The Self-Revelation of the Triune God
EXAMINATION
Answer one question
1. Consider the different ways God was perceived as ‘Father’ in the Old Testament Literature
2. Explore the main characteristics in the relationship between Jesus and the Father as expressed in the New Testament writings.
3. How was the Spirit of God understood in the Old Testament? Deliberate on the experience of the Holy Spirit as expressed in the New Testament.
4. “Given the intimate relationship between Judaism and Christianity, represented by the unity of the biblical Testaments, a historical unfolding of the Christian understanding of God must begin with the Old Testament”. Discuss this statement.
5. The doctrine of the Trinity is clearly and unequivocally present in the New Testament. Do you agree with this? Give reasons for your answer.
6. a. Explain briefly the following terms: homoousios, homoiousios, economic Trinity, immanent Trinity, monarchy of the Father, subordinationism, modalism, Arianism, and perichoresis.
b. In regard to their impact on trinitarian theology, write briefly on the following: The Council of Nicea, The Cappadocian Fathers, The Pneumatomachians, The Council of Constantinople, Richard of St Victor, The Fourth Lateran Council, and Elizabeth Johnson.
7. Elaborate on the trinitarian theology of St Augustine. What were its consequences?
8. Discuss the contributions of St Thomas Aquinas and St Bonaventure to trinitarian theology.
9 Discuss the Filioque crisis in the Church.
Please note that three of the above questions will appear on the exam paper on Thursday, October 16th and the task will be to answer one of them.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Notes for Students Ch 4-6
Chapter Four Augustine: Understanding the Doctrine
Augustine of Hippo had a profound influence on the development of Latin trinitarian theology. Appealing to the text from Isaiah that "unless you believe, you will not understand" (Is 7:9), Augustine believes so that he can understand (credo ut intelligam). He accepts without question the doctrine that there is one God in whom Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are at once distinct and consubstantial. His concern is not with proof but with understanding the unity and equality of the Three and their real distinction.
His book The Trinity is his most significant work on this subject. Unlike his Greek counterparts, Augustine does not begin with the three Persons as they function in history for our salvation and then work backwards towards the unity of God. He begins rather with the one divine nature itself and tries to understand how the three Persons share in that nature without dividing it. Subordinationism of every kind is rejected. Whatever is affirmed of God is affirmed equally of each of the Persons. Each divine person is identical to the other two persons with respect to Godhead. The equality of the three persons is due to their sharing the same substance.
Augustine argues against the notion that the substance of the Trinity is anything other than the Father, Son, and Spirit. He distinguished between the visible (incarnation and Pentecost) and invisible missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. With great insight, he recognized that the missions reveal the processions; in other words, the missions are the processions revealed in time. He distinguished between mission and procession, in terms of temporal and eternal, ad extra and ad intra.
Relations
In the Trinity all things are one except what is differentiated by reason of an opposition of relations (e.g., the Father, who is unbegotten, is not the Son, who is begotten). Augustine opposed the Arian notion that distinctions within God are either substantial (in which case there are three separate gods) or accidental (in which case God is purely monad). Threeness in God, therefore, is not rooted in threeness of substance or threeness of accidents but in threeness of relations: of begetting, of being begotten, and of proceeding.
Person
Augustine settled somehow reluctantly for the term "person" for the three hypostates, recognizing the need to say something in response to the question of what to call the Three. In God, to be and to be a person are identical. When two subjects are in relation to each other, such as master to servant, one can differentiate between the master in him/herself, and the master in relation to the servant. In this sense essence precedes relation. Applied to God, one can differentiate between the Father in the Father’s self and the Father in relation to the Son; similarly, the divine essence in some sense precedes relation. Augustine means that to be God and to be the Father (or Son or Spirit) are one and the same. Canons of logic inevitably fall short of reconciling these two statements: “to be and to be a Person are identical in God” and “a divine person subsists in relation to another”
Distinction
In the economy, Persons differ by what they do with respect to our salvation. On intradivine grounds, Persons are distinguished by their immanent processions. Processions found the relations. Father begets the Son. Son is begotten by the Father. The Spirit poses a special problem; to what other person is the Spirit opposed? In Augustine’s view the Holy Spirit is a person because, by its procession as Gift, the Spirit is opposed to the Giver (Father and Son together).
The Works of the Trinity ad extra Are One
According to the Greek theologians, God’s activity in creation originates with the Father, passes through the Son, and is perfected in the Spirit. Thus the Father creates, redeems, and divinizes through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Greek formulation displays the biblical and creedal sense of God the Father who comes to us in Christ and the Spirit. In Augustine’s theology, on the other hand, God’s activity in creation is the work of the Trinity, that is, of the one divine nature which exists in three Persons. Strictly speaking, the Trinity creates, the Trinity redeems, the Trinity sanctifies. For Augustine, the Trinity is present in all theophanies in the Hebrew as well as Christian Scriptures. He recognised that this principle, strictly applied, would contradict Scripture, or at least make for some strange assertions about the economy.
The Doctrine of Appropriations
According to Augustine, God and Father are not synonyms, as in the biblical, creedal, and Greek sense of ho theos. God means Godhead, the divine essence shared equally by three persons. Augustine’s departure from the biblical and patristic doctrine of the monarchy of the Father determined new ways of speaking about God. Both person and essence are absolute in God, but in some sense nature or essence precedes person; the three persons are divine because they share the same divine nature. Since the three share the same essence, their activity or operation must also be one. He recognized that the unity of the one God requires that all the works of the Trinity ad extra are indivisible, as from one principle. He maintained, however, that each of the divine persons possesses the divine nature in a particular manner and, thus, in the operation of the Godhead ad extra, it is proper to attribute to each of the Three a role that is appropriate to the particular divine person, by virtue of the trinitarian origin of that person. Creation is appropriated to the Father, redemption to the Son, and sanctification to the Holy Spirit.
While the Father, Son, and Spirit together are one God, not three gods, and works of the Trinity ad extra are one, Augustine explains that this does not mean that the Trinity was born of Mary, crucified, and buried, then rose and ascended into heaven. Against the obvious objection that he is destroying the several roles of the three Persons, Augustine argued that, even though it was the Son and not the Father who was born, suffered, and died, the Father cooperated fully with the Son in bringing about the incarnation, the passion, and the resurrection. It is fitting, however, for the Son to have been manifested and made visible in those events, since each of the divine Persons possesses the divine nature in a particular manner and since, in the external operation of God, roles which are appropriate to a particular Person in view of that Person’s origin within God are fittingly attributed to that Person. And yet all three Persons are always fully involved as one in every external action.
Once the Augustinian axiom that “works of the Trinity ad extra are one” is affirmed, and the economy no longer gives access to the distinctions of persons, then the corrective of a doctrine of appropriations is needed in order to restore a distinctiveness to each divine person. So, the doctrine of appropriations is a compensating strategy within Latin theology that tries to reconnect the specific details of salvation history to specific persons. Every appropriation is to be made on the basis of Scripture insofar as it indicates that a name or activity is proper to one of the divine persons. Some of the attributes for God now apply to divine persons but not to the divine essence (Begetter, Begotten, Proceeding), while others apply to the divine essence but not to the persons except by appropriation (Creator). In contrast to this, it is clear that if a theology were to begin from and center itself on the economy, all the while presupposing the essential unity of economy and ‘theology’, it would have no need for a doctrine of appropriations.
The Analogies
What is perhaps Augustine’s most original contribution to Trinitarian theology is his use of analogies drawn from human consciousness to explain the inner life of God. Augustine’s premise is that the soul is created in the image and the likeness of God (Gen. 1:26-27). Thus if God is a Trinity, then the soul must resemble that which it images. Augustine’s Trinitarian theology drew support from the way the NT hints that the generation of the Son (Mt 1 1:27 - “No one knows the Son except the Father”) and the procession of the Spirit (Rom 5:5 - “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us”) are somehow mirrored in or paralleled by the two basic activities of the human spirit: knowing and loving. In every process of perception, he points out, there are three distinct elements: the external object, the mind’s sensible representation of the object, and the act of focusing the mind. When the external object is removed, we rise to an even higher trinitarian level, superior to the first because the process occurs entirely now within the mind and is therefore “of one and the same substance,” namely, the memory impression, the internal memory image, and the focusing of the will. In the consubstantial, coequal, really distinct dynamic acts of the inner self-remembering, understanding, and loving God, Augustine finds the image of the triune God in the human person. The procession of the Son corresponds to that of understanding (intelligentia) from the mind (mens) or memory (memoria), while the procession of the Holy Spirit corresponds to the procession of love (amor). Still, Augustine was realistic about the limitations of this analogical approach. Analogies, as the saying goes, always limp. They tell us how things are like other things, but they warn us at the same time that the things being compared are also unlike one another.
The analogies are imperfect because in the soul the image of the Trinity is not identical with human nature, whereas in God the Trinity is the same as God. In the soul the three faculties of memory, understanding, and will operate separately, whereas in God the three persons work inseparably. In God there are three Persons whereas in each human being there is only one person. Augustine’s analogy of self-presence, self-knowledge, and self-love pre-emptively avoids any risk of tritheism but might seem to encourage a monopersonal, modalist view of God.
The Procession of the Spirit
Augustine wrestled with the question of how to distinguish the procession of the Holy Spirit from the procession of the Son by generation or begetting from the Father. He concluded that the procession of the Holy Spirit is only able to be distinguished from the Son if we say that he proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque, meaning "and the Son"), in a common spiration, as from one source or principle (De Trinitate 5.15). Augustine himself wrote of the Father endowing the Son with the capacity to produce the Spirit. Hence, in an original sense the Spirit proceeds from the Father.
Conclusion
Augustine’s theology begins from doctrine and tries to establish the correspondence between doctrine and the economy attested in Scripture. He separates the historical missions from the intradivine processions and explores the internal structure of the processions apart from the missions. He emphasises the unity of the divine essence, rather than monarchy of the Father; he makes reference to a divine essence that is prior to the divine persons; he attributes predicates to the divine essence and others to divine persons by appropriation. His theology precludes any ontological subordinationism. But it reoriented trinitarian theology in a direction that ultimately bore the fruit in scholastic theology of bypassing the oikonomia as the basis of a trinitarian theologia.
