The central concern of the theologians who met at Nicaea in 325 AD was to provide accurate parameters within which Christians could both understand and expound the biblical gospel. At its best, this was motivated by deep devotion to the person of Christ. Just as a lover bristles when his or her beloved is misdescribed, so it is with disciples who love the Lord Jesus.
Already in the New Testament it is clear that Jesus Christ cannot be rightly known and described without reference to the other persons in the Trinity. There is no “Son” without a “Father,” and “no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son” (Matt. 11:27). Furthermore, “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except in the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3). For eternal life is to know the true God and Jesus Christ whom he has sent (John 17:4). Thus, the doctrine of the Trinity is not only essential within the doctrine of God; the reality of the Trinity is essential to salvation. Nicaea’s statements about the Father and the Spirit are brief compared to its Christological formulation, but they are no less fundamental to true Christian faith.
Just as the revelation of God in Scripture is progressive and cumulative, becoming clearer as redemptive history unfolds, so also statements in the Creed disclose their full significance only gradually as one clause is further explicated by those that follow. This is so when we confess what—or better, in whom—we believe and trust: “. . . in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of all things visible and invisible.”
One God, the Father Almighty
We believe in “one God.” There are “Not Three Gods” (to borrow the words of a title of Gregory of Nyssa). We believe in “God the Father Almighty.”
An old-covenant believer could happily have made this confession, for God is thus presented from the beginning of Scripture’s story. He is the “Father” of all creation. He is “Almighty,” but of course that power has to be understood in terms of his character as “most wise, most holy, most just, most merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth” (WLC Q.7). He can do all his holy will.
God created the heavens and earth that are clearly visible to us. But the visible is not the totality of his creation. His almighty power in creation extends also to what is invisible to the naked eye—to “all things . . . invisible.” As he created us and the visible world, so also he created a world of spiritual beings, another branch of his family, so to speak, of creatures unlike us: angels and archangels, cherubim and seraphim, who are normally invisible to us. He was their “Father Almighty” as well as ours, for the angels too are described in Scripture as “sons of God” who were joyful spectators when God laid the foundations and cornerstone of the earth (Job 38:4–7).
God was “in the beginning” (Gen. 1:1)—that is to say, he already was, prior to the beginning of all things. He was and is I AM (Yahweh), without beginning (Exod. 3:13 15). By contrast, the cosmos and we ourselves all had a beginning (despite what some ancient philosophers—and some contemporary thinkers—would like to believe). The heavens and earth had an alpha point, a created beginning.
Before creation, there was only God. And out of nothing (ex nihilo) or “into nothing” (in nihilum), as Cornelius Van Til liked to say, he created the heavens and the earth.
We have no concept or precedent by which we can either measure or explain the singularity of a self-existent Being. Scripture—or, more precisely, God himself—furnished Moses with an illustration in the burning bush: “the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.” No wonder Moses decided to “turn aside to see” (Exod. 3:2–4). For here was an apparently self-fueling, self-sufficient fire: a fire on fire and yet not dependent on bush-fuel for its burning; it was burning, yet not burned up—an “I am fire,” not an “I became fire” or an “I was fire” but a fire that simply “is,” a fire with the attribute of “aseity” (“from-itself-ness”). The burning bush illustrated the aseity of God to Moses, and God spoke out of its midst—albeit, at the end of the day it too was created by him.
Maker of All Things Visible and Invisible
Genesis 1 is teleological in nature—it has a goal, an end-game in view, namely the creation of man, male and female, as the image and likeness of God, made to reflect him and his glory, and invited to know and enjoy fellowship with him (Gen. 1:26–2:3). It was thus as a residence for human beings, for us, that the world was created.
In 1979, Sir John Polkinghorne, the distinguished Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, caused a sensation by resigning his position in order to train for the ministry of the Church of England. I remember watching a naïve and over-assured television reporter asking him in a demeaning tone how someone with his advanced knowledge of the sheer magnitude of the cosmos could believe in a God who made human beings for relationship with himself. Polkinghorne calmly answered that in fact it was the sheer magnitude and balance of the cosmos that provided the conditions for our existence in the first place. Its size serves us! The reporter was, as it were, looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
We have no concept or precedent by which we can either measure or explain the singularity of a self-existent Being.
God is the “Father Almighty” then. He made us as his image and likeness in order to reflect his glory. This is why he gave man “dominion” over the earth. Indeed, he created a “starter garden” for him in Eden where he could “imitate” his Father by exercising a mini sovereignty over the earth by working it and keeping it (Gen. 2:15). And at the same time he was given a mandate to exercise his creative imagination and powers in order to extend this “starter garden” until the whole earth was gardened under his dominion, and the prayer would be fulfilled: “may the whole earth be filled with his glory!” (Ps. 72:19).
