I. "I BELIEVE IN ONE GOD"
200 These are the words
with which the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed begins. The confession of God's oneness,
which has its roots in the divine revelation of the Old Covenant, is
inseparable from the profession of God's existence and is equally fundamental.
God is unique; there is only one God: "The Christian faith confesses that
God is one in nature, substance and essence."3 This “Oneness” = Uniqueness because the God of Jesus Christ is Three
Persons.
201 To Israel, his
chosen, God revealed himself as the only One: "Hear, O Israel: the LORD
our God is one LORD; and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your might."4 Through the
prophets, God calls Israel and all nations to turn to him, the one and only God: "Turn to me and be saved, all the ends
of the earth! For I am God, and there is
no other.. . To me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear. 'Only in the
LORD, it shall be said of me, are righteousness and strength.'"5
202 Jesus himself
affirms that God is "the one Lord" whom you must love "with all
your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your
strength".6 At the same time
Jesus gives us to understand that he himself is "the Lord".7 To confess that Jesus is Lord is
distinctive of Christian faith. This is not contrary to belief in the One God.
Nor does believing in the Holy Spirit as "Lord and giver of life"
introduce any division into the One God:
We firmly believe and confess without reservation that there is
only one true God, eternal infinite (immensus) and unchangeable,
incomprehensible, almighty and ineffable, the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit; three persons indeed, but one essence, substance or nature entirely
simple.
God “One and Three”
(“I and the Father are
one” [Jn. 10, 30] / “The Father is
greater than I” [Jn. 14, 28])
“It is impossible to separate the question of whether God exits
[as One] from the question of who or what God is. It is completely impossible
to begin by proving or disproving the existence of God and then to begin
pondering who or what God actually is[1].
The contents that an image of God holds are a fundamentally decisive factor
in determining whether or not knowledge can develop here. And this
knowledge and these contents are so profoundly interwoven with the basic
decisions of human life, which limit or open up the sphere of a man’s knowledge,
that mere theory is impotent here.”[2]
The Ratzinger text on the constitutive relationality of the divine
Persons is decisive:
“Father” [“Abba”]
Theological Meaning: The relation of the pure act of engendering
“The First Person does
not beget the Son in the sense of the act of begetting coming on top of the
finished Person; it is the act of
begetting, or giving oneself, of streaming forth. It is identical with the act
of giving. Only as this act is it person, and therefore it is not the giver but
the act of giving, ‘wave’ not ‘corpuscle’ …. In this idea of relativity in word
and love, independent of the concept of substance and not to be classified
among the ‘accidents,’ Christian thought discovered the kernel of the concept
of person which describes something other and infinitely more than the mere
idea of the ‘individual.’ Let us listen once again to St. Augustine: ‘In God
there are no accidents, only substance and relation.’ Therein lies concealed a
revolution in man’s view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms
of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial
mode of reality. It becomes possible to surmount what we call today
‘objectifying thought;’ a new plane of being comes into view. It is probably true to say that the task
imposed on philosophy as a result of these facts is far from being completed –
so much does modern thought depend on the possibilities thus disclosed, but for
which it would be inconceivable.”[3]
The Point: God is “one” insofar
as it is impossible to have one Person without having the Other. If the
Father is the action of
engendering the Son, then it would not be possible to have the Father without
having the Son, nor the Son without having the Father.
“Son”
Theological
Meaning:
the relation of the pure act of glorifying and obeying
“The
Son as Son, and in so far as he is Son, does not proceed in any way from
himself and so is completely one with the Father; since he is nothing beside
him, claims no special position of his own, confronts the Father with nothing
belonging only to him, retains no room for his own individuality, therefore he
is completely equal to the Father. The logic is compelling: if there is nothing
in which he is just he, no kind of fenced-off private ground, then he coincides
with the Father, is ‘one’ with him. It is precisely this totality of interplay
that the word ‘Son’ aims at expressing. To John ‘Son’ means being-from-another;
thus with this word he defines the being of this man as being from another and
for others, as a being that is completely open on both sides, knows no reserved
area of the mere ‘I.’ When it thus becomes clear that the being of Jesus as
Christ is a completely open being, a being ‘from’ and ‘towards,’ that nowhere
clings to itself and nowhere stands on its own, then it is also clear at the same
time that this being is pure relation (not substantiality) and, as pure
relation, pure unity. This fundamental statement about Christ becomes, as we
have seen, at the same time the explanation of Christian existence. To John,
being a Christian means being like the Son, becoming a son; that is, not
standing on one’s own and in oneself, but living completely open in the ‘from’
and ‘towards.’ In so far as the Christian is a ‘Christian,’ this is true of
him. And certainly such utterances will make him aware to how small an extent
he is a Christian;”[4]
“Holy Spirit”
“In his intimate life,
God ‘is love,’[5]
the essential love shared by the three divine Persons: personal love is the
Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the Father and the Son. Therefore he ‘searches
even the depths of God,’ as uncreated
Love-Gift. It can be said that in the Holy Spirit the intimate life of the
Triune God becomes totally gift, an exchange of mutual love between the divine
Persons, and that through the Holy Spirit God exists in the mode of gift. It is
the the Holy Spirit who is the personal
expression of this self-giving, of this being-love. He is Person-Love. He
is Person-Gift. Here we have an inexhaustible reassure of the reality and an
inexpressible deepening of the concept of person
in God, which only divine Revelation makes known to us.
