[BBC List] the definition

Fri Apr 27 08:30:22 EAST 2007

God 

Reprinted from "A Dictionary of the Bible,"
edited by John D. Davis, Ph.D., D.D., LL.D., 1898, pp. 251-253. 

By Benjamin
<http://thirdmill.org/magazine/search.asp/keyword/bb_warfield/category/magaz
ine/site/iiim/searchtype/articles/allarticles/1>  B. Warfield

Dr. Benjamin B Warfield graduated from the College of New Jersey, now
Princeton University, in 1871 and after a period of study abroad at
Edinburgh and Heidelberg entered Princeton Theological Seminary and was
graduated with the class of 1876. Following a year's study at Leipzig,
Germany, and a short pastorate in Baltimore he was appointed instructor in
New Testament Language and Literature in Western Theological Seminary in
Pittsburgh and a year later elected professor. In 1886 he was called to
succeed Archibald Alexander Hodge as professor of Systematic Theology in
Princeton Theological Seminary - a position which he occupied with great
distinction until his death in 1921. 

Dr. Warfield won early recognition as a scholar, teacher and author. He
received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from the college of New Jersey in
1880; that of Doctor of Laws from both the College of New Jersey and
Davidson college in 1892; that of Doctor of Letters from Lafayette College
in 1911; and that of Sacrae Theologiae Doctor from the University of Utrecht
in 1913. He was editor of the Presbyterian and Reformed Review from
1890-1903 and until the time of his death, the chief contributor to the
Princeton Theological Review. 

The English word "God" is derived from a root meaning "to call," and
indicates simply the object of worship, one whom men call upon or invoke.
The Greek word which it translates in the pages of the New Testament,
however, describes this object of worship as Spirit; and the Old Testament
Hebrew word, which this word in turn represents, conveys, as its primary
meaning, the idea of power. On Christian lips, therefore, the word "God"
designates fundamentally the almighty Spirit who is worshiped and whose aid
is invoked by men. This primary idea of God, in which is summed up what is
known as theism, is the product of that general revelation which God makes
of Himself to all men, on the plane of nature. The truths involved in it are
continually reiterated, enriched, and deepened in the Scriptures; but they
are not so much revealed by them as presupposed at the foundation of the
special revelation with which the Scriptures busy themselves - the great
revelation of the grace of God to sinners. On the plane of nature men can
learn only what God necessarily is, and what, by virtue of His essential
attributes, He must do; a special communication from Him is requisite to
assure us what, in His infinite love, He will do for the recovery of sinners
from their guilt and misery to the bliss of communion with Him. And for the
full revelation of this, His grace in the redemption of sinners, there was
requisite an even more profound unveiling of the mode of His existence, by
which He has been ultimately disclosed as including in the unity of His
being a distinction of persons, by virtue of which it is the same God from
whom, through whom, and by whom are all things, who is at once the Father
who provides, the Son who accomplishes, and the Spirit who applies,
redemption. Only in the uncovering of this supernal mystery of the Trinity
is the revelation of what God is completed. That there is no hint of the
Trinity in the general revelation made on the plane of nature is due to the
fact that nature has nothing to say of redemption, in the process of which
alone are the depths of the divine nature made known. That it is explicitly
revealed only in the New Testament is due to the fact that not until the New
Testament stage of revelation was reached was the redemption, which was
being prepared throughout the whole Old Testament economy, actually
accomplished. That so ineffable a mystery was placed before the darkened
mind of man at all is due to the necessities of the plan of redemption
itself, which is rooted in the trinal distinction in the Godhead, and can be
apprehended only on the basis of the Trinity in Unity. 

The nature of God has been made known to men, therefore, in three stages,
corresponding to the three planes of revelation, and we will naturally come
to know Him, first, as the infinite Spirit or the God of nature; then, as
the Redeemer of sinners, or the God of grace; and lastly as the Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost, or the Triune God. 

