to be taken literally, of a human creaturely relationship, whereas God’s essential being as God per se is not touched nor characterised by this name, nay, He is infinitely above being Father to us, indeed is something different altogether. But what is figurative and not literal is that which we characterise and imagine we know as fatherhood in our human creaturely sphere. Figurative and not literal is even the Fatherhood of God in relation to our existence and world, as we recognise it in the revelation of His omnipotence as truth. We recognise it as truth and within the human creaturely sphere we speak of fatherhood in truth, because God is in truth Father: already beforehand, in eternity—which means even apart from our existence and world. He is the eternal Father, He is that in Himself. It is as such that He is then Father for us and reveals Himself to us and is the incomparable prototype of all human creaturely fatherhood: “from whom every fatherhood (πᾶσα πατριά) in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:15).
The statement that God is Father in truth, because from eternity to eternity, is, however, identical with the statement that, in revealing to us the Father, Jesus Christ is God’s Son in the same strict sense, therefore, from eternity to eternity—and the Spirit, through Whom we know the Son and in the Son the Father, again in the same strict sense, therefore, from eternity to eternity is Holy Spirit, God Himself. That is to say, Scripture does not distinguish between a divine content, origin and object, and a non-divine or less divine shape or form of revelation. But where God in His omnipotence meets man in time and where man in time knows and acknowledges God’s omnipotence, there in this double event Scripture sees God Himself in the arena no less than in the subject of this event itself. It is also this divine Subject Himself with Whom we have to do in the double event of revelation, that is, the objective and subjective event as such. God’s revelation of omnipotence is, according to Scripture, a self-contained circle of divine presence and divine action. That exclusiveness belongs to it for this reason: If the appearance of Jesus Christ were to be regarded as some sort of theophany and the descent of the Holy Spirit as the outbreak of any kind of enthusiasm, then God could place other revelations alongside of this revelation. If Jesus Christ and if the Holy Ghost is no less God, no less the divine Subject Himself than the God from Whom they come and to Whom they witness, then the conception of a second” revelation is in itself impossible. But indeed what this one unique revelation in Christ through the Spirit reveals to us is actually “that the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ … is, for the sake of Jesus Christ His Son, my God and my Father” (Heidelberg Cat. Q. 26).
God is therefore in truth Father because and in so far as He is in truth the Father of Jesus Christ and with Him the source of the Holy Spirit. Therefore and in so far can He be and is He our Father. It is grace and not nature (the nature of the relationship of God and man, already known to us) that we may call God “Father” in virtue of the knowledge of His omnipotence. As indeed this knowledge also itself rests on God’s revelation of His omnipotence. But the grace that, in virtue of His revelation of omnipotence, we dare know Him as Father and call Him Father, itself again rests on the truth that He in Himself from eternity to eternity is Father of the Son and with Him source of the Holy Spirit, fons et origo totius divinitatis. God’s Fatherhood is an eternal “person,” i.e. a peculiar eternal possibility and mode of being (τρόπος ὑπάρξεως) in God. That this is so is a fact that comes to us in the power of the act of omnipotence by which we are taught to call Him our Father. This act has the full irresistible power of divine truth. We say the same thing when we say: it has the power of the eternal Word and of the eternal Spirit in relation to Whom God is the eternal Father. The revelation that God is our Father comes to us—if it does come to us—with the complete and incomparable downpouring of the inner, the trinitarian reality of God. Since God is the eternal Father, His power is real omnipotence, is that “Whence” of our existence and of our world that is absolutely commanding and compelling, and, just on that account, so consoling. He can be, as we shall hear later, the Creator of heaven and earth, and He is that because He is the eternal Father.
We conclude with some explanatory observations.
1. God’s Fatherhood does not mean that there is in God’s being a super- and sub-ordination, that the Father is God more and otherwise than the Son and the Holy Spirit. God, as the eternally Begotten of the Father, and God, as He Who proceeds eternally from the Father and from the Son are in the same way God as God the Father Himself. His being the Father does not indicate a super-ordination, but an order in God. So also God’s revelation of the omnipotence is not something higher compared with God’s revelation of grace; God’s revelation of grace in Jesus Christ is not merely to be understood as a form and manifestation of the paternal revelation of omnipotence. That could only be if, in contradiction to the testimony of Scripture, the eternal Godhead of the Son and of the Spirit and along with that God’s eternal Fatherhood also were to be misunderstood.
2. God’s Fatherhood does not signify a special separate part in the being of God, but a “person” or mode of being of the one simple divine being, of one substance with the Son and with the Spirit, and in His peculiarity inseparably bound with them. Therefore the meaning cannot be that only the Father is Almighty and not also the Son and the Spirit—and that the Father is only Almighty and did not also share in all those attributes of God, of which the Second and the Third Articles of the symbol speak. Opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa. It is impossible to prefer with the Enlightenment faith in the Father-God, or with Pietism to seek to practise Christocentric theology or even a special Spirit-theology without imperilling the sure path of truth and finally losing it.
3. Yet the knowledge of God the Father gained from the act of His revelation of omnipotence is not to be taken as a misunderstanding to be corrected in a higher knowledge, in order then to disappear. For the Father is not the Son and not the Holy Spirit, although the Son and the Holy Spirit are not without the Father. So He also in His revelation is, it is true, not without them, as they are not without Him, but in the unity and simplicity of the divine being He is yet precisely in His omnipotence precisely the Father. If the activity of God like His Being is a unity, it is nevertheless an ordered unity and in this order the reflection and repetition of the order of His being. The fact that we lay stress upon the knowledge of the “Father Almighty” as a special first knowledge of God, and that there is a special first Article of the Creed, is as much justified, indeed demanded by the knowledge of the eternity of the divine Fatherhood as that same knowledge must summon us to see the Almighty Father in His unity with the Son and the Spirit, and therefore also to understand the three Articles of the Creed as a unity.
THE doctrine of Creation turns our attention for the first time directly to a reality different from the reality of God, the reality of the world. This doctrine has, for all that, absolutely nothing to do with a “world view,” even with a Christian world view. Nor is it any part of a general science that has got perhaps to be crowned and completed by Christian knowledge. If man looks at the world generally and from out of himself, and thinks he knows something of its origin, and if he perhaps decides to name this origin “God,” he must yet turn round again and become as a child in order to hear and comprehend what the symbol in common with Holy Scripture says: Creator of heaven and earth. But again, it is not by any means a specifically “Christian” world view that the Creed offers us. The wording itself should warn us off this idea, for it does not speak (in analogy with the expressions of the second and third Articles) of a creatio coeli el terrae, and therefore of a mundus a Deo creatus, but—and that is something different—of the creator coeli et terrae. A statement is here made about God. Let it be carefully noted: about the same God of Whom we have just heard that He is, and in what sense He is, the “Almighty Father”. And Creator is the name here applied to God. Let it be carefully considered whether what people think they know generally and of themselves about an origin of the world is not something