Part 1 of a Study in the Nicene Creed

“We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.”

Gerald Bray commented that, “It is no exaggeration to say that Christian theology began when Jesus called God his Father and taught his disciples to do the same.”1 This is sometimes challenged, as the imagery of a Father-Son relationship is there first between God and Israel, so, “Out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos. 11:1); and then secondly between God and his Servant to come, “Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights” (Isa. 42:1). But no one can deny that some unique light had been broken open to those first followers of Jesus when they were taught to pray directly and personally to “Our Father” (Mat. 6:9). 

In looking at this first line of the Creed, we will move from the bottom shelf to the top shelf, so to speak.

I. The priority of the Father in texts where more than one is named

II. The pattern of the Father in the economic Trinity

III. The paternity of the Father in the immanent Trinity

The Priority of the Father in Texts Where More than One is Named

1. Just like in this statement in the Creed, so in several texts of Scripture, there is an unmistakable feature. The Father has a noticeable priority. This can be a priority of order, but it can also be that the Father is referenced as “God,” whereas the Son or the Spirit are referenced as to their Person. For example, 

“of God and of Jesus our Lord” (2 Pet. 1:1).

“There is one body and one Spirit … one Lord … one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:4, 5, 6).

“ yet for us there is one God, the Father … and one Lord, Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 8:6).

Now why is this? The reference to the Father as “God,” when the Son or Spirit are referred to with more particularity has to do with at least some of what is proper to the Persons. It is common among all orthodox theologians to recognize a pattern in Scripture of the Father authoring, the Son informing, and the Spirit giving life. That is true about the works of the Trinity in creation, redemption, and consummation. So, sometimes “God” will refer to one Person, where the whole Trinity is being referenced. Other times, the Father is called “God” to differentiate between his authoring relationship in the economy of redemption, as opposed to those of the Son and Spirit which (logically and often chronologically) follow from that authorship.

2. So it would seem that in creation, the Father takes the initiative. You might even call it the “authorial” role. And we need to hold this under our hats any time we come to the doctrine of man, and the particular created natures of man and woman. God created something in this world called fathers and fatherhood for this authorial purpose. But the language of this line of the Creed is testimony to the fact that the early church saw, in the Scriptures, a place of priority for the Father in the works of creation — MAKER OF HEAVEN AND EARTH, OF ALL THINGS VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE. You might say, “Well, isn’t the Spirit involved in creation (Gen. 1:2)?” and “Isn’t the Son also maker of all things, both visible and invisible (Col. 1:16)?” Yes, indeed! However, there is a sense in which even the pagans understand what is meant by God “fathering” or “authoring” all creation: “For we are indeed his offspring” (Acts 17:28), or by the author of Hebrews, he is called "the Father of spirits" (Heb. 12:9).

3. The Father is predominately first in statements on the work of salvation. Most clearly this is the case in Ephesians 1:3-14. This makes perfect sense to anyone who accepts the doctrine of sovereign grace being taught in that passage by Paul, since there is a definite logic to what the Father does, namely election, leading to the work of the Son and the Spirit. But think also of Matthew 28:19 in the baptismal formula, or even in those simple greetings: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom. 1:7).

4. Mastricht made an interesting statement that is almost simple enough to miss its significance. He said,

“That the Father is God from eternity is so undoubted by all that the enemies of the Trinity leave eternal deity to him alone.”2

Now one might say to this, “Well, sure, but that’s no different than leaving deity to deity. The Unitarian is very happy to leave it at God the Father.” But this raises the question: Why use the word “Father” at all? If God is simply God without person, it raises the question of why the Scriptures attribute Father to him in any special way. Now at this point, the other half of the Unitarian’s personality — that is, the Universalist — will chime in and say, “No, no mystery at all. He is called ‘Father’ because the essence of Christianity is the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. We are all God’s children.” But there are just two problems with that. Massive problems. First, he is called Father to Jesus in a special way that does not apply to anyone else. Second, he is not called the Father of all, but for those outside of Christ, their father is actually the devil, according to Jesus in John 8 and Paul in Ephesians 2. So a Unitarian or Universalist attempt to account for the name “Father” is most unsatisfying.

The Pattern of the Father in the Economic Trinity

1. I mentioned that the familial Fatherhood of God was already implied even in the Old Testament. Take two passages in Isaiah for example,

For you are our Father, though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not acknowledge us; you, O Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name (Isa. 63:16).

But now, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand (Isa. 64:8).

2. When Jesus called God “my Father” this was very different from the sense in which we are told to call him Father. For example, right after Jesus had claimed to know that the Father was “working until now” (Jn. 5:17), as an answer to their charge that he broke the Sabbath, John’s narration gives us a glimpse into the implications:

This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God (v. 18).

So this special relationship that the Father has to the Son is one way in which we can see the oneness of the divine essence. 

3. By contrast, it says of us, “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (Jn. 1:12-13). So we are brought in, not by nature, but by the Spirit. However there is a fittingness here. It is fitting that in salvation we are brought by the Son who is by nature Son, to the Father in adoption: “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 Jn. 3:1). 

4. Everything in God’s creation is what it is because of what it says about God. Likewise in the great end of creation, the gospel that restores creation — this is no different. What the triune Persons perform in redemption is fitting to who God is in his own triune life. The Father who adopts us is eternally Father in himself. Paul says about all lesser fatherhood: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3:14-15). The pair of Greek words used by Paul here are Πατέρα and πατριὰ, which shows us that the “family” is really a “fatherhood,” but more to our point, that the traffic of Trinitarian analogies always flows one way. The analogy of lower fatherhood to The Fatherhood is mind-blowing enough; but Mastricht sees Ephesians 3:14-15 as a “relations of origin” passage. Now I will explain what that phrase means in a moment. But just notice that Paul says that the Father is the source of the name not only for the “families” on earth, but that order in heaven. 