“At the same time, the
Holy Spirit, being consubstantial with the Father and the Son in divinity, is
love and uncreated gift from which derives as from its source (fons vivus) all giving of gifts vis-à-vis creatures (created gift): the gift of
existence to all things through creation; the gift of grace to human beings
through the whole economy of salvation. As the Apostle Paul writes: “God’s love
has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to
us.”[6]
The
Origin of the Notion of “Person”
[Instead
of reading narrative, Greek actors spoke (“sounded”) through masks (“per-sonare”)
transforming abstract prose into dramatic action, and arousing interest]
Ratzinger explains that “the
origin of the concept ‘person’ is… ‘prosopographic exegesis.’ What does this
mean? In the background stands the word prosopon, which is the Greek equivalent
of persona. Prosopographic exegesis is a
form of interpretation developed already by the literary scholars of Antiquity.
The ancient scholars noticed that in order to give dramatic life to events, the
great poets of Antiquity did not simply narrate these events, but allowed
persons to make their appearance and to speak. For example, they placed words
in the mouths of divine figures and the drama progresses through the mouths of
divine figures and the drama progresses through these words.” [ Me: I
understood that the actors spoke through masks representing divine figures as
“sounding through” (per – sonare)]. “In other words, the poet creates the
artistic device of roles through which the action can be depicted in dialogue.
The literary scholar uncovers these roles; he shows that the persons have been
created as ‘roles’ in order to give dramatic life to events (in fact, the word
prosopon, later translated by ‘persona,’ originally means simply ‘role,’ the
mask of the actor). Prosopographic exegesis is thus an interpretation that
brings to light this artistic device by making it clear that the author has
created dramatic roles, dialogical roles, in order to give life to his poem or
narrative.
“In their reading of Scripture, the Christian writers
came upon something quite similar. They found that, here too, events progress
in dialogue. They found, above all, the peculiar fact that God speaks in the
plural or speaks with himself (e.g., ‘Let us make man in our image and
likeness,’ or God’s statement in Genesis 3, ‘Adam has become like one of us’
or Psalm 110, ‘The Lord said to my Lord’ which the Greek Father s take to be a
conversation between God and his Son). The Fathers approach this fact, namely,
that God is introduced in the plural as speaking with himself, by means of
prosopographic exegesis which thereby takes on a new meaning. Justin, who wrote
in the first half of the second century (d. 165), already says ‘The sacred
writer introduces different prosopa, different roles.’ However, now the word no
longer really means ‘roles,’ because it takes on a completely new reality in
terms of faith in the Word of God. The roles introduced by the sacred writer
are realities, they are dialogical realities. The word ‘prosopon’ =
‘roles’ is thus at the transitional point where it gives birth to the idea of
person….
“To summarize, we can say: ‘The idea of person
expresses in its origin the idea of dialogue and the idea of God as the
dialogical being. It refers to God as the being that lives in the word and
consists of the word as ‘I’ and ‘you’ and ‘we.’ In the light of this
knowledge of God, the true nature of
humanity became clear in a new way.”[7]
“the true nature of humanity:” Note that because man has been revealed as
made in the image and likeness of God (The Three), man must likewise be
person-in-relation.
Me: The point, of course, is that the revealed
dialogue in God is dramatic. There is action which is revealed in St. John: Love (1Jn. 4, 9).
Ratzinger wrote that “According
to Augustine and late patristic theology, the three persons that exist in God
are in their nature relations. They are, therefore, not substances that stand
next to each other, but they are real existing relations, and nothing
besides. I believe this idea of the late patristic period is very
important. In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not
something superadded to the person [as the Greek notion of “relation”
as accident is added to the notion of substance], but it is the person
itself. In God, the person exists only as relation. Put more
concretely, the first person does not generate in the sense that the act of
generating a Son is added to the already complete person, but the
person is the deed of generating, of giving itself, or streaming itself
forth. The person is identical with this act of self-donation.
“One could thus define the first person as
self -donation in fruitful knowledge and love; it is not the one who gives
himself, in whom the act of self-donation is found, but it is this
self-donation, pure reality of act. An idea that appeared again in our century
in modern physics is here anticipated: that there is pure act –being. We know
that in our century the attempt has been made to reduce matter to a wave, to a
pure act of streaming. What may a be questionable idea in the context of
physics was asserted by theology in the fourth and fifth century about the
person in God, namely, that they are nothing but the act the act of relativity
toward each other. In God, person is the pure relativity of being turned toward
the other; it does not lie on the level of substance – the substance is one –
but on the level of dialogical reality, of relativity toward the other….
“I believe a profound illumination of God as
well as man occurs here, the decisive illumination of what person must
mean in terms of Scripture: not a substance that closes itself in itself,
but the phenomenon of complete relativity, which is, of course, realized in its
entirety only in the one who is God, but which indicate s the direction of all
personal being. The point is thus reached here at which there is a transition from the doctrine of
God into Christology and into anthropology.”[8]
And the three Relations
that are the Divine Persons Who as Relations necessary implicate Each Other: if
there is no Father, there is no Son; nor if there is no Son, there cannot be a
Father; and The Spirit is the personification of the opposing relationality of
the Two as Self-Gift. God is One.