I. GOD, THE INFINITE SPIRIT

The conviction of the existence of God bears the marks of an intuitive truth
in so far as it is the universal and unavoidable belief of men, and is given
in the very same act with the idea of self, which is known at once as
dependent and responsible and thus implies one on whom it depends and to
whom it is responsible. This immediate perception of God is confirmed and
the contents of the idea developed by a series of arguments known as the
"theistic proofs." These are derived from the necessity we are under of
believing in the real existence of the infinitely perfect Being, of a
sufficient cause for the contingent universe, of an intelligent author of
the order and of the manifold contrivances observable in nature, and of a
lawgiver and judge for dependent moral beings, endowed with the sense of
duty and an ineradicable feeling of responsibility, conscious of the moral
contradictions of the world and craving a solution for them, and living
under an intuitive perception of right which they do not see realized. The
cogency of these proofs is currently recognized in the Scriptures, while
they add to them the supernatural manifestations of God in a redemptive
process, accompanied at every stage by miraculous attestation. From the
theistic proofs, however, we learn not only that a God exists, but also
necessarily, on the principle of a sufficient cause, very much of the nature
of the God which they prove to exist. The idea is still further developed,
on the principle of interpreting by the highest category within our reach,
by our instinctive attribution to Him, in an eminent degree, of all that is
the source of dignity and excellence in ourselves. Thus we come to know God
as a personal Spirit, infinite, eternal, and illimitable alike in His being
and in the intelligence, sensibility, and will which belong to Him as
personal spirit. The attributes which are thus ascribed to Him, including
self-existence, independence, unity, uniqueness, unchangeableness,
omnipresence, infinite knowledge and wisdom, infinite freedom and power,
infinite truth, righteousness, holiness and goodness, are not only
recognized but richly illustrated in Scripture, which thus puts the seal of
its special revelation upon all the details of the natural idea of God. 

II. GOD, THE REDEEMER OF SINNERS

While reiterating the teaching of nature as to the existence and character
of the personal Creator and Lord of all, the Scriptures lay their stress
upon the grace or the undeserved love of God, as exhibited in His dealings
with His sinful and wrath-deserving creatures. So little, however, is the
consummate divine attribute of love advanced, in the Scriptural revelation,
at the expense of the other moral attributes of God, that it is thrown into
prominence only upon a background of the strongest assertion and fullest
manifestation of its companion attributes, especially of the divine
righteousness and holiness, and is exhibited as acting only along with and
in entire harmony with them. God is not represented in the Scriptures as
forgiving sin because He really cares very little about sin; nor yet because
He is so exclusively or predominatingly the God of love, that all other
attributes shrink into desuetude in the presence of His illimitable
benevolence. He is rather represented as moved to deliver sinful man from
his guilt and pollution because He pities the creatures of His hand,
immeshed in sin, with an intensity which is born of the vehemence of His
holy, abhorrence of sin and His righteous determination to visit it with
intolerable retribution; and by a mode which brings as complete satisfaction
to His infinite justice and holiness as to His unbounded love itself. The
Biblical presentation of the God of grace includes thus the richest
development of all His moral attributes, and the God of the Bible is
consequently set forth, in the completeness of that idea, as above
everything else the ethical God. And that is as much as to say that there is
ascribed to Him a moral sense so sensitive and true that it estimates with
unfailing accuracy the exact moral character of every person or deed
presented for its contemplation, and responds to it with the precisely
appropriate degree of satisfaction or reprobation. The infinitude of His
love is exhibited to us precisely in that while we were yet sinners He loved
us, though with all the force of His infinite nature he reacted against our
sin with illimitable abhorrence and indignation. The mystery of grace
resides just in the impulse of a sin-hating God to show mercy to such guilty
wretches; and the supreme revelation of God as the God of holy love is made
in the disclosure of the mode of His procedure in redemption, by which alone
He might remain just while justifying the ungodly. For in this procedure
there was involved the mighty paradox of the infinitely just Judge Himself
becoming the sinner's substitute before His own law and the infinitely
blessed God receiving in His own person the penalty of sin. 

