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Light, God and grace
As a young teenager, I sat in a movie theater when the power went out. In the darkness, the murmur of the audience grew louder every second. I noticed how I tried suspiciously to look for an exit as soon as someone opened a door to the outside. Light streamed into the movie theater and the murmuring and my suspicious search were quickly over.
Until we are confronted with darkness, most of us consider light as something we take for granted. However, there is nothing to see without light. We only see something when light illuminates a room. Where this something reaches our eyes, it stimulates our optic nerves and produces a signal that allows our brain to be recognized as an object in space with a certain appearance, position and movement. Understanding the nature of light was a challenge. Earlier theories indispensably accepted light as a particle, then as a wave. Today, most physicists understand light as a wave particle. Notice what Einstein wrote: It seems that sometimes we have to use one and sometimes the other theory, while at times we can use both. We face a new kind of incomprehension. We have two contradictory images of reality. Individually, none of them can fully explain the appearance of light, but together they do.
An interesting aspect about the nature of light is why darkness has no power over it. While light drives away darkness, the reverse is not true. In Scripture, this phenomenon plays a prominent role in relation to the nature of God (light) and evil (darkness or darkness). Notice what the apostle John said in 1. John 1,5-7 (HFA) wrote: This is the message that we have heard from Christ and that we pass on to you: God is light. There is no darkness with him. So if we claim that we belong to God and yet we live in the darkness of sin, then we are lying and contradicting the truth with our lives. But if we live in the light of God, then we are also connected to one another. And the blood that His Son Jesus Christ shed for us frees us from all guilt.
As Thomas F. Torrance noted in his book Trinitarian Faith, the early church leader Athanasius, following the teachings of John and other early apostles, used the metaphor of light and its radiance to speak of the nature of God as they did It was revealed to us through Jesus Christ: Just as light is never without its radiation, so the Father is never without his Son or without his word. Furthermore, just as light and shine are one and not strange to one another, so too are the father and son one and not alien to one another, but of one and the same nature. Just as God is eternal light, so the Son of God, as eternal radiation, is God in himself eternal light, without beginning and without end (page 121).
Athanasius formulated an important point that he and other church leaders rightly presented in the Creed of Nicaea: Jesus Christ shares with the Father the one essence (Greek = ousia) of God. If it weren't for that, it wouldn't have made any sense when Jesus said, "Whoever has seen me has also seen the Father" (John 14,9). Just as Torrance states, if Jesus were not consubstantial (an ousia) with the Father (and thus fully God), we would not have the full revelation of God in Jesus. But when Jesus proclaimed that he is true, that revelation, to see him is to see the father, to hear him is to hear the father as he is. Jesus Christ is the Son of the Father in essence, that is, in essential reality and nature. Torrance comments in “Trinitarian Faith” on page 119: The Father-Son relationship fully and perfectly coincides in the oneness of God eternally proper and coexisting with the Father and the Son. God is Father just as He is eternally the Father of the Son, and just as the Son is God of God, just as He is eternally Son of the Father. There is perfect and eternal intimacy between the Father and the Son, without any "distance" in being, time, or knowledge between them.
Because the Father and the Son are one in essence, they are also one in doing (action). Notice what Torrance wrote about this in Christian Doctrine of God: There is an uninterrupted relationship of being and action between the Son and the Father, and in Jesus Christ this relationship was embodied once and for all in our human existence. So there is no God behind the back of Jesus Christ, but only this God, whose face we see in the face of the Lord Jesus. There is no dark, unfathomable God, no random deity that we know nothing about but can only tremble before while our guilty conscience paints hard streaks on his dignity.
This understanding of the nature (essence) of God, revealed to us in Jesus Christ, played a crucial role in the process of officializing the New Testament canon. No book was eligible for inclusion in the New Testament unless it preserved the perfect unity of the Father and the Son. Thus, this truth and reality served as the key interpretive (ie, hermeneutic) ground truth by which the content of the New Testament was determined for the Church. Understanding that the Father and the Son (including the Spirit) are one in essence and action helps us to understand the nature of grace. Grace is not a substance created by God to stand between God and man, but as Torrance describes it, it is "the bestowal of God unto us in his incarnate Son, in whom the gift and the giver are themselves inseparably one God." The greatness of God's saving grace is one person, Jesus Christ, for in, through and from him comes salvation.
The Triune God, the Everlasting Light, is the source of all "enlightenment," both physical and spiritual. The Father who called light into existence sent his Son to be the light of the world, and the Father and Son send the Spirit to bring enlightenment to all people. Although God "dwells in an inaccessible light" (1. Tim. 6,16), he revealed himself to us by his Spirit, in the “face” of his incarnate Son, Jesus Christ (cf 2. Corinthians 4,6). Even if we have to look warily at first to "see" this overwhelming light, those who take it in soon realize the darkness has been banished far and wide.
In the warmth of the light,
Joseph Tkach
President GRACE COMMUNION INTERNATIONAL
