Who Is God?

Welcome to Pastor Recoil’s Parish, where I talk about some things that you may not have heard about in church, either because it’s not quite appropriate for all audiences or it just isn’t something that’s easy to talk about in a sermon. Today we’re talking about one of the big questions in Christianity: Who is God?

Note: This post is a transcript of the video on the Pastor Recoil’s Parish YouTube channel, “Who is God?” presented above.

Introduction & Season 3 Update

As we’re now getting into Season 3 of Pastor Recoil’s Parish, I felt like I had to do something different. I mentioned this in the introduction video for this season but something needed to change. And, after talking it over with some folk, that change is starting with this video.

For the rest of this year, I’ll be sharing my views on some of the Basic Topics in Christian Theology. You could almost think of this as a short systematic theology in video form, as I go through several of the big questions in Christian thinking over the next twelve months. This month, I’m asking the question “Who is God?” and we’ll be talking about the Trinity and God the Parent.

Moving forward, we’ll cover other major questions. Next week will be, “Who is Jesus?” followed by “Who is the Holy Spirit?” “Why Creation?” “What is Scripture?” “What is sin and salvation?” “What comes next?” “Who are God’s people?” “What are the rhythms of the church?” “What are the rituals of the church?” “What is the purpose of the church?” and ending with “Why even bother?”

So today, let’s talk about the most straightforward place to start: “Who is God?”

Defining Deity

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer, so much so that many personal and organizational statements of faith don’t start with who God is but with what the Bible is. I didn’t want to do that though; I think it’s best to start with the thing from which everything else starts.

The core of the problem is that God is the ultimate “other” from us. In trying to figure this out, different people in different times and philosophical systems have come up with a number of different explanations about just what flavor of other God is from us humans, but they all seem to be somewhat lacking, including the explanation I’m going to use. And that is precisely because God is not like us, and we can’t fully perceive who God is.

For me, with my science and engineering background, the way I look at this through a dimensional lens. We humans operate pretty well in three dimensions: up/down, left/right, forward/backward. We can even kind of function in a fourth dimension, time, though even then it’s a challenge for us, since we are rather active in the three spatial dimensions but rather passively interact with the temporal dimension.

If you’ve ever tried to picture a 4 dimensional shape, it doesn’t really work for us. It’s like drawing a cube on a piece of paper; we can get the idea of what it really looks like if we know what a cube is, but the picture is lacking. Here on the screen is a 2-dimensional representation of a 3 dimensional representation of a 4-dimensional cube.

Schlegel wireframe 8-cell
Attribution must be given to Robert Webb’s Stella software as the creator of this image along with a link to the website: http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php. A complimentary copy of any book or poster using images from the Software would also be appreciated where feasible., CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to us.

This is how I think of God. We are three dimensional beings but God is not. God exists in a higher dimensional state and occasionally, like the 4 dimensional cube, we see projections of God into the reality we can understand. There’s actually a whole side of theology that is more concerned with the things God is not rather than the things God is, as it’s often easier to define God in the negative rather than the positive, because God is by God’s nature indescribable.

I should note, I try my best to not use pronouns for God. Our human relationship to pronouns is complex, especially these days, and even though, traditionally, male pronouns have been used for God, it seems like the best way to refer to an entity who is sufficiently different that they are unable to be properly described by human language, God seems to be the best way to refer to God, even when it gets a bit clumsy to do so.

The Nature of God

In trying to understand God, the most prominent tool used is that of the Trinity. The projections of God into our world generally take the form of three persons: God the Parent, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Yet it didn’t take very long for Christians to assert that these are not three faces of one being, nor are they three beings. These three persons interact with each other in a way that doesn’t make sense to us humans, and so early Christians used the ideas of Greek metaphysics, specifically the concept of essence, to try and explain God. It’s certainly not a perfect tool, but it’s the one which works the least worst for us so far, and so we’ve stuck with it, lacking another perspective to explain the unexplainable.

So the early Christians used Plato’s concept of essence, that there is out there a “something” that embodies all the aspects of the thing being described to connect these three projections of God. The Parent, Son, and Spirit are all three persons, separate from each other, and yet share one deific essence: they share the essential aspect that makes deity deity.