Catechism of the Catholic Church (Cont’d)
The “Name of God”
II. GOD REVEALS HIS NAME: YHWH: “I Am Who Am
With You”
203 God revealed himself to his people Israel by
making his name known to them. A name expresses a person's essence and identity
and the meaning of this person's life. God has a name; he is not an anonymous
force.[9] To disclose one's name is to make oneself known to others; in a
way it is to hand oneself over by becoming accessible, capable of being known
more intimately and addressed personally.
204 God revealed himself progressively and under
different names to his people, but the revelation that proved to be the
fundamental one for both the Old and the New Covenants was the revelation of
the divine name to Moses in the theophany of the burning bush, on the threshold
of the Exodus and of the covenant on Sinai.
The living God
205 God calls Moses from the midst of a bush
that burns without being consumed: "I am the God of your father, the God
of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob."9 God is the God of
the fathers, the One who had called and guided the patriarchs in their
wanderings. He is the faithful and compassionate God who remembers them and his
promises; he comes to free their descendants from slavery. He is the God who,
from beyond space and time, can do this and wills to do it, the God who will
put his almighty power to work for this plan.
The Name:"I Am who I Am:" By “ineffable” we mean that God cannot be put in any category of
the mind that has been abstracted from creation. As Creator, God is even
if nothing else were. If we
remove creation, we remove the categories, yet God continues to be. God accedes to Moses’ petition for His name
and tells him “YHWH” whereas it is revealed that the
Moses said to God, "If I come to the
people of Israel and say to them, 'The God of your fathers has sent me to you',
and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses,
"I AM WHO I AM." and he said, "Say this to the people of Israel,
'I AM has sent me to you'. . . this is my name for ever, and thus I am to be
remembered throughout all generations."10
206 In revealing his
mysterious name, YHWH ("I AM HE WHO IS", "I AM WHO
AM" or "I AM WHO I AM"), God says who he is and by what name
he is to be called. This divine name is mysterious just as God is mystery. It is at once a name revealed and something
like the refusal of a name, and hence it better expresses God as what he is - infinitely
above everything that we can understand or say: he is the "hidden
God", his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to
men.”11
Ratzinger wrote: “But God has names and calls us
by name. He is a Person who seeks other persons. He has a countenance and he
seeks our countenances. He has a heart, and he seeks our hearts. For him we are
not functions of the great machine of the world; precisely those persons who
have no automatic function are his people. To have a name means the possibility
of being called, and it means communion. For this reason Christ is the true
Moses, fulfillment of the revelation of the name. He did not come to bring a
new word as a name, but much more; he was himself the face of God, he was the
name of God; he was the possibility even for God to be called ‘you,’ to be called
as a Person and as a heart. His own name Jesus brought to its conclusion the mysterious name [YHWH + consider John
8, 24. 28, 58]of the burning bush. Now it
appeared clearly that God has not left t off speaking, that he had only
temporarily y broken off speech. For the name Jesus in its Hebrew form contains
the word Yahweh and adds to it ‘God saves.’ ‘I am who am’ has meant since the
time of Jesus: ‘I am the one who saves you.’ His being is Salvation.”[10] To
repeat, see Jn. 8, 24, 28, 58.
207
By revealing his name God at the same time reveals his faithfulness which is from
everlasting to everlasting, valid for the past ("I am the God of your
father"), as for the future ("I will be with you").12 God, who reveals his name as "I AM",
reveals himself as the God who is always there, present to his people in order
to save them.
209 Out of respect for the holiness
of God, the people of Israel do not pronounce his name. In the reading of
Sacred Scripture, the revealed name (YHWH) is replaced by the divine title
"LORD" (in Hebrew Adonai, in Greek Kyrios). It is under this title
that the divinity of Jesus will be acclaimed: "Jesus is LORD."
"A God merciful and gracious"
210 After Israel's sin,
when the people had turned away from God to worship the golden calf, God
hears Moses' prayer of intercession and agrees to walk in the midst of an
unfaithful people, thus demonstrating his love.18 When Moses asks to
see his glory, God responds "I will make all my goodness pass before you,
and will proclaim before you my name "the LORD" [YHWH]."19 Then the LORD
passes before Moses and proclaims, "YHWH, YHWH, a God merciful and
gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and
faithfulness"; Moses then confesses that the LORD is a forgiving God.20
211 The divine name, "I Am"
or "He Is", expresses God's faithfulness: despite the faithlessness
of men's sin and the punishment it deserves, he keeps "steadfast love for
thousands".21 By going so far as to give up his own Son
for us, God reveals that he is "rich in mercy".22 By giving his life to free us from sin,
Jesus reveals that he himself bears the divine name: "When you have lifted
up the Son of man, then you will realize that "I AM"."23
God
alone IS
212 Over the centuries, Israel's
faith was able to manifest and deepen realization of the riches contained in
the revelation of the divine name. God is unique; there are no other gods
besides him.24 He transcends the world and history. He made
heaven and earth: "They will perish, but you endure; they will all wear
out like a garment....but you are the same, and your years have no end."25 In God "there is no variation or shadow due
to change."26 God is "HE WHO IS", from
everlasting to everlasting, and as such remains ever faithful to himself and to
his promises.
