On Inter-Religious Dialogue III-2: Dialogue is a Part of Human Existence pt. 2

Last updated on: July 13, 2007 at 2:52 pm by Henry Karlson

On Inter-Religious Dialogue III-2: Dialogue is a Part of Human Existence pt. 2 2007-07-13T14:52:00-05:00 Henry Karlson

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The dialogical character of the human person can be established according to a Christological foundation where Jesus Christ, the Logos incarnate, serves as the archetype for humanity. We are made in the image of Christ in whom dwells the fullness of the Godhead in bodily form (cf. Col 2:9). The Logos, the image of the invisible Godhead, serves as the prototype of our existence. If we bring these positions together, as Marius Victorinus suggests we should, this leads us to understand that humanity exists as the “image of the image” of God. (cf. Marius Victorinus, Against Arius IA, pages 89 -167 in Marius Victorinus: Theological Treatises. trans.Mary T. Clark (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 1982),117). Therefore, we are not only made according to the image of Christ who is our prototype, but we are, in a derivative fashion, made according to the image of the Godhead, that is, according to the image of the Holy Trinity.

Christology and Trinitarian theology are intricately linked, as the history of doctrine consistently demonstrates; what is said in one must be reflected upon in the other. When a Christology demonstrates a dialogical character for the human person, this suggests that we have more work to do, that we need to discern if there is a Trinitarian dimension which underlies this character. Indeed, the hope would be that there is; otherwise, we would need to question whether or not our findings up to this point are sound. Moreover, just as a Trinitarian theology brings a new, deeper understanding to Christology, there is a hope that in a reflection of the human person in light of Trinitarian theology, we would gain a deeper appreciation of this dialogical character in question.

The Christian faith by necessity is a faith in the Holy Trinity. When Jesus reveals to us the fullness of truth, this revelation is Trinitarian. Jesus works with the Holy Spirit in His proclamation of the Father. Indeed, the truth of this is demonstrated at the beginning of His ministry, at His baptism, as is beautifully pointed out in the Troparion for Theophany sung in the Byzantine tradition, “When Thou wast baptized in the Jordan, O Lord, the worship of the Trinity made its appearance. For the voice of the Father bore witness to Thee when He called Thee His beloved Son. And the Spirit in the form of a dove confirmed the truth of the word. O Christ our God, Who hast appeared and hast enlightened the world, glory to Thee!”

The Christian life proclaims the whole reality of our experience with the divinity, of our relations with all three persons of the Holy Trinity, and not just our life with Christ. Yet, being with one of the persons suggests a relationship with all of them; being with Christ implies a relationship with all three persons of the Trinity, as Sergius Bulgakov relates, “The Trinitarian faith is already implied in faith in the Son, Who is sent by the Father and Who sends the Holy Spirit. Christianity is the religion of the Holy Trinity to such a degree that the concentration of piety on the Christ alone has become a deviation known by a special term as ‘Jesusism’” Sergius Bulgakov, The Orthodox Church. trans. Lydia Kesich (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1988), 102. The reason why the Christian life must be Trinitarian and not some form of “Jesusism” is because the Trinity provides for us the way to experience the fact that, “God is Love” (1 John 4:8).

At a first glance, the technicalities of Trinitarian discussions often appear to have little or no practical ramifications for the Christian life. What does it mean for us to say that there are three persons or hypostases who are homoousios with one another, united together as one Godhead? Is it a fact we must believe, and just leave it at that? Karl Rahner was correct to say that this is the way most Christians have grown to understand the Trinity. While it is true to the incomprehensible nature of God, it does not keep true to the dialogical character of God and God’s desire to reveal something important to us about Himself in the revelation of the Trinity. There must be something revealed, something with practical value, something which we can and do experience, which forms the basis of our Trinitarian theology. Indeed, we must believe that our view of God has practical ramifications, if for no other reason than the fact that it creates for us a hermeneutical outlook by which we view the world. When St Gregory of Nyssa describes the relationship between the Father and the Son as the relationship between the uncaused (the Father) and the begotten (the Son) (cf. St Gregory of Nyssa, On Not Three Gods), there must be something fundamentally important for us to learn from this. We just have to discover what it is.