The matters that are decisive in Augustine’s theology are the following:
1 Augustine’s emphasis on the unity of the divine substance as prior to the plurality of persons tends to blur any real distinctions among the divine persons. If divine substance rather than the person of the Father is made the highest ontological principle, then God and everything else is, finally, impersonal.
2. The ontological distinction between mission and processions results in the Trinity losing its function by minimising the relationship between the divine persons and the economy of redemption.
3. The anthropological starting point is a valid point of entry into salvation history: However, God’s economy of redemption and sanctification transpires within the soul of each individual. So, Augustine has radically relocated the locus of God’s economy and, in the process, has altered the theoretical basis for that economy. If the soul of every human being contains the vestiges of the Trinity, then we need only look within ourselves to discover God and God’s Oikonomia. If it is possible to know the Trinity without Christ, then the economy is not really essential to a theology of God.
4 Augustine’s idea of God leads to the conception that there is one unique God, thinking himself and loving himself, as a great egoist. But Augustine did not altogether abandon a point of intersection between God and creature. If humanity is created in the image of God, it seems natural, as Augustine did, to look for the image of God in our humanity. However, in the usual presentation of Augustine’s theology, God and the soul are alike in that they are both self-enclosed, self-related. His thought becomes a theology and anthropology of self-contained relationality and lacks a communal dimension. To some degree Augustine’s theo-psychology fails to come to terms with the fact that the relationality of the triune God is not self-contained but is poured out in the historical economy of creation, redemption, consummation.
5. His relocation of the economy within the human soul, away from the events of saving history, his preoccupation with processions over missions, and also his starting point within the unity of divine essence rather than the plurality of divine persons within the economy, contribute to the rupture between theologia and oikonomia.
6. Moreover, Augustine’s theology gave rise to the view in scholastic theology that any one of the divine persons could have become incarnate. This position ruptures God’s being from what is revealed of God in the economy of creation and redemption. Once it is assumed that the Trinity is present in every instance where Scripture refers to God, and once the principle that the Trinity acts as one is in place, no longer, it seems, is there any need for the plurality of divine persons in the economy.
7. By sundering God’s relationship to us in Christ and in the Spirit from God’s self-relatedness at the level of intradivine being, his theology indicated that the relationship of God to us in the economy is not constitutive of what God is as Trinity, a view which became prominent in scholastic theology.
8. His relative isolation of the economy and his preference for thinking and speaking of God as Trinity rather than as God (Father) who comes to us in Christ and the Spirit, takes away from the biblical and creedal ways of speaking of God.
9. Augustine’s theology is often represented as a circle or triangle, where the circle or triangle represents the common essence. This is in contrast to the ‘emanationist’ scheme of the Cappadocians, often pictured as linear: God the Father ® Son ® Holy Spirit ® world. The basic difference between Greek and Latin theology is often said to be that Greek theology emphasises person over nature, trinity over unity, whereas Latin theology emphasises nature over person, unity over trinity. Still, Augustine understood their unity in a perichoretic way. As he explains, they are "each in each, and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one" (De Trinitate 6.12).
10 Augustine’s influence on subsequent Christian belief and theology is, to be sure, enormous. Apart from Boethius, no one competes with him for theological impact on later centuries. The so-called Athanasian Creed (Quicumque) of the late fifth century clearly bore the stamp of Augustinian thought.
Boethius (d. ca. 524)
Through his definitions, Boethius affected all subsequent trinitarian doctrine in the West. He defined nature as “the specific difference informing anything” and person as “an individual substance of a rational nature” (incommunicable). This influential account of person highlighted the individuality and rationality of the reality that is the center of action and attribution.
Anselm
Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) greatest contribution to the Christian understanding of God is to present the principle that in God everything is one except for the opposition of relationships among the three Persons.
Chapter Five Deepening and Developing the Tradition
Thomas Aquinas: God is Perfection of Being
In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas, concerned for systematic intelligibility of the sacred mysteries in a way that was never part of Augustine’s intention, reverses Augustine's more historical order of approach, which begins with the missions of Son and Spirit, and instead begins his explication of the mystery of the Trinity with a consideration of the processions, then moves to the relationships of the divine persons ad intra, and finally to their missions ad extra. For Aquinas, God is Esse, the perfection of "being" or "is-ness." (The Latin esse, "to be," is a verb, not a noun.) He rests his case on the Exodus text (3:14) wherein Yahweh “responds” to Moses’ question: “I am who I am.” For Aquinas, this is the most suitable name for God.
Aquinas’s understanding of the Being and action of God is consistent with his famous “five ways” to prove the existence of God: the arguments from motion, causality necessity, gradation or exemplarity, and design. All of the arguments are reducible to one: the argument from causality. No one argument “proves” the existence of God. They are simply ways in which the believer can begin to “make sense” of his or her belief in God after the fact.
Indeed God is Ipsum Esse, sheer actuality, sheer being, in which we participate to a limited degree. This sheer liveliness of God in God is expressed in terms of insight and joy or delight. The fullness of insight naturally expresses itself in a word that is intelligible to itself, and sheer joy or bliss issues lovingly from the delight in that word. Aquinas then transposes Augustine's psychological analogy into a metaphysical understanding of God as the perfection of spiritual being, Pure Act. The immanent act of self-understanding issues in the inner word, the verbum – thus, the first procession whereby the Father conceived the Word or generates the Son. Secondly, we know from our experience that knowledge is not disinterested or without affectivity; the intellect takes delight in its understanding. The emanation of the Word is thus followed by the procession of Love. This, then, is the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God loving God; God's self-love. Thus, in the generation of the Word, God knows Himself and, in the procession of the Holy Spirit, God loves himself.
These processions produce, in turn, four real relations: paternity, filiation, spiration, and procession, but only three of them are really distinct from one another by reason of their mutual opposition: paternity, filiation, and (passive) spiration. And so there are three Persons, and only three, in God. These necessary events in the divine life, of generation and spiration, do not either divide an existing substance and yet are distinct since paternity and filiation (and breathing and being breathed in the case of the Holy Spirit) are distinct.
The Augustinian-Thomistic analogy of human understanding and loving for explaining the mystery of the Trinity as three coequal, consubstantial (same substance) divine persons, so co-inhering in each other as to be one fits well with the biblical teaching that the human person is created in the image of God and therefore reflects in a preeminent way the mystery of God's being. It resonates strongly with the scriptural references to the revealed processions of God's Word and Love. It acknowledges God as the perfection of consciousness and intentionality. It accords with an understanding of human being as participating, in limited degree, in the divine consciousness. It comes closer than any analogy to the mystery of the divine perichoresis (the mutual indwelling or co-inhering of the Three). It became the most privileged way of explaining the mystery of the Trinity for centuries, almost to the point of dogma! It was, for example, affirmed in the catechism of the Council of Trent and in a number of papal documents, and served, unchallenged, as common doctrine until relatively recently.
Summary Aquinas’s trinitarian theology: There is one divine nature, substance, or essence. There are two processions, although it is preferable to speak of the generation of the Son and the spiration/breathing of the Spirit. There are three persons: hypostases or subjects. There are four (subsistent) relations, or orderings of the divine persons among themselves that constitute them three persons in one God: paternity, filiation, active spiration, and passive spiration. There are five notions which are: inascibility or ingenerateness, paternity, filiation, spiration, procession. Four of the five describe relations; inascibility is the absence of relation. Three of these relations are ‘person constituting’, paternity, filiation and spiration. The composition of relations is derived from the two processions, being begotten and being spirated. “There are five notions, four relations, three persons, two processions, one nature, and no proof”.
Aquinas did not accept the move from human love to what we can say about God’s triune life, but he endorsed the loving interconnectedness (circumincession) of the three divine persons, something better expressed in Greek as their perichoresis, or reciprocal presence and interpenetration. Their innermost life is infinitely close relationship with one another in the utter reciprocity of love. However, the theology of Aquinas led to the marginalization of the doctrine of the Trinity, something he assuredly would have protested vigorously as contrary to his intention and to his own religious experience. The treatise on the Trinity became of quite diminished importance except as a formal treatment of processions, persons, relations. In post-baroque Catholicism, if the topic of the Trinity was covered at all in seminary and theological education, this often went no further than requiring students to memorise the 5-4-3-2-1-0 formula. Furthermore, the method of Aquinas not only conceals the economy of redemption but is also at odds with the typical patterns of Christian prayer and worship in which prayer is addressed to God the Father through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Beyond Aquinas
1 Philosophy: In a style that is more conceptual than experiential and historical, the God of philosophers has turned up in theological writing.
2 Devotion: From the time of Anselm, devotion to Jesus underwent a sea-change as it became more personal and mystical. Fresh developments in liturgy, painting, sculpture, and architecture furthered a deep sense of Jesus in his suffering, loving, human existence. Parallel to this fresh sense of the human, suffering Jesus, one also finds a new sensibility to his divinity and place in the Trinity. The strong Christ of trinitarian life belongs to a renewed appreciation of the tripersonal God that began in the tenth century and reached its climax with the institution of the Feast of the Holy Trinity in 1334.
Richard of St. Victor: God as Trinity of Love
One of the analogies that Augustine presented for consideration is the analogy of interpersonal love: the trinity of love that comprises the loving subject (the lover), the object loved (the beloved), and the relation or bond of love, the love which unites them. However, it risked a tendency to tritheism, depersonalised the Holy Spirit and leads to holding that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Yet, the Scriptures attest that God is love. So Richard of St. Victor emerges to retrieve the analogy of interpersonal love. His exploration of the mystery of the Trinity begins with the notion that God is the fullness and perfection of all goodness. Of all things that are good, charity is the greatest good, for nothing exceeds charity in goodness. God must therefore possess charity in the highest degree. An analysis of charity, as the supreme form of the good, then serves in Richard of St Victor's trinitarian theology to demonstrate – indeed almost to prove – that there must be a plurality of persons in the Godhead.
