What is the first thing that pops into your mind when you hear the word, "Godlike"? Godlike Power? Godlike Knowledge? These are the first things that enter my mind and they are what humanity thinks principal for understanding God.
Q. 4. What is God?A. God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. -Westminster Shorter Catechism
This is the definition of the Westminster Divines and may fairly be said to be illustrative of the best strain of Christianity. I want to ask a different question to begin though. What is the first thing that pops into your mind when you hear the word, "Christlike"? The answer to that question is difficult to put into words, just as you would find it more difficult to describe yourself or your spouse than you would to describe a historical person, say George Washington. The reason for the difficulty, in both cases, is that we have made the subject of the question personal. What God or George Washington are like is largely an academic question, which is why almost all theology savors of academia and Scholasticism. But what Christ or my wife is like is not at a distance from me. It matters to me. It affects me, and it changes who I am.
The second thing that I want to observe about this question is that the answers, even considered impersonally, are very different than the answers to the first question. What is Christlike? Well Christ is a man. Is being a Spirit and being a man mutually exclusive? I don't really know but it is certainly possible. Is being a man and being infinite mutually exclusive? I doubt that there is any such thing as a man who is infinite, in any sense. Can one who is unchangeable in his being and wisdom "grow in wisdom and stature"? Apparently His wisdom at least is not unchangeable. Did the fetus in Mary's womb and a full grown man have exactly the same power? These questions seem to be nonsense, which I think reveals that when we defined God we really didn't have any idea what we were talking about.
The theologically inclined among you are probably wanting to object at this point that I am confusing the human nature and divine nature of Christ. My answer is that Scripture never presents us with a divine Christ and a human Christ. Just as the God IS the Man, the Man IS the God. Whatever He is is what He is. And if He is God, not in some Arianizing sense but in truth, then anything which is true of God ought to be true of Him. As soon as you "flesh out" the God, the definition becomes dubious in the extreme. Certainly no place on which to hang your faith or base your whole future on.
This was the problem, I think, that confronted Martin Luther. We could never know with enough certainty to base our lives on what God is like in Heaven. This "theology of glory", essentially philosophy about what God is like in His glory, Luther rejected almost totally and sought to replace it with a theology based on what is certain about God, that is what is revealed in Christ, known as "theology of the Cross". In other words, we have tried to add Christ to our prebuilt system of theology, but theology of the Cross seeks to begin with Christ as the definition, express image, of God.
But the point in saying that God is hidden is to lead us to recognize that this is exactly the way God intends it to be. He does not want to be known as he is "in heaven," in his mere "almightiness" or even merely as "the God of predestination." He wants to be known as the God in the manger or at his mother's breasts, the God who suffered and died and rose again. His almightiness, his unchangeability, the threat of predestination-all these things are "masks" which God wears, so to speak, to drive us to look elsewhere, to look away from heaven and down to earth, to the manger and the cross, to preaching and the sacraments. For the point is that God simply does not want to be known and will not be known on any other level. He hides himself behind a mask which is intended to drive man away in fear to a place where he, as revealed God, wants to be known.
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Apart from his revelation in Christ, God is hidden. We have, ultimately, no means for penetrating that hiddenness. We don't really even have a basis for making an absolute separation between evil and good. Many things we think are good turn out to be evil in the end and vice versa. But this confusion of good and evil, this impenetrable hiddenness drives us to that one place where the hiddenness is broken through: the cross. Because of the cross we can say, "I believe in a good God, creator of a good earth." There God has come down to earth and revealed his will for us. -Gerhard Forde Where God Meets Man
In Reformed Theology, as in Medieval Theology, the essence of God, that is what makes Him Him, is completely unknowable. But the Patristic Theology offers us an interesting possibility.
For although it be impossible to comprehend what God is, yet it is possible to say what He is not. -Athanasius of Alexandria First Letter to Monks
This negative definition of the essence of God then must begin with the consideration that anything which Christ "emptied" Himself of when He became a man, or at any other time, cannot be essential to God. What was it then that could never be taken from Christ? What did He hold onto when He let go of all other things? I think a study of the Cross with the goal of answering this question will be very enlightening for us, but for now I will content myself with looking at the strangest thing that He held onto-His Faith in God.
If any man ever had a reason to doubt the goodness of God, it was the innocent man who was delivered to condemnation and death by His Father's "determinant foreknowledge". If God was going to be good to anyone surely it would be the "beloved Son in whom I am well pleased". Does anyone dare say that the things Christ suffered are good? That they are the gifts of a loving father to His darling Son? Maybe you and I can't say that, but Christ did. Despite being forsaken by God, He held onto His unshakable confidence in the goodness of God and His love for Him. The man who was being condemned by His Father, appeals to the very same Father to forgive our sins. And I will say that believing in the forgiveness of sins is the highest form of believing in the goodness of God. In Faith's most incomprehensible act, Christ, deserted and sold out by His Father, trusts to the same Father everything He cares about. For I do not understand the words, "Into thy hands I commit my spirit." to be a reference to His soul or to some afterlife otherworldly spirit but I take the words as if He said, "Into thy hands I commit my hopes and dreams, my desires, my Love. You are the one I trust to carry on for me when I am gone. I can no longer be the Guide and Shepherd of my Beloved, I trust you to send another in my place, another who is Yourself." If anyone ever had a legitimate complaint against God it was Christ, but He doesn't complain. If anyone had wronged Christ it was surely His Father, but Our Lord proves the righteousness of God by entrusting Him with His Bride.
And this is the sum of our faith, that if God was righteous doing that which seems the very zenith of unrighteousness, deserting and killing His innocent Son, then everything else He does is also righteous. However strange and painful our lives may be our call is to agree with God. To look on our lives with all of the sin and sickness and sadness and strangeness, and pronounce them good and worth living as He has done over all of Creation.
Before the Throne of God Above
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