God is Seen God
by Zerubbabel Press

How can man love? Why does God? Norman answers these and many other questions about love.

It might be asked, if the basic self of God and man is self-love, yet God’s self is eternally selfless love, is there not some alchemy by which man’s natural self-love can be trans-muted to selfless love? Why do we say that man can never by himself and in himself experience a self-change, and just become a selfless person, a God- and world-lover? On what grounds do we affirm that man by himself must and always will be selfish love, and God alone, and none else, is and forever will be selfless love? And that, therefore, if man is to know selfless love, he can only know it if his self-loving self is yielded to, joined to, indwelt by, and becomes the agent of the self-giving Self of God?

The answer is in the marvelous revelation from the beginning of rev-elation that God is a Trinity. God never has been The One Alone. If He had been, He would not be love, for love is outgoing. From the beginning He has been the Three-in-One. The Father begets the Son, who "from everlasting.. .was daily His delight." The Son "delights to do His will," saying to Him, "All Mine are Thine, and Thine are Mine." The Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son that by Him God may dwell in us and we in Him; and as we love one another, His love is perfected in us.

One of the great misconceptions of our evangelical faith is, through ignorance of the significance of the Three-in-One, to anthropomorphize God as a lonely figure, "an old man with a beard," as John Wren Lewis says in his pamphlet, Return to the Roots, "seated on a distant throne, instead of being what the Bible says He is, Father, Son and Spirit who is the love-life of the universe." "Of Him, to Him, through Him are all things," "who is above all, through all and in you all."

Wren Lewis, a mathematician and physicist, first attacks the common conception of God as "a Being of immense proportions somewhere ‘above’ or ‘outside’ the universe of stars and galaxies, who created it all at some distant date in the past and now supervises it like a foreman," a kind of "Old Man above the sky." Crudely sounding, maybe, to us to whom He is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, yet without doubt many earnest believers do have an understanding of Him not far removed from that description: at least we regard Him as a lonely separate Being, dwelling in some remote abode, looking down upon, guiding, judging our world. This sense of remoteness, this carping anxiety as to when and how He is approachable on His distant Throne, when we can be sure of His presence and when not, is the commonest misconception of thousands of believers.

Lewis then points out that the Bible never regarded the universe as "a system of stars spread out in aeons of space, or as a space-time continuum, or anything of the sort," but as "an encounter with persons, a net-work of persons in relationship. Space, time and matter and so on are abstractions of certain aspects of our communication with each other…. The truth is that the universe is, as far as we can ever know, a personal reality, a system of encounters between people, and all the stars and galaxies and vast distances spoken of by the astronomer are just as much contained within the universe of persons as are the vast number of molecules and atoms and electrons which make up the air that carries our speech."

That gives us then the "clue to the meaning of God," which John summed up in his one immortal phrase, "God is love." Does that then, he asks, deny the personality of God? No. "To say that God means the creative power of love between people, the power we usually call love, is not to reduce God to any thing, but rather to increase our ordinary estimate of love, and that is just what we need to do if we are to see life the right way up."

And then we get to the heart of the revelation: God from eternity has been the Three-in-One, and that God is love. "The most detailed and most practical adumbration of Love’s nature," says Lewis, "is the Christian doctrine of the Trinity." I would go further, and say, not adumbration, but central and sole existence of Love is the Trinity. "Love, this doctrine asserts, is essentially a threefold activity of relationship, involving the exact equipoise of three highly personal activities of Fatherhood, Sonship and Interpretation." God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. The Fatherhood of love is giving, the Sonship of love is acceptance, the Spirit of love is the interpretation, the outgoing, "which the theologians call the Eternal Procession: for every love-relationship must be open to the third person–to innumerable third persons. ‘In this Trinity,’ says the so-called Athanasian Creed, ‘none is afore and none is after another, none is greater and none less than another.’ Giving, acceptance, interpretation are all equal, and if they are not equal there is no love…. Similarly giving, acceptance, and interpretation are all severally infinite, spontaneous and eternal–yet they are not three loves, but one Love."

This One, this Three-in-One, is the only self-giving love in the universe. The Uncreated Love. Where one Member of the Trinity is, All are, for the Three-in-One is indivisible; so all things are basically manifestations of the Glorious Trinity. As Browning wrote:

I but open my eyes–and perfection, no more and no less, In the kind I imagined, full fronts me, and God is seen God In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod. And thus looking within and around me, I ever renew (With that stoop of the soul which in bending upraises it too) The submission of Mans nothing-perfect to God’s all-complete, As by each new obeisance in spirit, I climb to His feet.

Everything serves, for love serves, except where the perverted spirit has control.

We have already seen that in only one respect is God not yet seen as God in His true Self; and that is in created beings, made in His image, whose very creaturehood in all of its wonder of spirit, soul and body, has its permanent being in Him. These are they who have taken advantage of their privileged birthright as made in His likeness and have turned their backs, under the dominion of the first rebel, the author and instigator of this sin of sins, on the only source of selfless love in the universe. They have substituted in themselves the only alternative–self-love; for the moment Lucifer, the author and embodiment of self-love, refused to yield his created isolated self to union with the Uncreated self-giving Self of the Three-in-One, he became the originator and embodiment of a love turned in to itself. Let us therefore get it clear. Love is not a lonely self by itself. From eternity Love has been God the Three-in-One, Father, Son and Spirit, giving, accepting, ministering Love. Created selves could not be or manifest that love by themselves, for love is not one by himself, but the Threein-One. Therefore created selves can only express self-giving love through their love-faculty, if the Three-in-One, who is love, is united to them and manifests Himself through them.

—God Unlimited