TO RULE THEM ALL
02 The Core Concern of the Pioneers
03 Ellen White’s Trinitarian Journey
04 A Gateway to Pantheism
05 Covenantal Trinitarianism
06 The Covenant Communicator
07 MEDIATOR OF THE Eternal COVENANT
08 A Necessary Equality
09 The Covenant Negated
10 The Covenant Community
“Is power or love ultimate with God? Answer that one question aright, and we have the answer to all worthwhile questions.”
CHAPTER ONE
ONE QUESTION TO RULE THEM ALL
George MacDonald, the nineteenth-century Scottish preacher, places before us one question, the answer to which, sets the foundation for answering every other worthwhile question:
Is power or love the making might of the universe? He who answers this question aright has the key to all righteous questions. George MacDonald, England’s Antiphon (1868)
What an ingeniously simple and yet profound perceptual lens for making sense out of . . . well . . . pretty much everything.
Personally, I don’t think MacDonald’s bold claim is an exaggeration. It certainly does appear that there are only two possible ways to conceive of ultimate reality and the God behind it. Either power or love, as he put it, is “the making might,” or the creative force, that defines the universe and the character of the God that created it.
I can’t think of a third option.
Building on MacDonald’s idea, I would suggest that the same holds true with regards to belief systems. Every doctrine we humans formulate is traceable to either a premise of power or love. If “God is love” (1 John 4:8), it logically follows that every true doctrine would expound upon God’s love and every false doctrine would in some manner diminish love in favor of power.
Yes, God is powerful. The Bible says God is the “Almighty” (Genesis 17:1; Revelation 1:8). We rightfully employ the word “omnipotent” to describe God. And yet, even omnipotence has its limitations, extremely significant limitations, in fact. There are things that even Almighty God can’t do. The Bible itself names at least four of them:
God “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2), as opposed to will not.
God “cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13), which is to say, God cannot not be exactly who He is in character. God is unalterably true to His identity.
God “cannot be tempted by evil” (James 1:13).
And God cannot save a person that chooses to be lost, as much as He would like to (2 Peter 3:9).
C.S. Lewis explains the idea like this:
His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, “God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, “God can.” It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
We make a huge theological blunder when we turn omnipotence into omni-control. Exhaustive control within the context of free moral agency would necessarily entail coercion. If there is anything that Almighty God doesn’t want, it’s control. God possesses all power and yet does not employ all of His power to always get His way. The moment we equate omnipotence with omni-control, we need to reckon with the fact that love and coercion are mutually exclusive. They simply cannot simultaneously occupy the same relational space. To conceive of God as possessing absolute control is to eliminate any meaningful conceptions of love from our vision of reality.
The point is both simple and profound: for God, love is ultimate, not power.
God has power.
God is love.
And all the power God has is employed toward the exercise of the love God is.
Within God’s essential makeup, God’s abilities serve God’s character, not the other way around.
Love only occurs by the voluntary crossing of the neutral space that lies between an individual free self and an equally free other. If the essence of God’s identity is love, it follows that God does not employ force in His quest to establish a relationship with us. Implicit to the biblical idea that “God is love,” is the idea of divine self-limitation: God cannot control those whom He would have love Him. If love is the desired end, the sheer power of force cannot be the means of its attainment. This is why the biblical narrative portrays God as restraining His power in favor of wooing, drawing, alluring, calling, and pleading:
Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth. Isaiah 45:22, NIV
The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying: “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you. Jeremiah 31:3
Behold, I will allure her. Hosea 2:14
I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself. John 12:32
How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! Matthew 23:37
For the love of Christ compels us . . . that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again. . . . Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, 20
So, yes, God can do anything—any thing. “With God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). But it does not logically follow that with God all non-things are possible. God can do anything except what lies logically outside of the realm of possibility—like creating two adjacent mountains with no valley between, or creating existing things that don’t exist, or causing love to exist in the heart of a free agent who chooses not to love. Or—reaching all the way to the very foundation of reality itself—God cannot be love without someone to love, in as much as love entails other-centeredness. God cannot be love unless God, as God, is composed of both self and other. That is to say, if God is and always has been love, then God necessarily is a social dynamic of some configuration that includes both selfhood and otherness.
And this brings us to the subject at hand.
Turn God into an absolute, solitary self, and any coherent notion of love will necessarily vanish from your theology, and all you will have left is some sort of impersonal power. I insert the word coherent in that sentence, because, yes, you could arbitrarily declare that “God is love” in the midst of your insistence that God is a solitary self, but contradictions would quickly ensue. Without knowing God as a relational dynamic of more than one person, the premise that “God is love” vanishes up the theological chimney in smoke. At that point, another foundational premise must necessarily be put in the place of love, and the only premise remaining is power.
In the pages that follow, we will explore the implications that emerge from the theological premise, in its anti-trinitarian form, that God is a solitary self. We will also explore, by contrast, the implications of a social theology of God, which we will call “Covenantal Trinitarianism,” for reasons that will become beautifully evident as we proceed.
This book is titled, The Heavenly Trio. It is a follow-up to my previous release, The Sonship of Christ, which explored the identity of Jesus as “the Son of God.” In that study we engaged in what