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George MacDonald, the nineteenth-century Scottish preacher, places before us one question, the answer to which, sets the foundation for answering every other worthwhile question:

Is power or love the making might of the universe? He who answers this question aright has the key to all righteous questions. George MacDonald, England’s Antiphon (1868)

What an ingeniously simple and yet profound perceptual lens for making sense out of . . . well . . . pretty much everything.

Personally, I don’t think MacDonald’s bold claim is an exaggeration. It certainly does appear that there are only two possible ways to conceive of ultimate reality and the God behind it. Either power or love, as he put it, is “the making might,” or the creative force, that defines the universe and the character of the God that created it.

I can’t think of a third option.

Building on MacDonald’s idea, I would suggest that the same holds true with regards to belief systems. Every doctrine we humans formulate is traceable to either a premise of power or love. If “God is love” (1 John 4:8), it logically follows that every true doctrine would expound upon God’s love and every false doctrine would in some manner diminish love in favor of power.

Yes, God is powerful. The Bible says God is the “Almighty” (Genesis 17:1; Revelation 1:8). We rightfully employ the word “omnipotent” to describe God. And yet, even omnipotence has its limitations, extremely significant limitations, in fact. There are things that even Almighty God can’t do. The Bible itself names at least four of them:

God “cannot lie” (Titus 1:2), as opposed to will not.

God “cannot deny Himself” (2 Timothy 2:13), which is to say, God cannot not be exactly who He is in character. God is unalterably true to His identity.

God “cannot be tempted by evil” (James 1:13).

And God cannot save a person that chooses to be lost, as much as He would like to (2 Peter 3:9).

C.S. Lewis explains the idea like this:

His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, “God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,” you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, “God can.” It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God. C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

We make a huge theological blunder when we turn omnipotence into omni-control. Exhaustive control within the context of free moral agency would necessarily entail coercion. If there is anything that Almighty God doesn’t want, it’s control. God possesses all power and yet does not employ all of His power to always get His way. The moment we equate omnipotence with omni-control, we need to reckon with the fact that love and coercion are mutually exclusive. They simply cannot simultaneously occupy the same relational space. To conceive of God as possessing absolute control is to eliminate any meaningful conceptions of love from our vision of reality.

The point is both simple and profound: for God, love is ultimate, not power.

God has power.

God is love.

And all the power God has is employed toward the exercise of the love God is.

Within God’s essential makeup, God’s abilities serve God’s character, not the other way around.

Love only occurs by the voluntary crossing of the neutral space that lies between an individual free self and an equally free other. If the essence of God’s identity is love, it follows that God does not employ force in His quest to establish a relationship with us. Implicit to the biblical idea that “God is love,” is the idea of divine self-limitation: God cannot control those whom He would have love Him. If love is the desired end, the sheer power of force cannot be the means of its attainment. This is why the biblical narrative portrays God as restraining His power in favor of wooing, drawing, alluring, calling, and pleading:

Turn to me and be saved, all you ends of the earth. Isaiah 45:22, NIV

The Lord has appeared of old to me, saying: “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you. Jeremiah 31:3

Behold, I will allure her. Hosea 2:14

I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself. John 12:32

How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! Matthew 23:37

For the love of Christ compels us . . . that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again. . . . Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, 20

So, yes, God can do anything—any thing. “With God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). But it does not logically follow that with God all non-things are possible. God can do anything except what lies logically outside of the realm of possibility—like creating two adjacent mountains with no valley between, or creating existing things that don’t exist, or causing love to exist in the heart of a free agent who chooses not to love. Or—reaching all the way to the very foundation of reality itself—God cannot be love without someone to love, in as much as love entails other-centeredness. God cannot be love unless God, as God, is composed of both self and other. That is to say, if God is and always has been love, then God necessarily is a social dynamic of some configuration that includes both selfhood and otherness.

And this brings us to the subject at hand.

Turn God into an absolute, solitary self, and any coherent notion of love will necessarily vanish from your theology, and all you will have left is some sort of impersonal power. I insert the word coherent in that sentence, because, yes, you could arbitrarily declare that “God is love” in the midst of your insistence that God is a solitary self, but contradictions would quickly ensue. Without knowing God as a relational dynamic of more than one person, the premise that “God is love” vanishes up the theological chimney in smoke. At that point, another foundational premise must necessarily be put in the place of love, and the only premise remaining is power.

In the pages that follow, we will explore the implications that emerge from the theological premise, in its anti-trinitarian form, that God is a solitary self. We will also explore, by contrast, the implications of a social theology of God, which we will call “Covenantal Trinitarianism,” for reasons that will become beautifully evident as we proceed.

