NO GREATER LOVE: CONTEMPLATING THE TRINITY

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What is God “really” like? When scientists study nature, they can find out a great deal, but they cannot know everything because they are studying what they did not make. Likewise, we cannot “study” God the way scientists study and experiment with nature since God is at a higher level of being.

Of course, He is not just at a higher level of being, but as far as we know the highest level of being. What we do know about God comes not from study and experiment, but from Divine Revelation. That God is a Trinity is an important aspect of God which we could not know apart from Divine Revelation. However, just receiving and believing in the Trinity is not enough. We must contemplate the Trinity so that it becomes a part of us. The Trinity must dwell in us, indeed, live in us. The “doorway” into the Trinity is Christ. We cannot speak of the Trinity apart from Christ.

Theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, in his book Prayer, introduces us to the contemplation of the Trinity. WE CONTEMPLATE CHRIST, his world, his truth, in order to encounter God and "see" him. We do this with the eyes of faith, but they are genuine, objective eyes; they are the eyes of our mind and senses, but they have been enlightened interiorly by the Holy Spirit dwelling in us. We have already spoken of this illumination. Now we are concerned with the object of our contemplation: God. Everything else, creation, humanity, salvation history, is considered within the context of God in order that we may find him there. But this finding is to be a spiritual and personal encounter in which, by faith, we become aware of that "life" which God gives to the believer objectively in the form of grace, i.e., in the form of a participation in the divine nature, with its triune exchange of life and love. The latter implies the former: God's inner life is not merely objective, in the order of being; it is essentially spiritual and personal. Consequently, a merely objective participation in God, without a revelation through the word to acquaint the creature with the grace he has received and show him how to enter more deeply into it, would be a contradiction.

Jesus Christ, One Person in the Trinity, became Man. Because of this, we also are participants in the Trinity through Jesus Christ. Von Balthasar explains this in further detail. The Lord has always included us, disobedient as we are, within his loving obedience to the Father, that divine mystery between them which bears the name of the one Spirit common to them both. Hence: we would never come to a knowledge of the triune life in Jesus Christ, not even on the basis of the "objective" elevation we have received in the "state of grace" (assuming that such a "state" could exist in pure objectivity), unless we had also been participants, from all eternity, in the subjective relationship of the incarnate Son with his heavenly Father in the Holy Spirit. If grace is also given by all three Persons in unity, it follows that grace gives us a participation in their threefold nature. In faith-and not in open sight-we are drawn into this threefold nature as a result of our meeting and fellowship with the Son on earth. From a strictly theological point of view, therefore, our "seeing, hearing and touching" of Jesus Christ, the "Word of life", mediates to us a knowledge (veiled, no doubt, but absolutely true and objective) of the triune life of God. Grace is our mode of sharing in this life; it therefore endows us with the appropriate subjective faculty so that, with the certainty of faith, we can see the trinitarian side of the phenomenon of Christ as the object of our contemplation. It is an essential, indeed it is the cardinal activity of Christian prayer to unfold this implicit faith-knowledge, faith's "seeing, hearing and touching", in an ever-new seeking and finding. It does this precisely at the point where the incarnate Son, in complete openness, faces the Father in the Holy Spirit. Only in this way can the purpose of God's becoming man be fulfilled. That purpose is that God's inner nature and life should be opened up to us, should become familiar to us, and that we should experience with our very being, and hence also with our minds and senses, what it means to say that God is love.

Von Balthasar explains that this bringing of the Life of God, the Trinity, into us by means of One Man is a great stumbling block to many. Before we go on, a few words are apropos. Christian Liberalism (and this applies to non-Christian and Jewish thought as well) will never cease finding fault with the New Testament's narrowing down of the contemplation of God. Here we see heaven standing open in Jesus Christ, we see the Father indicating Christ's exclusiveness in a way that, hitherto, would have been inconceivable: he is the one to whom we must listen; it is in him that the great diversity ("in many and various ways", Heb 1:1) of the former revelations of God, both inside and outside Israel, in history and nature (cf. the Psalms and the Wisdom literature and their enthusiastic contemplation of nature) have been summed up. "In these last days" all these revelations have been narrowed down and channeled toward the only Son "whom he appointed the heir of all things". Those who cannot or will not believe in the divinity of the man Jesus are bound to find this an impoverishment, a disappointment. 

According to Von Balthasar, Christians must continually make clear to the world the connection between the One-Man Jesus Christ and the possibility of God living in all men. Christianity owes it to the world to make a clear connection between its testimony to the sole Redeemer, in whose name it takes "every thought captive to obey Christ" (2 Cor 10:5), and the witness of the Holy Spirit, which causes the entire world to awake to a religious freedom and universality which, left to itself, it could never attain nor imagine. This was the manner of Christ's own preaching, and this was the way the apostles sought to win others for Christ, especially after the resurrection and Pentecost. Unless, in Christ, the world has been given the trinitarian "Word of life" to hear, to see and to touch; unless the preaching, the life and all the institutions of the Catholic Church present divine life, opened up and rendered accessible to men, the world could justly regret the fact that man's religious contemplation has been taken over by dogma; indeed it would be right to regard it as the greatest catastrophe in mankind's religious history. So we see that the Christian has an absolute duty to cultivate trinitarian contemplation; he must come to see that what Jesus shows us of himself, what he bids us imitate, is the inner life of God, appearing in Person and overtaking us.

Von Balthasar explains the choice we have to make between different ways of viewing the world. Whether Jewish or Gentile in origin, Liberalism is always surrounded by an aura of magnanimity when contrasted with what is specifically Christian (and especially what is authentically Jewish). Its religious ideas and schemes conceive the world as a whole; man's relation to God can be established no matter what point he sets out from, since all such points are equal in regard to essence and each includes all the others. This is the Liberal catholicity of truth. Christian truth, by contrast, exhibits a tremendous paradox: God chose a single nation to be his own, and out of this nation he finally selected a single man to be his only-begotten Son; and yet the very purpose of this was to bring salvation to all nations and to all men. The only way to represent God's concrete uniqueness, under earthly conditions, is through the uniqueness of the Mediator, the concrete man Jesus Christ (I Tim 2:5). But such a Messiah would have been the worst of all false prophets if he had simply introduced a new "teaching" about God and a new "institution", unless, in giving "himself as a ransom for all", he had manifested the will of his Father who "desires all men to be saved" (see 1 Tim 2:4-6), and, through this revelation, in his life and death, he had proclaimed the very being of God to be triune Love.

The proof of this lies in the fact that, after so many centuries of official Christianity in the world, the stupendous Christian discovery, namely, the universality of God's sovereign resolve to save the world, which Paul announces as a hitherto closely guarded secret (Eph 3:2 f; Rom 16:25), is just as unheard-of a novelty (literally "not heard'") today. Isolated from the figure of Jesus Christ, it immediately becomes unbelievable; seen in the context of his historical uniqueness, the message produces the same wonderful results now as it did then. Only when truth is seen to have a trinitarian form does the assertion that God is love- burning, consuming, judging and redeeming love - become evident for the world as a whole. And truth can only be seen to be trinitarian when One of the Trinity becomes man and, in human form, interprets eternal Love to us. It is sad that even now some Christian missionaries are afraid to put forth the truth that the Trinity can live in all persons through Jesus Christ. – Jim Nugent, CFP