In the Greek-pagan scheme of thought, God is the absolute one (monism), therefore God is of one substance with all of creation (pantheism), therefore God is impassible (without passion or feeling) and thus incapable of undergoing any real suffering. But in the Hebrew narrative, God is covenant relationship. That is to say, God is eternally engaged in the most emotive interpersonal relationship imaginable, defined by an endless giving and receiving of love between distinct but integrated persons. God is not only omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, but also omni-passionate. God is self-giving passion itself, and the passion of Christ at Calvary reveals this sublime reality.
Now, then, once we have conceived of God as a “firm of equal power,” we are prepared to understand the sacrifice of Christ as the ultimate outworking of that power. Probing in that direction, our discoveries in the next chapter will be delightfully surprising.
“The way the cross reframes reality is so revolutionary that it will inevitably flatten out all domination systems and establish an egalitarian harmony unlike anything the world has ever known.”
Chapter Nine
The Covenant Negated
There is a psychology that lies just beneath the surface of the anti-trinitarian picture of God, as is the case with all theological orientations. Anti-trinitarianism is a theology of God that serves to formulate a fundamentally hierarchical construct of reality. By contrast, covenantal trinitarianism suggests a fundamentally egalitarian construct of reality. Each of the two perspectives entail, not merely a theoretical idea, but a sociological structure with implications for human relations.
One of the most fascinating books in my library, by A. Okechukwu Ogbonnaya, bears the descriptive title, On Communitarian Divinity: An African Interpretation of the Trinity. Among the book’s many excellent insights, this one stands out as vital:
It is almost a truism to say that how one conceives and speaks of God affects the way one lives with other human beings.
The effect moves in the opposite direction as well: we are often drawn to a given theological perspective because it supports the way we want relationships to operate.
The point is, what we believe about God matters immensely!
Ellen White explains just how immensely:
The whole spiritual life is molded by our conceptions of God; and if we cherish erroneous views of His character, our souls will sustain injury. Review and Herald, January 14, 1890
In this chapter, I will suggest that the anti-trinitarian picture of God is injurious to the soul by virtue of the fact that it portrays God as essentially unilateral, hierarchical, and power-oriented. From that premise, relationships will tend to sustain or take on unilateral, hierarchical, power-oriented constructs.
Subordinationism
Anti-trinitarianism holds that God the Father is “the one true God” both chronologically and ontologically. Then at some point along the way in God’s solitary existence, He either created or gave birth to a Son. The Son of God is thought to be God in a secondary sense and the Holy Spirit is regarded as the emanation of the Father. So then, an organizational structure is evident, in which the Father is over the Son and the Son is under the Father. This is called subordinationism: “the doctrine that the first person of the Holy Trinity is superior to the second, and the second superior to the third” (dictionary.com).
Said another way, God is a hierarchical power structure.
Anti-trinitarianism and subordinationism constitute a theological edifice built entirely on an unbiblical interpretation of the biblical word “begotten.”1 By ignoring the sonship narrative of the Old Testament, which is the source of the New Testament usage of “begotten,” advocates of anti-trinitarianism extrapolate from the word “begotten” that Jesus was birthed by the Father and is, therefore, subordinate to the Father. This interpretation of “begotten” then determines their misreading of Paul’s statement regarding the relationship between Christ and the Father in 1 Corinthians 15:28.
Now when all things are made subject to Him [Christ], then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him [the Father] who put all things under Him [Christ], that God [the Father] may be all in all.
In this passage, the advocates of anti-trinitarianism think they are reading an account of Christ being “under” the Father by virtue of the Father being a greater God and Christ being a lesser God who was brought forth into existence by the Father. But in this passage Paul is not working out God’s hierarchical reality before the creation of humanity. He is articulating the covenant purpose achieved by Christ as a member of the human race in relation to God the Father. Christ is our new representative head, occupying the position that was vacated by Adam. Paul is not trying to persuade us that God’s own intrinsic social arrangement is hierarchical, but rather that humanity, in Christ, has been brought back under God.2
All ideas have implications. A premise leads to a series of logical deductions. My conception of God will significantly play into the way I perceive and relate to people and the way I formulate all of my secondary doctrinal beliefs.