Richard argues that charity necessarily involves another, apart from oneself. Indeed, the greatest charity is self-transcending love for another person, who is one's coequal. Hence, he argues, there must be self-transcending love for another coequal person within God. Moreover, the lover and beloved wish to share their love. Mutual love, to be perfect, must be shared with a third; therein lies its consummation and perfection. In Richard's hands the analogy shifts from the triad of lover, beloved, and their mutual love to a triad of symmetrical and consubstantial interpersonal relations between coequals, where there is no hierarchy and where each person is at once lover and beloved. Given that it speaks deeply to and from human experience, it is hardly surprising that Richard of St. Victor's psychological analogy of interpersonal love has enjoyed considerable appeal in modern attempts to reinvigorate an understanding and appreciation of the mystery of the Trinity.
Richard of St. Victor defined person as “the incommunicable existence of an intelligent nature”. The divine persons are three incommunicable existents. The Father exists but is not the Son or the Spirit: the Son exists but is not the Father or the Spirit; the Spirit exists but is not the Father or the Son.
Richard offers us a model of God as community, a community, however, which is not - static but, full or the dynamic interplay of persons in relation. In his view of divine community there is both the highest degree of differentiation as well as the highest degree of harmony. He affirms that God is not only supreme charity but also supreme Beauty. However, the Beauty which God’s Being is, is precisely the dynamic, creative Beauty of persons in a relationship of love. Even though Richard places the accent on the polarity of persons in God in contrast to the Augustinian tradition where the unity of God is grounded in the divine nature, his stress on the harmony of relations, grounded in God’s Being as love, enables him to guarantee the unity of the trinitarian life. Hence Richard’s model allows him to exploit fully the classical tradition which he inherited that God’s Being is the relationships, interpreting the relationships of the three persons as relations of love. Thus theology is able to do justice to the biblical affirmation that God is love (1 Jn 4:8, 16).
However the first part of his argument does not yield a Trinity but only a binitarian God. Secondly, although Richard can show why love requires a plurality of persons and indeed why love between two persons does not do adequate justice to the full meaning of love, his approach does not show why the community of persons in the Trinity has three and only three persons nor does this approach indicate the order of the processions. These limits reveal that the community model taken alone is insufficient to illumine the total reality of the Trinity. What is needed is rather a complementarity of approaches.
In summary, Richard begins with person rather than nature, looking to the unselfish love of human friendship as the reflection of the unselfish love of divine friendship (since we are, after all, made in the image of God). In God there is one infinite love and three infinite lovers: lover produces beloved, and lover and beloved are the productive principle of an equal co-beloved.
Bonaventure: God is God and Goodness in Self-Diffusive
Inspired by Francis of Assisi, who through his experience of Christ had emphasized the nature of God as good and loving, and by the New Testament, which attests to goodness as the proper name of God: "No one is good but God alone.” (Lk 18.19, Mt 19.17), Bonaventure’s (ca. 1221-1274) trinitarian theology begins with the notion of God as good. Bonaventure, like Aquinas, then draws on the Augustinian inheritance, but, unlike Aquinas, he also draws on the Pseudo-Dionysian view that goodness, which is naturally and necessarily self-diffusive is the pre-eminent attribute of God. Since God is good, and since goodness is by its very nature self-diffusive and fecund, God is necessarily self-communicative and fecund (luxuriantly fruitful). For Bonaventure, this provides the metaphysical basis for the first emanation or procession in God (the Son/Word). The first person, the Father, is "the fountain of plenitude," "the first principle," from whom all comes. The first procession emanates as a natural emanation, which necessarily and naturally flows from the dynamic fecundity of the divine nature. Augustine and Aquinas, by way of contrast, envisage the first procession by way of intellect. Bonaventure then turns to Richard of St. Victor's reflections on love to understand the emanation or procession of the Spirit by way of love (by way of will). Bonaventure thus brings together a notion of goodness and the concept of love in his trinitarian theology.
The notion of primacy emerges strongly in Bonaventure's trinitarian theology: the Father is the first and ultimate source of all being; the fullness of divine fecundity resides in him. The Son or Word or Image is the inner self-expression of God and proceeds from the Father by way of exemplarity. His theology also includes creation in an inspiring way. Creation is another aspect of the self-expressiveness of the goodness that is God. Bonaventure recognizes that the cosmos emanates, in and through the Word, from the trinitarian exemplar and itself reflects the trinitarian order at various levels and degrees. The Trinity, as source of all, necessarily leaves its stamp on all creation. Thus, the world as a whole is a vast symbol of the Trinity. It is like a book that reflects its trinitarian author at each and every turn. Bonaventure suggests that it reflects its trinitarian Creator at three levels: as vestige (expressing the Trinity in a distant and unclear way); as image (reflecting the Trinity in a closer and more distinct way); and as similitude (that most intense reflection, which is found in the rational spirit that is conformed to God through grace).
This notion of the cosmos as the artwork of its trinitarian Creator has profound implications for our understanding of our relationship to and responsibility regarding the cosmos and provides a rich resource for an ecologically attuned theology in later developments of trinitarian theology.
The Filioque Crisis
The filioque controversy refers to the tragic dispute concerning the question of the procession of the Holy Spirit, which contributed to the Great Schism in the eleventh century, a separation of the Eastern Orthodox Churches from the Western Roman Catholic Churches. The Council of Constantinople (381) solemnly proclaimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The West, however, unilaterally inserted an addition into the creed and proclaimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). The Eastern remained faithful to Constantinople, asserting that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (through the Son). While the schism is usually dated at 1054, the separation was the culmination of a gradual estrangement over the preceding centuries and cannot really be dated so precisely.
Generally the distinctions between Eastern and Western styles of trinitarian theology are focused on the terms of Western essentialism and Eastern personalism, whereby Eastern trinitarian theology is said to proceed from the plurality of the persons, while Western trinitarian theology, following Augustine, proceeds from the divine unity. The loss of political unity and the establishment of the second imperial capital at Constantinople in the fourth century contributed to the gradual separation of the church in the East and the West and to the deepening of linguistic, cultural, and ecclesiological differences between them. The Church in the East, where political authority was strongly vested in the emperor, enjoyed an essentially spiritual authority, and that authority was expressed by the bishops acting collegially, a practice that was grounded in an understanding of the equality of bishops in the apostolic tradition. On the other hand, the church in the West, because of the vacuum of political authority there, assumed a political authority that was unknown in the East. Moreover, unlike the churches of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem in the East, the Church of Rome exercised jurisdiction over a vast terrain and tended to interpret and express its authority in more universal and less collegial terms. Finally, in the West, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed is regarded primarily as a doctrinal statement, even in the setting of liturgy, whereas the Orthodox venerate creeds as having almost the same status as the Scriptures.
The insertion of filioque into the creed emerged in the West, where it was used to counter the reemergence of Arianism that surfaced in Spain in the fifth century, and to affirm the equality of the Son with the Father. The insertion was as much a christological issue as a trinitarian one. The use of the interpolated Creed spread through the Western church, though not in Rome. There, the papacy, while not denying the orthodoxy of the filioque, resisted its insertion in the creed and, indeed, the recitation of the creed in the Mass. It remains unclear precisely when the filioque found its way into the creed at Rome. Tradition has it that it finally adopted in Rome in 1014, when it was used by the Pope Benedict VIII (1012-1024) in a eucharistic liturgy at the coronation of Henry II. Once adopted by Rome, however, the interpolated creed became standard throughout the church in the West, its usage now justified by claims to papal primacy. At this point, the interpolation emerged as a very serious doctrinal issue between Constantinople and Rome.
From the perspective of the East, the insertion of the filioque was effrontery in the extreme. First, it was an illegitimate insertion into the creed, which had been promulgated by an ecumenical council. Second, but no less important, it was theologically incorrect. The notion of the double procession violated the monarchy of the Father, as source of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Many in the East would admit the statement, through the Son, per filium, but not filioque. The claim to primacy in the West together with the Christian Crusades from the West further aggravated the tension and, with the pillage of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, the relations between East and West were irrevocably severed.
The Latin West was uncompromising. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1438-39 all affirmed the filioque. So the dialogue failed and the filioque question remained unresolved. The Ottoman conquest followed in 1453. Dialogue ceased and, with its demise, the hope of reunion was extinguished. The opposition in the East to the filioque and to papal primacy continued unabated.
A range of opinions currently exists in regard to the situation. Some in the West argue for the removal of the filioque from the creed (as happened at the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion in 1978) and a return to the original Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Some perceive that the substance of the teachings in the East and in the West in regard to the procession of the Holy Spirit (per filium, through the Son, and filioque, and the Son) are in fact different perspectives on the one divine reality and essentially identical. Though the scars of the previous centuries no doubt remain, the church today would seem to be freer than ever before to consider the filioque question anew, free of the political tensions and the acrimony of the past, free to move to a new and gracious space of authentic dialogue and discernment.
The Fourth Lateran Council (1215)
This Council promulgated two documents that are significant for the interpretation of Trinitarian faith. The first is the solemn Creed composed for the occasion containing the basic truths about the Holy Trinity. The second document is a special statement against Abbot Joachim de Fiore (ob. 1202), who exaggerated the distinction of the divine persons. The Council condemns his teaching and sanctions the doctrine which became the basis of the Trinitarian speculation of most scholastics. Moreover, the Council states that: “Between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying a greater dissimilitude,” (ND 30, DS 806).
This last statement is utilised by Elizabeth Johnson to support her approach to trinitarian theology from a feminist liberation perspective. She analyses the heart of the strategy of analogy in theology, as long understood in the tradition. First, in the strategy of analogy, we proceed from truths known naturally to the mysteries. Second, negation is inherent in our analogical language about God, as the Fourth Lateran Council highlighted. Third, no words can fully encapsulate and express the divine mystery. God remains ineffable, incomprehensible, ever beyond our language and concepts. Thereby, Johnson relativizes all of our God talk and relativizes the use of male imagery to represent and name God. God is not male! The Church community should therefore insist on engaging a much augmented field of metaphors with which to speak rightly of God. God is neither male nor female. When we use masculinist imagery we are speaking analogically, not univocally (one meaning). The Fourth Lateran Council reiterates that the dissimilarity exceeds the similarity in our analogy. So Johnson claims that since woman is just as much imago Dei as is man, then God is just as truly She Who Is as He Who Is (Ex 3:14). She sees that orthopraxis requires a radical reappraisal of the role and standing of women in the church and in society; and because orthodoxy has served to legitimate the oppression of women, its classical expression requires a reappraisal.
