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“The pagan idea of sacrifice is essentially transactional, whereas the Hebrew idea is covenantal. The difference between these two concepts is crucial, in that the first blocks our perception of God’s love and the second magnifies God’s love.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
A Necessary Equality
God is love.
Love is other-centered and self-giving.
The self-giving impulse that defines God, reasoned out to its logical extremity, would necessarily entail God giving the totality of Himself for others if circumstances should so demand. For love to be what love is, and for God to be who God is, there could be no limit to the lengths God would go in the giving of Himself to save us.
The cross, therefore, was always potentiated in God’s future, in principle. Calvary was there, from all eternity past, enfolded in the heart of God, as the kind of supreme self-sacrificing act that would be necessary for the outworking of love if sin should enter the universe.
But none of this is conceivable within a monistic doctrine of God.
If God is a solitary self, love is not foundational to God’s identity. And if love is not foundational to God’s identity, self-sacrifice in the face of evil is inconceivable for God. The cross of Calvary, as the ultimate act of divine self-sacrifice, cannot be logically deduced from the premise that God is an absolute singularity.
But, oh the beautiful realizations that await those who begin with the premise that God is an eternal fellowship of divine persons, plural, who are perfectly one in self-giving love!
The foundational concern of the Advent pioneers was that we maintain an understanding of the relational nature of God. They rejected trinitarian modalism for a vitally good reason, which they stated explicitly. Viewing God as one being projecting three persons would have the net theological effect of negating the divine personhood of Christ distinct from that of the Father. The relationship between the Father and the Son recorded in the New Testament would thus be rendered a mere charade possessing no actual substance. The pioneers discerned this and rightly pushed back on trinitarian modalism.
Taking the concern of the pioneers seriously, Ellen White realized that the overall effect of shrinking God down to an absolute singularity ends up turning God into what she called a “nothingness” or a “non-entity.” Doing so, she discerned, serves as a gateway to pantheism. She worked out the implications of divine personhood as necessarily interpersonal. If God is a personal being at all, then God is a plurality of personhood. She achieved this perspective by insisting that, “In Christ is life, original, unborrowed, underived” and that the Holy Spirit is “the third person of the Godhead.”
So crucial to a sound theological construct was this idea for Ellen White, that she would go so far as to list “the personality of God” as one of “the pillars of our faith,” one of “the old landmarks” of the Advent movement (Manuscript Release, No. 760, p. 9). She is not here using the word “personality” in the way we use it today to refer to the charisma or flatness of an individual’s social traits. She is using the word to mean personhood. She is insisting that each member of the Godhead is a person distinct from the others and together compose one God. Referencing the prayer of Christ in John 17, she said, “In these words the personality of God and of His Son is clearly spoken of. The personality of the one does not do away with the necessity for the personality of the other” (Letter 232, 1903).
This brings us to perhaps the most egregious theological transgression of anti-trinitarianism, and it is this: by reducing God to a solitary self, the anti-trinitarian doctrine reduces the sacrifice of Christ on the cross to the ultimate act of divine self-centeredness, essentially rendering Calvary a cosmic-level pagan sacrifice.
Before we develop the point with detail, it will be immensely helpful to identify the core issue at stake in the cosmic conflict between good and evil.
Satan Is a Theologian
Ellen White distilled the war between good and evil to one vital question:
Is God essentially self-centered or other-centered?
Unselfishness, the principle of God’s kingdom, is the principle that Satan hates; its very existence he denies. From the beginning of the great controversy he has endeavored to prove God’s principles of action to be selfish, and he deals in the same way with all who serve God. To disprove Satan’s claim is the work of Christ and of all who bear His name. Education, p. 154
Apparently, the devil is a theologian. He is in the business of formulating doctrines that have the net effect of denying that “God is love.” There is really just one thing the archenemy is after: to expunge love from the universe by denying its existence in God. So, then, wherever we encounter lines of theological or philosophical reasoning that make God out to be anything less than pure, self-giving love, the devil’s endgame is served.