213 The revelation of
the ineffable name "I AM WHO AM" contains then the truth that God
alone IS. The Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and
following it the Church's Tradition, understood the divine name in this sense:
God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and
without end. All creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he
alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is.
Being
“IS,” how can God be known?
Reality
“Furthermore, the Word of
God is the foundation of everything, it is the true reality. And to be
realistic, we must rely upon this reality. We must change our idea that matter,
solid things, things we can touch, are the more solid, the more certain reality.
At the end of the Sermon on the Mount the Lord speaks to us about the two
possible foundations for building the house of one's life: sand and rock. The
one who builds on sand builds only on visible and tangible things, on success,
on career, on money. Apparently these are the true realities. But all this one
day will pass away. We can see this now with the fall of large banks: this
money disappears, it is nothing. And thus all things, which seem to be the true
realities we can count on, are only realities of a secondary order. The
one who builds his life on these realities, on matter, on success, on
appearances, builds upon sand. Only the Word of God is the foundation of all
reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the heavens, it is
reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The realist is the
one who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak reality, as the
foundation of all things. Realist is the one who builds his life on this
foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm invite us to
discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our life, how to
build life.”[11]
Recall
that the “Word of God” is the Logos,
Who is the Son, the Person of Jesus Christ.
The Question of Faith: How “to know” Jesus Christ in His Persona.
Simon re-cognized Him and became “Peter”
confessing: “You are the Christ, the Son
of the living God” (Mt. 16, 16). But how did he do it if “no knows the Son
except the Father?” He had to let himself be drawn by the Father[12]
in prayer. That is by the experience of praying and going out of self, instead
of an initial conceptual knowing taking place, the way of knowing is a
consciousness that accompanies the experience. To know experientially is not the scientific
mode of knowing, but belongs to philosophical phenomenology. The act of faith
is this conscious way of knowing, the prime act that it accompanies is prayer.
Note that Part Four of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is “Christian Prayer,”
which is the act that engenders the other three parts. And note that Pope
Francis is emphasizing that the faith is not “ideology” nor reducible to
conceptualization: “In ideology there is
no Jesus [no Person]: his tenderness, love, meekness. And ideologies are always
rigid,” the Pope said. “In every sense: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a
disciple of ideology, they have lost the faith: they are no more a disciple of
Jesus[13],
they are a disciple of this attitude of thought, of this…”[14]
And for this reason Jesus says to them: ‘You have taken away the key of
knowledge’. The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also
moralistic knowledge, because these closed the door with so many requirements.”
The
account of knowing Christ is to be found in Ratzinger’s “Behold the Pierced One” Ignatius (1986) 25 -27 where
he explains Luke 9, 18 where Simon, by entering into the prayer of Christ to
the Father, experiences becoming “like” Christ as relation to the Father. In
that experience, he was able to say: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living
God,” and Christ said to him: “you are Peter, and on this rock I will build by
church” (Mt. 16, 17). And so, by becoming one with Christ, and re-cognizing
Christ, Peter has also entered into a
knowledge of the Father and the Trinity.
In
summary, since the Person of Christ is relation, and like is known by like,
then one “knows” the “IS” of the Trinity by “knowing” the “IS” of Christ, [15]
and one “knows” the “IS” of Christ by becoming the “IS” of Christ.
Benedict XVI, Francis: Lumen Fidei #19: “In accepting the gift of faith, believers become a new
creation; they receive a new being: as God’s children, they are now ‘sons in
the Son.’ The phrase ‘Abba, Father,’ so characteristic of Jesus’ own
experience, now becomes the core of the Christian experience (cf. Rom. 8, 15).
The life of faith, as a filial existence, is the acknowledgment of a primordial
and radical gift which upholds our lives.”
Me: In
a word, we experience God as One and Three insofar as we experience ourselves
going out of ourselves to say “Yes” (as
Our Lady) to Jesus Christ, the Word of
God and Son of the Father. That is, we become “other Christs, Christ Himself”
by this evacuating the inner space of ourselves. We defeat being
“self-referential” (Pope Francis) by being obedient to the vocation of the
moment, in the small thing (our Father). We know God by becoming God: “Only God knows God.”[16] We know the divine Person Who is pure
relationality, by becoming relational. How is that done? Again, see Ratzinger’s
Thesis III of his “Behold the Pierced One” (Ignatius [1986] 25-27).
III. GOD, "HE WHO
IS", IS TRUTH AND LOVE
214 God, "HE WHO
IS", revealed himself to Israel as the one "abounding in steadfast
love and faithfulness".27 These two terms
express summarily the riches of the divine name. In all his works God displays,
not only his kindness, goodness, grace and steadfast love, but also his
trustworthiness, constancy, faithfulness and truth. "I give thanks to your
name for your steadfast love and your faithfulness."28 He is the Truth,
for "God is light and in him there is no darkness"; "God is
love", as the apostle John teaches.29
God is Truth
215 "The sum of
your word is truth; and every one of your righteous ordinances endures
forever."30 "and now, O
LORD God, you are God, and your words are true";31 this is why God's
promises always come true.32 God is Truth
itself, whose words cannot deceive. This is why one can abandon oneself in full
trust to the truth and faithfulness of his word in all things. the beginning of
sin and of man's fall was due to a lie of the tempter who induced doubt of God's
word, kindness and faithfulness.