Chapter Six Contemporary Approaches to Trinitarian Theology
After Aquinas, theology developed into proving a doctrinal point, with Scripture being reduced to proof texts. Moreover, our modern world thinks differently from that of Aquinas and the medieval theologians with their emphasis on classical metaphysics. Our culture instead demands that the teachings of Christianity be expressed in more experiential and existentially meaningful terms. We, also, live in a culture where belief in God is simply not a deeply determining feature in the way that it was in Aquinas's time. Indeed, in some cultures, a sense of the absence of God is a deeply determining feature and the very question of the existence of God is itself problematic. Hence the emergence of a great dissatisfaction with the psychological analogy and a need for developing a new theological way for making sense of Christian truths.
The German theologian Karl Rahner SJ (1904-1984), observed that, in the textbook trinitarian theology of his times, the doctrine of the Trinity was effectively isolated from the other major tracts of systematic theology and, moreover, that it was also remote from the actual events of salvation history, with the unity of God treated prior to the tri-unity of God, and in essentially metaphysical terms and categories, resulting in a seemingly arcane doctrine with little or no practical significance for Christian life. Rahner particularly lamented the separation and the ordering of the tracts treating the doctrine of God and the doctrine of the Trinity in classical trinitarian theology, a sequencing that makes it seem that the doctrine of the Trinity is mere supplement to the former. He was also critical of psychological speculation in classical trinitarian theology, arguing that it neglects the experience of the Trinity in the economy of salvation in favor of a seemingly almost gnostic speculation about what goes on in the inner life of God. In the process it really forgets that the self-communication of God in history presents the very being of God as he is in himself, and must be if indeed the divine self-communication is the communication of God in his own self to us.
God is known where God has revealed himself, and that is as manifest in the life of the Word incarnate, the Word existing as the man, Jesus Christ. God's self-communication is truly a real self-communication. Rahner insists that the economic Trinity reveals the immanent Trinity. In deed, in his famous Grundaxiom (basic axiom), Rahner insisted that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa.
Rahner analyzes the conditions for the possibility of incarnation and grace. He recognized that creation, the creation of what is other than God, is the condition for the possibility, the necessary presupposition, of God's divine self-communication to what is other than God. Indeed, creation itself is a moment in the divine self-communication. He argues that the incarnation of the Word requires that creation is ordered to the possible incarnation of the Word. Creation of the cosmos is the beginning of trinitarian self-revelation and from its beginning the cosmos exists in the order of grace. He perceives that the human person is ordered to the possibility of the incarnation and to personal union with the indwelling Trinity. In grace the human person encounters not simply something but Someone, nothing less than God’s triune self. God does not merely indirectly give his creature some share of himself by creating and giving us created and finite realities, but the grace God gives is primarily uncreated grace, the indwelling of the three divine persons in the graced human person. The world and the human person come into being as the condition for the possibility of God's self-communication.
The Paschal Mystery as Icon of the Trinity
Christ, not the human person or community as such, is the preeminent and unsurpassable image of God. “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation... all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:15-16). Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) asserts that God reveals himself in the person of Jesus, preeminently in the paschal mystery of his death, descent into hell, and resurrection. He also urges "a kneeling theology," a theology that is mediated by prayer and adoration and imbued with a sense of the sheer glory of God. Faith is first of all a seeing and a beholding and, indeed, an adoring, long before it is an act of seeking understanding.
Balthasar recognizes that the trinitarian mystery is especially revealed at the midpoint of the Easter Triduum, in Jesus' descent into hell, (1 Pet. 3:19; 4:6a). There in the descent, he argues, the glory of the Lord is principally revealed, the glory that is the love that God is (1 Jn 4:8). "It is 'glory' in the uttermost opposite of 'glory,' because it is at the same time blind obedience, that must obey the Father at the point where the last trace of God seems lost (in pure sin), together with every other communication (in pure solitariness)." Balthasar sees God's being, not in terms of absolute and perfect being, but rather in terms of the self-emptying, self-sacrificing, and intrinsically dynamic nature of love. The cross is the revelation of God's glory, albeit a hidden glory, but the glory of inner-trinitarian love.
Balthasar recognizes that the descent represents Jesus' solidarity with the sinner in his/her death, in his/her radical separation from God, in his/her hellish desolation and utter loneliness as a being-only-for-oneself, and in his/her complete powerlessness to redeem oneself. The essential mystery of the descent into hell is that God himself (in the person of the incarnate Son) experiences God-forsakenness and God-estrangement. It is this that constitutes the mystery of our salvation and indeed the glory of the Lord. For this God-forsakenness, this abandonment of the Son by the Father in the descent, is possible only because, at this their point of greatest separation, Father and Son are united in undying love by the Holy Spirit. In the resurrection, the revelation of the Trinity is decisive. It reveals that, even in that moment of their extreme and utmost separation, Father and Son are united. The soteriological "for us" of the paschal mystery is grounded in the self-giving self-yielding love of the divine persons of the Trinity. The paschal mystery reveals that the nature of our triune God is positively constituted by this eternal kenotic self-giving and receiving between the divine persons.
Jurgen Moltmann, a German Protestant theologian, reminds theology that God is where God is self-revealed, and that is in Jesus' paschal mystery, particularly Jesus' death on the cross. Moltmann, a prisoner of war in World War II, wrestles with the question of suffering and of theodicy. The event of the cross can be understood only in trinitarian terms: “If a person once feels the infinite passion of God’s love that finds expression here, then he understands the mystery of the triune God. God suffers with us – God suffers from us – God suffers for us; it is this experience of God that reveals the triune God. The cross takes place in the history between the Father and Son. It is "the concrete history of God," the event of the love of the Son and the grief of the Father, from which issues the Spirit, who opens up the future and creates life. The event of the cross-the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son, and the power of the Spirit-is taken up into the very being of the triune God, where it is constitutive of God's triune being and history. Moltmann persuades us that God is this trinitarian event, the event of the cross: the Father who delivers up his Son, the Son who is abandoned, and the Holy Spirit who is the bond of union between them.
An understanding of the cross as a trinitarian event leads Moltmann to an understanding of the trinitarian history of God wherein God affects and is affected by history and experiences a history with the world. The goal of the history of God is the unity of all things in God and with God, when all will be "all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28). The eschaton is thus God's future, the consummation of the trinitarian history of God, as well as that of creation. To show God's transcendence and independence from the world, Moltmann asserts that the Trinity is the object of our worship and praise.
Sebastian Moore: The Conversion Experience of the Trinity
The disciples of Jesus were strict monotheists. So, clearly a remarkably dramatic change of consciousness led them to proclaim that Jesus was Lord and God. Moore describes the radical change in the disciples' religious consciousness as a result of their encounter with the risen Jesus in terms of "resurrection shock waves." The first resurrection shock wave erupts with the appearance of the risen Jesus and the disciples’ spontaneous confession that Jesus is Lord and God. He has, after all, done what only God can do. He is risen from the dead. Consider, for example, the experience of Thomas, as presented in John 20. Thomas exclaims: "My Lord and my God!" In this first resurrection shock wave, the disciples recognize that Jesus is God. The second resurrection shock wave in their consciousness comes with the experience and recognition of another divine one, the one whom Jesus himself called Abba/Father, as the one who is the author of this great event, this sending of Jesus to us, for us and for our salvation. The disciples, albeit strict monotheists, recognize that divinity resides in both Jesus and the Father. Third, there occurs another resurrection shock wave: the experience of the presence of God as Spirit, mysteriously in their midst, animating and inspiring the community, Spirit of Jesus, Spirit of love, Spirit of unity. With this, the pattern becomes cyclic, a system, a flow of life between .Father and Son through the Spirit. The three stages of shock-waves of the Resurrection encounter are thus these: displacement, extension, cyclic life-flow. Thus the matrix of the images of the divine persons is the "infinite connection” as it undergoes the transformation of the encounter with the risen Jesus. The pre-religious concentration of divine energy takes, under the pressure of this encounter, the shape of Father, Son and Spirit. Moore explains: "The bottom line of Nicaea was that Jesus had done for us what only God could do, had given us what only God could give, and therefore had to be God, whatever the awesome problems created by such an equation in the intellectual world.” In summary, the paschal mystery emerges as the dynamic by means of which our consciousness is radically transformed and we enter into a trinitarian God-consciousness and ultimately into the trinitarian communion.
Francois-Xavier Durrwell & the Mystery of the Resurrection
The resurrection of Jesus lies at the core of Christian faith, (Rom. 4:25, 1 Cor. 15:14). Durrwell recognizes that Jesus' death and resurrection constitute essentially complementary dimensions of the one mystery, "two aspects of the one Paschal Mystery.” From the moment of the resurrection, Jesus is established in the fullness, plenitude and perfection of glory. The resurrection, in Jesus, knows no tomorrow. The risen Christ remains forever in the eternal (that is, ever present) actuality of the one single eternal moment of this plenitude and perfection, (Heb. 13:8). The resurrection enacts, in the realm of creation, the inner-trinitarian begetting of the Son by the Father, the eternal generation, for the whole being of Christ is raised to the glory of sonship. The eternal trinitarian movement of God ad intra is realized ad extra.
Moreover, Jesus, the incarnate Son, in his whole being is risen, risen in his humanity as well as his divinity. God, in the resurrection, takes Jesus, in his humanity, into the fullness of the eternal begetting of the Son. This is the mystery that, as we confess in the creed, is “for us and for our salvation.” That Jesus, in his humanity, is taken into the mystery of the Trinity, means that we, in our humanity, in union with Christ are incorporated into the same divine generation. Raised with him, we too are born of God in the Holy Spirit, and share fully in the divine birth that is Christ’s. And, not just humankind but all creation is involved in this divine begetting. In Christ, all creation becomes filial, entering into the mystery of the eternal generation of the Son. Henceforth the eternal begetting of the Son in the Spirit is immanent within the world: the world is steeped in the eternal trinitarian movement.”