Within the official doctrinal statements of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, we can see that there is a direct connection between what we believe about God and what we believe about the church. As we saw previously, Fundamental Belief Number 2 of the Seventh-day Adventist Church holds that, “There is one God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a unity of three coeternal Persons.” From a theological premise, Fundamental Belief Number 12, The Church, articulates an ecclesiastical view:
The church is the body of Christ, a community of faith of which Christ Himself is the Head . . . . The church is one body with many members, called from every nation, kindred, tongue, and people. In Christ we are a new creation; distinctions of race, culture, learning, and nationality, and differences between high and low, rich and poor, male and female, must not be divisive among us. We are all equal in Christ, who by one Spirit has bonded us into one fellowship with Him and with one another; we are to serve and be served without partiality or reservation. Through the revelation of Jesus Christ in the Scriptures we share the same faith and hope, and reach out in one witness to all. This unity has its source in the oneness of the triune God.
Note the crucial words, “We are all equal in Christ.” The doctrine of the Trinity as held by Seventh-day Adventists constitutes an egalitarian vision of God that yields an egalitarian vision of the church. The flow of thought is beautifully simple. We believe in the essential equality of all human beings as the natural outworking of our belief in the essential equality of the three members of the Trinity.
Premise: God is a unity of three coeternal, coequal Persons.
Conclusion: the church is a community of equals that compose one body.
God as a Heavenly Trio of equal, coeternal persons, constitutes a theological premise that inevitably leads to an egalitarian ecclesiology. If God’s ultimate reality consists of relational equality, then relational equality is conceivable for the body of Christ. By contrast, to view God as a solitary self who causes the Son to exist and from whom the Holy Spirit emanates, constitutes a theological premise that inevitably leads to a hierarchical ecclesiology.
Really, there are only two basic doctrines of God from which to choose:
1 God is a solitary supreme being, with Christ coming into existence after God and, therefore, falling under God. In this case, we live in a universe that is inherently structured for hierarchical power dynamics.
2 God is a relational synergy of three equal persons who are one in nature and character. In this case, we live in a universe that is inherently structured for the equality of free persons coexisting in love.
In short, the universe is either organized for power or for love. And if the universe is organized for love, perhaps love itself is power, but power of a different kind.
The Cross Is the Power of God
Paul understood that the self-sacrifice of Christ on the cross had the effect of overturning, in principle, all the power structures of the world. Jesus achieved this monumental task, Paul explains, by setting in motion an entirely different kind of power, a power of such magnitude that it will inevitably bring “to nothing” everything contrary to it. The way the cross reframes reality is so revolutionary that it will inevitably flatten out all domination systems and establish an egalitarian harmony unlike anything the world has ever known.
For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent.” Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
Paul is employing poetic irony here to deliver his point with clarity. The wisdom of the world isn’t wisdom at all, but foolishness, and “the foolishness of God” is the true wisdom. What could be apparently more foolish to the onlooking world, with its addiction to hierarchical power dynamics, than the most powerful person in the universe, God Himself, refusing to exercise His power to preserve Himself against the onslaught of His enemies?
Paul states unequivocally that the death of Jesus on the cross—which from all appearance looks like complete weakness and defeat—is “the power of God.” Paul is playing with the word “power” here in order to reframe it, in order to offer a new definition of power. He is fully aware that the world defines power as sheer muscle and might, as the exertion of authority over people. And in the face of all that, he essentially says, No, that’s not power at all, but weakness. The only real power is on display at the cross, with God Himself voluntarily giving His life for His enemies while giving forth nothing but unreserved mercy, forgiveness, and love. Now that’s true power, because it completely changes the game by changing the categories and definitions altogether. The cross of Christ has completely moved the goalpost for all relationships, so that power has become weakness and weakness has become power. Reality as we know it has been inverted in Christ. The ultimate objective is no longer to have the position of power over others, but rather to have the position of service under others, which is a different kind of power. In fact, having power over others was never true power in the first place. It’s just that we’ve all been deceived by the allure of self-exaltation, so we have imagined that up is up and down is down. In reality, up is down and down is up.
The world naturally arranges itself hierarchically. Ever since the fall of Adam and Eve, human beings have been in competition with one another, striving to dominate one another, establishing pecking orders, subjugating the weak under the strong and generally assuming that the only way to organize people is within top-down systems.
Why do we so naturally think this way?
If we pan out to take in the larger biblical narrative, we are reminded that sin was introduced into the world by a power-mongering megalomaniac by the name of Lucifer. He became obsessed with the delusional quest to exalt himself over God and occupy the throne of the universe (Isaiah 14:12-14).