216 God's truth is his
wisdom, which commands the whole created order and governs the world.33 God, who alone
made heaven and earth, can alone impart true knowledge of every created thing
in relation to himself.34
217 God is also truthful
when he reveals himself - the teaching that comes from God is "true
instruction".35 When he sends his
Son into the world it will be "to bear witness to the truth":36 "We know that
the Son of God has come and has given us understanding, to know him who is
true."37
God is Love
218 In the course of its
history, Israel was able to discover that God had only one reason to reveal
himself to them, a single motive for choosing them from among all peoples as
his special possession: his sheer gratuitous love.38 and thanks to the
prophets Israel understood that it was again out of love that God never stopped
saving them and pardoning their unfaithfulness and sins.39
219 God's love for
Israel is compared to a father's love for his son. His love for his people is
stronger than a mother's for her children. God loves his people more than a
bridegroom his beloved; his love will be victorious over even the worst
infidelities and will extend to his most precious gift: "God so loved the
world that he gave his only Son."40
220 God's love is
"everlasting":41 "For the
mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not
depart from you."42 Through Jeremiah,
God declares to his people, "I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you."43
221 But St. John goes
even further when he affirms that "God is love":44 God's very being
is love. By sending his only Son and the Spirit of Love in the fullness of
time, God has revealed his innermost secret:45 God himself is an
eternal exchange of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and he has destined us
to share in that exchange.
IV. THE IMPLICATIONS OF
FAITH IN ONE GOD
222 Believing in God,
the only One, and loving him with all our being has enormous consequences for
our whole life.
223 It means coming to
know God's greatness and majesty: "Behold, God is great, and we know him
not."46 Therefore, we must
"serve God first".47
224 It means living in
thanksgiving: if God is the only One, everything we are and have comes from
him: "What have you that you did not receive?"48 "What shall I
render to the LORD for all his bounty to me?"49
225 It means knowing the
unity and true dignity of all men: everyone is made in the image and likeness
of God.50
226 It means making good
use of created things: faith in God, the only One, leads us to use everything
that is not God only insofar as it brings us closer to him, and to detach
ourselves from it insofar as it turns us away from him:
My Lord and my God, take from me everything that distances me from you.
My Lord and my God, give me everything that brings me closer to you
My Lord and my God, detach me from myself to give my all to you.51
My Lord and my God, take from me everything that distances me from you.
My Lord and my God, give me everything that brings me closer to you
My Lord and my God, detach me from myself to give my all to you.51
227 It means trusting
God in every circumstance, even in adversity. A prayer of St. Teresa of Jesus
wonderfully expresses this trust:
Let nothing trouble you
/ Let nothing frighten you Everything passes / God never changes Patience /
Obtains all Whoever has God / Wants for nothing God alone is enough.52
IN BRIEF
228 "Hear, O
Israel, the LORD our God is one LORD..." (⇒ Dt
6:4; ⇒ Mk
12:29). "The supreme being must be unique, without equal. . . If God is
not one, he is not God" (Tertullian, Adv. Marc., 1, 3, 5: PL 2, 274).
229 Faith in God leads
us to turn to him alone as our first origin and our ultimate goal, and neither
to prefer anything to him nor to substitute anything for him.
230 Even when he reveals
himself, God remains a mystery beyond words: "If you understood him, it
would not be God" (St. Augustine, Sermo 52, 6, 16: PL 38, 360 and Sermo
117, 3, 5: PL 38, 663).
231 The God of our faith
has revealed himself as HE WHO IS; and he has made himself known as
"abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness" (⇒ Ex
34:6). God's very being is Truth and Love.
Paragraph 2. THE FATHER
I. "IN THE NAME OF
THE FATHER AND OF THE SON AND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT"
232 Christians are
baptized "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit"53 Before receiving
the sacrament, they respond to a three-part question when asked to confess the
Father, the Son and the Spirit: "I do." "The faith of all
Christians rests on the Trinity."54
233 Christians are
baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit: not
in their names,55 for there is only
one God, the almighty Father, his only Son and the Holy Spirit: the Most Holy
Trinity.
234 The mystery of the
Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of Christian faith and life. It is the
mystery of God in himself. It is therefore the source of all the other
mysteries of faith, the light that enlightens them. It is the most fundamental
and essential teaching in the "hierarchy of the truths of faith".56 The whole history
of salvation is identical with the history of the way and the means by which
the one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reveals himself to men "and
reconciles and unites with himself those who turn away from sin".57
235 This paragraph
expounds briefly (I) how the mystery of the Blessed Trinity was revealed, (II)
how the Church has articulated the doctrine of the faith regarding this
mystery, and (III) how, by the divine missions of the Son and the Holy Spirit,
God the Father fulfils the "plan of his loving goodness" of creation,
redemption and sanctification.
236 The Fathers of the
Church distinguish between theology (theologia) and economy (oikonomia).