In the mystery of the resurrection, the stigmata of Jesus' suffering and death remain. The risen Lord is forever the Slain Lamb (Rev. 5:12). Death emerges not as means of reparation or redemption of a debt but as the necessary passage or passover to resurrection and to life in communion with the triune God. Since the resurrection is the eschatological event, the Holy Spirit emerges as the eschatological gift. In summary, the paschal mystery reveals both the means and the meaning of salvation (our redemption) and the trinitarian reality of God who saves (revelation of the triune God). The paschal mystery expresses the eternal trinitarian exchange.
Augustine of Hippo had a profound influence on the development of Latin trinitarian theology. Appealing to the text from Isaiah that "unless you believe, you will not understand" (Is 7:9), Augustine believes so that he can understand (credo ut intelligam). He accepts without question the doctrine that there is one God in whom Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are at once distinct and consubstantial. His concern is not with proof but with understanding the unity and equality of the Three and their real distinction.
His book The Trinity is his most significant work on this subject. Unlike his Greek counterparts, Augustine does not begin with the three Persons as they function in history for our salvation and then work backwards towards the unity of God. He begins rather with the one divine nature itself and tries to understand how the three Persons share in that nature without dividing it. Subordinationism of every kind is rejected. Whatever is affirmed of God is affirmed equally of each of the Persons. Each divine person is identical to the other two persons with respect to Godhead. The equality of the three persons is due to their sharing the same substance.
Augustine argues against the notion that the substance of the Trinity is anything other than the Father, Son, and Spirit. He distinguished between the visible (incarnation and Pentecost) and invisible missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit. With great insight, he recognized that the missions reveal the processions; in other words, the missions are the processions revealed in time. He distinguished between mission and procession, in terms of temporal and eternal, ad extra and ad intra.
Relations
In the Trinity all things are one except what is differentiated by reason of an opposition of relations (e.g., the Father, who is unbegotten, is not the Son, who is begotten). Augustine opposed the Arian notion that distinctions within God are either substantial (in which case there are three separate gods) or accidental (in which case God is purely monad). Threeness in God, therefore, is not rooted in threeness of substance or threeness of accidents but in threeness of relations: of begetting, of being begotten, and of proceeding.
Person
Augustine settled somehow reluctantly for the term "person" for the three hypostates, recognizing the need to say something in response to the question of what to call the Three. In God, to be and to be a person are identical. When two subjects are in relation to each other, such as master to servant, one can differentiate between the master in him/herself, and the master in relation to the servant. In this sense essence precedes relation. Applied to God, one can differentiate between the Father in the Father’s self and the Father in relation to the Son; similarly, the divine essence in some sense precedes relation. Augustine means that to be God and to be the Father (or Son or Spirit) are one and the same. Canons of logic inevitably fall short of reconciling these two statements: “to be and to be a Person are identical in God” and “a divine person subsists in relation to another”
Distinction
In the economy, Persons differ by what they do with respect to our salvation. On intradivine grounds, Persons are distinguished by their immanent processions. Processions found the relations. Father begets the Son. Son is begotten by the Father. The Spirit poses a special problem; to what other person is the Spirit opposed? In Augustine’s view the Holy Spirit is a person because, by its procession as Gift, the Spirit is opposed to the Giver (Father and Son together).
The Works of the Trinity ad extra Are One
According to the Greek theologians, God’s activity in creation originates with the Father, passes through the Son, and is perfected in the Spirit. Thus the Father creates, redeems, and divinizes through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Greek formulation displays the biblical and creedal sense of God the Father who comes to us in Christ and the Spirit. In Augustine’s theology, on the other hand, God’s activity in creation is the work of the Trinity, that is, of the one divine nature which exists in three Persons. Strictly speaking, the Trinity creates, the Trinity redeems, the Trinity sanctifies. For Augustine, the Trinity is present in all theophanies in the Hebrew as well as Christian Scriptures. He recognised that this principle, strictly applied, would contradict Scripture, or at least make for some strange assertions about the economy.
The Doctrine of Appropriations
According to Augustine, God and Father are not synonyms, as in the biblical, creedal, and Greek sense of ho theos. God means Godhead, the divine essence shared equally by three persons. Augustine’s departure from the biblical and patristic doctrine of the monarchy of the Father determined new ways of speaking about God. Both person and essence are absolute in God, but in some sense nature or essence precedes person; the three persons are divine because they share the same divine nature. Since the three share the same essence, their activity or operation must also be one. He recognized that the unity of the one God requires that all the works of the Trinity ad extra are indivisible, as from one principle. He maintained, however, that each of the divine persons possesses the divine nature in a particular manner and, thus, in the operation of the Godhead ad extra, it is proper to attribute to each of the Three a role that is appropriate to the particular divine person, by virtue of the trinitarian origin of that person. Creation is appropriated to the Father, redemption to the Son, and sanctification to the Holy Spirit.
While the Father, Son, and Spirit together are one God, not three gods, and works of the Trinity ad extra are one, Augustine explains that this does not mean that the Trinity was born of Mary, crucified, and buried, then rose and ascended into heaven. Against the obvious objection that he is destroying the several roles of the three Persons, Augustine argued that, even though it was the Son and not the Father who was born, suffered, and died, the Father cooperated fully with the Son in bringing about the incarnation, the passion, and the resurrection. It is fitting, however, for the Son to have been manifested and made visible in those events, since each of the divine Persons possesses the divine nature in a particular manner and since, in the external operation of God, roles which are appropriate to a particular Person in view of that Person’s origin within God are fittingly attributed to that Person. And yet all three Persons are always fully involved as one in every external action.
Once the Augustinian axiom that “works of the Trinity ad extra are one” is affirmed, and the economy no longer gives access to the distinctions of persons, then the corrective of a doctrine of appropriations is needed in order to restore a distinctiveness to each divine person. So, the doctrine of appropriations is a compensating strategy within Latin theology that tries to reconnect the specific details of salvation history to specific persons. Every appropriation is to be made on the basis of Scripture insofar as it indicates that a name or activity is proper to one of the divine persons. Some of the attributes for God now apply to divine persons but not to the divine essence (Begetter, Begotten, Proceeding), while others apply to the divine essence but not to the persons except by appropriation (Creator). In contrast to this, it is clear that if a theology were to begin from and center itself on the economy, all the while presupposing the essential unity of economy and ‘theology’, it would have no need for a doctrine of appropriations.
The Analogies
What is perhaps Augustine’s most original contribution to Trinitarian theology is his use of analogies drawn from human consciousness to explain the inner life of God. Augustine’s premise is that the soul is created in the image and the likeness of God (Gen. 1:26-27). Thus if God is a Trinity, then the soul must resemble that which it images. Augustine’s Trinitarian theology drew support from the way the NT hints that the generation of the Son (Mt 1 1:27 - “No one knows the Son except the Father”) and the procession of the Spirit (Rom 5:5 - “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us”) are somehow mirrored in or paralleled by the two basic activities of the human spirit: knowing and loving. In every process of perception, he points out, there are three distinct elements: the external object, the mind’s sensible representation of the object, and the act of focusing the mind. When the external object is removed, we rise to an even higher trinitarian level, superior to the first because the process occurs entirely now within the mind and is therefore “of one and the same substance,” namely, the memory impression, the internal memory image, and the focusing of the will. In the consubstantial, coequal, really distinct dynamic acts of the inner self-remembering, understanding, and loving God, Augustine finds the image of the triune God in the human person. The procession of the Son corresponds to that of understanding (intelligentia) from the mind (mens) or memory (memoria), while the procession of the Holy Spirit corresponds to the procession of love (amor). Still, Augustine was realistic about the limitations of this analogical approach. Analogies, as the saying goes, always limp. They tell us how things are like other things, but they warn us at the same time that the things being compared are also unlike one another.
The analogies are imperfect because in the soul the image of the Trinity is not identical with human nature, whereas in God the Trinity is the same as God. In the soul the three faculties of memory, understanding, and will operate separately, whereas in God the three persons work inseparably. In God there are three Persons whereas in each human being there is only one person. Augustine’s analogy of self-presence, self-knowledge, and self-love pre-emptively avoids any risk of tritheism but might seem to encourage a monopersonal, modalist view of God.
The Procession of the Spirit
Augustine wrestled with the question of how to distinguish the procession of the Holy Spirit from the procession of the Son by generation or begetting from the Father. He concluded that the procession of the Holy Spirit is only able to be distinguished from the Son if we say that he proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque, meaning "and the Son"), in a common spiration, as from one source or principle (De Trinitate 5.15). Augustine himself wrote of the Father endowing the Son with the capacity to produce the Spirit. Hence, in an original sense the Spirit proceeds from the Father.
Conclusion
Augustine’s theology begins from doctrine and tries to establish the correspondence between doctrine and the economy attested in Scripture. He separates the historical missions from the intradivine processions and explores the internal structure of the processions apart from the missions. He emphasises the unity of the divine essence, rather than monarchy of the Father; he makes reference to a divine essence that is prior to the divine persons; he attributes predicates to the divine essence and others to divine persons by appropriation. His theology precludes any ontological subordinationism. But it reoriented trinitarian theology in a direction that ultimately bore the fruit in scholastic theology of bypassing the oikonomia as the basis of a trinitarian theologia.
The matters that are decisive in Augustine’s theology are the following:
1 Augustine’s emphasis on the unity of the divine substance as prior to the plurality of persons tends to blur any real distinctions among the divine persons. If divine substance rather than the person of the Father is made the highest ontological principle, then God and everything else is, finally, impersonal.
2. The ontological distinction between mission and processions results in the Trinity losing its function by minimising the relationship between the divine persons and the economy of redemption.
3. The anthropological starting point is a valid point of entry into salvation history: However, God’s economy of redemption and sanctification transpires within the soul of each individual. So, Augustine has radically relocated the locus of God’s economy and, in the process, has altered the theoretical basis for that economy. If the soul of every human being contains the vestiges of the Trinity, then we need only look within ourselves to discover God and God’s Oikonomia. If it is possible to know the Trinity without Christ, then the economy is not really essential to a theology of God.
