The LORD said to me, “You are my Son;
	today I have begotten you."
— Psalm 2:7b

All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.
— Matthew 11:27

The relation between the Father and the Son is described principally in terms of begetting or “generation”—the Father begets and Son is begotten. This is to be thought, as Bulgakov writes, “of course in a wholly other sense than earthly birth.”1 Irenaeus and Gregory of Nazianzus saw the Son’s generation is something beyond our human understanding and so best described and honored by silence.2 Supplementary to such silence, the two predominant images for the generation of the Son in the long history of chatty theologians are that of inner word (Word) and human generation (Son)—the psychological/intrahuman and social/interhuman.

In the analogy of human (interhuman), animal, or “natural” generation, one nature is communicated from one being to another through biological reproduction.3 Now getting too fixated (univocally) on a particular image is the royal road to heresy—such was the reticence of Irenaeus and Gregory above. If the generation of the Son is like this (you can see Arians reason) then there was time when the Son was not. A “generation” or “birth” is usually thought of as how one being’s life begins by being bodily born (separated) from another. To qualify this analogy—how the generation of the Son is not-like human/animal generation—is to recognize that this is a generation that is not in space and time. It is a begetting/generation/beginning without spatial separation or bodies (incorporeal) and without beginning or ending in time.4 The event of the generation of the Son is an eternal event—it is an eternal generation, “an always being engendered.”5 With the Son’s “primal nativity” there is no before or after (there was never a time in which the Father was alone and then begot the Son); there is only a reciprocal relation of “endless movement.”6 The generation of the Son from the Father (as we saw in the last meditation) the self-generation of absolute Life in which the Father “gives that all he is”7—the Father gives the divine nature to the Son.8 This, as Thomas argues, is thus a “real relation” an “order” in the same nature.9 The Father begets/generates the Son, but the Son is equally God and there was never a time that he was not.

From the psychological (intrahuman) analogy the Son’s generation as fittingly compared to that of the intellect—the “intelligible conception” of the inner word.10 Thomas described the generation of the Word variously as “intellectual emanation,”11 “intellectual procession,”12 or “spiritual procession” in the Godhead13 where “in God the Father, the act of being (esse) and the act of understanding (intelligere) are the same.”14 This analogy is not natural (as with Son) but immaterial generation (as with a word in a mind).15

In both of these ways of coming at the generation of the Son/Word there is an “upsurge of life,” an “eternal engendering.”16 Closely related to generation are notions of “origination” or even “cause.” Western thinkers such as Richard of St Victor and Thomas Aquinas following Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine present the Trinitarian persons as distinguished by relations of origin.17 (Though Thomas does state “that relations, not origins, constitute the hypostases” in his de Potentia.18)

Some Eastern Orthodox thinkers like Bulgakov see origin, production, or cause as not the best ways of thinking about the relation between the Trinitarian persons. Bulgakov critiques an understanding of the Father that becomes too abstracted (as principle or cause or source) from the more dynamic concrete language of giving forth, generating. Thomas himself was wary of using “cause” at times for Trinitarian relations for this reason.19 Bulgakov asks: “What can causal origination in eternity signify?”20 There is an analogical distance between these ways of thinking about the relation of things in the world, about finite making or about a series of causes which are then used for the relation of creation, the relation between God and the world, and then used to speak of the relations between the Trinitarian persons. Bulgakov objects to using the language of cause to talk even about God’s creation—“on these paths” of a series of causes “it is not possible to transcend the world.”21 These are three very different kinds relations (inner-worldly, creation, and inner-Trinitarian), and the difference can get elided/confused—the Father causes the Son, God causes the world, sugar causes tooth decay. These “causes” so different it might be better to vary our language (or qualify it) so as to avoid confusion (God being a clockmaker)...or heresy (like Arianism).22 Other analogies for trinitarian life are drawn as we’ve seen from life more generally (generation) and human or rational life in particular (mental conception). If we want to use these (intra and inter) human analogies them we should keep them more apophatic, odd, obviously analogical. The same applies to more general (physical?) analogies like cause or origin or principle: perhaps the origin-less origination within the origin or the principle without principle.23

Finally, the Son’s going forth from the Father is conceived in terms of revelation. “No one has ever seen God; God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (Jn 1.18). With the Son at the Father’s side the Father is known—as an “other” who corresponds and is singularly corresponding to the Father. Theologians have seen the Son (and Spirit) revealing the Father as an order that is not merely economic (not just what God is doing in the world) but has to do with the life of the immanent Trinity (apart from the history of the world). The Father is “the revealed”—the revealed hypostasis—that the Son is “revealing.”24 When the writer of Hebrews writes of other communications and revelations of God and then says “in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb 1.2), the revealing of the Son who is the Word did not begin late in time—in the last days the Son is revealed as the revelation of the Father. The Son declares the Father, Irenaeus writes, “from the beginning.”25 With the psychological analogy (as we see in Jn 1) the Son is the Word of the Father, his “expression (expressio)” (Bonaventure).26

The Father and the Son are together in a paired out-going movement.27 A natural question: To whom does the Son reveal the Father? Irenaeus enumerates the various orders of angels to which the Son reveals the Father,28 but he also sees “revelation” as one of many ways of talking about the “indescribable” generation of the Son from the Father: “production, or generation, or calling, or revelation.”29 The life of God is a kind of self-revelation, a going-forth in himself. Revelation is not “something God does” so much as, in a Trinitarian understanding, “something God is”—there is, as Thomas writes, a natural communication, a “natural sharing” in the Trinity,30 a self-giving, as we see in the thought of Michel Henry reflecting on John’s Gospel.31 The Father is, as Bulgakov writes, the “unsearchable but self-manifesting Abyss.”32 While the Father “is Silence, Mystery, the Transcendent even in the Holy Trinity,”33 he is also the “One Who Reveals Himself.”34 The truth of the Father does not just rest in itself but goes forth in itself as the Word goes forth (Is 45.23)—the Son then is the faithful/true witness in himself (Rev 3.14).

The Son is the revealing image of Father—the “image of God” (2 Cor 4.4; Col 1.15-20; Heb 1.2-3). Because he is the Son, he is the perfect image of the Father, the Father’s shining forth, his “eternal radiation.”35 The Son is not only like the Father (with a divine family resemblance), but the Son is the true repetition of the Father, the full representation of the Father, his “exact imprint” (Heb 1.3). With the Son as eternal image, as the one who has received all things from the Father, as the “one who has received”—the Son’s very existence as Son gives thanks to the Father. As the perfect image, the non-identical repetition of the Father, the Son within the Triune God “subsists in a perpetual and perfect oblation,” as Bouyer writes, “an entire and unceasing act of thanksgiving.”36

All things have been handed over to me by my Father
— Matthew 11.27

If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!
— Luke 11.13

Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
— Luke 12:32

While there is precedent in the Old Testament (one of many images of God), the consistent name of “Father” comes from Jesus’ particular way of speaking and becomes central in the New Testament.1 Indeed, it is the Son who primarily knows and reveals the Father as Father (Mt 11.27). Jesus uses the word “Abba” as a term of intimacy with which Jesus addresses the Father in his (Jesus’) distress (Mk 14.36). In receiving the Spirit we too are adopted into the position of the beloved Son such that we cry “Abba! Father!” (Rom 8.15; Gal 4.6). The name of “Father” is revealed by Jesus and in the scriptures.2 As recognized early on, in the New Testament “God” (theos, deus) usually refers to the Father (as “Lord” comes to be a regular designation for Jesus Christ).3

Eph 1.17: “the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory”
2 Cor 11.31: “the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ”
2 Cor 13.14: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

The revealed name of “Father” works on an analogy to human fathers or fatherhood, an analogy that is in danger of being lost. Today “father” is saddled with associations varying from absence/abandonment to something unnecessary to an antiquated figure of authority to be resisted, rejected, ignored—often only remaining useful as a figure of blame, a name for a besetting evil. The response to this danger should not be to abandon the name “Father”—this would hopelessly disconnect our theology from the New Testament and Jesus himself—but to recover or rediscover meanings that have been lost or abandoned. We can see in the capitalization of “Father” not an enthroning of our all-too-human failings, but a standing critique, a signal of difference of God the Father from—even the implicit failure of—human fatherhood.4 As God’s kingship is true kingship that is the transcendent standard of which our all-too-human kings and leaders fall short, as God’s work of Creation is true creation, as God’s Love is true love, as God’s Faithfulness is the true faithfulness, so is God’s Fatherhood the true fatherhood that is the transcendent standard of which our all-too-human fathers fall short—”the Father, from whom all fatherhood (patria) in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph 3.14-15). The proper understanding of God as Father is not anthropocentric but archetypal—“Father” applies primarily to God and only derivatively to creatures.5 This, I think, is one proper way to think of Jesus’ injunction: “call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Mt 23.9). If you are honoring “fatherhood,” do so to give proper honor to God and not to exalt yourselves. (It should be noted that scripture, in calling God Father, does not exclude maternal imagery such as a mother’s intimate bond with and providing/providence for her dependent nursing child (Is 49.15)—“As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you” (Is 66.13).6)

Using the name “Father” for the first person of the Trinity is an analogy arising from human generation/biology, from the begetting of children. “Father” is paired with “Son.” This is a temporal analogy for an eternal relation. The Father is “the” Father of the Son and not himself a son—whereas every human father is also a son. As the Son is the only-begotten, so the Father is the unbegotten.7 The Son is conceived in and begotten from the Father (as, in the psychological analogy, the Word is “conceived” in the “begetting Mind”8). (It should be noted that Maximus here uses human maternal moments to describe divine paternity.)

The statement from Psalm 2, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you” (Ps 2.7), is used repeatedly in the New Testament at points when Jesus is revealed as “Son” in new ways. The annunciation (Lk 1.35), Jesus’ baptism (Mt 3.17; Mk 1.11; Lk 3.22) and his resurrection (Acts 13.33) and ascension (Heb 1.5, 5.5) are junctions in salvation history.9 These are “a temporal expression of an eternal act”10—the Son’s (and Father’s) eternal reality is not changing but being revealed and changing us, bringing about our salvation.

Understanding the Father is approached both negatively and positively. The “negative” approach, emphasized by Augustine and Aquinas, can be represented by Gregory of Nazianzus who sees the Father as a distinctive person of the Trinity in that he is unbegotten or unoriginate (as opposed to the Son is begotten and the Spirit proceeds).11 The Father (who is not a/the son) is an origin without origin: “The personal name of the unoriginate is ‘Father.’”12 The more “positive” approach to the Father is in relation to the other persons of the Trinity.13 Before moving on to this (in our next meditation) we can take a step back from these particular Trinitarian relations to see more general positive attributes of the Father as having a primacy or firstness and a plenitude or fullness the Father gives as a source (such as is emphasized with Hilary of Poitiers and Bonaventure).14

The Father is the Father by fully giving himself “by eternally giving his all”—by giving away “everything the Father is” and holding nothing back.15 Balthasar writes that the Father is the Hingabebewegung—the “movement of self-giving that holds nothing back.”16 The Father, Balthasar continue, “in uttering and surrendering himself without reserve, does not lose himself.”17 The Father is the infinite source who gives infinitely. The Father has “given all things” to the Son (Jn 3.35, 13.3)—he gives the divine nature to the Son18 as the Son receives all things from the Father.19 The Father communicates to the Son his (the Father’s) “very own power and nature”—the “communication of the Son’s power.”20 The Son is absolute and absolutely from the Father.21 The Son can do nothing of himself, of his own accord (Jn 5.19), on his own authority (Jn 8.28) but only from the Father—yet as Bulgakov writes: “Fatherhood is synonymous with self-renunciation, with self-revelation in others.”22

Another image for the Father along these lines from the tradition is that of source or font, the fons divinitatis. Athanasius describes the Father as fountain and light.23 Augustine writes that “the source of all godhead, or if you prefer it, of all deity, is the Father.”24 He is the logical (not temporal) fontal (like a fount/fountain) plenitude or fullness from which the Son and the Spirit flow forth.25 Unlike the Son and the Spirit, Father is his own origin (innascibilis), as Richard of St Victor writes. The progenitor is the source, is “radical” in the sense of the root (radix) from which things flow.26

Father is also seen as the fruitful or fecund or generative source of the life of the Son and the Spirit (Bonaventure).27 Thomas thinks of this along the lines of the psychological analogy in that the mind gives life to the word.28 God has life in himself, and the Father (if we are to think of the Son as Son and the Spirit as somehow proceeding) is more at the origin, the fount of the flow of life within the Godhead. Michel Henry writes of the Father as the absolute Life that generates the Son as First Living—as life engendering, as self-engendering, the life that precedes.29

As such a source, the Father, the first person of the Trinity, has the character of “firstness.” The Father’s “firstness” or “primity” is not just the first among many in a sequence, but is the principle, the arche in a more dynamic sense.30 The Father is in God himself the “that from which”—a “whence”—as source of eternal living movement.31

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness….”
So God created man in his own image,
	in the image of God he created him
— Genesis 1.26-27

The Lord says to my Lord:
“Sit at my right hand,
	until I make your enemies your footstool.”
— Psalm 110.1 (Matthew 22.44, Mark 12.36, Luke 20.42-43, Acts 2.34-35)

What is God like if God is Triune and we are created in the image of God? One of the most enduring answers has something to do with persons. However, the term “person” today may be as confusing and indeterminate as the ancient Greek and Latin terms for the Trinity that we considered in our last meditation[link]. Some twentieth century theologians have sought to avoid the connotations of “person” by using other terms entirely: Barth’s three “modes of being” (Seinsweisen) or Rahner’s three “distinct modes of subsisting” (distinke Subsistenzweisen).1 Augustine wrote about using the term “persons” with some embarrassment—that it is “not so much to affirm something as to avoid saying nothing.”2 However, at this point with long usage in the Christian tradition it’s hard to ditch—though throughout the Latin tradition the question of its adequacy keeps recurring.3

How do we think about the persons of the Trinity otherwise than in the terms of ancient faculty psychology which seems like three parts of person or of modern “persons” (autonomous individuals) which seems like tritheism (a small pantheon)? Perhaps there are resources and ways of thinking that will help us revive the “person” as a helpful term for Trinitarian reflection

Neither the Greek word “prosopon“ nor its Latin translation “persona“ is the Greek or Latin word for what we moderns would call a “person”—they didn’t have one. In the ancient world, prosopon/persona was used in three contexts. First, it was used in the context of ancient drama as both more literally the “mask” an actor wore, what is “before the eyes” (prosopon) of the other (and oneself), what is seen by others or the way the mask served to amplify the voice, as a kind of megaphone (”persona”—literally “sound through”). More figuratively prosopon/persona was used of the part being played, the character in the drama (one of the dramatis personae). Second, prosopon/persona was used in a grammatical sense (by the philologists of Alexandria or Varro for Latin) regarding the “person” of a verb: 1^st person (the one speaking), 2^nd person (spoken to), 3^rd person (spoken of/about). Third, persona is used in Roman law for a party with legal standing (Cicero). In all these senses, the ancient understanding of prosopon/persona had to do with acting and more specifically speaking in relation to others—inter-human, socially-located speech.4 This ancient understanding of “person” also help explain why prosopon/persona left something to be desired when it came to talking about the Trinity: It sounds like you’re talking about God having three masks or roles—the one God has a “Father” mask, a “Son” mask, etc.—the very picture of modalism.5

The natural move for us today is to think of Trinitarian “persons” as something like modern persons: autonomous rational individuals, self-conscious over time—as with Descartes or Locke6—or the autonomous “buffered self” described by Taylor.7 Often “person” is used to emphasize universality and equality; though this feels like the last refuge of something hardly defended from the acids of a mad modernity. It seems that only “persons” to survive into the twentieth century are the shallow functions of political ideologies—a facile egalitarianism that “doth protest too much.” Such modern understandings were why Barth tried to avoid “person” language such that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are “three self-existent individuals with their own special self-consciousness, cognition, volition, activity.”8 Hart observes that such a modern understanding of person as self-focused, isolated, monad has an uncomfortable proximity to the “vicious tendencies of sin.”9

Yet something of our current understanding of person has some purchase. We cannot help but think of “person” as one conscious and relating agent among others—a self within community. And this is what we read of God in scripture: he is aware, has thoughts (we don’t have access to), loves, acts, is faithful. God is not impersonal, not a force or nature, not a what but a who. Perhaps, to come at things from a different angle, instead of seeing a “person” as something we know well, we should observe what strange and mysterious critters human persons are.