Paul, too, informs us that Satan operates in the arena of ideas, and that the war between good and evil is a theological war at its foundation:
The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel that displays the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. 2 Corinthians 4:4, NIV
The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 2 Corinthians 10:4-5, NIV
Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. 2 Corinthians 11:14-15, NIV
Satan’s agenda is to blind people’s minds to the gospel, which Paul defines here as the good news of God’s true image, or character, as revealed in Christ. The implication is that Satan specializes in manufacturing lies regarding the character of God. So, then, Paul explains that we wage our war against Satan by demolishing “arguments,” or lines of reasoning, that run contrary to an accurate “knowledge” of who and what manner of person God is. When Paul says that Satan “masquerades as an angel of light,” he means that Satan presents himself as a messenger of truth. Satan operates within the realm of theological and philosophical systems. He is channeled through the sermons and writings of professed ministers of truth whose overall effect is to diminish the knowledge of God’s love.
Even a casual survey of the history of ideas reveals that monism, in its various forms, is likely the most prominent and effective concept ever fabricated for denying love as the essence of God’s identity:
Plato’s Absolute One
Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover
Arianism’s Solitary God
Modalism’s One God in Three Forms
Pantheism’s All-is-One-and-All-is-God
In each case, God is reduced to an absolute singularity and a depersonalized force, absent of relational dynamics, empty of interpersonal exchange, void of love. Anti-trinitarianism is simply a subtle form of monism. As such, it poses significant problems for our understanding of the cross of Christ.
A disastrous theological outcome
The New Testament is repetitious and unequivocal in its declarations regarding the identity of Christ. According to Matthew’s gospel, the babe born in Bethlehem was none other than, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23). Paul states explicitly that “God was manifested in the flesh” (1 Timothy 3:16) and that the crucified one was none other than “the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2:8). Ellen White emphasizes the fact that the sacrifice we see taking place at Calvary was the sacrifice of none other than God:
He who had subjected Himself to humanity was the Majesty of heaven, the Creator of every good and perfect gift. In giving Himself to redeem our world, Christ gave Himself a living sacrifice. He emptied Himself of His high prerogatives, left His mansions of glory, His throne and high command, and became poor, that we through his poverty might be made rich. Signs of the Times, April 22, 1897
According to the anti-trinitarian view, the one who died on the cross was a chronologically secondary and ontologically lesser divine being occupying a subordinate position under the “one true God.” Depending on which version of anti-trinitarianism we consider, Christ was either a created deity, a begotten deity, or an eternally generated deity. But whatever word is employed to describe how He came into existence, the point is that He came into existence. He is not, therefore, God in the same sense as the Father. There was a point at which He began to exist, before which He did not exist. J.M. Stephenson, an early Advent pioneer, expressed the idea bluntly:
The idea of the Father and Son supposes priority of the existence of the one, and the subsequent existence of the other. To say that the Son is as old as the Father, is a palpable contradiction of terms. It is a natural impossibility for the Father to be as young as the Son, or the Son to be as old as the Father. . . . The idea of an eternal Son is a self-contradiction. He must, therefore have an origin. But what saith the Scriptures? They speak right to the point. The apostle Paul says, speaking of Christ, “Who is the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature.” Colossians 1:15. . . . To be such, it must refer to his Divine nature. . . . Creature signifies creation; hence to be the first born of every creature (creation), he must be a created being; and as such, his life and immortality must depend upon the Father’s will, just as much as angels, or redeemed men. J.M. Stephenson, Advent Review and Sabbath Herald, November 14, 1854
Stephenson is simply being true to a false premise and grabbing a Bible verse out of context for its support. Clearly overlooking the larger covenantal sonship narrative of Scripture, Stephenson isolates the words “Father” and “Son” and simply assumes that the Bible uses this language in an effort to inform us regarding the ancient origins of Christ as a created being. He thinks God is a “natural” Father and Christ is a “natural” Son, logically demanding that the Son be younger than the Father, since that’s how it works with human fathers and sons. As a result, we end up with an older God creating a younger God. And that theological premise, in turn, produces a glaring distortion of God’s character when we come to the atoning death of Christ. The result is the most disastrous theological outcome imaginable: the sacrifice of Christ on the cross of Calvary was the sacrifice of a created being to God for human salvation, rather than the sacrifice of God for our salvation.
