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from the district pastor ...

Rev. Mark Jamison

For the next few months, I would like to do a series of articles on the Augsburg Confession. Hopefully, the commentary will enable us to better speak about God both within the church and to our secular culture as well. To save both space and time, I will not actually quote each article, but will only offer commentary.

Article I is about the Triune God. It refers back to both the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds upholding the distinct personhood of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, while at the same time maintaining the unity of the divine being. The Article also rejects the anti-trinitarian heresies of: 

(1) the Manicheans who were religious pluralists and syncretists mixing in elements of the Chrisitan and Buddhist faiths, and positing a sharp dualism of the conflict of good versus evil; 

(2) The Valentinians, a gnostic group of the 2nd century A.D. who believed Christ and the Holy Spirit are only manifestations of God, not distinct persons of the Godhead; 

(3) The Arians who claimed The Son of God was created, and not of the same being as the Father; 

(4) The Eunomians, an extreme group of Arians in the 4th century; 

(5) the Muslims because they reject the Trinity; and 

(6) the Samosatenes who confessed that Jesus was not divine in his nature, but was a man especially empowered by the Holy Spirit, a kind of super Corinthian enthusiast, if you will. 

Many if not all of these heresies have their modern counterparts. Some famous so-called Biblical scholars including, the likes of Marcus Borg and John Spong, most likely represent the Samosatenes today. The New Age rage are probably the descendants of the Valentinians and the Gnostics. Islam is still with us. Space permitting there will be more comments about the modern counterparts later.

Luther and the reformers wanted to emphasize the unity of the 3 persons of the Triune God. They wanted to move away from the unscriptural speculation about the inner being of God so prominent in the Middle Ages. Instead they wanted to accent that the inner being of God is made known through his works in revelation. It was necessary to uphold the Trinity for the sake of making it clear that salvation was an act of God, and that in our relationship with the Triune God, it is God who takes the initiative. Without a proper Trinitarian emphasis, we're left with a movement towards self-salvation. Nothing less than faith as trust in God, outside of the self, was at stake.

The connection for the Reformers then between the Trinity and salvation is their legacy to us. If you don't have the freedom and sovereignty of God as revealed in the Trinity, how can you trust God for salvation? A part of that freedom and sovereignty is the right for God to name God's self. And if God in the flesh, Jesus of Nazareth, calls God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, how can you improve upon the God knowledge and consciousness of God in the flesh? To reject the Trinitarian name of God is to disbelieve Jesus. We are given God's Trinitarian name to trust and to call upon in prayer, praise, and thanksgiving (Small Catechism, Second Commandment). How can you call on and trust in some nameless being? For that matter how can you have a relationship with a person if you call them the wrong name or don't know the person's name at all? The people we have the best, deepest relationships with call us by our rightful name. So also with God, getting God's name right is matter of making sure we trust in the right God. True faith and the Trinitarian name are inseparably linked.

That is why it is so wrongheaded for some in the church to refuse to call God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We call God Father because Jesus did. Abba, a native term Jesus used of God was a term of endearment implying the deepest closeness and spiritual intimacy. For that and whatever other reasons Jesus called God Father, if the true name of God gives offense to those who have had experiences with abusive fathers and/or sons, what will overcome the offense is faith, not renaming God, as the Reimagining God conference tried to do in 1993. If God's name has caused the offense, only God can overcome the offense by giving faith. In faith God is apprehended on God's terms, not by limited analogies to human experience. In faith God defines human experience, and not the other way around. It is precisely those who have been wounded by abusive fathers and sons who need to hear of the unconditional love of the Heavenly Father and the Son of God who show how deficient such earthly males are. Wounded-ness is not an obstacle to faith that God can't overcome. God doesn't need our language games, to overcome all the things that are offensive to the old sinful self. It is also ludicrous to imply, as the rejection of the Trintarian name does, that there weren't people abused by males in the first century A.D. or any century thereafter.

For those outside the church, Article I also has much to say as well. A relationship implies distinct persons or parties. The 3 persons of the Godhead are distinct, but are in an inseparable unity. That same both/and-ness applies to our relationship with God. God is other than us, although we are in union with him in faith. Therefore, we can't embrace much New Age and Neo-Gnostic thinking that says we are all a part of God's being or that we have the a spark of the divine in us. To say that Christ and the Holy Spirit dwell in our hearts in faith is a different statement than we are made out of the divine substance, or that all of creation and God are made out of the same stuff (pantheism). As far as Muslims today are concerned, the Lutheran Confessions do not allow us to say Allah is the same God we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We know no other God than the one revealed in his Son, Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. God's revelation in Christ and how the effects of Christ work on those in other religions are parts of the hidden mystery of God. What is revealed to Christians is to proclaim and do evangelism with sensitivity and understanding to other religions. Only dialogue with Muslims and other non-Christians is not enough. Muslims for example may be attracted to a God whom you can actually call Father in place of Allah, but they would never address God that way.

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