One implication of this original “dominion” (Gen. 1:28) is that it has always been legitimate for a Christian to be a scientist, to probe the nature of the universe, and to apply what he or she learns—to “subdue,” in both understanding and application, what God has created. Adam was called to be a scientist, a seeker after scientia (knowledge): a life scientist, an earth scientist, a biologist, a zoologist, a cosmologist—God’s vicegerent on earth. If indeed it was God’s custom to meet Adam and Eve in the Garden (Gen. 3:8), then they surely had much “in common” about which to talk!
This is the privileged gift of the “Almighty” Creator to his earth-family, with whom he has endowed a miniature almightiness to “have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” as well as over plants and trees and all the animals who share this planet (Gen. 1:28). And clearly this privilege was to be exercised in humility and in gratitude to the Creator because it was all his gift. This is his cosmos after all. We are not its owners but its stewards, ruling it for him and with his mandate.
God has creatively “projected” himself in miniature form into us, his human creatures, making us in (or as) his image and likeness.
How sad it is, therefore, if a scientist is motivated by the glory of man rather than of God, or seeks to reach beyond the alpha-point of the cosmos in order to “prove scientifically” that there is “nothing” beyond, and thus hammer the final nail into the coffin of the so-called “outmoded belief” in a Creator. It is ironic that the Creed’s statement that God is the Creator of all things visible and invisible suggests this is exactly what Scripture leads us to expect! If creation was out of nothing and into nothingness (ex nihilo and in nihilum), it follows that prior to the alpha-point of creation, there was and is nothing “there” to find. Indeed, there was no “there,” only God the Trinity! And how foolish to think that the Creator of such a universe would be subject to detection and measurement by scientific instrumentation or mathematical formulae! So, were the unbelieving scientist to rejoice in confronting the Christian with “I have been to the beginning, and there was nothing there,” the believer’s response would surely be a quiet, “I told you so, but you did not hear me; the Bible says so, but you would not listen.”
What the theology of the Creed here teaches us to reject is not “science” as such but the false philosophy of “scientism,” which holds that everything is reducible to
mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology, plus time and chance.
It has often been held that the right “hermeneutic” for interpreting the Book of Nature grew out of the Reformation’s employment of a right hermeneutic for interpreting the Book of Scripture. As a result, we twenty-first-century Christians have a fuller grasp of the Creed’s words than was available to the theologians who originally wrote them. Now, thanks to space travel, and the employment of appropriate “hermeneutical” tools (like the Hubble and other telescopes), we are told that the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years in diameter. (The unobservable—well, no one knows—apparently scientists would still love to discover its shape!) When we view this through the lenses of the biblical telescope, we echo David:
O LORD, our LORD,
how majestic is your name . . .
You have set your glory [not only in, but] above the
heavens . . .
When I look at your heavens [they are his not ours!],
the work
of your fingers [for Yahweh, creation is merely “finger
exercise”!] . . .
what is man that you are mindful of him?
(Ps. 8:1, 3–4)
Thus we confess with Paul, “Your invisible attributes . . . eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” (Rom. 1:20). As Professor John Murray noted, wryly contradicting the earth-bound philosophy of Immanuel Kant, “Phenomena disclose the noumena of God’s transcendent perfection and specific divinity.”
God thus shows himself to be “Almighty.” Of course, cynics like to ask, “Can he then create a stone too heavy for himself to lift?” But in doing so they miss the internal logic of the Creed’s statement. The “omni-” attributes of God are attributes of God, whose purposes and acts are consistent with the nature and logic of his own being. He does all his holy will. He does not do the inherently contradictory.
We draw the appropriate conclusion from our observation of this vast and magnificent cosmos that God the Father, the “Maker of heaven and earth,” is indeed “Almighty” (Rom. 1:20). We also feel that his goodness and his ability to create and sustain the beautiful as well as the true are admirable to the point of being breathtaking. And so we join David and ask in wonder, “what is man . . . that you care for him?” (Ps. 8:4).
But there is a further profound truth enshrined in Nicaea’s words. The Almighty brought into being this amazing space-time continuum ex nihilo. But the One who lies “beyond, before, and behind” creation (to speak from our human perspective) is not only an Almighty Creator; he is also a personal God. He is “the Father Almighty.”
