Trinity Sunday
(From “The Trinity As History” by
Bruno Forte)
The Exile of the Trinity:
"Is the God of Christians a Christian God?
This question, paradoxical in appearance, arises
spontaneously if we consider the manner in which most Christians picture t heir
God. They tak of him by referring to some vague divine ‘person,’ more or less
identified with the Jesus of the Gospels or with an unidentifiable heavenly
being. In prayer they speak to this rather indefinite God while at the same
time they find the way the liturgy prays to the Father through Christ in the Holy
Spirit a bit strange, not to say abstruse: God is prayed to, but not in!
“It is an undeniable fact that many Christians, ‘notwithstanding
their exact profession of the Trinity, are almost alone as “monotheists” in the
practice of their religious life. One can even risk claiming that if the
Trinity should have to be suppressed as false doctrine, a great part of
religious literature could still remain unchanged after this occurrence. The
suspicion could arise that, for the catechism of the mind and heart (unlike the
printed catechism), the representation of the incarnation on the part of the
Christian would not have to change at all if ever there were no Trinity.’”
Blogger: There has been a radical change through the Second Vatican
Council. The Trinitarian Persons have become the meaning of the human person by
the mediation of Jesus Christ as prototype of man. Until Vatican II, Catholic
theology had considered Christ to be an exception to man. Joseph Ratzinger explained that pre-Christian philosophy was limited to the level of essence to which
I would add that there was due to the epistemological level they worked at,
namely, sensible perception and abstract thought. They did not have the
experience of transcendent being as in the self going out of self in the act of
faith. Reality was always known in categories of conceptual abstraction.
Christianity introduced the existential experience of self-transcendence in the
act of faith. One can know not only by vision and conceptual abstraction, but
also by hearing and accepting the testimony of another which is a stretching of
the self to transcendence.This is another epistemological level which reveals another level of reality.
Ratzinger
comments that “Scholastic theology developed categories of existence out of
this contribution given by Christian faith to the human mind. Its defect was
that it limited these categories to Christology and to the doctrine of the
Trinity and did not make them fruitful in the whole extent of spiritual
reality. This seems to me also the limit of St. Thomas in the matter, namely,
that within theology he operates, with Richard of St. Victor, on the level of
existence, but treats the whole thing as a theological exception, as it were.
In philosophy, however, he remains faithful to the different approach of pre-Christian
philosophy. The contribution of Christian faith to the whole of human thought
is not realized; it remains at first detached from it as a theological exception,
although it is precisely the meaning
of this new element to call into question the whole of human thought and to set it on a new course.”[1]
Vatican
II’s Gaudium et spes #22 corrects this error, affirming: “In reality it is only
in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man truly becomes
clear. For Adam, the first man, was a type of him who was to come, Christ the
Lord, Christ the new Adam, in the very revelation of the mystery of the Father
and of his love, fully reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high
calling. It is no wonder, then, that all the truths mentioned so far should
find in him their source and their most perfect embodiment.
“He who
is the ‘image of the invisible God’ (Col. 1, 15), is himself the perfect man
who has restored in the children of dam that likeness to God which had been
disfigured ever since the first sin. Human nature, bay the very fact that it
was assumed, not absorbed, in him, has been raised in us also to a dignity
beyond compare. For, by his incarnation, he, the son of God, has in a certain
way united himself with each man. He worked with human hands, he thought with a
human mind. He acted with a human will, and with a human heart he loved. Born
of the Virgin Mary, he has truly been made one of us, like to us in all things
except sin.”
The
Trinity enters the human dimension through Jesus Christ and becomes the very
meaning of man, and therefore the dynamic of all human existence: sexuality,
work, economics, politics, etc. That Trinitarian dimension appears in us by the
going out of self which we call supernatural
and takes place in the most material and ordinary situations of secular life.
We can say this differently: The Creator, when thinking man, thought Christ, not Adam. Adam was "a type," but Christ was the "prototype: (Redemptor Hominis #10). Here the bi millennial lacuna of a pagan anthropology is raised to its rightful Christian status as a creative dynamic, an ontological subjectivity, which overturns the total perspective man, work, salvation and society.
The soteriology now is not an eschatological liberation from sin into a pristine pre-lapsarian state of grace beyond this world, but identification with the dynamic of Christ living in the here and now creating a secular freedom and autonomy of man through the exercise of work as another Calvary perpetuated by yet another Upper Room. That "upper room" is not now a Catholic institutional "Christendom" but a secular world made increasingly secular - read free and truly autonomous - by the presence, Love and work of "other Christs" making it so by imaging the Communio of the Trinity in it.
[1] J.
Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio Fall
1990, p. 449.
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