Far from being little monads of clear self-consciousness, we are perplexing mysteries. If we think of the prosopon or persona in the sense of the ancient theatrical mask, hidden depths resound within and without: A mask communicates, enables not only relating to others (other actors) but being able to be observed as relating (the audience). Which one is real? Is the play the thing? Is all the world a stage? Is the player the part? Is acting an act? Indeed a mask is also different than what is masked. The persona that reveals amplifies the voice also conceals. It is a double—there is a singular, reserved, “idiotic” (in Desmond’s idiom as incommunicably singular) other. The mask/persona is both excessive (coming forward) and recessive (receding, reserving). Yet this incommunicable face behind the face is the one who acts, who effects the communication.10

The psycho-social person is elliptical—both bi-focal and mysterious, characterized by both the ellipse and the ellipsis. The person as bi-focal like an ellipse whose circumference radiates from two points, centers, foci. The psycho-social person is an other in relation, inward and outward. Yet both foci of our ellipse pass into obscurity—like something left out under an ellipsis. Our twin foci are twin obscurities: We have both inward psychic depths and outward social atmospheres, aerial domains—murky, limited visibility above and below. We might call this a human person’s bi-directional self-transcendence—one is always going beyond oneself toward others, and one is always a reserve of otherness relative to one’s present awareness.

Within, the person is singular and unique, irreplaceable, and this “intimate incommunicability is what sources the singular communicability.”11 Richard of St Victor emphasizes this aspect of the person when he defines (in this case a divine person) as: “an incommunicable existence of the divine nature.”12 The inwardness (not merely being a function of a social “outwardness”) of a person is seen in one’s freedom—a free subject, an acting agent able to control oneself to some extent with self-possession and self-determination even if this is always incomplete.13 An emphasis of both Thomas Aquinas and Richard of St Victor is that a person is something substantial and existing (existentia), not epiphenomenal—“as something bearing ontological density.”14

Aquinas took from Augustine’s psychological model the idea of a person being a substantial or subsisting relation.15 Such relations between the persons are how they are distinct from each other.16 While we think of ourselves as having relations, the divine persons are relations. In the psychological analogy the human “word” or understanding is a relation but it is not substantial—when this idea is transferred to the divine person of the Word, the Son it is modified to be “substantial” so that the Trinity is really three—not just three aspects of one thing/mind. With Richard’s more social model the substantial/existing bit is inherent in the human person in a way it isn’t with the psychological model.

The human is then also always interhuman, between, intermediated, an other-in-relation. This is implicit etymologically in seeing the person (in Richard of St Victor’s definition) as “existing” (existentia)—ex-istence is a kind of being outside of, being beyond itself.17 A person is a center of relationship18 where relation is irreducible—persons are only ever plural, in relation, in community.19 A person is, as Desmond writes, a “selving within community” such that “to be personal is to be in social relations.”20

And yet we are a porous site of communication—the outward echoed within (the social forms the psyche) and the inward echoes without (the psyche forms the social). We are, as Merleau-Ponty concludes his Phenomenology of Perception, a knot of relations within and without—some apparent and accessible, some descending and ascending into secret depths.

Divine personhood in the Trinity would be not less-than-personal but—in our elliptical sense—personal and trans-personal.21 The Trinity is, Desmond writes, “both radically personal and yet, as such, more than merely personal”—“if ‘person’ is confined to the human being as a finite integrity of mindful life, the divine intimates more.”22 As human persons are a finite centers of mindful life and relationship, God as an infinite center is a trans-finite infinite version of what is restricted in the human image.23

The story from the origins of Christianity through the Middle Ages is that of the forging of personhood in conversation with clarification of the doctrine of the Trinity. In thinking about how the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are persons we are also thinking about how we humans are persons in a way that is like and (crucially) not like the Divine Persons. We are related to ourselves (our murky depths) and others (our clouded visibility) in an at best obscure manner. The divine persons are united in such a way that relations are the only possible distinction; the relations are the persons. There is an intimacy of relation, a porosity of the personal to the transpersonal, an elliptical unity.

For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.
— 2 Peter 1:17–18

For the classical theologians in the Greek East, God specially revealed himself in the theophanies on Mount Sinai and Mount Tabor. On Mount Sinai—as Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius the Areopagite observe—the one unknowable God is revealed as he descends and speaks with Moses alone in thick cloud (Ex 19.3, 16, 20). On Mount Tabor (Mt 17.2-5; Mk 9.3-7; Lk 9.29-35; 2 Pet 1.17-18) echoing the baptism of Jesus—as Origen and Maximus reflect—the God as Trinity is revealed as Jesus is transfigured and addressed as Son by the Father and overshadowed by the cloud/glory signifying the Holy Spirit.1

If we take a step back from the particularity of the divine name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit (perhaps a questionable move?), we can say that it is revealed that the one God is three. This one and three is (at least initially and perhaps finally) like a duck-rabbit gestalt illusion (where in the same image you can see one of two images, but only one at a time). One can think of the three as distinct, but their unity/connection is obscure (how are they one?). Bulgakov saw this with the Cappadocian Fathers.2 One can think of the one, but the distinction of three is then obscure (how is it three?). We can’t keep both the one and the three in equal focus at the same time.3

Trying to think how (abstractly) the one is three and the three are one, we can begin to see perhaps, as Dionysius saw, that three-ness/trinity and one-ness/unity are not to be understood here in our typical senses4—dealing not with finite numbers but with something infinite.5 Maximus says God is hymned as Monad, as transcendent unity, and Trinity, as divine fecundity.6 Bulgakov writes that we might think of such triunity as a “divine number, which does not exist in the natural world”—a “super number”—a hint that we’re not thinking about something that is static7—as Barth writes, an “eternal repetition in eternity.”8 The three are distinguished but not divided (Nyssa)9—together in a way that is “indivisible” and “self-consistent” (Athanasius).10 The oneness of the three is a cleaving together (and apart) but not a comingling.11 To affirm the Trinity and the Unity of the Triune God is to avoid both tritheism (where God not really one) and modalism (where God is not really three).12

God is one and three: We believe in one God, but if we believe in the Trinity we believe that one God is three…what? Anselm referred to three “something-or-others” or “I know not what” (tres nescio quid).13 Eventually (in the West anyway) we’ve settled on three “persons.” But this is a far from obvious solution. Augustine (as Congar observes) saw the term “person” as “not so much to say something as to avoid saying nothing.”14 While we can see theologians like Irenaeus (in the second century) working without any settled technical terms for the three, a need for some kind of more precise and technical language was felt from early on.15

To skip ahead a bit, the Cappadocian settlement in the fourth century would be that God is one ousia and three hypostases. Previously these two terms, ousia and hypostasis, were often used as synonyms—they were practically indistinguishable. Both meant something like real being, that which is underneath (hypo) what appears on the surface (see the same with the “sub” in the more Latin “substance”).16 (In fact, the standard Latin translation for both Greek terms—ousia and hypostasis—was substantia.) From this perspective, to say that the Trinity is one ousia (”being” or “nature”) and three hypostases (”subsistences” or “persons”) is to say God is really one and really three but not in the same way. Here Christian theology was using Greek words but not taking over Greek philosophical categories. Ousia and hypostasis were, before being transformed by Christian theology, underdetermined. Barth observed that the traditional technical philosophical terms for God’s threeness had problems: the Latin persona lends itself to tritheism (God is three things, not really one), while the Greek hypostasis can lend itself to modalism (God is one thing in different forms, not really three).17 That’s why he proposed his own term, “modes of being” (Seinsweisen), which in its English translation is even more modalist-sounding. There is no univocal backstop we can rest upon when our less-than-univocal analogical language is unsatisfactory. Even these technical terms are used analogically at best, and they require significant qualification to not lead us astray.18 But qualified they were.

Interestingly, the term “person” (prosopon (Greek), persona (Latin))—proposed by Tertullian in the early third century—did not settle the issue. “Person” for us today smacks of tritheism (that God is not really one) in that it makes you think of three people—as a professor of mine (who shall remain nameless) once quipped: “Pappy, Jr, and lil Spooky.” In the third century, it was the opposite: prosopon/persona smacked of modalism (that God is not really three) in which the “persons” as but three “masks” for the one God. “Person” (prosopon/persona) then was less a center of self-consciousness than an identity or party differentiated by their relations.19 (We’ll treat persons more at length in the next meditation.)

Over the course of the fourth century, the term hypostases (the plural of hypostasis) came to be used for individual differentiated instantiations. With humans and material things (as material) the differentiation or distinction had to do with being distinct individuals in space and time. With God (and kind of with humans, to keep things confusing) the differentiation or distinction had to do with relations (e.g father and son are not interchangeable).20 The Cappadocian settlement in the fourth century stop using ousia and hypostasis as synonyms (like they were previously). Basil of Caesarea, the elder Cappodocian, wrote of the Triune God as one ousia and three hypostases. He and then Gregory of Nazianzus and Gregory of Nyssa (these three being “the Cappadocian Fathers”) use the term hypostasis as having to do with a particular being. Ousia (”nature” or “being”) came to be used for what is one in God, what is held in common; hypostasis (”subsistence”) came to be used for what is more limited and particular—the parallel term used in Latin was persona. Subsequently in the Greek East hypostasis came to be used interchangeably with prosopon.21

Augustine in the early fifth century was wary of speaking of God in terns of person and nature: it seemed to him like three particular individual beings of the broader abstract category/genus of divinity, like a pantheon. It’s hard to say this is monotheism. He preferred in fact to use the term person for the one rather than three.22 Boethius in the early sixth century (in the context of thinking about how Christ was one person with both divine and human natures) provided what would prove to be an influential definition of person (in his Contra Eutyches) as an “individual substance of a rational nature.”23 In the Latin West, this understanding of person would have a strong presence in medieval theology and would come to be the main way Westerners would talk about the three of the Trinity over against the one divine essence or nature or substance: three whos and one what.

If we think these technical terms (ousia, hypostasis) have helped us resolve the paradoxicalness of the paradoxical harmony of the Trinity, we’d be mistaken. They are not resolving the tension, they are clarifying it. Taking these terms literally makes them more and not less misleading (no univocal backstop).24 The “solidity” of these terms should be seen as digging in one the opposing sides of the paradox: one ousia/being/nature means “really, in reality, irreducibly one”; three hypostases/persons means “really, in reality, irreducibly three.” There is one X and three Ys where X and Y are not the same but are equally real/fundamental.25 To think of the Trinity, as Gregory of Nazianzus puts it, is to “be struck from all sides by the lightening flash of one light and also three...divided undividedly...and united in division.”26

And the LORD appeared to him by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the door of his tent in the heat of the day. He lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, three men were standing in front of him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent door to meet them and bowed himself to the earth and said, “O Lord, if I have found favor in your sight, do not pass by your servant.”
— Genesis 18:1–3

The Social Analogy

In Genesis 18 we’re told that “the Lord appeared” to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre (v1). What he sees are “three men” (v2). Abraham addresses them(?) as “Lord” (v3). When they address Abraham we are told they speak as one (like a Greek chorus?): “they said” (vv5, 9). Then we’re told that “the LORD” speaks to Abraham and Sarah (vv10, 13). Whenever they(?) refer to them(?)selves it is in the first person singular “I” (vv10, 14). This bewildering encounter (bewilderingly recounted) is (re)presented in Andrei Rublev’s classic Icon of the Trinity. Here the specific image of “three men” who are “the LORD” trades on the social analogy for the Trinity—that the Triune God is somehow like a group of human beings (though here three fancy dudes with haloes and wings).

The social analogy for the Trinity arose largely in the twentieth century reflecting back on patristic and medieval sources such as the Cappodocian Fathers and Richard of St Victor reflecting on how love requires a relation between a plurality of persons yielding a kind of community.1 The social analogy of the Trinity has the benefit of reflecting on how the Trinity is a relation of love between persons. Classically person/prosopon had to do with the face or facing toward one—so in at least in this etymological sense “person” is inherently relational.2 This vision of face-to-face relation is something that the intrapersonal model of the psychological analogy fails to give us.3 Such a vision fits with how Barth sees the “existence of the I and the Thou in confrontation” as “constitutive for God.”4 The social analogy emphasizes three distinct persons as centers of consciousness, volition, and agency in a community of love.5

Richard of St Victor depicts the Trinity as a community of love in which the persons of the Trinity are distinguished by the giving and receiving of the gift of love: the Father gives love (gratuitus, as a pure source or giver), the Son receives the gift of love (debitus) and gives it away (gratuitus), and the Spirit recieves (gratuitus) as pure receiving, as himself the Gift.6 Caroline Divine Thomas Traherne poetically describes the Trinity in terms of love, of one love and three loves: love (as “benevolent affection to another”) flows/streams/communicates from itself to its object (from and to), and love also rests in the object (in). There is love in the bosom of the lover (Father), love in the stream to the beloved (Son), and the lover’s love (the Spirit) dwelling in the beloved—love begetting, love begotten, love proceeding.7 In the Trinity, love is the producer (”love loving”), the means (”the means by which a lover loveth”), and the end (”it is love by loving”).8

The main problem with the social analogy is that the togetherness or community (or even common human nature) of three persons doesn’t seem like much of a unity—at least in a way that obviously fits with the confession that “the Lord is one” (Dt 6.4).9 The inter-personal approach risks ending up as a “crude anthropomorphism”—a small pantheon is only a relative improvement on a large one.10 Gregory of Nyssa—who is often cited as an inspiration for social trinitarianism—uses a number of analogies, none of which he regarded as satisfactory. He wrote about how the Trinity is like three men or three torches well aware that the utility of these images was limited only to exhibiting a unity or commonality of a sort.11

The Psycho-Social Analogy

Balthasar noted the usefulness of holding the psychological and the social analogies in tension—like looking from two starting points or approaching lines of perspective.12 Though it’s not quite the same thing, I find another (but related) kind of analogy from the human to be doing something similar. What distinguishes the social analogy from what I’m calling the psycho-social analogy is that while the social goes deeper than the “outward” relation between persons in community we can also think about how social interrelation is as “inward” and intimate to the person as anything.

Eminent French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty was also a pioneer in developmental psychology (he was Piaget’s predecessor as professor of Child Psychology at the Sorbonne).13 He saw that the first self we experience is not our own but another—usually our mother. The interhuman and the intrahuman are intimately interrelated—the psyche is social. The fact that psychological personhood is inherently social may be a hint toward thinking of divine “persons.” There is a constitutive relation between neighbor and self (whether that be mimesis or nemesis). That which transcends (though grounded in) our bios—our biological animal life—is the domain of the psyche. The psyche expands (we might imagine) both inward and outward—a secret/intimate inwardness arising in relation to a social/public outwardness. Outward interrelations and conversations enable inward interrelations and conversations—and vice versa. We are within a between (without) and a between within. The psycho and social come together. The social is as real and substantial—and mysterious (if differently) and hard to access (if differently)—as the psyche. The interesting part analogically is not thinking about God developmentally and so temporally (who has no antecedent conditions) but rather our (phenomenological) experience of our personhood as primordially/always-already social. The psyche lives from and toward other psyches primordially.

Robert Spaemann’s work, Persons, presents the person as intrinsically communal.14 To think of ourselves is to take a certain distance from oneself in oneself—it is a self-differation, a self-objectification, even a self-realization.15 A person is a person among persons—always in relation to other persons. This relation is a priori—it makes us persons. We are not first persons and then enter into relation to others (this would be a posteriori):16 “the experience of the other is co-original with the experience of self.”17 The first person is never the first person—the first person we meet or are aware of is not ourselves. Personhood is irreducibly plural.18 Spaemann writes:19

Solipsism, then, is incompatible with the concept of the person. The idea of a single person existing in the world cannot be thought, for although the identity of any one person is unique, personhood as such arises only in a plurality.

The ancient pre-Christian concept of person (part of the rough material from which the Christian and indeed Western understanding was forged) was a site in a relational constellation: whether that be a role or part played in a drama with other players (and by extension in society), a legal agent, or the grammatical “place” of one speaking, spoken to, spoken of.20 The person is a creature of speech and communication: addressing, being addressed, responding.21 Speech entails anticipating what another would hear. While speaking to others we’re always already talking to ourselves to hear our words as another. The social outside is always already inside. The soul as the seat of personality is that human element that operates in the human realms (psyche and society). The soul (psyche) is social.

Human persons as such are, in a psycho-social sense, subsisting relations existing essentially in an immanent economy of giving and receiving. This has obvious analogical power. If God is personal in himself (and not merely in relation to creation) then God—as personal—is a plurality in relation. The personal is always interpersonal. That relationality somehow precedes or is at least equipromordial with personality gives us a kind of social analogy for the Trinity in which the “three” (the persons) are not prior to the “one” (the common nature? being? unity? X)—”personality necessarily says relationality.”22 Thomas Aquinas—working from the psychological analogy—famously describes the divine persons as subsistent relations:23 From a psycho-social angle we too can affirm that “the persons are the subsisting relations themselves.”24 This is a way of thinking of the divine persons as subsisting relations to each other but not as aspects or faculties of divine mind.

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
— Genesis 1.26, 27

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
— Mt 22.37

The two major developed analogies for the Trinity in the history of Christianity are the psychological analogy and the social analogy. Human beings are described at the beginning of Genesis as being created in the image of God. The human is at once the best view we have on God from creation and (perhaps because of that) the most tempting. We can easily forget that God is not just a big powerful version of us, like the pagan divinities of antiquity. What better idol is there than a human one? As Voltaire quipped: God created us in his image, and we return the favor. Yet no other created thing is so named “the image of God” such that we can try, as Augustine says, “somehow to see him by whom we were made by means of this image which we ourselves are, as through a mirror”1—however much objects in this mirror are more distant than they appear.

