needed an object of His love that could love Him back.
-But if creation exists to increase the glory of God, does that mean God changes? An unchanging God cannot become more glorious from one moment to the next, or be less glorious at creation than at its destruction.
-Creation can therefore not be for the purpose of increasing the glory of God.

The alternative makes that last statement much more palatable: creation is not the cause of any amount of God’s glory, but rather the effect of it - the natural outcropping thereof. God is glorified in the display of all of His attributes, and creation exemplifies each one of those: justice, mercy, and goodness in His relation to mankind; power, enormity, and transcendence in the rest of creation. Creation declares the glory of God (Psalm 19:1); it does not - it cannot - increase it. This is hardly an exhaustive list; any attribute of God can be seen to be wonderfully exemplified in creation and history.
We can thus not be the cause of any amount God’s glory, but are the result of it as it existed before the foundation of the world.

I’ve referenced John Piper’s proof of a selfish God a lot in the past few articles, and once again it is the starting point of this one. To reiterate, if God is good, and Himself the ultimate good in the universe, He can only have Himself and His own glory as His highest goal. This is posited as the motive of God working through history in the redemption of mankind, that His mercy and justice may simultaneously be exemplified.

But does this mean that God is bound by higher notions of ‘glory’ and ‘good’? It would certainly seem so if we are to apply the self-interest model of free will to God. We are bound in our behavior by our knowledge, our values, and our interests. Obviously God has infinite knowledge and thus entirely correct values, but does God have interests? Being omnipotent, can He ever improve His lot?

This concept can be compared to human government in a way: there is no rule of law in Heaven. “L’État, c’est moi” was a heinous thing for Louis XIV to say to modern liberal (in the classical sense) sensibilities, because there was nothing inherent in his own humanity to give him such authority over others of equal humanity. Not so with God. By virtue of having infinite authority and infinite knowledge, God is not bound by restrictions that He may place on us, whether moral or physical, and He is good in doing so.

We can then say that “God is good” is a tautology. Whatever God is, is good, and all that entails. Whatever we say is good here on earth is perfected and fulfilled in God: we say Pizza is good insofar as it is filling; God is infinitely filling. We say that the Mona Lisa is good insofar as it is beautiful and exemplifies talent; the world and the universe are crafted with unfathomable talent: His eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made (Romans 1:20). Furthermore, God Himself, being good, is more beautiful than anything seen on this earth. The very nature of God as the omnipotent creator does not bind Him to a notion of ‘goodness’, but binds us to Him in that our highest good is only found in Him.

Glory can be understood then not as a separate attribute of God, but as a manifestation of ‘good’. In fact, all of God’s attributes - mercy, justice, love, jealousy, holiness - are not conflicting inclinations like we humans may have, but manifestations of the singular attribute that God is good. As Tozer said in The Radical Cross, “When God sends a man to die, mercy and pity and compassion and wisdom concur - everything that’s intelligent in God concurs in the sentence”. Likewise, when God redeems a man from judgement, it’s not as if God’s justice cries out for death but mercy overrides it. God’s attributes are never conflicted; that was the point of the Cross: to demonstrate that justice is not put aside in the redemption of mankind; that God does not contradict Himself.

So if God is thus not bound by values or self-interest, then what motivates God to act?

God’s unchanging nature (Malachi 3:6) and total sovereignty mean that He is not constrained by, and exists outside of, time - in that there is no past, present, or future to God (2 Peter 3:8), and is thus unchangeable, as change requires the passing of time. God at the very same instant creates the world as He redeems it and destroys it, even though it seems to us that there is a very large intervening period among these. As God Himself is pre-existent with regard to time (John 1:1), so the will of God is pre-existent with regard to concept and constraint. Nothing within time has given rise to God, and no concept or constraint has given rise to or can constrain the will of God.

As Christians, we have faith that “God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose” (Romans 8:28). As straightforward as this seems, the concept of good itself is more problematic than it ought to be: what is good in the first place, and what does Paul mean by good here?

The prosperity gospel as preached by such luminaries as Joel Osteen (above) and the aptly named Creflo Dollar is often criticized by orthodox Christianity for emphasizing the material as God’s means of blessing the faithful. It’s easy enough to renounce blatant Prosperitism as materialistic and fair-weather faith, but how often do the rest of us fall, more subtly, into the same trap?

I cannot count how many times I’ve heard prayers thanking God for placing us in a country where we are free to worship Him. It’s a favorite theme of Patriotic Evangelicalism. But what is this saying? Thank you, God, for a comfortable life where I don’t have to make a real stand for my faith? Jesus says in Luke 6:22, Blessed are you when men hate you, and ostracize you, and insult you, and scorn your name as evil, for the sake of the Son of Man. Is living in America really a blessing in this light? Why would we thank God for withholding the blessing of persecution?

There is none good but one, that is, God.
-Mark 10:18

Many times we read a verse like Romans 8:28 without an understanding of what “good” truly is. And without that understanding, we substitute our fleshly understanding of good. What is good then? Our pleasure. Our comfort. Circumstances. Materials. The eternal might be good too, but what use is that to me now? We thank God for indulging our misconceptions of our own interests, all the while consciously avoiding any sort of more painful but infinitely higher and more profitable blessing that may otherwise be bestowed.

