God is his own exegete

1. The Son, interpreter of the Father

Scripture says of man that he has never seen God, that God dwells in unapproachable light, that no created spirit can fathom his inner life. How then can man, who is created with an orientation towards God and constantly seeks him, begin to interpret him? Only God, who has the vision of his own wisdom, is able to reveal his wisdom. We find this literally in Job 28:27 in the Septuagint version. The closing verse of the Johannine prologue repeats this in a trinitarian and therefore deeper context: “No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son, who is nearest to the Father’s heart who autos exegēsato” (1:18). Ignace de la Potterie, in a long investigation, has illuminated what exactly the word exegēsato means.¹ It is noteworthy that in the Greek temple there were interpreters of divine oracles who bore the name ‘exegetes.’² It seems improbable, though, that the Evangelist has drawn from this source, for the very reason that Jesus certainly does not interpret a divine oracle but is himself the revelation, which John designates simply as the “truth.” One will thus have to explain the sense of the word from the Greek version of the Old Testament where it means, beyond mere ‘telling’ or ‘announcing,’ rather ‘revealing’ or ‘disclosing.’³ What is specific to John appears when one recognizes, in distinction to Moses’ bringing of the Law, that Jesus brought the unity of “grace and truth.” The Son turned towards the Father has “disclosed” or “revealed” both of these⁠—⁠above and beyond the sentence “no one has seen God.” This means that the act of revelation is for John identical with its content: the Son as man discloses (through his being and doing) the essence of God the Father, so that he can say of himself: “To have seen me (in that which I am to do) is to have seen the Father” (Jn 14:9).

If one understands “revelation” (Offenbarung) as a laying-bare (Offen-legung) or a setting forth (Dar-legung), then it also has the sense of “rendering intelligible” or “interpreting.” In this way, the disclosure of what is accessible to no one is always at the same time an act of the highest and most gracious free will. Grace and truth do not stand next to one another indifferently, they immediately form an indivisible unity.⁴ The introduction into the essence of the Father, which the Son is, will thus never be merely theoretical; there is in the Bible, insofar as it is God’s revelation, no “theoretical truth” at all. Instead, Jesus, as interpreter, always actively reveals the Father. The understanding reception of his proclamation is only possible as an act, i.e., as a following, which is a grace and which shows the gracious side of revelation. The expression “theo-logy” means originally that God enunciates himself in grace through his Logos. This laying-bare in the man Jesus can be⁠—⁠thanks to its intelligibility, but thanks also to the communication of divine grace (the Holy Spirit)⁠—⁠apprehended, followed, pondered, and grasped in human words and concepts.

Yet it is sufficient here to take theology in its first meaning, as the self-interpretation of God in the Incarnation of his Son. We will consider in the second part, how man’s interpretation presupposes that “the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given us” (Rom 5:5). It will then become clear how we can understand God’s interpreting himself through man without canceling his mysterious character, or alternately, how the abiding mysteriousness of God does not hinder a real understanding by man. The first possibility lies in the essence of Christ. As true man, he can make God intelligible to us through human words, gestures, deeds, and sufferings. As true Son of God, he still shows us at the same time something boundless, which sets our incipient understanding in endless motion towards deeper comprehension. The second reason lies in the fact that the Holy Spirit given to us as an aid for our understanding never simply coincides with our created and finite spirit. The Spirit illuminates us with his divine light of understanding, but in such a way that he convinces us ever more deeply that we only understand when we surrender ourselves in faith to the self-revealing God. The third reason is that what the Son reveals to us of the Father—the infinite love, ready for any sacrifice, of the Father himself (who “loved the world so much that he gave his only Son” [John 3:16])—is a fact eternally inconceivable for every comprehension. So Paul can summon us, by an exact paradox, to know “the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge” (Eph 3:19). This is what the triune God has destined for us in Christ. All comprehension of the self-interpreting God is called to an unceasing self-transcendence, which (according to Gregory of Nyssa) will not come to a standstill even in the eternal beatific vision.