St Thomas Aquinas can help us here. The Trinity describes real relationships within the Divinity. “The idea of relation, however, necessarily means regard of one to another, according as one is relatively opposed to another. So as in God there is a real relation, there must also be a real opposition. The very nature of relative opposition includes distinction. Hence, there must be real distinction in God, not, indeed, according to that which is absolute–namely, essence, wherein there is supreme unity and simplicity–but according to that which is relative” St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Bros. edition, 1947), I.28-3. The three persons are distinct persons, and not just three modes of one reality, but they are, despite their personal differences, united as one God, and each person is fully God, and not just a part of God. Their essence guarantees that God is one, while the internal relations of the three hypostases indicates that, even in the divinity, there is a plurality which is open to distinction and unique personality. Even in God, who is the ultimate “one” before any other, there is no monistic monotony overriding personal freedom. Within the Godhead, non-quantitative unity does not override relative distinction. How are we to understand these relations? According to St Thomas Aquinas, they represent actions of God within God. In an important passage, he confirms this, “Now as there is no quantity in God, for He is great without quantity, as Augustine says (De Trin. i, 1) it follows that a real relation in God can be based only on action. Such relations are not based on the actions of God according to any extrinsic procession, forasmuch as the relations of God to creatures are not real in Him (13, 7). Hence, it follows that real relations in God can be understood only in regard to those actions according to which there are internal, and not external, processions in God” (ibid., I-28.4).

So, we can see that there is a plurality of relations in the Trinity. How exactly does this help us to understand that “God is love?” Love is personal; it can only exist when it is shared. For God to be love, God has to be personal. But God’s love must not be merely a love for creation. If it were, either God would be dependent upon creation, and creation would have to be eternal, or else we would have to say that “God is love” is not eternal truth. But if we are saying God is love in His very nature and essence, it cannot be the latter; and if God were dependent upon something other than God for His existence and nature, He would not be God, and so we cannot accept the former possibility either.

In its embrace of another subject, love always desires the best for the one who is loved. It wants them to fulfill their potential, to achieve the fullness of their personal being. Love communicates, it cannot be silent. In love, we reveal all of who we are to our beloved, desiring them to embrace us in our entirety, to take us in as we are, and to find joy in us. Moreover, we hope and desire that they will do the same with us; to share in love all of who they are, so we can embrace them, and find joy in them. For love to be what God is, this ecstasy of love must be the eternal experience of the persons of the Trinity. Thus, we must agree with St Bonaventure when he declares, rather obscurely, “faith says that God communicates Himself in the best manner by eternally having a loved one and another beloved of these two, and hence God is one and triune” St Bonaventure, Breviloquium. trans. Erwin Nemmers (London: B. Herder Book Co., 1946), I-2.3.

What does St Bonaventure mean? In the Godhead, love, for it to be truly love, cannot only be embraced by only two persons; love is fruitful and multiplies itself. It wants others to share in the joys of love. Thus, in the inner life of the Trinity, just as love must go beyond a monad (or self-love), it must go beyond a dyad (two persons cut off from everyone else); it must truly be plural by the addition of a third. To truly be what it is called to be, love must be experienced in a threefold fashion. The I and the thou join together as the we for towards another thou in whom the we relates to with love. There is no necessity for a fourth person, because the three together in embracing another thou would still be a “we” meeting a “thou.”

