1. Faith in the Holy Trinity (continued)

The articles could have started in a different place. It is interesting that they do not begin with a statement about revelation. They do not first give an epistemological grounding of the knowledge of God before moving on to substantive expressions of what that knowledge is. Neither do they start with Christ and the incarnation, or the gospel, and work out from this point (as a 20th century theological statement might have).

However, starting with God in this way reflects the order of reality, not the order of knowledge. The starting point is the God who is the source of all things, not the nature of our access to him - even the Son is here first introduced as ordered to the Father. Jesus does not exist in or for himself - there is a priority of the Father over the Son. The Son's orientation is towards the Father.

There is no question but that this statement employs terms that are Platonic rather than distinctively Christian, as the Cyberpastor noted. Christian thinkers have since very early on found platonic terms a congenial way of expressing what they found in the OT. These terms are especially useful in speaking of God's absolute transcendence - his sheer infinity.

The question is: is this use inappropriate? Does it fatally distort the doctrine of God? If you take the first article in toto, we do see that there is in place a dialetic between God's oneness and threeness which we could certainly read as heavily qualifying those Greek terms in a distinctively Christian way. That is, the article does not stop at God's infinite distance from us, but also by speaking of Father, Son and Spirit, implies his nearness to us: and flows on into the second article, which more properly announces the coming of the Son of God into our midst.