that crawl upon the earth.’ God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:26–27
The author of Genesis was so struck by our relational nature that he went as far as can be gone, and said that we are so because God is so, and he made us so because he wanted us to be like him in love. In our nature is found a reflection of the nature of God. A shorthand idea is needed to express what is meant by something relational by nature with a power to choose. If we call this entity a ‘person’, then we have acquired the first vital concept for expressing a Trinitarian faith. God is personal in this sense. We know this because we are persons, but by creation, and hence by the will of an interactive Creator.
The second concept follows rather less obviously. I have suggested that creation need not have been interactional at all. It could have been like a tall building divided into one-room flats, each one with a window to the east. We could each have been in different rooms, all looking at the sun, but without awareness of each other, or any means to relate to each other, even if we wanted to. The ancient idea of man as the image of God can then be pressed further. ‘Male and female he created them.’ Humanity is not totally expressed by just the men or just the women, it is a plurality as well as a unity. Nature did not have to be divisible into partitions: we could all have been androgynous, or even non-sexual in nature. That stamp came from God. The Creator is a unity and a plurality.
One can go further than this still. The image of God, a humanity that is male and female, is part of the interactivity in all of creation. It is not just that men love God and women love God. Human persons were created also to love each other. In the love between a man and a woman, they can give life, share with God in creating a new person. A traditional description of the Holy Spirit comes from this way of thinking: he is the vinculum amoris, the chain of love between Father and Son. Again, we reflect our Creator; two distinct types of person, and their love for each other, giving rise to creation of life.
Be warned that it is very easy indeed to talk complete rubbish about the Trinity. And it is all rather difficult, even impossible, to understand (and hence to explain!) Like all other doctrines, we are putting into clumsy human words something revealed in Christ, and foreshadowed in the Old Testament. Getting the formulation true to the Christian experience of salvation took many centuries and, sadly, much controversy. If confused, we can take refuge in the Creed that was produced, and which we still say each Sunday. But the doctrine of the Trinity, that God is one God in three Persons, is not a speculation. It comes from making sense of what Christ has done for us, which he himself expressed as a command to baptize ‘in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28:19).
The cunning plan
If you are feeling completely lost, that is not necessarily bad. Remember that we are awash anyway in the boat on the stormy sea, and have just been joined by Jesus. It is time to say what God’s better idea for us might be. The aim is entirely simple and can be put in a very few words. Nothing does better than the special formula from the Third Eucharistic Prayer which we use at funerals:
We hope to share in your glory when every tear will be wiped away. On that day we shall see you, our God, as you are. We shall become like you and praise you for ever through Christ our Lord, from whom all good things come.
God’s solution to our needs and troubles is to restore us to his image. We need to think a little about the problems he faces in doing this. The immediate one is sin. But what is sin? You might have been brought up on lists of sins, some of them attractively mysterious. Don’t lie, don’t be rude, don’t hate, don’t commit adultery. All of these are indeed sinful, but the true nature of sin is something deeper. It is not simply that God gets angry if you do or say the wrong thing. Sin, fundamentally, is a refusal to relate to God.
No matter how much he loves us, he can give us nothing if we will not accept it. The consequences of this are dire. Imagine a human family in which all the people have decided that the mother is out to poison them. Food is not safe if it is given by her, but it is all right if it is taken for yourself. So each member has to grab what they want for themselves, and as early in the cooking process as possible so that it is not too poisonous. The result is a considerable amount of indigestion and stomach ache, the personal consequences of sin. In addition, the brothers and sisters come to distrust each other, each wishing to get the food first, and never sure if the others are not tricking them. Life becomes, in the words of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, ‘nasty, brutish and short’. Here we have the social consequences of sin, the way a personal refusal of God spreads to a refusal of others. In the end, as more children are born into the household, they pick up without choice the habits of their parents and other relations. We have a fallen society with no hope of redemption within itself.
Here is one part of the redemption in Christ, the teaching and example which reveals the love of God, whose full depth is shown in the sacrifice of the Cross. He is like someone coming into the dysfunctional family who dares to eat food from the mother’s hand. But in order for the example to persuade, he has to be like them. There is no use having an exemplar whom we suspect of being immune to the poison. This is why the docetic Gnostics mentioned in chapter 2 were so dangerously wrong when they thought that God could not really have become human in Jesus, that there must have been some special ‘get-out’ clause or immunity for Christ. It is the same point that lies behind the temptation of Jesus in the desert: ‘If you are the Son of God, turn this stone into a loaf’ (Luke 4:4). Precisely because he is the Son of God, Jesus was prepared to lay his power aside so as to convince us of his love.
But sin goes deeper than that. Traditionally, the Church has talked about Original Sin, an idea which is understandably unpopular. The story is that the first sin of Adam and Eve was passed down all the generations as a hereditary curse, rather in the same way as big ears or a snub nose like mine. Theologians, especially St Augustine, noted the rage of tiny infants when disappointed of food or attention, and saw this as a mark of the fatal inheritance. But once it was realized that Adam and Eve may not have existed as such, the doctrine began to lose credibility. Nobody would put much research money into a quest for a putative ‘sin’ gene in human cells.
The language surrounding original sin may not hold much water any longer, but the central idea, the faith the doctrine attempts to express, has something going for it. Anyone who has undergone any form of psychotherapy discovers how basic and elemental are some of our destructive impulses. We learn more each day about the subtle interactions of genes and environments, behaviour and cognition. If you think that is all hocus-pocus, then I would point to the fact that very few of us get close to imitating Christ. We may start to take God’s love, but what do we do with it then? Take the Sermon on the Mount: ‘be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Matthew 5:48). How are you doing? How much longer will you need? Our fallen state is a universal experience.
The radical Christian message is about how deep that fall has gone. We know this because we know how far God has gone in Christ to restore us to his image. The full damage of sin happens on the level of our basic nature. This is the basic content of the doctrine of Original Sin. All of us are damaged in nature, and pass that on. We know this, because the Word became flesh to rescue us. The remedy is on the same scale and level as the disease.
One way to put it is like this. Our nature is relational, we are persons. In denying ourselves the love of God, we deny ourselves the material with which to love each other. In doing this, we block off part of God’s creative love from the whole world, as though we are standing in each other’s light causing mini-eclipses. The love which most reflects God’s, that of woman and man creating a child, is also affected, and thus there is a lack in the creative power passed on by them. It is like a dry field. Each of us is standing holding an umbrella, so that no matter how much it rains, the field remains parched. It may as well be drought. After a while, weedy, malnourished seedlings