If the person dying on the cross is less than the one and only true God in the least particular, we have a huge theological problem.
How huge?
Well, it would equate to a complete erasing of the distinction between the Christian gospel and all the pagan religions of history.
That’s how huge!
We would essentially be saying that the difference between the sacrifice of Christ and all the pagan sacrifices of history is merely a difference in magnitude, but not in kind. Following the logic of anti-trinitarianism from its fatal false premise, we end up with the sacrifice of Christ on the cross being the ultimate appeasement sacrifice of history, completely eclipsing the self-sacrificing love of God.
When contemplating the substitutionary death of Christ, everything depends on the identity of the substitute. Our theology—our picture of God—vitally hinges on whether the one hanging on the cross is God in the highest sense, or not. John Stott gets to the heart of the issue with laser clarity:
The first proposal is that the substitute was the man Christ Jesus, viewed as a human being, and conceived as an individual separate from both God and us, an independent third-party. Those who begin with this a priori lay themselves open to gravely distorted understandings of the atonement and so bring the truth of substitution into disrepute. They tend to present the cross in one or other of two ways, according to whether the initiative was Christ’s or God’s. In the one case Christ is pictured as intervening in order to pacify an angry God and wrest from him a grudging salvation. In the other, the intervention is ascribed to God, who proceeds to punish the innocent Jesus in place of us the guilty sinners who had deserved the punishment. In both cases God and Christ are sundered from one another: either Christ persuades God or God punishes Christ. What is characteristic of both presentations is that they denigrate the Father. Reluctant to suffer himself, he victimizes Christ instead. Reluctant to forgive, he is prevailed upon by Christ to do so. He is seen as a pitiless ogre whose wrath has to be assuaged, whose disinclination to act has to be overcome, by the loving self-sacrifice of Jesus.
Such crude interpretations of the cross still emerge in some of our evangelical illustrations, as when we describe Christ as coming to rescue us from the judgment of God, or when we portray him as the whipping boy who is punished instead of the real culprit, or as the lightning conductor to which the lethal electrical charge is deflected. John Stott, The Cross of Christ, p. 150
Human history is characterized by ritual sacrifice. It is not at all unique. Nearly every ancient pagan religion includes some element of the practice, ranging from the sacrifice of money and pleasures to the sacrifice of animals and humans. It can easily be assumed, and often is, that the sacrifice of Christ was merely of a greater magnitude than the pagan sacrifices. I’m going to suggest that it is also a fundamentally different kind of sacrifice.
The pagan idea of sacrifice is essentially transactional, whereas the Hebrew idea is covenantal. The difference between these two concepts is crucial, in that the first blocks our perception of God’s love and the second magnifies God’s love.
The transactional idea suggests that human beings sacrifice to God in order to get from God what He is otherwise unwilling to give. Sacrificing to God possesses merit or purchasing power with God. It changes God, making Him willing to love or favor or bless those who offer sacrifice to Him. In the pagan scheme of thought, the sacrifice acts upon God, altering His fundamental posture toward the human sacrificers.
The covenantal idea of sacrifice suggests that the sacrifice is made by God for human beings, not by human beings to God. God makes the sacrifice because He already loves us, as a pledge of His faithfulness to us. The sacrifice can be said to have merit only in the sense that God, by Himself, in Himself, has satisfied His just hatred of sin even as He forgives sinners. He acts in this sacrificing manner purely because of who He is and not because we have done anything to change His heart toward us. Seen through the covenantal lens, the death of Jesus on the cross is understood to be the ultimate acting out of God’s promise to remain faithful to humanity at any and all cost to Himself.