The Bible leaves no room for duality here. The entire rest of Romans 8 sets up a dichotomy between the spirit and the flesh, and the valuation of the self and its comfort is unmistakably fleshly living. What good is suffering if comfort is our good? What good is mourning if a perpetual emotional high is our good? No, good is so much higher than that. Suffering does not bring about our comfort; it destroys it. Mourning does not bring about happiness; it is the very opposite thereof. But suffering and mourning bring about a much higher good than either of these things: drawing nearer to God.

This then is the promise of Romans 8:28: not that Christians will prosper, not even that we will be comfortable - It is not in any respect a material guarantee. Rather it is that for anyone who loves God, any and all circumstances can only serve to bring him closer to God. This, more than any thing or circumstance, is the ultimate blessing.

The phrase “The beauty of the Lord” is thrown around a lot in Christian circles, especially in song. It’s a wonderful thing to sing about, but what is the beauty of the Lord? How can it be appreciated when there is nothing of Him for us to see but His creation?

For a long time I had no idea what it meant to marvel at the beauty of the Lord. I had not even but the vaguest idea of what beauty really meant. In retrospect, my first glimpse was the testimony of a missionary who had been working with Campus Crusade at various universities. He recounted the story of a grad student he met one day, who told him though she was not a Christian, she knew “there must be a God, because math is so beautiful”.

Though I didn’t grasp the profundity of that statement at the time, I could appreciate what she was saying. Math is elegant, cohesive, and infinitely interconnected. Though it’s Simple enough to say 2×8=8×2 and know that fact, one could spend a lifetime on the mechanisms behind that truth. Concepts can be generalized to the point where we get things like imaginary numbers and the complex plane. I recall one day several years ago reading through Wikipedia and stumbling upon Roots of Unity, and almost being brought to tears because of the beauty of it. It’s easy enough to know that i to a power divisible by four gives you 1, but who knew that the same mechanism behind that was also behind -1 returning 1 when raised to even powers? Who knew that the cycle of i, -1, -i, 1 when counting up powers of i is actually circling around the complex plane? Who knew that these concepts could be extended and generalized geometrically so that you can figure out complex numbers that will return 1 raised to any power?

More recently, I have been astounded by the elegance of God in orchestrating all of Biblical history - even all of total history - to one singular object. All of the Old Testament points to Christ. All of the New Testament points to Christ. Christ points to the glory of God, and all of history points to the glory of God through Christ. Realizing this was the same feeling as first comprehending roots of unity - a supreme awe at the elegance of it all.

What then is beauty? What does the beauty of math have in common with the beauty of God? What does a beautiful woman have in common with a beautiful song?

Purpose. Unity of intent and reason for existence and action.

In a beautiful theory, everything that it describes is accounted for and subsumed under a single process or intent, and all variety is a manifestation thereof. Nothing is arbitrary. This is why physicists are after an “equation of everything”: right now, a multitude of (as far as we know) unrelated physical forces populate the theory. A plethora of arbitrary constants litter textbooks, and we have no idea why they are so (for example, the gravitational constant, the speed of light). Scientists as much as anyone else are searching for beauty - looking for the commonality among the forces, looking for reasons behind the constants - for example, the equations that subsumed electromagnetism and the weak force under the electroweak force were a major step forward in the beauty of mainstream physical theory. Likewise, much of the popularity of string theory is because of its beauty and elegance in tying so many disparate branches of science together (though it is well to keep in mind that though truth is beautiful, not all beauty is necessarily truth).

Aesthetic beauty is a bit harder to pin down, because there are so many conflicting conceptions of beauty. What is the purpose of a painting? Of a song? In most cases, the beauty of a song or a painting is self-referential: it is a form of beauty, but only a shadow, because its purpose is itself. A certain melodic fragment is put in a song, and built upon - this is beauty in song. The repetition thereof is a form of pseudo-purpose - arbitrary melodies that never lead anywhere make for an incoherent song. Similarly in painting and other aesthetic arts, beauty comes from thematic coherence. Superimposing the subject of The Scream onto a pointallist painting, though both are arguably beautiful in their own right, does not make a beautiful product. Though they are both internally consistent, they are not consistent with each other.

This is the way that God is beautiful. We know that all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16). The scriptures have singularity of purpose - pointing to the glory of God through the work of Christ - and are at no point arbitrary. We see that all things work together for the good of those that love God (Romans 8:28), and that good is God. We know then that none of history - every event, down to the fly on the strawberry - is arbitrary. It is all oriented - the good, the bad, even the downright evil - by God towards good (Genesis 50:20) - the glory of God through the redemption of mankind. Though we mean our actions towards any number of evil things, God works it for good. God is, more than anything temporal, completely internally consistent and singularly oriented towards one goal. God is therefore the pinnacle of beauty - the beauty from which all other beauty derives itself.

To be continued. Coming soon: Taking comfort in a selfish God - How God’s beauty translates into our good.