Then this mighty fallen angel led humanity into rebellion against God on the same premise (Genesis 3:1-5). The principle of sin entered into the human psyche in the form of a desire to place self over others and, ultimately, over God Himself. Once this diabolical principle was introduced into the human thought process, it proceeded to infect all relationships. This was made evident by Adam’s immediate impulse to justify himself by blaming Eve, and Eve’s impulse to justify herself by blaming the serpent. Both Adam and Eve, by implication, were blaming God (Genesis 3:11-13). Immediately after their fall, God explained to the first humans that part of the curse of sin is that they would now be inclined to engage in rivalry against one another, each seeking to dominate the other, resulting in a general historic trajectory of males dominating females (Genesis 3:16).
The next chapter of the story reveals the beginnings of sibling rivalry, with Cain killing his brother Abel (Genesis 4). Cain then became the first city-builder, making him the founder of post-sin civilization, moving humanity toward the development of systemic evil, which would be facilitated through hierarchical structures (Genesis 4:17). A few generations later, Lamech decided to follow the example of revenge set by Cain, murdering a man for merely wounding him (Genesis 4:23-24). Retaliatory violence soon became wholesale violence. In due course violence overtook the world to the point that “the end of all flesh”—or the extinction of humanity by means of pandemic violence—became inevitable. As a result, God found it necessary to intervene with a flood in order to salvage the human race (Genesis 6:1-8).
After the Flood, a descendent of Cain by the name of Nimrod became the founder of Babel and Nineveh, cities organized around the principle of self-exaltation (Genesis 10:8-12; 11:1-9). Babel then becomes the notorious Babylon of history, characterized by self-exaltation and violence (Daniel 2-4), so much so that the king of Babylon becomes a biblical type of Satan himself, who spawned the ideology of self-exaltation in the first place (Isaiah 14). Babylon then shows up throughout Scripture as the archetypal kingdom of self-exaltation and violence, until it finally becomes a metaphor of the eschatological empire of evil that implodes under the weight of its own oppressive power dynamics (Revelation 14-18).
Paul continues:
For I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. I was with you in weakness, in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching were not with persuasive words of human wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not be in the wisdom of men but in the power of God. However, we speak wisdom among those who are mature, yet not the wisdom of this age, nor of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing. But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew; for had they known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. 1 Corinthians 2:2-8
The point is so vital that Paul is repetitive. He reasons like this:
The world operates by assumed notions of wisdom and power that are actually foolishness and weakness.
Jesus came to the world and revealed a wisdom so counterintuitive to human thinking that it looks like foolishness to us. He set in motion a quality of power so opposite to the power dynamics of the world that it looks like weakness to us.
The universal delusion runs so deep that while the wise scholars and power brokers of the world were crucifying Christ, they were oblivious to what they were really doing. While they were exercising their supposed “power” in accordance with their supposed “wisdom,” they were actually crucifying none other than “the Lord of glory.” If they had known they were doing this, they would not have done it, because they would have realized that their wisdom and power was going to backfire on them and bring them “to nothing.”
At the cross of Calvary, Paul insists we witness the Almighty weakness of God and the infinitely wise foolishness of God! There is a power in love that is foreign to the power mongers of our world. There is a wisdom in self-sacrifice that makes no sense to the reasoning process of fallen human minds. With the world’s definition of power on the table, just one pressing question hangs before the universe, and before every beating heart:
Is power or love ultimate with God?
The cross of Calvary answers the question with irrefutable finality, clarity, and beauty.
How so?
Well, according to Paul, what makes the cross the definitive remake of the world is the fact that the one hanging on the cross was none other than “the Lord of glory.”
Not a created being.
Not a secondary begotten deity.
Not anyone other than God in the highest sense, “the Lord of glory.”
Paul pushes back hard on the world’s power by pointing to the consummate expression of true power at the cross of Calvary, where we witness “the Lord of glory” laying down His life in self-giving love for the world. Calvary is the definitive event of history precisely because the one hanging on the cross is none other than the most powerful person in the universe, God Himself. By reducing Christ to a secondary deity—whatever that means—the anti-trinitarian doctrine of God creates a perceptual barrier that prevents us from understanding the reframing of power Christ brings to us in the gospel. If the one hanging on the cross is even one step out or down from the Lord of glory, the entire logic of the gospel crumbles into a self-serving heap. The cross of Christ puts to shame the lie that power, not love, is ultimate with God. And in so doing, Christ offers to the world a new structuring principle:
Go down rather than up.
