Starting with Jesus 1

Starting with Jesus: Part 1

All human beings except Jesus the Messiah can only know God ab extra (“from the outside”). Jesus knows God ab intra (“from the inside”). All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him (Matthew 11:27— a bolt out of the Johannine blue in Matthew). From these two ways that God can be known as defined by the early church Fathers, Dennis F. Kinlaw offers an intriguing exploration of basic theology in his Let’s Start with Jesus: A New Way of Doing Theology. This post is part one of two part review.

With the wonder of the incarnation, Kinlaw presses us into the theological complexities as the New Testament and early church thinkers define the biblical affirmation of “one God” existing (or subsisting) in “three persons.” This exploration introduces us to the term perichoresis and Kinlaw does not even mention it as “circle dance.” Kinlaw suggests, “The term perichoresis derives from two Greek words: (1)chora, which means “space” or “room” and is the nominal form of the verb choreo, “to make room for”: plus (2) the preposition peri, which means “around” or “about.” … The inner life of the triune Godhead is thus a life of communion in which the three divine persons live from, for, and in one another” (82,83).

Kinlaw is not afraid to go against the “religiously correct” grain of thinking. He compares the theology of God in both Judaism and Islam and repeats that the God of Christianity is not and cannot be the God of the other two great monotheistic religions. Without a plurality (Trinity) of persons in God, there is no capacity for eternal love. Love requires an “other.” To write “God is love” must require that God is multiple “persons” (29). Jesus revealed what Yahweh is in God-being and God is, when well thought out, Trinitarian. Divinity as plurality is blasphemous to Jews and Muslims.

Kinlaw argues that the term “Father” is not an anthropomorphism (a human characteristic applied to God) but an actual expression of God’s being. The Father cannot be the Father without the Son and the Son cannot be so without the Father. When Jesus speaks of the Father, “[h]e is talking metaphysics, not metaphor–ontology,not analogy. His relationship with God is not like that of any human son and human father. The relationship between the Father and the Son is the prototype (original) of which all human familial relations are ectypes (copies)” (26).

What is a person? Kinlaw admires the thinking and conclusions of the early church Fathers as they wrestled with defining the inner life of the Trinity as revealed in Jesus the Messiah. True knowledge of our own personhood is grounded in the “persons” of the Trinity. Kinlaw presses the communal dynamics of the Trinity and insists Enlightenment individualism reduced and warped our understanding of what a “person” is. A “person” is not defined as a reality in itself, but only as a being in relationship, in fact, a web of relationships. We can only know ourselves as we are persons in relationship. This truth mirrors the knowledge of the Father, Son, and Spirit of one another in the Godhead.

Kinlaw’s book is an easy read and I’m surely not doing it justice in two brief posts. Pick up and read. Next time we’ll tackle Kinlaw’s fascinating presentation of what it means to love.