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III

PATREM OMNIPOTENTEM

“FATHER” and “Almighty”: these two first designations of God—each singly and the two in their interconnection—lead us at once into the fullness, into the light, and also into the darkness of the prophetic-apostolic testimony to revelation which is summarised in the symbol.

In the sense of the symbol and in line with what was worked out in the last Lecture towards an understanding of the Christian conception of God, we shall have immediately to make it clear to ourselves that the conception “Almighty” receives its light from the conception “Father” and not vice versa. And that, although it is undoubtedly God’s revelation, and therefore an act of divine omnipotence through which God makes Himself known to man as Father; although we undoubtedly know God the Father in the exhibition of His omnipotence. But an act, and that an act of divine omnipotence is the revelation of God’s Fatherhood. God’s omnipotence is not some power that we might be inclined to regard as omnipotence. It is the power of the Father that does not make itself known to us as omnipotence in abstracto but only as the omnipotence of the Father, and that means—in the Father’s revealing Himself to us. This first article of the Creed and, in particular, these initial constituents are in no respect a playground for Natural Theology. It is not as if we already of ourselves knew what “omnipotence” is, in order then to have to learn from revelation only this in addition—that God is the Almighty and that the name and character of “Father” fit him. On the contrary, the revelation of God the Father is as such also the revelation of His omnipotence, and it is from this revelation that we have first of all to learn what real omnipotence is.

But according to the passages in Scripture where the conception “Father” gets its most pregnant meaning, the revelation of God the Father is the revelation of God in His Son Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Scripture explicitly calls it the sole revelation of the Father. Therefore it is exclusively in this place that we shall have to seek to understand decisively and finally the conception “Father”. Let us start, however, from the fact that the revelation of the Almighty God and therefore of what in the sense of the symbol is called “omnipotence” is identical with the revelation of the Father of Jesus Christ through the Spirit, it being here that we have to learn what real “omnipotence” is.

With these words, “revelation of God the Father,” we at once push into the sphere of faith’s deepest mysteries. These words, “revelation of God the Father,” contain a remarkable contradiction, so far as God as Father is just not manifest to us in revelation itself, or is manifest only as the God Who remains hidden from us even in His revelation and just there, Who, in disclosing Himself, conceals Himself, Who, in coming near to us, remains far from us, Who, in being kind to us, remains holy. “No man hath seen God at any time” (John 1:18). “He dwelleth in a light which no man can approach unto” (1 Tim. 6:16). That, according to the Scriptures, is God the Father. God wants a faith in Himself as Father that expresses itself in obedience, i.e. He wants to be known under the condition that His hiddenness is recognised, to be known in the act of His revelation, which means—in His Son through the Holy Spirit. God’s revelation in His Son through the Spirit is a revelation which, far from excluding, includes within itself a remaining hidden, indeed a profoundest becoming hidden on the part of God. God’s revelation in His Son, so far as we understand by that concretely the—to us quite comprehensible—human existence of Jesus Christ, is, as the second article of the Creed will show us just as strikingly as is in keeping with the New Testament, a way into the darkness of God; it is the way of Jesus to Golgotha. If as such it is a way into the light of God, and is therefore really God’s revelation, then that is because this Jesus on “the third day rose again from the dead, He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God.” But that is said of Jesus the Crucified. Actually the hidden God here becomes manifest; we are here led right to the limit of what we can conceive in order that here (here, where Jesus Himself cries: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”) we may catch the words, “Behold, your God!” God the Father, as Father of Jesus Christ, is He Who leads His Son into hell and out again. And in so far as He, as Father of Jesus Christ, gives Himself through the Holy Spirit to be known as our Father, we learn that we can follow Christ only by taking up our Cross, that our Baptism in His name is Baptism into His death and that we must die with Him in order to live with Him (Rom. 6:3 f.), that our life, as the life of all His own, is a life that is hid with Him in God (Col. 3:3). Here, too, we are led right to the frontier where our appropriate attitude can only be an obedience that marches out into the darkness and a faith that steps out of the darkness into the light. Not more and not less than the Lord over life and death becomes manifest to us in the revelation of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. This Lord over life and death is God the Father.