Father
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century atheists and agnostics argued that belief in divine fatherhood was simply a form of “projectionism”—projecting on to a god of our imagination a subjective and deep-seated psychological need for a “father figure.” But in fact, Scripture presents the “projection” the other way round: God has creatively “projected” himself in miniature form into us, his human creatures, making us in (or as) his image and likeness. We are his children because he is our Father. We do need him, but as Augustine eventually realized, this is because he has created us for himself, and therefore our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him. And because he is a “Father Almighty,” Christians are able to sing “This is my Father’s world.” We are secure in his almighty reign in all the providences of life.
This is what uniquely impressed God’s ancient people. He was “mindful of” and had a “care for” the lowly son of man (Ps. 8:3–4). This covenanted loving-kindness in turn led them progressively to understand what is similarly progressively unfolded in the Creed. God was not only “Father” as the universal Creator (implied in Heb. 12:9, God is the “Father of spirits”; according to James 1:17, God is the “Father of lights”). He was, in a special sense, a covenant sense, their Father. He had rescued them from Egyptian bondage and, like a father carrying his son from danger to safety and rest, he had carried them through the sea and the wilderness (Exod. 4:22–23; Deut. 1:31): “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos. 11:1). And so they could confess, “as a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him” (Ps. 103:13; cf. Prov. 3:12–13; Isa. 63:16; Mal. 1:6; 3:17). On rare occasions—as in the case of David—this fatherhood was expressed in more intimate and individual terms (2 Sam. 7:14; Ps. 89:26).
As the Nicaean fathers distilled the biblical story, like that story itself, they lead us on further. For unitarians also speak about “God Almighty” as Father as well as Creator. And it seems to be normative in all brands of Western unitarianism that the one “must have” attribute of God is . . . the love of a father. But there is a twofold incoherence here.
The first is existential and is frequently unmasked by the question, “If you truly believed in a ‘God who is a loving Father,’ why do you not seek to know him and to love him in return with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Yet where is the evidence of this in your life?”
The second incoherence is theological: the unitarian “God” has nobody to love, no “other” to whom he can express himself in any meaningful way, indeed nothing to love except his unitary (and by implication “lonely”!) self. He is the prisoner of an eternal self-love, an inescapable divine narcissism, which (eventually!) makes him realize that he needs a creation if his love is ever to be fulfilled. For in its very nature love is other-directed, not only self-directed.
In glorious contrast, the Creed leads us through its introductory confession that we believe in “God the Father Almighty” to the realization that while this is the testimony of the Old Testament, it is not in fact a description of a unitarian deity but of the first person of the “three-person’d God” (John Donne). Yes, “the LORD our God, the LORD is one” (Deut. 6:4). And already, from the opening chapter of the Bible, God’s people were given hints of the truth that would later fully emerge in Jesus’s announcement in Matthew 28:18–20. As B. B. Warfield noted, earlier biblical revelation was like “a chamber richly furnished but dimly lighted.” Now that the light has been “switched on” in Christ, the theological furniture that had always been present becomes clear (Heb. 1:1ff). So “the Father Almighty” refers not only to God as divine Creator, but also to the fact that this Father is the Father of his Eternal Son in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. He is the first person of the Trinity.
We seek to understand God’s revelation as far as its ultimate borders, and we need the wisdom to know when we have reached them and make sure we go no further.
The Trinity is the foundational mystery of God, and the ultimate mystery to us. But it would be arrogance on our part if we assumed the Creator of this vast cosmos,
of all things visible and invisible, was reducible to our understanding. Moreover, believers discover that it is in the light of this mystery that we see things more clearly:
“all now mysterious shall be bright at last” (Katharina von Schlegel’s hymn, “Be Still My Soul”). We seek to understand God’s revelation as far as its ultimate borders, and we need the wisdom to know when we have reached them and make sure we go no further. But the marvel is that, when we reach those borders where attempts at further understanding create only headaches, we find ourselves standing on the theological shoreline gazing out at a glorious trinitarian ocean of the Divine Being who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the One Lord who has created, guarded, and redeemed us. We thus bow in “wonder, love, and praise” (Charles Wesley’s hymn, “Love Divine, All Loves Excelling”). Just as the Sun blinds those who dare to gaze directly into it, and yet we see everything in its illuminating light, so the mystery of the Holy Trinity sheds light on all other mysteries. Augustine was right: “In no other subject is error more dangerous, or inquiry more laborious, or the discovery of truth more rewarding” (On the Trinity I. 3). And how gloriously rewarding it is to know, trust, and begin to love the persons of the Trinity, and be led by the Spirit, through the Son, to know the Father. It is, indeed, “eternal life” (John 17:3).
