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God. Trinity. Son as the image of the Father
In the works of
Fr. Sergei Bulgakov
6
I have said, Ye
are
gods;
and all of you
are
children of the most High.
Jhn 10:34.
33
The Jews answered him, saying, For a good work we stone thee not;
but for blasphemy;
and because that
thou, being a man, makest thyself God.
34
Jesus answered them, Is it not written in your law, I said,
Ye are gods?
Psa 82:6.
35
If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;
36
Say ye of him, whom the Father hath sanctified, and sent into the world, Thou blasphemest;
because I said,
I am the Son of God?
John 6:27.
Son is the living image of the Father
The principle (archē)
of the nature of Divinity, as of the entire Holy Trinity, is God the Father. He has His own nature, and His possession of it is a hypostatic, co-hypostatic, and interhypostatic act.
The Father acquires Himself as His nature, not in Himself and for Himself, but in proceeding out of Himself and in begetting, as the Father, the Son.
Fatherhood is precisely the form of love in which the loving one desires to have himself not in himself but outside himself, in order to give his own to this other I, but an I identified with him, in order to manifest his own in spiritual begetting: in
the Son, who is the living image of the Father.
The Father lives not in Himself but in His Son's life;
the Father lives in begetting, that is, in proceeding out of Himself, in revealing Himself. The Father's love is ecstatic, fiery, causative, active. Unfathomable for the creaturely spirit is this
begetting
of the Son by the Father, of the Person by the Person. This begetting power is the ecstasy of a going out of oneself, of a kind of self-emptying, which at the same time is self-actualization through this begetting. The Father actualizes
His own,
His own hypostatically transparent nature, in the hypostasis of the Son, who is His Word, the “image of his person
[hupostasis]”
(Heb. 1:3).
The Father has Himself in His nature as the hypostatic Word, His Word, and the Father is the one who speaks the Word. Thus, in the first place, God's hypostatic nature is the Father's hypostatic Word, which is uttered by the Father in the Son. “All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father;
neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son”
(Matt. 11:27).
For the Father, begetting is self-emptying, the giving of Himself and of His own to the Other;
it is the sacrificial ecstasy of all-consuming, jealous love for the Other: “love is strong as death;
jealousy is cruel as the grave: the coals thereof are coals of fire, which hath a most vehement flame”
(Song of Songs 8:6).
Son is the hypostatic image of the Father
… There is a perfect identity between the Father's proper, inner Word, restrained in silence, and the hypostatic Word, which is engendered from the Father and which is His own uttered Word.
The Son has and knows nothing that the Father does not have;
and the Father does not possess anything that is not manifested in the Son.
This is attested by the Word of the Father about Himself and about the Father;
some of these testimonies concern His divine-human, kenotic ministry, while others have a more general character.
The chief pertinent text from the Synoptics is from Matthew
11:27:
"no man knoweth the Son, but the Father;
neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son"
(cf.
Luke 10:22). In
John 10:15,
we find:
"as the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father"
(cf.
6:46). Also:
"he that hath seen me hath seen the Father. … I am in the Father, and the Father in me"
(14:9,
11);
"I have known thee"
(17:25).
Also pertinent are all of Christ's testimonies in which He identifies Himself with the Father in life, will, and works:
"The Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into his hand"
(John 3:35);
"the Father. sheweth him all things that himself doeth"
(5:20;
cf.
5:19);
"I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me"
(5:30;
cf.
6:38);
"as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things"
(8:28);
"I do always those things that please him"
(8:29);
"I have not spoken of myself;
but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak"
(12:49);
"the word which ye hear is not mine, but the Father's which sent me"
(14:24);
"I speak that which I have seen with my Father"
(8:38;
cf.
12:50);
"that I have heard of my Father"
(15:15).
And all this is summed up in the identification:
"I and my Father are one"
(10:30;
cf.
10:38);
"if ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also"
(8:19);
"he that hateth me hateth my Father also"
(15:23);
"I am in the Father, and the Father in me"
(14:11;
cf.
14:20);
"thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee"
(17:21;
cf.
17:23);
"we will come unto him, and make our abode with him"
(14:23).
The perfect adequacy of the revelation of the Father in the Son is attested by Scripture so undeniably and irrefutably that one does not need to insist on it. Indeed, this adequacy follows from the very relation of spiritual fatherhood and sonhood, where the
Son is the hypostatic image of the Father
("the brightness of his glory and the express image of his person"
[Heb. 1:3]), while the Father shows Himself in the Son. One can say that here the Divine Predicate, the Word, is absolutely adequate to the Divine Subject;
but this identity is realized in two different hypostases, about which it can nevertheless be affirmed:
"I and my Father are one,"
that is, Their separateness is affirmed at the same time as Their identity in mutual love.
See also
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