Love forms the bonds which unites the persons of the Holy Trinity, and so can be seen to be that very consubstantial nature by which the persons of the divine Trinity are one and the same with one another. “Rising above the bounds of its nature, I goes out of temporal spatial-limitedness and enters into Eternity. There the whole process of the interrelations of the lovers is a single act, in which an infinite series of individual moments of love is synthesized. This single, eternal, and infinite act is the consubstantiality of the loves in God, where I is one and the same as the other I, but also different. Ever” Pavel Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 68. This does not mean that there is no freedom for God to create. Since love is productive, so the Trinity in their love freely creates the world. Creation must be seen as an elective, internal choice of God and not some external necessity forced upon God making Him create. In love, through love, and by love, God desires others to relate to, and desires that they shall have a share in the divine life. “If in His power and truth God is all, He desires in His love that all should be God. He desires that there should be outside of Himself another nature which may progressively become what He is from all eternity – the absolute whole” Vladimir Solovyev, Russia and the Universal Church . trans. Herbert Rees (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1948), 160. But in order for this to be, these others must be persons who can love and unite with God through love. They partake of God through love, exist through love, and yet by that same love in which God creates them, they are given their own will. They are given this freedom so that they can manifest love as an act of choice. Love is never love when it is forced. Love must be freely given and freely received. This means that for God, who in love desires others to share in the glory of His majesty, there is a risk; love calls out for lovers, but what will be the response? Love can be declined, causing the creature who rejects God’s love to find themselves in a perpetual state of self-denial. While they reject the God who loves them, they cannot deny their own existence, which was granted to them by God in God’s love. They can’t exist without the God they reject, and so in their very inner being, there is turmoil. They accept their own existence (and often place it above all other things), meaning they accept the continued act of God which preserves their existence (and even, in this respect, they accept God because they are formed in the image and likeness of God!). But they reject the love of God which makes that existence joyful and fulfilled. Here we can begin to understand how it is the sinner and not God who creates the pains of hell. “Hell itself consists of the unfulfilled love for God, which, because of spiritual limitation, is expressed in enmity toward Him, theomachy, or in spiritual sleep. The state of hell is, in essence, antinomic, because it combines the revelation of God and the abandonment of God; and it is this antinomic character that imparts to hell an eternal character. God Himself does not reject creation. It is creation that, in its desolate emptiness, rejects God” Sergius Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb. trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2002), 487-8.

What does this discussion now tell us about the human person? When we bring this back into the human equation, it says a lot about who we are, what we were made for, and what, then, we should do to live a fulfilled life. We were made to be lovers. If God is love, to be in the image of God is to be in the image of love. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (I Cor. 13: 4-8a). To be a lover requires hope for the betterment of the beloved; it requires unending patience. It means we want to listen to what our beloved has to say. It is dialogical, because in the embrace of love, the lovers want to know the other, want to know who they are, want to communicate to each other the fullness of their being, so that communion can be achieved. Just as in the Holy Trinity, love brings together the three as one, and yet accepts and needs plurality for that love to be manifest, so in humanity love unites and yet does not destroy personal differences. It seeks communion with others, and shows the kind of spiritual death we face if we isolate ourselves from everyone and everything. “The statement ‘God is love’ (I Jn 4:8) does not designate an attribute or a relation, but the divine nature itself. Likewise, man, made in the image of God, is invited to bring about love in his very being, which makes us understand that the words ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’ (Gen. 2:18) do not in the least express some vague sentimental tenderness, but the most exact conformity to the truth found within the Trinity” Paul Evdokimov, Woman and the Salvation of the World. trans. Anthony O. Gythiel (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994), 257.

Love is the bond which unites humanity together. The incarnation is a result of God’s love for humanity; the grace of the incarnation, when we join ourselves to it, helps us fulfill who we are meant to be; it makes us lovers in our own right. This love is capable of uniting us with God, but, to be lovers, like God, it must reach out and seek reconciliation and peace in the world, even as God seeks our own reconciliation and peace. To be true to ourselves, we must be people of love; to be people of love, we must love God and our neighbor. “The unbreakable bond between love of God and love of neighbour is emphasized. One is so closely connected to the other that to say that we love God becomes a lie if we are closed to our neighbour or hate him altogether” Pope Bendict XVI, Deus Caritas Est. Vatican trans. (Vatican: 2005), para. 16. The two laws – to love God and to love our neighbor — are in reality one and the same; they are reflections of what it means to be in the image and likeness of God. God loves God, therefore, we are called to love God and be united with God. God loves all of creation; therefore, we too, to be true to ourselves, to be true to our inner nature, must love the world and all the people and things within. God listens to us, so we are called to listen to others. God speaks to us through revelation, revealing to us in the best way possible, the fullness of His being; so we too are called to humbly communicate ourselves to others, and enter in a grand dialogue which exists in the image of the internal dialogue of love found in the Holy Trinity.

Dialogue

Henry Karlson

Theological Anthropology

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