Within the Hebrew narrative, the substitutionary death of Jesus on the cross is the outworking of the covenant God made with the world through Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 15). What we see taking place at the cross of Calvary is not an appeasement sacrifice made to God, but rather a covenant sacrifice made by God. In the person of Christ, the very God of the universe is giving His life in faithful covenantal love for His creation.
Equality Is Inherent in God’s Makeup
If self-sacrifice is the final act of love at its extremity, the person hanging on the cross of Calvary must be God in the highest sense, or else the death of Christ would be a supreme act of selfishness rather than love.
To Ellen White’s thinking, it is the absolute ontological equality of Christ with the Father that distinguishes His death on the cross from every other sacrificial transaction in human history:
Christ’s position with His Father is one of equality. This enabled Him to become a sin offering for transgressors. He was fully sufficient to magnify the law and make it honorable. That I May Know Him, p. 292, 1893
This is an extremely simple and yet profound insight. Notice that the sacrifice of Christ as a “sin offering for transgressors” served “to magnify the law” of God. And notice that in order for the magnifying of God’s law to happen, the one dying on the cross must be equal with the Father. What does this mean? Well, God’s law is love. So think this through: if the cross was meant to magnify God’s law of love, God must be the one doing the suffering and dying on the cross. If the person on the cross were not equal with the Father, that inequality would render the cross a supreme act of taking on the part of God rather that a supreme act of giving.
Calvary is the outworking of a law, a principle, a truth that is embedded within reality itself. That law is love, and love operates in a specific manner:
Love is relational integrity, and love suffers when its relational integrity is violated.
Love is characterized by faithful union, and love hurts when its union is broken up.
Love is reciprocal giving, and love agonizes when giving ceases on either side of a relationship.
There is nothing arbitrary about any of this. It’s not magic, as if God is conjuring up some kind of effect and imposing it on reality. The death of Christ on the cross is not God exacting an arbitrary price of suffering and death in exchange for His mercy. Rather, it is the outworking of the principle of self-giving love at the farthest reaches of its extremity in response to sin. God cannot stop loving us. If we don’t love Him in return, He will still follow through to keep on loving us at any and all cost to Himself. God is love and cannot be otherwise. God is, therefore, always in the process of being exactly who He is, always in the process of acting out His fundamental essence in whatever form the circumstances demand.
Even if all the free moral agents in the universe were to be unfaithful to God, God would continue to be faithful no matter the outcome for Himself, even to the point of the complete expenditure of Himself. And that’s what He did in Christ at Calvary. When the Bible says, “God is love,” it means that God will remain true to all others above and before Himself, at any cost to Himself, even if that cost is all of Himself.
In Philippians 2:5-8, Paul’s atonement logic runs like this:
The one who was in very nature God, became human,
voluntarily emptied from Himself the prerogatives that belong to Him as God,
so that He might give Himself, as God, over to death on our behalf.
The anti-trinitarian logic runs like this:
a divine being who was long ago brought into existence by God,
was sacrificed by God,
thus someone other than God suffered and died for our salvation.
In the first instance, God is making the sacrifice of Himself. In the second instance, God is requiring the sacrifice of another. In the first instance, God’s justice is satisfied in Himself by the voluntary sacrifice of Himself. In the second instance, God’s justice is satisfied by the sacrifice of another to Him.
It is inescapable that the anti-trinitarian doctrine views Jesus as somehow not God in precisely the same sense that the Father is God. It is conceded that Christ is “God” in some sense, but definitely not in an equal, co-eternal sense with the Father. In this, the anti-trinitarian doctrine is a form of paganism, because it imagines that godhood, or divinity, is an attainable state for beings that are not God in the ultimate sense.
If we remove the idea of innate, eternal relationship from our doctrine of God, we are left with a pretty diabolical picture of God on at least two counts:
1 Apart from a trinitarian doctrine of God, at some point in our reasoning God must be conceived as an absolute singularity of pure ego and/or loveless power. Take your pick, but both options are pretty dark.
2 Apart from a trinitarian doctrine of God, the cross cannot be conceived of as a divine act of pure self-sacrificing love, but must be viewed as God exacting the sacrifice for human salvation from somebody other than Himself.