There’s a lot of other explanations for the Trinity, ones that use more contemporary concepts than that of essence, such as the social trinity, economic trinity, immanent trinity, but they’re all ways of parsing out this relationship of three persons who are yet one entity, separate yet united.

The least worst analogy I’ve used to describe this relationship is that of speech. The speaker, the Parent, speaks a word, the Son, and the breath that carries the speech is the Spirit. It’s not perfect; it doesn’t fully encapsulate all that there is about God, but it’s so far the least worst that I’ve found.

I realize that I’m hedging a lot here. I think when it comes to understanding God’s nature, we have to. The more certainty with which we describe God’s nature the less accurate we become, because we inevitably lean towards a stricter monotheism than we understand God to be or we lean towards tritheism, which also doesn’t fit all that we understand God to be. God’s nature is messy, because we only see parts of it at a time, but cannot understand the whole of God because of our tiny, meat-brains.

Attributes of God

And yet, even though we cannot understand all that there is to know of God, there are certainly some things that we can understand. There are attributes of God that have projected into our understandable reality which help us to know the God we cannot fully know.

The first of these is that God is love. Now I don’t mean that God is loving, or that God loves, or that God does things that look like love. I mean that part of that essential thing of deity that makes God as I understand God is love. Everything God is about is giving oneself to another, which is part of why the Trinity seems so necessary. God being love only works if the subject doing the loving has an object to love. Love works when there is a relationship, so the Parent and Son can love one another, and God in Trinity can love humanity, but God loving Godself as a single entity doesn’t work. God is, as part of the essential things of being God, love.

Another attribute of God is that God is complete. I almost went with “perfect” here, but there’s a lot of baggage in our contemporary understanding of the word “perfect.” Another synonym that gets used in Scripture is the idea of maturity, but I think completeness is best. God is everything God needs to be. God doesn’t need to grow up; God doesn’t need to go to college; God is everything that God needs to be. And this is what I mean by complete. There isn’t anything that God needs to become more god-ish, God is already there.

There’s really two more aspects of God that I want to highlight here, though there are many more aspects of God that I could describe, but both of these second require a sort of sub-aspect of God that builds from the first one. Because God is love, God also values free will. As many a teen drama or comedy show have awkwardly explored, love isn’t love when it’s required. If someone is forced to love someone else, is that really love if it isn’t chosen without coercion? I would say no. So for love to really exist, it must be a choice.

So the next aspect of God is that God is all-powerful or omnipotent, and yet chooses to limit God’s exercise of that power. God can do anything, yet because God is love, God often chooses not to, because God values free will. When it comes to humans, this means that God’s actions are usually not as dramatic as we would want them to be. We want God to heal everyone from everything, or to end poverty, or do any of these big actions. But we can see even from God the Son’s time on earth that too much direct action turns God into a vending machine and in doing so misses out on God’s nature as love. So, in order to be true to God’s loving nature and respect God’s valuing of free will, God chooses to limit God’s ultimate power and not act, even and especially when not acting causes God suffering, as God suffers that which God’s inaction allows to happen.

Similarly to God’s self-limited omnipotence, God is also all-knowing, or omniscient, and yet is responsive to changes caused by free will. There’s a lot to debate about this: does God know what everyone and everything will choose to do and thus free will is just an illusion? Is there a multitude of different universes in which every alternative plays out? Is every decision just a quantum uncertainty that, until a decision is made, all outcomes are equally likely until probability collapses around the one event? I don’t have an answer to any of those questions. But I do know that God can, and has, changed God’s mind, at least according to the writers of Scripture. God’s omniscience is not controlling, but rather responds to the free will of humans.

These are just a few of the major attributes of God, understood through the Trinity, but now, and for the next few videos, I want to continue exploring the particular persons in the Trinity, beginning with God the Parent in this video and continuing with God the Son and God the Holy Spirit in the next two videos.

God the Parent

I should clarify, I have been using “Parent” for the first person of the Trinity, because it covers more bases than the traditional term of “Father.” While male language is typically used to describe God the Parent, God also is often given plenty of feminine or mothering traits, in addition to the masculine or fathering traits. To use contemporary language, God the Parent is non-binary, encompassing both human genders. Between that ways God the Parent is described as both fathering and mothering; that humans are made male and female, both in the image of God; and that God the Parent is the parent of the Son (who we’ll get to next time, and is canonically male) the non-binary category finally gives us a useful way to define God the Parent which encompasses more of Their nature.