4 Augustine’s idea of God leads to the conception that there is one unique God, thinking himself and loving himself, as a great egoist. But Augustine did not altogether abandon a point of intersection between God and creature. If humanity is created in the image of God, it seems natural, as Augustine did, to look for the image of God in our humanity. However, in the usual presentation of Augustine’s theology, God and the soul are alike in that they are both self-enclosed, self-related. His thought becomes a theology and anthropology of self-contained relationality and lacks a communal dimension. To some degree Augustine’s theo-psychology fails to come to terms with the fact that the relationality of the triune God is not self-contained but is poured out in the historical economy of creation, redemption, consummation.
5. His relocation of the economy within the human soul, away from the events of saving history, his preoccupation with processions over missions, and also his starting point within the unity of divine essence rather than the plurality of divine persons within the economy, contribute to the rupture between theologia and oikonomia.
6. Moreover, Augustine’s theology gave rise to the view in scholastic theology that any one of the divine persons could have become incarnate. This position ruptures God’s being from what is revealed of God in the economy of creation and redemption. Once it is assumed that the Trinity is present in every instance where Scripture refers to God, and once the principle that the Trinity acts as one is in place, no longer, it seems, is there any need for the plurality of divine persons in the economy.
7. By sundering God’s relationship to us in Christ and in the Spirit from God’s self-relatedness at the level of intradivine being, his theology indicated that the relationship of God to us in the economy is not constitutive of what God is as Trinity, a view which became prominent in scholastic theology.
8. His relative isolation of the economy and his preference for thinking and speaking of God as Trinity rather than as God (Father) who comes to us in Christ and the Spirit, takes away from the biblical and creedal ways of speaking of God.
9. Augustine’s theology is often represented as a circle or triangle, where the circle or triangle represents the common essence. This is in contrast to the ‘emanationist’ scheme of the Cappadocians, often pictured as linear: God the Father ® Son ® Holy Spirit ® world. The basic difference between Greek and Latin theology is often said to be that Greek theology emphasises person over nature, trinity over unity, whereas Latin theology emphasises nature over person, unity over trinity. Still, Augustine understood their unity in a perichoretic way. As he explains, they are "each in each, and all in each, and each in all, and all in all, and all are one" (De Trinitate 6.12).
10 Augustine’s influence on subsequent Christian belief and theology is, to be sure, enormous. Apart from Boethius, no one competes with him for theological impact on later centuries. The so-called Athanasian Creed (Quicumque) of the late fifth century clearly bore the stamp of Augustinian thought.
Boethius (d. ca. 524)
Through his definitions, Boethius affected all subsequent trinitarian doctrine in the West. He defined nature as “the specific difference informing anything” and person as “an individual substance of a rational nature” (incommunicable). This influential account of person highlighted the individuality and rationality of the reality that is the center of action and attribution.
Anselm
Anselm of Canterbury’s (1033-1109) greatest contribution to the Christian understanding of God is to present the principle that in God everything is one except for the opposition of relationships among the three Persons.
Chapter Five Deepening and Developing the Tradition
Thomas Aquinas: God is Perfection of Being
In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas, concerned for systematic intelligibility of the sacred mysteries in a way that was never part of Augustine’s intention, reverses Augustine's more historical order of approach, which begins with the missions of Son and Spirit, and instead begins his explication of the mystery of the Trinity with a consideration of the processions, then moves to the relationships of the divine persons ad intra, and finally to their missions ad extra. For Aquinas, God is Esse, the perfection of "being" or "is-ness." (The Latin esse, "to be," is a verb, not a noun.) He rests his case on the Exodus text (3:14) wherein Yahweh “responds” to Moses’ question: “I am who I am.” For Aquinas, this is the most suitable name for God.
Aquinas’s understanding of the Being and action of God is consistent with his famous “five ways” to prove the existence of God: the arguments from motion, causality necessity, gradation or exemplarity, and design. All of the arguments are reducible to one: the argument from causality. No one argument “proves” the existence of God. They are simply ways in which the believer can begin to “make sense” of his or her belief in God after the fact.
Indeed God is Ipsum Esse, sheer actuality, sheer being, in which we participate to a limited degree. This sheer liveliness of God in God is expressed in terms of insight and joy or delight. The fullness of insight naturally expresses itself in a word that is intelligible to itself, and sheer joy or bliss issues lovingly from the delight in that word. Aquinas then transposes Augustine's psychological analogy into a metaphysical understanding of God as the perfection of spiritual being, Pure Act. The immanent act of self-understanding issues in the inner word, the verbum – thus, the first procession whereby the Father conceived the Word or generates the Son. Secondly, we know from our experience that knowledge is not disinterested or without affectivity; the intellect takes delight in its understanding. The emanation of the Word is thus followed by the procession of Love. This, then, is the procession of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God loving God; God's self-love. Thus, in the generation of the Word, God knows Himself and, in the procession of the Holy Spirit, God loves himself.
These processions produce, in turn, four real relations: paternity, filiation, spiration, and procession, but only three of them are really distinct from one another by reason of their mutual opposition: paternity, filiation, and (passive) spiration. And so there are three Persons, and only three, in God. These necessary events in the divine life, of generation and spiration, do not either divide an existing substance and yet are distinct since paternity and filiation (and breathing and being breathed in the case of the Holy Spirit) are distinct.
The Augustinian-Thomistic analogy of human understanding and loving for explaining the mystery of the Trinity as three coequal, consubstantial (same substance) divine persons, so co-inhering in each other as to be one fits well with the biblical teaching that the human person is created in the image of God and therefore reflects in a preeminent way the mystery of God's being. It resonates strongly with the scriptural references to the revealed processions of God's Word and Love. It acknowledges God as the perfection of consciousness and intentionality. It accords with an understanding of human being as participating, in limited degree, in the divine consciousness. It comes closer than any analogy to the mystery of the divine perichoresis (the mutual indwelling or co-inhering of the Three). It became the most privileged way of explaining the mystery of the Trinity for centuries, almost to the point of dogma! It was, for example, affirmed in the catechism of the Council of Trent and in a number of papal documents, and served, unchallenged, as common doctrine until relatively recently.
Summary Aquinas’s trinitarian theology: There is one divine nature, substance, or essence. There are two processions, although it is preferable to speak of the generation of the Son and the spiration/breathing of the Spirit. There are three persons: hypostases or subjects. There are four (subsistent) relations, or orderings of the divine persons among themselves that constitute them three persons in one God: paternity, filiation, active spiration, and passive spiration. There are five notions which are: inascibility or ingenerateness, paternity, filiation, spiration, procession. Four of the five describe relations; inascibility is the absence of relation. Three of these relations are ‘person constituting’, paternity, filiation and spiration. The composition of relations is derived from the two processions, being begotten and being spirated. “There are five notions, four relations, three persons, two processions, one nature, and no proof”.
Aquinas did not accept the move from human love to what we can say about God’s triune life, but he endorsed the loving interconnectedness (circumincession) of the three divine persons, something better expressed in Greek as their perichoresis, or reciprocal presence and interpenetration. Their innermost life is infinitely close relationship with one another in the utter reciprocity of love. However, the theology of Aquinas led to the marginalization of the doctrine of the Trinity, something he assuredly would have protested vigorously as contrary to his intention and to his own religious experience. The treatise on the Trinity became of quite diminished importance except as a formal treatment of processions, persons, relations. In post-baroque Catholicism, if the topic of the Trinity was covered at all in seminary and theological education, this often went no further than requiring students to memorise the 5-4-3-2-1-0 formula. Furthermore, the method of Aquinas not only conceals the economy of redemption but is also at odds with the typical patterns of Christian prayer and worship in which prayer is addressed to God the Father through Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Beyond Aquinas
1 Philosophy: In a style that is more conceptual than experiential and historical, the God of philosophers has turned up in theological writing.
2 Devotion: From the time of Anselm, devotion to Jesus underwent a sea-change as it became more personal and mystical. Fresh developments in liturgy, painting, sculpture, and architecture furthered a deep sense of Jesus in his suffering, loving, human existence. Parallel to this fresh sense of the human, suffering Jesus, one also finds a new sensibility to his divinity and place in the Trinity. The strong Christ of trinitarian life belongs to a renewed appreciation of the tripersonal God that began in the tenth century and reached its climax with the institution of the Feast of the Holy Trinity in 1334.
Richard of St. Victor: God as Trinity of Love
One of the analogies that Augustine presented for consideration is the analogy of interpersonal love: the trinity of love that comprises the loving subject (the lover), the object loved (the beloved), and the relation or bond of love, the love which unites them. However, it risked a tendency to tritheism, depersonalised the Holy Spirit and leads to holding that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Yet, the Scriptures attest that God is love. So Richard of St. Victor emerges to retrieve the analogy of interpersonal love. His exploration of the mystery of the Trinity begins with the notion that God is the fullness and perfection of all goodness. Of all things that are good, charity is the greatest good, for nothing exceeds charity in goodness. God must therefore possess charity in the highest degree. An analysis of charity, as the supreme form of the good, then serves in Richard of St Victor's trinitarian theology to demonstrate – indeed almost to prove – that there must be a plurality of persons in the Godhead.
Richard argues that charity necessarily involves another, apart from oneself. Indeed, the greatest charity is self-transcending love for another person, who is one's coequal. Hence, he argues, there must be self-transcending love for another coequal person within God. Moreover, the lover and beloved wish to share their love. Mutual love, to be perfect, must be shared with a third; therein lies its consummation and perfection. In Richard's hands the analogy shifts from the triad of lover, beloved, and their mutual love to a triad of symmetrical and consubstantial interpersonal relations between coequals, where there is no hierarchy and where each person is at once lover and beloved. Given that it speaks deeply to and from human experience, it is hardly surprising that Richard of St. Victor's psychological analogy of interpersonal love has enjoyed considerable appeal in modern attempts to reinvigorate an understanding and appreciation of the mystery of the Trinity.
Richard of St. Victor defined person as “the incommunicable existence of an intelligent nature”. The divine persons are three incommunicable existents. The Father exists but is not the Son or the Spirit: the Son exists but is not the Father or the Spirit; the Spirit exists but is not the Father or the Son.
