Trinity are inseparable," and Calvin, commenting on a passage whose "aim is shortly to sum up all that is lawful for men to know of God," notes that it is "a description, not of what He is in Himself, but of what He is to us, that our knowledge of Him may stand rather in a lively perception, than in a vain and airy speculation." But let us also recall that in this doctrine generations of Christians have conserved indispensable elements in their thought of God:—His fatherhood, His Self-disclosure in Christ, His spiritual indwelling in the Christian community. Wherever it has been cast aside, something vitalizing to Christian life has gone with it. But at present it is not a doctrine of much practical help to many religious people; and it often constitutes a hindrance to Jews and Mohammedans, and to some born within the Church in their endeavor to understand and have fellowship with the Christian God.
We may adopt one of two attitudes towards it: we may accept it blindly as "a mystery" on the authority of the long centuries of Christian thought, which have used it to express their faith in God—hardly a
Protestant or truly Christian position which bids us "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good"; or we may consider it reverently as the attempt of the Christian Church of the past to interpret its discovery of God as the Father Lord, revealed in Christ, and active within us as the Spirit of love; and use it in so far as it makes our experience richer and clearer, remembering that it is only a man-made attempt to interpret Him who passeth understanding. The important matter is not the orthodoxy of our doctrine, but the richness of our personal experience of God. Dr. Samuel Johnson said: "We all know what light is; but it is not so easy to tell what it is." Christians know, at least in part, what God is; but it is far from easy to state what He is; and each age must revise and say in its own words what God means to it. Here is a statement in which generations of believers have summed up their intercourse with the Divine. Have we entered into the fulness of their fellowship with God?
Do we know Him as our Father? This does not mean merely that we accept the idea of His kinship with our spirits and trust His
kindly disposition towards us; but that we let Him establish a direct line of paternity with us and father our impulses, our thoughts, our ideals, our resolves. Jesus' sonship was not a relation due to a past contact, but to a present connection. He kept taking His Being, so to speak, again and again from God, saying, "Not as I will, but as Thou wilt." His every wish and motive had its heredity in the Father whom He trusted with childlike confidence, and served with a grown son's intelligent and willing comradeship. Fatherhood meant to Jesus authority and affection; obedience and devotion on His part maintained and perfected His sonship.
Further, we cannot, according to Jesus, be in sonship with this Father save as we are in true brotherhood with all His children. God is (to employ a colloquial phrase) "wrapped up" in His sons and daughters, and only as we love and serve them, are we loving and serving Him. In Jesus' summary of the Law He combined two apparently conflicting obligations, when He said, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thou shalt love thy neighbor." If a man
loves God with his all, how can there be any remainder of love to devote to someone else? What we do for any man—the least, the last, the lost,—we do for God. We do not know Him as Father, until we possess the obligating sense of our kinship with all mankind, and say, "Our Father."
Do we know God in the Son? There is a sense in which Jesus is the "First Person" in the Christian Trinity. Our approach to God begins with Him. In St. Paul's familiar benediction, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ precedes the love of God. We know God's love only as we experience the grace of Jesus. We cannot experience that grace except as we let Jesus be Lord. Absolute and entire self-commitment to Him allows Him to renew us after His own likeness and equip us for service in His cause. He cannot transform a partially devoted life, nor use a half-dedicated man. Those who yield Him lordship, treating Him as God by giving Him their adoring trust and complete obedience, discover His Godhood. To them He proves Himself, by all that He accomplishes in and through them, worthy of their fullest
devotion and reverence. He becomes to them God manifest in a human life.
While in the order of our experience Jesus comes first, as we follow Him, He makes Himself always second. He points us from Himself to the Father, like Himself and greater; "My Father is greater than I." There is a remoteness, as well as a nearness, in God; it is His "greaterness" which gives worth to His likeness. To use a philosophical phrase, only the transcendent God can be truly immanent. We prize Immanuel—God with us, because through Him we climb to God above us. Jesus is the Way; but no one wishes to remain forever en route; he arrives; and home is the Father. Jesus is the image of the invisible God; but the image on the retina of our eye is not something on which we dwell; we see through it the person with whom we are face to face. We know God our Father in His Son. Every aspect of Jesus' character unveils for us an aspect of the character of the Lord of heaven and earth. Every experience through which Jesus passed in His life with men suggests to us an experience through which our Father is passing with us His