God's Self Revelation

There is a Person, and His name is Jesus Christ. There is a Person and His name is the Father. There is a person and His name is the Holy Spirit. There are three persons in the Divine Monarxia (God-head) who in their threeness and interpenetrating inner-relating shape the oneness of the one being of God. The one being (ousia) is not what it is without the three persons (hypostatses), and the three persons are not who they are without the one being. As Epiphanius has written:

God is one, the Father in the Son, the Son in the Father with the Holy Spirit . . . true enhypostatic Father, and true enhypostatic Son, and true enhypostatic Holy Spirit, three Persons, one Godhead, one being, one glory, one God. In thinking of God you conceive of the Trinity, but without confusing in your mind the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Father is the Father, the Son is the Son, the Holy Spirit is the Holy Spirit, but there is no deviation in the Trinity from oneness and identity.[1]

Without God’s economic Self-revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ there can be no genuine particularist or objective knowledge of God. Who God is is wholly contingent without remainder upon His Self-exhaustion for us in His Self-exegesis in Jesus Christ (see Jn. 1.18). Muslims, from within the framework of their “revelation” (i.e. the Qur’an, Hadith, Mohammed, etc.) have no access to this conception of God. The only way we could argue, as Volf does, that Muslims do have access to the same God that Christians have access to through Christ would be to posit a dualist conception of God wherein “there is a God behind the back of Jesus.” But there is no God behind the back of Jesus; there is only one prosopon, one face of God, Jesus Christ. By this reality all by itself it is not possible to conceive of God as non-Trinity; God must be conceived of as Triune, necessarily so, since His own Self-professed Self-revelation, is the Second Person in His Godselfed life. The Son, Jesus Christ, through His broken body tore the veil asunder between humanity and God as He entered into humanity in the Christmas reality of Incarnation (Logos ensarkos); Divinity and humanity are now eternally joined of God’s own free election to not be God without us, but Immanuel, with us. In this reconciliation between humanity and Divinity is genuine revelation. There is no more holy ground than this, and Muslims, without the Holy Spirit, without the Son, cannot have any conception of the only true and living God.

Jesus stands at the door and knocks, those who have eyes to see and ears to hear will hear God speak; they will hear Him speak through the vocal cords of Jesus Christ provided breath by the Holy Spirit. They will not hear Him speak through Abraham (because before Abraham was Jesus was Jn. 8); they will not hear Him speak through Mohammed; they will not hear Him speak through the Qur’an or Hadith; they will hear Him speak through the melodious and powerful voice of the Lion of the tribe of Judah, Jesus Christ—thankfully many of them are!