Tolle Lege: Father, Son, & Holy Spirit

Sometimes it’s nice to read a book when you leave unimpressed with the writing style and creativity of the author. I don’t think Ware a person personally devoid of creativity; I think he was very purposeful in his writing style. While many are looking for creative and innovative ways of expressing the Trinity (The Shack) it is refreshing to read a simple, biblical, historical, traditional, and creedal expression of the Trinity. Ware’s Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is written such that the ordinary layman will have no problems digesting it.

And the three members of the Godhead work together in harmony. Not in unison, but in harmony. “Unison” expresses a form of unity, yet it has no texture and richness. “Harmony,” however, communicates the idea of unified expression but only through differing yet complementary parts. You have different voices in different pitches. One carries the melody, but just one. Others carry the strains of harmony to fill out and complement the melody. If you think that only one part matters, you are sorely mistaken. For again, to achieve the kind of textured and rich unity that harmony accomplishes, all the parts are important. Yet each part has to be an expression of the same score, the same composition, expressing the mind of the composer.

The beauty of harmony is a beauty of diversity without discord, of distinctiveness without disarray, of complexity without cacophony.

So it is with the Trinity: it is God’s unified nature expressed richly and beautifully in the three equal and full possessions and manifestations of that one nature, with each “voice” contributing variously, yet with complete unity and identity of nature or essence. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not identical Persons, but they are harmonious in accomplishing the one undivided purpose, one undivided goal, one common work, since they each possess fully the one, undivided divine essence. So, unity and difference, identity and distinction-this marks the triune nature of God most centrally. Just how this identity and distinction gets worked out among the Persons of the Godhead, and what this means to the lives of us who are made in his image-these questions are what will occupy us through the remaining chapters of our study.

To insist on egalitarian relationships where God has designs structures of authority and submission is to indicate, even implicitly, that we just don’t like the very authority-submission structures that characterize who God is, and that characterize his good and wise created design for us. But when we see that this structure of authority-submission pictures God himself – that the members of the Trinity exist eternally as equal in their essence but distinct in the taxis that marks their distinct roles – then we realize that what we have chafed at is, at heart, the very nature of God himself.

We are images of God in order to image God…

No competition, no jealousy, no bitterness, and no dispute exist among these Persons. Here in the Trinity, rather, we see hierarchy without hubris, authority with no oppression, submission that is not servile, and love that pervades ever aspect of the divine life. Unity and diversity, identity and distinction, sameness and difference, melody and harmony – these are the qualities that mark the rich texture of the life of the one God who is three.