This book is titled, The Heavenly Trio. It is a follow-up to my previous release, The Sonship of Christ, which explored the identity of Jesus as “the Son of God.” In that study we engaged in what we called “an Old Testament reading of the New Testament,” allowing the Hebrew narrative of Moses and the prophets to tell us what the apostles mean when they say that Jesus is “the Son of God.” While Sonship was written for a wide audience of Bible students from all denominational backgrounds, Trio offers perspectives of specific interest to Seventh-day Adventists. It explores the anti-trinitarian views of the founding pioneers of the Advent movement, as well as the view developed by Ellen White, who is regarded as a prophetic voice to the Advent movement.

First, we will identify “The Core Concern of the Pioneers.” Prepare yourself for a major Aha! moment as we discover what these early Bible students of Adventism were really getting at with their pushback on the Trinity. It is generally acknowledged that the Advent pioneers were anti-trinitarian, but little attention has been given to the specific concern they expressed. If we pay attention to the particular nature of their concern, it becomes evident that the Seventh-day Adventist Church arrived at its present trinitarian position, not in spite of the pioneers, but as the inevitable outworking of their concern. The pioneers were Bible students in process. The development of theology takes time, so the pioneers were not without blind spots. But as honest searchers for truth, they were eager to learn. Notwithstanding their blind spots, I will suggest, they pointed the church in the right direction and thus contributed to the formation of the current doctrine of God held by the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

After this, we will examine “Ellen White’s Trinitarian Journey.” We will see that Ellen White, while surrounded by anti-trinitarian brothers whom she held in high regard, refrained from making any anti-trinitarian declarations herself. More significantly, she discerned the legitimacy of the specific concern her brothers were articulating, while steering clear of the deep problems that lay just beneath the surface of their anti-trinitarian views. As a result, Ellen White formulated a rich trinitarian picture of God that was grounded in the individual personhood of each member of the Godhead, based on an awareness of the covenantal nature of God. In this chapter we will also discover how the anti-trinitarian doctrine lends itself to pantheism.1 This is a connection Ellen White discerned and addressed. I realize this is a provocative proposition, but once we put the pieces in place, I am confident you will find it persuasive.

Next, we will pan out historically to consider in greater detail how anti-trinitarian theology can be “A Gateway to Pantheism.” The world is full of belief systems. This chapter suggests that almost every belief system can be seen as fundamentally Hebrew or Greek in its orientation to reality. From the Hebrew lineage of thought, we receive a covenantal vision of God—relational, free, open, dynamic, empathic. From the Greek philosophers, we receive a monistic depiction of God—solitary, fixed, closed, absolute. Yes, the history of ideas is a little messier than these two categories encompass, but much of what’s going on in the human psyche is explainable within the dichotomy that exists between Hebrew and Greek frameworks.

Having gained a working knowledge of Hebrew and Greek thought, we will offer a brief history of God under the title, “Covenantal Trinitarianism.” Our goal here will be to allow the Hebrew Scriptures to form our picture of God, noticing how beautifully, delightfully, and convincingly different this picture is from the Greek view.

Next, we will delve into the vital biblical truth of mediation, which opens our understanding to the activity of God within human history prior to the incarnation of Christ. Titling this chapter, “The Covenant Communicator,” we will examine two Old Testament revelations that depict God as always communicating in love to all human beings within the realm of our thoughts and feelings.

Furthering our exploration of mediation, the next chapter is titled, “Mediator of the Eternal Covenant.” Here we will encounter within the biblical narrative the presence of Two Yahwehs, one in heaven and invisible to human sight, the other actively engaged on earth in a visible form.

In the chapter, “A Necessary Equality,” we will see how knowing God as an indivisible social unit of other-centered love vitally informs our understanding of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross of Calvary. If, in the final analysis, God is believed to be a solitary self, the death of Jesus on the cross can only be thought of as the ultimate act of self-centeredness on the part of a God for whom self-sacrifice is impossible.

Once we’ve wrapped our minds around the covenantal equality of Christ with the Father, in the “The Covenant Negated” we will be able to discern by contrast that the anti-trinitarian doctrine constitutes a fundamentally hierarchical picture of God and of human relationships. To our astonishment, we will discover that hierarchical structures do not reflect the ideal relational maturity to which the new covenant calls us in Christ.

Finally, we will reflect upon the church of Christ as “The Covenant Community.” It will become evident that our picture of God inevitably impacts our understanding of what the church is and how Christ calls it to function in the world.

All in all, in the following pages, we will discover that there really is only one question to rule them all.

Is power or love ultimate with God?

Answer that one question aright, and we have the answer to all worthwhile questions.

1 A doctrine in which God and the physical universe are synonymous, meaning that God is not a personal being that exists distinct from the universe.