The dignity of God doesn’t depend on what I think of him. Any crown he wears wasn’t placed there by me or any other man. Jesus’ rank was not conferred upon him by councils of people like me. God himself pronounced Jesus to be utterly worthy of living forever, wielding all the power there is. That’s what Christ’s resurrection implies. Many men of those times who had been quite sure that God couldn’t become man and that God couldn’t raise the dead felt that they now had to speak of the risen Jesus as “my Lord and my God!” This solitary figure who fought his way back from the depths of death must have been either God himself, the creator of life, or one of the same kind. Jesus’ resurrection terribly upset people’s ideas about God. Were there actually two Gods? To make matters worse, when some of Jesus’ disciples were praying together at Pentecost, they felt themselves caught up by the same power that had carried Jesus along. Christ’s own spirit (ghost) was now living and working in them! Somehow they had become a new earthly body for Christ. This meant that the one God of their fathers had a threeness about him! According to their experience, the one God was Father, Son, Holy Ghost—three living elements working together in perfect unity. The disciples couldn’t even tell people what had happened to them and what God they were talking about, without using expressions which implied the tri-unity, the trinity of God. But can three ones be one, or three and one be the same? The Jews said that such talk was blasphemy. Yet the early Christians simply couldn’t account for themselves apart from a God who had possessed them in three ways: as Almighty Creator, as victorious Savior, and as activating Spirit. The threeness of the one God accounted for the three parts of the one story that Christians had to tell: the Father’s eternal plan to bring men to himself, his Son’s coming to make it possible, and his Spirit’s working to bring it to pass. The truth of the trinity of God was at the heart of the gospel. If God had not become man in Christ, then the great gap between the Holy God and his sinful creatures in this world would not have been overcome. Then there would still not be any reasonable hope of final victory over sin and death. We would be cut off, isolated on an island of despair and death without bridge or boat.
The trinitarian formula of the Creed is the only one that takes into account all facts about Jesus and his apostles, and makes sense of them. Any other way of expressing God always eliminates something important from the New Testament, explains it away, drastically reinterprets it, plays it down, or mutilates it somehow. Any gods I may dream up must be squared with the experience of the first Christians. The Creed reminds me that from the earliest days it was not possible for a Christian to believe anything whatsoever he happened to fancy. I believe in the Father Almighty . . . his only Son . . . the Holy Ghost—the God of the Creed.
Books by Dr. John A. Ross