Because analogies for talking about God from humanity itself is not pure invention but are thus authorized by scripture2 we should not be surprised that, at Thomas writes, the image of Trinity “is impressed upon rational creatures”3 and “attributed to man under diverse formulae.”4 When it comes to other created things we may see vestiges (hints, traces) of the Trinity, but only in the human can understand an “image”5 and can so ascend from human structures to divine counterparts.6 The two prevailing ways analogies for the Trinity from the human image are the psychological (the classic western or Latin model) and the social (more modern though claiming an older sometimes eastern pedigree)—the intrahuman and interhuman.

The psychological analogy—the analogy from the human psyche or soul—starts with the idea that the image of God is to be found in a human person and not on our appearance or form of our bodies. God doesn’t say (to mash-up Genesis and Plato) “let us make man in our image: a featherless biped.” Focus then is placed rather on the inward life, the “soul” of the human person. This approach is dependent upon Augustine, but not exclusively so. Maximus the Confessor similarly observes the image of the Trinity in “our soul” as the image of God in our nous (mind), logos (wisdom), and spirit (life)7 and Gregory of Nyssa makes a similar move seeing distinction and unity of the Father and the Son as like that of mind and word/thought—that the word is from the mind and makes it (mind) manifest.8

Augustine progressed through multiple versions of the psychological analogy. Earlier, in his Confessions, the distinction was between our being, knowing, and willing. Then in his The Trinity Augustine sees a model of the Trinity in our loving another. (This is actually more of a social analogy though from the perspective of one member of a loving community.) “If a man loves his neighbor,” Augustine writes, “it follows that above all he loves love itself.”9 The odd part here is “love itself” as part of the loving relation between one and another; Augustine puts this different ways: to love one’s brother and to love that love; to love charity is to love charity loving something; love loves something as it loves itself.10 Here we have the lover (the Father), what is loved (the Son), and love itself (the Spirit).11

Probably more well known is the analogy from later in The Trinity of the general operation of our mind’s knowing and loving. The most basic human mental acts are thinking of something and desiring it.12 This yields the “trinity” of (1) mind, (2) its knowledge in a “word” (a mental or internal word, conception), and (3) its will or love (the act of love consequent upon the act of knowledge). The mind’s act of knowledge (procession by way of intellect) is followed by the act of the appetite (procession by way of will).13 (Love is seen as root of all appetites, will—desiring what is good.14)

Likely the most influential (and fully developed) version of the psychological analogy is how one knows and loves oneself. One, knowing oneself, loves oneself (or the mind loves itself) in the sense that you have to know something in order to be able to love it.15 Reflective knowledge of oneself entails a kind of distance—stepping back from yourself to regard yourself like in a reflection, and image, a mental image or word. Loving oneself (as what is regarded) is a “rejoining” movement—overcoming mental distance.16 Love is the third element that holds together the begetter/begetting mind and the begotten word;17 love is “like something in the middle, joins together our word and the mind it is begotten from...in a non-bodily embrace.”18 These three are one “since mind is itself loving itself and itself knowing itself.”19

Augustine later refines this model of self-relation by seeing in one mind as the unified whole possessing three operations of memory, understanding, and will.20 The one mind (1) remembers itself (memoria sui) in unreflective self-presence or ground of the mind, (2) understands itself (intellectus sui) in reflective self-knowledge, and (3) wills or loves itself (voluntas sui) in conscious embrace, loving self-affirmation.21 Likewise with the one God who loves himself, the Father is the source, the Son is the word of reflective divine self-understanding, and the Spirit is the love that unites the two.

A significant failing of the psychological analogy has to do with some of its reception in and through the Middle Ages. Interestingly, as Lewis Ayers points out, Augustine, who developed the classical versions(s) of the psychological analogy, steered away from the term “analogy” because he saw it as signifying “a comprehensible proportion” that was improper for talking about God—favoring instead the looser “similitudo” or likeness.22 Augustine’s psychological analogy ends up being advocated through the Middle Ages, as Friedman argues, in more and less literal versions.23 There are “stronger” versions of analogy presented by mostly Franciscan theologians such as Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus that, in Desmond’s terms, are more dialectical—seeing the more indirect and indeterminate language of analogy as being ultimately reducible to more univocal (if not strictly so) terms. Dominican theologians (generally) tended to see the analogy in less literal terms--less the only way one must properly understand the processions of the Word and the Spirit than a resemblance, a helpful metaphorical way of talking about them.24 Aquinas can be read as supporting either trajectories.25 The issue could be presented as whether the psychological analogy is ultimately a species of direct or indirect speech, demonstrative or illustrative, proper or metaphorical, dialectical or metaxological.26 The former, I think, is the kind of analogy that Barth like Augustine himself was rightly nervous about: likeness that forgets it is a likeness, idolatrous univocity in analogical clothing.

If we take the common (faulty) caricature of the psychological analogy as Western and the social analogy as Eastern: One can travel father West and get to modalism as one goes farther East and arrives at tritheism.27 They are both lame, limping but not immobile analogies.28 When it comes to the psychological analogy we’ve been considering in this meditation in particular, the distinction of different faculties or activities of the soul doesn’t seem much like three distinct persons—as the doctrine of the Trinity affirms. Intramental activities are a long way from persons,29 and the association of person with faculties implies that the other persons lack necessary aspects of personhood.30 Does the Word lack love or will? Does the Father delegate his love of the beloved Son to the Spirit? Here you can see the analogy slipping beyond its remit. Indeed, both Augustine and Thomas themselves explicitly note that taking three aspects of a person as being somehow three persons is, as Augustine says, ”immeasurably inadequate.”31

Finally, a real problem with the psychological analogy is that it trades on what is to many an antiquated psychology and therefore ceases to function as a living analogy. “A is like B” is not helpful if one is not familiar with B. It’s a heavy lift to grasp the lineaments of particular ancient and medieval philosophical anthropologies before going on to think about the Trinity. To change metaphors, it’s quite a detour. My sense is that it often gets stalled thinking more about humanity than God.32

The psychological analogy is a way to think about the unity-in-relation of the Trinity that is rooted in something we intimately experience, of understanding and loving oneself—though ”this happens in God and us in different ways.”33 Yet it is one among many analogical approaches and a particularly rich and evocative one with rich possibilities for imagining the dynamism of the Divine Life. Thinking in terms of the plural parts of one person calls for, as Balthasar writes, “a complementary counterimage” of plural persons.34

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power
— Acts 10.38a

For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.
— Eph 2.18

The mystery of the Christian Trinity is the affirmation that God is both One and Three, is both unity and trinity—“triune.” Christianity affirms monotheism, but in a way the other “Abrahamic” monotheisms (Judaism and Islam) flatly reject. Yet Christians affirm the centrality of the first two commandments of the Ten Commandments (the LORD is God and we should honor no other) and the Shema of Dt 6.4 (“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one”). Early believers distinguished between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—they aren’t considered the same God in different guises/modes—yet there was no hint of polytheism.1 (Romans considered them atheists because these Christians only believed in their one God.)

The work of Christian meditation and theology here of imagining the paradox of Three and One in a harmonious manner, to coordinate the two poles in a way that makes sense to us. To occupy a conceptual space that holds together both one/simplicity and many/multiplicity—as, we will see, with identity and non-identity, aseity and love, eternal peace and fundamental dynamism2—involves a trinitarian logics or imaginary. This is to occupy, as Gregory of Nyssa puts it, an (impossible) “mean” between the Jews and the polytheist Greeks3 that risks being a stumbling block to the former and folly to the latter (1 Cor 1.23-25).

One of the most common strategies for imagining such a trinitarian logic is that of trinitarian analogies—presenting a way of thinking about the Trinity in “some befitting conjecture.” Such a use of analogy is always limited, always a likeness in the midst of unlikeness, such that we are always sifting—“accepting,” as Gregory writes, “only whatever is well-fitting in the image, let him disregard what is dissimilar.”4 There is something about analogy (using particular creaturely images for talking about God) that is particularly appropriate for Christians—our faith is not so much an ahistorical teaching/wisdom as the announcement (the good news) that something that happened in history, in space and time, has a universal claim and significance. The scandal of Christianity is its “positivity” (in the nineteenth century sense of historical particularity) conjoined to its universality. We should not be surprised when Christians take particular things in space and time as being able to point us to (to be “like”) things of a more ultimate significance.

No created reality gives us a fully adequate analogy for the Trinity.5 Such a critter would no longer be an analogy (it’d be univocal). Given that no one analogy gives us a clear picture of what it is trying to depict, a salutary way forward is to use plural analogies. Many analogies make the fact that our language is analogous more apparent. Turner observes how Julian of Norwich uses a proliferation of images and excess of affirmation as an apophatic strategy—using many words/images implies that no one word/image is sufficient.6 Such a plurivocity can go some way towards turning the bug of imperfect analogies into a feature.

Let us then survey some of the trinitarian analogies that have proliferated through the centuries. Some analogies are fairly close to the surface of the scriptural witness. The most obvious of these is that of family—of the Trinity as divine family: Father and Son. We can see this in Psalm 2.7 “You are my Son; today I have begotten you” applied to Jesus by Paul in Acts 13.33 and the author of Hebrews (1.5, 5.5) and in the prologue to John’s Gospel: The only-begotten Son, the only Son from the Father. This analogy is biological, a relation of life, in particular, of generation. In a family there is an intimate oneness of many. This, Balthasar argues, is “the most eloquent imago Trinitatis that we find woven into the fabric of the creature.”7 Yet we immediately come to a limit as biologically a father does not generate a son without a mother. (Here is a flashing neon sign saying “don’t take this univocally.”) The familial analogy is biological but also social—having to do with ordered relations, where the members have different relationships to each other. The Son’s relation to the Father is different than the Father’s relation to the Son. One way this analogy was developed (by Augustine and others) is to see this familial relation as essentially a relation of love. The Spirit then is seen as the relation of love between the Father and the Son (here the analogy is stumbling).

As we’ve mentioned in the previous meditation, another analogy particularly close to the surface of scripture is that related to the Baptism of Jesus, the theophany at the Jordan. Throughout the New Testament Jesus is given the title of “Christ”—Jesus Christ, Christ Jesus. Anointing, christening in scripture is an act of selecting, appointing, choosing, setting apart, or commissioning. In the Old Testament priests are anointed and so set apart (Ex 28.41, 29.7, 30.30, 40.13-15). Also sacred objects like the altar (Ex 29.36) and the tabernacle and its contents (Ex 30.26, 40.10; Lev 8.10-11; Num 7.1) are anointed for their sacred use. While the priesthood may have relevance for the notion of Jesus as the Anointed/Set Apart/Christened One, the principal meaning is most likely comes from the Old Testament anointing of kings (Judg 9.8, 15; 1 Sam 9.16 (Saul), 16.12-13 (David), 1 Kings 1.34, 39 (Solomon)). Jesus is identified as the Messiah, the Anointed, the Christ. Acts 4.25-26 applies Ps 2.2 (the rules of the world set themselves against “the Lord and his anointed”) to Jesus. In Lk 4.17-21 where Jesus applies the prophesy of Is 61.1 (“the LORD has anointed me to bring good news”) to himself. What makes this image particularly trinitarian is seen in Acts 10.38 where Luke writes: “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit.” Father anoints the Son with the Spirit.8 The Father is the one who anoints, the anointer—He does the choosing, the appointing. The Son is the anointed one, the Messiah or Christ—He is the one chosen, the one set apart and appointed with this office. The Spirit is the anointing, the unction. The analogy of anointing has the advantage over the familial image in scripture of having a more obvious place for the Spirit—but it is not a personal one. It also lends itself to adoptionism.

Throughout the tradition there are sundry trinitarian analogies that have multiplied. On the more philosophical side, Augustine proposes many possible analogies in his de Trinitate. One is a perceptual analogy (the “evidence of the eyes”) distinguishing in the one act of visual perception “the thing we see,” “the actual sight or vision,” and “the conscious intention.”9 Thomas sees in a single conception of the intellect as threefold distinction in the conceived object between substance, species, and order.10 On the more earthy side, Tertullian proposes root, branch, and fruit as well as spring, river, and stream.11 John of Damascus sees the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as being like the sun, the ray of sunlight, and the radiance itself.12

Finally, there are also analogies for the Trinity to be found in the way God relates to us (in revelation) and in the way we relate to God in prayer (an analogia orandi). We relate to God as Trinity in prayer inasmuch as we pray focally to the Father through the Son (who intercedes for us (Rom 8.34)) in the Spirit (we pray in the Spirit (Eph 6.18) who “helps us” to pray (Rom 8.26)). In our one act of prayer the three Persons of the Trinity can be distinguished after the standard prepositions of to/through/in; we find this classically in Eph 2.18: ”through him [Christ] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.” As we mentioned previously, Barth gives particular attention to how God as Trinity relates to us in revelation: as revealer, revealed, and revelation. The Father reveals himself, the Son reveals the Father, and the Spirit as God present to and within us. The most influential trinitarian analogies arise however from our human being and our act of love. We’ll examine these central analogies in the next meditation.

hGo therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
— Matthew 28:19

The broad trajectory of this part on the Trinity is to begin with thinking about the Triune God in terms of (A) divine persons in community and then abstracting to (B) the difference and dynamism of the divine life and then to (C) the divine being and its attributes. It is common for systematic theologies in their treatments of the Triune God to begin with a section like (C) on the One God (De Deo Uno) before moving to something like (A) on the Trinity (De Deo Trino). The justification for this reversal should become clear in due course.

“God,” theos, or deus are words borrowed from paganism, and they communicate at the risk of confusion—for what we are talking about is not a god among others.1 And yet when we speak of God we are speaking with a kind of generality...which is the way we talk about one thing among others. It’s not great, but it’s what we’ve got. Part of the work the capital-G does is to put the word “God” in scare-quotes or under erasure (if we’re feeling PoMo and thinking back fondly of the 80s and 90s). Capital-G “God” is like a proper name. But it isn’t really.

The most proper name of God in the Old Testament is YHWH, Yahweh (usually translated as “the LORD” in all caps). The most proper name of God in the New Testament is “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”2 This is the singular “name” used in the Great Commission at the conclusion of the Gospel of Matthew (28.19). This, Barth comments, is “the one name of the one God is the threefold name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”3 “The Trinity” as a shorthand for this one threefold name.4

Thinking and talking of and to God (in reflection and worship) as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was at the core of Christian practice and identity from the earliest times.5 The all-too-common claim that the Trinity is the product of later centuries sees the centuries of reflection on the Trinity as somehow a denial that it was always present and central to Christianity.6 The primitive fact of Trinitarian belief is manifest in the New Testament as our earliest (non-speculative) source for Christian belief and practice.

There are three explicit Trinitarian formulae in the New Testament—interestingly each lists the Divine Persons in a different order:7

• The baptismal formula concluding the Gospel of Matthew (Mt 28.19): “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”

• The benediction concluding Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians (2 Cor 13.14): “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”

• Paul’s coordination of the ministry of the church with the Divine Persons (1 Cor 12.4-6): various gifts—same Spirit; various service—same Lord; various activities—same God

Beyond these explicit and seemingly formal statements (suggesting the possibility of their prior use as liturgical elements) there are several other notable Trinitarian New Testament passages:

• Acts 2.32: Jesus raised by God and given the promise of the Holy Spirit

• Acts 7.55-56: Stephen full of the Holy Spirit sees Jesus at the right hand of God at the conclusion of his recounting of salvation history

• 1 Peter 1.2: “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with his blood”

• 2 Thes 2.13: beloved by the Lord, God chose you, to be save through sanctification by the Spirit

• Eph 1.17: “that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit”

• Eph 2.18: “For through [Christ] we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.”

• Eph 4.4-6: one Lord, one Spirit, one God and Father of all

Here, in scripture as in later Christian thought and practice, “Father, Son, Spirit” is the divine name revealed—the relations of who God is in himself and as he comes to us.8 This belief is fundamental to Christianity—as Thomas writes: “The Christian faith principally consist in acknowledging the holy Trinity.”9 The doctrine of the Trinity is Christianity in nuce—in an enfolded seed. We affirm and confess (to ourselves, to others, and to God) our belief in the Trinity in the condensed nutshell prayer and confession of making the sign of the cross. This most common Christian mystery remains a mystery10—it is a potentially scandalous paradoxical harmony that, Florensky writes, “could not be proclaimed by anyone except God himself.”11

The Trinity is a mystery, but that does not mean thought about it ends there. On Trinity Sunday, we often experience a collective shrug from clergy when it comes to helping the faithful think about the Triune God—something like “It’s a mystery! So I’m off the hook!” Others blithely toss whatever heretical nuggets popped into their head after an hour on the internet and some fortuitous stumbling upon and slapping together a few bible verses. This all leaves the impression that the Trinity is somehow both important and not worth thinking about.