Richard offers us a model of God as community, a community, however, which is not - static but, full or the dynamic interplay of persons in relation. In his view of divine community there is both the highest degree of differentiation as well as the highest degree of harmony. He affirms that God is not only supreme charity but also supreme Beauty. However, the Beauty which God’s Being is, is precisely the dynamic, creative Beauty of persons in a relationship of love. Even though Richard places the accent on the polarity of persons in God in contrast to the Augustinian tradition where the unity of God is grounded in the divine nature, his stress on the harmony of relations, grounded in God’s Being as love, enables him to guarantee the unity of the trinitarian life. Hence Richard’s model allows him to exploit fully the classical tradition which he inherited that God’s Being is the relationships, interpreting the relationships of the three persons as relations of love. Thus theology is able to do justice to the biblical affirmation that God is love (1 Jn 4:8, 16).
However the first part of his argument does not yield a Trinity but only a binitarian God. Secondly, although Richard can show why love requires a plurality of persons and indeed why love between two persons does not do adequate justice to the full meaning of love, his approach does not show why the community of persons in the Trinity has three and only three persons nor does this approach indicate the order of the processions. These limits reveal that the community model taken alone is insufficient to illumine the total reality of the Trinity. What is needed is rather a complementarity of approaches.
In summary, Richard begins with person rather than nature, looking to the unselfish love of human friendship as the reflection of the unselfish love of divine friendship (since we are, after all, made in the image of God). In God there is one infinite love and three infinite lovers: lover produces beloved, and lover and beloved are the productive principle of an equal co-beloved.
Bonaventure: God is God and Goodness in Self-Diffusive
Inspired by Francis of Assisi, who through his experience of Christ had emphasized the nature of God as good and loving, and by the New Testament, which attests to goodness as the proper name of God: "No one is good but God alone.” (Lk 18.19, Mt 19.17), Bonaventure’s (ca. 1221-1274) trinitarian theology begins with the notion of God as good. Bonaventure, like Aquinas, then draws on the Augustinian inheritance, but, unlike Aquinas, he also draws on the Pseudo-Dionysian view that goodness, which is naturally and necessarily self-diffusive is the pre-eminent attribute of God. Since God is good, and since goodness is by its very nature self-diffusive and fecund, God is necessarily self-communicative and fecund (luxuriantly fruitful). For Bonaventure, this provides the metaphysical basis for the first emanation or procession in God (the Son/Word). The first person, the Father, is "the fountain of plenitude," "the first principle," from whom all comes. The first procession emanates as a natural emanation, which necessarily and naturally flows from the dynamic fecundity of the divine nature. Augustine and Aquinas, by way of contrast, envisage the first procession by way of intellect. Bonaventure then turns to Richard of St. Victor's reflections on love to understand the emanation or procession of the Spirit by way of love (by way of will). Bonaventure thus brings together a notion of goodness and the concept of love in his trinitarian theology.
The notion of primacy emerges strongly in Bonaventure's trinitarian theology: the Father is the first and ultimate source of all being; the fullness of divine fecundity resides in him. The Son or Word or Image is the inner self-expression of God and proceeds from the Father by way of exemplarity. His theology also includes creation in an inspiring way. Creation is another aspect of the self-expressiveness of the goodness that is God. Bonaventure recognizes that the cosmos emanates, in and through the Word, from the trinitarian exemplar and itself reflects the trinitarian order at various levels and degrees. The Trinity, as source of all, necessarily leaves its stamp on all creation. Thus, the world as a whole is a vast symbol of the Trinity. It is like a book that reflects its trinitarian author at each and every turn. Bonaventure suggests that it reflects its trinitarian Creator at three levels: as vestige (expressing the Trinity in a distant and unclear way); as image (reflecting the Trinity in a closer and more distinct way); and as similitude (that most intense reflection, which is found in the rational spirit that is conformed to God through grace).
This notion of the cosmos as the artwork of its trinitarian Creator has profound implications for our understanding of our relationship to and responsibility regarding the cosmos and provides a rich resource for an ecologically attuned theology in later developments of trinitarian theology.
The Filioque Crisis
The filioque controversy refers to the tragic dispute concerning the question of the procession of the Holy Spirit, which contributed to the Great Schism in the eleventh century, a separation of the Eastern Orthodox Churches from the Western Roman Catholic Churches. The Council of Constantinople (381) solemnly proclaimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. The West, however, unilaterally inserted an addition into the creed and proclaimed that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). The Eastern remained faithful to Constantinople, asserting that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father (through the Son). While the schism is usually dated at 1054, the separation was the culmination of a gradual estrangement over the preceding centuries and cannot really be dated so precisely.
Generally the distinctions between Eastern and Western styles of trinitarian theology are focused on the terms of Western essentialism and Eastern personalism, whereby Eastern trinitarian theology is said to proceed from the plurality of the persons, while Western trinitarian theology, following Augustine, proceeds from the divine unity. The loss of political unity and the establishment of the second imperial capital at Constantinople in the fourth century contributed to the gradual separation of the church in the East and the West and to the deepening of linguistic, cultural, and ecclesiological differences between them. The Church in the East, where political authority was strongly vested in the emperor, enjoyed an essentially spiritual authority, and that authority was expressed by the bishops acting collegially, a practice that was grounded in an understanding of the equality of bishops in the apostolic tradition. On the other hand, the church in the West, because of the vacuum of political authority there, assumed a political authority that was unknown in the East. Moreover, unlike the churches of Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem in the East, the Church of Rome exercised jurisdiction over a vast terrain and tended to interpret and express its authority in more universal and less collegial terms. Finally, in the West, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed is regarded primarily as a doctrinal statement, even in the setting of liturgy, whereas the Orthodox venerate creeds as having almost the same status as the Scriptures.
The insertion of filioque into the creed emerged in the West, where it was used to counter the reemergence of Arianism that surfaced in Spain in the fifth century, and to affirm the equality of the Son with the Father. The insertion was as much a christological issue as a trinitarian one. The use of the interpolated Creed spread through the Western church, though not in Rome. There, the papacy, while not denying the orthodoxy of the filioque, resisted its insertion in the creed and, indeed, the recitation of the creed in the Mass. It remains unclear precisely when the filioque found its way into the creed at Rome. Tradition has it that it finally adopted in Rome in 1014, when it was used by the Pope Benedict VIII (1012-1024) in a eucharistic liturgy at the coronation of Henry II. Once adopted by Rome, however, the interpolated creed became standard throughout the church in the West, its usage now justified by claims to papal primacy. At this point, the interpolation emerged as a very serious doctrinal issue between Constantinople and Rome.
From the perspective of the East, the insertion of the filioque was effrontery in the extreme. First, it was an illegitimate insertion into the creed, which had been promulgated by an ecumenical council. Second, but no less important, it was theologically incorrect. The notion of the double procession violated the monarchy of the Father, as source of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Many in the East would admit the statement, through the Son, per filium, but not filioque. The claim to primacy in the West together with the Christian Crusades from the West further aggravated the tension and, with the pillage of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, the relations between East and West were irrevocably severed.
The Latin West was uncompromising. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 and the Council of Florence in 1438-39 all affirmed the filioque. So the dialogue failed and the filioque question remained unresolved. The Ottoman conquest followed in 1453. Dialogue ceased and, with its demise, the hope of reunion was extinguished. The opposition in the East to the filioque and to papal primacy continued unabated.
A range of opinions currently exists in regard to the situation. Some in the West argue for the removal of the filioque from the creed (as happened at the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion in 1978) and a return to the original Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed. Some perceive that the substance of the teachings in the East and in the West in regard to the procession of the Holy Spirit (per filium, through the Son, and filioque, and the Son) are in fact different perspectives on the one divine reality and essentially identical. Though the scars of the previous centuries no doubt remain, the church today would seem to be freer than ever before to consider the filioque question anew, free of the political tensions and the acrimony of the past, free to move to a new and gracious space of authentic dialogue and discernment.
The Fourth Lateran Council (1215)
This Council promulgated two documents that are significant for the interpretation of Trinitarian faith. The first is the solemn Creed composed for the occasion containing the basic truths about the Holy Trinity. The second document is a special statement against Abbot Joachim de Fiore (ob. 1202), who exaggerated the distinction of the divine persons. The Council condemns his teaching and sanctions the doctrine which became the basis of the Trinitarian speculation of most scholastics. Moreover, the Council states that: “Between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying a greater dissimilitude,” (ND 30, DS 806).
This last statement is utilised by Elizabeth Johnson to support her approach to trinitarian theology from a feminist liberation perspective. She analyses the heart of the strategy of analogy in theology, as long understood in the tradition. First, in the strategy of analogy, we proceed from truths known naturally to the mysteries. Second, negation is inherent in our analogical language about God, as the Fourth Lateran Council highlighted. Third, no words can fully encapsulate and express the divine mystery. God remains ineffable, incomprehensible, ever beyond our language and concepts. Thereby, Johnson relativizes all of our God talk and relativizes the use of male imagery to represent and name God. God is not male! The Church community should therefore insist on engaging a much augmented field of metaphors with which to speak rightly of God. God is neither male nor female. When we use masculinist imagery we are speaking analogically, not univocally (one meaning). The Fourth Lateran Council reiterates that the dissimilarity exceeds the similarity in our analogy. So Johnson claims that since woman is just as much imago Dei as is man, then God is just as truly She Who Is as He Who Is (Ex 3:14). She sees that orthopraxis requires a radical reappraisal of the role and standing of women in the church and in society; and because orthodoxy has served to legitimate the oppression of women, its classical expression requires a reappraisal.
Chapter Six Contemporary Approaches to Trinitarian Theology
After Aquinas, theology developed into proving a doctrinal point, with Scripture being reduced to proof texts. Moreover, our modern world thinks differently from that of Aquinas and the medieval theologians with their emphasis on classical metaphysics. Our culture instead demands that the teachings of Christianity be expressed in more experiential and existentially meaningful terms. We, also, live in a culture where belief in God is simply not a deeply determining feature in the way that it was in Aquinas's time. Indeed, in some cultures, a sense of the absence of God is a deeply determining feature and the very question of the existence of God is itself problematic. Hence the emergence of a great dissatisfaction with the psychological analogy and a need for developing a new theological way for making sense of Christian truths.