Or we can break it down like this:
If, way back in eternity past, at the most fundamental level of the divine reality, God is an absolute one,
and this absolute one at some point caused another one to come into existence,
and then, when someone had to suffer and die for fallen humans, this one true God sent forth the one He had brought into existence to suffer and die instead of Himself,
well, then, we are face-to-face, not with the most amazing act of self-sacrificing love imaginable, but with the most frightening act of selfishness imaginable.
Calvary is either proof that God is love or proof that God is a bloodthirsty monster. If God is the one doing the suffering and dying at Calvary, then Satan’s fundamental lie—God is selfish—is proven false. But if the one suffering and dying at Calvary is someone other than God, then welcome to the most nightmarish picture of God the human mind can imagine. Welcome to a universe in which the most powerful person in existence is essentially self-serving.
The Sundering of God
Return to James White’s brilliant insight. If Christ is eternal God, James reasoned, then we need conceptual language to describe the Father and Son that predates their functional roles as Father and Son. So James suggested that we think of the two as a “firm (a corporate unit) of equal power.”
Equal.
That’s the vital point.
Because if both are God, then they must be fundamentally, ontologically, absolutely, eternally equal!
Ellen White then expanded James’ language to include the Holy Spirit, deliberately setting forth a trinitarian doctrine of God. As noted previously, she employed various terms to depict the three members of the Godhead as they exist apart from their roles as Father, Son, and Spirit:
. . . three holiest Beings in heaven. Sermons and Talks, vol. 1, p. 367
. . . three great, infinite powers. Sermons and Talks, vol. 2, p.167
. . . three great powers in heaven. ibid., p. 295
. . . three holy dignitaries of heaven. Sons and Daughters of God, p. 351
. . . three great personal dignitaries and powers of heaven. ibid., p. 351
. . . three highest powers in the universe. Signs of the Times, August 16, 1905
. . . three great and glorious heavenly characters. Manuscript Releases, vol. 6, p. 389
. . . three powers of the Godhead. Australasian Union Conference Record, October 7, 1907
. . . three great agencies. Amazing Grace, p. 150
. . . three representatives of heavenly authority. Manuscript Releases, vol. 6, p. 29
. . . three living persons of the Heavenly Trio. Evangelism, p. 615
Within the realm of God’s own divine reality—before and beyond all our material and reproductive categories as created beings—God consists of the “three living persons of the Heavenly Trio.” God, in all God’s transcendent God-ness, is composed of three living persons, three equal powers, three great agencies, who are one in nature, one in character, one in love.
Of course, this is difficult for us to comprehend, because we are contingent creatures confined to material and reproductive categories that involve being born, beginning to exist, and undergoing developmental processes. We are men and women, that become husbands and wives, that reproduce sons and daughters. We are begotten and we beget. That’s what we are. So it is difficult for us to conceive of categories of being and existence that fundamentally transcend what we are. Therefore, when God moves out of Himself in any mediated form to make Himself accessible to us, there is the risk that we will equate the mediated form with God’s ultimate nature as God. James began to understand this and took a vital theological step toward clarifying the essential equality that necessarily must exist within God’s own reality. Ellen White understood the point with greater clarity and basically said, Think of God as a Heavenly Trio of personal beings who share equal power.
It is here, precisely here, that we have laid a theological foundation upon which to build a beautifully coherent atonement theology, in which the sacrifice for our salvation was made by God, not to God.