The Trinity is given and affirmed in faith—not the product of natural reason but is a “datum” given to us in revelation and affirmed in faith.12 As with all revelation, however, faith seeks understanding in meditating on this revelation received in faith. The doctrine of the Trinity is mysterious, as Herbert McCabe says, but not nonsense.13 Early Church Fathers (like Origen, Irenaeus, and Gregory of Nazianzus) see the doctrine of the Trinity as known and affirmed primitively but gradually thoughtfully clarified over time. The emerging coherence in lasting formulations mainly in the fourth century AD represents a forging of paradoxical harmonies through transformed philosophical concepts that functioned to halt the oscillation (flipping back and forth) between tritheism (that the three divine persons are three gods) and modalism (that the three divine persons are but three faces/modes of the one God).

But this clarification was not just dealing with a conceptual nuisance. The Christian life is only understood on the basis of the Christian story which is itself only understood on the basis of the singular Christian Triune God. Serious error in one’s thinking about God twists and distorts the whole of one’s thought and life. There is a difference between saying that we can make some sense of the obscure (maybe embarrassing) doctrine of the Trinity and saying that its strange logic reveals to us something most profound, far-reaching, and imaginatively transformative for understanding reality as such. What do we mean when we say we believe that the Triune God is somehow the origin and end of all things?

Our ways of speaking about the Triune God are mainly drawn from the economy of salvation, but centrally from the life and work of Jesus. The Trinity is God as revealed in Jesus Christ. To believe in Jesus as the Christ is to believe in the Trinity.14 As Julian of Norwich wrote (in 14th century English): “For wher Jhesu appireth the blessed trinity is understand.”15 The Christ-event leads us into the mystery of the Trinity16—as Balthasar writes: “The Son’s historical obedience throws the trinitarian life of God into relief.”17 The focal figure of Jesus points to both the Father and the Spirit18 for to speak about who Jesus is is to also talk about the Father (who sends and is revealed in Jesus) and the Spirit (who “Christ”-ens Jesus and is sent by/through Jesus (from the Father) to be the gift of his presence to/in believers (Jn 14, 16). The life of Christ is a happening/event of the revelatory light/glory of the presence and action of God—a dense point that unfolds as and can only be grasped in the “ungraspable” context of the Trinity.19 When we read about Jesus (lectio), we come to think about trinitarian interrelations (meditatio), and are so enabled to imagine ourselves participated in these trinitarian relations (oratio and contemplatio).

Two key events especially reveal the Trinity in the Gospels at the beginning of Jesus’ earthly ministry with his baptism and at its completion in his death and resurrection. In the baptism of Jesus, the theophany at the Jordan (Mk 1.9-11; Mt 3.16-17; Lk 3.21-22), we have distinctly present the three divine Persons: Jesus rising up from water, the heavens parting and Spirit descending (hovering?) like a dove, and the voice from heaven (the voice of the Father) speaking of his “beloved son”—the Son in the flesh, the Father in the voice, and the Holy Spirit in the form of the dove.20 As Irenaeus and Basil of Caesarea observe, in the baptism of Jesus, God is present as the Anointer, Anointer, and the Ointment/Anointing.21 The Messiah/the Christ is the anointed one. The Trinity is God as revealed in Jesus Christ such that to say “Christ”/”the Anointed” is to imply the Trinity—the Father (the Anointer) anoints the Son (the Anointed/Messiah/Christ) with the Spirit (the Anointing). One could say that the Trinity is implicit in the first verse of the Gospel of Mark (perhaps the earliest of our Gospels): “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1.1).

Jesus’ revelatory baptism is then echoed or restated in Jesus’ transfiguration (Mt 17.1–13; Mk 9.2–13; Lk 9.28–36; 2 Pet 1.16-18) before his suffering and death. The Triune life of God is of course revealed most supremely in Christ’s cross and resurrection. (Much more on this anon.)

The trinitarian baptismal formula in Mt 28 both looks back to Jesus’ baptism and forward to ours.22 The earliest common Christian statements of Trinitarian belief were likely baptismal confessions reflecting and unfolding Mt 28.19.23 As Jesus’ baptism (as Christ) revealed who God is (Trinity) and what God is doing (salvation)—the fulfilling of all righteousness (Mt 3.15) of Jesus in our place—so we as disciples are baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit so that we might come to be in Jesus’ place as beloved children of God. What was surprising to John the Baptist (Mt 3.14) is wonderful to us.

Thus, as Gregory of Nyssa writes, the Trinitarian name (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) is the mark of the Christian24 and is echoed in our making the sign/mark of the cross with the Trinitarian name (“in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”) as a representation/remembering/reenacting of our baptism.

And they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? For you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean.”
— Acts 17:19–20

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Tertullian asked at around 200 AD. From the beginning philosophy has been a consistent dialogue partner for theology. There have been and are various configurations of the relationship between the two disciplines or practices. One of the defining aspects of philosophy is its independence, its autonomy. Once this is left by the wayside (for human reason is fundamentally dependent and ordered to a life beyond it) the difference between theology and philosophy gets a lot smaller. Philosophy has a hard time strictly defining itself in a way that excludes theology (no matter how much it postures as doing so)—and vice versa. Something that claims universal reach ends up having pretty indeterminate borders.1 Indeed, “theology” as an intellectual discipline is a latecomer—the Greek fathers didn’t hesitate to call themselves “philosophers.”2 One thinks of Daniel as made the chief of the magicians and astrologers in Babylon.

William Desmond describes the intermediation or interrelation between theology and philosophy as a porosity.3 The two are distinct but interrelated; the border divides but doesn’t separate.4 Such porosity describes a closeness and passage and hospitality between them, but a it is still a genuine between or relation, a commonality that doesn’t collapse their difference.5 This porosity (as Desmond describes it) between theology and philosophy is simply a matter of history; as I argue (with regard to modernity) in my Modern Christian Theology, theology and philosophy cannot tell their own stories independent of each other, as if the other didn’t exist. Theology and philosophy or metaphysics share the common subject matter of the classical synthesis: the mystery of being itself in terms of the world, human being, and God.6 Thus both theology and philosophy reach out “toward the root of the other”7—both are seeking to articulate what is ultimately real such that, as Balthasar notes, “a metaphysics that refused to be theology would thereby misunderstand and repudiate its own object.”8

Let us meditate on the not-simple relation between theology and philosophy—the relation of Athens/philosophy to Jerusalem/theology specifically from the perspective of Jerusalem/theology. Though there are others, I briefly name four relations of what philosophy is to theology: herald, handmaid, tempter, transformant.

A herald announces the arrival, the coming of something new. Early on Christian thinkers (like Justin Martyr or Clement of Alexandria9) thought of philosophy as, in a sense, preparing the way for Christianity—as a precursor to theology. Philosophy opens onto, leads to theology. This can be in a more active apologetic mode of advocating for or commending the Christian faith for those outside, “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you” (1 Pet 3.15-16). The context of Peter’s words show that this about honor, glory, shame—what is seen as of worth to others. This is a work of condescension or accommodation to one’s audience—using what makes sense to them. We see this in scripture with Paul on the Areopagus in Acts 17.

Philosophy can also point to or open onto theology be in a more passive or perhaps patient mode. Philosophy, of its own proper nature, seeks beyond itself—it is called from within itself beyond itself.10 Philosophy can open to divine transcendence after breaking down before the deepening mysteries/excesses of being—Desmond calls this a second astonishment after a second perplexity.11 Ultimately, Desmond argues, religion is closer and more intimate to the primal matrix of our deepest gifts/givenness, our closeness to reality, our ultimate desire. Philosophy has a deep impulse toward it.12 Philosophy opens onto theology. Theology is the queen because it is the mother.

The classic image (of Thomas’) is that philosophy is the handmaid (ancilla) to theology (the Queen of the sciences). Philosophy helps theology in its project. Philosophy aids theology in extending to its properly universal scope—in seeing the ramifications of the Christian confession “within the structures of creaturely truth.”13 Theology expands via philosophy’s seeing ramifications and helping provide explanations. The product of this help is typically systematic theology—the work of meditation on revelation in its relation to itself and the rest of the world as we know it. Here philosophy as metaphysics is worth noting. Metaphysics is thinking about reality—not how we know it (epistemology) or how we live in it (ethics) but what “is,” what is the case. Theology is robustly metaphysical—it has to do with thinking about the reality of God, creation, and humanity and how they are related to each other. A theology that is not interested in metaphysics is at best not very self-aware; you’re going to end up having some kind of metaphysics while you’re paying lip-service to orthodoxy and smuggling in your hip politics.14 The answer to bad metaphysics is not no metaphysics but better metaphysics—for we cannot live as thinking beings without thinking about what “is”, what is real, within or without. From this perspective we can see the difference that believing that God created the world and created humans in a special way makes.15 Philosophy helps theology form a properly expansive picture of reality—a systematic theology, a “worldview.”

Theology should also see philosophy as a tempter—as something that can lead to error or harm. There is a doubleness to philosophy—it is a pharmakon, meaning both remedy and poison. We might think of this as theological critique of philosophy. Tertullian early on judged dabbling in philosophy as a (if not the) way to heresy—to distorting Christian belief.16 A later and more balanced approach would be something like Augustine’s image of Israel leaving Egypt: as they left behind the burdens and idols that oppressed them and carried off the treasures, the silver and gold of the Egyptians (“spoiling the Egyptians”), so we Christians should sift, should leave behind the error and sin of pagan philosophy but preserve and use to our own proper ends the true treasures and insights (heralds and handmaids) to be found there.17 William Desmond names this doubleness between ultimate transcendence and turning the infinite into a finite object—how directly naming God objectifies God.18 We “cannot but need” images and names to speak of God at all,19 but we risk to “tailor God too much to what is intelligible in terms of our determination.”20 Thomas writes we must guard against presumption, deeming ourselves “able to measure the nature of everything,” which is “the mother of error.”21 Philosophy can tempt us to overreach, to get out over our skis.

We can see a bit of this playing out in the nineteenth century. Hegel saw religion/faith as having true content but in the indeterminate form of “representation” or image/picture-thinking (Vorstellung). Religious representation needs to pass from “faith” to “understanding” in the sense of having the proper determinate philosophical form. Religion is suspended/aufgehoben/relativized/finds its truth in philosophy. This is a variation on a broader nineteenth century move of seeing religion as ultimately reducible to nothing but X: speculative reason for Hegel, a kind of feeling for Schleiermacher, morality for Kant. These would win the bronze, silver, and gold medals (respectively) thereafter in liberal theology and its revenants. Kierkegaard, on the side of Christian theology, was not impressed.

Philosophy can tempt us with idolatry. Hosea (8.6) says the idol is something an artisan has made and is not God. The idol, Isaiah writes, is making something that we’ve made (a graven or mental image) a standard that measures God (Isaiah 40.12-20). Here we take the lower as the higher (Isaiah 44). We become so enamored by certain concepts and values that we forget the all-too-human “made by” tag on it. They become, as Barth writes, a Trojan horse—a gift for the god—“in whose belly—we hear a threatening clank.”22 Here we must distinguish between idol and icon.23 Both take a finite idea or thing in the world. But the idol fixates on or stops at the worldly thing/idea and recoils upon the human as a univocal (or dialectical) “counterfeit double” (in Desmond’s terms) while an icon takes the finite image/idea analogically/hyperbolically as something that is an imitative/participative image—a medium of transit, communication.24 Philosophy at its best can aid us in the prophetic guard against our (sometime philosophical) hubris in making counterfeits of God.

Finally, philosophy has been theology’s transformant. A transformant is something that has undergone transformation under the influence of something else (usually used in the context of cellular biology). (A close runner-up was “metamorph”—which probably sounds cooler but doesn’t work as well as a more passive direct object.) Throughout its history, theology has taken up and adopted philosophical categories and transformed them. E.g. our very concepts of being and personhood arose in no small part from thinking about (and refining the conceptual tools to do so) the central mysteries of the Christian faith: Creation, the Trinity, the Incarnation.25 Because of revelation theologians make “new philosophical moves”—philosophical/metaphysical/cosmological categories are transformed to elaborate especially the doctrine of creation.26 Desmond’s work is a magisterial case of such an elaboration with his meditations on agapeic origination.

Balthasar imagines philosophy as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil which remains ambivalent “until it is polarized through” theology.27 Theology, even in scripture, appropriates takes over functions with previously belonged to philosophy28 and so philosophy and metaphysics is stretched and adapted to serve revelation—producing new ways of talking and understanding.29 The Cappadocian Fathers explained, for instance, the biblical Trinity in philosophical categories but refined and transformed those categories as they did.30 Theology borrows and applies philosophy but in so doing transforms it.31 We will see numerous instances of this in the following mediations.

To whom then will you liken God,
or what likeness compare with him?
— Isaiah 40.18

Such was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD
— Ezekiel 1.28

One particularly fruitful mode of indirection in the history of theology (especially in the West) is analogy—“a certain likeness of things to God.”1 To speak of God in terms of “likeness” or similitude recognizes that we can’t represent God “in the same way” as creatures2—it is an in-between, imperfect knowledge.3 Analogy entails using words normally used for things and meanings within the world in a different context—namely to talk about God.4

God has spoken of himself in a human language.5 If he spoke of himself in a way we cannot, how could we understand it?6 Revelation, scripture, is given to us in a way we can grasp it—”according to the thinking of the common man”7—that we may be drawn into the ascending spiral of transformation toward God.

If we think of the interrelations of the classical synthesis (of God, the world, and humanity), in speaking of God we humans are using language we usually use to talk about the world (and ourselves) to talk about God. Analogy endeavors to talk about God in a way that reflects God’s relation to the world.

Talking about relation between God and world (and of talking from the midst of the world about God) is fraught with controversy: whether it be Western analogia entis (the analogy of being), Eastern Sophia, and/or sundry borrowings from Neoplatonism and German Idealism. Nevertheless analogy is a way of getting at a humanly intelligible relation between God and the world. (Intelligibility has to do with some kind of relation.8) Analogy, like the divine ideas tradition, sophia, metaxological metaphysics, etc., tries to think the boundary between God and the world does not abolish any relation or communication between them.9

Analogy, talking about how God is like the created world, is a species of indirect speech, of indirection. Thinking, speaking, meditating on something as the boundary of human understanding necessitates an indirect approach10—with both positive and negative moments as we say with the triplex via. This often entails using language in a different way than we are used to,11 using images in a more self-conscious manner. This might even mean intentionally using images for divinity that are difficult to take literally12—as Thomas expands on this insight from Dionysius, “what belongs to less noble creatures is more frequently transferred to God to remove all occasion of error.”13 “The best names,” Desmond writes, “name themselves as other than the name.”14 Having multiple approaches and many names, many limited, imperfect images, is a feature, not a bug15—Dionysius writes: “Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is.”16

Such indirect figurative non-univocal language is not what smart people understand clearly but needs dumbed down into picture-thinking for the masses—’toons for the rubes. Indirection (metaphor, symbol, analogy, etc) is needed as it provides the only ways of talking about that which looms beyond the scaffolding of our mastery and makes it shudder, rattle, and fall. The strange attractor that agitates/draws perplexed attending…we suspect that we are not just expanding our own intelligible precincts but are entering another domain that that predates us. We repeat Ricoeur’s maxim: Le symbol donne á penser—the symbol gives rise to thought. There is no hidden philosophy under the symbol, rather we need “to philosophize starting from the symbol.”17

Let’s return to analogy in particular as a species of indirect speech about God. Analogy uses the same term or name (like being, good, etc) but in a different sense—it is a kind of equivocity—because, as Thomas writes, “no name belongs to God in the same sense that it belongs to creatures.”18 There is, as Torrance writes, “an incongruence between our knowing the divine Object of our knowing.”19 But our talk about God is not purely equivocal—not meaning something totally different than how we talk about worldly things—because then we could know or say nothing about God at all.20 As Mascall explains, analogical terms “neither mean precisely what they mean when applied to finite beings nor are completely meaningless.”21 Analogy then is a “mean” between the univocal and the equivocal—it is, as Thomas puts it in his key statement, a “mode of community of idea [that] is a mean between pure equivocation and simple univocation.”22 (See Paradoxical Harmonies for more on univocal, equivocal, etc.) Analogy is an “unlike likeness.”23 Such a likeness is asymmetrical—likeness/similitude always against the background of an even greater unlikeness/similitude.24 Przywara talks about this always greater dissimilitude in terms of a “polarity” between the transcendent God and the world of our experience.25

Karl Barth was uneasy when it came to analogy’s comparing the incomparable. Barth’s beef arose from an understanding of analogy which is based on “a being which the creature has in common with the Creator”26 where the difference creature and Creator is just a matter of extending a series into the infinite (in an almost quantitative sense).27 Barth’s uneasiness with such a concept of analogy comes from a very similar place as Thomas and Przywara’s advocacy of analogy in the face of their wariness of univocal language about God.28 Analogy, like anything human, can be misused—can become a dialectical way toward an all-too-human univocity. (See Desmond’s Fourfold.) But misuse doesn’t define use. Analogy properly used is precisely to guard against such treating God like an object in the world.29

A basic error that can arise in the utilizing of philosophy within theology is a move to conform the mysteries of revelation to the standard of the clear and distinct ideas of philosophical reason—as if the mystery is an embarrassment. “I think what you mean to say is...” But again the indirection is not a failure to say something that philosophy could say more clearly. The (indirect) symbol gives rise to (precedes and is not supplanted by) thought. Indeed, the most glorious human ideas fall under the apocalyptic judgment of revelation; sometimes there’s a previously unimaginable transformation that philosophical ideas undergo from the side of revelation. Theological analogy should function to guard the threshold that is the enigma of transcendence—to defer to the excessive fullness on the other side.30

In the likeness/similitude of analogy there is a reversal of priority. We say second what is first. The ordo cognoscendi (the order of knowing) is the reverse of the ordo essendi (the order of being). Analogical realities (like goodness or wisdom or beauty) “exist,” Thomas writes, “in God before they exist in creatures even though their names were applied to creatures first”31 such that “we understand such likeness of a creature to God as a hot thing to heat.”32 The reversal is such that we go from saying God is like x to saying x is like God—as God is the true X. Analogy is here linked with participation making more clear the relation of dependence of our ideas ultimately upon God and not the other way around—such as “when a form is really found in one thing, and in another by a remote…imperfect participation.”33 Creatures are like God “according to analogy” which, Thomas argues, means ”by participation”—creatures participate in some likeness of what God’s essentially.34 God is good but—as the origin/what makes things good in the first place—not in the way anything else is good. God is, “exists” but—as the origin of existence/what makes anything exist—but not in the way anything else exists.