The German theologian Karl Rahner SJ (1904-1984), observed that, in the textbook trinitarian theology of his times, the doctrine of the Trinity was effectively isolated from the other major tracts of systematic theology and, moreover, that it was also remote from the actual events of salvation history, with the unity of God treated prior to the tri-unity of God, and in essentially metaphysical terms and categories, resulting in a seemingly arcane doctrine with little or no practical significance for Christian life. Rahner particularly lamented the separation and the ordering of the tracts treating the doctrine of God and the doctrine of the Trinity in classical trinitarian theology, a sequencing that makes it seem that the doctrine of the Trinity is mere supplement to the former. He was also critical of psychological speculation in classical trinitarian theology, arguing that it neglects the experience of the Trinity in the economy of salvation in favor of a seemingly almost gnostic speculation about what goes on in the inner life of God. In the process it really forgets that the self-communication of God in history presents the very being of God as he is in himself, and must be if indeed the divine self-communication is the communication of God in his own self to us.
God is known where God has revealed himself, and that is as manifest in the life of the Word incarnate, the Word existing as the man, Jesus Christ. God's self-communication is truly a real self-communication. Rahner insists that the economic Trinity reveals the immanent Trinity. In deed, in his famous Grundaxiom (basic axiom), Rahner insisted that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and vice versa.
Rahner analyzes the conditions for the possibility of incarnation and grace. He recognized that creation, the creation of what is other than God, is the condition for the possibility, the necessary presupposition, of God's divine self-communication to what is other than God. Indeed, creation itself is a moment in the divine self-communication. He argues that the incarnation of the Word requires that creation is ordered to the possible incarnation of the Word. Creation of the cosmos is the beginning of trinitarian self-revelation and from its beginning the cosmos exists in the order of grace. He perceives that the human person is ordered to the possibility of the incarnation and to personal union with the indwelling Trinity. In grace the human person encounters not simply something but Someone, nothing less than God’s triune self. God does not merely indirectly give his creature some share of himself by creating and giving us created and finite realities, but the grace God gives is primarily uncreated grace, the indwelling of the three divine persons in the graced human person. The world and the human person come into being as the condition for the possibility of God's self-communication.
The Paschal Mystery as Icon of the Trinity
Christ, not the human person or community as such, is the preeminent and unsurpassable image of God. “He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation... all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:15-16). Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905-1988) asserts that God reveals himself in the person of Jesus, preeminently in the paschal mystery of his death, descent into hell, and resurrection. He also urges "a kneeling theology," a theology that is mediated by prayer and adoration and imbued with a sense of the sheer glory of God. Faith is first of all a seeing and a beholding and, indeed, an adoring, long before it is an act of seeking understanding.
Balthasar recognizes that the trinitarian mystery is especially revealed at the midpoint of the Easter Triduum, in Jesus' descent into hell, (1 Pet. 3:19; 4:6a). There in the descent, he argues, the glory of the Lord is principally revealed, the glory that is the love that God is (1 Jn 4:8). "It is 'glory' in the uttermost opposite of 'glory,' because it is at the same time blind obedience, that must obey the Father at the point where the last trace of God seems lost (in pure sin), together with every other communication (in pure solitariness)." Balthasar sees God's being, not in terms of absolute and perfect being, but rather in terms of the self-emptying, self-sacrificing, and intrinsically dynamic nature of love. The cross is the revelation of God's glory, albeit a hidden glory, but the glory of inner-trinitarian love.
Balthasar recognizes that the descent represents Jesus' solidarity with the sinner in his/her death, in his/her radical separation from God, in his/her hellish desolation and utter loneliness as a being-only-for-oneself, and in his/her complete powerlessness to redeem oneself. The essential mystery of the descent into hell is that God himself (in the person of the incarnate Son) experiences God-forsakenness and God-estrangement. It is this that constitutes the mystery of our salvation and indeed the glory of the Lord. For this God-forsakenness, this abandonment of the Son by the Father in the descent, is possible only because, at this their point of greatest separation, Father and Son are united in undying love by the Holy Spirit. In the resurrection, the revelation of the Trinity is decisive. It reveals that, even in that moment of their extreme and utmost separation, Father and Son are united. The soteriological "for us" of the paschal mystery is grounded in the self-giving self-yielding love of the divine persons of the Trinity. The paschal mystery reveals that the nature of our triune God is positively constituted by this eternal kenotic self-giving and receiving between the divine persons.
Jurgen Moltmann, a German Protestant theologian, reminds theology that God is where God is self-revealed, and that is in Jesus' paschal mystery, particularly Jesus' death on the cross. Moltmann, a prisoner of war in World War II, wrestles with the question of suffering and of theodicy. The event of the cross can be understood only in trinitarian terms: “If a person once feels the infinite passion of God’s love that finds expression here, then he understands the mystery of the triune God. God suffers with us – God suffers from us – God suffers for us; it is this experience of God that reveals the triune God. The cross takes place in the history between the Father and Son. It is "the concrete history of God," the event of the love of the Son and the grief of the Father, from which issues the Spirit, who opens up the future and creates life. The event of the cross-the grief of the Father, the surrender of the Son, and the power of the Spirit-is taken up into the very being of the triune God, where it is constitutive of God's triune being and history. Moltmann persuades us that God is this trinitarian event, the event of the cross: the Father who delivers up his Son, the Son who is abandoned, and the Holy Spirit who is the bond of union between them.
An understanding of the cross as a trinitarian event leads Moltmann to an understanding of the trinitarian history of God wherein God affects and is affected by history and experiences a history with the world. The goal of the history of God is the unity of all things in God and with God, when all will be "all in all" (1 Cor. 15:28). The eschaton is thus God's future, the consummation of the trinitarian history of God, as well as that of creation. To show God's transcendence and independence from the world, Moltmann asserts that the Trinity is the object of our worship and praise.
Sebastian Moore: The Conversion Experience of the Trinity
The disciples of Jesus were strict monotheists. So, clearly a remarkably dramatic change of consciousness led them to proclaim that Jesus was Lord and God. Moore describes the radical change in the disciples' religious consciousness as a result of their encounter with the risen Jesus in terms of "resurrection shock waves." The first resurrection shock wave erupts with the appearance of the risen Jesus and the disciples’ spontaneous confession that Jesus is Lord and God. He has, after all, done what only God can do. He is risen from the dead. Consider, for example, the experience of Thomas, as presented in John 20. Thomas exclaims: "My Lord and my God!" In this first resurrection shock wave, the disciples recognize that Jesus is God. The second resurrection shock wave in their consciousness comes with the experience and recognition of another divine one, the one whom Jesus himself called Abba/Father, as the one who is the author of this great event, this sending of Jesus to us, for us and for our salvation. The disciples, albeit strict monotheists, recognize that divinity resides in both Jesus and the Father. Third, there occurs another resurrection shock wave: the experience of the presence of God as Spirit, mysteriously in their midst, animating and inspiring the community, Spirit of Jesus, Spirit of love, Spirit of unity. With this, the pattern becomes cyclic, a system, a flow of life between .Father and Son through the Spirit. The three stages of shock-waves of the Resurrection encounter are thus these: displacement, extension, cyclic life-flow. Thus the matrix of the images of the divine persons is the "infinite connection” as it undergoes the transformation of the encounter with the risen Jesus. The pre-religious concentration of divine energy takes, under the pressure of this encounter, the shape of Father, Son and Spirit. Moore explains: "The bottom line of Nicaea was that Jesus had done for us what only God could do, had given us what only God could give, and therefore had to be God, whatever the awesome problems created by such an equation in the intellectual world.” In summary, the paschal mystery emerges as the dynamic by means of which our consciousness is radically transformed and we enter into a trinitarian God-consciousness and ultimately into the trinitarian communion.
Francois-Xavier Durrwell & the Mystery of the Resurrection
The resurrection of Jesus lies at the core of Christian faith, (Rom. 4:25, 1 Cor. 15:14). Durrwell recognizes that Jesus' death and resurrection constitute essentially complementary dimensions of the one mystery, "two aspects of the one Paschal Mystery.” From the moment of the resurrection, Jesus is established in the fullness, plenitude and perfection of glory. The resurrection, in Jesus, knows no tomorrow. The risen Christ remains forever in the eternal (that is, ever present) actuality of the one single eternal moment of this plenitude and perfection, (Heb. 13:8). The resurrection enacts, in the realm of creation, the inner-trinitarian begetting of the Son by the Father, the eternal generation, for the whole being of Christ is raised to the glory of sonship. The eternal trinitarian movement of God ad intra is realized ad extra.
Moreover, Jesus, the incarnate Son, in his whole being is risen, risen in his humanity as well as his divinity. God, in the resurrection, takes Jesus, in his humanity, into the fullness of the eternal begetting of the Son. This is the mystery that, as we confess in the creed, is “for us and for our salvation.” That Jesus, in his humanity, is taken into the mystery of the Trinity, means that we, in our humanity, in union with Christ are incorporated into the same divine generation. Raised with him, we too are born of God in the Holy Spirit, and share fully in the divine birth that is Christ’s. And, not just humankind but all creation is involved in this divine begetting. In Christ, all creation becomes filial, entering into the mystery of the eternal generation of the Son. Henceforth the eternal begetting of the Son in the Spirit is immanent within the world: the world is steeped in the eternal trinitarian movement.”
In the mystery of the resurrection, the stigmata of Jesus' suffering and death remain. The risen Lord is forever the Slain Lamb (Rev. 5:12). Death emerges not as means of reparation or redemption of a debt but as the necessary passage or passover to resurrection and to life in communion with the triune God. Since the resurrection is the eschatological event, the Holy Spirit emerges as the eschatological gift. In summary, the paschal mystery reveals both the means and the meaning of salvation (our redemption) and the trinitarian reality of God who saves (revelation of the triune God). The paschal mystery expresses the eternal trinitarian exchange.
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