Having identified God as three equal and eternal powers, Ellen White was then able to articulate the death of Christ on the cross as an event that involved “the sundering of the Divine Powers” (SDA Bible Commentary, vol. 7, p. 924). Here, again, she has employed James White’s language in order to convey the idea that the sacrifice for our salvation involved a severing of the eternal oneness of the three great powers that compose the Heavenly Trio. Returning to the language of James White, the sundering of the divine powers first involved one member of the “firm of equal power” stepping out from the firm to become a member of the human race. Whereas James merely said, Christ stepped “out of this firm for a certain time,” Ellen White expanded the idea by saying that Christ stepped out eternally:
In taking our nature, the Savior has bound Himself to humanity by a tie that is never to be broken. Through the eternal ages He is linked with us. . . . To assure us of His immutable counsel of peace, God gave His only-begotten Son to become one of the human family, forever to retain His human nature. . . . God has adopted human nature in the person of His Son, and has carried the same into the highest heaven. . . . In Christ the family of earth and the family of heaven are bound together. Christ glorified is our brother. Heaven is enshrined in humanity, and humanity is enfolded in the bosom of Infinite Love. The Desire of Ages, p. 25-26
Astoundingly, one of the members of the Heavenly Trio, who had always and only been God for all eternal ages past prior to the creation-redemption enterprise, voluntarily became a member of the human race, not for a temporary period of time, but for all eternal ages future.
By framing the sacrifice of Christ as a “sundering of the Divine Powers,” Ellen White is operating within a covenant framework, which opens our minds to the self-sacrificing love of God with astounding clarity and beauty. To Abraham was revealed the gravity of the sacrificial ordeal God must endure in order to keep covenant with humanity. Abraham was instructed to cut asunder three sacrificial animals and lay the severed pieces across from one another, forming a path between them. God then appeared as a flaming torch and walked the path between the pieces. “On the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abram” (Genesis 15:18). The covenant involved God enacting a solemn oath that God would be cut asunder to save humanity. When Daniel prophesied of the coming Messiah and His atoning sacrifice, he employed the language of covenant sacrifice, as well: “Messiah shall be cut off, but not for Himself” (Daniel 9:26).
The word “sundering” means, “to split apart, divide, cleave, rend, separate.” And that’s precisely what God endured to save us. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46). God endured a horrific tearing apart of the divine being in order to keep covenant with humanity.
The Savior could not see through the portals of the tomb. Hope did not present to Him His coming forth from the grave a conqueror, or tell Him of the Father’s acceptance of the sacrifice. He feared that sin was so offensive to God that Their separation was to be eternal. The Desire of Ages, p. 753
By taking humanity upon Himself in the incarnation, while yet retaining His divinity, God willingly submitted Himself to the limitations of human nature so that His covenant oath might be put to the ultimate test, thus proving His love selfless and true. Having laid aside His divine privileges and powers (Philippians 2:5-8), God, in the person of Jesus Christ, entered into the full experiential reality of our sin and guilt. “Numbered with the transgressors,” He bore “the iniquity of us all” (Isaiah 53:12). For a sustained period of time He faced the dark horror of complete separation from the Father and the Spirit, unable to see life for Himself beyond the grave. The hope of resurrection was blotted from His view by our sin. And yet He had declared to Peter that the sacrifice of His life was voluntary, for at any point He could have called to the Father for legions of angels to deliver Him (Matthew 26:53). God in Christ was willing to suffer the horrific demise of eternal death, forever ceasing to exist, to die an eternal death from which there might be no resurrection, rather than allow humanity to suffer the same fate. The cross of Christ is the zenith revelation of God’s love, making forever clear that the Creator of the universe literally loves all others more than His own existence.
The entire covenant narrative of Scripture lands at the cross of Calvary for its ultimate meaning. But do not miss this point: it is vital to the logic of the story that God—and no less than God—undergo the covenant cutting in order that His pledge of faithful love be confirmed. And this means that God must be known as an eternal relational unit of love so that when we look upon the sacrifice of Christ at Calvary, we are able to discern that it is God’s very own sacrifice of God’s very own self. In order for the separation of God from God to be real at Calvary, there would need to be persons, plural, in real relationship with one another within the parameters of God’s own intrinsic and divine reality, who could undergo that separation. If we conceive of God as ultimately existing in no relationship at all, existing in the far reaches of eternity past as a solitary self, existing with no others and, therefore, with no active love, it is inconceivable that God could undergo suffering and sacrifice. We are left with the impassive God of Plato and Aristotle.