Analogy and participation have to do with the relation between the things of this world (that we are used to talking about) and God. We name this singular relation—between the Creator and creatures—“creation.” The reason we can use the language of the creature to speak at all of the Creator is that the creature is like the Creator somehow35—there is an intelligible relation between the Creator and the created world (even if that intelligibility is never fully determinate). Creation and analogy are intertwined. God has preeminently what is only in a secondary way represented in creatures36—Thomas writes: “whatever is said of God and creatures, is said according to the relation of a creature to God as its principle and cause, wherein all perfections of things pre-exist excellently.”37

William Desmond describe this kind of homecoming of meaning to its ultimate origin as hyperbole—as hyperbolic. In our indirect endeavor to speak of God—in our realizing our saying is actually dependent upon, derived from, participating in a Reality that precedes it—there is a reversal of meaning’s gravity, as it were. We thought we were talking about God only to find we’re repeating poorly something that was always already there before we had anything to say. It is as if our mindfulness is thrown (ballein) beyond (hyper)—“a releasing transcendence drawing us upward.”38 We find that we are, as Przywara observes, in “distanced obedience” according to what is above, the above that orders.39 Indirect speech (like analogy) that passes into hyperbole is the fulfillment of the via eminentiae. Something immanent in our experience suggests/points beyond itself to something above/beyond/transcending our experience.40 Indirectly, the Lord appears—through three “of”s (Ez 1.28): “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD”—but appears nevertheless.

hHoly, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory.
—The Sanctus (BCP1979 362) based on Isaiah 6.3b

It would be strange if thinking about God were easy and obvious.
—McCabe, God Matters, 11.

Theology is talk (logos) about God (theos). Though it is not, all human talk could and should be about God as all things are from and to him1 and are so “applications or corollaries” of our understanding of God.2 Yet we do not know God’s essence;3 we cannot know what God is4 as he is in himself.5 We cannot fit God in a genus.6 The way we usually think about what something “is” goes off the rails when we try to do that with God. God is not a kind of being in the world. We should be wary of using, as Dionysius writes in his Mystical Theology, “terms derived from the lowest orders of being” to “describe the transcendent Cause of all things.”7

Following Dionysius, Maximus, and Thomas, another way of putting this odd situation and moving toward understanding it is that our best option for talking about God given that, as Thomas writes, “we cannot grasp what God is” directly is to talk about God indirectly—regarding “what He is not and how other things are related to Him.”8 As Maximus writes earlier, there are two general modes of theology: (1) “properly honoring divine transcendence by absolute silence” and (2) “positive affirmations based on [God’s] effects.”9 These positive (how other things are related to God) and negative (what he is not) ways—the affirmative kataphatic (re what is kata- “down from” God) and the negative apophatic (re what is apo- “apart, away from” God)—serve as paired counterparts of one another. The negative or apophatic limits/constrains/corrects the positive or kataphatic, but without the kataphatic we’d have nothing to say, an agnosticism or “practical atheism.”10 As Thomas writes: “God is both revealed and hidden by creatures.”11 These two ways in conjunction yield promise of a way forward if indirectly to thinking about God in relation to the world.

Thinking about how other things are related to God, are “down from” God, has been called the Via Causalitatis—the way of causality—because it sees creatures as reflecting their origin, their cause, in God. This way talks about how God is like the things that are created, that come “from” (kata) him. This kataphatic way moves from the knowledge of creation to knowledge of God—from effect to cause such that “the names given to God are derived from His effects.”12 The affirmation of reflections of the Creator that we see in creatures are admittedly loose.13 The creation points to its “cause” or origin in God with some adequacy and appropriateness, but in ways that need qualification.

Paired with the way everything (all of creation) is connected to God as its origin or “cause” is seeing the way God differs from all else. This is the Via Negationis, the way of negation—denying that the characteristics of creatures exist in God in the same limited, finite mode as they do in creatures. This way is about how God is not like—apart from (apo-)—things in the world. It is important to note the constructive work that is being done here: apophatic negation does not simply negate the kataphatic affirmations of the way of causation but directs them beyond finite worldly beings. The negative here is corrective; it denies univocity (that God as the “cause” is of the same order of his “effects”). As we saw above (The God We Don’t Know), God (as far as epistemic objects go) is “seriously odd” such that our usual concepts break down in his presence.14 God is not a determinate thing in space and time—is not a part of a whole—and is not a whole made up of parts and elements, and so we can’t (at least not well) talk about him in the way we talk about finite things.15 In this way—also called the way or method of remotion or removal16—we deny of him any limitation, any form that we use to think about finite things like corruption, composition, and mutability—so we’d say God is incorruptible, simple, immovable.17 This negative moment helps us have a properly humble way to speak of God as opposed to the vainglory of praying to the idol of a mental image or concept.18 For, as Maximus observes, “the uncreated is not naturally contained by creation, nor is the unlimited comprehended by what is limited.”19 This yields an interesting situation where we can have “proper” if partial knowledge of that which remains unknown,20 and these are the “most true” things we can say about God21—as Thomas writes: “through negations, when we have a proper knowledge of thing, we know that it is distinct from other things, yet what it is remains unknown.”22

A third way, the Via Eminentiae (the way of eminence or preeminence or superabundance), arises from the combining/pairing of negative apophatic NO and the positive kataphatic YES—an affirmation that is hyper- or super- beyond affirmation and negation.23 As Dionysius writes, the via eminentiae combines the others ways “by denying all things of him [negation], surpassing all [eminence], to contemplate him as their cause [causality]”24—“the cause of all is considerably prior to this, beyond privations, beyond every denial, beyond every assertion.”25 As Fran O’Rourke writes:26“God is thus beyond both affirmation and negation. Through negation, names are purified of all finite connotation and, in a union of affirmation and negation, their content is intensified toward infinity.” The way we normally use names there is some imperfection “which does not befit God, even though the thing signified in some eminent way does befit God.”27 God is the “first” cause, the “highest” good;28 he has being, life, and wisdom “more excellently than the human intellect can grasp, or words can signify”29—supersubstantial, supervital, superintelligent.30

This triplex via is primarily rooted in theology of Dionysius the Areopagite though it goes back to Platonism and extends from early Christian theologians (Origen) through the Middle Ages.31 From the similarity that names the positive likeness of creatures to God and the difference that names the deficiency of this likeness comes a way of naming the transcendence and perfection of God from and beyond his creation.32 God is x. Well, not our kind of x, not the way worldly things are x. More like, capital X. The X that is source and reason for our kind of x. Maybe the Creator’s X is the truth of creation’s x…x-es like being, power, life, wisdom, goodness, beauty…

The seraphic hymn in Isaiah that we join in our Sanctus names God’s kingly eminence as “Lord” from his transcendence through negation as “holy” and from his causation of all things, his “power and might.” Heaven and earth are full of his glory. Heaven and earth—which are not God—are nevertheless not only pointing to God “speaking” of his glory—because they exist only as created by him—they are the fruit, the effect of his power and might alone. They not only intimate or hint at God—showing his glory, “speaking” of his presence and reality in the midst of what is not him—they are “full” of his glory.

Your statutes have been my songs
	in the house of my sojourning.
—Psalm 119:54

In the face of theology’s mystery, unknowing, paradox, faith must yet seek understanding. Theology’s meditative work calls for intelligibility, understanding, determinacy, making careful distinctions. This work is hard but necessary. We may rightfully be diffident when it comes to talking about God, “yet we must dare.”1 Nevertheless the seeking of faith for understanding is as endless task, an infinite task for minds in time.

As we intimated in the previous meditation, the shape of the understanding, the intelligibility that we seek in theology may require a broadening and deepening of the rationality or understanding. “Reason” often means too much (competing rationalities) or too little (an impossibly narrow scientistic positivism). What we are looking for, the kind of intelligible connection we seek in theology’s meditation is classically understood most broadly in aesthetic terms as convenientia/conveniens (fittingness/fitting), harmony, or elegance. This elegance names the harmony of the paradoxical harmonies of the Christian faith. Part of our difficulty is that “aesthetics” thinking about beauty has in modernity become confined to a local domain of art where it was classically more broadly connected to metaphysics, to thinking about reality.2 Balthasar thinks of this aesthetic aspect of intelligibility in terms of “form (Gestalt) or of figure (Gebilde). Formosus (‘beautiful’) comes from forma (‘shape’) and speciosus (‘comely’) from species (‘likeness’).”3 He saw the aesthetic task of perceiving form as fundamental to theology (and even “apologetics”).4

Thomas uses the term conveniens (like convene: coming together) to describe reasonableness of the Christian mysteries, the harmony of the paradoxical harmonies; it is usually translated as “fitting” as opposed to “awkward.”5 Faith assents to the fitting, to what “seems good.”6 Thomas describes as “fitting” the Christian mysteries: the incarnation,7 God’s work of salvation in Christ’s shameful death,8 that the transcendent (unknown) God reveals himself (made known) to humanity,9 that humans are immaterial (soul) and material (body),10 that providence entails the freedom of secondary causes like humans (dual causation/agency),11 the bodily resurrection of the blessed,12 and the pleasure of the difficult life of virtue of joy in suffering.13 This convenientia/harmony/agreement characterizes the fittingness or elegance (beauty, peace, goodness) of orderliness of world without,14 its changelessness in the midst of change,15 and the order of the renewed Christian mind within.16 Whereas Irenaeus speaks of the oikonomia, the harmonious economy of God’s providence,17 Julian of Norwich writes of the “behovely”—as in “it behoves one”—sometimes translated as “necessary.”18 Anselm, often presented as an arch-rationalist, often speaks in a more aesthetic manner of rectitudo—rightness or accord. This rectitudo (sometimes translated as “necessity” is used to describe something that has/had to be so (why God became man, why that “had to” happen, why it was right or fitting). Both Balthasar and Barth recognize the aesthetic bent of Anselm’s ontological proof and his understanding of salvation as satisfaction (re “honor” or glory).19

Seeing in these more aesthetic categories as a grounding for what makes sense, theology should then be understood a work of imagination. Theological imagination envisions a picture of the world, a frame for what makes sense, for what is believable. Kierkegaard writes of imagination as a fundamental even transcendental faculty, it is what makes our other faculties (thinking, feeling, willing) possible. Imagination is the frame of possibility—of what can be (thought, felt, done). It is “the possibility of any and all reflection”—“a power that is the first condition for what becomes of a person.”20 The imagination depicts, makes visible, makes aware, brings the world into existence for one. How we imagine the world frames our possibilities, how we might dwell in the world, what is even possible.21 We live from an imaginative perspective of the world larger than the present moment. As Ricouer writes: “One lives only that which one imagines.”22 Part of this imaginative work might be called the translation of ideas. There are some thoughts in Bible etc that made sense in their context that do not today without explanation. This may involve providing the significant explanation and connection to the classic formations while also presenting the ideas in new forms. Theology’s meditation is a work of forming—of informing and transforming—the imagination from which we live.

A Christian vision of life and the world, a Christian imaginary, presents a rich and coherent picture of the whole, of how things hold together as a whole. The “symbol,” Paul Ricouer writes—that which holds together—“gives rise to thought;” the holistic particular vision makes possible what unfolds within it. Such an imaginative construal—a speculative, meditative exercise—coheres as a world, a web of meanings. Theology in its broader sense is a thinking about God primarily and secondarily the universe in relation to God so as to present a distinctive universe of meaning, a Christian vision of the world, a particular discourse with a universal claim.

A common way to think of theology as an interconnected whole is that of a system—of a systematic theology. Some, like Kierkegaard, are rightfully wary of theology being a system if “system” is taken in the sense of closed (fully determined and completed) whole. This may be God’s knowledge, but we can’t look over his shoulder to see what (and how) he sees. At the end of our meditative work it is not complete, not finished, not fixed, no matter how we strain after completeness.23 However we might think of different kinds of systematicity and different kinds of “wholes” (open, closed, fragmentary). An open whole sees things as holding together and interconnected in a vision that is never complete or perfected or “closed.” There is no firmly established usage for what constitutes “systematic theology” as distinct from say “Christian doctrine” or “dogmatics.”24 Systematic theology, we might say, is about seeing things as a whole, endeavoring to talk about the whole breadth of Christian theology and how the parts are related to each other intelligibly (in a way you can talk about) in this whole. Systematic theology is about the big picture, the Christian Imaginary, the Christian world-view and how it holds together as a whole in an elegant, harmonious, fitting, even behovely manner. Within this holism we can draw something out to see its connections (to use Merleau-Ponty’s description of phenomenology) pulling or holding apart the parts of the whole to see the intentional bonds/strings that hold it together.

A way of thinking about the “whole” of Christian theology is in terms of the classical synthesis as presented in Louis Dupré’s Passage to Modernity. The classical synthesis affirms both the distinction and the intelligible relations between God, the world, and humanity—the three great topics of metaphysics (that Kant declared beyond the scope of human knowledge). This synthesis marks classical Christianity (from the Church Fathers through the High Middle Ages) off from the disintegration of synthesis beginning in the late middle ages and progressing into modernity with their sundry dualisms and then reductionisms.25

The present work is re-presentation, a non-identical repetition, a remembering imagining again of this premodern Christian classical synthesis. As such it draws on the common project with the great confessional theologians of the twentieth century (such as Bulgakov, Barth, and Balthasar)—looking back (ressourcement) as way moving forward, retrieving something forgotten. After this first introductory part’s long throat-clearing, the second, third, and fourth parts of this book (or century of meditations) deal with God (the Trinity), the world (creation), and humanity, respectively.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us
— John 1.14a

For the foolishness of God is wiser than men
— 1 Cor 1.25a

There is a long tradition for speaking of the core articles of Christian belief as “mysteries.” Florensky observes cheekily of the church fathers and great theologians that “hardly any of them gives a clear and precise explanation of anything.”1 The apostles are, as Paul writes, “stewards of God’s mysteries” (1 Cor 4.1). Such mysteries are not to be solved or resolved so much as confessed and contemplated2—not to be resolved or annulled but to be illumined and unfolded.3

This gives Christian truth has a paradoxical character. As Balthasar writes, to approach the mysteries we “must proceed by statements running in opposite directions.”4 These mysteries are said in terms “paradox”—para-doxa being literally what is contrary to expectation or popular opinion. Paradox is not just not-knowing but is in Christian belief a characteristic marking a “higher rationality”5 such that—as Spinoza once wrote that veritas est index sui et falsi, that truth is the index (the criterion, the indicator, that which points to) of itself and of the false6—Kierkegaard writes that for us the paradox is the index (criterion) and judex (judge) sui et falsi.7 With many of the central affirmations or mysteries of the faith what is binding or primary is the paradox—the elements held in tension but not to be abandoned—and not a particular explanation of it. For example, Christian orthodoxy affirms that Christ is fully God and fully man, not necessarily a partucular understanding of how. “The paradox,” Oakes writes, “is primary and it establishes the terms within which all explanations must unfold.”8

Paradox here is a matter of holding opposing ideas together. There are many terms for it: “paradox” (Kierkegaard), “contradiction” (Pascal, Florensky), “coincidence of opposites” (Nicholas of Cusa),9 “antinomy” (Florensky, Bulgakov, Schmemann),10 “dialectic,” “antithetics,” or “analogy” (Przywara). The contradiction here is not simple logical contradiction—affirming both A and non-A; there is a difference between this kind of “bifocal” creative tension and garden variety self-contradictory nonsense.11 The tension is not so much to be solved or resolved but is itself the way forward, as itself “the most precise concept possible.”12 It harkens back to the aporia of Plato’s “secret doctrine”—as Pickstock terms it—”the weaving of the One and the Two, the same with the different.”13

Now, the following is a bit abstract, but is helpful for thinking about the place and nature of paradox in Christian theology (and for thinking philosophically about knowledge, truth, and reality more generally). William Desmond’s “fourfold way” or “fourfold sense of being” distinguishes between different configurations of relation and otherness, unity and difference, coherence and contradiction.14 This fourfold is: the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the metaxological. The four senses name “speakings” or how a “voice” speaks (obvious in the “voc” in the first two senses). The univocal sense is uni-vocal, the speaking of one voice. Univocal sense has to do with simple, unmediated unity. Equivocity is where there are two contrary voices saying different things, two “speakings,” two voices speaking, thus a “contradiction” (like in dictate or predict): A and non-A. The equivocal sense has to do with simple, unmediated otherness, difference. With the dialectical sense, what seem to be many voices are found to be actually, in the end, one voice. This is difference mediated and so reduced to unity. The dialectical says these two seemingly opposed things/ideas are actually just two lesser parts or aspects of a greater whole, a deeper reality. (Hegel, the great dialectical master, begins his Logic by seeing the opposition between being and nothing as resolved when we see them as moments/aspects of the more basic/true reality of becoming.) The final “metaxological” sense names a “between” (metaxu) of a plurality of voices (a “plurivocity”) that are different but in harmony. This between-thinking of the metaxological is one of communion, of community, of otherness in relation—of otherness (not reducing to one, to a union (the dialectical)) in relation (not just an affirmation of contradictories (the equivocal))—that is neither mere contradiction (univocal and equivocal) nor dialectical fusion. My term for this metaxological relation is paradoxical harmony. “Paradoxical” names the otherness, the difference, the two-ness, the contradiction; “harmony” names the togetherness, the communion, the one-ness (the union and unity of communion and community), the coherence.