"Theology" refers to the mystery of God's inmost life within the
Blessed Trinity and "economy" to all the works by which God reveals
himself and communicates his life. Through the oikonomia the theologia is
revealed to us; but conversely, the theologia illuminates the whole oikonomia.
God's works reveal who he is in himself; the mystery of his inmost being
enlightens our understanding of all his works. So it is, analogously, among
human persons. A person discloses himself in his actions, and the better we
know a person, the better we understand his actions.
237 The Trinity is a
mystery of faith in the strict sense, one of the "mysteries that are
hidden in God, which can never be known unless they are revealed by God".58To be sure, God has left
traces of his Trinitarian being in his work of creation and in his Revelation
throughout the Old Testament. But his inmost Being as Holy Trinity is a mystery
that is inaccessible to reason alone or even to Israel's faith before the
Incarnation of God's Son and the sending of the Holy Spirit.
II. THE REVELATION OF
GOD AS TRINITY
The Father revealed by
the Son
238 Many religions
invoke God as "Father". The deity is often considered the
"father of gods and of men". In Israel, God is called
"Father" inasmuch as he is Creator of the world.59 Even more, God is
Father because of the covenant and the gift of the law to Israel, "his
first-born son".60 God is also called
the Father of the king of Israel. Most especially he is "the Father of the
poor", of the orphaned and the widowed, who are under his loving
protection.61
239 By calling God
"Father", the language of faith indicates two main things: that God
is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at
the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God's parental
tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood,62 which emphasizes
God's immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. the language of
faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first
representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human
parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood.
We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between
the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human
fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard:63 no one is father
as God is Father.
240 Jesus revealed that
God is Father in an unheard-of sense: he is Father not only in being Creator;
he is eternally Father by his relationship to his only Son who, reciprocally,
is Son only in relation to his Father: "No one knows the Son except the
Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son
chooses to reveal him."64
241 For this reason the
apostles confess Jesus to be the Word: "In the beginning was the Word, and
the Word was with God, and the Word was God"; as "the image of the
invisible God"; as the "radiance of the glory of God and the very
stamp of his nature".65
242 Following this
apostolic tradition, the Church confessed at the first ecumenical council at
Nicaea (325) that the Son is "consubstantial" with the Father, that
is, one only God with him.66 The second
ecumenical council, held at Constantinople in 381, kept this expression in its
formulation of the Nicene Creed and confessed "the only-begotten Son of
God, eternally begotten of the Father, light from light, true God from true
God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father".67
The Father and the son
revealed by the spirit
243 Before his Passover,
Jesus announced the sending of "another Paraclete" (Advocate), the
Holy Spirit. At work since creation, having previously "spoken through the
prophets", the Spirit will now be with and in the disciples, to teach them
and guide them "into all the truth".68 The Holy Spirit is
thus revealed as another divine person with Jesus and the Father.
244 The eternal origin
of the Holy Spirit is revealed in his mission in time. the Spirit is sent to
the apostles and to the Church both by the Father in the name of the Son, and
by the Son in person, once he had returned to the Father.69 The sending of the
person of the Spirit after Jesus' glorification70 reveals in its
fullness the mystery of the Holy Trinity.
245 The apostolic faith
concerning the Spirit was confessed by the second ecumenical council at
Constantinople (381): "We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and giver
of life, who proceeds from the Father."71 By this
confession, the Church recognizes the Father as "the source and origin of
the whole divinity".72 But the eternal
origin of the Spirit is not unconnected with the Son's origin: "The Holy
Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is God, one and equal with the Father
and the Son, of the same substance and also of the same nature. . . Yet he is
not called the Spirit of the Father alone,. . . but the Spirit of both the
Father and the Son."73 The Creed of the
Church from the Council of Constantinople confesses: "With the Father and
the Son, he is worshipped and glorified."74
246 The Latin tradition
of the Creed confesses that the Spirit "proceeds from the Father and the
Son (filioque)". the Council of Florence in 1438 explains: "The Holy
Spirit is eternally from Father and Son; He has his nature and subsistence at
once (simul) from the Father and the Son. He proceeds eternally from both as
from one principle and through one spiration... And, since the Father has
through generation given to the only-begotten Son everything that belongs to
the Father, except being Father, the Son has also eternally from the Father,
from whom he is eternally born, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the
Son."75
247 The affirmation of
the filioque does not appear in the Creed confessed in 381 at Constantinople.
But Pope St. Leo I, following an ancient Latin and Alexandrian tradition, had
already confessed it dogmatically in 447,76 even before Rome,
in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, came to recognize and receive the Symbol of
381. the use of this formula in the Creed was gradually admitted into the Latin
liturgy (between the eighth and eleventh centuries). the introduction of the
filioque into the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed by the Latin liturgy
constitutes moreover, even today, a point of disagreement with the Orthodox
Churches.
248 At the outset the
Eastern tradition expresses the Father's character as first origin of the
Spirit. By confessing the Spirit as he "who proceeds from the
Father", it affirms that he comes from the Father through the Son.77 The Western
tradition expresses first the consubstantial communion between Father and Son,
by saying that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son (filioque). It
says this, "legitimately and with good reason",78 for the eternal
order of the divine persons in their consubstantial communion implies that the
Father, as "the principle without principle",79 is the first
origin of the Spirit, but also that as Father of the only Son, he is, with the
Son, the single principle from which the Holy Spirit proceeds.80 This legitimate
complementarity, provided it does not become rigid, does not affect the
identity of faith in the reality of the same mystery confessed.