And it is just His lordship over life and death that is the omnipotence of God the Father. This is as different from the idea of an infinite potentiality as our real life is from one of our dreams. For infinite potentiality in itself and as idea is an empty conception under which no one has ever yet seriously imagined anything, because it simply cannot be done. But the omnipotence of the Father, revealed in the revelation of His Son through the Holy Spirit, is (in the obedience and faith given to this revelation) a reality which can be recognised as the totality of all known and conceivable and unknown possibilities. For the Lord over life and death with Whom we have here to do, is as such the Lord of our existence, i.e. He to Whom our life and with it our death has become bound, He Who at the utmost limit of all our possibilities commands us: Halt! and at the very same place and instant: Forward! to Whom therefore we effectively belong, i.e. in extremest fear and in greatest hope. That is “omnipotence” in a serious sense of the word. For the “all” (omnipotence) in a serious sense means: the circle that is described by this claim of God to our life and to our death. And in a serious sense “power over all” means: the claim that thereby meets us, our being in subjection to this claim. All other “omnipotence” would not be real omnipotence. Only the claim of the Lord over life and death has real omnipotence. This real omnipotence becomes manifest to us in what the Scriptures call the “revelation of the Father”. This is the omnipotence of the divine decision legitimately made over us and recognised as such by us: this is infinite potentiality, because it is reality illimitably and unconditionally, because all possibilities, those known and those hidden, have in it their standard, their ground, their boundary and their definition, because we are really surrounded by it on all sides, sustained by it in every way, because along with our existence it rules also our world, rules it indeed completely. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:29 f.). Once more, it is the revelation of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit which reveals to us this, the real omnipotence.

Now in this revelation of omnipotence, that is to say, in giving us His Son and the Holy Spirit for the knowing of His Son, God shows Himself as the Father. The act of omnipotence of the Lord over life and death in the revelation through the Son in the Spirit shows not only His omnipotence, but shows it as paternal; it shows God’s Fatherhood. It demonstrates and this demonstration is the truth that God is Father, not only and not first of all as our Father, but already in Himself eternal Father and precisely as such, our Father. So it is not the case that God only became Father, in relation to our existence and our world, by revealing Himself to us in the Son through the Spirit. Therefore it must not be said that the name “Father” for God is a transference to God, figurative and not to be taken literally, of a human creaturely relationship, whereas God’s essential being as God per se is not touched nor characterised by this name, nay, He is infinitely above being Father to us, indeed is something different altogether. But what is figurative and not literal is that which we characterise and imagine we know as fatherhood in our human creaturely sphere. Figurative and not literal is even the Fatherhood of God in relation to our existence and world, as we recognise it in the revelation of His omnipotence as truth. We recognise it as truth and within the human creaturely sphere we speak of fatherhood in truth, because God is in truth Father: already beforehand, in eternity—which means even apart from our existence and world. He is the eternal Father, He is that in Himself. It is as such that He is then Father for us and reveals Himself to us and is the incomparable prototype of all human creaturely fatherhood: “from whom every fatherhood (πᾶσα πατριά) in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:15).

The statement that God is Father in truth, because from eternity to eternity, is, however, identical with the statement that, in revealing to us the Father, Jesus Christ is God’s Son in the same strict sense, therefore, from eternity to eternity—and the Spirit, through Whom we know the Son and in the Son the Father, again in the same strict sense, therefore, from eternity to eternity is Holy Spirit, God Himself. That is to say, Scripture does not distinguish between a divine content, origin and object, and a non-divine or less divine shape or form of revelation. But where God in His omnipotence meets man in time and where man in time knows and acknowledges God’s omnipotence, there in this double event Scripture sees God Himself in the arena no less than in the subject of this event itself. It is also this divine Subject Himself with Whom we have to do in the double event of revelation, that is, the objective and subjective event as such. God’s revelation of omnipotence is, according to Scripture, a self-contained circle of divine presence and divine action. That exclusiveness belongs to it for this reason: If the appearance of Jesus Christ were to be regarded as some sort of theophany and the descent of the Holy Spirit as the outbreak of any kind of enthusiasm, then God could place other revelations alongside of this revelation. If Jesus Christ and if the Holy Ghost is no less God, no less the divine Subject Himself than the God from Whom they come and to Whom they witness, then the conception of a second” revelation is in itself impossible. But indeed what this one unique revelation in Christ through the Spirit reveals to us is actually “that the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ … is, for the sake of Jesus Christ His Son, my God and my Father” (Heidelberg Cat. Q. 26).