To return to the paradoxical mysteries of the Christian faith, we might think (and we wouldn’t be the first) that it would of course be simpler just to dump one side of the paradox. The term we usually have for this is “heresy.” The Greek word airesis means “choice”—you choose the side you’re keeping and toss the other. (Ta-daa! Problem solved.) Heresy, impatient with paradox, doubles down on a more simple rationality, “a rational one-sidedness that claims to be everything.”15 This choosing of one side leads to an exaggeration that distorts and mutilates.16 Heresy is a contraction of the rich and complex into something simpler—as Ephraim Radner writes, a “deliberated withering.”17 Heresy is here (in Desmond’s sense) univocal. No contradiction, no paradox, no problem! Just obvious heresy. Problem: How can God be three AND one? Univocal (simple heretical) solution: God is just three and not one (tritheism) OR God is just one and not three (modalism). An equivocal approach usually just rejects Christian belief as incoherent, as entailing logical contradiction—something can’t be both one and three. (It is rare to find a Christian theologian that actually believes this though they might talk this way.) The dialectical approach to Christian doctrines and mysteries would be that what seems contradictory, but actually upon further examination isn’t (dialectical)—it is only a relative or apparent paradox. This usually ends up being a more refined form of heresy—keeping the two opposed religious ideas and then smuggling in a superior/more fundamental philosophical idea as the “truth” of these lesser religious ideas. The dialectical approach collapses the tension in the end into something univocal—and usually something that sounds more philosophical or secular than Christian. A dialectical approach might say that the Trinity is ultimately a way of talking about the three moments of the dynamic unfolding of Spirit/the universe (so a modalism, but three modes of something that is dynamic) or that with Christ “God” is just something about the religious dimension of human reality and Jesus had that in the fullest sense (so he’s fully “God” but in a way that is not really distinct from humanity in general). It’s not unusual upon encountering such an approach to Christianity to feel like your pocket is being picked. That’s because it is.

Beyond these, the metaxological mode affirms the paradoxical harmony of the Christian mysteries/articles of faith. It affirms both the contradiction (though not simply equivocal) and the coherence (though not univocal or dialectical). The Trinity is both One and Three and there are (as we will see) many and various analogies, ways of imperfectly talking about this mystery. The metaxological calls for the more imaginative and indirect ways of speaking: metaphor, analogy, symbol, hyperbole. The metaxological, if it has to choose a side (between univocity and equivocity), is an “affirmative equivocity” as signifying that we are talking about that transcends us.18 If we fail or stumble in thinking the harmony, the safest way is to fall back on the paradox (fully God and fully man). This learned ignorance sees the threat of offense at the “contradiction” as preferable to the threat of simple (univocal) or refined (dialectical) heresy.

Paradoxical harmony, the metaxological mode, is the shape of Christian belief. When we think of our medieval-modern axis of Aquinas and Kierkegaard, we notice a lot more harmony in the former and talk about paradox in the later. The High Middle Ages was civilization that excelled at uniting complexity elements (difference) into a harmonious coherent vision (togetherness).19 Perhaps one way of thinking about this is that what was once seen as more of a harmony now in modernity (with its more univocal fixation) has become more paradoxical. We, on the far side of this contraction of rationality in modernity, have to realize what we’re working with. This particular kind of “rational-logical understanding” has to be adapted.20 Our particularly modern uneasiness with paradox is not a mark against the Christianity but is what Kierkegaard calls an “acoustical echo” telling that something is off with our application of our simple, all-too-human categories to God and his mighty works.21 This is not the abandonment of reason but its (re)expansion toward what we might think of as more aesthetic categories. (Our present understanding of aesthetic as subjective has less to do with that being the case than beauty (like goodness) being a remainder/left-over—another “acoustical echo.”)

This brings us back to the harmony of paradoxical harmony. Erich Przywara writes of paradox or contradiction as able to set up a rhythm (as a temporal harmony) or a harmony (as a spatial rhythm). There is a music and beauty to Christian truth, an elegance, a form.22 Such an understanding of harmony—such an aesthetic slant is not a “woo-woo” escape from reason but a way of thinking about rationality, of how thought functions rationally, how we find coherence in the midst of contradiction.23 Perhaps we need a greater meditative patience for paradox—to see in its strangeness something neither obvious nor absurd but harmonious form. To think of the paradoxical harmonies of the Christian mysteries as less datapoint than form and beauty is ingredient to the work of theology as meditatio (on the way to oratio) to be something more fitting of wonder and praise of, as Jeremy Taylor writes,24

God, who in His infinite wisdom does concentre and tie together in one end things of disparate and disproportionate natures, making things improbable to co-operate to what wonder or to what truth He pleases.

The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand;
repent and believe in the gospel.
— Mark 1:15

In Dionysius’ geometric figures representing divine and celestial/angelic works of love, the higher ministers to the lower with two movements: the straight line (descending) and the spiral (bringing up). There is first condescending to provide for the lower and then elevating the lower to be in communion with what is higher.1 There is proclamation and then invitation.

Straight Line: Condescend, Proclaim, Announce—Down and Out
The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.

Our proclamation continues and reflects God’s revelation. The condescending straight line (that Dionysius describes) comes down from God to us and through us to others. Revelation and then proclamation descend from the higher to the lower for the sake of the lower, to provide for the sub-ordinate. The higher in condescending into the lower does not cease to be the higher. There is a conjunction and a boundary between, as Kierkegaard puts it, the eternal and the existing.2

Our Lord’s message is summarized in Mark 1:15. The first half of the verse is a proclamation or announcement: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” The descending line of the Word comes near to us and announces its presence and nearness—it is here now. Paul (quoting Deuteronomy) writes (Rom 10.8, 17b): “But what does it say? “The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart” (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim)…hearing [comes] through the word of Christ.”

Proclamation like revelation is often met with the shock of offense. Even indirect communication (say using stories or parables) does notsomuch remove the offense but lets it sneak up on you when your defenses are down. The central point of the word that has come near in the offensive proclamation of Christianity is the coming of the kingdom of God in Jesus—that Jesus is Lord, is King, is the Christ/Messiah, the Son of the Living God (Mt 16.16). “The main issue,” Kierkegaard writes, is that “he declared himself to be God.” This forces the decision of faith or offense—“either to fall down in worship or to join in killing him.”3 There’s a more easy-going-seeming form of offense in the all-too-common understanding of Jesus as relevant teacher of morals who reflects our values back to us. Such an accommodation is too easily a betrayal of the Gospel—a rejection of our King in favor of a popular rebel. As Kierkegaard writes in an unpublished review: “You throw out all of Christianity and thereupon, with an exultant look, say something like this: Where now is the paradox? More correctly, you should say: Where now is Christianity?”4

The shock of the descending word—the impact of the descending intersecting line—from the higher calls for an ordeal, a trial, a decision—either I am right and this is wrong or I am wrong.5 One in the lower must endure the difficult, the either/or, lose life in order to find it, to attain the higher.6

Spiral: Elevate, Invite, Call—Up and In
Repent and believe in the gospel.

In response to the proclamation of the word, we are invited to respond, we are called to come up, to be elevated. To receive the proclamation of the gospel, to receive the one making the descending movement to us, is to receive the One proclaimed.

Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me.

—Matthew 10:40

Whoever receives the one I send receives me, and whoever receives me receives the one who sent me.

—John 13:20

To “repent and believe in the gospel” is to join in the spiral upward movement of God’s grace. We join with, receive what is proclaimed, we accept the call. In faith we believe what we hear proclaimed to us. “So,” Paul writes, “faith comes from hearing” and “if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10.17b, 9).

The spiral elevates but not directly—it is not a straight line up. As we’ve seen, it’s not an easy ascent/assent. Before faith comes repentance. In order to believe you must first realize that what you’re doing isn’t working, you can’t get there from here, that you have to change, repent. Kierkegaard, reflecting on Acts 2, sees how we might experience the higher as “intoxicating,” hearing its proclaimed speech as a “strange tongue,”7 but, to the contrary, we are invited to a shocking sobriety that makes manifest that we in the lower are the ones who are intoxicated.8

Another way to think of the indirect ascent of the spiral, of how we are called and invited to the higher is that the victory of the kingdom that is proclaimed/announced is a victory over us—over you and me—over the person addressed by the proclamation. The proclamation is one of victory—of the return of the king. The invitation then is a call to surrender, to join the side of the victor. To repent and believe in the gospel, is at once to lament (for you are defeated) and rejoice (for you are liberated and victorious in the Victor). “The enthusiasm of faith,” Kierkegaard writes, “is not a defense—no, it is attack and victory; a believer is a victor.”9

The ascent of repentance and faith that we are called to is, in Kierkegaard’s terminology, a teleological suspension. Teleological has to do with having an end (telos) that is beyond one. In relation to this higher end we are suspended in two senses. First is suspension as being negated, put out of play (like a suspended license). Second is suspension as founding, as being held in place from above (like a suspension bridge). In repentance we are suspended in the first (negative) sense; in faith we are suspended in the second (positive) sense. In such a “teleological suspension” (of the lower from or within the higher) there is a negating of the lower sphere as absolute and yet an affirmation of it as de-centered, as properly located.

The higher perspective of faith is one that sees farther and tells a more convincing story than the lower perspective. Faith’s perspective is a story, a narrative, Irenaeus called it a “hypothesis” in its ancient meaning of a plot or basic narrative—like what we’d find in Scripture and summed up in early creeds.10 Faith’s higher story effects a kind of “out-narration”—the “new” story or paradigm cannot be understood in terms of the “old”—but the “old” paradigm can be understood in terms of the “new.”11 The same preached word that is folly to those who are perishing is “the power of God” to “us who are being saved” and from it we can see that this higher “foolishness of God”—as it is seen from below—“is wiser than men”—actually makes more sense—“and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Cor 1.18, 25). The scope of theology is total (even if its clarity and precision is only ever incomplete); the citadel of faith, the city of God, encompasses the world. We live in and from the gospel.

The lower perspective is “assumed into a higher concentricity”—re-narrated from the perspective of the higher discourse, finding its deeper truth and proper home there.12 The higher, the truer view is the one that presents the broadest and most coherent perspective or narrative—“a world-view, a life-view”—that can locate and account for less true perspectives.13 We are called up, taken up, invited into the city of God; we find our proper place within it; we find our stories making more sense there. It is like moving to a foreign land, to new place and coming to realize that this is actually your homeland; you are not leaving home, you are coming home. The Psalmist describes just this as foreigners from all over the world come to Zion not as immigrants and strangers but as those who were born—again, from above—there (Jn 3.3).

Glorious things of you are spoken,
	O city of God.
Among those who know me I mention Rahab and Babylon;
	behold, Philistia and Tyre, with Cush—
	“This one was born there,” they say.
And of Zion it shall be said,
	“This one and that one were born in her”;
	for the Most High himself will establish her.
The LORD records as he registers the peoples,
	“This one was born there.”
—Psalm 87:3–6

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money/mammon.
But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
— Matthew 6.24, 33

How on earth does one get to the suspended citadel of faith? On earth, one doesn’t—not the way one accesses things on earth—you can’t get there from here.1

For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
	nor your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
	so are my ways higher than your ways,
	and my thoughts than your thoughts.
— Isaiah 55.9⁠

To begin to answer perhaps obliquely, Kierkegaard and Thomas Aquinas—our unlikely medieval-modern axis (13^th & 19^th cent.)—help us think in terms of the higher and the lower. The higher from the perspective of the lower is other—discontinuous, transcendent—impossible, inaccessible, even absurd within the terms/framework of the lower. The lower cannot understand the higher, cannot “get a perspective” on it.2

As our Lord teaches in Mt 6.24:

No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.”

Here the lower’s relation to the higher is an “either/or”—the transition from the lower to the higher is decisive, it is a leap.3 One does not attain the higher on the terms of the lower. Higher cannot be perfectly known or expressed by lower—cannot be “sufficiently known”4—but the higher can be grasped and known through a kind of participation—of the lower becoming or participating in the higher (we will return to this below).5

The higher from the perspective of the lower is therefore distorted and often seems strange or downright absurd and offensive. Jesus himself said “blessed is the one who is not offended” the way those in Nazareth took offense at him (Mt 11.6, 13.57). Athanasius recounts such offense when he says “they are in the habit of saying, ‘How can this be?,’ as if what they cannot conceive cannot be.”6 One approaches the higher as a Mount Sinai or a Mount Moriah “whose peak towers sky-high”—as a challenging height—“with a horror religiosus.”7 As Paul writes, the word of the cross that is preached (the higher) is folly (absurd) to the perishing (the lower) (1 Cor 1.20-31), for, as Thomas writes, “men are wont to regard as foolish anything beyond their understanding.”8 It is not that faith or the content of faith is absurd, but that, Kierkegaard explains, “for the person who does not believe, faith and the content of faith are absurd.”9 The higher from the perspective of the lower is paradoxical; the paradox marks as Kierkegaard writes, a “higher rationality.”10

Dionysius the Areopagite (a Christian philosopher in the 5^th/6^th century) describes in The Divine Names the loving/ministering activity of God and His angelic beings (celestial intelligences/“divine minds”) using simple geometric figures. First, there is the circle—the binding together of the equal, of peers in communion with each other. Second is the (descending) straight line—condescending to provide for the lower. Third and finally, there is the (ascending) spiral—elevating or “returning” the lower to be in communion with what is higher. The ascending movement is not a direct straight line but a more indirect helping the lower to learn to join in the motion of the higher (an ascending spiral toward the circle of communion).11 When it comes to the circular communion of the higher, we do not have access (now). It is like the suspended citadel. However, in God’s revealing Word and in the proclaiming of that Word there is a condescending movement (the straight line) from the higher, the citadel, to the lower—reaches down.

For as rain and snow fall from the heavens
	and return not again, but water the earth,
Bringing forth life and giving growth,
	seed for sowing and bread for eating,
So is my word that goes forth from my mouth;
	it will not return to me empty;
But it will accomplish that which I have purposed,
	and prosper in that for which I sent it.
— Isaiah 55:10–11

The Word of God in Christ, in Scripture, and in the Church’s proclamation to those who do not (yet) believe is a straight line—it is of the order of apocalyptic revelation. It comes and brings life, but it comes from elsewhere. Its message is one of strict hierarchy. This is the lower, that is the higher. The lower is lower than the higher. The lower is not independent from the higher but is ordered to it. The lower as ordered to, through (regarding providential intermediate powers), and by the higher.12 The perfection, Thomas writes, “of the lower is for it to be subject to the higher.”13 The blessed or “edifying” realization is that, as Kierkegaard writes, before or “against” God we are “always in the wrong”—that we are less in ourselves than we are “hidden in God.”14

We have something of this strange word from the higher to the lower—literally from a mount—with the Beatitudes in Matthew 5. Jesus’ disciples as happy/blessed in the higher perspective and unhappy/cursed from the lower perspective. Or truly happy are those that the lower sees as unhappy for they dwell in the fuller truth of reality. The truth of the higher truth is revealed and dwells in the lower with dissonance. Christ himself is this in the fullest sense—the Word revealed and crucified.

