God's Grandparents

Heather conveys a question from her Sunday Schoolers-- "Does God have grandparents?"

Short answer: no.

Long answer: Since God is an eternal and uncreated being--God has always existed and does not have an origin or a source--God can't have grandparents because they would have existed before God did. There are examples I'm familiar with in Greek and Native American mythology of the gods who rule the world being born from earlier beings--parents and grandparents, and in some strands of Buddhism it's possible for a person to be reborn as a god, so presumably in that rebirth you'd have god ancestors, but in the monotheistic traditions--Judaism, Christianity, Islam--God always existed and does not have parents.

This raises an interesting issue in trinitarian theology. [Somewhat technical explanation to follow--ed.] Because classical trinitarian theology has required that the Christ be a co-equal person within the Trinity, and not somehow lesser than or subsequent to the Creator or Holy Spirit, even though Jesus is the Son of God, the two of them (and the Holy Spirit) are all uncreated and eternal beings.

CS Lewis describes it this way: you should imagine three books that have been resting on a table throughout eternity. Just because one book is lying underneath the other doesn't mean that they aren't all eternal, just that they have a particular relationship to one another--that of one supporting the other. The relationship itself, in this case, is eternal as well.

While I tend to think that trinitarian theology gets a little ahead of itself in being able to describe the very inner workings of God, and that it's nearly impossible to extrapolate something clean and logical from the Bible on the topic of God's nature, I do appreciate the importance that the trinity implies for relationship. The trinity as Christian tradition has imagined it suggests that God is not a single, lone-ranger, self-sufficient and independent force, but is in fact an egalitarian community within herself, bound together into one being by love.