III. THE HOLY TRINITY IN
THE TEACHING OF THE FAITH
The formation of the
Trinitarian dogma
249 From the beginning,
the revealed truth of the Holy Trinity has been at the very root of the
Church's living faith, principally by means of Baptism. It finds its expression
in the rule of baptismal faith, formulated in the preaching, catechesis and
prayer of the Church. Such formulations are already found in the apostolic
writings, such as this salutation taken up in the Eucharistic liturgy:
"The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship
of the Holy Spirit be with you all."81
250 During the first
centuries the Church sought to clarify her Trinitarian faith, both to deepen
her own understanding of the faith and to defend it against the errors that
were deforming it. This clarification was the work of the early councils, aided
by the theological work of the Church Fathers and sustained by the Christian
people's sense of the faith.
251 In order to
articulate the dogma of the Trinity, the Church had to develop her own
terminology with the help of certain notions of philosophical origin:
"substance", "person" or "hypostasis",
"relation" and so on. In doing this, she did not submit the faith to
human wisdom, but gave a new and unprecedented meaning to these terms, which
from then on would be used to signify an ineffable mystery, "infinitely
beyond all that we can humanly understand".82
252 The Church uses (I)
the term "substance" (rendered also at times by "essence"
or "nature") to designate the divine being in its unity, (II) the
term "person" or "hypostasis" to designate the Father, Son
and Holy Spirit in the real distinction among them, and (III) the term "relation"
to designate the fact that their distinction lies in the relationship of each
to the others.
The dogma of the Holy
Trinity
253 The Trinity is One.
We do not confess three Gods, but one God in three persons, the
"consubstantial Trinity".83 The divine persons
do not share the one divinity among themselves but each of them is God whole
and entire: "The Father is that which the Son is, the Son that which the
Father is, the Father and the Son that which the Holy Spirit is, i.e. by nature
one God."84 In the words of
the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), "Each of the persons is that supreme
reality, viz., the divine substance, essence or nature."85
254 The divine persons
are really distinct from one another. "God is one but not solitary."86 "Father",
"Son", "Holy Spirit" are not simply names designating
modalities of the divine being, for they are really distinct from one another:
"He is not the Father who is the Son, nor is the Son he who is the Father,
nor is the Holy Spirit he who is the Father or the Son."87 They are distinct
from one another in their relations of origin: "It is the Father who
generates, the Son who is begotten, and the Holy Spirit who proceeds."88 The divine Unity
is Triune.
255 The divine persons
are relative to one another. Because it does not divide the divine unity, the
real distinction of the persons from one another resides solely in the
relationships which relate them to one another: "In the relational names
of the persons the Father is related to the Son, the Son to the Father, and the
Holy Spirit to both. While they are called three persons in view of their
relations, we believe in one nature or substance."89 Indeed
"everything (in them) is one where there is no opposition of
relationship."90 "Because of
that unity the Father is wholly in the Son and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the
Son is wholly in the Father and wholly in the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is
wholly in the Father and wholly in the Son."91
256 St. Gregory of Nazianzus, also called "the
Theologian", entrusts this summary of Trinitarian faith to the catechumens
of Constantinople:
Above all guard for me this great deposit of faith for which I live and fight, which I want to take with me as a companion, and which makes me bear all evils and despise all pleasures: I mean the profession of faith in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. I entrust it to you today. By it I am soon going to plunge you into water and raise you up from it. I give it to you as the companion and patron of your whole life. I give you but one divinity and power, existing one in three, and containing the three in a distinct way. Divinity without disparity of substance or nature, without superior degree that raises up or inferior degree that casts down. . . the infinite co-naturality of three infinites. Each person considered in himself is entirely God. . . the three considered together. . . I have not even begun to think of unity when the Trinity bathes me in its splendour. I have not even begun to think of the Trinity when unity grasps me. .92
Above all guard for me this great deposit of faith for which I live and fight, which I want to take with me as a companion, and which makes me bear all evils and despise all pleasures: I mean the profession of faith in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. I entrust it to you today. By it I am soon going to plunge you into water and raise you up from it. I give it to you as the companion and patron of your whole life. I give you but one divinity and power, existing one in three, and containing the three in a distinct way. Divinity without disparity of substance or nature, without superior degree that raises up or inferior degree that casts down. . . the infinite co-naturality of three infinites. Each person considered in himself is entirely God. . . the three considered together. . . I have not even begun to think of unity when the Trinity bathes me in its splendour. I have not even begun to think of the Trinity when unity grasps me. .92
IV. THE DIVINE WORKS AND
THE TRINITARIAN MISSIONS
257 "O blessed
light, O Trinity and first Unity!"93 God is eternal
blessedness, undying life, unfading light. God is love: Father, Son and Holy
Spirit. God freely wills to communicate the glory of his blessed life. Such is
the "plan of his loving kindness", conceived by the Father before the
foundation of the world, in his beloved Son: "He destined us in love to be
his sons" and "to be conformed to the image of his Son", through
"the spirit of sonship".94 This plan is a
"grace [which] was given to us in Christ Jesus before the ages
began", stemming immediately from Trinitarian love.95 It unfolds in the
work of creation, the whole history of salvation after the fall, and the
missions of the Son and the Spirit, which are continued in the mission of the
Church.96
258 The whole divine
economy is the common work of the three divine persons. For as the Trinity has
only one and the same natures so too does it have only one and the same
operation: "The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are not three
principles of creation but one principle."97 However, each
divine person performs the common work according to his unique personal
property. Thus the Church confesses, following the New Testament, "one God
and Father from whom all things are, and one Lord Jesus Christ, through whom
all things are, and one Holy Spirit in whom all things are".98 It is above all
the divine missions of the Son's Incarnation and the gift of the Holy Spirit
that show forth the properties of the divine persons.