I also have a bad habit of referring to the Parent as simply, God, even when I should reserve that term for the Triune deity as more of a collective. I’m going to try to be consistent, referring to God as the triune, the Parent or “They” for first person of the Trinity, the Son or “He” for the second person, and the Spirit or “She” for the third person, which I’ll talk about more in the Holy Spirit video in a few months.

I understand that some Christians would have a problem with this, in large part because I’ve heard from them that they do. I’m making the choices I am because I don’t want to limit God to just masculine expressions, instead seeking to encompass more of God’s unknowable nature.

Essential Characteristics of the Parent

So with that out of the way, what are some of the things that are important to know about the person of God the Parent? I’m splitting these up into three basic categories for each of the persons of the Trinity: their essential characteristics, their attributes, and their work. There will be a lot of overlap in these categories though.

The Eternal Begetting

So the first defining characteristic of the Parent is that the Parent births the Son. Without the Son, there is no Parent; without the Parent, there is no Son. Without the other, neither person of the Trinity has their identity. This is another of those moments in systematic theology which gets rather circular, but it’s one of those things that must be circular. Parent and Son are neither without the other.

But there also wasn’t a time that the Son was not. The phrase the church uses to describe this from pretty early on is “eternally begotten.” God the Parent has always been the Parent and will always be the Parent. God the Son has always been the Son and will always be the Son. So this identity as Parent is perhaps the essential one in understanding who the Parent is.

Speaking Creation

Next, God the Parent is the speaker who formed creation into being. Later on I’ll talk more about this in the Creation video, especially what the idea of God creating is and isn’t, but for now I’ll talk about the Parent’s role in creating. All three persons of the Trinity participate in the creative act: the Parent speaks the Word, another term for the Son, and the Spirit carries the Word over and into the order brought to chaos.

In some ways, the Parent’s role in creating isn’t all that different from the begetting of the Son. It’s bringing new life where there wasn’t life before, except that the act of creating is not from eternity. There once was a time in which all we know was not, but the idea is the same. Part of the Parent’s identity is that They are ultimately the parent to all of creation, as well as being the Parent to the Son.

Source of Love/Good

A third essential characteristic of God the Parent is as source. I’ll talk about some of this later, as part of the Parent’s continued work is to sustain divinity and creation, and I’ve talked about some of this already, as the Parent spoke creation into being and begets the Son, but the Parent is also the source of all that is good in the world. In creating, God declares that which God created “good,” which is an admittedly nebulous concept. What is “good” for one culture isn’t always “good” for another.

The goodness that the Parent is the source of is the kind shown through the life of Jesus. Good is feeding someone who is hungry, giving clothes to someone who doesn’t have clothes, offering water to someone who is thirsty, welcoming someone who is a stranger or immigrant, and visiting someone when they are sick or in prison. Good is bringing systems of oppression to light through nonviolent resistance. Good is hoping the best for even your enemies. And the Parent is the source of that good.

Attributes of the Parent

In addition to these sort of essential characteristics, there are also certain attributes about the Parent which are important to mention.

Spiritual Being

For one, the Parent is a spiritual being, and does not have a physical body, though there are certainly traditions recorded in Scripture which imply a sort of spiritual body. Older traditions in Scripture see God as having more human features and being more explicitly masculine, though later traditions assert a more spiritualized view of God. I say God here on purpose, rather than the Parent. Christian tradition tends to see the Old Testament as referring to the Parent, generally; the Gospels referring to Jesus; and Acts and the letters focusing on the work of the Spirit. I say this generally, as each person of the Trinity is at work in all of Scripture. As these older traditions about God’s form and features are all contained in the Old Testament or Jewish Bible, it’s probably a better idea to refer to God there rather than using a Christian form of address, like Parent.

Ever since the time of the writing of the later Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures, though, God / The Parent has been seen as a being of a spiritual nature rather than having a physical body. For Christians, the only part of the Trinity with a physical body is God the Son, Jesus, after his resurrection and ascension.