God is therefore in truth Father because and in so far as He is in truth the Father of Jesus Christ and with Him the source of the Holy Spirit. Therefore and in so far can He be and is He our Father. It is grace and not nature (the nature of the relationship of God and man, already known to us) that we may call God “Father” in virtue of the knowledge of His omnipotence. As indeed this knowledge also itself rests on God’s revelation of His omnipotence. But the grace that, in virtue of His revelation of omnipotence, we dare know Him as Father and call Him Father, itself again rests on the truth that He in Himself from eternity to eternity is Father of the Son and with Him source of the Holy Spirit, fons et origo totius divinitatis. God’s Fatherhood is an eternal “person,” i.e. a peculiar eternal possibility and mode of being (τρόπος ὑπάρξεως) in God. That this is so is a fact that comes to us in the power of the act of omnipotence by which we are taught to call Him our Father. This act has the full irresistible power of divine truth. We say the same thing when we say: it has the power of the eternal Word and of the eternal Spirit in relation to Whom God is the eternal Father. The revelation that God is our Father comes to us—if it does come to us—with the complete and incomparable downpouring of the inner, the trinitarian reality of God. Since God is the eternal Father, His power is real omnipotence, is that “Whence” of our existence and of our world that is absolutely commanding and compelling, and, just on that account, so consoling. He can be, as we shall hear later, the Creator of heaven and earth, and He is that because He is the eternal Father.

We conclude with some explanatory observations.

1. God’s Fatherhood does not mean that there is in God’s being a super- and sub-ordination, that the Father is God more and otherwise than the Son and the Holy Spirit. God, as the eternally Begotten of the Father, and God, as He Who proceeds eternally from the Father and from the Son are in the same way God as God the Father Himself. His being the Father does not indicate a super-ordination, but an order in God. So also God’s revelation of the omnipotence is not something higher compared with God’s revelation of grace; God’s revelation of grace in Jesus Christ is not merely to be understood as a form and manifestation of the paternal revelation of omnipotence. That could only be if, in contradiction to the testimony of Scripture, the eternal Godhead of the Son and of the Spirit and along with that God’s eternal Fatherhood also were to be misunderstood.

2. God’s Fatherhood does not signify a special separate part in the being of God, but a “person” or mode of being of the one simple divine being, of one substance with the Son and with the Spirit, and in His peculiarity inseparably bound with them. Therefore the meaning cannot be that only the Father is Almighty and not also the Son and the Spirit—and that the Father is only Almighty and did not also share in all those attributes of God, of which the Second and the Third Articles of the symbol speak. Opera trinitatis ad extra sunt indivisa. It is impossible to prefer with the Enlightenment faith in the Father-God, or with Pietism to seek to practise Christocentric theology or even a special Spirit-theology without imperilling the sure path of truth and finally losing it.

3. Yet the knowledge of God the Father gained from the act of His revelation of omnipotence is not to be taken as a misunderstanding to be corrected in a higher knowledge, in order then to disappear. For the Father is not the Son and not the Holy Spirit, although the Son and the Holy Spirit are not without the Father. So He also in His revelation is, it is true, not without them, as they are not without Him, but in the unity and simplicity of the divine being He is yet precisely in His omnipotence precisely the Father. If the activity of God like His Being is a unity, it is nevertheless an ordered unity and in this order the reflection and repetition of the order of His being. The fact that we lay stress upon the knowledge of the “Father Almighty” as a special first knowledge of God, and that there is a special first Article of the Creed, is as much justified, indeed demanded by the knowledge of the eternity of the divine Fatherhood as that same knowledge must summon us to see the Almighty Father in His unity with the Son and the Spirit, and therefore also to understand the three Articles of the Creed as a unity.