How then does God reveal himself to us in Jesus Christ? Let us divide the answer for simplicity’s sake into three parts. He does so first through the Son’s becoming and being a man. In this way, “grace and truth” came into our darkened realm: “the light shone in the darkness.” The light, which is God, shone from God into our darkness, at first unconcerned whether we comprehended it or not. How can Jesus’ just being a man already be a revelation of God? With our gaze fixed on the dogma, we can say that there are two reasons. First, because the divine person of the Son must be able to translate his own divine being into the language of being a man. For the Son, who is “theomorphic” (in the form of God), becomes truly anthropomorphic. As a child he is dependent on man, especially on his mother. So God wills in the covenant to be “dependent” on man. The child grows and chooses to be at home in the temple, the house of his Father. So God dwells even in the earthly temple with himself. As a man, Jesus will be tired, he will become angry, he will become weary with men, and he will finally weep over Jerusalem. All of this had already been asserted of God in the Old Testament. He can become tired and wearied of the covenant’s being broken ever again to such a point that he forbids Jeremiah to pray for the people: too late! His anger can blaze terribly, yet still always be a form of his love. In rabbinical writings, he will even grieve and weep over Israel. Jesus represents, in the whole of his action, the feeling heart of the Father.

The second reason for this is that the divine person of the Son is already from eternity the self-enunciation and self-revelation of the Father. For this reason, Jesus does not in his human nature so much proclaim his own divine nature as he does the Father, to whom he continuously refers both as man and as God. That Jesus becomes the explicit revealer in his public life as teacher (through word and wondrous deed) is shown secondly by all episodes in the Gospels. He teaches men how God really is and since he is, himself, a man, astonishingly he teaches them to imitate this God. The entire Sermon on the Mount shows this. How is small, perishable man to be capable of taking the infinite eternal God as his model? Because man was created from the beginning according to the image of God, and Jesus taking up this image directs it beyond itself to the prototype: in loving one’s enemies, in not striking back, in forgiving because God forgives first. In this way, Christ becomes not only the interpreter of God, but by the same stroke, the interpreter of man. By letting the light of the prototype fall upon the image, he gives man his dignity and truth.

But the highest interpretation of the Father, takes place in the last stage of the earthly existence of Jesus—in the Passion. His public life was a failure, just as Yahweh’s renewed approaches to Israel were repeated failures—to the point of exile and, afterwards, in the distortion of the Abrahamic faith into a self-satisfied, pharisaical, and political religion of law. But now God speaks his final word: his Son, who is his Word, takes over in suffering the role of those who say “no” (he is made “into sin” [2 Cor 5:21]) and carries it through to his inconceivable abandonment by God (“why?”), to his death, and to the experience of the hopelessness of Sheol, as the Psalms describe it (“descended into Hell”). Where the words of Jesus, the man on the cross, trickled out, the Father speaks his loudest and most definitive word: “God has loved the world so much that he gave his only Son” (Jn 3:16). A word which seen humanly is only silence and ruin becomes, as John shows, the final glorification of divine love. The Cross alone is God’s final exegesis, who here proves himself once for all as love. Whoever removes himself even an inch from this self-interpretation—thus the entire first epistle of John—is no longer a Christian; he has not understood the self-interpretation of God.

We cannot emphasize strongly enough that this exegesis of God has no real analogue in the entire world of religion. Here God interprets his depths in suffering—that is, in a voluntary suffering, taking on himself the guilt of others; all the other ways traveled by man to God are such as entail the overcoming of suffering, the quest for the “happy life,” or immunity to the reversals of life. All this is comprehensible. These are the typically human notions in which wisdom consists. But God’s self-interpretation is in its foolishness “wiser than human wisdom” (1 Cor 1:25).

In this way, the farthest depths of divine love, whose fountainhead is the Father, are plumbed through Jesus, the Son of the Father. In the heart pierced again in death, a wound is torn open, which, as Claudel says, plunges down to the center of the Trinity.⁵

2. The Spirit as interpreter

But do men then understand this self-interpretation? As the Gospel ceaselessly tells us, not before the Holy Spirit has been sent to them and has settled in their hearts. Neither did the Jews understand (they did not want to understand at all what was laid before them), nor the disciples, whose lack of understanding is reiterated three times in one passage: “But they could make nothing of this; what he said was quite obscure to them, they had no idea what it meant” (Lk 18:34). They betray, deny, flee before the cross. The disciples on the way to Emmaus “had hoped” but are now disappointed. The disciples do not believe those proclaiming the Resurrection, so that the Lord must take them to task on Easter Day (Mk 16:14). The Spirit had simply not yet come. The Spirit, who had overshadowed Mary, who thus effected the first interpretation of God in Christ, who had endowed Jesus at his Baptism with the missionary power and continuously led and “impelled” him—the Spirit had to be “breathed out” at the end to the Father by the dying One, so that the One rising from the dead could breathe him into the Church from the Father.

