God the Father--anyone remember Him?

Because counterfeit-Christian cults typically deny the Deity
of Jesus, many genuine Christians develop a notion that Jesus
is the only Person of the Godhead Whose Deity ever needs to
be asserted. But here I will discuss a different erosion of the
Blessed Trinity.

Let me begin one evening at a Christian coffeehouse, not so
long after I had received Jesus as my Savior. A young man
leading prayer on stage was addressing Jesus directly from
beginning to end, with no recognition of the Father: "Thank
You Jesus for this, thank You Jesus for that..." and finally:
"Thank You FOR SENDING YOUR SON."

Think that one over.

The Jesus-Only heresy often gets a free ride, with even people
who are not explicitly part of that heresy figuring that as long
as you name Jesus it's okay if you wipe your feet on the Father
and the Holy Spirit. Especially on the Father. The Holy Spirit
has a claim staked out in inspiring the Bible, convicting of sin,
and giving the gifts and the fruit; but for everything else, there's
Master Card. That is to say, for everything else, the Father gets
bumped aside in people's minds in favor of the Son.

Absolutely every God-manifestation anywhere in Scripture which
is not obviously labelled "Holy Spirit" gets attributed to Jesus
and onlyJesus by those who skate close to the Jesus-Only doctrine,
though they do have a little awkwardness about Who it was that
said "This is My beloved Son" when Jesus was standing there
listening. Essentially, the Father is left with _nothing_ to
do, and nothing but that one token line to say. If not actually
in the Jesus-Only sect, they'll _say_ that the three Persons are
co-equal, but they really make the Father LESS co-equal. (When
you note that the Virgin Mary's pregnancy was actually caused by
the Holy Spirit, that _really_ appears to leave the Father with
no role--not even as a Father!)

So why do they do this? Because they, like the heathen, go on
emotions; and Jesus, visibly suffering and visibly rising from
the dead, naturally arouses more emotion in us than the unseen
Father can. So they put their theological investment where their
emotional investment is. Reinforcing this is the lazy mind's
hunger for simplicity.

There are those who try to get farther than simplistic emotions,
and they desire God not only to be loving but also transcendent.
Such persons can see the sentimentalist motivation of those who
lean to Jesus Only--so they lean the other way, figuring that
the very Deity of Jesus must have been trumped up in the first
place by precisely such an emotional approach. If I had ever
fallen away into a cult, it would have been for exactly this
reason; but by God's grace, I stuck with (small-o) orthodox
Christians until I became able to digest the Trinity. And I
was not helped in this digestion by people saying "Believe
it because I say that God's Word means that," whereas I was
_greatly_ helped by the arguments that C.S. Lewis offered
for the Trinity in "Mere Christianity."

Being now a set-in-reinforced-concrete Trinitarian, here is
what I might say to help a seeker who is put off by seemingly
excessive concentration on the Second Person only:

"I agree with something G.K. Chesterton wrote: that being
multi-personal allows God to experience love and companionship
_within_ His own essence, even before He created anything.
This upholds His transcendence, showing that He did not NEED
to make living creatures to save Himself from loneliness, He
CHOSE to make them so that He could extend His love. This is
also what enabled Him to keep on being God and yet also enter
_into_ created life in the Incarnation. There's a passage
in Isaiah which says that God could not find a man to work
deliverance, so His own arm brought Him victory. God would
not delegate the hard job of Atonement to a created man,
even a sinless created man who was willing to make that
sacrifice. His love would make Him prefer to sacrifice
Himself, and being Triune made it feasible for Him."

By the way, the fact that God would need somehow to continue
being God while also coming down for us leads us to an irony.
The Jesus-Only teachers don't realize this, but they come full
circle and end up saying almost exactly the same thing as those
who _deny_ the Deity of Jesus. If you insist on only one Person
in the Godhead, that Person has to exist _outside_ the body of
Jesus that hangs on the cross, so that the crucified one has
Someone _TO_ Whom to be saying "Into Your hands I commend My
spirit." Thus Jesus-Only teachers are forced to believe that
their unipersonal God was NEVER entirely _inside_ the human
life of Jesus, but only had a hand stuck into it, as into a
glove or a puppet. That's what a denier of Jesus' Deity would
also say! By contrast, a "detached" Person of the Trinity could
get ALL the way inside human life and human death, while leaving
the other two Persons to carry on the business of being God
and sustaining the cosmos.

We're almost through! Let me return to the matter of people
diminishing the importance of God the Father. The distant and
un-seeable character of the Father may be _precisely_ what
makes it possible to say that we see God fully in Jesus, and
yet somehow _don't_ yet see Him fully. Note that, where I John
says "When He appears, we shall be like Him," it is NOT, NOT,
NOT saying "When _Jesus_ appears," though numerous people make
themselves believe that this is what it says; it is referring
to the FATHER, for the Father is the ONLY antecedent given for
the pronoun. So there IS something worthwhile about the Father
in Himself.

And what is that something? Well, it can indeed be strongly
argued that all God's perceptible actions and audible speech
in the Old Testament were Jesus at work; but consider how Jesus
Himself said that the Son does what He sees the Father doing.
There, I think, is our clue, and there is the Father's niche.
The Father's place is as "first among equals;" it is LEADERSHIP
within the Trinity. I believe that the Father was the Person
Who said in Genesis, "Let Us--". I believe that it is the Father
Who _originates_ the ideas of the Godhead. This gives Him a job,
so to speak, even if He is not visible to us up front. And that
is why Paul can write that the Son will remain subject to the
Father for eternity, without it meaning that the Son is inferior.

Someone to whom I presented this reasoning let it pass right
by him unheeded, saying to me something like, "That's right,
just like you said, the Father submits to the Son and the
Father obeys the Son." Huh??? The emotional pull of "Jesus
Only" is that strong, even for those who have not committed
themselves consciously to the heresy. But as long as I'm here,
there will be at least one Christian who does NOT relegate God
the Father to being only a background spear-carrier with no
lines of dialogue in the show.