“FATHER” and “Almighty”: these two first designations of God—each singly and the two in their interconnection—lead us at once into the fullness, into the light, and also into the darkness of the prophetic-apostolic testimony to revelation which is summarised in the symbol.
In the sense of the symbol and in line with what was worked out in the last Lecture towards an understanding of the Christian conception of God, we shall have immediately to make it clear to ourselves that the conception “Almighty” receives its light from the conception “Father” and not vice versa. And that, although it is undoubtedly God’s revelation, and therefore an act of divine omnipotence through which God makes Himself known to man as Father; although we undoubtedly know God the Father in the exhibition of His omnipotence. But an act, and that an act of divine omnipotence is the revelation of God’s Fatherhood. God’s omnipotence is not some power that we might be inclined to regard as omnipotence. It is the power of the Father that does not make itself known to us as omnipotence in abstracto but only as the omnipotence of the Father, and that means—in the Father’s revealing Himself to us. This first article of the Creed and, in particular, these initial constituents are in no respect a playground for Natural Theology. It is not as if we already of ourselves knew what “omnipotence” is, in order then to have to learn from revelation only this in addition—that God is the Almighty and that the name and character of “Father” fit him. On the contrary, the revelation of God the Father is as such also the revelation of His omnipotence, and it is from this revelation that we have first of all to learn what real omnipotence is.
But according to the passages in Scripture where the conception “Father” gets its most pregnant meaning, the revelation of God the Father is the revelation of God in His Son Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. Scripture explicitly calls it the sole revelation of the Father. Therefore it is exclusively in this place that we shall have to seek to understand decisively and finally the conception “Father”. Let us start, however, from the fact that the revelation of the Almighty God and therefore of what in the sense of the symbol is called “omnipotence” is identical with the revelation of the Father of Jesus Christ through the Spirit, it being here that we have to learn what real “omnipotence” is.
With these words, “revelation of God the Father,” we at once push into the sphere of faith’s deepest mysteries. These words, “revelation of God the Father,” contain a remarkable contradiction, so far as God as Father is just not manifest to us in revelation itself, or is manifest only as the God Who remains hidden from us even in His revelation and just there, Who, in disclosing Himself, conceals Himself, Who, in coming near to us, remains far from us, Who, in being kind to us, remains holy. “No man hath seen God at any time” (John 1:18). “He dwelleth in a light which no man can approach unto” (1 Tim. 6:16). That, according to the Scriptures, is God the Father. God wants a faith in Himself as Father that expresses itself in obedience, i.e. He wants to be known under the condition that His hiddenness is recognised, to be known in the act of His revelation, which means—in His Son through the Holy Spirit. God’s revelation in His Son through the Spirit is a revelation which, far from excluding, includes within itself a remaining hidden, indeed a profoundest becoming hidden on the part of God. God’s revelation in His Son, so far as we understand by that concretely the—to us quite comprehensible—human existence of Jesus Christ, is, as the second article of the Creed will show us just as strikingly as is in keeping with the New Testament, a way into the darkness of God; it is the way of Jesus to Golgotha. If as such it is a way into the light of God, and is therefore really God’s revelation, then that is because this Jesus on “the third day rose again from the dead, He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of God.” But that is said of Jesus the Crucified. Actually the hidden God here becomes manifest; we are here led right to the limit of what we can conceive in order that here (here, where Jesus Himself cries: “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”) we may catch the words, “Behold, your God!” God the Father, as Father of Jesus Christ, is He Who leads His Son into hell and out again. And in so far as He, as Father of Jesus Christ, gives Himself through the Holy Spirit to be known as our Father, we learn that we can follow Christ only by taking up our Cross, that our Baptism in His name is Baptism into His death and that we must die with Him in order to live with Him (Rom. 6:3 f.), that our life, as the life of all His own, is a life that is hid with Him in God (Col. 3:3). Here, too, we are led right to the frontier where our appropriate attitude can only be an obedience that marches out into the darkness and a faith that steps out of the darkness into the light. Not more and not less than the Lord over life and death becomes manifest to us in the revelation of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit. This Lord over life and death is God the Father.
And it is just His lordship over life and death that is the omnipotence of God the Father. This is as different from the idea of an infinite potentiality as our real life is from one of our dreams. For infinite potentiality in itself and as idea is an empty conception under which no one has ever yet seriously imagined anything, because it simply cannot be done. But the omnipotence of the Father, revealed in the revelation of His Son through the Holy Spirit, is (in the obedience and faith given to this revelation) a reality which can be recognised as the totality of all known and conceivable and unknown possibilities. For the Lord over life and death with Whom we have here to do, is as such the Lord of our existence, i.e. He to Whom our life and with it our death has become bound, He Who at the utmost limit of all our possibilities commands us: Halt! and at the very same place and instant: Forward! to Whom therefore we effectively belong, i.e. in extremest fear and in greatest hope. That is “omnipotence” in a serious sense of the word. For the “all” (omnipotence) in a serious sense means: the circle that is described by this claim of God to our life and to our death. And in a serious sense “power over all” means: the claim that thereby meets us, our being in subjection to this claim. All other “omnipotence” would not be real omnipotence. Only the claim of the Lord over life and death has real omnipotence. This real omnipotence becomes manifest to us in what the Scriptures call the “revelation of the Father”. This is the omnipotence of the divine decision legitimately made over us and recognised as such by us: this is infinite potentiality, because it is reality illimitably and unconditionally, because all possibilities, those known and those hidden, have in it their standard, their ground, their boundary and their definition, because we are really surrounded by it on all sides, sustained by it in every way, because along with our existence it rules also our world, rules it indeed completely. “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matt. 10:29 f.). Once more, it is the revelation of the Father through the Son in the Holy Spirit which reveals to us this, the real omnipotence.
Now in this revelation of omnipotence, that is to say, in giving us His Son and the Holy Spirit for the knowing of His Son, God shows Himself as the Father. The act of omnipotence of the Lord over life and death in the revelation through the Son in the Spirit shows not only His omnipotence, but shows it as paternal; it shows God’s Fatherhood. It demonstrates and this demonstration is the truth that God is Father, not only and not first of all as our Father, but already in Himself eternal Father and precisely as such, our Father. So it is not the case that God only became Father, in relation to our existence and our world, by revealing Himself to us in the Son through