Among much that could be said about this (after all, what tomes have been written on the Trinity!), one stands out. God the Father who created all things outside
of himself has had from all eternity an inner personal life of fellowship with his Son and Spirit. His essential attributes and his tri-personal characteristics have had full, infinite, divinely satisfying and glorious expression in his own life.
The early fathers of the church expressed this in a neat Latin tag: opera trinitatis ad intra indivisa sunt—the internal works/activities of the three persons of the Trinity within the Trinity are never exclusive to any one person. Father, Son, and Spirit are mutually engaged in the inner life of God. There is an ineffably glorious interconnection and intercommunication which the Father Almighty enjoys with his Son and Spirit. But to this maxim another was added: opera trinitatis ad extra indivisa
sunt—in all of God’s external actions (creation, providence, redemption, consummation) all three persons are engaged.
This is a permanent principle of God’s activity. But, as with other elements in divine revelation, it becomes particularly clear at certain points. In the act of creation,
the Father speaks and brings things into being through his Word (Gen. 1:3, 6, 9, etc.), creating order and fullness out of the formlessness and emptiness of the original created stuff, and not least in the creation of man, by the Spirit (1:2; 2:7). The Father redeems his people from Egypt, providing water from the Rock (which was Christ the Son; Exod. 17:6; 1 Cor. 10:4). But he did so through the Spirit (Isa. 63:9–14), whom they resisted and grieved (Isa. 63:9–14). In the incarnation, baptism, ministry, passion, resurrection, and ascension of our Lord, the Father and the Spirit are also present and active.
Within this context, we find the personal appropriations of each of the three persons. If Father, Son, and Spirit are together engaged in all divine operations, it is also true that in every operation each person enjoys a distinctive role: The Father plans, the Son effects, the Spirit applies and completes. This is why John Calvin wrote of the vast delight he found in a statement of Gregory Nazianzus: “I cannot think on the one without quickly being encircled by the splendor of the three; nor can I discern the three without being straightway carried back to the one” (John Calvin, Institutes 1:12, citing Gregory’s On Holy Baptism xl.41). But as we think of the three, we begin to appreciate that there are dimensions in our fellowship with God in which we have communion with each person in a unique way.
We are all instinctively aware of this, even if we rarely articulate it. Thus, for example: a shy young student for the ministry leads in prayer for the first time in a church service. He is, understandably, nervous. He begins well by praising the Heavenly Father. But seconds later he gives him thanks “that you came to die for us on the cross.” It is a nervous slip! He did not mean to commit the heresy known technically as “Patripassianism.” He should have praised the Father for sending the Son to die on the cross, not for dying on the cross himself. For not the Father, but only the Son, died on the cross.
We thus instinctively sense that in our communion with all three persons of the Godhead, we enjoy communion in and worship of each person distinctly—and yet never exclusively, since in every aspect of God’s activity towards us each person is distinctively engaged.
As the Creed continues, it becomes clear that it is in and through the work of his Son that we are now able to call God our Father. This is profoundly satisfying intellectually and stabilizing existentially. So we ought not to rush on past it too quickly.
Knowing God as our own Father is intellectually satisfying. For while we do not know everything about everything or even everything about anything, we know what is most important about all things. They are created realities, not unexplained accidents; and it is our Father who has created them. Since this is our Father’s world, we his children have the privilege of exploring everything he has made and using wisely all the resources he has planted in his creation for us to discover and enjoy. This is the true “dominion” for which we were created as his image and likeness (Gen. 1:26–28). Such knowledge of God is also existentially stabilizing. Since it is our Father who is the Creator (and by implication the Sustainer) of all things, we can rest secure in his world:
God who made the earth,
The air, the sky, the sea,
Who gave the light its birth,
Careth for me. (Sarah Rhodes)
Thus the opening words of the Nicene Creed become the foundation for a life of trust and quiet poise even in a fallen world. For if you are a Christian, the Almighty
Creator of all things both visible and invisible is in fact your Father. This is the mystery the Son reveals and the Spirit confirms. And it is the joy into which Jesus Christ
brings us when he reassures us that this God, the Almighty, the Creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible, is the Father who “himself loves you”
(John 16:27).
Come to believe this, with the fathers of Nicaea, and the world looks different. And in addition, we ourselves become different—different from what we once were,
and sufficiently different from an unbelieving world to make it ask about the reason for the hope that is in us (1 Pet. 3:15)!