Our Lord explains further this logic of the higher and the lower in the next chapter of Matthew. The straight line descends to us and demands that we must choose: you can serve two masters, either/or, God or mammon (Mt 6.24). But then our Lord concludes, after considering our anxious temptations to think of our lives in terms of the lower alone (Mt 6.25-32), then our Lord concludes (Mt 6.33):

But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

The higher includes the lower; if higher then also lower. While the lower perspective sees itself as complete, the higher includes and completes the lower in a way it (the lower) was not capable of doing. As C.S. Lewis writes, ”you can get second things only by putting first things first”15—“put first things first and we get second things thrown in.”16 Because the ordo cognoscendi (the order in which we come to know things) is the reverse of the ordo essendi (the order of reality) we come to know the first/higher things later, as we ascend to them. The things we come to later are more fundamental, more all-embracing. From the perspective of the higher, the lower is reconciled, is included, aufgehoben, suspended in the higher. We enter the suspended citadel by being suspended.

We must remember that while we may have produce a meditative sketch of the bigger revealed picture (such as I am attempting in these works), we never attain anything like a total systematic view of the whole—a “system of existence” such as that of the divine intellect.17 The Christian picture is one full of mystery, persisting tensions, and paradox, as Balthasar recognizes, ”so acute that there are many who refuse even to look in the direction of totality.”18 The life of faith is not absurd to the faithful, but it is always strange—we are only ever on the way to the perspective of God’s Word being natural for us.

If you do not stand firm in faith, you shall not stand at all.
— Isaiah 7.9a (NRSV)

But you stand fast through faith. So do not become proud, but fear.
— Romans 11:20b (ESV)

Those who trust in the LORD are like Mount Zion,
     which cannot be moved, but abides forever.
— Psalm 125:1

In faith we start from above, receiving what is revealed, and descend from the principle, from what is first—which is not us. Whereas natural reason would ascend from our knowledge of creatures toward God, the knowledge/teaching of faith does not “follow the same order”—it comes from above descending from revelation.1 Faith relates to the divine,2 and the theology that works from faith then moves in thought from the Creator to creatures.3 With faith moving down from above “the whole thing is in suspense.”4 The faithful sailor, Kierkegaard imagines, looks at the stars, not the sea, for their founding, for what gives stability; they conquer the changeable by the eternal.5

Faith for us is the starting-point—the initium.6 As understanding is ordered toward truth as its goal and fulfillment so we are ordered to God as the First Truth, as our goal and fulfillment. The happiness that is the end of the will—that we do not yet possess—surpasses us.7 Faith involves both the intellect and the will. When it comes to things that are higher than us, will, Thomas observes, can reach farther than intellect.8 It is as if faith is pulled by the will (ultimately, as we will see later, by love) above the normal orbit of knowledge.9 We can see Thomas’ understanding of the “First Truth” as taking an intellectual image and placing it within the fuller ambit of human life—regarding what is not merely what is the case but what is most important for us. Put technically, the First Truth is the foundational formal object of faith—what faith as an intellectual operation is directed toward.10 The “firstness” of what faith grasps/points to/rests in refers to how what is given in revelation serves as a principle (a first thing) for the rest of our thinking and living. The first in reality (God) becomes first in our apprehension of reality by faith.11 In faith we are connected to God as this First Truth—in whose “prime light” we cannot fix our gaze.12

Faith founds Christian thinking and living. Thomas reads Hebrews 11’s faith as the “substance of things hoped for” such that faith provides ”a kind of foundation” for the spiritual life.13 The original Greek word translated as “substance” or “assurance” in Hebrews 11.1 is “hypostasis”—something that is not ephemeral but has a reality, a standing-on-its-own. Faith founds—it serves as a foundation, it makes solid. Faith’s founding, it should be noted, is not a founding on faith itself or “faith alone.” Christian faith is not faith in faith—it is not belief in the power of belief or something vapid like that. Our faith of itself is just air. But in faith we are founded in/upon that in/upon which we believe: The Word of God, God’s revelation, Jesus Christ.14

In faith we begin with God’s initiative in revelation as a basis of a whole new world of understanding and our living within that world.15 Faith’s foundation is perhaps best understood as a suspension—a founding from above, over nothing—“happy out on 70,000 fathoms of water.”16 Coming after and attending/holding to the Word, faith hangs, is suspended from revelation and weaves together in meditation a web of understanding of the world from which we live. Faith, as Ricouer writes, is the “knot” that holds to (what comes before) and holds together (what comes after).17 The knowledge and understanding of the Christian life, Christian theology, lives in (to metamorph metaphors again) the nest of the faith that humbly attends to God’s revelation, meditates upon it, and relates to God prayerfully. It is a matter of trust, of obedience, of love. “Christianly,” Kierkegaard notes, “as you believe, so you are, to believe is to be.”18

Theology is a reflection within faith—theology does not move beyond faith “to another genus.”19 Theology (or “dogmatics,” revealed theology), Kierkegaard writes, is “faith’s understanding” for faith is theology’s “organ” and “point of departure.”20 The particularity of theological thinking in our modern age is that it has no pretensions to autonomy in the sense of the modern independent rational individual beholden to no one—high on their own supply. Yet the grounding of theological knowledge in faith in revelation provides theology a kind of autonomy vis-a-vis other disciplines or domains of knowledge (beholden to the secular principalities and powers).21 “The more you cut faith off from all supplies from the surrounding world,” Kierkegaard writes, “the more secure is the fortress.” This aerial citadel, secured and suspended from heaven, this edifice of faith “is a world to itself, and it has life within its ramparts.”22 Indeed, the foundation of faith divides and cuts off what Balthasar calls “genuine theology” from the “false” theologies (false but perhaps more respectable to earn a “fitting place in the firmament of the university’s faculties”)23 that would rather have a common human/anthropological truth as their foundation than faith the embarassingly particular and “methodologically dubious.”24 The foundation of faith gives theology a standing apart; theology is playing a different game, not that of the pick-me at the secular party.

With theological understanding’s building from/upon faith, believing progresses to knowing25 without it being progressively/developmentally supplanted by it—faith is not a ladder we can kick away after we’ve ascended it (in this life). Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio bemoans that while faith was once the task of a lifetime, now it is a speedbump to be passed over on the way to proper philosophical understanding.26 There is however no “going further” than faith without negating it.27 Such an understanding of faith as the way to knowledge of God is, as Wilken observes, part of what made Christianity as distinctive and noxious to the ancients as it is to us moderns.28

The proper posture or attitude for the founding of faith is notsomuch triumphal as humble. Again, we are not the ones laying the foundation, it’s not our triumph—we are dependent upon God and so upheld by him as we hold to his revealed Word. Understanding based on faith in revelation, on an authority of that which is above us, of which we are not the masters (if indeed we remember this) should serve, Thomas says, as a “rudder” to curb presumption29—to remind us in our theological reflections that we are not able “to measure the nature of everything,” but are reliant upon the sometimes strange words of another.30 This is so ”that all that is of faith might be attributed not to human power or wisdom but to God.”31 Our knowledge of the highest and most important things in life is not like the best kind of knowledge we can have of anything—it is “the most imperfect knowledge about the most noble.”32 Faith’s is the uplifting sight of the downcast gaze.33

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.
— Romans 10:17

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
— Hebrews 11.1

At the heart of Christianity is faith in what is revealed by God1—in that which is beyond the intellectual comprehension and ability of normal human reason.2 Though this might seem to be unreasonable or in tension with reason, there is not a real opposition.3 Faith in revelation is indeed reasonable when we consider that we are dealing with something of a higher order than us. Because the authority of revelation comes from “somewhere else”—from a “separate qualitative sphere”4—then, as Thomas writes, “a philosopher is a fool to disbelieve what an angel says, and a much greater fool if he disbelieves what God says.”5

God has provided revelation so that through our faith/belief in what God has revealed we have a “safe road of cognition” of spiritual things and ultimately himself6—such that through faith in revelation “just one old woman knows more about these things that pertain to the faith than heretofore all philosophers.”7 That which is beyond—that which we do not (yet) see—“descends on us in the manner of revelation” as something spoken to us in words to be believed, to be accepted by faith.8

Even these poor philosophers can catch on that something is up when it comes to revelation. Alain Badiou reflects upon revelation as an event, an apocalyptic rupture—the event of something otherwise invisible or unthinkable that opens possibilities that weren’t there before. The event arrives as a “proposition,” a proposing, of a new possibility.9 Our faith in or fidelity to the event of revelation constitutes us as “subjects” of that event. The defining goes from the prior/higher/transcendent event of revelation to us as now subjects of it.10 Faith involved a newness, a beginning (again)—like a being born again/from above—it is “constantly being acquired,” Kierkegaard writes, “continually being generated” like a new creation, a recreation of our hearts.11 Faith opens to the event of revelation as a breakthrough to a new life.12 In faith we meditate upon what is revealed and are so transformed.

Seeking to present a definition of faith, Thomas follows Augustine (in particular Augustine’s gloss on 2 Cor 3.5): “to believe is to think with assent.”13 Thomas also refers to Hebrews 11, where we read that faith is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence [argumentum] of things that appear not.”14 Faith is then “willed assent, with certitude, to that which is not seen”15—in particular assent to that which which is revealed—“for the faith of which we are speaking, does not assent to anything, except because it is revealed by God.”16

Thomas Aquinas locates faith as midway between “understanding” (intellectus—immediate knowledge of self-evident principles) and “science” (scientia—mediate deduction or induction) which both give us certitude and vision (on one hand) and “doubt” (that sees evidence for something as ambivalent or equivocal) and “opinion” (which leans toward one side, but is not certain) which are neither certain nor clear apparent vision (on the other).17 We do not establish or prove revelation by something else that we know that is “higher.” Christian theology’s faithful meditation is, as Thomas explains, an “inferior science” that gets its “principles” (the things it starts from) from the “higher science” of God’s knowledge.18 (We might think of chemistry as a higher science relative to biology as the latter is based on the principles of the former…or physics and mechanical engineering.) Faith is not a mere matter of private/subjective opinion but is bound to what is revealed by God. (One cannot both have faith and so relativize/denigrate/deny it by saying it’s just my opinion.)

The certainty of faith is however a “conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11.1). Faith is certain but not the way something self-evident is. Nor does it have the certainty (as with scientia) that arises from the “necessity of reason.”19 Faith falls short of the certainty of vision (like doubt and opinion).20 But faith has certainty, it “cleaves firmly,” has the same ”firm adherence” as science or understanding (in Thomas’ strict sense).21 Rather faith has, as Thomas writes, the “certainty and firm adherence by a voluntary choice”22—cleaving firmly without perfect clear sight.23 It grasps the most perfect, noble objects of understanding (God and salvation) with “a most imperfect operation of the intellect.”24

Faith has to do with both the intellect and the will—it is thinking with assent.25 Though Kierkegaard never actually uses (the Danish equivalent of) the phrase “leap of faith,” he does indeed talk about how faith is a “leap” in the sense of not being merely a matter of self-evidence or logical demonstration, a movement, we might say, of the intellect alone. Faith also involves the will, an assent, a decision, an act of freedom, a resolution and so entails a “venture,” a “transition,” a “leap.”26 The “Yes” of faith is then less a thing of entertaining ideas in armchair speculation and more in the domain of obedience27—it is a choice, a decision, an act.28

But faith is a strange act—it is an act of dependence, an active passivity. Faith, as Kierkegaard defines it, “rests transparently in God,” in “the power that establishes.”29 In faith we rest in that upon which we depend upon. We have faith in that which is revealed, we trust and take refuge in God’s revelation in Christ the Word. But our dependence/resting is not about just that upon which one believes, on the objective side—toward Jesus Christ, the Word, before us in revelation. In faith we also rest/depend upon the inner enabling of faith, on the subjective side—enabled/encouraged by the Holy Spirit behind or within us. God influences our will “from within.”30 This sounds weird because it is. Someone who is not us changing our will seems to be, by definition, “from without.” Yet God (here in the person of the Holy Spirit) is not another competing operator in the world. He enables our acting to rest in him. Faith, Thomas writes, “as regards the assent which is the chief act of faith, is from God moving man inwardly by grace.”31

As Jesus Christ, the Son of the Father is the Word of God, is the “minister” the definitive locus and focus of revelation, the “collaborating” Holy Spirit then is the enabling and illuminating Gift within us that empowers us within to have faith in, to take up and receive that revelation.32 In the Son and the Spirit, the inaccessible comes to us. God condescends to graciously enable our knowledge/assent to him—as Maximus the Confessor writes:33

Never can a soul reach out toward the knowledge of God if God himself does not, having condescended, lay hold of it and lead it up to himself. For a human mind is not strong enough to ascend such a distance—as if to seize for its part some divine illumination, if God himself did not draw it upward, as far as is possible for a human mind to be drawn upward, and enlighten it with divine radiances.

Faith is how God would have us begin to positively relate to him—“by faith,” Athanasius writes, “and by pious reasoning joined with reverence.”34 We believe in things heard and then seen. We must now only hear as his servants while we desire to see God as his sons and daughters.35

Blessed is the man
[whose] delight is in the law of the Lord,
     and on his law he meditates day and night.
He is like a tree
     planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
     and its leaf does not wither.
In all that he does, he prospers.
For the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
— Psalm 1.1a, 2-3, 6a

The praises which He desires are the reflection of His beams:
which will not return till they are apprehended.
— Traherne, Centuries, II.94 (102))

Theology, our talking about God, is embedded in God’s talking to us—in revelation and scripture—and our talking to God—in prayer and worship. Theology is the meditatio between lectio and oratio. If you wonder about the point of theology, it has something to do with how our reading the Bible is related to our praying—and how these are related to the rest of our living in and experiencing the world beyond our times of hearing the word of God is scripture and attending/reaching out to God in prayer. Theology is part of the Christian life—to be understood, as Barth writes, “only with reference to its origin and goal in practice.”1 While it is common today to begin theology with prolegomena, method, foundations (kind of what we are doing in this first part), seeing theology as meditatio recognizing that we always begin in the middle, in media res, that God is the beginning and end.

Theology then is properly embedded/nested in spiritual practice—not merely an activity of mind but part of the transforming of the mind. Theology is not merely our thinking about God but is part of our relation to God. Theology is the connection between reading scripture and prayer. To be sure, these are not discrete moments.2 Reading is always already meditating—we are mediating between the what is read/heard and the other things we remember. Properly (here we are more apt to lose our way) meditation is oriented toward prayer: why you are thinking about this, the end, the in-order-to of theology. Meditatio overlaps with the work of interpretation or hermeneutics. A given scriptural passage is considered in relation to other prior learning (other scriptural passages for instance) such that we think about the relation, order, sequence of between ideas.3

Theological meditation is the work of faith. To believe, Pieper writes, means “to regard something as true and real on the testimony of someone else”—to believe someone and to believe something.4 Faith though seeks understanding; we think about what is believed. The Talmud refers to “wrinkling oneself over the Torah”—to wrinkle the brow or to press forward5 in consideration (review, examination, recollection) of spiritual things.6

Theology happens within a proper ethos—as meditatio between lectio and oratio, a reflection arising from revelation and moving toward prayer. Such a practice of theology (not forgetting itself, where it came from and where it goes) is a work “before God” (Lacoste).7 William Desmond (sometimes we theologians lose the thread and need a philosopher to remind us of what we’re doing) observes that often theological thoughts are taken out of their ethos and are made into orphans.8 Desmond points to the example of Anselm’s ontological “proof.” Theology as meditation, however, properly has a “porosity” to its origin (in revelation) and its issue (in prayer).9 It is (Lacoste observes) a “subordinate function”10—it is not the beginning or the end. Balthasar (along with Barth and Bulgakov) was particularly sensitive to how much modern theology suffers a deep disjunction with this traditional spiritual or ascetical ethos. What Kant and Hegel were up to, though they cover much of the same conceptual ground of Christian theology, seems pretty foreign to it. As there is no true repentance or piety or prayer in Kant or Hegel or their progeny—so there can be no true theology-as-meditatio.11 The different trajectories between the scholastic (mendicant) and the monastic in the middle ages grew from the late thirteenth century into the now obvious rift between theology and “spirituality” in modernity.12

Theology as meditatio involves the faithful and creative repetition of revelation. It is beholden to the authority of revelation, puts itself in service to it13 as a continuing response to it.14 But while we seek to be faithful to our revelatory inheritance we cannot but do this as our own work of originality, of developed sacred imagination.15 We must hazard to piece things together, taking up our inheritance differently.16 Such a reading, even if we seek to reproduce the meaning of revelation can only ever be something to some degree creative, something we produce.17