Greatest is defined by serving rather than by being served.
Operate by a power-under-others relational dynamic rather than by a power-over-others one.
The Authority-Liberty Spectrum
For anti-trinitarianism and its ideological sibling, subordinationism, hierarchical authority represents the highest level of maturity to which relationships may rise. Why? Well, for the simple reason that, according to anti-trinitarianism, hierarchy is intrinsic to God’s own nature, and, of course, we can rise no higher than God in our relational maturity.
I will suggest that hierarchical authority is utilitarian at its highest level of operation and, therefore, penultimate to God’s highest ideal. It serves its purpose by gradually vanishing from necessity. Even apart from the biblical revelation, which shows top-down authority to be a sub-optimal relational dynamic, simple relational logic quickly leads us to the same conclusion. In other words, it is intuitive to the development of relationships that love ultimately displaces the need for the exercise of authority.
To the degree that human beings engage in responsible self-governance, liberty expands and authority becomes increasingly unnecessary. Conversely, to the degree that human beings do not engage in responsible self-governance, authority becomes necessary in order to mitigate relational violation and its resulting harm.
This is what we might call The Authority-Liberty Spectrum.
Responsible self-governance has the effect of flattening out social relations into egalitarian circles of mutually-exchanged influence, each one contributing their voluntary service to the whole community without any power being exerted by any one person over any other. A lack of responsible self-governance inevitably leads to restricted freedom and the imposition of authority.
In politics, the authority-liberty spectrum looks something like this:
Dictatorship: the exercise of absolute arbitrary power, especially in a cruel and oppressive way, by one person over many. To the degree that a nation descends morally and becomes criminal by its own libertine excesses, it will become susceptible to dictatorship. A lack of self-control leads to a state of weakness in which a people is liable to be controlled by a malevolent external force.
Monarchy: a form of government in which all authority is centered in a single individual, a king or queen, with at least the notion that the ruler should be just, but with the risk that the ruler may become unjust and slide into despotism.
Democracy: a system of government that operates by the will of the whole eligible citizenry of a state, which emphasizes majority vote as the expression of the people’s will, but ideally expressed through representatives.
Republicanism: a system of government that operates by the will of the whole eligible citizenry of a state, which emphasizes the superiority of representation over pure majority vote, representation serving as a safeguard against the majority imposing its will on a minority.
Libertarianism: a form of governance in which the state exerts the least amount of authority possible over its citizens. As a political philosophy that advocates for society operating at the extreme freedom end of the authority-liberty spectrum, libertarianism exists only as a political ideal that has never been successfully implemented. The reason it has never been tried is because it is completely dependent on the responsible self-governance of the general population for its success, which has never been universally plausible. It is discerned that in a libertarian form of government, the minority rich and powerful would increasingly and inevitably dominate, exploit, and oppress the poor and weak majority, with no governmental authority to stop them.
Covenantalism: an ideal system of responsible self-governance in which all citizens live without imposing harm on one another. Covenantalism, we might say, is a fully realized libertarianism. Externally imposed authority is unnecessary due to the internal operation of love. Covenantalism is the vision of the world that was cast by Moses and the prophets, which Israel failed to implement, and which was fully realized in the person of Christ. The good news of the kingdom of God, which Jesus fully embodied, is the covenantal love of God worked out in and applied to all relationships. According to the biblical narrative, the final state of the world will be covenantal, consisting of a universal community in which each one exists with complete freedom without violating others. The covenantal state is one in which complete freedom and perfect love are seamlessly merged as one experiential reality.
Scripture describes the covenantal state with these poetic words:
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. But everyone shall sit under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid. Micah 4:3-4
Imagine every person with their own plot of land, each one a responsible steward of the resources their land yields, coexisting with every other landowner without fear of any person imposing harm. Imagine that each of those individuals is completely content with what they have, and free from all desire to possess or control anybody else’s land or resources. Because each individual is responsibly self-governed, nobody needs to tell anybody else what to do and nobody needs to be protected from anybody else. Therefore, no commonly employed police force or military or governing political bodies would be needed. When people are self-governed by covenantal integrity, no externally imposed governance is required. Stated most simply, if each person is doing what they ought to be doing, nobody needs to tell anybody what to do. This is the biblical vision of a covenant-governed world.
