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.

Barack Obama led the popular vote by 7% on November 4. A hefty margin for sure in a presidential race, but nothing at all compared to the electoral vote turnout: a good 37% margin. And except with rare occasions where the granularity of the state system falls on the other side of a close race (i.e., the 2000 election), electoral vote margins are almost always starkly amplified over the popular vote margin. Why is this, and what does it tell us about markets?

Earlier I wrote about Efficient Market Theory and its shortcomings in failing to describe overweighted information in stock prices. The example used there was horse betting, but the electoral college is also a great, and much more accessible example, whose design highlights the way information may become overweighted.

The key to this overweightedness hinges on the fact that the popular vote is not a probability. A 53%-46% spread does not mean that John McCain has a 46% chance of winning. As a matter of fact, if we are to look at the electoral college as a measure of the probability of either candidate winning, John McCain was severely overrepresented in the college with respect to the poll numbers. If supporters of McCain and Obama were homogeneously distributed throughout the country, even a 1% edge in the popular vote would give Obama the entire college. In a winner-take-all system, a few points (the margin of error) away from 50% in the polls and probability of a win drops precipitously.

The exact same effect can be observed in the House and Senate with regard to party control and vote outcomes. Each additional Democratic congressman shifts the aggregate passed legislature 0.45% in the House and 0.63% in the Senate in the liberal direction, according to one measure of such things (Stimson, 2008) - until the halfway point. The single congressman that gives the Democrats control of Congress carries with him a 48.9% shift in policy in the House, and a 34.8% shift in the Senate (conversely, the same is true for Republican control in the opposite direction). Legislation, like the presidency, is winner-take-all, and the only probability that matters is at the margin when the proportion is 50%.

Predictions in the stock market are similarly boolean, in that investors decide whether a particular stock will return a profit or a loss over the course of their investment. They are not interested in how it meanders up and down along the way except insofar as that represents a trend upwards or downwards - at least no more than the popular vote matters to the election. A stock price carries no more information about the future performance of that stock than the electoral college contains about the popular vote: it too is not a probability. And also like the electoral college, these predictions influence the outcome. Buying a stock on the expectation of a positive return will cause its price to rise, just as casting a vote for a candidate will increase his popular vote proportion. Finally, a stock in price/earnings equilibrium (that is, when all information is present and weighted optimally) can be thought of as at the 50% margin with regard to gains vs. losses, in that, according to Efficient Market Theory, its price is equally likely to go up or down depending on news - basically, any news while the stock is at equilibrium is that last senator that pushes the stock into positive or negative territory.

Stock movement is thus decided at the margin, where the expectation boolean is determined. If enough stock is sold at once in a particular company because of a bad piece of news, the stock price drops and the boolean turns negative, which tells people that the expected earnings no longer justify the (original) price - it will generate a loss with respect to the overall market if bought at the current price. But this triggers more people sell while they have the chance, and before long, the negative data has driven the price down to where it is justified by the new expected earnings. Just like the electoral college, a company need only move a few points down from price/earnings equilibrium to initiate a precipitous drop in stock price.

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.