The Spirit is not a second interpretation of God, but rather the perfection of the first and only interpretation, “since he will not be speaking as from himself but will only say what he has learnt; and he will tell you of the things to come. He will glorify me, since all he tells you will be taken from what is mine. Everything the Father has is mine; that is why I said: ‘All he tells you will be taken from what is mine’” (Jn 16:13⁠-⁠15). The unity of the self-interpretation of God could not be more clearly expressed. It also comes to light when the Spirit sent into the hearts of the faithful cries out, “Abba, Father,” uttering the call of the Son to the Father.

The introduction by the Spirit into “the whole truth” is, of course, an unending process, one that cannot be concluded on earth and within history. In order for this process not to degenerate into formlessness, it must be enacted within determinate, established structures, which correspond exactly to the Incarnation of the Word in the bodily and spiritual structure of a man. The basic tendency of genuine interpretation will always be recognizable in its incarnational character. It chisels out the image and essence of Jesus in the faithful. It never tends, as other religions do, towards escapism from the body or the world. The missionary Spirit does not aim at effacing the boundaries between the divine self-interpretation in the world and the laws proper to the inner, non-religious structures. If Jesus gives us his peace, “a peace the world cannot give” (Jn 14:27), then the distinction remains intact when from a Christian peace a worldly peace is encouraged or even attained, or when from Christian freedom a worldly liberation is encouraged or even carried out.

The interpretation of the Spirit takes place within the structures erected and protected by him. These are the Church with the Holy Scriptures and the Tradition belonging to it, including the distinction between “shepherd” and “flock” characterizing it. These elements are the presupposition for an ever-continuing, living interpretation of the Spirit, which throws itself in the ever new and deeper visions of the saints; in ever greater purification of what is genuinely Christian from all foreign additions; in the ever deeper impression of this purified good on the multiplicity of cultures and traditions (recall the miracle of languages at Pentecost); in the perpetually living witness of Christians to the point of martyrdom, which Jesus foretold to them; in their deepening prayer, by which God’s truth in Christ can penetrate anew and originally into each individual; and in the renewed beginnings of Christian theology, which attempt to penetrate the unfathomable mystery of the trinitarian gift presented to the world. The aspects of the Spirit’s interpretation are infinite. Since the Spirit is always present anew, since Jesus also dwells with us “all days until the end of the world,” there is no danger that the stream will dry up and that what is absolutely current will sink into the historical past.

After what has been said, it would be quite wrong to want to resolve the self-revelation of the triune God into phases, as if there were first an age of the Father (whether creation, or the Old Testament), then one of the Son (from the Incarnation, but for how long?), and finally one of the Spirit (which begins at the latest with the Incarnation and can in no way—with Joachim of Fiore—be transferred into the future). This division into phases, which has been attempted many times in orthodox and heterodox ways, is impossible. God in his three hypostases is always one and so can interpret himself as the one God.

The Church Fathers always read God’s trinity in the very first verse of Genesis: God the Father speaks his Word in the beginning as his Spirit hovers over the waters. Indeed, the entire creation bears in different degrees of clarity the image of the triune God. In the Old Testament, God speaks “in diverse ways” through his Word; his Spirit “has spoken through the prophets.” In the Incarnation, which the Spirit effects, the Son reveals the Father in that Spirit. In the time of the Church, the Spirit interprets for the world nothing other than the love between Father and Son which has become visible in Christ: at one and the same time, the Spirit is subjectively the love bestowed upon us and objectively its testimony before the world. Consequently, there are no true phases, but rather a crescendo of divine light which, whether unrecognized or recognized, is always the same light of the always triune love.

Were God not his own interpreter, man, who certainly knows that he is a creature and that there is a Lord who is his origin and end (DS 3004), would never ascertain what “the inner life of God” is. Only the Spirit of God is able to fathom that. But precisely this Spirit is given to us “to teach us to understand the gifts that he has given us. Therefore we teach, not in the way in which philosophy is taught, but in the way that the Spirit teaches us: we teach spiritual things spiritually” (1 Cor 2:10⁠-⁠13).