Aspects of Both Genders

I asserted earlier, in discussing why I’m saying Parent rather than Father to refer to the first person of the Trinity, that the Parent contains aspects of both traditional human genders, as humans are made male and female in the image of God. This is one of the attributes of the Parent, as they are both and neither male and female. Given the patriarchal nature of most Biblical societies, the Parent is most often referred to with male pronouns, even when performing typically female tasks, like mothering. Contemporary understandings of gender are rather helpful in describing the fullness of God the Parent, rather than ignoring certain aspects in order to reinforce a gender binary or imply the superiority of one gender over another because of some argument regarding the nature of the Parent.

Invisibile

Another attribute of the Parent is their invisibility. Just as the whole of God is unable to be perceived by humans, so also the Parent cannot be seen. There are a number of statements in Scripture about this imperceptibility, sometimes saying that humans cannot see God and live, sometimes simply that the Parent is spirit and therefore cannot, because of their nature, be seen. This is part of the reason for the Son’s incarnation, so that, in seeing the Son made human, humans can also see in him the Parent who cannot be seen.

Coequal in Divinity

The last attribute of the Parent is their coequality with the Son and Holy Spirit. Even though it may seem like the Parent is greater than the other two, as the Son is begotten of the Parent, the Spirit proceeds from the Parent through the Son, and the Parent is the source of divinity; all three exist as three equal persons in the one Triune God. This is one of the mysteries of the Trinity, something that we can sort of describe but not actually fully comprehend, like so many things when it comes to God.

Work of the Parent

There is more than just these attributes and characteristics of course, but I think these highlight some of who the Parent is. Now, I’ll briefly discuss what the Parent does, which is related to the things the Parent is.

Sustaining Divinity

Because the Parent is the source of divinity, even while being equal to the other two persons of the Trinity, part of the Parent’s work is the sustenance of divinity. This is an aspect of the Parent’s work that is important, but one that we don’t know much about. 

Sustaining Creation

As the Parent sustains divinity, so also the Parent sustains that which the Parent created, namely everything else that isn’t divinity. In Christian though, all of those things which we don’t generally think about: the growth of plants for food, the continued balance of the air for us to breathe, pretty much anything that is out of our responsibility and control is in the responsibility and control of the Parent.

This can take some unhealthy turns though. For one, it can lead us to neglect a lot of things that are our responsibility. Many Christians neglect their care of the earth regarding climate change on the assumption that those are in God’s realm of responsibility. The other side can lead to something like deism, in which the Parent set the world in motion then took a step backwards, like a clockmaker building then starting a clock.

There is some truth in both views, yet God appointed humans to be God’s delegate in caring for the created order, and, while God did self-limit in order to form everything we know, God’s self-limitation doesn’t preclude God’s continued action either. Like so many things regarding God, the Parent’s continued maintenance and sustaining of Creation is a mystery that we’ve only seen a small portion of.

Eternal Reign in the New Creation

The final important part of the work of the Parent that I want to discuss is one that hasn’t happened yet. When the new heaven and new earth come to be in the new creation, something I’ll talk about in several months when we get to “What’s Next?” the Son will hand the kingdom over to the Parent, and the Parent will reign forever in the presence of humans, when everything is made complete and all suffering, violence, and death will be no more. The Parent has currently delegated their authority to the Son, but that authority will return to them in the new creation.

This is a bit of an odd concept to us in an era where democracy is praised and authoritarian rulers are not, but in the time of the Bible, the idea of God the Parent ruling with perfect love and perfect goodness would have been a much better alternative to human rulers who were typically selfish and capricious. There is certainly some reinvention of what the eternal reign of the Parent will look like in light of a world with an increasingly diffuse understanding of power, but for now, I think of it as a certain theocratic anarchy — one in which God is ultimately in charge, but humans will be free to exercise their free will in ways that will never cause harm to other, because all of us will be free of that which causes us to be selfish.

Summary

So this about wraps up the opening video of this year on both the Triune God and the first person of that Trinity, God the Parent. I hope this gives those of y’all who have stuck around a bit of a better idea on the Trinitarian God of Christianity, as well as what God the Parent is like and is up to in the world.

Next month, we’ll talk about the most controversial member of the Trinity, in large part because he’s the hardest part to understand: the God-Human, Jesus of Nazareth, the Word of God Incarnate, the Parent’s Son. Until then …

If you want to see more of my content, check out the links to my right, or click on the logo below my face to subscribe so you’ll know when my next video comes out. Thank you for watching, and take the time today and every day to love your neighbor as yourself, especially if you don’t like them all that much.