The Paternity of the Father in the Immanent Trinity

1. When we see the Father as first in the economy, we are being taught that the Father was first in the Trinity first, that is in the immanent Trinity.3 Likewise, when we say that Christ is Son by nature, whereas we are sons by adoption (or even Adam being a son by analogy), we cannot mean that unless the Son is by nature “Son,” that is, by an eternal relationship. Father and Son are who Father and Son are. They never became that relationship. They never “took on” the titles. The Persons of the Trinity are not nominalistic deities. They are not “just so in name.”

2. All this talk invariably raises the egalitarian’s or feminist’s question: Is God male? It depends what is meant of course. It is better to say “masculine,” though that might not mean so much to our effeminate culture that is embarrassed by the masculine precisely because it is traumatized by reality itself. Now God is referred to in the masculine “he” throughout the Scriptures. Hebrew and Greek both have the personal pronoun (he, him, his) just as in English. This fact by itself shows us that the biblical author’s use of the masculine cannot be reduced to mere culture. Now God is properly referred to in this way in the transcendent sense. We have to remember that all that exists as an effect is an analogy or copy of something about God, but always the traffic of the analogy flows from Creator to creature, and never the other way around, nor as equals. One implication here is that biological maleness in human beings is the analogy, the faint copy or shadow.

What is like God here has more to do with the initiating, leading, authoring, dimensions, and not the bodily and other such aspects. C. S. Lewis has much to say about it in his second installment of the Space Trilogy, Perelandra. However, a few profound glimpses are offered from “the Director” to Jane in the third book, That Hideous Strength:

“The male you could have escaped for it exists only on the biological level. But the masculine none of us can escape. What is above and beyond all things is so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it. You’d better agree with your adversary quickly,” or else …

“You are offended by the masculine itself,” the Director told Jane. “The loud, irruptive, possessive thing — the gold lion, the bearded bull — which breaks through hedges and scatters the little kingdom of your primness as the dwarfs scattered the carefully made bed.”

If none of this “does anything” for us, fair enough — we can leave it for another day. At the very least, we ought to start with Scripture's attribution and note that it was intentionally selected and cannot be reduced to cultural conventions.

3. At any rate, we are now ready to be introduced to the concept of relation of origin. And the first thing we will say about that is that the Father alone is unbegotten. The Son is begotten. We do not say that the Spirit is begotten, but that he proceeds. We will have to wait to see why that is. For now, we at least note that the Son is begotten in a way that the Father is not. The Spirit proceeds in a way the Father does not. The easiest entry point for this is in the concepts of the Word of God and the Wisdom of God. The Son of God is called both God’s Word and God’s Wisdom. John 1:1-3 and 1 Corinthians 1:24 (and very likely Proverbs 8:22-24 as well) are the places to look. We will examine each in more detail later. 

4. For now we need only to advance to the first building block of this relation between Father and Son. And rather than dive down in the very deepest end of the pool, let’s start with a question that forces a deeper answer from us that we may be used to giving. When the Father sent the Son, why is it that the Son did not send the Father? And if you say, “Because the Son was willing,” I will only ask you, Why was the Son willing and not the Father? And if you say, “Well, it wasn’t that the Father wasn’t ‘willing,’ but that this was the eternal agreement.” Then I will only ask again, Why was this the eternal agreement to send the Son and not the Father? And if you say, “Because he is the Son and sons don’t send fathers but fathers send sons.” You do realize that I will only ask you, Why do fathers send sons, and not sons fathers? Now there are alternative tracks here.

At one of those points, a favorite response is: “These things aren’t for us to ask because Scripture does not tell us.” But then I will only ask you: Are you sure about that? I find that the best theologians in church history disagree with that assessment. And that should at least give us some pause to reconsider.

This is not as speculative as it might seem. I am not actually asking for ultimate positive reasons within the nature of God at this point. I am only trying to force us to see that there must be a reason in God’s nature. Was the Father sending the Son something more than an arbitrary decision in the Godhead to send one of what would otherwise amount to three “non-specified entities”— where, in such a case, the names they reveal are equally arbitrary — or do the names “Father” and “Son” and “Holy Spirit” signify real proper subsistence? Orthodox Christian theology has answered in the latter way. 

4. Mastricht even used the term “aseity” which all classical theologians would recognize as a divine attribute as such. But for him it was “aseity, not the essential aseity common to the three persons, but personal aseity, in which he has his essence a se, from himself, and lacks an origin from another, the aseity by which he is said to have life in himself and to have granted the Son to have the same life in himself (John 5:26).”4

Concluding Question. I know this may seem like too simple of a way to get at something so deep; but if the economic works of the Persons of the Trinity were not designed by God to be a window into the immanent Trinity (that is, the Persons as they related eternally), then we must ask why he could not have simply elected, redeemed, and renewed us without the specific names being what they are. Bavinck says, “in a unique metaphysical sense God is the father of his Son.” And further, "In the true original sense God is the Father of the Son ... This relation of the Father to the Son was not born in time but exists from eternity ... God's fatherhood of the Son is his particular personal attribute. He alone is of himself, the first in the order of existence (John 5:26) and hence the Father both in creation and re-creation, from whom all things exist (1 Cor. 8:6)”5

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1. Bray, God Has Spoken, 101.

2. Mastricht, TPT, II:529.

3. Mastricht is odd in the sense that he affirms the classical element that “He is the font of all deity and of all the persons,” very much breaking from Calvin’s autotheos emphasis; and yet he uses the word “economy” both of the immanent and economic, calling the higher “the heavenly economy” following his exegesis of Ephesians 3:14-15 — TPT, II:527-29.

4. Mastricht, TPT, II:529-30.

5. Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, II:272.