III. GOD, THE FATHER, SON, AND HOLY GHOST

The elements of the plan of salvation are rooted in the mysterious nature of
the Godhead, in which there coexists a trinal distinction of persons with
absolute unity of essence; and the revelation of the Trinity was accordingly
incidental to the execution of this plan of salvation, in which the Father
sent the Son to be the propitiation for sin, and the Son, when He returned
to the glory which He had with the Father before the world was, sent the
Spirit to apply His redemption to men. The disclosure of this fundamental
fact of the divine nature, therefore, lagged until the time had arrived for
the actual working out of the long-promised redemption; and it was
accomplished first of all in fact rather than in word, by the actual
appearance of God the Son on earth and the subsequent manifestations of the
Spirit, who was sent forth to act as His representative in His absence. At
the very beginning of Christ's ministry the three persons are dramatically
exhibited to our sight in the act of His baptism. And though there is no
single passage in Scripture in which all the details of this great mystery
are gathered up and expounded, there do not lack passages in which the three
persons are brought together in a manner which exhibits at once their unity
and distinctness. The most prominent of these are perhaps the formula of
baptism in the triune name, put into the mouths of His followers by the
resurrected Lord (Matt. xxviii. 19), and the apostolic benediction in which
a divine blessing is invoked from each person in turn (II Cor. xiii. 14).
The essential elements which enter into and together make up this great
revelation of the Triune God are, however, most commonly separately insisted
upon. The chief of these are the three constitutive facts: (1) that there is
but one God (Deut. vi. 4; Isa. xliv. 6; I Cor. viii. 4; Jas. ii. 19) ; (2)
that the Father is God (Matt. xi. 25; John vi. 27; viii. 41; Rom. xv. 6; I
Cor. viii. 6; Gal. i. 1, 3, 4; Eph. iv. 6; vi. 23; I Thess. i. 1; Jas. i.
27; iii. 9; I Pet. i. 2; Jude 1); the Son is God (John i. 1, 18; xx. 28;
Acts xx. 28; Rom. ix. 5; Heb. i. 8; Col. ii. 9; Phil. ii. 6; II Pet. i. 1);
and the Spirit is God (Acts v. 3, 4; I Cor. ii. 10, 11; Eph. ii. 22); and
(3) that the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are personally distinct from one
another, distinguished by personal pronouns, able to send and be sent by one
another, to love and honor each the other, and the like (John xv. 26; xvi.
13, 14; xvii. 8, 18, 23; xvi. 14; xvii. 1). The doctrine of the Trinity is
but the synthesis of these facts, and, adding nothing to them, simply
recognizes in the unity of the Godhead such a Trinity of persons as is
involved in the working out of the plan of redemption. In the prosecution of
this work there is implicated a certain relative subordination in the modes
of operation of the several persons, by which it is the Father that sends
the Son and the Son who sends the Spirit; but the three persons are
uniformly represented in Scripture as in their essential nature each alike
God over all, blessed forever (Rom. ix. 5) ; and we are therefore to
conceive the subordination as rather economical, that is, relative to the
function of each in the work of redemption, than essential, that is,
involving a, difference in nature. 

Thanks.

Charis,

Mike Abendroth

 <http://www.bbcchurch.org> www.bbcchurch.org

Ephesians 3:21 auvtw/| h` do,xa evn th/| evkklhsi,a| 

2 Tim 1:2b  "Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our
Lord."

"Faith is not our physician; it only brings us to the Physician ... Faith is
not our saviour. It was not faith that was born at Bethlehem and died on
Golgotha for us. It was not faith that loved us, and gave itself for us;
that bore our sins in its own body on the tree; that died and rose again for
our sins.  It is a sin-bearer that we need, and our faith cannot be a
sin-bearer. Faith can expiate no guilt; can accomplish no propitiation; can
pay no penalty; can wash away no stain; can provide no righteousness. It
brings us to the cross, . but in itself it has no merit and no virtue.
Faith is not Christ, nor the cross of Christ. Faith is not the blood, nor
the sacrifice; . Our faith does not divide the work of salvation between
itself and the cross. It is the acknowledgment that the cross alone saves,
and that it saves alone. Faith adds nothing to the cross, nor to its healing
virtue. It owns the fulness, and sufficiency, and suitableness of the work
done there, and bids the toiling spirit cease from its labours and enter
into rest. Faith does not come to Calvary to do anything. It comes to see
the glorious spectacle of all things done, and to accept this completion
without a misgiving as to its efficacy. It listens to the "It is finished!"
of the Sin-bearer, and says, "Amen."   

NOT FAITH, BUT CHRIST 

by Horatius Bonar 
(1808-1889) 

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