On the Image of the Invisible God
Q. What do we mean when we say that Jesus is the only Son of God?
A.We mean that Jesus is the only perfect image of the Father, and shows us the nature of God.
Q. What is the nature of God revealed in Jesus?
A. God is love.
“He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation; for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.” —Colossians 1:15-17 (RSV)
“Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” — 1 John 4:7-12 (RSV)
To say that Jesus is the perfect image of God is first and foremost to say that he reveals God’s character. If you want an answer to the question of who the God is that Christians worship, you look to Jesus and his teachings and behavior. This means, above all, that what is revealed is God is not an abstraction or an impersonal force or power, but rather God is personal and, manifest by the incarnation above all, is involved in the world and in the lives of those who are in the world. God is capable of relationship and desires relationships with the world. Not only does God seek relationships, but God deals in the particularities of the world: Jesus cannot be abstracted from his being a first-century Jewish man, an affirmation of God’s particular relationship to liberate and care for Israel. God seeks the good for God’s creation and this good turns out to consist in the relationships God seeks with God’s creatures. God does not leave us at the mercy of the ravages of Sin and Death, showing through the resurrection of Jesus that death has been defeated and transformed into the gateway to new and unending life.
This revelation of God’s character, while it is primary in the revelation offered by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, cannot but also be a revelation of God’s nature or being in certain significant ways. God is revealed as a person, a who, and not merely a what, through the who-ness of Jesus, which means that Jesus does not merely reveal things about God, but actually reveals God. Thought of another way, Jesus does not merely point to God, but in being the perfect image of this God must be this God. And yet, there must be some room for distinction since the image cannot simply be identical in every way with the thing it images. So, we have the beginnings of notion that the Trinity as a description of God who in God’s being has three distinctions but no divisions. Moreover, in revealing himself as the Son, Jesus reveals that in God there is Father. Historically this relationship has been the single thing that proves irreducible between the three persons: The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all alike equally and fully God, sharing everything about the being of God, including knowledge, will, power, etc., except the personal relationships. The Father, Son, and Spirit share all aspects of their being, including their unity, except fatherhood, sonship, and spiration (the term for the procession of the Spirit from the Father and the Son).
There are a few important implications of the idea that Jesus perfectly images the Father and reveals the full nature of God to us. First, one must be careful not to try to set Scripture at odds with itself in understanding Jesus. There can be no room for a “Jesus of the Gospels” who reveals God over and against an interpretation or lesser revelation of Jesus seen in the rest of the New Testament. The Jesus of the Gospels is known to their authors as the same resurrected one known to Paul and the other authors of the New Testament. The Gospels are as much interpretations of who Jesus was and what he revealed, in light of the resurrection, as the Jesus who comes through in the rest of the New Testament. Second, one cannot set the New Testament up as doing away with the Old Testament. The God revealed in Jesus is the God of Israel revealed in the Old Testament. In fact, there is a strong tradition of seeing God revealed to Israel as the Son who becomes incarnate in Jesus, with the idea that the person of the Father is only revealed in the incarnation of the Son.
All of these things come together to show that one cannot make the simple move some wish to make of saying “Jesus reveals God so we can turn to Jesus (particularly his teaching) in the Gospels to learn who God is.” Knowing Jesus requires that we are familiar with the whole of Christian Scripture. More than this, knowing God as God is revealed in Jesus means that knowing God is not simply a matter of learning information about God. If God is personal, then we know God by getting to know God as we would get to know other people. We know God not simply by memorizing information, but by spending time with Jesus and following in his ways. We get to know God through prayer and worship and service to the least, the places above all where God has revealed Godself in Jesus to continue to be encountered. It means we must approach relationship to God through Christ as a relationship in the present tense, to a still living person—even if not living among us in the same way as other living people—and not merely as a historical figure.
All of this then brings us to the importance of talking about the revelation of God as love. Indeed, we must hold this, as is made clear in John’s first letter. Those who do not exhibit love do not know God. But here we have to be careful about slipping into idolatry. To say that God is love is not to say that we can define or understand love any way that we wish and then say “and that is God,” a move that happens to often in progressive Christian spaces. God is love, but God also defines what love is. John sees this in immediately offering an explanation of the character of this love after asserting that God’s love has the character of self-giving, that God’s love was made manifest in sending the Son into the world to forgive our sins that we might live through him. So, one can indeed affirm the common refrain from Presiding Bishop Michael Curry that “if it’s not about love, it’s not about God” fully, but only if one understands that “love” is itself defined and understood with reference to the self-giving love that Christ shows toward us. We cannot begin with the assumption that we simply have an unblemished, intuitive understanding of love that we can then use as our compass to go and look for God active in the world. It may in the end turn out that we can in some ways use our intuition for what love is in order to discern God at work in the world, but we can only do this after we have subjected our intuition to the revelation of God’s character in Jesus Christ, a revelation that is known only with reference to the totality of Scripture and in following in Jesus’ footsteps as a disciple and worshiper.
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