Quote of the Day

…the doctrine of the Trinity says something that does not go beyond the first point but that underlines and clarifies it.  For it adds the claim that as God has revealed himself in Christ, so he is in himself.  What he does through his Son on earth reveals what he is like from eternity to eternity.  His revelation in the gospel tells us the ultimate truth about God's being and nature, or else it is not authentic revelation at all.  The love of the Father sending, empowering, guiding, and finally vindicating his Son, the love of the Son, coming, obeying, suffering, dying, are particular historical expressions of the love that eternally flows between Father and Son at the heart of the life of God.  The complex of relationships between Father, Son and Spirit are not just the means by which God communicates with us, they are an essential part of the content of that communication.  They are not just how he speaks, but part of what he says.  If these relationships are not of eternal significance, then the gospel itself is not of eternal significance.  That God not only acts in history as Father, Son and Spirit, but that he is in himself Father, Son and Spirit is the doctrine of the immanent or essential Trinity.

Thomas Smail

Quote of the Day

…in prayer the goal of the work of Son and Spirit is to introduce us to the Father and to establish us in fellowship with him.  So it follows from the nature of the gospel and life of the God it reveals that Christian prayer is properly and characteristically addressed to the Father.  What it says could not be said from the Son and the Spirit, but what both Son and Spirit have taught it to say is 'Our Father.  IF we do not find that right and natural, we need to ask ourselves why.  There is a type of protestant prayer that concentrates in an unhealthy way on Jesus, and that can easily become familiar and sentimental, because it has forgotten who Jesus is - the only Son of and the only way to the Father.  There is a Jesuology that can lavish an all too human love on an all too human Jesus and banish God to such remote transcendence, that we are back with the idea that we have to cling to a loving Jesus to keep us  right with a remote and probably angry God.  There is equally a prayer that concentrates on the Holy Spirit and the gifts and blessings he can bestow in a way that forgets that these things matter only when we use them to witness to the Son and to serve the Father in amore effective obedience.  To pray to Jesus rather than through him, to the Spirit rather than in him, as the established habit of our prayer, is to betray a doubt about our relationship to the Father.

Prayer is through Christ….in John 16..."I do not say I will ask the Father on your behalf."  He will not go instead of us, we are to come ourselves because the way is open.  Yet it is immediately clear that our ability to do so is entirely dependent on Christ and our relationship to him.  We do not come by ourselves, but it is we ourselves who come through him.  The same idea of mediation is implied in Hebrews 4:16.  Because he has gone into the holiest of all as High Priest we can "approach the throne of grace with confidence"…….It was into all this that Christ initiated his disciples when he said, "When you pray, say Abba,"…

 Thomas Smail

From his book, "The Forgotten Father"

Quote of the Day

In the new Testament, as understood in the mainstream of Christian tradition, we meet the same God three times.  First of all we meet him in the Father, whom Jesus prayed to and obeyed, at whose bidding he came, lived, suffered and died, by whose hand he was raised from the dead.  But in Jesus Christ himself, we encounter the same divine love and power appearing personally among us as our fellowman.  God is now not only exalted in heaven but made man on earth.  The acts of Jesus are the acts of God, the words of Jesus are the words of God, the suffering of Jesus is the self-sacrifice of God, the person of Jesus is the person of God, so that the confession of the Church echoes the confession of Thomas (John 20:28) and addresses not the Father in heaven but the risen human Jesus, "My Lord and my God".  But with Jesus ascended there comes according to his promise allos Parakletos, "Another of the same kind of Advocate Counselor."  The Holy Spirit who keeps on relating Christians to Christ and the Father, and then to one another, is himself God, God at work in and among men.  He does not hand us over to another, but in this other he keeps on coming to us himself.

- Thomas Smail

Quote of the Day

God the Father "has been regularly and ritually confessed, but his being and work as Father has been out of the centre of concern.  It is of course true that in recent years there has been a great deal of concentration of God.  It has, however, been a mainly apologetic concern, about the basis, possiblitity and meaning of speaking about God at all, rather than a properly dogmatic discussion with in the Christian family on the basis of shared faith about he nature and character of the God who in Christ has revealed himself to his people as Father, as well as Son and spirit.  The question about God that people have been asking has been whether he exists rather than who he is.  

Thomas Smail

Quote of the Day

…we have had in recent years a Jesus movement and a charismatic movement.  The one has almost disappeared and the other is threatening to run out of steam, perhaps because each is in a different way inadequate to the gospel, which his basically a Father movement.   It is not first a Jesuology (a doctrine about Jesus) or a pneumatology (a doctrine about the Spirit) but it is a theology or even a patrology - a doctrine about God the Father.  It starts not with the cross of Jesus or with the gift of the Spirit, but with the Father who so loved the World that he gave his Son in his Spirit.

Thomas Smail

Quote of the Day

One admires Christ according to aesthetic categories as an aesthetic genius, calls him the greatest ethicist; one admires his going to his death as a heroic sacrifice for his ideas.  Only one thing one doesn't do: one doesn't take him seriously.  That is, one doesn't bring the center of his or her own life into contact with the claim of Christ to speak the revelation of God and to be that revelation.  One maintains  a distance between himself or herself and the word of Christ, and allows no serious encounter to take place.  I can doubtless live with or without Jesus as a religious genius, as an ethicist, as a gentleman - just as, after all, I can also live without Plato and Kant….Should, however, there be something in Christ that claims my life entirely with the full seriousness that here God himself speaks and if the word of God once became present only in Christ, then Christ is not only relative but absolute, urgent significance for me…understanding Christ means taking Christ seriously.  Understanding this claim means taking seriously his absolute claim on our commitment.  And it is now of importance for us to clarify the seriousness of this matter and to extricate Christ from the secularization process in which he has been incorporated since the Enlightenment.

 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Quote Of The Day

In our own day, we have a theoretical Trinitarianism, but in many instances we have a practical Unitarianism.  For instance, there are many churches where the person and work of Christ are given such focus that all thought of the Father and the Holy Spirit is removed.  These churches seem to have as their creed, 'Jesus is all that I need.'  Of course, these churches affirm that they believe in the Father and the Spirit, but for all practical purposes, they are Unitarian in their religious behavior.  Theirs is a Unitarianism of the second person.  At the same time, in the past century, there probably have been more books written on the person and work of the Holy Spirit than were written in the first nineteen centuries of the Christian church.  This is a direct result of the charismatic movement and Pentecostalism, which give so much attention to the Holy Spirit.  Please don't misunderstand.  I think it is a wonderful thing that the church has been awakened to the power and the presence of the Holy Spirit.  We need that.  But we need to be careful that we don't slip into a practical Unitarianism of the third person, because the Scripture shows that the work of God is Trinitarian in every dimension.

R. C. Sproul