THERE is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker, and Preserver of all things both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.
Possibly the first thing we will note, and which will annoy us throughout, is the seemingly random use of capitals. But there is a method. Here we find capitalisation for God, members of the Godhead, pronouns for Him and active attributes of Him – Maker, Preserver in this case. It is a type of respect from which we have moved.
They start with God. They could have started with method – this is how we will do this and these are our working assumptions. But no. They start with God.
They remind us that today we need to recapture the otherness of God. Over fifty years on from the publication of John Robinson's 'Honest to God' our culture's professional atheists still argue against a God that is too small. A god of the gaps shrinks as science explains. The Articles say more than that our God is a great big God and he holds us in his hands. That song, fun as it is, suggests the existence of other, smaller gods. Article 1 says no. It's all metaphor though. God is real and language is metaphor. Creeds, Articles and other proclamations are inadequate. And God is certainly not what is left after science has finished explaining.
This Article is a not entirely unexpected Trinitarian formula, the test case for classic Christianity. We believe in one God, Father, Son and (we now say) Holy Spirit.
O'Donovan describes the gospel as the proper tension between the transcendence and the incarnate nearness of God. So if you want to know what God is like, says Paul to the Colossians, look at Jesus. We will. Tomorrow.
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