Seeking a fuller understanding of scripture, meditation chews, ruminates, digests—incorporates scripture into oneself, into one’s view of the world.18 While meditatio considers parts carefully—digging, “as it were, for treasure”19—it also moves to connect into a whole, a vision (a worldview?), a big picture/perspective from which one lives.20 In Scripture God speaks to us about himself, but, as Barth writes, “in speaking about himself to us he speaks about all things.”21

From the immediacy of hearing/reading the Word we then reflect upon it—stepping back to consider. From reflection one the steps back “into” immediacy—what Kierkegaard describes as an immediacy after reflection or second immediacy—in oratio. After working to discern the will of God, we will it—we joining God and will his will.22 Perhaps the primary speech of our God-talking or theology should be to God and not to overhearing human witnesses.23 Here the Psalms are exemplary. They reflect on and often summarize scripture and the acts of God in the past, reflect on how this relates to the psalmist and/or their audience in the present, all the while turning Godward and transforming these thought into prayer.24

Meditatio progresses into oratio insofar as (1) meditation informs our prayer and (2) prayer fulfills our meditation. (1) Guigo writes that “prayer without meditation is lukewarm.”25 In order to have meaningful communication from us to God, we must hear (lectio) and think (meditiatio) before we speak (oratio)—our speech must be a “listening speech”26—though all too often we ignore (don’t listen to or think about) God until a crisis when we stumble heedless and ignorant before God to complain about his neglect. (Israel got this approach down to a science.) From the perspective of meditatio, our response to God’s revelation comes in such a way that it is ours, the fruit of our work of understanding that revelation. Indeed, the early church’s hymns and prayers arose as the products of considered theology, of meditation.27 (2) Guigo also observes that “meditation without prayer is unfruitful.”28 Working toward comprehension alone misses, even defeats, the point of meditatio.29 We learn about the divine names not out of curiosity but out of a desire to join more of our mind to his praises.30

Prayer (oratio) arises from meditation (meditatio) in different mode—a second immediacy/an immediacy after reflection. It is less mulling over in ourselves than a dispossessive return, a “giving back” of our thoughts and ourselves to God.31 Prayer ascends, “lifts itself up to God.”32 The “to God” of prayer is in a vocative mode of calling, invoking, beseeching/asking, thanking, praising.33

“Prayer,” Guigo observes, “when it is fervent wins contemplation, but to obtain it without prayer would be rare, even miraculous.”34 For the church fathers and medieval monks, the end or goal of the Christian life goes beyond prayer, beyond talking to God, to being with, being in communion with, resting in the presence of God. Theoria in Greek, contemplatio in Latin, is not a thing of formal abstraction; less of the desk than the altar, or making desks into altars. In a perhaps more “mystical” mode or register, contemplations posture is one of abiding, dwelling, resting in/with God.

This project tries to effect something like this understanding of theology as meditatio. It is composed of meditations—three “centuries” or sets of one hundred of them. The intent is that these are meditations principally upon scripture—and so upon other scriptures and what other thinkers inside (and outside) of the tradition have had to say—and are ordered toward prayer, to help us know and move toward the One is our beginning and end.

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show to his servants the things that must soon take place. He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.
—Revelation 1.1-2

The last book of the Bible—the Revelation to John, John’s Apocalypse—begins with that revelation being multiply mediated. It is not a direct deposit but a passing-along, a (presumably faithful) game of telephone, a reverberating. God gives the revelation of Jesus Christ through an angel to John who gives it to us. The reverberating of the word of God continues through tradition (tradere—transmitting, handing over, passing from one person to another “hand to hand”) such that the proclamation of the Word of God in scripture—the Word coming from God to us through scripture—is not other than this passing/handing on of tradition. Traditio is a “handing on” of something, a teaching or text, to another. (A “handing over” of something that shouldn’t be, like a secret or a person, makes you a traditor, a traitor!)

There is an isomorphism (a mapping-onto-one-another) between proclamation and tradition: both are not simply passing along the text of scripture but hopefully the Word of God, the transforming good news, what comes before and after and through the mere text of scripture. God’s revelation is mediated to and through us in the proclamation and tradition of the Church. From the beginning the Church, its confession/message, and its scripture were and are indissolubly linked.

From early on, the church has sought to present in brief the heart of the gospel or kerygma1 about the Word become flesh that is passed along and proclaimed. In two places in First Corinthians (in chapters 11 and 15) Paul uses a technical formula for handing down (traditioning?): “what I received” Paul writes “I delivered to you.”

For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. (1 Corinthians 15:3–5)

Simon Gathercole in The Gospel and the Gospels sees this primitive gospel in the affirmation of (1) Jesus’s messiahship, (2) his death for sins, (3) his resurrection, and (4) his fulfillment of scripture. These components are drawn from Paul’s summary in 1 Cor 15:3-4.2 Only the works from the apostolic era that reflect this core affirmation about Christ (unlike the various gnostic gospels, e.g.) came to be taken as the authoritative presentation of the apostolic faith—the New Testament. With this passage and 1 Cor 11 (along with the risen Lord’s words and actions in Emmaus in Luke 24), we can see that what is handed down is Jesus Christ crucified for our sins and resurrected as received and understood through Word (according to the scriptures) and Sacrament.

The kerygma, the gospel comes to be called early on the “rule” or “canon” (regula in Latin, kanon in Greek) of “faith” or of “truth”; today we most commonly refer to it as the regula fidei, the rule of faith. This core-of-the-gospel is a rule/canon/standard of teaching that can be passed on, confessed in baptism and in worship, and seen as a summary (a recapitulation or conspectus) of the scriptures.3 Irenaeus writing in the late 100s saw that this rule/canon/creed is what speaks to and unifies scripture like a unified piece of music or body of diverse members.4 The germ or seed of this rule/confession/gospel/kerygma is, as we have seen, Jesus Christ crucified for us and risen (with “Christ” implying “according to the [OT] scriptures”). A next bit-more-expansive version of such a summary would be what we find in early baptismal confessions (like in Tertullian c.200AD and Hyppolytus c.215AD) or something very like the Apostles’ Creed or what we find even earlier in Irenaeus5—all having three (explicitly Trinitarian) sections/articles with the Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection in the center. The “expansion” from something like “Jesus Christ died for us and was raised” to these earliest creeds/rules/canons is quite natural in that the latter simply states the former’s implied preconditions (Jesus is the Son of God the Creator) and ramifications/significance (Jesus is the present and returning Lord and Savior who sent his Spirit to effect this reality in his Church).

The apostles that were empowered and sent with the “precious deposit” of the gospel6 as witnesses to Jesus Christ as the crucified and risen Lord7 suffered and indeed died (almost all martyred) before denying this gospel/kerygma/message.8 The same apostles who were witnesses to Jesus Christ crucified and risen are also those who initially, as Irenaeus writes, “ordered and established the Churches.”9

From the beginning, as we have noted, Christianity is a message and a communal life—ordered around word (catechesis centered around scripture) and sacrament (1 Cor 11, 15; Lk 24). The Church Fathers were usually leaders (often reluctant bishops) in concrete churches, in living communities.10 Robert Louis Wilken in his brilliant The First Thousand Years presents the five common elements that factually describe any one thing that is “Christianity” as an observable unity over time (here up until 1000AD), a cross-cultural, multi-linguistic, multi-ethnic, trans-political entity—such that you can say that one group of people in, say, Iran (Asia), and one in Egypt (Africa) and one in France (Europe) are all Christian churches, are all a part of the same “catholic” Church. In these Five Common Elements, common beliefs and practices, we can see the continuation of the very earliest passing along of what is revealed in the Word become flesh, in Jesus Christ who died for our sins and was raised.

1. the Bible — OT and NT (as the best representatives of the apostles’ teaching)
2. the Nicene Creed — as representing the apostolic rule of faith
3. Bishops — as the successors of the apostles
4. Baptism and the Eucharist
5. Monasticism

Within the broad tradition of the Christian the Bible is seen as the preeminent, most important source for theology—it is the richest representation of the gospel, the very witness of the prophets and apostles to Jesus Christ. We as Christians today, as practicing members of the Church, are blessed with the ability to take up the Word in scripture. When the Word reaches us—when we hear, we receive it into our hands, we read (lectio)—we join in this work of God’s initiative, of the passing along of God’s word to us. We grow in our dwelling in the distinctive universe of meaning presented in the scriptures—in the world of the Word.11 We live in and from the Word. But this is not some magical transformation of our minds; it involves our work.

One of the classic understandings of the discipline/ascesis/work of the Christian life is the fourfold way of lectio divina (as its more commonly known) or the scala claustralium, the “ladder of monks”:12

lectio—reading
meditatio—meditation
oratio—prayer
contemplatio—contemplation

Lectio or reading comes first and provides the foundation for the later moments/steps/degrees/rungs. Lectio is where we begin. It provides the subject matter.13 We begin with the already-begun-before of God’s descent; the beginning of our being with God comes before us with God’s revelatory/apocalyptic initiative. We begin by receiving what has been passed on to us. Revelation transmitted, handed on through tradition, comes to us, and we receive it, hear it, read it. We are dependent upon and perceiving-of its advent, its arising; our hands, ears, eyes receive a gift, a given (a report, a testimony, a witness, a message, a word, a reverberation) from elsewhere.

Lectio implies a posture of dependence…even penitence or renunciation.14 I read/listen as one in need of hearing not my thoughts and ways (I’ve mostly heard enough) but God’s thoughts and ways—His word that comes down to us from on high to bring about his ways in us (Is 55). We read because we want or need (to).

We read at the beginning of the book of Revelation that God’s revelation, the revelation of Jesus Christ, is for us (Jesus’ servants). The revelation of the Word (via an angel) comes to John who “bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.” We receive this revelation, this word, passed on from John (the Revelator? the Witness? the Traditor?). So we read. And with this, God’s multiply-mediated Word—God’s revealed (in Christ) and passed-along (in scripture through proclamation and tradition) and read (by us today) Word—opens onto the work of theology.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven
     and do not return there but water the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
     giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
     it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
     and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
— Isaiah 55:10–11

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us—that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. And we are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
— 1 John 1:1–4

The Word of God comes to us as an event, an act, an encounter in which God is active. It is God as a subject speaking to humans—communicating himself in an objective event.1 Karl Barth in the first volume of his Church Dogmatics brought together and articulated different common senses of “the Word of God”—Jesus as the Word made flesh, scripture as God’s Word, and the Word of God as what is proclaimed and passed along by us humans—of thinking about how the event of the Word reverberates to us. Barth presents the Word of God as one event in three forms expanding out in concentric circles.

First is the mystrerious act of revelation itself the pure divine speech-act. This is The Word, God’s final and ultimate revelation in Jesus Christ—God’s Word is Jesus Christ. The Son of the Father, God (the Word who was with and was God (Jn 1.1)) became flesh as a human person and dwelt (literally and perhaps, as we’ll see, significantly: “tabernacled”) among us (Jn 1.14); “in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb 1.1).

Second is the attestation or witness to the Word in Scripture—the prophetic and apostolic witness to the Word who is Jesus in human speech and then writing. Scripture as a faithful witness sets that to which it witnesses before us. The Word is also written as a collection of human texts that is also the bearer of divine revelation. Scripture is not other than the Word of God—it is our best (only?) attestation/witness/access to it.

Scripture “presents” the God’s Word, makes it present, to us. It carries (and so is) the revelation of the Word to us as a wave in water expanding out—as a heard voice reaches us only through waves of air or a seen form reaches us through light waves/particles—moving to us through time (always later) and space (always elsewhere). How can we see or hear the Word made flesh? Not entirely differently than we see or hear anything in the world. The event of the Word is an event in time and space that reaches us, is witnessed to, is passed along—the light, the glory shines between (Jn 1.5, 9, 14), the voice we see2—that reverberates through time and space to us. That which separates us from it is also the medium of communication and connection. Scripture connects us to and makes present to us the event of the Word—through the apostolic witness to and prophetic anticipation of that Word.

Third, the Word reaches—through the witness of scripture—to us and through us in the proclamation, preaching, or testimony of the Church. The Church’s faithful proclamation of the Word an “actualizing” event. through which God’s Word witnessed to in scripture becomes God’s word to us in the present. (Scripture comes alive as we take it up and are taken up by in to become occasions and vehicles for God’s proclamation to be proclaimed to people (like us) in the world. The Word in scripture about the Word made flesh is handed down through the ages to us today through the testimony of the church.

We come to the center, the event, the act of God’s revelation only through the reverberations, the concentric circles—we hear proclaimed the witness of scripture which connects us to the Word, to God himself. (In all three forms of the Word, though in different ways, God acts through human acts—it is not a zero sum.) One encounters the Word of God in Scripture and the proclamation of the Church; one encounters Christ as the act of revelation in scripture’s witness and the church’s testimony. The Word is not a revelation that merely happened in the past—it is happening as it reaches through scripture to us in the present. Alternately, we only approach the center through the periphery (though it is more proper to see the initiative and motion God’s moving to us.) God is revealing himself to us in his Word now. The Word reverberates from there and then to us here and now.

This threefold reverberation/shining forth of the Word (as described by Barth above, but more fundamentally in John’s …Gospel) has evocative correspondences or parallels to the revelation to Moses (and Israel) on Mt Sinai, as we’ve already intimated in our previous meditation, and the structure of the sacred space of the tabernacle/temple.3 This correspondence can also be extended (by, well, Peter) to the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mt Tabor.4 The concentric circle can be seen not only as moving from the inner to the outer but from the center as the top to the outside as the bottom—like a wedding cake or a mountain.

At the summit of Mt Sinai, God descends and speaks with Moses alone in thick cloud (Ex 19.3, 16, 20). In the Holy of Holies of the tabernacle, resting place of the ark of the covenant, the throne/footstool of God only the high priest enters once a year on the Day of Atonement (Ex 25/Lev 16). Jesus is transfigured—his face altered, his clothing radiant, dazzling, and intensely white “as light”—speaks with Moses and Elijah. (Elijah had a similar encounter with the LORD as Moses—His presence passes by—on Mt Sinai/Horeb (1 Kings 19.8-18).) There is a divine voice from the overshadowing bright cloud/glory on Mt Tabor (Mt 17.2-5; Mk 9.3-7; Lk 9.29-35; 2 Pet 1.17). At the highest summit and deepest interior, Jesus Christ himself is the Word become flesh and dwelling/“tabernacling” among us (Jn 1.14).

Then there is the middle zone of Sinai to which Aaron, his sons, and the seventy elders (who become Moses’ intermediaries) “come up” to eat and drink before God beneath sapphire pavement of heaven (Ex 24.1-11, 19.24) in the midst of clouds. The Holy Place, the sanctuary of the tabernacle/temple, contains the table and lampstand in the midst of dense clouds of incense and is where only the priest may enter and serve (Ex 26). Jesus led Peter, James and John up the “holy mountain” (2 Pet 1.16-21) where he is transfigured before them (Mt 17.1-8; Mk 9.2-8; Lk 9.28-36) and they were “eyewitnesses of his majesty” who “heard this very voice” from the cloud (2 Pet 1.16,18). Those apostles and prophets (”we”) who have seen the Son/Word’s glory (Jn 1.14) have passed on the sacred writings “breathed out by God” (1 Tim 3.15-16). And this is the word of God (”prophesy of scripture...men spoke from God”) is not merely the word of man (”someone’s own interpretation...the will of man”) (2 Pet 1.20-21).

Israel encamped at the foot of Mt Sinai (Ex 19.2) outside the boundaries; the people were not to touch the mountain (Ex 19.12). But Moses descended to them and delivered what God had said to them, and he and the elders lead them and ministered to them in the wilderness. In the outer court of the tabernacle (where the altar resides) (Ex 27) the people of Israel would come to worship and sacrifice. At the foot of Mt Tabor were the other disciples that Peter, James, John, and Jesus rejoin after the transfiguration. We who hear the word proclaimed, are those to whom the eyewitnesses of the majesty of the Transfiguration testify (2 Pet 1.16, 18)—we receive the message of the “prophetic word more fully confirmed” (2 Pet 1.19).

At the highest summit/deepest interior of the revelation on Mt Sinai, the worship in tabernacle, the transfiguration of Jesus, and the Word of God communicated to us are holy, set apart, consecrated, sites of the intensive event of God’s presence. This is the most singular, the most intimate (the “fullness,” the most intense glory (Jn 1.14, 16)), the light all-but-unapproachable of God’s revelation—Moses alone, the high priest alone on one day a year, Jesus with the other solitary recipients of revelation (Moses and Elijah), the only Son who is the Word become flesh. This singular and intensive revelation, the one Word, reverberates, is pass on, is communicated from the one to the few (the chosen representatives) to the many. In this communication, we hear, we see what God has revealed made present. What has been revealed and communicated has been revealed and communicated now to us.

The life made manifest in Christ was made manifest to his disciples, and now we may share in the fellowship of that life with them (1 Jn 1). As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are God’s ways higher than our ways—but, as the rain and snow fall from the heavens and bring life to the earth, so God’s Word goes forth and accomplishes God’s purposes in the world (Is 55).