Institutional governments are necessitated by human dysfunction and immaturity. They accommodate the fallen human condition by providing each of us protection from the rest of us. Where there are individuals inclined to transgress other individuals, governing mechanisms must be put in place to stop bad people from doing the bad things they will do if they are not stopped. But imagine a world in which no bad people do any bad things to anybody. In that kind of world, policing authorities would be unnecessary. It is evident, then, that authority does not exist as an end in itself. The moment authority does exist as an end in itself, authority tips in the direction of authoritarianism. Legitimate authority only exists to the degree that it is necessary in order to externally impose restrictions where self-governance is not occurring. The ideal state of humankind is absolute freedom with an absolutely operational moral compass of love, for where there is no misuse of free will, there is no infliction of harm; and where there is no infliction of harm, there is no need for the exercise of authority to prevent harm.
A short and simple way to express the tension at play along the authority-liberty spectrum is as follows:
Love necessitates freedom in order to exist, and freedom necessitates love in order to continue existing. Freedom is dangerous to the degree that people don’t love, and freedom is beneficial to the degree that people do love.
The law of God is the primary biblical case that makes the point about the authority-liberty spectrum.
Restriction or Freedom?
“Thou shalt . . .”
“Thou shalt not . . .”
At lower levels of moral maturity, we hear God’s law speak to us with an authoritative voice of moral mandate, whereas at higher levels of moral maturity we hear God’s law speak to us of a perfect liberty so at rest in God’s love that the voice of authority goes silent.
The external exertion of authority is necessary to the degree that mutual love is not operable between free agents—not ideal, but necessary. In God’s system, externally imposed authority is provisional toward freedom, with the goal being that those who are provisionally under the law would become agents of responsible self-governance. Said another way, God is aiming to bring us to a place where nobody has to tell us what to do and, yet, we do the right thing. This is the ideal to which the law itself points. But due to our fallen condition, this ideal strikes us as idealistic and unattainable. Nevertheless, we cannot lower the standard to meet us where we are, lest we lose sight of the noble heights to which we may attain. We must maintain a clear vision of God’s ideal, always remaining under its critique and striving to meet it.
The authority-liberty spectrum is a delicate matter because we need authority as long as we need it. But God’s ultimate plan, as envisioned by the gospel, is that we would not need it. So what are we to do? Well, we make a utilitarian use of authority, as needed, without becoming addicted to it or dependent on it. We cultivate relationships in such a way as to make authority gradually less and less necessary, the way parents raise children into adult autonomy, and the way couples hope their marriages will go as they mature in one another’s love.
Think about how love works in relation to free will.
If two free wills are in agreement, there is no sense of one being over the other, nor of one needing to submit to the other. Only at the point that the two free wills pull in opposite directions does one need to be submitted to in order to keep the relationship from disintegrating. So, at one level of maturity the law of God exerts authority, while at another it ceases to exert authority.
According to Paul, “the law is good if one uses it lawfully, knowing this: that the law is not made for a righteous person, but for the lawless” (1 Timothy 1:8-9). What does this mean? Well, it means that a person who is in harmony with the law from the inside out does not need to be imposed upon to keep the law from the outside in. Paul is saying that the Ten Commandments communicate to us in the context of sin. If the Fall of mankind had never occurred, the law of God would never have been formulated as a list of requirements. All statements of moral mandate—“Thou shalt . . . Thou shalt not . . .”—assume the presence of transgression. Where there is no transgression, no moral negation statements are necessary. The law is only needful in the face of sin, according to Paul, and ceases to exert authority over us to the degree that it takes on the form of love inside of us. A relationship in which there is perfect love is, by definition, a state of relational rest from authority dynamics. This is what Paul is getting at in his profound yet simple framing of God’s law.
In Galatians, Paul works through this line of reasoning in detail.
Knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faith of Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Jesus Christ, that we might be justified by the faith of Christ, and not by the works of the law: for by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified. Galatians 2:16, KJV
For if the inheritance is of the law, it is no longer of promise; but God gave it to Abraham by promise. What purpose then does the law serve? It was added because of transgressions, till the Seed should come to whom the promise was made . . . Is the law then against the promises of God? Certainly not! For if there had been a law given which could have given life, truly righteousness would have been by the law. But the Scripture has confined all under sin, that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe. But before faith came, we were kept under guard by the law, kept for the faith which would afterward be revealed. Therefore the law was our tutor to bring us to Christ, that we might be justified by faith. But after faith has come, we are no longer under a tutor. Galatians 3:18-25