259 Being a work at once
common and personal, the whole divine economy makes known both what is proper
to the divine persons, and their one divine nature. Hence the whole Christian
life is a communion with each of the divine persons, without in any way
separating them. Everyone who glorifies the Father does so through the Son in
the Holy Spirit; everyone who follows Christ does so because the Father draws
him and the Spirit moves him.99
260 The ultimate end of
the whole divine economy is the entry of God's creatures into the perfect unity
of the Blessed Trinity.100 But even now we
are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity: "If a man loves
me", says the Lord, "he will keep my word, and my Father will love
him, and we will come to him, and make our home with him":101
O my God, Trinity whom I adore, help me forget myself entirely so
to establish myself in you, unmovable and peaceful as if my soul were already
in eternity. May nothing be able to trouble my peace or make me leave you, O my
unchanging God, but may each minute bring me more deeply into your mystery!
Grant my soul peace. Make it your heaven, your beloved dwelling and the place
of your rest. May I never abandon you there, but may I be there, whole and
entire, completely vigilant in my faith, entirely adoring, and wholly given
over to your creative action.102
IN BRIEF
261 The mystery of the
Most Holy Trinity is the central mystery of the Christian faith and of
Christian life. God alone can make it known to us by revealing himself as
Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
262 The Incarnation of
God's Son reveals that God is the eternal Father and that the Son is
consubstantial with the Father, which means that, in the Father and with the
Father the Son is one and the same God.
263 The mission of the
Holy Spirit, sent by the Father in the name of the Son (⇒ Jn
14:26) and by the Son "from the Father" (⇒ Jn
15:26), reveals that, with them, the Spirit is one and the same God. "With
the Father and the Son he is worshipped and glorified" (Nicene Creed).
264 "The Holy
Spirit proceeds from the Father as the first principle and, by the eternal gift
of this to the Son, from the communion of both the Father and the Son"
(St. Augustine, De Trin. 15, 26, 47: PL 42, 1095).
265 By the grace of
Baptism "in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy
Spirit", we are called to share in the life of the Blessed Trinity, here
on earth in the obscurity of faith, and after death in eternal light (cf. Paul
VI, CPG # 9).
266 "Now this is
the Catholic faith: We worship one God in the Trinity and the Trinity in unity,
without either confusing the persons or dividing the substance; for the person
of the Father is one, the Son's is another, the Holy Spirit's another; but the
Godhead of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is one, their glory equal, their
majesty coeternal" (Athanasian Creed: DS 75; ND 16).
267 Inseparable in what
they are, the divine persons are also inseparable in what they do. But within
the single divine operation each shows forth what is proper to him in the
Trinity, especially in the divine missions of the Son's Incarnation and the
gift of the Holy Spirit.
The Concretion of the revelation of the Trinity is GS 24 as
grounding the social doctrine of the Church [Chpt 5 of “Christian Freedom and
Liberation” CDF].
(To be done at the end of the 4th class)
[1]
Why? Because they are in two different but complementary epistemological
horizons
[2] J.
Ratzinger, “The God of Jesus Christ,” Ignatius (2008) 19-20.
[3] J.
Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 131-132.
[4] J.
Ratzinger, “Introduction to Christianity,” Ignatius (1990) 134.
[5] 1
Jn. 4, 8 and 16.
[6]
John Paul II, Dominum et Vivificantem #10.
[7] J.
Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17 (Fall, 1990) 441-443.
[8]
Ibid 443-446.
[9] “The beast is a number and translates into
numbers. What that means is known to us who have experienced the world of the
concentration camps: its horror was due to the fact that the camps obliterated
faces, annihilated history, and turned human beings into interchangeable parts
of a huge machine. Human beings were identified by their functions, nothing
more. Today we must fear that the concentration camps were only a prelude, and
that the world, in accord with the universal law of the machine, may adapt
itself completely to the organization of the concentration camps. For in a
place where only functions exist, human beings can only be a kind of a
function. The machines that human beings have constructed will stamp on people
the sign of the machines. It is necessary to render human beings legible to the
computer, and this is only possible if human beings are translated into
figures. Everything else remaining in human beings becomes unimportant.
Whatever is not a function is nothing. The beast is a number that transforms
people into numbers;” J. Ratzinger, “The God of Jesus Christ,”
Ignatius (2008) 23-24.
[10]
J. Ratzinger, “The God of Jesus Christ,” Ignatius (2008)
[13] Read: Person.
[16]
Benedict XVI,
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